Pondside Planner – Page 46

#50by50ish #50 – Lose weight – Two strikes down

November 22 2019

Well, my first attempt with transparent commitment, public goals, everything arrayed to push me led initially to weight loss of about 30 pounds, and then regained about 15 of it. Strike one.

My second attempt, my “reboot” this year, was wiped out by depression and I ended up not only regaining all of the other 15 pounds I had first lost, but I also added another 5 on top of it. Pushing me to my largest weight ever, 345 pounds. Strike two.

Sigh.

So I’m working on a reboot plan, I know why it’s not working, and what I need to do, but apparently the online transparency plan isn’t working for me as a way of keeping my nose to the grindstone. I have a couple of new things to try, but I guess I’ll try those out on my own and post updates more sporadically. Stay tuned!

♫ I saw the sign ♫

September 2 2019

I have the song, “I saw the sign”, by Ace of Base, going through my head (and it’s probably going through yours now too, sorry about that!). If I was being honest with this post, it should be titled “I missed the sign” because I did. I missed a sign that was staring me in the face for over a week because I was focused on the day-to-day detritus of daily life, not the broader world. Let me explain.

I posted earlier this year that I was facing depression and had to choose amongst three options (My seven ways to respond to depression // Choosing between three depressions // Deciding on my way forward). I ended up opting for a very aggressive “F*** the Universe” approach, which was not about saying “screw everyone”, although at least one person thought that’s what it meant. No, I meant that the universe seemed to be sending me signals about certain things, and rather than listening to them, I chose to give the universe the middle finger and pretend everything was a raging success. Literally telling the universe itself to go screw itself, not the people in the universe. Astronomy was one of the areas where the universe was messing with me, but there were others (FtU Update – 30 days in). But regardless of what method I use, the depression still sits there. Maybe mitigated, maybe not, but it’s there until it’s not. The only way out is through.

I’ve been on holidays the last two weeks, which has been good for my mental and physical health, and I have detached so much that I’ve actually forgotten my password for my work phone. Either that or it’s just futzed on me and won’t accept my password. I’ve got one more day and then I’ll be back at it on Wednesday, so the IT people there can figure it out for me.

But just over a week ago, I was back at home after a busy couple of nights doing star gazing, I was doing some planning for a few things in the next six weeks, and I was feeling overhwhelmed. Stressed even. And I missed the sign.

Oh, sure, I saw that I was stressed. That was easy. I could even articulate some of it. But I missed the sign.

I was stressed. STRESSED. Something I can’t feel when I’m depressed because it dampens everything down. I’d broken through the depression (some areas of progress that will likely be part of future posts, perhaps) and I hadn’t even noticed my emergence, partly because I was ignoring any signals from the universe. I was feeling better, more upbeat, more optimistic about my ability to do certain things, and I was slowly starting to ratchet back up my planning for various events and habits. Of course, I’m still physically depleted energy-wise, and so I was feeling overwhelmed quicker than usual, but I missed the sign that feeling ANYTHING, even STRESS, was a sign.

♫ Life is demanding, without understanding.
I missed the sign, and it opened up my eyes, I missed the sign. ♫

A weird form of progress, to be sure, but progress never the less.

#50by50ish #46 – Purging some of my library

August 10 2019

My #50by50 years have come and gone, both the lead up and the bonus time when I was actually 50. I’m now 51, and there are a couple of items that I started during the period that I haven’t written up yet. One of those was a commitment to purging some books from my collection.

To be honest, I have no idea how many books I have in the basement. My educated guess is somewhere between 1500 and 2500. A huge range I know, and a large number of books. I’ve held on to them over the years, and they have followed me through multiple moves. For some of those homes, the books were basically just piled on a big book shelf four and five layers deep or left in boxes for a while. Most are mysteries, and while I occasionally go back and read some, part of the reason I have them still is that they are part of series. I am a “completist” in that sense…if I read an author, and like him or her, then I want to read EVERYTHING they’ve ever written. I read all the books by Sue Grafton, for example, including tracking down two early books by her through Interlibrary Loans. Even though the two books I had to scramble to find were not part of the series and had no relation to her mystery novels, I wanted to “complete” them. I started reading Edgar Award winners some time ago, and the first book was REALLY hard to find as it was out of print. Again, ILL found it so I could read it.

