The word of the week is obdurate.
Jan 1 - Four Day Mini-Vacation II
Christmas AND New Year's worked out
well this year!
This was my second 4-day weekend in a row, and I
took it easy for the most part, using the time to give my core muscles a rest
as well as my eyestrain; the muscles around my right eye are still bothering me
slightly at the end of the day, though I no longer have to wear sunglasses at
night to counteract bright lights - mostly.
After a relaxing morning, I met my friend Simon at Caffe
Fantastico in the afternoon to just chat and catch up, as I hadn't seen him
since he gave me such amazing feedback about my first novel's most recent draft
back in October 2017. While Caffee Fantastico is rather loud at times, its
location at the very same Parkside Hotel where I swim is conveniently within
walking distance of my home. Also, they have Phillips Dark Matter on tap, so
that was nice too, as I rarely have alcohol these days due to my regular
headaches.
Later on, my lady joined me there for a while, so
we enjoyed the ambiance of being in a different place than our usual hangouts
and our conversation was as always delightfully deep on a variety of topics.
It was a great way to start the new year!
Jan 2 – Reward Show!
At last!
I promised myself that I wouldn't
watch any new episodes from my favorite shows( Trollhunters, Voltron, Star Wars Rebels, et al )until I finished
the edits on my v4.5 draft for my first novel, but as progress has been
extremely slow one that front due to financial stress and health issues, I gave
myself a slight break for 2018, I picked ONE show to allow myself to watch: Trollhunters!
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| Guillermo Del Toro's amazing show - Season 2! |
It's tragic that the original voice
actor for the show's main character, Jim, was killed in June 2016 in a freak accident when his SUV rolled loose and pinned him against a brick wall. Anton
Yelchin was a rising young Hollywood star, best known for his role as Chekhov
in the new Star Trek films and by all accounts a wonderful human being; he
plays the part of Jim well, and notes from the TrollHunters producers state that they were able to integrate all
of his pre-recorded dialogue into this second season, which in a way allows him
to stick around with his fans a little longer...
I'm going to take my time watching
the series for the next few months, rewarding myself with an episode only at
the end of weeks where I've made solid progress on completing my draft, with
the goal of having it ready for my critique group and a few others to go
through before the summer arrives in June - the anniversary of Anton's passing.
It's fitting, and I think Anton would
understand.
Jan 3 – DONE with eBay sales
While I was pleased with my latest
eBay sale, I've almost run out of stuff to sell.
Also, it's getting damned expensive
to do business online, with shipping costs and eBay fees eating up huge percentages of profits, especially
now that PayPal and eBay have gone their separate ways.
For example, as I mentioned a few
weeks ago, I managed to sell my rather rare Crossbows & Catapults game
collection for a decent $200 price, which was great as the money came in handy
for a bill that was due a few days later.
But man, those fees - look at what I
paid for the 'privilege' of selling on eBay:
eBay Fee: C $36.47 Shippo Fee: $46.57 = $83.04
So, if my price was $200.00, then my total profit after fees was $116.96 - ARGH!
What gets me are the new fees,
courtesy of Shippo, the company that eBay is now using instead of PayPal
and who essentially sits there with a pretty interface between you and shipping
companies so they can charge you a fortune for doing essentially nothing.
I should've gone with my first instinct and printed up the label on CanadaPost
with my business account, but I guess I had to learn a lesson... again.
Now, I may be mistaken, and the
Shippo fee may have been rolled into the total fee paid for the shipping label
to send to the receiver... but that doesn't really make sense. I will look into
it this week by contacting Shippo by email, now that the holiday shopping
craziness has died down a bit so I can get an answer in a reasonable timeframe.
I suspect that I'm right, and if that's the case I won't be using eBay to sell anything
any more, instead switching to local services like craigslist, Kijiji and
VarageSale, among others, most of which don't have substantial fees - or any
fees at all.
Jan 4 – Stopping Online Stupidity
As some of you know, I've been fighting a fairly
lonely battle online for the last year against stupidity, ignorance and even
malicious misinformation when it comes to climate change in various FBook groups that I frequent. Here's why I do what I do, in a nutshell, pushing back
against people spreading pseudoscience:
Thankfully, my mostly-solo endeavours of the last
year have been bolstered recently by the arrival of almost a dozen pro-science
online friends, and amongst us we've managed to hold the line against the worst
of the climate-change crazies. Which is quite a feat, as the
least-knowledgeable are somehow the most vocal in their protestations against
scientific evidence in favour of their opinions...
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| Being polite doesn't help with cognitive dissonance... |
While most of the self-titled
'skeptics' are indeed rabid climate-change deniers and defend their opinions in
the face of logic, reason and evidence, many others just don't know where to
turn in the tsunami of disinformation out there. When presented with proper
information, some of those are quite grateful for the help:
For the new year, since I'm no longer
have to ‘go it alone' in pushing back, I've also decided to adopt a single
resolution for online debate - Tolerance:
It's my hope that in 2018, we'll see
less and less of the fake-skeptic on FBook, and more people who are just unable
to process the vast amounts of information and need help in finding proper
scientifically accurate sources for what's happening in the field of climate
change, once without hugely-bent agenda-driven biases, from either side.
It should be an interesting year, hopefully less tiring too!
Jan 5 – Who ARE these people?
