I am unusually excited to get this hat because it is very bright and very yellow and completely unlike the other hats that I have, all of which are drab, muted colors or not even colors at all. Perhaps this will be the start of a bold new me. At the very least it will be a bold new top of my head.
For those unfamiliar, it is an Outdoor Research Swift cap, which has been my go-to head covering for the past few years. My current collection of Swift caps features these colors:
Black
White
Blue
Tan
Purple
Green
The hats with color in them are so neutral in tone they look like they are a color/gray blend. But my yellow cap will show them all! (The yellow is referred to be OR as “sulphur”, which is kind of gross, but as long as the cap doesn’t smell like sulphur, I don’t care.)
I have been working from home (WFH) for about eight months now and here’s my list of what is good, bad and ugly about it.
The Good
My commute has been reduced from just over one hour to 30 seconds
I get 90 minutes more sleep per night
I can finish my shift, go for a run and be home before I’d normally complete my post-work commute (this still works in winter, the running is just done on the treadmill instead)
Breaks allow me to do or start chores that would otherwise be impossible until I was off work, including:
Starting/folding laundry
Starting/unloading the dishwasher
Baking bread. The office never smells like fresh-baked bread and this is a tragedy.
Sweep, mop
Run down the garbage or organics
Check the mail (the physical kind that comes in envelopes)
I can listen to music while I work (I don’t do it often, but I do it occasionally)
I never have to wait to use the bathroom
I never have to worry about someone else making the bathroom a giant stink bomb
Snacking is easy and convenient
Co-workers and other people cannot walk up to your cubicle and trap you in long, painful conversations
I will point out that the first three items listed are huge quality of life improvements. Almost life-changing, really.
The Bad
Some tools that must be relied on are not great. To be fair, this would be true at the office as well, it’s just that when WFH you can’t just go to someone’s office to have a look because the remote support tool refuses to elevate privileges.
Online meetings. These are often even more soul-draining than in-person meetings. To the person that asks, “Can you hear me?” at the start of every meeting: Yes, we can hear you. If you don’t suddenly start putting your mic between your feet or attaching it to your cat, we will hear you every time! Also, even when people are on video, it can be challenging picking up on body language and other visual cues.
Let’s just say some people are not exactly timely in answering messages
Can feel isolating at times, given the lack of face to face interaction
The Ugly
Knowing that this will eventually end and most people will just automatically go back to doing everything the old way, taking no lessons from what we learned. Or in other words, people will be people.
Overall, I love WFH. I don’t miss the office at all. The air in the office is bad, the commute is long, there are numerous distractions, I am forced into contact with others and this inevitably leads to a series of colds and other bugs through the year.
Hey, I finally checked out Canva, that logo-making site all the cool kids are talking about and I’ve come up with the perfect new logo on my very first try:
Isn’t it a delight? How could I ever improve on this?
This bit puzzles me: “Like almost every journalist working today, he’s won a few awards.” There are a few ways to interpret this:
A sarcastic jab suggesting that anyone who calls themselves a journalist is going to get some sort of award handed to them by someone, as a kind of participation prize. “Who wrote a good story? YOU wrote a good story!”
A non-sarcastic observation that most journalists today are such hard-working people that most of them end up winning awards.
Something else that got lost in translation.
Really, I’m leaning toward the third option, because the first seems too nakedly hostile to be plausible, and the second goes too far the other way, elevating journalists in an odd way that suggests a kind of superiority. “Don’t you wish you were a journalist? You’d have awards!”
The strange, random things you see.
Creole Ned is a web logger (or blogger). Like most bloggers posting today, he has won no awards at all. But his hair smells nice most of the time.
While 2020 has been a benighted hellscape, the seasons have pretty much come and gone as they normally would.
Here is my indisputable ranking of seasons from best to worst. INDISPUTABLE.
Summer. The days are long. It’s warm but rarely too hot (I mean, people in Death Valley may feel differently, but in the Lower Mainland the really hot days amount to a handful per summer). Everything is lush and green. There is something soothing about walking through a park on a pleasantly warm summer afternoon and something almost magical about watching dusk come late as you sit outside, enjoying the warmth of the evening. Summer is the best.
Spring. Spring is like a low rent version of summer. The best part is the part that’s closest to summer, in June. But it’s also nice for a few other reasons: The switch back to Daylight Saving Time restores actual light to early evening. The trees begin to bud and flower. The brown of the world begins to change back to green. It gets warmer. You no longer have to wear three layers to go outside.
Fall. The first part of fall is basically the last part of summer, which is aces. This is followed by a transition period that I would actually rank higher than most of spring, where the weather can be pretty nice and the trees look spectacular as leaves start to change color. Some years this period only seems to last a few weeks, then it gets colder, wetter and of course, the switch back to Standard Time, murdering the chance of any outdoor activities in the evening that can’t be done in the dark for months. Fall also gets negative points for leading into the worst season of all…
Winter. Come on, this is no contest. Winter sucks. It’s cold, it rains all the time, the days are stupidly short, the landscape is bleak and barren and there’s always a chance of snow. Winter only exists to make the other seasons look good in comparison (people in Death Valley may feel differently).
After writing this post, I thought to myself, I’m pretty sure I’ve ranked the seasons before–and I have! Here’s the post, in which I pretty much say the same things, often down to the exact same phrasing: Seasons in the sun (and rain and wind and occasionally snow). Like the seasons, my posts keep coming back every year (or five).