But if I’m brutally honest, the main reason I have them still is that I love books. At different points in my life, when times were tough, they were the only real friends I had. I could lose myself in them and block out the world. Mysteries will always be my favorite, and I’m sure it was no accident that my first “book crush” was the Three Investigators series, with a smarter than average lead detective, my age, and overweight. There were 42 books in the series and I still have every one. All different shapes and sizes. I’d love to get them all nicely formatted in ebook form, but alas, they are long out-of-print and what is available online are poor quality scans. But I digress.

About a year ago, I doubled down on my books…what did I really want to keep. I certainly NEVER want to move them again, and while we aren’t likely to move for another 10 years from our pseudo-forever home, I won’t let them go with a simple wave. No, I’ve held on to them this long, some for 40 years, and now I am invested. I feel like I have to make the time investment — and money — worth it somehow.

Part of my plan is making sure that I give them away, not just dump them in a landfill. That is not as easy as lots of people think. “Oh, give them to x group”. Except most of your likely target groups will hold them for a very short time, if they take them at all, and if they don’t have a sale, they cart them off to the dump. I want something better for my friends final resting place. At the least I would hope they would be loved by someone at least one more time.

Another part of my plan is that for some of the books, I will grab the e-book version if I can. Very few are in public domain, but if they are, I can likely find them. I have hopes that I will eventually be able to do at least a basic review of them.

A far more seditious part though is a desire to hold them for Jacob. He loves mysteries, and it was a large source of pride and enjoyment for me to see him plow through all 42 3I books. He loved the series too. He even read it a second time once he finished the first round. And when I look at some of the books in my series, I can see books that I would love to introduce him to…

Agatha Christie novels are obvious. So are Sherlock Holmes. Maybe a little harder edge at some point with Elmore Leonard or the Jane Whitefield series by Thomas Perry, or the Reacher novels by Lee Child. The McNally series started by Lawrence Sanders. Well, almost anything by Lawrence Sanders. Some of the sweeping sagas by Jeffrey Archer. The Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald. Oh, and the Spenser for Hire series by Robert B. Parker.

House of Night for the fantasy realm, which seems a lot like Harry Potter for the teen set until the main character witnesses fellow students engaging in oral sex in a darkened hallway. Yeah, those need to wait a bit.

And on a strange psychological level that I don’t understand, I would love love love to see Jacob reading the Sackett series of western novels by Louis L’Amour. Many of the above titles, but especially L’Amour, were books that I was introduced to by my father. He would read voraciously sitting in his kitchen chair in the morning, and there were always 2 or 3 pocket books beside his chair in the kitchen or out at the lake. Garage sale purchases by my Mom, she frequently would grab 10-12 per week and stock up. Why do I think there is some psych stuff buried in there? Because just the thought of my son reading books that my Dad read is enough for me to be tearing up while writing this paragraph. Must be allergies to the dust on the books.

Now I know that is mainly rationalization. An excuse not to get rid of them. But oddly enough, trying to work on my weight, and confronting some of the psych that goes with that was enough of a small impetus to start going through my books. I used to have a huge tracking list, long out of date, for the various series. Yet if I was getting rid of the books, I wanted SOME sort of list of what I had once owned.

In the short-term, I was keeping a short list of what I was putting in each box:

66 books – Star Trek;
19 books – Star Trek;
39 books – 17 Louis L’Amour, 1 Sue Grafton, 8 Star Trek, 4 John D. MacDonald, 1 Jeffrey Archer, 3 Robert B. Parker, 1 James Bond, 1 Charlaine Harris, 1 Laura Lippman, 1 House of Night, 1 David Baldacci;
23 books – 6 Tom Clancy, 1 David Stone, 1 David Levien, 1 Alison Gordon, 1 Tanya Huff, 1 Brian Freeman, 1 Lustbader/Ludlum, 1 Lawrence Block, 1 Lee Child, 1 Robert B. Parker, 3 Star Trek, 1 Programming, 1 Janet Evanovich, 1 Ian Rankin, 1 Perri O’Shaugnessy, 1 Lawrence Sanders;
24 books – 5 Robert Ludlum, 2 Steve Berry, 2 David Baldacci, 2 x Shortstories, Lee Child, John Grisham, John Twelve Hawks, Terry Pratchett, John Ramsey Miller, William Lashner, James Lee Burke, Kate Mosse, Yasutaka Tsutsui, RIck Mofina, Robert B. Parker, Agatha Christie, Robertson Davies;
09 books – 5 Star Wars, 1 PC Cast, 1 Kazuo Isiguro, 1 Lawrence Sanders, 1 Charlaine Harris; and;
43 books – 32 Agatha Christie, 2 x Mitch Albom, 1x the rest –> Walter Mosley, Arthur C. Clarke, William Coughlin, Elmore Leonard, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Perry, Charles Dickens, Peter Haining, Alan Dean Foster.

