Bedside Report

Today was supposed to be a relaxing Presidents Day. While I was able to spend some time watching The History Channel's documentary on the Presidents, today, like the last 5 days has been miserable.

I suppose it's that time of year. I always seem to get sick around this time of year for some reason, and mother nature decided to add insult to injury (or illness) by dumping not far off of a foot of snow.

After I spent what seemed like much more than an hour shoveling my car out from the snow I decided to look up a map to visualize areas of the country who have the greatest number of people spending their Presidents Day miserably waiting for good health.

At first, the fact that it was widespread nearly all over the country made me feel a little bit comforted...no, I just feel like crap.

A Peninsula Affair

On a day filled with map and crosshairs news, I thought it would be nice, rather, to touch on an old political hotbed of contention, Crimea. The Black Sea peninsula has been a valuable post for many hundreds of years.

On a weekend that truly passed by in the blink of an eye, I found myself, as I often do, engulfed by a Sunday morning History Channel special: Russia - Land of the Tsars.

History Channel does a good job incorporating maps into their documentaries. They are particularly good at using them to show advancement and retraction of empires. One scene from Sunday portrayed the Russian advancement on the Crimean peninsula, on the Black Sea in modern day Ukraine.

In addition to being a relaxing Sunday activity, the documentary got me wanting to get back in to War & Peace and reread Crime & Punishment. The desire to travel to Russia, or course, also remains.

Here's how Crimea appears on my 2000 National Geographic wall map. A map which, on what was otherwise a challenging day, served as a window of imagination and inspired creative thoughts.

The Geography Blog

Apparently my love of maps is not shared by many. Niche shops and niche bloggers are out there but with few exceptions one cannot mention their affinity for maps without a look of confusion trickling across the face of the listener.

Maps represent tangible places and experiences. When I was a kid I would look for simple geographic features, like the curving of a coastline or the bending of a road and try to find that feature on a map. I thought about the technology and thought that must go into map making and how refined maps had become compared to their mid-millennium counterparts. I was also a strange kid :)

Now I spend a good portion of my life making maps. For the most part they are simple with a narrow and somewhat boring purpose but I'm hoping to change that. Geography, maps and imagery is my true passion. It's a way to make sense and capture moments in an ever changing and beautiful landscape.

Geography lets us keep our physical place on this planet and in the universe in perspective. It allows us to relate to each other in a multitude of geospatial and cultural ways. It makes us human.

On this blog, I'll run the gamut from google earth to maps, general geography and did you knows, how to's and new technology. I hope you enjoy it as much as I like experiencing it!

Let's get started!