The winter solstice was actually yesterday but I was busy entertaining myself troubleshooting browser issues and realizing how little I enjoy spending my time troubleshooting things anymore. Which is not a great thing, since it’s also my living. Oops.
Anyway, yesterday was the shortest day of the year, meaning that today and every other day this year (all nine of ’em) will keep getting delightfully longer. Or to be technical, the sun will set later, giving us a smidgen more daylight.
So although December 21st marks the official start of winter, for me it signals the official countdown to Daylight Saving Time (I advocate switching to this year-round–make it so, government people in charge of clocks or whatever) and the beginning of summer, the best season of all.
There are 10 billion blogs on the internet. And another 200 trillion people who ignore blogs and only pay attention to social media sites, like Facebook or Twitter. These numbers are a rough estimate. I’m not a mathologist or stats guy or whover it is that counts things.
The point I’m making is that there is a lot of stuff to read on the web, and since everyone has a limited time to devote to reading web-based material, we all make choices about what to read and what not to.
Most blogs have a specific focus–that focus draws the reader in and keeps them coming back, assuming the author keeps the posts interesting and has an engaging style, or offers free coupons for beer or kittens. That focus can cover any of 500 quadrillion topics, ranging from writing to film reviews, to making wine to politics, to the question of whether most planets have a core made not of metal, but of delicious chocolate fudge.
My blog has no particular focus. A quick look at the posts per category illustrates this (I’ve excluded categories with a lower than three-digit count):
General: 897
Jogging: 661
Writing: 240
Health: 220
Book reviews: 191
Who reads a blog for general posts? No one, except for two people:
generals who think the posts are about the military rank
the author’s mom
General is not a good way to draw people in, unless you have a voice that is captivating beyond all measure, and then you could probably better utilize it than by posting on a blog, anyway.
Next up: Jogging. This could potentially be interesting to, say, joggers, except they’re just posts detailing my runs and are really only interesting to me, with the occasional odd exceptions for bear encounters or spectacular spills.
Writing? That’s something that could be legitimately interesting, but like jogging, I mostly chronicle my efforts (or lack thereof) to write, I don’t offer advice or anything of particular use to anyone not interested in me suffering in a mediocre way for my art. I do have 41 posts on writing prompts, though–but you probably shouldn’t use them.
Health is again like jogging. Do you want to read about me peeing into a cup or having sore knees? Even I don’t want to read about these things, but it hasn’t stopped me from making 220 posts about them.
Finally, we have book reviews. Amazingly (to me) I have posted 191 reviews, which seems like so many I wonder if a semi-evil twin secretly wrote a bunch of them. This could be a draw, the only issue is my tastes are all over the place and I read some pretty terrible, commercial fiction (not always intentionally), so the appeal here would be for someone with an insatiable appetite for any book reviews at all. A limited market, I suspect.
In the end, my blog is really best-suited for me. And I don’t think I could reshape it to focus on a topic that would lure readers in–and why would I want that, anyway? Sure, I like attention (when it’s positive, not “Your fly is down…again”) but I never started this blog way back in the olden days of 2005 with the intention of having an audience. No, for now and into the foreseeable future, I’ll just write for me, keeping this blog as an ersatz journal that happens to be available to all on the web (but usually gets 1-20 visits per day, 20 visits being equivalent to approximately 2.66666666667e-7% of the world’s population).
In which I explore more of the zany features of WordPress 5.0.
Apparently lists are now considered blocks
This list is about blocks
Blocks tend to be very block-like
I don’t think I have anything else to say about blocks
Quotes are also blocks
– Some random blog guy
This is apparently a verse block So pretend these are profound lyrics to a song you've never heard of Except nothing rhymes and the meter sucks [guitar solo]
WordPress 5.0 has launched and it’s introduced a somewhat controversial change to its editor, moving all discrete elements into blocks that can be moved around all willy-nilly, or perhaps even in an orderly manner. (I’ve chosen the new Drop Cap feature for this opening paragraph, to see how it looks. It seem to only appear in the editor when I am not editing this paragraph…er, block.)
The three main advantages of this over the old method:
Provides a more WYSIWYG look. For example, this post is showing the same fonts while I’m in the editor as I’ve selected to display on the site, making it easier to know how things will look.
Blocks are easier to move around. Content in the old editor is basically just code dumped into a big file and moving it around has always been a bit messy–not unlike mucking around with Word’s formatting, really–and I’ve often ended up in the text mode view to try to straighten out how things look. Blocks should largely eliminate this.
