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Tag: musings

PA Day Antics.

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Hello glorious Friday morning, how are you! For what it’s worth the sun is currently shining, I can see some light grey blue sky out my window and the kids are home off school because of the York Region pa day schedule. I believe there is another one, plus the Family Day holiday in February to plan around too.

Not to mention there are only a few weeks left until Valentine’s Day. Not a huge deal, atleast not around my immediate neck of the woods. We do something nice/simple for the kids, but we don’t make much of a fuss about it between my spouse and I. Haven’t done so since the mini mites entered the picture. We haven’t celebrated some of our more minor milestones from November yet. For a few years running, actually. Finding a trust worthy baby sitter has proven challenging, and we don’t go out all that much to warrant an exhaustive search. My eldest can do her babysitting course in another year or two, and then we’re all set to go out on the town to enjoy ourselves until 10:00pm. Living large! I’m excited. For a few years from now, we’ll really be able to live it up together, as a couple! Instead of trading off to go and do stuff separately.

The temperature is still really low, low, low, low. Not going to be much fun to go outside. I know we’d spoken of doing an outdoor skate this weekend, but I fear that will require hours of labour to clear the rink before we begin. And by then I’ll be too tired/frozen to want to skate for an hour or more.  The things we do for the ones we love. Not looking forward to having to manhandle the old snowblower around on the ice pad at the in-laws. Heavy and traction less. Stinks to high heaven, and never wants to start. I always end up pulling skin off my fingers pulling the recoil fifty times in a row. Not to mention the sore shoulder that will give me. Or I’ll get to scrape down the ice pad with a metal blade and then shovel the fine crystals off so the ice is nice and smooth. The only thing I don’t do, because I think my brother in law enjoys it, is flood the rink or run his homemade zamboni contraption. Can’t say I blame it. Setting the boards, stakes, and liner was a real chore. Cleaning the ice sucks, but maintaining the cleared ice pad is a piece of cake in comparison.

Which reminds me, I need to find all the skates and helmets for the outing. Pray that last years oversized skates still fit, and that the edges are still keen enough to skate on reasonably well. The girls have done two sessions of Ringette so they know how to skate, the basics anyway. Can move forward and backwards, but we’re not doing olympic trials or speed runs or anything like that. Good enough to just have fun is all that matters at this point.

Working from home during a pa day certainly is an experience in futility with small kids at home. Some times I think my oldest is mature, and other times – yeah, not so much. To think the original plan, pre Christmas was to be back in Florida right now. Several things didn’t line up, so we had to pass on it, but otherwise we could have avoided much of this sudden deep freeze, and be riding roller coasters right now, or sitting on a beach. It wouldn’t be all that hot, but a mid sixties to low seventies is better than the minus twenty give with the windchill we currently have. I can do shorts and a sweater in a theme park. I sure as hell can’t do that here, right now, deep into January. Brrr. No thank you.

I very nearly pulled the trigger on a new bandsaw yesterday. I held off though. I got to looking at saw mills again, and my eye started to wander. Then I was looking into chainsaws and Alaskan mill set ups, and got to thinking – again. So I halted all activity because I’m obviously not 100% certain of what I really want to do with my limited funds. I think I still need a bandsaw regardless of if I get into milling. I need to be able to resaw boards, more than I need to be able to slab logs. No, scratch that. Processing my own logs into slabs is great! But, I still need a bandsaw to break down slabs for use on anything other than live edge projects which are not trendy anymore. Had a real hay-day the last four to six years, but moving away from that sort of thing now. More straight edge, asymmetrical designs. Think minimalism with a flare for angles and joinery. But I digress. I only watch a few Japanese, and American furniture builders right now. It’s what I’m seeing, but that’s a tiny sliver of what’s going on out in the wider world.

Anyway. Have a nice Friday, and a great weekend. Stay warm!

Acerbic Anaerobic Excercises for the forthright and direct.