So my first purge would be a simple 223 books, or about 10% of the hoard (although I like the idea that it is not hoarding if it’s organized!). I reached out to a few places that people suggested, and met with rejection across the board. Most places are happy to take the latest best seller, as would most used bookstores, but nobody wants the backlists. Except the archives right next to my house shares space with the Friends of the Ottawa Public Library. And once a month, they open a store in the lobby of the library and sell books, CDs, DVDs, audio collections, etc. I think their prices are a bit high — I can picture my mother going there and saying, “Well I hope they like their stuff, because they’ll have most of it still at the end of the sale!” — but I’m more disposed to things “moving” than worrying if it gets its value back to the library. But they’re the ones who have to sort and store and lay it all out. Most importantly, my collection fit their parameters of what they’ll take. Almost all of it in fact. A chance for the books to move on to a new home. What do they do if they have it for awhile and it doesn’t sell? I don’t want to know, honestly.

For me, it is enough to know I didn’t trash them and they have a chance to find a new reader again. And in Andrea’s view, anything that gets my crap out the door is a good thing. 🙂 I also bookmarked a bunch on the ‘net so I could track them later and the full list is below.

Phase 1 is complete though — I purged some books.

A. C. Crispin	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 014 – The Eyes of the Beholders
Agatha Christie	4.50 From Paddington
Agatha Christie	The Murder on the Links
Agatha Christie	Hickory Dickory Dock
Agatha Christie	The Regatta Mystery And Other Stories
Agatha Christie	At Bertram’s Hotel
Agatha Christie	The murder of Roger Ackroyd
Agatha Christie	Poirot’s Early Cases
Agatha Christie	Curtain Poirots Last Case
Agatha Christie	Mrs McGinty’s Dead
Agatha Christie	The A B C Murders
Agatha Christie	Elephants Can Remember: A Hercule Poirot Mystery
Agatha Christie	Labours of Hercules
Agatha Christie	The Golden Ball and Other Stories
Agatha Christie	By the pricking of my thumbs
Agatha Christie	Death Comes As the End
Agatha Christie	Parker Pyne Investigates
Agatha Christie	The Man in the Brown Suit
Agatha Christie	Cards on the Table
Agatha Christie	And Then There Were None
Agatha Christie	One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
Agatha Christie	The Harlequin Tea Set and Other Stories
Alan Dean Foster	The Last Starfighter
Arthur C. Clarke	Dolphin Island
Barbara Hambly	Star Wars: Children of the Jedi
Block, Lawrence.	Eight Million Ways to Die
Brad Ferguson	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 048 – The Last Stand
Brad Ferguson	Star Trek: The Lost Years: A Flag Full of Stars
Brian Freeman	Stripped
Cannell, Stephen	Runaway Heart (2003)
Cathi Unsworth	London Noir
Charlaine Harris	Living dead in Dallas
Charlaine Harris	Club Dead
Charles Dickens	The Pickwick Papers
Christie Golden	Star Trek: Voyager – 006 – The Murdered Sun
Christie Golden	Star Trek: Voyager – 017 – Marooned
City of the Sun (html)	David Levien
Clancy, Tom – Net Force 02	Hidden Agendas (1999)
Clancy, Tom – Op Center 07	Divide and Conquer (2000)
Cliff McNish	The Silver Child
Coben, Harlan	No Second Chance (2003)
Dafydd Ab Hugh	Star Trek: Voyager – 009 – Invasion! 4 – The Final Fury
Dafydd Ab Hugh	Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – 027 – Vengeance
Dafydd Ab Hugh	Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – 005 – Fallen Heroes
Dafydd Ab Hugh	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 044 – Balance Of Power
Dana Kramer-Rolls	Star Trek: The Original Series – 062 – Home is the Hunter
Dave Galanter;Greg Brodeur	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 041 – Foreign Foes
Dave Stern	Star Trek: Enterprise – 008 – Daedalus’s Children
Dave Stern	Star Trek: Enterprise – 007 – Daedalus
