Today’s forecast is light showers and a high of 18, which is a bit cooler than normal. Tuesday they claim a high of 25 (not a record, but 5 degrees warmer than average) and mostly sunny. The point is we have reached the season of variable weather, where it could be sunny and almost summer-like (good fall) or wet and cool (not Fonzie cool, the other kind), which is bad fall. But the seasons are relentless and there’s no avoiding them, so instead I will look forward to drinking tea, keeping warm and enjoying runs where I don’t have to worry about Dry Mouth Syndrome. See? Positive!
UPDATE: Real and yummy red velvet cake came two days later. Worth the wait.
A poor substitute, but it’s hard to screw up peanut butter and chocolate. Not impossible, but hard.
Also, I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point the Canadian version of these went from Reese to Reese’s, aligning itself with the American version. I always thought Reese sounded a bit funny.
These cups, which of course seem tiny in my adult hands, are about 76 calories each. Do not scarf.
Yep, it happened just as the prophecy and my birth certificate foretold: I have turned 60 today.
In most demographic divisions, I am now in the last group, the group where no further division is necessary, because someone who is 60 acts, reacts and lives in the exact manner as someone who is 90. Or 100. (I riffed on this last year when turning 59, but now IT’S HAPPENING. Will start listening to country music tomorrow.)
Unlike last year, when I altered my run schedule specifically to run on my birthday (because I wanted to make a statement), this year I preferred to stick to the schedule, which meant I ran yesterday, will run tomorrow and take today off. Conveniently, my Garmin Forerunner, after wishing me a happy birthday, told me it was a Rest Day. I will not disobey my watch.
And that’s about all I have to say. It will be a slightly mellower day for me, but otherwise typical. I may vacuum, which is probably in the Top Five for least exciting birthday activities.
Here is a celebratory birthday GIF. I may add a drawing of my own later, I have an idea.
Description: “A dull gray background. Hurtling from the sky is a huge asteroid, white heat glowing around it and streaming from behind. Directly in its path, seconds from impact, is a person holding up a phone, taking one last photo.”
Check out Chris’s excellent work on your favourite (?) social media platform or at notes.art
I saw this on Mastodon (I am sure it’s been making its rounds on all the socials for some time) and it reminded me of the domains I have let go in the past. None of them were dropped for financial reasons–back when I dropped a few of them, the cost of renewing was as low as $10 a year.
But there’s a psychological weight to holding onto something you (secretly) know you’re never going to use, and so I let them go. I am currently paying for five domains right now, which is not a big number in the grand scheme of things, but seems like a lot of domains for one random dude to have.
Let’s see where they stand!
creolened.com. This domain! It’s been running as a WordPress blog since February 2005, so its 20th birthday will be coming up soon. This is the one domain I actively use.
stanwjames.com. This is my name and it’s a domain. If I was advertising for a job or something, I’d probably slap something on it. I have occasionally thought of moving everything from creolened.com to this domain, but ultimately I don’t have a compelling reason to do so.
gumgumpeople.com. Currently a bare-bones WordPress site. I may do more with this in the next few years. Even if I don’t, I’ll keep it around (hee hee).
gumgumgames.com. This is idle, but could be used if I ever finish a game.
doodlingsandnoodlings.com. This was meant to be a place for my writing and drawing (sort of a more focused version of creolened.com), hence the name, but I never quite put together a plan for it. Also, I regularly forget if doodlings or noodlings comes first. This is another maybe for future use.
All of my domains, then, are currently safe, even though most will still remain idle. But you never know, the future is unwritten and all that jazz. Maybe I’ll start posting cat pictures to all of them.
I had 90 minutes or so to kill before birding yesterday and so when I arrived downtown I got off at the ?Main Street SkyTrain station and walked from Science World along False Creek, to just past the bathhouse at English Bay, then back to near the Aquatic Centre, which is just by Burrard Street Bridge.
Here’s a gallery of photos I took, a combination from my iPhone 12 and my Canon EOS M50 (you’ll know which is which, trust me).
Weather is still generally summer-like (today’s forecast high is 29C, which is a whopping 7 degrees higher than the average), but more comfy (except for today).
That more comfy weather is ideal for running.
My birthday, yay! I have always maintained that having a birthday is better than the alternative.
I don’t have to return to school.
Two stat holidays if you work for someone else.
Some of the leaves start to turn and look all pretty up in the hizzy.
School supplies are on sale. I don’t need them but whenever I see big displays of pens, paper, binders and notepads, I always want to buy one of everything.
September bad:
Days get noticeably shorter. The sun is already setting before 8 p.m.
In a weird way, I kind of miss the start of school. But I’m referencing when you’re still a little kid, and starting a new school year is an adventure, and a year feels like it stretches out forever.
We officially move from summer (my favourite season, I don’t care what the haters say!) to fall, which starts out fine and ends with skeletal trees, a few hours of daylight, and everything gray and soaked with rain.
For the first time since October 2023, I have posted an average of two posts per day in a single month (31 days, 62 posts).
This is not exactly one of the great achievements of my life, but it does signal that I was finally able to get into the habit of posting more regularly again, and more specifically, not getting hung up on what to post, just posting whatever.
I believe I have achieved posting whatever.
Onto September!
But first, it’s time for you-know-who again. That’s right, typing cat!