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Some days the hardest part about writing is coming up with a useable title to follow. Usually I utilize it as a lead in for my one sided conversations, other times it’s a click baity nonsense jumble to attract attention, and other times I think it’s a funny thing to say. Doesn’t really matter. I don’t think a mere title has ever gotten me more views, clicks, eye balls or deeper reading into the ole back catalogue of 555 days of entries. Some will say it is a numbers game, others tap into rage, some humour, and others technical skills or an educated treatise on a subject worthwhile of attention. Not this guy. Domestic Duties Monday, or Wednesday, Hump Day, Middle of the Week Day diatribes about laundry, messy kids, the local weather, and jabbering on about freelance graphic design, or attempting to finish my short story collections, and an illustrated children’s book. You won’t find Nobel Prize winning content here. A fair bit of snark is available though. Plus TMI stories of Crohn’s Disease, and intestinal distress. Glory to those whom behold such words. Words, I say! Explicit, delicate, sonorous words. Munch. Blather. Bile. So many to choose from.

I have some website headers to produce today, a few more photo edits to make, and a series of event posters too. Work is a bit lighter this week. I do need to hit up the local Lifelabs for blood work this afternoon, so that’s there, sitting on my mind. Here’s hoping my requisition form is still in good standing, or it may be a shorter visit than intended. Then a late day school pick up for my oldest, whisked off for an indigenous day downtown with a school club for a speaking event. They all seemed pretty excited about it. Happy to see it. Now I just need to wait around between 3:00pm, and 4:30pm or potentially later for their bus to come in. Hopefully they will update us using the parents Facebook group. That would be a really great service.

Pretty sure today is Thursday. Mid to late June all ready, I can hardly believe it. I mean I should, my Visa bill came in all ready so that’s always a strong indication the month is about to close out. Had another birthday party invite for the kids today, up to four now for the next two weeks alone. At this pace I’m going to go broke buying Lego sets for other families. Ha. Ain’t that the truth. Thus far I have planned nothing for the summer. To be totally honest I haven’t had the time to think. Well, up until this week I had been going pretty hard with work, but I saw a real slow down very recently, and I did some additional tree pruning, and house cleaning. But I haven’t given much thought to summer activities beyond the park, the farm for weeding, rock removal & watering, or swimming at the in-laws. We can visit area splash pads, but the pool is more private, and has far fewer interlopers. I don’t expect I’ll be all that busy until late August and beyond. As the events have to happen before we can audit them, or conduct research. I have done almost no wood working this spring either. Was too busy with freelance design work (which is a good thing). And what little extra time I did have available I spent cleaning up, tearing down, and reorganizing the space to make it feel more open, and less cluttered. Now I can fit my lawn mower down two aisles from front to back of my shop space and not get snagged on anything. A miracle. That allows me to move bicycles around for repair & maintenance work too. A true boon. I do have a big box full of burnable stuff to go out, but I’m not that concerned about it right now. I have done a pretty decent job of decluttering and opening up floor space, so for now I am satisfied.

Well, I need to eat breakfast and send some proofs off for review. Talk again soon. Ciao Bella!

Sixty Eight degrees° the elevator muzak from Helsinki.

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And what a fine specimen of a mind bending psychological disorder it is too. All kazoo noises and garbage can cymbols, with a soft synth wave chorus throughout. Pulling off the melody with a saw blade and violin bow was a stroke of genius. Could do without the canon blasts and the nails on a chalk board, but you have your tastes and I have mine. Let’s just agree to disagree on the finer points, shall we.

In other news I found a line on a nice looking set of used golf clubs from nearby, so I hope to acquire those later on today, for a modest price. Score! The point of the purchase was to be able to continue a new (hopefully yearly) golf outing with my older siblings, and my father for as long as he can manage it. I’ve never owned golf clubs before, so this feels momentous. Similar to how i felt actually buying my own pair of ice skates. Perhaps this summer I’ll be fortunate enough to have a date night with my wife and we can go to the driving range or mini putt by ourselves! Like we used to do all the time, prior to having children. How we long to have a quiet meal out together. Damn you Covid! Going to be a while yet too.

