For every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting?

Well, hi there. How's it going? Yes, yes, I know, I know, it's kind of rude to just drop off the face of the earth with no explanation. You've kept pace with me these past few months as I've slowly made my way up to square 84. Such good progress over the summer - biking a lot, eating fresh foods, living a pretty clean existence, doing some fundraising.

Now I'm on square 86, in the throes of my fall work travel schedule, blogging while cookies on an airplane after having a big ol' beer with my airport restaurant dinner, with a die that only has ones and twos on it... What's it going to be? Is my fall going to end up being one big roll of a one? Or will I persevere and roll a two? Oh, the suspense!  

"All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you hope to climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner, and for every snake a ladder will compensate. But it's more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair; because implicit in the game is unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent; in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, Alpha against Omega, father against mother." - Salman Rushdie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakes_and_Ladders)