It’s the future! Shiny! New!
So far, I have to say it seems fine for my usual posts, which are just lots of words that go on and on. Doing these posts is only very slightly different than before, and certainly no more difficult, so for now I say ten thumbs up! I reserve the right to remove thumbs as I see fit.
And on the second point mentioned in the title, I’ve always wanted to have LEGO to play with, but really have no space for it. I totally missed out when I was a kid. I’ve still got Minecraft, which kind of scratches the same itch, but with the bonus of not taking up half the living room. Or is that actually not a bonus? Hmm.
It was Saturday night and I was getting ready for bed at the fashionably late hour of 12:45 a.m. when the fire alarm went off in my building.
The condo has two alarms, one in each bedroom, and if you think of a 747 on takeoff as producing a sound level of 10, these alarms produce a sound level of 10 million. The only way you would not hear them is if you were deaf and even then you’d probably still feel the sound waves blasting against your body. I put on my shoes, jacket and cap, grabbed my phone and headed out into the chilly 3ºC weather to gather with the neighbors I never see.
I noticed what looked like smoke coming from the back of the building, so walked around the side and discovered it was just a steam plume from the hospital. A few minutes later the first fire truck arrived and the firefighters gathered at the panel in the lobby that was flashing angrily. About ten minutes after that the panel was silenced and we were waved to head back in. I overheard some speculation that “dust” or something may have set off the alarm, which I kind of hope is not what happened, because dust is not exactly a rare thing. But it was confirmed that the alarm was not deliberately set off, as they didn’t have to reset it. With nothing on fire, I was safely tucked into bed shortly after 1 a.m. I was a bit concerned the alarm might go off again (because, you know…dust), but fortunately it didn’t.
Today I am happy there was no fire and my ear drums are not burst. Seriously, that alarm is loud enough to break bone.
Today I received an email from Logitech (one of approximately 300 million emails reminding me it’s Cyber Monday) and I decided to click the link to check out their mad deals. They had them conveniently grouped by price. Well, mostly:
Really, I just wanted an excuse to use the thinking face emoji. I love that guy, especially the Apple version shown above. He really seems engaged in some serious thinkin’.
I went to IKEA and bought a Lack, which is their made-up name for a coffee table. It was cheap–only $25–and easy to assemble. It’s a little narrower than the one it replaces and much lighter. It’s dark and has clean lines. It is very Swedish. And it looks sharper than the heavy, glass-topped table it replaces, which looked more appropriate to something you might find in your grandparents’ home around 1975.
I also replaced my dresser, a piece of furniture that came with me when I first moved to Vancouver in 1986. So this is not just a piece of furniture that looks like it came from the 70s, it actually did come from the 70s (I had it for a few years back in Duncan). Of late it had gotten incapable of containing all of my clothes, with my running gear and jeans piled on top. But it’s one of those things you never really think about until you finally do and then you’re navigating the IKEA maze, picking up the three boxes of boards, screws and braces that will take hours to assemble and voila, I have a new giant dresser that fits this century and holds all of my clothes. And it smells nice, too.
My current nightstand is a stack of six cardboard boxes in a pair of 2×3 stacks. These are filled mainly with books I will never look at again and covered with a blue bath towel to give it a “level” surface. This doesn’t look like grandma furniture, because it lacks any style at all, even simple kitsch value. It does look a bit like what a poor student might slap together (the boxes were cheap because, like IKEA furniture, they had to be assembled). I’m going to replace this soon with an actual nightstand.
I have no idea why I literally waited decades to replace some of these things, much like I have no real idea why I am suddenly doing it now, but it feels right and good and I feel a little less tacky and very slightly more stylish for having done so.
Also, now that I look at my computer desk, I suddenly want to replace it, even though I don’t need to. Like I need a drawing table next to it or a separate place for the printer or…something. It’s suddenly inadequate. But we’ll see. It’s actual furniture, so it isn’t as high a priority as a stack of boxes. That was a bit of clever improvisation that was never meant to be permanent, but much like the dresser, it’s just there and I never thought about it, but now that the thinking has started, the furnituring will continue.
Yes, most Canadians actually celebrate Thanksgiving on the Sunday and not the actual holiday (today), but today is the official day and we’re celebrating with…chicken. Because cooking turkey for two is only a good idea if you REALLY like turkey. And while I don’t mind turkey, I’m not a big fan of turkey for weeks.