I guess I'm just out of it...
By it, I mean g33k culture: I have
little idea what's going on nowadays, if 2017's conventions are any indication.
That's greatly concerning to me, as I've always been of the opinion that I keep
up with g33k culture: I used to love Attack
Of The Show along with many other g33ky media I kept up with what was
happening.
Yet when I went online this week to
see the latest cosplays( such skill!
)it was a shock: I only recognize about one in 20 of the characters, a majority
which seem to be from more recent anime shows, and there was a distinct lack of
any scifi / fantasy or videogame characters that I know. See if you recognize
any of these:
This normally wouldn’t be a big deal,
but it made me wonder if I'm living in my own little 'g33k bubble' - not paying
attention to anything that I'm not already used to, something that could also
happen easily with Google when you filter out news items that you don't really
care about...
Anyway, it's not a HUGE deal, but it
makes me wonder if I do end up going to a convention in a year or two( finally!
)if I will even recognize a quarter of what's going on around me.
Then again, 2018's going to be DAMN
busy for me, so maybe I need to your off and I can pick up my g33k-cred again
in 2019 or 2020.
Jan 6 – Family Finances
Today was a long time in coming. - and worth the wait!
For some time, my sister and I have
wanted to have a 'family budget talk' with my parents, to get us ALL on the
same page as to where we stand now financially... and use that to move us all
forward towards attainable financial goals.
Part of the stress that I've
continuously felt for the last number of years is not knowing if I or my sister
would have to set money aside to support my parents in any given month, as we
didn't know what their financial situation was exactly. While they appear to be
doing well, some months were not so stable, and today's talk was in part
specifically to know where they stood - which succeeded admirably.
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| All numbers are in the ballpark, but privacy-adjusted - and I'm NOT in the positive EOY! |
I presented them with my 'Budget
Worksheet'( above )which I developed myself years ago( after long
searches for better ones that failed )and have been refining ever since. It
allows me to plug in my income and my expenses, then fiddle around with them to
see how to stretch each month's income by reducing expenses and the plan ahead
for those months that have three paydays or things like GST or income tax
returns. The example above shows a fictional version of my own budget, in which
I'm earning a good deal more than actual right now along with much more modest
monthly expenses and even a 'savings account expense' to save for a rainy day -
something up on unable to afford to do yet in my life to date.
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| It's felt like this every. Damn. Day. Since... well, the 90's. |
It was a long afternoon, but quite
fruitful, as my sister and I skillfully discussed delicate financial matters
with my parents while avoiding any antagonistic or accusatory pathways: this is
always a touchy subject and none of us are immune. By the end, we'd all figured
out where we were financially and where we wanted to go as a family as well as
individuals by helping each other as much as possible every month from now on
to get out from under the burden of owing other people money. It was extremely
liberating for me to feel the claustrophobic constraints of the financial box
I've been living in for far too long loosen and now that my family will would
be doing everything possible to get my feet under me at all this moving forward
towards futures that WE have control over, and not the banks.
I slept extremely well tonight, and it's
worth noting because of the dream that I had.
Normally, my dreams aren't at all exciting, as
I've noted previously: I hang around old houses and shopping malls that I've
been to, and generally not much that's memorable - just my subconscious hashing out its boring crap so my creative mind can exercise when I'm awake.
Yet tonight, for the first time that
I can recall, I dreamed that I was an astronaut.
I dreamed that I was kept busy with
all the pre-flight checklists and other work necessary to prepare my rocketship
for launch, rushing around along with many other people to ensure that
everything would be in place for the upcoming flight.
The best part of the dream?
Towards the end, I knocked on an
unmarked door and Spock opened it, ushering me inside to a control center where
we went over the calculations for the launch.
I can't quite remember, but I think I
had a huge smile on my face as we worked. SPOCK!!!!
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| LLAP, Leonard... |
Jan 7 – Sacrosanct
Sundays are great: I love having
every weekend off.
For most of my working life, that was
the case and for many years when I worked retail, it was common for me to work
3 out of the 4 weekends in any given month, especially after I left University;
it was almost a given.
Now that I've had weekends free for
almost 4 years now, I don't think that I'd go back without major
consideration, because of what they represent:
Freedom.
Now, some people might say "But
you work EVERY weekday, how's that better?" And they have a point, but
they'd be missing mine: not working weekends means that I have the freedom to
plan around that 'free space' and it's been glorious. Given that so many of my
friends also have day jobs, it doesn't matter if I have a weekday free, as it's
a rarity that anyone I know now could actually do something of a warning or an
afternoon... which rather defeats the purpose.
Sundays especially were sacrosanct to
me, days that I set aside specifically for family and friends, not work. Here's
what I have to say about my Sundays almost exactly three years ago, when the
subject came up in my blog:
I'll leave you with that, friends and
family: you're all always on my mind, the matter where we are in life.
My eyestrain has lingered this week
in the form of end-of-day fatigue that have unfortunately combined with the
shifting weather barometric pressure to give me headaches almost all week long.
I've been able to control them with Tylenol until this weekend, when I had to
use an Aspirin for the first time in a decade and thankfully that settled the
eyestrain down almost completely for the day at least. I also surprised myself
by walking 10K steps on Sunday almost without noticing without my cane and it
was a wonderful feeling - more of that to come!
