I ordered a new hat

It looks like this:

Swift Cap - Sulphur

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.)

Work from home: The good, bad, and ugly

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.

Close to the borderline

The Canada-U.S. border, that is, not the Billy Joel song.

Here’s a mini-album of pics I took while Nic and I toodled around Boundary Bay and area on Saturday, November 28. The weather was cool but clear, with little wind. Perfect for picture-taking.

Me taking a photo of Nic taking a photo of the sunset at Crescent Beach
Sunset at Crescent Beach without Nic taking a picture of it
Sign in the public washroom at Centennial Beach warning you not to put happy little crabs in the urinals
Berries enjoying the sun at Centennial Beach
Two moons rising at Crescent Beach
Seagull log at Centennial Beach

Photo of the Day, November 24, 2020

A creepy, burned out house, a fiery bright sunset punching through an otherwise dark, dreary afternoon.

Nerdy fun fact: The iPhone 8 camera software could not handle the sky being bright and orange and seriously dialed down the intensity. I had to boost the vibrancy in Affinity Photo to get it back to what it actually looked like.

Haiku for seasonal allergies

So you try to breathe
But nothing gets through your nose
Allergies are great

Okay, even by my low standards, that haiku basically sucked.

But who even knows if they’re allergies or something gone totally defective in my sinuses? It’s funny in a way, because as annoying as it is to have my nose almost perpetually plugged up, I’ve kind of gotten used to it. I guess this proves the old adage that you can get used to almost anything.

And addicted to nasal spray.

No, not addicted. I can stop any time. Any season. A season without allergies. The best season.

That’s it, I’m going to bed. Or have a bath. Something to take my mind off my nose.

* Possibly not an old adage

What does this mean?

A story on the CBC News site about personal responsibility and how the Alberta government is handling the pandemic ends with the usual short bio on the author. Here it is:

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.

The definitive ranking of seasons, 2020 edition

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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…
  4. 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).

National Novel Writing Month 2020 Day 23 word count: 38,341 (minus 38,341)

Yes, if I had participated in NaNoWriMo this year and had stayed on track, I’d be closing in on 40,000 words as of today, or possibly have already moved beyond that upon entering the final week home stretch.

Instead, my word count is zero. I have written nothing, nada, zilch. I have not had to wonder if the Windows version of Scrivener 3.0 would finally be ready for NaNo this year (spoiler: it isn’t), I have not had to wonder how I will fix giant plot holes, barely-there characters or gaps in logic that an 18 wheeler could rumble through.

Do I feel bad about this non-effort, especially since I had originally planned on participating?

I do not. If I think about it in some detail I can move the needle to “a little bad.”

And yet, I am trying to get moving on writing again, in the same way that a man who has to walk a thousand miles starts his journey by checking Amazon for a nice pair of comfortable shoes. I wrote this post! I wrote another post! More writing may occur!

We’ll see where it goes.

I did happen to come across this post while searching for something else on my blog and I call to Inspiration Cat to help me like you’ve never helped me before! (If you read the linked post you will see that Inspiration Cat did not, in fact, help me at all.)

And just because the image amuses me and this month’s unofficial blog theme is Funny Cats, here is the happy little typist again: