I don’t have a long list for this week, but I’m really happy with what I have.
Recurring items. I did my 7Qs update yesterday (7 questions: From failure to E.T. (2022 – 022-028) and I’m finding I am enjoying the process. Thoughts that I wouldn’t normally contemplate or blog about…I know lots of people who do it to pad their website content, but for me, it’s simply just poking my brain to think about random topics.
For this update of progress, the big change is that I added my new paradigm around “projects” to my to-do list tracker. I often struggle that my to-do list for the week or month is large, which is how I like it, but the struggle is that it is hard to prioritize certain items. For example, in the coming week, I have a few errands to run and they’re relatively non-negotiable. I have to do them. So obviously those are top priority, right? But if the urgent always crowds out the important, I don’t get to focus on some “lesser” priorities that are part of my long list of projects. I reclassified a few of them after an earlier posting in the week (Projects, projects and more projects…). But in the end? I still have 37 projects that I’m tracking. I don’t work on them all the time, of course, but I often feel like I’m never getting to them.
Soooo, the big change this week is that I now have two columns for my to-do list for the week/month. Column 1 is my regular or recurring items. Simple tick box items that include errands. But I also made a list of activities in the second column where ANY of them are movement forward on 1 of the 37 projects. I don’t have to be moving any particular project forward, I just want to keep track that I am accomplishing SOMETHING on the projects while I’m churning and burning through other simpler items.
We also did a game night this past week, although it was relatively a simple night.
Other items. Just as I have a number of little chores or errands in the coming week, I knocked a few off the list this past week. I needed to change the filter in our refrigerator, which is simple enough except for the fact that you then have to run water through the new one for about 5-7 minutes to make sure you get all the sediment out of it. So it’s been on my to-do list way longer than it should for something so simple. But done. I also picked up new compression socks that I had ordered, very exciting I know.
In terms of finances, I figured out two more donations this week for Soroptomist and the Riverview Park and Zoo, both in Peterborough.
I did a bit of tech support for Grace’s website design and launch, we’ll see what else kind of help she’ll need but she’s doing well.
For work, I figured out how to use One Note more easily, so that’s working. Plus managed to move a few files forward this week. I still feel I was like “half-succeeding”, not swinging for the fences yet, which is to be expected.
In terms of family “togetherness”, Andrea and I have been enjoying watching Discovery of Witches, and I’m hoping she’ll join me to watch the new Reacher series starting next weekend.
And let’s not forget to mention I cut my own hair again, flashback to the early COVID period, and Andrea fixed it up for me.
Reading. I feel a little foolish to say that the item that I feel was my biggest accomplishment this past week, beyond staying vertical (I’ve been feeling like crap since my new meds started on Tuesday), is that I think I have a way forward on my book tracking and reviews. I’ve been doing most of it in Excel, but I don’t use the spreadsheet as a database much, and I’m trying to push myself to use One Note as the “all in one place” solution for my notetaking etc.
I created a set of new tabs, pages, and subpages to be able to share my list of books (read and TBR) all in one place in One Note, and I’ve been experimenting with copying the data for the 200 reviews over quickly. I’m torn between pasting it all into ON or just putting in the link to the review on my website. After all, it’s already published there. What’s the point if I’m not going to use it? Well, the main issue is that it is not sortable/searchable with all my TBR books too. So I’m almost there, not quite.
However, I managed to make a list of all the Erle Stanley Gardner books, particularly for the Perry Mason series, and then I read the first three in the series, all contributing to my progress for January in the Reading Challenge. Plus made lists for Robert B. Parker and the gigantic Star Trek collections.
Conclusion. I’m ecstatic about the new project list, and I made some progress in some key areas. As I said, I started a new med on Tuesday (injected, which is an accomplishment itself), but it knocked me on my butt for the rest of the week and into the weekend. It’s a win that I’m still vertical at this point. Onward!
I’m asking myself seven questions a week, and here are this week’s questions.
022. In what areas of life, or about what topics are you way too serious?
As an analytical introvert, almost all areas. I think about multiple aspects of my life, even mundane ones. A friend is motivated to maximize utility when spending money — such as going to theme park X and figuring out which of the restaurants has the best value for money so he doesn’t end up needing to be Richie Rich when his kids get hungry. They’re fascinating stories, and I admire the commitment, but my bent is a bit different. For me, it is more like a belief that “some day, everything will be organized — a place for everything and everything in its place”, both physically with my stuff and mentally with my approach to life.
