I love these generic photos. Photo by Nao Triponez on Pexels.com
Last night, I dreamed that I returned to work at Starbucks as a barista, a position I last held 24 years ago. Yes, it’s been awhile.
Here are the details as I recall them:
The store was either very big or in a very big space. The ceilings were vast, like the kind you would find in a convention hall. The store had two bars arranged opposite each other in a square, but there was something in the square between the bars, so to go from one to the other you had to walk all the way around, which seemed like a vast distance in the dream.
I was wearing a black long-sleeved shirt and had the sleeves rolled partway up. I think it may have been a turtleneck.
We were either post-pandemic or in a dream version of the world where COVID-19 never happened, as no one was wearing masks. This was the only nice part of the dream.
It was very busy. Orders were coming in fast, and I was clearly out of my depth. Everything I knew I’d long since forgotten. A customer asked for a triple, and I looked at the menu board, trying to figure out what a triple might be. He wanted three shots of espresso, of course, something any noob barista would know.
I don’t remember if this happened, but it seemed like at least one customer remarked about how they knew more about my job than I did–which was accurate.
I don’t remember how the dream ended, but I do remember waking up and feeling kind of crappy about it. On the other hand, the idea of working retail anywhere again gives me the willies, so perhaps the dream was just my mind’s way of reminding me, should I seek out some additional income from part-time work on the side.
In conclusion, I would like a nice dream about fluffy nice things tonight. Or winning the lottery and not having it turn out to be an ironic horror or something.
This site has photos for everything! Or at least the two things I’ve used it for so far. Photo by RODNAE Productions on Pexels.com
From our Chinese food dinner last night. This is just absurdly delightful:
A routine will turn into an enchanting escapade.
My mind boggles at what this could entail. I wonder how doing laundry could become an enchanting escapade. I mean, it could happen! Somehow. Possibly.
Or I could be on a run and magically enter a delightful fantasy realm where the animals all sing together and have awesome harmony. In a universe of endless dimensions, it’s theoretically conceivable.
Wait, I may have figured it out. The fortune also gives six numbers to use in the lottery. Maybe my routine of buying lottery tickets will yield riches at long last. That would definitely lead to an enchanting escapade or two.
FAKE EDIT: I have purchased an additional Lotto 6/49 ticket using the provided six numbers. I consider it my charitable contribution for Christmas. Maybe the funds will help provide someone with an enchanting escapade, because now that I re-read the fortune, it doesn’t necessarily even refer to me, just that a routine–maybe someone else’s–will become an enchanting escapade.
A week or so ago, I got an email from “PayPal” saying that I was going to be charged an “inactivity fee” because I hadn’t logged into or used my account in a very long time. I ignored this, because it smelled just like a phishing scam.
Today I got another email saying I had been charged the inactivity fee and to avoid further charges, I’d need to log in to my account. I decided to do just that (not by clicking any links in the email, of course).
Turns out it’s legit! I was charged a dollar and change, taken from the whopping $5 I had in the account. Oddly, I also had an offer to have $5 added by just clicking a button that was basically, “Gimme gimme free money!”, which offset the charge nicely.
Still, it reminded me that I don’t use PayPal anymore, and the idea of being charged for not using a service is dumb and customer-hostile. So I closed my account.
Thanks for helping me simplify my life a little, PayPal!
UPDATE, August 14, 2023: I bought the Keychron Q1, complete with knob. I'm not sure why I never posted about it. Or maybe I did, and I have failed in searching my own site.
Smoke-flavored cheddar sticks
They taste exactly like smoke and cheddar. Somehow this does not delight me as much as I thought it would, and now I am sad.
Also, the “peel here to open” plastic wrap is strangely difficult to peel open, as if it’s designed to make you work up an appetite or something.
Keyboards
Dave Lee disses on the very keyboard I own in the video linked below. Now I want a Keychron Q1. This is completely irrational, as my CTRL keyboard continues to work perfectly. Still, I want one.
We had a tantalizingly brief window back in early July when it seemed it might actually be under control and on its way out. BC moved to Step 3 of 4 in its “Restart” plan and masks became optional. Everyone (well, almost everyone) was getting vaccinated. Cases were down to a few dozen or so per day and heading toward single digits.
Then the far more contagious Delta variant hit. And in August the mask mandates came back. Step 4, originally set for September 7th, was postponed indefinitely. Today we are still seeing 300-400 cases per day–and that’s actually reflecting a downward trend! And just as it starts to go back down, the new Omicron variant arrives, which seems to be rattling a lot of scientists, though no one really knows much about it.
For me, the masks are how I gauge progress. When masks become optional (again), I will consider the pandemic to be actually winding down into something managed like the flu. I’ve asked people when they think masks will go back to being recommended rather than mandatory, and no one will even venture a guess.
