Have I talked about this before? I may have, but I am lacking in imagination at the moment so I’m going to talk about this again.
As the title says, there are two perks to the pandemic that I have seen so far. Yes, there may be others, but these are the only ones that seem meaningful in a greater sense.
Work From Home. WFH is awesome. No commute, extra time for sleeping and exercise or doing whatever I want. Being able to step away from the desk and raid your own fridge for a snack. No distracting co-workers coming to your desk. It’s great. I don’t miss the office at all. I guess I am a solo player that also happens to work well with teams.
No illness. It’s ironic that as a pandemic swept the globe I have not had a cold, the flu or anything like that since January 2020. This is pretty much unprecedented, and it’s all due to one little thing: avoiding people. Basically, every time I have gotten sick it’s been someone else’s fault.
If I think of more, I’ll add more later. But really, these are the biggies and I would miss them dearly if I had to go back to an office. So my plan is to somehow arrange to never have to do that again. My plan is in its early stages.
After 16 years I have moved this site to a new host. The old host provided excellent support but had clearly moved away from webhosting, so it seemed like a good time to pull up stakes and move to a host that was actually focused on webhosting.
From the user’s perspective (both of you), nothing has changed, this is all backend stuff.
The process of moving was very simple, I never even had to post a blinking “Under construction” sign, though I really wanted to, and will do so now:
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted one of these. Perhaps it will help kick-start me onto a new burst of creativity or sunshine-filled thoughts or something.
Today I got an email from Telus telling me they are shutting down personal webspace as of May 31, 2021:
The notice is amusing in how they try to avoid saying, “Everyone totes uses Facebook now, move your cat pictures there.”
So I went to the URL to see what I had put up (if anything) and it turns out to be, in fact, a picture of my long-deceased cat (who was alive at the time, I should note).
Here is the amazing HTML code I wrote ALL BY MYSELF back in 2008 or whenever it was.
Yes, once again I have found another way to post to my blog. I am getting ever-closer to posting from a fridge or toaster.
This time I am posting from MarsEdit, which is software specifically designed to let you write blog posts and then post them…to your blog. Setting it up was dead simple and it works offline, which is nice if my connection flakes out but I SIMPLY MUST BLOG.
I can already do this in Ulysses, too, so I will have to see how MarsEdit makes things better or sexier.
I was originally only going to repeat “bluh” here, but it occured to me that I am also disorganized, so I’ll record that here as well.
Bluh.
I am disorganized.
It’s not that I don’t try to be organized, it’s that I have no consistent method for it. I will sometimes write something down using old-fashioned pen and paper, others times I might use:
Drafts (iOS app)
OneNote
iA Writer
Notepad
Notepad++
This blog
Something else
So when I go to find something I vaguely recall writing down, I end up searching across multiple devices and drives, hoping I’ll get lucky on a keyword. And Windows is still pretty slow doing searches. So for 2021 I vow to come up with a better way to organize my ideas and junk. Or else. Or else I won’t.
UPDATE: I found the idea that prompted my thoughts on being disorganized–it was made through iA Writer, but was saved to iCloud, which doesn’t show up automatically on the PC version. So I blame myself and the software.
April can be a rather damp month sometimes, so I wanted to record for posterity that we are in the middle of a week-long stretch of beautiful, summer-like weather. It was 23 today. 23! In April!
I’ve decided that it’s time to give the entire site an overhaul. As groovy as the Cooper black logo is, the overall design of the site is stale and a bit cluttered, as some sections have been neglected and others are a bit too buried.
I also need to find a way to make the running posts optional. Or maybe start a running blog. And then start running again.
My current thought is something like this:
Come up with a new compact logo that can sit in the top-left
Remove the entire set of menu bar items along the top
Add a left sidebar with simple links to all the usual stuff (archives, etc.)
Have “noteworthy items” in the right sidebar
Continue to post the usual nonsense for the actual blog part in the middle
Try to allow for a “customized feed” so people can skip stuff of little interest to anyone but me, like my running updates (or maybe post them elsewhere, like in a journal or a private/separate blog)
This is going to take a while, and I’m going to try to make it work with my current theme, GeneratePress, because I have grown so used to it (and it works well). For now, I will be frequently playing around with different fonts and things that are easy to change on the fly.
BONUS FAT UPDATE: I have hit a high of 179.7 pounds. This is ominously close to 180 pounds, which would be a bit devastating to hit psychologically. Today I weighed in almost two hours earlier, which usually results in the weight being higher. I watched the numbers flick past 180 before settling back to…179.7 pounds (again).
This week I have returned to work and I have experienced an odd combination of stress, frustration and simple boredom. I have partaken of crackers, but not excessively so.
On the other hand, I’ve gotten very good at not eating anything after dinner. Yay on that. I am also drinking more water, as I find more than a little (diet) soda now seems to be giving me heartburn.
Further incentive on losing weight: I have a bunch of old t-shirts that still look great but are too snug to wear right now. I tried on a pair of cotton shorts I normally wear in the summer–they are a size 31 waist, which is one size higher than my usual 30–and could not do up the button. It was physically impossible. I was embarrassed. But I vowed not to buy new clothes that would fit–I’m not going to backslide and give myself an out in the battle against fat.
I will lose the weight. Just weight and see (ho ho).
As I am still trying to lose weight, I am opting out of indulgences this Easter, but I can still wax nostalgic on the candy I enjoyed in days past. Here is my reminisce, in handy list form:
Cadbury Creme Eggs: I used to buy three-packs of these and eat all three eggs at once. Well, one at a time, but one after the other. The thought of doing so now makes me queasy. These were and are super rich. One is enough. For the entire year. Maybe longer. But as a kid, I loved these.
Chocolate Easter Bunny: The hollow ones were never as much fun as the solid ones, although the fact that they could make “hollow” chocolate amazed me as a kid. The solid ones, on the other hand, these had some serious heft. Eating one (starting at the ears, of course) was something to be tackled over multiple sessions, gnawing away like a dog with a chew toy. Thinking about it now makes my jaw tired. And to be honest, the chocolate wasn’t great, but I was not a discerning young lad.
Cream Half Eggs: I can’t remember the name of these, and today you can probably only get them via established brands, such as Oh Henry, but back in the days of yore, these eggs (flat on the bottom, so shaped like an egg cleaved in two from end to end) had a creamy filling that wasn’t as sickly sweet as the Cadbury eggs, but were still yummo and probably my favorite of the bunch.
Marshmallow Eggs: Never a real favorite, but I never turned one down.
You may notice this list does not include Peeps. That is deliberate.
If I do have a snack on Easter, it will probably be a bowl of low sugar cereal. Woo.
It was actually yesterday, so I’m late, but here is a summary in handy list form:
It was cool
It was wet, especially in the morning
There is still a pandemic
Today–the second day of spring–was different!
It was even cooler
It rained a lot more
The pandemic was mostly unchanged, though
I actually don’t mind the rain much–I went out in it twice today. But I am looking forward to fewer showers and more sun, being able to go out wearing a t-shirt and shorts and things being green instead of dead. I have had my fill of winter for another year, especially one spent wearing a mask in every public space.
Finally, here’s a flower so this post isn’t just me complaining about the weather:
