In what I hope will become a regular feature over here on the site, I’d like to introduce you to…random stuff on the internet.

Let me clarify. We love talking about our travels ad nauseum over here at Drive on the Left, and obviously chatting about London is our second favorite topic. But did you know that behind the scenes I have a random obsession with ‘longform journalism’ (basically long, literary feature articles)? Or that Drew can spend literally hours reading about aircraft models, and that he knows, by heart, every major restaurant opening in most major world cities? It’s impressive.

We have other interests, in addition to travel. Go figure.

We’re also both avid readers of online material, and frankly spend a lot of our free time showing each other random videos from Jimmy Fallon or pups reuniting with their owners, the kind of lighthearted fluff that makes the world go ‘round.

Here are some other things we’ve been exploring online recently:

Saving Money So We Can Travel Even More

We are putting in place some new budgeting goals for the New Year. We are great at tracking our expenses, but the only goal we’ve had is to spend more on travel than in any other category. True story. To refine our approach, I have really enjoyed reading up on budgeting from the perspective of different families.

We also downloaded this new budgeting app to try out. It syncs to our two phones so we can both access our data real time, a huge improvement.

If you are a fan of yearly goal setting and for some reason haven’t heard of, or followed, Chris Guillebeau’s method, check it out. I use a slightly modified version of his template, which he embedded in the post.

Podcasts: The Killer of Free Time

I was on the podcasting bandwagon long before Serial made its debut last year. In fact, I remember listening to podcasts back in 2007 as I trained for my first 10k. But I’m thankful to Serial for the boom in podcasts over the past year, and have found many new favorites.

In particular, I love The Popcast, The Lively Show, and several of the Slate podcasts (Culture Gabfest is my fave, but I also love their weekly spoiler special where they talk about last week’s episode of Serial. The devotion is real.). Drew is partial to Planet Money, I’ll Drink to That and Special Sauce.

Crafty Stuff

My current life conundrum – I want to do more crafty art projects, but I have a major aversion to clutter. How do I bring some creativity into my life without sacrificing my need for not owning anything? These YouTube channels inspire me to buy stamps and photo printers and scrapbooks.

Annoying Drew With Long Articles

When I wake up too early in the morning to the sound of construction going on a few doors down, I read articles off of the Longform app. Recently I loved this article about how weird the English language is. I read most of it out loud to Drew, it’s just that good.

Fave Posts Round-Up

If you missed it, here are a few of the favorite posts that we’ve put up here over the past few weeks: a roundup of our favorite brunch spots in London, a look back at our travel highlights in 2015, and a tribute to our pup Basil, who we lost last month to old age. I keep watching this video we made last month about a weekend trip to Somerset – what a great weekend that was, and Basil is the star of the show, as it should be.

Cheers to a fab weekend!