Mikes Writing

walking my way

Here I am already on blogpost number 2. Amazing! Last time here I got up to about 30 and then deleted things. I decided this time to try my level best to not just do that again. Making 11ty work is not a great deal of work. I do a few things with it I like.

What I like about using 11ty is I don’t really want a bunch of changes to just write. Some pretty theme or big-time changes really do nothing for what I came here for. That’s a place for some words to be stored and shown. Out of the box, 11ty just gives me a place to write but I like to make the few changes.

Adding all that to GitHub and Netlify is a commit away and then I get things on iOS which is easy. The goal always is to be able to write on either as painlessly as possible. This is really important to me since I take the iPhone and not the laptop when I go places. Even just walking in the morning for coffee and then staying out a bit to admire the weather or get wet in rainy season is a thing too.

I walk my way through all this knowing what it is I want. I want this blogging to be as easy as I can do it while having a nice place also to create markdown files for the blog and for other writing I have been thinking of lately. To get this for the blog, I bent my massive skills (duh) to creating an apple shortcut to make a new file for the blog with the current date and the yaml front matter in place. When I run it I get a new file ready to go. I just change the name, add in the tags and title and write. Right?

Yeah right!

In the vein of my previous incarnations, it is now time to include a photo of something not remotely connected to what I’m writing about. I am not sure why this is a thing but I enjoy finding photos of things here or there. Sometimes elsewhere. Maybe there is a connection. This was one of the recent times we walked for hours around one of the most beautiful Khmer temples around. It is my favorite and we spent time there.

Banteay Srei 2026

Then we had some lunch with the tuktuk driver and visited two other temples. Some days the going becomes the going. It is a thing we do not do that often. Going there during “green season” meant flowing green ricefields, trees growing out over the roads, and this cool breeze that might hint at rain. It did rain as we found our way home if memory serves.

flash forward to now

From then to now. I guess I will write some more on this as I stumble across a thought or two. One thing is I miss us doing these things. There’s never too many times to go to Angkor Wat. Given there are likely over 90 temple complexes it is very possible to see a place seen before but with a new lens.

I guess this is just the way it goes and I miss a lot of what was. Before we would just get a tuktuk and go. Sometimes on an afternoon my wife would say,

hey honey. Lets go to Bayon temple just for fun.

Never had to ask me twice. These days it takes some asking for us to even consider going. This is likely why I’ve reached the point of wanting and needing time away. Some different container. A different walk. Even if I have been before. Kampot is that container. It offers this different view of life for me. That lens I was talking about.

How many times must a person visit the magnificent Angkor Wat? I dunno. Have not reached that number and likely never will.

I’ll let this go and just walk my way.

See you down the road.