023. What is your definition of happiness?
024. Describe a past experience where you overcame failure.
025. Write down the life lesson(s) you learned from this experience.
I’m going to use a strange example to answer all three of these together. I don’t know if this would hold for others, or be “deep” enough for philosophy majors, but my happiness equation is about simply realizing potential.
In Grade 9, my father convinced me that I should take a double period of tech…a combination of three classes through the year for 3 months each one of drafting, machine shop and electricity. My father was a factory worker, and likely saw that I had very little aptitude for physical stuff, and I would need and benefit from such a course. A trade to give me some direction. It didn’t go the way he expected but it was the best course I ever took.
I sucked at it. I had almost zero aptitude. I really liked electricity, had little discipline for drafting, and machine shop overshadowed all of it. The project for the year was a tack hammer. You basically made the handle on the lathe with knurling for grip and threading at the top with a die. The head was mostly cut and shaped on a band saw tool, and then a drill press for the center hole with a tap for threading to screw it on the handle. Then you cut the top of the handle off, heated and fired it (as I recall), and voila, one tack hammer. A friend of mine who was good at these types of operations could probably have done it in his sleep. Mine took me the full trimester, I didn’t quite finish all the intended steps but enough to finalize it, most of the cuts were the wrong angle, etc. I think I got maybe 60% on it. But I still have it. I use it regularly. I made that and it’s functional. It’s probably the maximum potential I had at the time (or still, to be honest).
In our second year, we were supposed to make a C clamp. At the start of the year, I looked at all the marks in machine shop and realized that while the project was worth 40%, that meant the rest was worth 60%. That was my other potential, the theoretical side. I knocked that out of the park and got 59/60. The project? Not even close to finished, the angle of the bar going through the threads was wrong (supposed to be level, mine was angled down about 4-5 degrees), the cuts were off. 18/40. For a 77/100 overall, about 10% higher than the previous year. I had found another way to realize my “potential”, playing to my strengths, not the curriculum.
But the 77 doesn’t mean as much to me as a tack hammer that I still use. I have other hammers, but I regularly choose that one if I can. It’s reliable, it’s MINE. If I look at mementoes from over the years, many of my personal keepsakes come from having realized some potential in me, even if it wasn’t amazing or objectively “high” against others’ abilities. I did my best and produced something I didn’t necessarily think I could.
I failed at machine shop in one sense, the first year, a low mark, but I realized my potential; I passed the second year using another potential, a dodge if you will from the assignment, and got a higher mark, but not as satisfying over time. The real success of the course though was it taught me some humility. I was super smart and I couldn’t just think my way through it. My brain wasn’t enough for the mechanical aspects. There were lots of people in my high school who were academically-inclined, and lots of people who look at machine shop or the trades as being for “dumb people”. That somehow any Joe or Jane could do it, no problem, that working with your brain was somehow “better”. I knew different.
In some way, I have probably learned that lesson too well. I know I’m not good with my hands. I made some bookshelves, and I understood the theory of joints and how to make everything look nice. But when I was done? They looked functional, not quality. Good enough for a basement for books, not something I would put anywhere else in the house. I would LOVE to build an observatory in the form of a shed in my backyard. I have all the official knowledge required on how to do it. I can cut and hammer and screw. But I have no real talent or skill at it. It would look like a fort built by a ten-year-old in their backyard. So, I avoid doing things like that that would build up some experience and maybe some skill. I just don’t do it at all, if I can help it. I get too frustrated, too fast, when the outcome looks amateurishly bad. I often say it is my “digital aptitude over analog ability” potential.
But it can also be an excuse. Jacob, for instance, will likely grow up never having built anything like that. He’s assembled shelving, he helped me hammer some shelving together out in the garage, but we haven’t built much. I don’t think Lego counts. I’m hoping he might enjoy some aspects of a 3D printer in that regard. Small and dexterous is not always the best choices for him or me, but well, we’ll likely give it a try as we attempt some board game design.
