Why is it that for two months of the year we get bombarded with pumpkin spice everything? It’s bad enough that eggnog starts showing up in September.
Pumpkins aren’t spicy. Pumpkin pie is gross. Yes, even if you like it, it’s gross. When you carve a pumpkin, what do you do with everything inside it? You compost it, as nature intended. I may grant an exception for pumpkin seeds if enough salt is involved.
Is that perhaps what pumpkin spice is? Just adding lots of salt to anything vaguely pumpkin-y? I could possibly get on board with this.
Pumpkin spice is inescapable. It’s everywhere. Someone is probably selling Pumpkin Spice Socks.
Anyway, down with pumpkin spice. Up with hot cocoa.
And only 256 days until next summer, WHERE THERE IS NO PUMPKIN SPICE.
September is a transition month in a number of different ways, even more so this year than in others for me in particular:
At the start of the month it is still summer, and it can be quite sunny and warm
By the end of the month it’s fall and while the weather can still be t-shirt-worthy, it can also be what it is currently: in the low to mid-teens and very much The Rains. Now begins the slow turning of all the lush greens of summer, to be replaced briefly by the explosion of fall colors before everything turns gray and naked, like the aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
And this marks the first full month after leaving my job of close to nine years. I won’t go into details here, but will say that it has been a month of planning, working and setting up toward the future. It has also been a boon to my mental health because I had grown to despise both the work and work environment at my previous place of employment. Getting out of there was like removing a slow drip of poison into my system.
My birthday is also in September, so it’s a chance to reflect on gaining another year and being happy about that vs. the alternative
The start of the school year is no longer particularly meaningful to me now, for which I am grateful, but I am aware of it on the periphery, with kids no longer out and aboot the same way during the day
October brings the last of the warm weather for the year (if we are lucky), the aforementioned explosions of color (the highlight of the season by far), Halloween (the holiday I am indifferent to, but I do enjoy seeing how people decorate their homes and yards) and, of course, pumpkin spice everywhere. What’s the deal with that, anyway? Pumpkins aren’t spicy!
With another heavy rainfall warning in effect, it’s hard to believe it was mere weeks ago that the whole province was kindling waiting to explode. But here we are, complaining again as The Rains resume.
And now, a haiku:
Rain, rain and more rain
Contemplating ark building
Umbrellas for life
I went out late this afternoon to close my rings and get some fresh air. The weather threatened rain, so I actually wore pants (well, sweatpants). Plus it was only 12C.
I was nearing the path leading to the stairs down into Lower Hume Park when I heard from the other side of the pool building the distinct crunch of two vehicles smushing themselves together. I paused my walk, went around the building and saw two cars by the crosswalk, the one that was directly behind the other featuring a new buckled hood.
The crosswalk here on east Columbia is one that features pedestrian-controlled flashing lights, but I did not notice them flashing at the time (though I wouldn’t swear they weren’t). The drivers of the vehicles were out and no doubt exchanging information and going through the usual fender bender rituals.
What I noticed next was a guy with a dog on the crosswalk. He looked hesitant. I am guessing this is what happened:
Guy with dog gets to crosswalk and does/does not push pedestrian light
Guy with dog steps out to cross
Guy in Car #1 sees this and obligingly stops to allow Guy with dog to cross without getting run down
Guy in Car #2 is oblivious to all of this for whatever reason and plows into the back of Car #1
Guy with dog then crosses and continues into the park, despite being a direct witness to the collision
Here is the guy wearing a very bright red hoodie.
But his dog was leashed!
I at least give him kudos for making himself highly visible. He should have at least talked to the guys in the cars, though. But he had a dog, and that means he (and by proxy) his dog can do anything they want, including ignoring accidents they have just watched happen directly in front of them.
The season, not like falling down the stairs or something.
The days get shorter
And the trees explode with color
Then everything dies
On the one hand, the last line is rather bleak. On the other, fall ends on December 20th and by then the sun sets at something like 3 p.m., it’s always cold and almost always raining, the trees are stripped naked and vegetation is all withered, dead or gone.
But lawns still look really lush and green.