To commemorate the holiday, here is a vaguely disturbing animated gif I found on the internet. Enjoy!
I’m going to write about the spring cleaning I did in September in October.
It all makes sense. Mostly.
Last weekend I went to fetch some dirty clothes from the spare bedroom and it was…untidy (it’s usual state). I noticed a crate had slipped from the bed (don’t ask) and was leaning hard into my bike, which was leaning against other stuff. This didn’t look good for the bike. I straightened the crate and wheeled the bike out to the living room (which is really very clean now, actually).
And then I got hit by spring fever, four months late. I’d been meaning to start going through a lot of my old stuff–the things packed into boxes and bags that travel from one move to the next and never come out of their boxes and bags–and finally start tossing them. I’d read that shedding possessions is liberating. And I’m a liberal guy.
I started with the clutter surrounding my “nightstand.” I put that in quotes because my nightstand is six artfully arranged storage boxes with a blue towel on top. This actually works reasonably well as a nightstand, and it hides a lot of storage in plain sight. But surrounding this was a collection of old tech boxes (iPad Air, etc.) that I had no reason to keep. I gathered them up into a cloth grocery bag. I had some small piles of notebooks and photos I wanted to keep and stashed them in a temporary holding space in one corner of the room. I then moved to one of the “closets” in the bedroom. I put that in quotes because there is no door and without a door I’m not sure this counts as a closet, but it’s a nook with a bar for holding jackets on hangars, so I call it a closet. This one is filled with all kinds of junk, including many old books, a bunch of unsorted coins, a Boggle game from the 1970s (really) and more. I tidied up the coins and put them into a box (labeled “Heavy” as it is), then worked on the books, dividing them as follows:
books I would keep
books I wouldn’t keep
The latter was further divided into hardcover and paperback. Some of these books date back almost 40 years, having followed me from Duncan to the dozen or so homes I’ve had in the Lower Mainland, ending here in New Westminster. Most books I’ve read. Some are in near-mint condition, though the paperbacks tend to be yellowing due to the cheaper paper stock. The books I kept were a small handful, hardly enough to make a single volume of a Steve Erickson novel. I also found a giant stash of old game manuals and had no hesitation in turfing the lot, with a few sentimental exceptions, including:
Doom II. The manual is actually nothing special, but this evokes real nostalgia for me.
Tribes. Full color and reflecting of a game that never was, thanks to skiing. Again with the nostalgia, too.
Fallout. Spiral bound and includes recipes. A classic for the (atomic) ages.
I also kept a few GTA maps, though I’ll never play (or buy) another Rockstar game again, because the maps are kind of neat. They’ll probably go in the next cleaning, though. The attachment is not strong.
In all, I ended up clearing out nine bags of stuff, plus boxes for an Xbox 360 and Xbox One. This is a lot of boxes.
And you know what? I do feel liberated! And I can’t wait to tackle the “nightstand” (and get a real nightstand), empty out my dresser, toss a bunch of old clothes, then get a new dresser that looks like it was made in this century instead of 1919. After this, I’ll move on to the computer nook, the bathroom cabinets and anything else I can find (the spare bedroom is Jeff’s task, though I will probably help once a safe passage is carved through the space).
All of this started because I was looking for dirty socks. It’s like some variation on the butterfly effect, but with stinky clothing and fewer butterflies.
Today it was sunny. But it was also windy. And the wind felt cold.
Now I must truly admit that summer is over. The summer wind doesn’t feel bitter, it feels playful, except when it’s whipping up forest fires that burn down half the province. But still, it’s at the very least pleasant to feel against your skin. The summer wind, not the forest fires.
What I’m saying is I’m glad I wore my hoodie today.
A side effect of taking lots of nature-type photos is I’m paying a lot more attention to seasonal changes, so I’m noticing things like the leaves on trees changing color, or flowers starting to fade and die a lot more than I did before. Some things, like so many chestnuts on a sidewalk it feels like the sound stage of a slapstick comedy, are harder to miss even without my new heightened awareness.
I swear the next post will not be about the weather.
It got into the 20s today and actually felt a bit warm. It was nice.
Judging by the 10 day forecast this may be the last hurrah for summer this year. I’m not complaining, mind you, just looking back wistfully on the long, warm days of yore. You know, earlier this month. And today.
But I’ll admit, a lot of the trees are very pretty right now, even as we prepare for The Rains.