In terms of potential, I often view my HR guide in almost the same way. I found a way to explain something complex, to reduce it its constituent parts and to do so in plain language so others can understand it, and in a way that they’ll find helpful for applying that info to a competition. I applied my potential to accomplish that feat. Could someone else do better? Sure. Could someone else make a better tack hammer? Sure. But it’s not an objective scale, it’s totally subjective. It was the best I could do, and I did it.
I realized *my* potential and I’m good with that.
026. What would you like people to understand about you?
It probably sounds lame, but I think the most important thing I would want someone to “get” about me, particularly my son, is the dichotomy between subjective reflection and objective ambivalence. There are lots of people who have similar drives to mine for improving something or to dig deeper within themselves to understand something, and then turn that outward to tell everyone they meet how they can be a better self. I have no such ambition. I’m happy to share my hard-won realizations, for HR, for astronomy, for books or movies or TV oh my, but I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything. I’m sharing what works for me.
When I started participating in a couple of specific online fora, one of the most beautiful phrases to me was the simple “Your mileage may vary”. My approach to things stops at my skin…just because I do it one way, I rarely try to impose that same expectation on someone else. “I’m doing me, you do you.” And the me that I’m being is an analytical introvert who loves answering these questions as they make me think in ways I hadn’t even yesterday. A slightly different nuance than normal, a slightly different way of explaining it. Should everyone do that? Probably not. But it works for me. Your mileage may vary.
027. What is your best recent memory and why?
This question has been in my queue for the last week. And I thought I knew what I would say — I was going to talk about Christmas again, how being at the inlaws in Peterborough surrounded by family, and having fun, slightly teasing, mega laughter around the table was such a huge stress relief of the last two years. A feeling of normalcy heightened by the delay and diminished expectations of life.
But then Saturday morning happened. I slept late, I’ve been feeling like crap this week with my new med, and Andrea wanted to clip Jacob’s toenails that were overdue. I suggested that she use a special “kit” I have for footcare, since I have weight-induced diabetes, and for many with the same issues, footcare is frequently a problem. Diminished circulation, trouble even reaching my feet in terms of flexibility (yoga master, I am not), blah blah blah. Anyway, I have a better-than-average set of tools that I ordered about three years ago with the standard scissors and clippers (although better quality), plus a larger high-quality pair of curved snippers plus a metal toenail file. I suggested perhaps she could try them with Jacob’s toes, see if it helped the struggle a bit (he doesn’t like having his toenails done).
Anyway, she went and did it, she came back to the bedroom, and I asked, “So how was it using the kit?”. And I swear, as she tried to answer, it looked like it was physically HURTING her to reply. Like the question had broken her brain and she kind of grunted and moaned as she tried to answer. And then she realized what she had sort of “said”, and we both burst out laughing. Laughing so hard like we couldn’t breathe.
It is those moments that I think are most real, the most precious, the most spontaneous. A week later, you have no memory of WHAT was so funny, but there it is. (And for the record, they worked fine. The question just threw her off and she wasn’t sure how to phrase it.)
028. What are your thoughts on extraterrestrial life?
I thought I would end with something a little lighter. I think the question involves actually three sub-questions, and without the sub-questions, the big one is meaningless.
First and foremost, do I think there are forms of life elsewhere in the universe? Absolutely. There will be plants and amoeba and I would be surprised if there weren’t animals of some sort. Within our own solar system, I think we’ll find the basic forms of life on Venus and Mercury, and the remains of life on Mars and beyond.
Secondly, the REAL question is if there are intelligent species like you find in Star Trek? I’m less sure about that one. But I’m inclined to think yes. While evolution on any planet will be unique, evolution with similar outcomes is not likely limited to one planet in the entire universe. I suspect part of me just thinks about the quote from the movie / book “Contact” about how if we’re all alone in the universe, it’s a pretty big waste of space.
Finally, though, will we ever meet them? We have come a long way in the last one hundred and fifty years as a race. Maybe we will survive ourselves. Maybe we will survive an era of machines and computers. Maybe we will somehow merge consciousness with machines giving lifespans of much greater timeframes and permitting long journeys on generational ships to explore. Maybe we develop new technologies that give us much faster travel speeds than we have now. I don’t believe faster-than-light travel is possible, but I would like to believe it is. But I don’t see any of it happening in the next 300 years. Black swan events for technology might leapfrog us ahead, yet I doubt it. Not in that way. I do think we’ll find a way to colonize Mars and the moon. I have doubts after that. And sure, other species might develop the capabilities and come visit us. But I doubt it anytime in the next 500 years.
