After I answered question #9, What thing would you never do again? “Answer questions for a Liebster award.” for the Liebster Award nomination from Li Dea, Victoria at America’s Roads nominated Off Center & Not Even for a Liebster Award as part of completing her nomination by Li Dea. I decided to break out of Never Never Land and answers Vitoria’s questions. Her blog is in Russian also, but she recently added a translator, so I got the questions in English. Therefore, I answered her questions in English.

My (Victoria’s) questions

Question 1) What inspires you to write new posts?

Answer 1) Daily life. Cats. Owls. Trees. Cranes. Beavers. Insects. Spiders. Snakes. Flowers, Roses. Wild animals in general. The Bosque. The Rio Grande. Downtown Albuquerque. Guitars. Music. Parodies. Other bloggers. Anything that seems interesting.

Question 2) How do you find the time to maintain your site?

Answer 2) There’s “maintain” and there’s “maintain”.

1. As far as the platform maintenance, I leave that to WordPress because I don’t want to deal with maintaining a website. I would rather put my energy into posting blogs. In that sense, I probably shouldn’t complain so much about WordPress.
2. As far as time to maintain a blog as in posting content daily, I simply work blogging into my daily routine. Whatever I’m doing has a good chance of becoming blog material. Posts also become archives of how things were in the recent past, and what was happening at any given time before the present day.

Question 3) Is blogging for you a job, a pleasure, a necessity, or something else?

Answer 3) Mostly something else. As I mentioned, blogging is part of the daily routine. It can be a problem working in a post when I’m really busy with other things, just pain tired or feeling like everything sucks. However, unless the Internet or WordPress is down, I, at a minimum, post at least one photo.

If I had to write a story or poem, post an interview, write a review, etc. every day or even once a week, forget it. Blogging would be too much work, and I wouldn’t blog. While some of my posts take months to prepare collecting photos, writing poems, prose or lyrics, recording music, etc., I need to be flexible and spontaneous. I had been planning to post “Prepare to DIE” with Spunk on the 13th, but when I went out for a walk in the bosque Owls happened, so I posted Owls on the 13th and Spunk had to wait until the 14th (don’t tell Spunk he got Trumped [AAahhh!] by owls).

Question 4) What is your life motto and has it changed with age?

Answer 4) I have never had a life motto.

Question 5) What have you learned while sitting at home in quarantine (it can be some kind of training courses, or just life 7) observations)?

Answer 5) I never sat around the house during lockdown or quarantine. Since we have property that backs up to the Bosque and the Rio Grande, we were never really quarantined in the sense we couldn’t leave the house or got outside. Since we are pretty much hermits anyway, nothing much changed for us. At the beginning of the lockdown, I went to the office once a week to run backups and do server maintenance, but after three weeks, I started going to the office as usual.

As for seven observations:

1. Governments have politicized the pandemic.
2. Policymakers and many governors have made very poor, politically motivated decisions about how to deal with the pandemic.
3. The media has engaged in unnecessary fear-mongering and misinformation about COVID-19.
4. The government health and medical industrial complex has run and continues to run disinformation campaigns about COVID-19.
5. Testing data, information about treatments, and death counts from COVID-19 have been manipulated, so it’s difficult to trust “official” information about the pandemic.
6. Social media giants are aiding and abetting in the misinformation campaigns.
7. Governments, industry, and many service providers are using the pandemic as an excuse to give bad service.

Question 6) What is the first thing you want to do once quarantine is canceled?

Answer 6) I will go to the first available conference that was postponed because of the pandemic to give a paper.

Question 7) What book by a modern author do you reread and can recommend to your friends?

Answer 7) “Jar City” and the whole Inspector Erlendur series by Arnaldur Indridason.

Question 8) And which book is a classic?

Answer 8) “The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Question 9) If you could start over, would you choose your profession or do something else?

Answer 9) I can’t think of anything. What I do for a living has allowed me to do pretty much everything I have liked to do in the past, and all the things I currently like doing.

Question 10) What would you like to change in the country you currently live in?

Answer 10) Three things:

1. We the people vote all the toxic, old, entrenched politicians from both parties out of office, and vote in a fresh set of candidates. Call me old-fashioned, out-of-touch, and naive, but I prefer voting for change over rioting for change.
2. Change the date we have to file and pay taxes from April 15th to October 30th every year so people who pay taxes will have had the shock of paying taxes only a week before going to the polls to vote on the first Tuesday in November.
3. Politicos, the popular press, and social media giants STOP engaging in divisive identity politics that are dividing this country.

Question 11) With age have you become more open or more closed to new acquaintances?

Answer 11) More open. I was pretty shy as a kid and mostly did things by myself. I try to give everybody a fair assessment before passing judgment on them.