The Drew Story: New Year, New Outlook, New Blog

First of all, hello, and thank you for reading! My name is Drew, and I'm a bit of an eccentric. Some of you may have followed my other blog, "Hard Highway," thanks for sticking around! I'm sure you'll enjoy my life off the road just as much as my life on the road.

As for being off the road, I felt it was just time for me to move on to other things. I've re-enrolled in college and intend on finishing up my degree in mechanical engineering. So that's step one. I'm also working to refine and advance my photography skills in order to accomplish my next goal, to take part in the production of a big screen movie. Fingers crossed on that one, I'm just starting out.

Stay tuned though, lots of interesting things will be coming your way via this outlet. I FULLY Intend to keep this slightly more up-to-date than I did with Hard Highway. I know I said that about that blog too, but things are different now. I wake up in the same place every morning, have access to my own computer as well as have the free time now to get out on my own and explore.

For starters, I embarked on an afternoon hike through the forest surrounding my house to clear my head, what manifested from that hike was a short photo journalistic look at what I call "Human Nature."

If you know me, you'll know that I'm certainly no hippy, but I can't help but feel a little ashamed and angry at our species when everywhere I look there is some piece of trash carelessly thrown out because someone was too lazy to hold on to it for the extra 5, 15, or 30 minutes until they came across one of the MANY garbage cans we humans have conveniently placed all around our civilization. It's not at all limited to litter, either. Everywhere I looked, I saw reminders and traces that humans were not far away. As the old naturalist motto goes: "Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints." With all the high tech distractions in our lives these days, it's easier and easier to forget the natural beauty all around us. On my travels, I was amazed to learn than most of the people I talked to had never seen the night sky. Obviously everyone sees the sky, that's not what I mean, but when you think of the night sky, how many of you see a dull gray or orange haze with a few specs of light shining through here and there? I've seen more than my share of that sort of night sky, and after a while, I started to forget what was really up there. Did you know that you can actually see our own galaxy very clearly with the naked eye? Get away from all that light pollution and look up on a clear night, and the concentration of billions upon billions of stars hangs right above us in plain sight.

Now what on Earth can we humans do that could possibly improve upon that? My mind is a blank on that frontier.