Think we might take the wee one to go see some fish today. Obviously the first choice would be an aquarium, but that’s down town and full of people. So we’ll go the closer option, I imagine, and hit up the Zoo. Lots of exhibits have fish, and we have family yearly passes, so – cheap too! The large wall tank near the jellies is my favourite, but I know others like the massive curved tank option as well. I have never owned fish, but I do watch a guy on YouTube from Alabama who spent many months and lots of money building a five acre bass pond on a corner of his peanut farm. Maybe I like the building more so than the fish, but it was interesting and entertaining at the same time.

I’m feeling the terrain building bug again. Problem is, I don’t have anywhere to store or maintain yet another 2x2ft playing board. I could build it and give it away, or sell it. But I have peculiar tastes, and I’m not sure I’d want to part with it when finished anyway. Could be I just want to work on something physical, as writing is fun, but it’s also just more digital output. Not a tangible item to hold, that has weight and a realness to it. Plus, to build more terrain I need to buy a lot of expensive supplies, where as I have clay on hand that I can use, bought and paid for, just waiting on me to get down to business. Choices – choices.

I wonder if I will keep the streak going up to one hundred days. I’m sort of amazed I have made it to 68, to be honest. Something tells me if I’d have tried this with exercise it would have fizzled after day five. Which, honestly, reflects poorly I’m sure. I just passed chapter twenty five, so I think I’m down to the last few chapters. Although every single time I say “only X number of chapters left” I find something new to expand upon and the count goes higher. So let us say, the last handful, and we can draw this portion to a close. I don’t think I will be able to let this universe go, so I can forsee new stories developing after I close out book two. Could take a full year to come back to it again, but maybe not. These daily writing entries tend to get me thinking, and that ends up as a new chapter getting written. Once the wheels are in motion, I have to write it down, or else rely on my memory to recapture it later on. Not my favourite way to go about it.

Watching the Winter Olympics

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And feeling rather blah about it. Not that I get all dressed up in red and white face paint and shake a flag around for two weeks at the best of times, but really not feeling it this year. We watched a few moments of Alpine skiing, half pipe, freestyle snowboarding and some speed skating. Not for very long, and with only passing interest. I remember years were we would wake up super early, or stay up late to catch stuff live, and to watch the over tired tv personalities wrangle with sports figures and get drunk on set and act up. It was hilarious and entertaining and fun. But this Winter Olympics feels like it has this massive black cloud looming over it, because we all know about the Uighurs, and the Human Rights issues going on there, but we are to what? Forget it for two weeks, forgive it for the sake of some live sports on tv 24/7. It feels off. Hard to shake even with all the pomp and ceremony surrounding the events. Doesn’t help that Covid has the stands bare, and it looks as hollow as it feels. But before we get all Righteous and sanctimonious, let us remember how many other countries are participating in Apartheid like occupations, and are actively producing human rights abuses against members of their own populations. So – yeah. Now that that has been said. On to something else.

After last weeks school covid exposure we have tested clear again today, thankfully. Our friends whose child fell ill from Covid from that same classroom has since passed covid along to three of the four members of the family. Three of them seem to be mild, but one is in tough shape. The little one who brought it home is now on the up & up.

Did anyone out there watch the new Ghostbusters? Was it any good? I kind of want to see it, but I’ve had a slew of bad luck watching reboots and things like that. I don’t want to buy it, as the cgi looked suspect. More cartoony than I had hoped for. Although now that I’m a middle aged man I realize that most franchise stuff is geared towards 8-12 year olds to garner life long fans. Trying to revisit movies you loved as a kid will deflate you fairly quickly. The rose coloured glasses of misunderstood jokes, or being enthralled by bright colours and slapstick comedy while missing the point of the film itself comes home to roost when you finally have more to bring to the viewing than the enthusiasm of child-like wonder.

Hold on, I’ve just been asked to make a pumpkin out of blue and yellow pipe cleaners. A father’s work is never done.

How do you solve a problem like 51?

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But not centimeters of snow! Thankfully. We did not get the one foot of snow that was potentially forecasted, although more snow is coming later on today. My back thanks you! Four inches is manageable every couple of hours.

Speaking of puns, I added at least one visual pun into my latest report. Made me laugh, I wonder if anyone else will clue in to it. Fun tip, having worked so hard Monday through Wednesday, plus some light work this previous weekend I now get to enjoy a lighter day – Go Me! Much appreciated by my brain, wrists and sense of musical whimsy. I did bust out some music yesterday as I was nearing the end of laying out my first draft.

It’s funny as a kid, youth, teen, early twenties I could not work in silence, I had to have music on, but after working for many years in open office spaces, I’ve come to love working quietly. I can on occasion, if I don’t have to pay attention to critical elements, listen to loud music and sing along as I work. Mainly doing pie charts, and bar graphs, and scatter graphs though. Not the table portion. A mixture of Motorhead, The Beatles and The Blue Stones, followed up by Wolfmother and Status Quo. That’s my go to musical line up these days. Hood and loud too. Which is fine because I work from home, and don’t live on top of my neighbours. I guess I’d have to invest in some seriously high quality head phones if I ever go back to working on site when Freelancing, or go back to an in-house design position. I like the zero commute time too much though. Chasing dollar bills has always ended badly for me. I guess if the work/industry is amazing I could potentially do it again. But coming from large market alcoholic beverages with massive start of the year marketing meetings with air travel, fancy hotels, meetings in swanky spaces, free drinks, great food, famous guest speakers and late night parties for days on end, you’d be hard pressed to improve on the type of perks I’ve known over 16 years affiliated with that industry. Work hard and play even harder was a common refrain amongst the C-Suite types.

Yeah – so. Still writing a bit every single day, and haven’t forgotten about my short story series. I’m working through some character moments in my head before I write out anything. I am trying to get these last six or so chapters to land properly. Going to require some footwork on my end. I’ll keep you posted.

50! – We Reached 50 Days and all you got was tinnitus.

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EÈEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE – isn’t that delightful. Is your inner ear issue accented or other? Muah- muah. Now that’s cleared up.

Big fifty day milestone. I feel like this is a sort of AA meeting. Hello my name is… and I have been writing for fifty days – small smattering of applause. Not that big a deal, but I’m kind of happy I’ve stuck with it.

In happy news, I will have the first polished draft of my report done today, just shy of 100 pages. It’s a hefty document, looks lovely. Three days of real work, plus a Sat/Sun combo of a couple hours of front end work. Not to mention I did a fair amount of leg work well before I had any of the data sets. Things like building out my templates, and setting up colour palettes in various programs, and gathering the specified font families. Not hard work, but time consuming. I’d much rather have that tucked away so i can start the heavy lifting, than wait until the raw data comes in and then have to do all that stuff before i can really begin. I’m lazy, i want as few obstacles in the way so that i can complete a task. Set my foundation, then come in like a nutter and tear through the work as quickly as i am able. I also proof my pages as i go, since there are so many colour coded tables.

So big 50! Wow – what can I say, glad to be here. Happy some of you have chosen to follow along. Today’s big to-do is about three movies i recently watched. Some good, some moderate, and some heavy cheese (a.k.a Fromage) if you’re of the Much Music & Ed The Sock era like I am.

First up was “Nobody”, an action packed mix of John Wick & The Equalizer, with some snappy banter and blood soaked fighting. I liked it a lot. Big fan of John Wick franchise too. This was my favourite of the three films I saw over the Christmas holidays, which I had never seen before. I should also mention, these were all watched at home, not in a proper theater, with candy, drinks and massive screen and sound. Could have played a part in why movies two and three didn’t land so well. They were far more spectacle based. If you like watching men in their fifties fight, shoot and drink their way through trouble then Nobody is great.

Second up was Venom: Let there be Carnage. Followed in the first ones footsteps, fun, goofy and kind of silly. I liked it, but if I’m going to rewatch a Spider-man adjacent film, I’d watch into the spider verse for a fifteenth time. That was great, in 3d imax and on my home screen. Tom Hardy is great, Venom is funny. Carnage has a size issue, he’s a touch too big for my recollection. But I like Woody Harrelson, so I can see past that. It does show as a $70 million movie and not a Marvel tent pole at $150 million dollar movie. But the small focus is kinda nice. Not world saving, but a select few people. Lower stakes to deal with.

