People sometimes ask me if Airstream Life will run out of things to write about someday. I used to worry about that, in the first year of the magazine, but I don’t any longer. Even though I only plan at most three issues in advance (nearly a year at our publishing schedule), I have learned that there are an infinite number of topics to learn about and share, if you take the time to be interested in the world around you.

I do a lot of the hunting myself, just as a consequence of being a curious person, but fortunately I don’t have to do it all. The magazine has attracted a group of regular writers who are likewise curious, and they are constantly tossing ideas at me. It’s my pleasure to field the queries. They range from ridiculous to genius, but they’re always interesting, so the process of reviewing them is mostly fun.

Today someone asked if we were planning an article on Airstream collectible dishes. My answer was no, but it’s an interesting idea. We’ll kick it around the editorial staff and see if anyone qualified to write it raises their hand. That kind of thing happens regularly, and with some nurturing it inevitably turns into a good article. The words you read in the magazine take an incredible amount of work to produce — literally weeks or months of a writer’s time, plus multiple editing passes, photography, fact-checking, and layout — but the process is fun because I get to indulge my own interests.

People ask me, “What is Airstream Life about?” and I sometimes answer that it is about whatever interests me at the moment. That really is more the truth than any other answer I could give, but I know it scares people, so I usually just say that it is about things that people who own Airstreams would be interested in. That’s a non-answer but it seems to satisfy questioners.

However, the things that interest me at the moment have little to do with Airstreams. For example, I am having lots of fun with my ukulele. I am using it as a stress relief and break from the computer. Every hour or so I get up from the table and work on a song. The song for today is “Something” by George Harrison, and it’s coming along nicely. Uke mania has really captured me and it is dangerous because it leads to the acquisition of more ukes. Everyone I know (in person or through the Internet) seems to have a collection of at least six.

There’s a saying in the uke world, “You can’t eat just one.” Gotta have all four sizes to start: soprano, concert, tenor, and baritone. Then there’s the variations on shape and sound: “pineapple” ukes, cigar-box, resonator, and the novelty ones, different colors, historic ukes … oh, it’s bad. I keep reminding myself that I can only play one at a time and I certainly don’t have room in the Airstream for a collection.

There’s the rub of having “interests”. They can lead to acquisitions and that leads to a house full of stuff. We are trying to avoid that. Even though we now have the space, we are trying to keep our lives relatively uncluttered by things. That means exercising our interests has to be restricted to intangibles and consumables, which is a real challenge with a couple thousand square feet of house just begging to be filled up. So I am continuing to direct my interests to things I can put in the magazine instead, even if only tangentially. I just need to find an angle for a uke story in an upcoming issue …

… which brings us back to where we started. Airstream Life will never run out of articles. There’s too much interesting stuff in the world. And I can’t fit it all in my house.