All right, then.
The days get shorter
And the trees explode with color
It sucks after that
More accurate now. But fine, here’s a “happy” version:
The days get shorter
And the trees explode with color
Hot cocoa and gloves
I consider this progress in my quest to eat healthier and better (no offense to McDonald’s, which does have healthy choices on its menu).
But now that I think about it, I could really go for a Sausage and Egg McMuffin. I love those things.
I have now used internet technology to find the closest McDonald’s, and it’s apparently a 29-minute walk from my place, or five Starbucks away. How is this even possible? What sort of world do we live in that I need to walk for almost an entire half hour just to get a McChicken? This is way beyond impulse purchase territory for me.
The weather simply wasn’t as perpetually scorching as it was in July, and today it barely climbed to 17C, which is below average for this time of year. We’ve had some actual precipitation. The bit of rain has been enough to revive lawns and take everything from tinder dry to just dry. Fittingly, the weekend promises more showers, so the FIRE DANGER signs may at last come down.
In other not-so-hot news, COVID-19 numbers have been way up. The only good part here is that almost all infections are unvaccinated people (meaning the vaccines are working), and the numbers may have already plateaued. It’s still a bummer because we have clearly regressed when many thought the pandemic was finally beginning to wane when we moved to Step 3 on July 1st. Eventually we’ll be able to go back to something similar to how things were without requiring vaccines, vaccine cards, masks or deep sea diving helmets.
Many years ago I thought about what sort of career I’d like to have, instead of just bouncing from job to job and/or relying on networking to essentially do the same.
I thought about what I liked to do and what I was good at and where they might intersect, taking the approach as a self-designed “What color is my parachute?” thing.
What did I like? Tech! I’ve always had a geeky interest in tech, whether it was video games, digital watches (hey, back in the olden times they really did seem cool) or other gadgets.
What was I good at? I was always into making things, so I was pretty much a creative person. My childhood and teen years are filled with sketches, comics, short stories and an incomplete balsa wood roller coaster. Being creative wasn’t just something I enjoyed, it pretty much defined who I was.
But I ignored this.
Instead, I came up with the answer of “I enjoy helping or teaching others.” This is true enough, and it seemed a more practical thing to try to turn into a career. By combining these two things I was set!
I enjoy tech
I enjoy helping people
=
A career in tech support!
The problem is tech support doesn’t require being creative at all. Sure, someone may tell you that you need to be creative to find solutions, but that’s just playing semantics. The actual skills required aren’t anything close to what you use for drawing or writing or acting. It’s all about research, organization and puzzle-solving. While I enjoy those things, they aren’t the same, but I went ahead into tech support anyway, because logically it just had to work!
And it did, in a way, for a while. But the reality is that tier 1 or even tier 2 tech support is pretty basic stuff. Depending on how well-designed the systems you work with are, you can find yourself doing a lot of very repetitive stuff, like resetting passwords, re-enabling 2FA access or things like that. These are menial tasks, and ultimately they came to bore me. And then I burnt out. I felt very much like the guy in the motivational poster in Futurama:
I faced the horror of having most of my job experience being in tech support, and how was I supposed to get out from that? It turned out that the best way was to make a clean break entirely, at least for now. I had to accept that I had made a critical error in assuming that enjoying tech + helping people = a great career.
I’ll never work as a tier1/2 tech support person again. I’ve done that enough to have wrung out everything I can get from it. And after realizing my fatal flaw in combining what I liked with what I felt I was good at, I’m now asking myself, “What do I enjoy doing and how can I build a career around that?”
The plan is, starting tomorrow, to not drink any soda for the next week and see what happens. What will I drink instead? Here’s a list:
Goat blood
Motor oil
Liquid soap
Molten lava
No, wait, that’s the list of what I won’t be drinking. Here’s the actual list:
Water
Chocolate milk (after a run)
Tea
I am curious to see if anything at all noticeable happens. And if I can resist the siren song of that delicious1For relative values of “delicious” diet soda.
I will report back in one week with the results, possibly presented in chart form or as some kind of multimedia extravaganza.