Not posting from a safari, which would be equal parts exciting and gross (and weird), but posting from the Safari browser on my Mac mini because I can’t stop trying other browsers. Help.
Safari seems better than before, but the fact that it has no Windows version means it is pretty much dead to me, unless I completely give up PC gaming and the Apple silicon Macs aren’t that good–yet.
Because this is largely a content-free post in order to boost my post count for the month, I present another image of an amusing cat:
I don’t write much about politics–and especially not in 2020 when leaders around the world have often not just disappointed but been actively harmful, but this shot from the CBC News site of side-by-side stories captures the results of BC’s election yesterday. With advance poll and mail-in ballots still remaining to be counted, the results won’t be official for a while, but it seems clear the NDP won their biggest majority ever and the BC Liberals will almost certainly be looking for a new leader soon.
I found my 1994 driver’s license. It recalls that all-too brief era when I both had hair and a beard with no gray hair in it. The hair and beard are both pretty much gone now, but their memory lives on in this tiny, blurry photo in which you can still clearly see that I look half-asleep for some reason. I remember the blue hoodie like an old friend.
(I attempted to clean up the image a bit in Affinity Photo–it actually looks a good bit better now, believe it or not.)
I haven’t talked about the weather for what seems like, well, a good solid week, at least.
Two days ago it was the last day of summer. It was mostly clear and the sun felt pleasantly warm on my back as I went for a walk.
Yesterday was the first day of fall and it was also pleasantly sunny and warm. I like pleasantly warm fall days, because it creates the illusion that a cold, wet and going-on-forever winter is not really coming.
Today, however, the weather app had this:
And this:
This promise is being fulfilled outside, right now, as I type this. In a way the heavy rain is nice, because it makes it easier to make decisions, like, “Should I go outside?” because the answer is invariably, “Hell no.”
It does complicate my walk/runs, though. I don’t mind (but don’t prefer–I’m not crazy, after all) running in the rain, but walking in it is different. When you run you generate enough heat to stave off the cold and wet, for awhile. When you walk, even briskly, this doesn’t really happen. So I must ponder if I want to do a walk/run, a run or maybe “Hell no” it and stick to the treadmill.
In the meantime, I am putting together a playlist of nothing but rain-related songs. And then not listening to them.
At the start of the year I set what I felt was a modest goal for reading books: 26. One book every two weeks. I’m not a fast reader so giving myself two weeks to read a book seemed entirely reasonable, assuming I wasn’t going to read the equivalent of Stephen King’s Complete and Uncut Edition of The Stand each time.
Almost all of my reading is done during my commute to work. It is a long commute–just over an hour each way–and I previously would just zone out and listen to music, which was nice in its own way, I suppose. Switching to reading significantly boosted the number of books I read, though, and I feel this is a better use of my time. For one, it allows me to explore more new authors than I might normally, because I have such a generous block of time set aside just for reading.
I’ve not moved much from my preferred genres, though. Some things are harder to break from.
At the start of this year I was in a bit of a funk. Overweight and struggling to get back on track, unhappy with work life, unhappy with having such a long commute and losing a significant chunk of my day to it, reading or not. The end result is I read less than normal, opting more for the blissful escape of music piped through noise-canceling earphones, possibly the best indirectly-related transit purchase I’ve ever made. Sometimes I put them on and don’t even listen to music, just the velvet silence they provide on an otherwise loud, roaring train.
I was keeping up with my book goal, though only just until mid-March, when the pandemic hit. From March 18th until this past Wednesday my commute was gone (we are now obligated to go in once a week to provide on-site support for the few classes that are still happening on campus). Without the commute, my reading place was gone. Sure, I could just use the same time to keep reading, but that’s not the way most people work, I suspect.
You find your routine disrupted, you make changes and adjust. For me, this meant getting up later in the morning. Not sleeping in, but simply getting closer to the proper amount of sleep. A net positive. For the space where the afternoon commute existed I now exercise. Both of these things have made me feel better and have improved my health. I honestly don’t want to go back to a daily commute. The thought sours my stomach.
But what of the reading? Goodreads tracks your reading challenge and lets you know if you are on track, ahead or behind. I fell behind, by a few books, then by a seemingly insurmountable number. I was eight books behind at one point.
As of today that number is about to be cut in half to four and I now think I can catch up and meet my goal. How did I do this?
By taking baths.
My Kobo Libra ereader is water-resistant, so there’s no danger in getting it a little wet, so it has become my companion in the tub. I get in and read for maybe an hour or so, then tend to the actual bath part. It is a very relaxing way to read.
I re-read almost all of The Amityville Horror in the bathtub. While the book wasn’t really worth re-reading, it proved the experience of reading in the tub was a worthwhile one.
I’ve also started reading more often on my iPad when I go to bed (yes, I know they say this is bad, blue light keeps you awake and so on, but I don’t read for long, honest!) and so I typically have two books on the go.
So far this has been working and it’s getting me back on track on my reading goals for the year (I’m more goal-oriented than I realized, I think). The fatigue of the pandemic has been pushed aside, even as I find myself wearing masks and being more cautious than ever, because I need to get back to just doing stuff. And if that means reading in the bathtub, that’s what I’m doing.
