The word of the week is whimsy.
May 16 – Four Years Already?
I moved into my current place four years ago this
week.
Hard to believe, really, that I've shared this
space with my sister for that long and we still get along so damn well. There's
probably some sort of Guinness World Record in there somewhere, when I think
about it, and I'm grateful for it. I can't imagine what it would be like
trying to interview roommates, living with strangers or even friends to try and
make or things work. For all of our differences, my sister has been the best
roomie I could ever have asked for.
Living here has been interesting, and more than
challenging a few times: crazy-loud upstairs neighbours, sleep deprivation,
unemployment, a road full of motorcycles outside my front window, bouts of
pneumonia and cellulitis and chronic wrist pain... I've dealt with all of these
and more and I'm still here, still sane and( mostly )healthy.
Nothing stays the same
forever; I know this well.
My current apartment, for all its warts, has been
pretty good overall in terms of places that I've rented - the more recent two
years far more than the first two years. Job stability and improved health
helped balance that equation somewhat.
I find it interesting that I don't know where
I'll be living four years from now. I'm almost certain that it won't be in this
building, given my need for a more quiet locale to practice my writing craft(
hear that, motorcycles? )in the future. Ideally, I'd like to have
a place somewhere in the city, on a quiet suburban street well back from any
main roads, hopefully without too many idiots in the immediate neighborhood.
Here's hoping!
May 17 – Rude Writing?
It was an odd critique group tonight, in that I
didn't have anything to contribute of my own.
As I mentioned in last month's blog note, I've
only finished half of Book 2, and last month I ran out of the current batch of
first-draft chapters for critiquing.
On the bright side, it means that our critique
nights are taking all that long, about 2 1/2 hours in total and we can get into
more detail for each person's chapter under review since we have less overall
material to go through of the night. We've been doing this now for over three
years and I'm eager to start generating more new material for Book 2 in a few month’s time so that I
can get feedback on it.
On a related note, we had a bit of skulduggery in
our writing group today.
Thanks to the way Meetup.com is set up, anyone can join our group. Someone new did just that a week ago, then created a new Meetup meeting under the auspices of our writing group... without asking any of the administrators, or even having met any of the group members.
I understand this is the age of the electronic
social group, but this behavior smacked to me of rudeness and also a form of hijack:
it's was akin to a stranger showing up at a well-established local group meeting,
handing out business cards for another meeting and then leaving immediately.
My fellow admin and I are going to handle this
quietly, which I think is called for as it's not really a big deal but we don't
want to set a problematic precedent. The next time this person creates a
meeting, we're going to cancel it and immediately message them to the effect
that if they want to use our membership, they should show up to a few meetings
first; our writing group has been around a while and have certain standards to
maintain with the use of the groups name, minor though that point is.
If they don't like that, they can form their own
group. Easy enough.
May 18 – Move, Move Again?
Another sign that I should be moving on...
I learned today that work will likely be moving
me to another department, still within the same office. I'll probably be doing
one of a few familiar tasks, but not administration... which is a good thing,
actually.
This time last year, when I was just doing
invoices, I was able to listen to music all day long which I found inspiring to
my creative side. It's perfect timing to be going back to that, in a way, as I
need to spend this summer editing Book 1... and what better way to keep my
creative juices bubbling all day then with inspiring music, just like last
year?
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| I had it so good... and now it's no longer My Spot. |
In the meantime, I've moved desk twice since I
was turfed out of my 'corner condo' at the beginning of the month. As you can
see from the pics above, I was gloriously ensconced in a corner spot of the
office, with no glaring overhead lights and the sort of privacy that you get
only after years in the same office.
Where I am now is likely to change again, as I
get pushed over to the other side of the office were all the invoice folks
live. Unfortunately, I'll only get two monitors( not the 3 currently enjoyed
by the Admin team )and I'll be in a
space probably half the size of my current desk area... which will take
some getting used to, I think.
But who knows? 3 to 6 months from now, I may be
located at another office altogether, if one of my recent job applications
bears fruit. A bump in pay is certainly worth some desk-size reduction, or
other minor disruptions in one's daily worklife.
Change can be a good thing, especially if
you're half-expecting it...
May 19 – Landing Life
I don't do sale flyers anymore.
It used to be that I'd seek out the occasional
good deal on things Needed, or sometimes even things Wanted, by regularly
visiting sites such as RedFlagDeals.com, NCIX.com, Newgg.ca and so forth. It
was fun and interesting to see how good a deal one could get, before stock ran
out or other factors came into play. Over the years, these sites have netted me
many a good deal, but one thing has always remained the same: they involve
spending money.
Given my current finances, it's just smarter not
to even look.
If I keep things simple and avoid temptation of
any kind, I think I'll do just fine. I'm not lacking in anything in my household
by any stretch of imagination: I have more accumulated gadgets then I probably
need, even after clearing out some of the more obsolete things last fall. By
removing the temptation of "Hey, that looks cool, I could probably use
that" from my vocabulary altogether, I'll be able to better concentrate on
what Needs Doing for the rest of 2016, and ensure that I lower my anxiety
levels by going very easy on my wallet.
Tonight I also attended a 'learning session' at
the invitation of a family member, who thought that it might prove useful in my
life as it has in theirs. This program is known internationally and has been
around for several decades, with the distinction of costing a fair penny to get
into while providing meaningful results for thousands of people needing focus
in their lives.
Interestingly, while I was there for three hours
listening to the speakers, my thoughts during the session all ran along the
same lines: I don't need this in my life right now, as I have a pretty good
idea of where I'm going and what I need to do to get there.