August 27, 2021 was a pleasant summer day. I was on vacation–the last day of vacation, actually. I had started my stay-at-home vacation1No, I will not use the term “staycation” two weeks earlier, with my last day in the office being August 13. And yes, it was Friday the 13th (read the Wikipedia article to find out there is no consensus on how, exactly, Friday the 13th came to be considered unlucky), but there was no bad luck that day, just another 7.5 hours of working remotely, which I had been doing (with occasional trips to the office about once per week) for over 17 months as the first few waves of the pandemic swept across the world. Well, maybe there was some bad luck for the entire sum of humanity at that point, come to think of it.
August 27 was also my last day working at Langara College. I chose to leave before the busy fall semester would begin–which was also when the school would re-open to on-campus classes. Getting out before the busiest time of year seemed wise, wiser still since we were still in the middle of a full-blown pandemic and I remembered very clearly how crowded the halls of the college were.
When I look back on the time I spent there–a few months short of nine years–I have no ill will. I worked tech support. It was exactly what you’d think, maybe worse in some small ways. I started and ended in the same place, never advancing, though that was partly on me (I turned down a chance to move to a different team) and partly on management (in fact, when I returned from a three-month leave of absence in April 2021, the manager told me there was quite literally nothing for me, but they could help train me in other things that interested me. It was kind of bizarre, in retrospect (and it did play a not-insignificant part in my decision to leave). While I never advanced, I did assume more responsibilities and was probably well-positioned to take over the management position directly above me, had it opened up (it did not while I was there, though I did serve in a temporary capacity in the role from time to time).
The pandemic was a boon in a few ways, which I’ve mentioned here before:
Commute time when from a combined 2 hours and 24 minutes to 0 minutes.
This allowed me to get more sleep and more exercise. A literal win-win!
Not being around co-workers also meant I didn’t get sick. During that 17 months working remotely, I never caught a cold, the flu or even the sniffles. And I got in better shape, ate more sensibly, and lost weight.
But work-wise, the pandemic was not good. The co-op program, in which I oversaw two to four co-op students each semester, something I’d been doing for about two years, was shut down until January 2021. I reverted to being a regular tech and after just a few months, I was already burnt out. The co-op program resumed at the same time I went on my leave of absence (a coincidence) and was handed off to someone else. When I returned, it was made clear to me that I would not be overseeing the co-ops anymore, but never explained as such. This was really the main reason I chose to leave, the meeting with the manager was just confirmation that the decision was the right one.
That meeting happened in early April. I knew I wanted to quit, but I didn’t have a plan. I pondered and by June a plan had formed, so I then moved to when to leave. I was helping oversee the implementation of a new knowledge base and ticket system, which would critically go live while my manager was on his vacation, so I knew I needed to stay for that and to make sure everything was not on fire when he returned.
An unfortunate side effect of this is that he returned only two days before my effective last day, because I’d booked my annual vacation for the last two weeks of my employment. I still remember in Slack, he was catching up on email on August 11, and he typed something like “Oh” when he got to my letter of resignation (I thought I still had a copy of it, but can’t seem to find it. It was short, euphemistic and to the point). I couldn’t give him the full notice he deserved because he was on vacation and kids, never take your work on vacation and do not bug co-workers when they are on vacation, unless someone is going to die in the next hour otherwise.
He wished me well and gave me a gift card for free eats–which I used! I mean, I used it the next year. I’m never very quick at redeeming things.
I had an exit interview on that last day, the 27th. I was mostly guarded. I felt no need to rock the proverbial boat and really, it was mostly me–it had become clear that I was not happy where I was and management had assured me that nothing about where I was would change–so leaving was really just the logical thing to do.
And now, three years later, how do I feel about it?
It was absolutely the right thing to do. I still keep in touch with a few co-workers. I heard some nice things about me after I left, which made me feel good. I hear occasional gossip. I am not surprised that three years later, the service desk where I worked for so long is now be staffed by people I don’t know. The turnover is always highest there, because tech support never gets the treatment it deserves–not at Langara and, really, not anywhere else, either.
I don’t miss the commute, and I don’t miss the work at all. Like, not even a tiny little bit. I feel I was pretty good at what I did–I got positive feedback, people were always pleasant to me, and I genuinely enjoy helping others, but there has never been a time when I thought, “I miss doing that stuff.”
Well, a slight correction: I really liked working with the co-ops. The energy, the vibe, it was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed being a teacher or mentor of sorts, kind of like the dad desperately trying to be hip to the kids, and sometimes even pulling it off. A number of the co-ops went on to use me as a job reference, which is another one of those things that made me feel good.
In summary, the strongest feeling I have is actually no feeling at all. When I reflect on those years, from 2012 to 2021, I don’t have any kind of emotional response. It’s just a time in my life where I did work, got my fill, then left. I feel, for the amount of time I was there, that there should be more, but there isn’t. I guess that makes me a little sad, but it is what it is.
I end with two photos, the first the view from my cubicle, the second the campus at sunrise.
I have the same goat head mask.Red sky in morning, tech support take warning (applies to every day).
I came across this quote again today again, and it still resonates.
The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism – and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But, if he’s reasonably strong – and lucky – he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s elan. Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death – however mutable man may be able to make them – our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