Third, and what I found to be disappointing was Suicide Squad 2. Lots of body horror, which I wasn’t expecting. Plus I kind of hate Peace Keeper. Maybe he’s funnier and more congenial in the prequel tv show he’s now got, but he didn’t do it for me. Harley felt like an afterthought, and most people weren’t compelling. However, Polka Dot man was unexpectedly great. You get a sense of the guy, and feel for him and his interdimensional polka dot disease. King shark was a lazy groot knock off. Didn’t add much to the plot. And why are so many DC characters essentially just a rebrand dead shot, or whomever Will Smith was in the first one. Idris Elba felt wasted. I think the issue was I heard so much hype around it I had unreasonable expectations for it. It only landed at my feet with a damp thud. Sploot.

The first ground hogs say early spring! But you never can tell. Have some more snow on the way today. Another foot to the pile. I’ll have to rest up as it’ll really give my back a once over if it’s wet and heavy!

Melty Brain & Eye Strain.

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Fought hard against the report today, went deep into the trenches and was bested by it. Dry eyes and a melting brain. Hard to think straight. Sore left eyeball for my troubles. Thought I could possibly complete the robust beast today, but no such luck. On the upside I have only 60% of what I should have had to do tomorrow left to complete. Perhaps trying for that extra 40% was just too much. But why put off until to tomorrow that which you can do today? Well – eye strain and melty brain for starters actually. Twenty pages was a solid goal, going over was silly. No chance I was going to pull off the full last forty in one six hour uninterrupted day. A+ for effort though.

Know your limits and play within them! Or else try not to melt your brain by doing too much with it all at once like a fool.

Tomorrow marks day 50! Do I have something fun to say? Any new pertinent information to share? A rant to glide into, or perhaps a movie review? Who knows, you’ll just have to wait and see.

Good morning, good afternoon and good night.

It’s February 1st : An exploration of Day 49.

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Almost to fifty, if you can believe that. This wasn’t so much a new years resolution as an attempt to grind out some time in my schedule to do any sort of writing I could on a consistent basis. And on a couple of select days that has prompted me to write new and interesting materials. It’s not all Pulitzer worthy text, which I am aware, but genre-esque space science fiction fun. Easy reading if you will. My question now is, how long do I keep the streak running for? Until I finish book two? Most likely yes. Then I might take a break. Or, after I complete the last six or seven more chapters I’ll switch gears and write a few more autobiographical one off’s to pad the page count a bit. Make it feel like the 99 cents through Kindle is worth it! Ha.

Or I’ll feel like painting or sculpting or it’ll get warm enough to do some wood working. I find it unpleasant to handle chisels in sub zero temperatures. If it’s around zero or above i can make it work.

Had a solid work day yesterday, and today is shaping up to be a good one too. Invoices out means paid invoices coming back in, in the near future. Just resting my wrist for a shake while I quickly clack this out on my phone via thumbs. Have to make the effort to get up and walk around. Shake out those shoulders and legs. Get limber! Stay healthy out there people!

Day 48, and it’s going to be a busy one.

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Lots to do, lots to do today. Also have to get my eye sight checked today. Fingers are crossed that I still don’t need real prescription glasses. Trying to hold off, as once I give in my eyes will deteriorate more rapidly in my middle age. Paid work is still rolling in, which is fantastic, so good there for now. Big – big job I’m working through now. If I can get a good chunk out of it today, like I did on Saturday and Sunday then I will be able to sleep better knowing I am making progress on it. Still have thirty odd pages to go of the raw data to assemble. My wrists will sing come Friday!

Might need to be a little less present in writing my connected short story series this week. But who knows. I have to take breaks to eat and move, so maybe I’ll get a sense of some story beats I just have to get down on paper.

All the best on this, the last day of January. Just think, you’ll never have to do this day again!