It was quite freeing to be able to sit there and
listen, without feeling as though my life needed to be turned upside down in
order to make it better. I felt grounded and relaxed, confident in the
decisions I've made in the last couple of years to bring myself to the point
where I am now and continue onwards with my life.
Good things are coming my way; some of them are
already here.
May 20 – Long Weekend!
Thanks to good timing, today was my day off and
combined with the holiday on Monday, I get a four-day Victoria Day weekend!
I made good use of it today, by doing a lot of
cleanup with my papers. Usually around this time of year, I make a point of
going through all of my old files and receipts to toss whatever's no longer
relevant or useful or timely. I make sure to shred all the private documents
and bills however; no sense in giving information to use by ID thieves these
days.
It's a good feeling to get rid of a lot of the
old to make room for the new. I especially enjoyed going through some of the
folders and seeing things that triggered fond memories of days gone by, like
this flyer from Rahams:
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| 25 years on, it's still in my heart... |
Raham's
was my go-to place for RPG and boardgames in Grades 7 and 8, as well as
throughout high school. It was located in downtown St. Catharines, in the
basement of Raham's Office Supply, down a short set of stairs in the front of
the store - I don't think I ever bought a single thing from the office supply
store upstairs, in all the years that I went through their front door.
Downstairs was a wonderland.
They had it all, in the 80s and early 90s: RPG
games, miniatures, boardgames and even computer games in their later years,
including the Amiga system that would become my favorite personal computer of
all time. It was a magnificent place to explore, even on a student's budget, as
you could so many things of interest there and there was always something new
coming in week to week. I was sad to see the store close in the 1990s and while
a former employee opened up a spiritual successor store down the road, it was
never the same. Rahams was where my imagination was given license to buy, a toy
store for my purely creative side.
It's sad that such a big part of my growing
up hasn't a single mention anywhere to be found on the Internet today... save
for today's entry.
In the evening tonight, my lady and I got a taste
of the 2016 Victoria Kite Festival!
Tonight, after sunset from 9 to 11pm, there were
night-flying kites galore! It was a cloudless night with a full moon and the
lighting was just perfect, as you can see from this video:
There was a fair crowd out, despite the cool wind
and it was simply magical there in the bright moonlight, with all the
LED-lit kites in the sky floating high above:
May 21 – Busy Day, Relaxing Night
Today I continued organizing my papers from
yesterday, and finished by midafternoon with a feeling of satisfaction for job
well done.
I also seemed to have slightly injured myself -
again.
Yesterday, while I was making changes to the A/V
equipment under my TV, I was kneeling and standing a fair bit over the course
of an hour. Apparently that stretching movement re-injured the muscle tear in
my left leg, so that my thigh now burns painfully if I move it in certain ways
or put too much weight on it.
So I'm possibly back to where I was last summer:
not riding my bike. Argh.
It's a real bummer, as I was looking forward to
getting out on my replacement bike this year, after spending the last nine
months diligently not hurting myself to allow time to recover after last
summer's painful experience. I can only hope it's a temporary setback.
In the evening, my lady and I went out to dinner
and a movie.
We went to see The Jungle Book, a cgi
tour-de-force with special effects by none other than WETA, who did all the
work on Peter Jackson's Lord Of the Rings and Hobbit movies. The
story, adapted by Disney from the classic story by Rudyard Kipling, was a solid
entertaining 90 minutes from start to finish, with very few slow spots at all.
The principal actor, a young unknown by the name of Neel Sethi, put in a solid
performance throughout, with a few minor spots noticeable where he's acting to
the green screen - quite forgivable in light of the rest of the pictures
quality, I thought. Having Bill Murray voice the character of Baloo the bear
was a pure delight...
May 22 – Soaring Skies!
Today, we flew some kites!
Well, actually we went to see quite a few kites
in the sky, down at the Victoria International Kite Festival at nearby Clover Point. There were dozens of
kites in the sky, small and large:
My girlfriend and I arrived there in the late
morning, walking about 20 minutes from a quiet breakfast in Cook Street Village
down to the ocean. We joined a fair crowd of folks walking along the shoreline
paths of Dallas Road towards Clover Point, following the bright glimmering of
colored kites in the sky ahead, then flying our own brilliant skysailer:
We stayed for a couple of hours, admiring the
various kites appearing and disappearing in the skies around us as time went
on. We left shortly after noon, just as a layer of cloud slid across the sun
and dimmed the temperature a fair bit.
The rest of my
afternoon was kind of quiet, which was exactly what I needed. I worked on my
blog and catnapped here and there, while the day marched on outside. I did take
time to meet my lady for dinner at Foo downtown, where we sat outside on the
patio to enjoy the perfect late afternoon weather under the once-again sunny
skies.
I caught a movie in
the evening with my sister, choosing to watch Safety Not Guaranteed, a
solid time-travel romantic movie from 2012. It's based on a classified ad that
appeared in a CA paper in 1997 and quickly became a phenomenon, enough so that
the movie almost felt familiar in some ways:
It was good in to a
busy three days, leaving me in the great room to sleep in tomorrow, which is
Victoria Day. Lately I've been waking up around 5 AM and having trouble getting
back to sleep, but I'm trying to train myself out of it by going to bed a
little bit later each night and with an ultimate goal of getting about seven
hours sleep on average. That means staying up most nights until at least 11 PM
and trying to sleep through until well past dawn's early light that manages to
peep through my blackout curtains.
That's about all I have for this week. Looking ahead, it's just work, enjoy the summer with my lady, and edit Book 1... nothing else big planned, save getting more sleep. Doesn't sound all that exciting, but it sure does sound like I'll get a lot accomplished!
