I am, by all accounts, a night owl. Growing up, I had a LOT of trouble falling asleep. Literally hours sometimes tossing and turning and staring at the ceiling, with or without music, too hot or too cold, screen time, no screen time, doesn’t matter. This pattern has continued through-out my life where I go from semi-normal for me (midnight to 1:00 a.m.) and going until 8:00 a.m. to not being able to fall asleep and pushing it to 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., and waking up at 6:30 or 7:00 at the latest.
Which of course then likely ends up with a crash sometime around 5:00 p.m. Earlier if I let it, later if I push through. The last couple of weeks have been tough. I feel like I’m sleeping but not getting any REM. My sleep machine monitor says otherwise. But I’m fighting migraines, sinus headaches, and just pressure in general, and it is sapping my energies.
Tonight I fell asleep around 6:30 and almost slept through dinner. I needed 30 minutes to get me moving again. J and I watched X-Men tonight, then I did some stuff on my desktop and website to set up a table for my music reviews, another tick mark on my to-do list on the whiteboard, and now I’m crashing at 10:30 p.m. Wish me luck.
I mentioned that I took the night off yesterday, vegged and watched TV. I was fighting a migraine tonight, but managed to hold it together until about 9:00 p.m. Today was Andrea’s birthday, and we did lunch together, take-out for dinner plus a nice cake that Jacob chose from the store (our one last year was a bit of a first-time outcome, so she deserves a good one this year), and no gift cuz it hasn’t arrived yet. We played a game after supper, watched some more TV, and then Jacob and Andrea headed to bed.
I was meditating on some work-related news I got today, and I didn’t really feel like concentrating on anything puzzle-like with my website or sorting bins. My ribs are out of alignment, I can’t get them to slide back in, and chiro isn’t until Friday.
So I was looking for something “different” to try. I have been binging Lost and Monk alternately over the last few weeks, but I was looking for a change. They’re both good shows, but they aren’t grabbing me to the level that their popularity would suggest. Lost is interesting, but also a little soap opera-y; Monk is decent but a few of the cases have been blindingly obvious from the moment Monk said “he’s the guy” and then there’s 20 more minutes or more to get to the solution. One was obvious for the how after the death, 60 seconds in, and another lasted about 90 seconds.
Amazon has been running ads in between episodes for a couple of other shows, and for one of them (Hanna), I have seen Season 1 but not Season 2. Yet it is a very high-intensity action show, not quite what I was looking for. They keep advertising Knives Out, but I intend at some point to watch that with Andrea. I’ve seen some of it on a preview, but not the whole movie.
Which leads me to a small show called Upload. It’s a bit like the Matrix or Altered Carbon in that a person’s consciousness can be uploaded to the cloud before death. And so there are businesses that basically run SIM-like worlds, where you can live for eternity in the afterlife. A virtual “heaven”, with in-app purchases.
The main character is named Nathan, and he’s played by Robbie Amell. I probably would have passed on the show if it wasn’t for him. Separate from being Stephen Amell’s cousin and hence I’ve seen promos for the show for some time, even before Amazon started flogging it to me, I liked Robbie when he was on a few other shows like The Flash and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow.
But truthfully, I like him in just about everything…Alcatraz even if only short-lived; Revenge for a small part; the big lead in the short-lived The Tomorrow People. He sells “nice guy” better than just about anybody else. I’d love to seem him do a version of Heaven Can Wait, although Upload isn’t that far off.
I managed to binge a few episodes, and while some of it is simply dealing with “life after death” and continued contact with the living (he attends his own funeral since he’s basically an app now, and people can talk to him direct). His girlfriend is paying for all of the ongoing costs, and the two of them are trying to figure out how “their life continues” until the two of them are reunited in 60 years when she dies.
But the real “story” divides in two…first and foremost, there is a love story between Nathan and his “customer service rep” Nora. She’s lonely and can’t connect in the real world but she makes a connection with Nathan. Secondly, there is an underlying current of the capitalist nature of continuing to milk people after their death, and the sinister side of the business.