No, not writing one. I just mean reading them. After my post about all my various projects, for some reason, I went down a rabbit hole for how I’m tracking books read, next in series, etc.
I tend to do “completion” binges of authors, aka “If I read one, then I want to read them all!” Way back when I was in my early teens, I had a small handwritten list of some titles (some of them came from Carolee as she wanted me to find Agatha Christie or Helen Macinnes titles at garage sales if I saw any!).
Then later, I had a double-sided list in 6-point font that I kept up to date until sometime in the early 2000s when my list of authors was way too large for 2 pages. Since then? I just look it up on the internet when I’m looking for the next read in a series. I’ve thought about a virtual list, but never really found a tool that I liked well enough to use, although to be honest, I’m realizing that is more about not knowing what information I want to keep vs. being simply too anal-retentive with my goals.
So, let’s back up a second. The “book” project has three components.
A. I want a list of books by author or series that I have read along with the list of ones that are to be read. A “status of completion” list, if you will. When I was only reading paper books, that wasn’t that difficult. I tended to buy them and read them, my backlog of TBR wasn’t that big, so I could basically “tick” the box when I bought it. It wasn’t that I had READ it, it was a purchase list. An inventory list rather than a to-do list.
B. When I read something, I like to write a book review. My book review process has been anal-retentive over the years, and it hinders me considerably in actually doing the review. My intent, when I started long ago, was to do them formally, not quite professional but more than the comments you see from most users. A bit of rigour, if you will. I made the review accessible — a blurb about the plot, what I liked, what I didn’t like, a final one-line conclusion, a rating, and some links and tags. Sounds simple enough, right? But then I would share it multiple places. Over the years, this included:
Amazon.com
Amazon.ca
Good Reads
Library Thing
Chapters Indigo
Kobo
Barnes and Noble
Google Books
The Ottawa Public Library
Savvy Reader
Facebook forums for a book club with Savvy Reader (My book pledge)
Facebook forum for my book club
PolyWogg.ca
I feel like I missed a couple in there, but those are the obvious ones. Yet each of those sites, all 13 of them, tend to have slightly different layouts and formats. My site and Good Reads tend to have a very simple format, so I can use the same layout for both. Amazon (.com and .ca) plus Chapters, Kobo, Barnes and Noble (and Nook) have similar fields, albeit not in the same order so I have done those in batches. The Ottawa Public Library, Google books, and LibraryThing are relatively compatible so that was batch 3.
I would write the review in a Microsoft Excel template on a “writing” tab that would follow my PolyWogg.ca template pretty close (batch 1), but then I had a few other tabs that would take the info from that template, copy it to another format / layout for batch 2, and another for batch 3. I could therefore write it on the writing tab and it would autopopulate the other sheets. Then when I went to upload a review to the other sites, I could go to that sheet, copy and paste the layout with headings, and paste it into the review and press save. I have about 200 reviews across all the sites done that way. It works, it is “efficient” for process, and way back when I started all of this in the early 2000s, it made some sense to me.
If the first point of a review is to publish my thoughts, then the second point of a review is to help someone else decide if THEY would like the book too or not. And if so, then of course I should publish my reviews where readers are looking for reviews i.e., on those sites. Early on, I would get people interacting with me about the review, commenting on this or that, agreeing or disagreeing, etc. And on some of the sites, you would get a ranking of how many you had done and if people found them helpful. I liked that interaction. Most of the time, when I had read something, that was the end of it. Very few people read the books I read, so it was an informal way to have an ad hoc book club. But over the last 15 years, many of those sites have decreased interaction rather than increased it. Easier to manage the social media side if there isn’t direct interaction. If you see a review on Amazon, for example, all you can do now is say if it was helpful or report it. You can’t comment on it.
Which means, after that long summary, I am no longer getting much in the way of interaction on the books I review. It doesn’t help that I do a lot of backlist stuff too. If I was publishing a review of the latest book, it would get more traction on GoodReads for example. And, at the same time, I have my own book club that I run. Low intensity, sure, but if I want interaction on what I read, I just post there.
