Quietly seething in the comfort of my home

We haven't gone anywhere as a family for foliage season, nor have we been to the beach pure and simple for a long time. The reasons for this are various. We are lazy, for sure, but also because it's pretty nice off our backyard.  There's the terraced park leading down to the lake with its own little beach, behind which rises hills covered with trees, which change with the season pretty durned nicely.  So we've kinda got the summer and fall vacation options baked into our backyard.  And because it's nice, people come to us.  People walking or biking round the lake, or people from around town and/or out of town wanting to go swimming or whatever.

And, since in the natural order of our weeks, we drive around quite enough, thank you, hopping into the car to burn extra carbon seems kinda wasteful.  With our old cars, I used to be proud of how many miles we drove, as if tending to the cars and keeping them for a long time was a demonstration of virtue. With this generation of vehicles, I'm now into how few miles we're driving.

I've also tried to manage down the amount I/we fly on planes, also for emissions reduction reasons. From an environmental point of view, it all makes sense.

But when I look out on Facebook at people's pictures from the beach, the mountains, the Caribbean, the Caucasus, I'm often like:  "man, that looks good.  I wanna go there," which can quickly translate into "I am such a failure, how is it we don't go there."  A large part of it is just sheer competitiveness and envy, which is just silly, and can devolve into outright counterproductivity.  Though I suppose it gets me thinking, and gives me a little something to write about on an otherwise slow brain day.