General

It’s been over ten years since my first tweet

This is not a momentous occasion or anything. Twitter is one of the social media sites that can be both a dumpster fire and pretty useful simultaneously. Looking over my history, it’s clear I’ve been content to be an observer.

As an observer, I still find people posting screenshots of walls of text composed elsewhere to get around the 280-character limit of Twitter to be weird.

Here’s that first tweet. While I still like the quote, I would not exactly jump at the chance to quote Woody Allen these days. I probably should have known better in 2011, really.

Look at that sad, empty heart! No wonder the kitten looks so bereft. (If I change from the kitten avatar in the future, please apply this to whatever is in its place).

Thinking about it now, I have no recollection at all what my last tweet was. Let’s find out!

It turns out that was my only original tweet. Every other tweet was a reply to someone else and amounts to 12 total. Eight were to Nike Support, which forces you to use Twitter, the other four were inane responses to friends. A captivating Twitter Time Capsule, this is not.

2021: Well, that was a year

photo of cats near a green dumpster
I was looking for “dumpster fire” but I think I like this image better. Photo by Betül Balc? on Pexels.com

As the final days of 2021 draw near, and we look forward (?!) to 2022, let’s reflect on the year that was. And it was a year.

Unlike previous posts, I’m mixing everything together–personal victories, political nonsense, the state of the world and so on. Let’s call it Earth Blend, available for $11.99 at your local Starbucks.

The Good

  • I left a job I had come to actively not enjoy (hate is too strong a word)
  • I did three and a half months of drawing prompts to start the year
  • I did an Inktober prompt. Yes, one. Hey, it’s better than nothing!
  • Summer forest fires, while bad in general, only led to a few smoky days in Metro Vancouver, down considerably from previous years
  • I ran a lot more than in 2020, even with a late start of August
  • I got a mirrorless camera (Canon EOS M50) and have had oodles of fun taking photos with the telephoto lens (nothing pervy, just naked birds)
  • Dodged getting sick for another year
  • I kept blogging. Funny cats, hooray!
  • Contributed art and a trailer to an actual video game that will be for sale on Steam soon™
  • Trump is no longer president
  • The world did not blow up

The Bad

  • Will no one rid me of this meddlesome pandemic?
  • The COVID twins of Delta (“more people will get infected”) and Omicron (“everyone you know will get infected”)
  • My weight is basically unchanged. It should be down. I blame myself and salty/sweet snacks.
  • The heat dome (seriously, I never expected it to be hotter locally than the times I travelled through the Mojave Desert in the summer). 42 °C is pretty warm.
  • The frozen dome. Yeah, that’s what I’m calling it. -14 °C is actually probably easier to manage than 42 °C, but it’s still, you know, rather chilly for these parts. We shattered temperature records at both ends of the thermometer in 2021. 2022 will reveal if this was a fluke or the start of a fun new climate trend.
  • My fiction writing was, uh, moribund-though I did one writing prompt, so that’s a start!
  • I didn’t read as much, since I no longer have a commute. This is both good and bad.
  • I got a DisplayLink adapter, so I could fudge using my MacBook Air with dual displays, and have yet to get it working. A minor thing but still technically bad.
  • I’m ending the year with sinus issues, possibly related to the cold weather, but likely not related to COVID-19
  • U.S. democracy is looking a little beat-up after four years of Trump, the January 6th riots, and 40+ years of Republicans pushing for one-party rule

The Rest

  • I still haven’t seen a movie in a theater since watching Onward in the first week of March 2020 and can’t say I miss the experience. I love being able to pause and go pee. It’s especially handy now that the average movie is ten hours long. To clarify, I go pee in the bathroom, as civilization expects.
  • Justin Trudeau smelled a majority government within reach and instantly doomed any chance of it by calling an unnecessary election. The result was a Parliament virtually unchanged from before the election, proving the whole thing a waste of time. You’d think Trudeau might learn a lesson from this, but…we’ll see.
  • Discovering a prominent anti-vaxxer was living in my building and later died of COVID-19 was a little weird
  • I still like lists

Boxing Day 2021

I have no idea what the malls were like today. With snow on the ground, the high temperature of the day being -6C and the Omicron variant of COVID-19 doing a variation of Oprah’s “You get a car and you get a car and you get a car!” with the entire general population, it seems unlikely the stores were packed.

But people do love a good bargain.

I went for a walk but otherwise stayed inside, warm and content to avoid crowds, plague and things.

I did a quick drawing to celebrate Boxing Day, though. In hindsight, I wished I had put flaps on the box. I mean, I still could, but maybe I should just move onto bigger, better boxes.

I’m also thinking about restarting some art lessons, to better ground myself in the basics. I’m a bit rusty.

Tools used: iPad Pro 12.9″, Procreate, sketching pencil from Bardot Brush Pencil Box set

White Christmas 2021 (not a remake)

brown wooden house covered with snow near pine trees
A slight exaggeration of current conditions. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

As the ancient elders Environment Canada foretold, we have indeed been bestowed with a white Christmas in 2021. It’s time for a list!

Snow good

  • It’s pretty!
  • Makes things nice and quiet
  • I don’t have to drive around in it
  • Forces some people to slow the heck down for a change
  • Building a snowman helps hone art skills and provides exercise
  • Making snow angels is good, clean fun

Snow bad

  • If it rains after, snow becomes slush, slush becomes slushpocalypse with continuing rain
  • Makes walking around, a task that is normally pretty easy, suddenly and annoyingly more difficult
  • I don’t have to drive in it, but others do, and they make the roads more dangerous because Vancouver drivers and snow, amirite? (I am right)
  • If it’s snowing, it’s cold. Brr.
  • Unless you have proper attire, making snow angels will leave you wet and frozen

And today’s evidence:

The Brunette doing a Snowy River impression
Careful on the stairs (Lower Hume Park)
Snowy banks on the Brunette River

Brewing up a bad dream

white ceramic coffee cup on white saucer
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.

The best fortune cookie fortune ever

a person holding a fortune cookie
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.

We’ll find out on December 22nd!

Strange currencies

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!

Smoke-flavored cheddar sticks and keyboards

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.

How about that pandemic?

Yep, I’m officially tired of it 21 months in!

Dear COVID-19: You suck

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.

Answering the question, “Will there be snow this winter?”

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.