Why am I looking at this? Because I want to do more book reviews. I want to churn and burn and move on. Mostly I want to clear the freaking backlog of reviews too. And the current process has been WAY too anal-retentive. It not only collects info I don’t care about (why do I care who the ****ing publisher was????), and I stopped some of the elements a while ago, but also simply takes too long for me to write a review. On a regular basis, I would say it takes me upwards of 30-45 minutes to write the review, upload it on all the websites, and be “done”. For those that are more complex (like short-story collections), it can take me an hour at least. With no real added benefit for all the sub-sites too.
So I’m going to focus on putting it only on the PolyWogg site, not all the other sites. It isn’t driving people to me nor creating discussion/interaction, so what’s the point? They don’t need my support. Well, maybe the Ottawa Public Library, but their review area isn’t that convenient.
C. I want an in-home solution for tracking not only where I am on collecting and reading, but also for managing my ebook library. I have a large ebook TBR collection, and I’ve gone down a giant rabbit hole this year to make the library collection a lot more segregated for types of books (general fiction, various series, and specialized non-fiction categories). When I’m done reading a title, I add my review to the metadata for the ebook file and store it in a separate e-library collection. But my old idea of “one tick” is sufficient to indicate I have the book to read no longer applies. I need a way to indicate OWN, READING, READ, REVIEWING, and DONE.
I’ve played with a few tools out there. Some are good little trackers but they’re only on an app with no desktop version, so I’d have to type it all on my phone. Pass. Others are great with database imports, but lousy at tracking my categories above. Others are good in one area but not another, particularly for the ability to access while on the go. The list is useless to me if I’m browsing through Chapters and see a title that interests me but I don’t know if I have it or not. Most of the time I just take a picture and order it as an ebook from them later, or from Amazon or elsewhere if there is a price differential, but some titles I buy in paper still. Regardless, I need a list and I need to be able to access it on the go.
So far, all the pieces seem to be taking me out of the Excel world (which has been good to me for a long time) and moving me into more of an integrated OneNote option. I think I’m going to have a separate page for each author (or series if more than one author), as well as another tab with the actual prose of the reviews. Which means I can write my reviews on my site and just paste a copy into OneNote later or simply put in a link in the table.
Great, I have a way forward. Except it now means I’m going to take a night here or there over the next year to go deep on individual authors to compile their full list of books for my tracker. On the plus side, there are some very good sites out there who already compiled the lists for me.
Sung to the tune of “He’s a lumberjack and that’s okay”, I am now a human pincushion. Or at least an occasional one.
My diabetes isn’t as under control as I would like, too much sedentary behaviour in the last two years in particular, as well as changed meds that are better for me but have some side effects. My A1C number has crept higher in recent months so time to do something “different”.
No, not insulin, I’m not at that level of difficulty, but they do want to add another medicine to my regimen. Namely one called Ozempic. I was okay with adding one, no biggie I thought as I’m already taking four pills and one of them is hard on my stomach so can’t up the dosage any higher. Except the new one? It’s an injected one.
They started off saying that I would be doing injections IN MY STOMACH, but that wasn’t likely to happen. I couldn’t see ANY way I would be up for that, at least not before I tried my first injection today. Needles in my STOMACH? Pass.
On the plus side, it’s only once a week. But it’s a layer of complication I would rather do without. I did my “training” today by video with a nurse, she walked me through my first injection.
Clean my hands, obviously;
Clean the head of the pen (it’s like an Epi pen, sort of) with an alcohol swab;
Add the needle to the pen;
Prime the needle and remove any potential air in the needle;
Clean my leg (small alcohol swab);
Set the dosage on the pen;
Insert the needle into my LEG (not my stomach) gently at 90 degrees;
Press thumb on end until it resets slowly to 0 and then hold for ten more seconds;
Remove my thumb from the end and remove pen with needle;
Put small cap back on needle, remove needle from pen, dispose of needle in a safe container (free from the pharmacy);
Store the pen + other needles, swabs back in my medicine cabinet.
Now, I generally knew the steps before I did it, and the only thing that was making me a little nervous was the actual insertion of the needle. It is incredibly small, sure, but it’s still sticking a needle in my leg.
I don’t really like needles, despite having them as a kid for years to deal with allergies. When I get one for vaccines or boosters, I try to look the other way and think of the Republic.