David Bischoff	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 031 – Grounded
David Dvorkin;Daniel Dvorkin	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 008 – The Captain’s Honor
David Niall Wilson	Star Trek: Voyager – 014 – Chrysalis
David Stone	The Echelon Vendetta
Dean Wesley Smith;Kristine Kathryn Rusch	Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – 017 – The Long Night
Dean Wesley Smith;Kristine Kathryn Rusch	Star Trek: Voyager – 002 – The Escape
Dean Wesley Smith;Nina Kiriki Hoffman;Kristine Kathryn Rusch	Star Trek: Voyager – 018 – Echoes
Diane Carey	Star Trek: Day of Honor – 1 – Ancient Blood
Diane Carey	Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Station Rage
Diane Carey	Star Trek: Voyager – 011 – Flashback
Diane Carey	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 035 – Descent
Diane Carey	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 001 – Ghost Ship
Diane Duane	Star Trek: The Next Generation – Dark Mirror
Elmore Leonard	LaBrava
Esther Friesner	Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – 007 – Warchild
Gene DeWeese	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 047 – Into the Nebula
Gene DeWeese	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 002 – The Peacekeepers
Gerber, Michael	Barry Trotter & The Shameless Parody
Howard Weinstein	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 015 – Exiles
Howard Weinstein	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 006 – Power Hungry
Howard Weinstein	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 023 – Perchance to Dream
Ian Fleming	You Only Live Twice
J. M. Dillard	Star Trek: Enterprise – 005 – Surak’s Soul
J. M. Dillard;Kathleen O’malley	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 052 – Possession
J. M. Dillard;Michael Piller;Rick Berman	Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – 001 – Emissary
J.M. Dillard	Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
Jeffrey Archer	A Prisoner of Birth
Jenny Carroll	When Lightning Strikes
Jenny Nimmo	Charlie Bone and the Invisible Boy
Jenny Nimmo	Children of the Red King Book 01 Midnight for Charlie Bone
Jenny Nimmo	Charlie Bone and the Castle of Mirrors
Jenny Nimmo	Children of the Red King Book 02 Charlie Bone and the Time Twister
John D MacDonald	The Executioners (aka Cape Fear)
John D. MacDonald	Kitten on a Trampoline
John D. MacDonald	The Deep Blue Good-By
John D. MacDonald	You Live Once
John D. MacDonald	Nightmare in Pink
John D. MacDonald	Wine of the Dreamers: A Novel
John D. MacDonald	Where Is Janice Gantry?
John D. MacDonald	Weep For Me
John D. MacDonald	The Neon Jungle
John D. MacDonald	The Price of Murder
John D. MacDonald	The Only Girl in the Game
John D. MacDonald	The Last One Left
John D. MacDonald	The Good Old Stuff
John D. MacDonald	The House Guests
John D. MacDonald	The end of the night
John D. MacDonald	The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything
John D. MacDonald	The Drowner
John D. MacDonald	The Empty Trap
John D. MacDonald	The Damned
John D. MacDonald	The Brass Cupcake
John D. MacDonald	The Deceivers
John D. MacDonald	Soft touch
John D. MacDonald	The Crossroads
John D. MacDonald	Slam the Big Door
John D. MacDonald	One More Sunday
John D. MacDonald	The Beach Girls
John D. MacDonald	Please Write for Details
John D. MacDonald	One Monday We Killed Them All
John D. MacDonald	On the Run
John D. MacDonald	Murder in the Wind
John D. MacDonald	Murder for the Bride
John D. MacDonald	Judge Me Not
John D. MacDonald	More Good Old Stuff
John D. MacDonald	End of the Tiger
John D. MacDonald	Death Trap
John D. MacDonald	I Could Go on Singing
John D. MacDonald	Death Quotient and Other Stories
John D. MacDonald	Deadly Welcome
John D. MacDonald	Dead Low Tide
John D. MacDonald	Contrary Pleasure
John D. MacDonald	Cry Hard, Cry Fast
John D. MacDonald	Barrier Island
John D. MacDonald	Clemmie
John D. MacDonald	Condominium
John D. MacDonald	Ballroom of the Skies