The woman who plays Nora, Andy Allo, is new to me. I’ve seen her in Black Lightning, but I don’t remember her. She has a huge “girl next door” vibe going on, and is awesome.
It isn’t exactly the best show ever, but it’s kind of interesting, and there are a few interesting cameos here and there. CSM is there from X-Files, for instance. And on a different tangent, there is regular ref to sex and hookups and nudity, oh my, which is too bad for the show. It has the potential for some interesting cross-over stuff that would be watchable by a younger audience but not with the extra stuff thrown in that doesn’t seem to ever fit properly I assume they don’t want people thinking it’s some Hallmark RomCom or something or they’re hoping to be sold to HBO? IDK.
Regardless, it fit the bill. A bit of mystery and a whole lot of falling in love. A nice delightful romance to watch and enjoy.
Today I choose to try something different and I quite enjoyed it.
The TIC routine is a disciplined taskmaster, and I don’t let myself off the hook very easily with it. I generally tell myself that even if I make a conscious decision during the day, I also have to blog about it. It is the only way I have of making my “practice” manifest in a way that allows me to hold myself accountable.
And generally speaking, when I slack off, I count it as breaking the chain.
Some nights I am not sure what, if anything, I really did that day. I review my day and I am not sure what to write about. Tonight, it was a bit of the opposite problem. I had a few things to choose from, yet the one I chose almost goes against my routine.
I drove Andrea over to an appointment this morning, and I could count that as a conscious decision to support my wife, but it’s too minor to count. It’s just part of being the only one in the house who can drive (not counting Jacob being able to park a Tesla).
I could count some sharing I did on the United Way campaign today. We’re encouraged to share “why we give” type stories, to share a bit of ourselves, and for a lot of people, there’s not much thought that goes into it. For me, I had stuff I could talk about. Namely the number of social services that we have used over the years for and with Jacob. I would have been really nervous to share that story in person, but it was somehow easier to do by video. So I did. I could even count that I’m supporting the campaign at all, which is a small mental feat of its own. I am concerned about their high admin fees for the national campaign when most of the fundraising is done for free by public servants. Yet I was more concerned that someone in my area, a close coworker, was voluntold to do it without any real support in place to help. I’ve done the coordination role before, I’m decent at it, and I’m good with technology, so I volunteered to help this year. I know, it surprised me too. Apparently my principles against the specific form of the campaign are less demanding than my principles of seeing a coworker have to do too much by themselves.
I thought about writing about two inter-related choices I made in the early afternoon. I was on a conference call with my boss and our management team when I could hear J having a small meltdown upstairs. I knew Andrea was with him, and I could have left it at that, but I’m trying hard to support him in his transition back into school, particularly on the emotional side. So I ducked out of my conference call for ten minutes to go check in on him to see if he needed help. A bit of extra outside perspective to let him know that struggling to get back up to full capacity is completely normal, just as it would be if he was a parent coming back after parental leave. You don’t simply hit the ground running on day two.
The inter-related choice I made was to somewhat push on moving our management meetings on Mondays to the morning from early afternoon. Jacob has his lunch now from 1:45 to 2:30, and since Andrea is taking the morning break (11:00-11:45), I’m on lunch duty. Which meant it would conflict with our weekly management meeting. In previous years, I probably would have just sucked it up and told J he was on his own for Mondays. Instead, I pushed the team to move it to the morning, with full transparency on why, and they agreed. So now I can have lunch with him four days out of five, with Andrea and I switching places / times on Thursdays. Andrea made similar adjustments to her schedule, but the blog isn’t about her choices, it is about mine. 🙂 So I could have written about that.
I could have talked about a small development at work later this afternoon that caught me off guard and my reaction to it. An opportunity of sorts, and while I suspect the answer will be no in the long run, I didn’t presuppose that outcome. Because I know myself well, and am comfortable making tough decisions quickly, I almost said no on the spot. Instead, I left the door open to a fuller conversation tomorrow.