So I wasn’t looking forward to it today. How much would the needle hurt? And while I can’t put it in my shoulder (can’t reach around to reliably do it at 90 degrees), I figured the upper thigh would serve as my best option.
I didn’t even feel it. I probably COULD do it in the stomach if I ever need to do so. For now, I’ll just swap legs each week.
On the positive side, it helps with the diabetes, with a side benefit that it helps with weight loss too. It seems to do most of it by shrinking my stomach so I’m not hungry and don’t eat as much, so we’ll see how that goes. Doesn’t work for everyone.
In the meantime, I’m now a pincushion. And apparently, that’s okay.
I have a lot of projects on the go, reflecting a very long to-do list of sorts. As a result, I often feel like I’m not making “enough” progress on my projects because individually I’m not. But it makes me wonder if I should think of them as a “group” instead of individual projects. Here is the set of them.
A maker space theme
I want to get a 3D printer, and under that heading, I have a lot of sub-project ideas. Some are them are astro-related, some are game- related, but many of them are simply just fun ad hoc stuff to make with a 3D printer.
For the astro ones, I want to not only build a telescope (or 3) likely using a 3D printer, but also have some projects around converting old binoculars into eyepieces (a guy online has a way of doing it that looks downright fascinating). There’s also some options to create an attachment for a Maglite flashlight in a way that would replace a green laser pointer and without running afoul of Transport Canada rules. Both of them are things I would love to design and then share with the broader astro community in Canada, perhaps part of my volunteering / giving back to RASC.
I have some computer-related items, including assembling a robot that I have, building a video game console with a Raspberry Pi, and programming my own app (likely around Trivia).
I mentioned “games” above, and I want to do some board game design with Jacob. He likes it, he’s pretty creative, and together we might have some fun.
I also have some “kits” for multiple Lego projects (including several fairly large ones), some escape room puzzles, fixing some previous projects, putting together some Kiwi kits I bought for Jacob but that didn’t really appeal to him, and a variety of easy crafting projects.
An organizing theme
I have a whack of things I need to do for organizing the garage, basement, stuff around the house, some reno projects, etc. Many of them are far from urgent, of course, but we’d like to do them sometime. Preferably when COVID improves and we can have workpeople in our house more easily.
A large self-expression theme
Obviously, the biggest form of self-expression for me is writing. Within that sub-category, I have project ideas related to my blog and all the normal subtopics, my PolyWogg HR guide, a guide to managing your career in the public service, a manager’s guide to the public service, an Astro Guide (with multiple subtopics), a guide to performance measurement, a review of certain types of government programs, and performance measurement for libraries…it’s a long list of areas to write about, and I haven’t even talked about my fiction writing. Much of it will push to my retirement, but they’re on the list. In the same vein, I review books, movies, music, TV shows…I’m even reviewing Sky and Telescope magazines as part of a mini-project.
I already covered a “maker space” idea, but other areas of self-expression, perhaps a little more artistic, include origami, photography (including a photo site or scanning my mother’s photo albums), and cooking. I’d even like to learn to play the piano and fly a drone.
A social (or reading) theme
I don’t know if this is really a social theme per se, but I have a book club aka the PolyWogg Reading Challenge that I run, and it creates interaction with a number of friends and new acquaintances around books. It takes a bit to run, but people seem to enjoy it, and I like seeing people who didn’t know each other before I created it start talking and sharing books. Some have even got together to exchange books!
I also have a desire to organize all of my ebooks and to binge a large number of series. Not exactly a “project”, but it’s not not a project either.
A learning theme
Probably the biggest project under here is the idea of MOOCs and various courses that interest me. Psychology is at the top of that list, with a MOOC at Carleton, and I even have the textbook to start. But there are tons of courses on The Great Courses as well as on Coursera that I can do for free too.
I think I should lump astronomy in here too, at least for my own learning. There’s some element of it that is different from my writing / self-expression theme including just imaging and observing.
Moving forward
For those keeping score, that’s probably between 40-50 “smaller” projects that are on my list and I do a little bit on them at a time, embracing the variety. But it does mean of course that I’m not making a lot of progress on any ONE project, I don’t “tick” the box that they’re done.
I’ll have to think about this a bit more as I take stock at the end of March, June, September and December i.e., a quarterly review of how I’m doing.