But I will!
I think the soonest will be in March 2022, or roughly three months from now. But that’s only if the current trend continues, and I have no confidence that it will. A safer bet will be by summer–June 2022, or about seven months from now–more than two years after the pandemic started.
I mean, I’m still glad to have not caught a cold or the flu since January 2020, but I do yearn for the good parts of everyday life to return to normal or normalish sooner rather than later.
Technically, it’s still fall, but the answer is yes.
Boo.
The view outside my home office window this morning:
Window closed (I ain’t crazy), so some reflections may occur. The snow does not transform that poor bush that died during the summer heatwave into something magical-looking.
It’s mostly gone now, but the portent remains, ominous, white and fluffy.
Every day I either go for a run or for an exercise-style walk, by which I mean I walk for at least 30 minutes at a brisk pace, so the Apple Watch activity app registers the walking as exercise.
Today was a walk day and since we are square in the middle of a system that is endlessly pouring rain, I opted to head out late morning, just to get it over with. Waiting out the rain was not a realistic option.
But knowing it would be very wet and that I might venture to areas with massive puddles, I made a few changes to my usual outdoor wear:
I wore my nice Scarpa boots, which are waterproof
I wore my Goretex raincoat, which is theoretically waterproof
Normally I’d wear my old trail running shoes and hoodie, but I felt these would not hold up.
I was half right.
The boots worked very well and kept my feet nice and dry. The only downside is I have to wear regular insoles, or they fit too tight, but for shortish treks, it’s fine.
The jacket was a weird and appalling disappointment.
The pockets got wet. And by that, I mean the indies of the pockets, meaning my hands, phone, mask and AirPods case all got damp. This was bad.
The wrists on the jacket allowed enough water ingress that I had to lock the screen of my watch to keep it from wigging out. And the hood is so big and floppy that it kept bouncing out of position, and any sudden breeze threatened to pull it completely down off my head.
The only good part is my torso stayed mostly dry.
The hoodie, in comparison, does not keep my chest and abdomen as dry when it is pouring out. I’ll end up with some lines of dampness running vertically down my t-shirt, enough that I’ll change when I get out of the rain.
But the hood itself not only keeps my head dry, it actually fits over the brim of my cap, keeping the cap dry and providing a kind of shield to keep the water away from my face. This has the added bonus of reducing rain splattering on my glasses.
And the pockets never get soaked through, so my hands stay warm and dry.
Really, it’s just weird that the jacket works so poorly, almost like the waterproofing has completely broken down.
I felt a bit silly going out as it was. No one voluntarily goes out in weather like this. I went down to Hume Park and didn’t even see some lunatic out with their dog, and there’s always some lunatic out with their dog. I did see two people riding bikes, though.
Mostly, I just want summer back. Yes, even with the occasional heat dome.
I went for a walk in The Rains this afternoon and the Brunette River was on the cusp of flooding over its banks at Lower Hume Park for the second time in two weeks. Oy.
Here it is looking all swollen and such:
Hooray for water! No, wait…
The view from the paved path, with water from the path flowing directly into the river. That will likely reverse overnight. The narrow gap is a short trail you can normally use to get right next to the river. Technically you still can do that, you’re just going to get a little river in your shoes at the same time.
Take the path from the water to the water to get to the water
This blog of mine was started in 2005 and is approaching 16 years of age. It will make a terrible driver when it gets its license.
Here are a few random stats as I contemplate where to next take this blog (of mine):
3,597 posts
All-encompassing General category has 1,151 posts. The next most:
673 for Outdoor runs. One might say I obsessively document my runs. I say I’m thorough.
381 for Health. I’m sure this has been on an upward trend as I get older and closer to being a Futurama-style head in a jar
294 for Writing. So many dreams crushed. But some good laughs, too.
237 for Photography. This went up significantly in the last three years and bird pics started in January 2021 after I got a mirrorless camera.
220 for Creative. Like photography, most of these posts happened in the last few years, seeing a big uptick when I did Inktober in 2019 and 2020.
100 for Lists. It’s probably higher than this, I sometimes forget to use the Lists category. I liked lists before listicles became a thing. Also, listicle is a gross-sounding word.
26 comments (most very early on, when I asked people to test comments–they pretty much count as a vestigial feature at this point)
46 pages (only a handful are actually publicly viewable, but I’ve deleted very few once they’ve been made)
2,418 spam comments blocked (this is pretty low, considering how long the site has been up–even the spambots generally ignore this site)
61 posts in September 2020. I was posting my snack intake every day. I took in a few snacks.
And so much more
In 2022 I plan on reworking the site design, which will make it magical or something. I expect it will still be mostly ignored, but that’s okay. As blogs come in and go out of fashion, creolened.com will be here, wearing its bell bottom jeans and not caring who (if anyone) looks.