Or I could have talked about some stuff Jacob and I did after school today, our choice of SupperWorks for dinner (yummy wings), or even a game of cards (Moonshot Euchre) after dinner.
Yet my full intent was to blog about what I planned to do later tonight, after supper, which was some more computer stuff. Yawn, I know. But I really wanted to dig into it and to feel like I made some progress. I actually have a couple of areas to tackle, similar in structure and activity, and I wanted to knock one off the list. Over the last few weeks, I have gone from having about 200 posts in “pending” and 30 in “draft” to having none left pending and less than 20 in draft. I still have 178 to “update” at some point, mostly for photos, but looking at the content of them, that is a long way off. A lot of digital dominoes to fall before then. But there are two small areas I can do now, and I was going to do at least one tonight.
As I was about to head down to my computer, Jacob and Andrea started watching tonight’s episode of American Ninja Warrior, something we do regularly as a family when it’s on. I was going to timeshift to later in the week, but I decided instead to sit down for the first hour with them. Then, when it was over, I decided I would just “let it go” for my plans tonight and to literally give myself a night off. I had a full productive day, and all I really wanted to do was veg and binge-watch the rest of Season 2 of Monk.
So I did. Not from lack of ambition, but because I just wanted to do it.
Tonight I choose to take the night off and give myself a rest.
If you’ve been reading this blog, you probably already know that Jacob was not really enjoying school that much last winter. French immersion, social isolation, a split class with a bunch of Grade 6 kids, winter…he wasn’t feeling it. So he was resisting big time in January and February, on top of the strikes that were going on.
The shutdown was like a dream come true for him. No commuting, less work, a new laptop to do everything on, no need to argue about recess activities, better lunch options. His teachers adapted and coped with what they had to work with, but there wasn’t a lot of support out there for them. The end of the year was a “thank god it’s over”-type moment.
Normally we celebrate first day of school and last day of school milestones. For the first day, Andrea takes pictures either at the bus stop or the front of the house; for the last day, we always leave early from work, go do something and then out for dinner wherever he wants.
For his first day back today, we were keeping it a bit low-key for a virtual return. Everybody else who is doing in-person is already back to school like his cousins and a bunch of his friends. Today was his first day.
As I said, I was initially trying to downplay the “bigness” of it and we told him in advance that it would be a big adjustment from going with relatively light structure and no work to suddenly 6.5h of class time, 9:00-3:30 essentially, although there are breaks in there of course. And a real full setup with the teacher actually “teaching” for a full day, as opposed to his spring options which were about 30 minutes per week of live feed and the rest by email.
My mind totally futzed on the french immersion side of things, namely that he had been doing hardly any french since March except for schoolwork, and even then, very little “active listening”. Today was a wall of full french immersion with a new teacher who talks fast.
For anyone who has learned French as an adult, or English, we know what that’s like when you haven’t spoken it in a while and suddenly WHAM, you’re back in. When I was on french training, and we had a vacation or break, it was like coming back and starting from scratch almost.
As soon as I realized he was hitting that wall, I also realized we had underplayed his return for the wrong parts. Or rather we had tried to reduce his stress levels while totally forgetting to extra-celebrate his start of Grade 6. We had already made sure to take the pictures this morning, with his commute simply being our stairs (!), but by 9:30, he had hit that linguistic wall. We rearranged our dinner plans a bit for tonight (mostly reviewing what we had already thawing in the fridge) to let him pick anywhere he wanted to go for dinner to do an “extra” celebration of his new school, new virtual life, new grade, etc. Plus we “stopped by” his desk multiple times during the day to see how he was doing.
I’ve reached out to introduce ourselves to the teachers, do a little of the dance with them on social inclusion (seeing basically if we can lay some markers for him for specific people he can do group work with), and Jacob was thrilled today to see who was in his class. He knows 8 other people from Knoxdale, and I would say at least 4 of them are people he actually likes (not always a guarantee). So he’s part of the Knoxdale Nine (my nickname for them) in this new virtual school, and he hung out with some of them after school today in the Google Meets. He REALLY enjoyed that part. Plus the English and Math which were in English.
For dinner, we celebrated his first day — and his survival! — with Lone Star as his choice. Like me, we love their fajitas. We know they HAVE more things on their menu, we’ve just never ordered many of them.
Then a game of cards, and it was crash-y time for a tired little boy. A good day and I’m glad we recovered in time to celebrate the whole day, not just the start of the day. Hard to remember normal stuff in a COVID world, but we did.
I headed out of town for a few days, and while I had planned to keep blogging while I was away, I didn’t have a good internet connection on my laptop. This is starting to annoy me a bit…several times I’ve been hoping to write something, or work on a project, and my laptop is just struggling to do anything with the internet. I have a good tablet, I have a good phone, but I need to figure out a different option for online access where I need to be typing stuff. I was offline essentially for 5 days, so I figured I might as well drop the TIC series, it was just too hard to write.
And yet it wasn’t just about the writing. I was also struggling in the environment I was in, a basic holding pattern, to really feel like I was making conscious choices. All I could do was hold still. I thought about tricking myself into saying the TIC “drop” or break in the chain wasn’t my fault, but I could have still kept making choices even if I didn’t write about them right away. But I didn’t feel like I was. So it definitely has to be thought of as a clean break and takes me to series f.
Now that I’m back to the house, and at my desktop again, I’m a bit out of sorts as to what in my long list of things do I want to work on. One thing that is attracting my interest is that I have a series of blog posts that I have written but which are stuck in editing limbo because I haven’t quite figured out the right layout and format for them. I solved some recent layout issues for music, although not completely, and for book reviews, although again not completely. The structure is done, just some of the editing and population still needs work. Which is fine, no issues there. Just a question of time and discipline.
My TV reviews were a bit more problematic. Or at least they seemed to be. I have only compiled 12 of them on the website, 8 seasons of Castle and 4 seasons of Continuum. To do the reviews, there are a number of variables for consistency:
Format of the page title;
Layout of the actual review itself, including two images;
Four or five headings to structure the review;
A graphical representation of my overall rating of the season;
Closing signature block;
Two links to other reviews or the show on IMDB.com; and,
A list of the episodes for that season.
I knew generally what I wanted to do, based on earlier wrestling matches with the seasons of Castle. But I was not completely thrilled with my review of Castle – Season 1 (PWTVR00001). There was something about the start of it that kept nagging at me, like I didn’t have something quite right for format or design.
But I just had a similar problem with my music reviews, and I realized for that one that it was more about flow and repetition. Could this be the same problem? It was. For some reason, I had started my review with some text that should be paragraph 2 and 3, and buried my lede for paragraph 1 farther down. A bit of editing, some rearranging, some deletions, and voila, it held together. Now that I could see what it SHOULD have said, I could figure out the rest of the headings and framework. I then replicated it 7 more times, moving 8 reviews out of “pending” and into “published”.
I had a different problem with Continuum. I had tried formatting it earlier to sort of / kind of match the Castle layouts, and for some strange reason, I was getting a really weird layout as a result. Sidebars went missing, featured images weren’t aligning properly, word wrap was doing things in weird places. All four posts / reviews were messed up. And while I would love to know what the problem was, it was easier to just copy the text to a notepad, thus stripping out stupid codes that were messing it up, pasting them into a whole new post with the proper TV review formats and structure, unfortunately redoing some links here and there, but in the end, fixing 4 more posts.
Thus completing 12 TV reviews that were pending and giving me another big strike-through on my to do list. If I want to move on to other reviews, I can. And I will in time. But for now? The previous 12 are fixed, published, and done.