John D. MacDonald	All These Condemned
John D. MacDonald	Area of Suspicion
John D. MacDonald	April Evil
John D. MacDonald	A Man of Affairs
John D. MacDonald	A Key to the Suite
John D. MacDonald	A Flash of Green
John D. MacDonald	A Bullet for Cinderella
John D. MacDonald	Cinnamon Skin
John D. MacDonald	The Lonely Silver Rain
John D. MacDonald	The Green Ripper
John D. MacDonald	Free Fall in Crimson
John D. MacDonald	The Dreadful Lemon Sky
John D. MacDonald	The Empty Copper Sea
John D. MacDonald	The Turquoise Lament
John D. MacDonald	The Scarlet Ruse
John D. MacDonald	The Long Lavender Look
John D. MacDonald	Dress Her in Indigo
John D. MacDonald	A Tan and Sandy Silence
John D. MacDonald	The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper
John D. MacDonald	Pale Gray for Guilt
John D. MacDonald	One Fearful Yellow Eye
John D. MacDonald	Darker Than Amber
John D. MacDonald	Bright Orange for the Shroud
John D. MacDonald	A Deadly Shade of Gold
John D. MacDonald	The Quick Red Fox
John D. MacDonald	A Purple Place for Dying
John Peel	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 036 – Here there be Dragons
John Vornholt	Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – 009 – Antimatter
John Vornholt	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 051 – Rogue Saucer
John Vornholt	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 017 – Contamination
John Vornholt	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 027 – War Drums
John Vornholt	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 007 – Masks
John Vornholt;Gene Roddenberry	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 083 – The Genesis Wave 3
Karen Haber	Star Trek: Voyager – 012 – Bless the Beasts
Kazuo Ishiguro	The remains of the day
Keith Sharee	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 012 – Gulliver’s Fugitives
Kevin J. Anderson	Star Wars: The Jedi Academy Trilogy II: Dark Apprentice
Kij Johnson;Greg Cox	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 050 – Dragon’s Honor
L. A. Graf	Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – 019 – Invasion! 3 – Time’s Enemy
L. A. Graf	Star Trek: Day of Honor – 2 – Armageddon Sky
L. A. Graf;Michael Piller;Jeri Taylor;Rick Berman	Star Trek: Voyager – 001 – The Caretaker
L.A. Graf	Star Trek: The Original Series – 073 – Death Count
L’amour, Louis – Sackett’s 09	Sackett (1961)
Laura Lippman	To the Power of Three
Laurell K. Hamilton	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 030 – Nightshade
Lawrence Sanders	McNally’s Puzzle
Lee Child	Die Trying
Lee Child	Bad Luck and Trouble
Lemony Snicket	The Bad Beginning (A Series of Unfortunate Events)
Lois Tilton	Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – 006 – Betrayal
Louis L’Amour	Novel.35.Conagher.1969
Louis L’Amour	The Quick And The Dead
Louis L’Amour	Novel 1978 – The Proving Trail (v5.0)
Louis L’Amour	Collection 1983 – The Hills Of Homicide (v5.0)
Louis L’Amour	Sacketts.14.The.Lonely.Men.1969
Louis L’Amour	Fair Blows the Wind
Louis L’Amour	Novel 1971 – Tucker (v5.0)
Louis L’Amour	Novel.13.Radigan.1958
Louis L’Amour	Sacketts.11.Mojave.Crossing.1964
Louis L’Amour	Showdown at Yellow Butte (1983)
Louis L’Amour	Novel.46.Where.The.Long.Grass.Blows.1976
Louis L’Amour	Novel 1959 – The First Fast Draw (v5.0)
Louis L’Amour	Talon&Chantry.05.Rivers.West.1975
Louis L’Amour	Novel.40.Under.The.Sweetwater.Rim.1971
Louis L’Amour	Novel.47.Bendigo.Shafter.1978
Louis L’Amour	Sacketts.02.To.The.Far.Blue.Mountains.1976
Mark Garland;Charles G. Mcgraw	Star Trek: Voyager – 007 – Ghost of a Chance
Mark Haddon	The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Mccay;W. A. Mccay;E. L. Flood	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 025 – Chains of Command
Mel Gilden	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 019 – Boogeymen
Melissa Scott	Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – 010 – Proud Helios
Melissa Scott	Star Trek: Voyager – 013 – The Garden
Michael A. Stackpole	Star Wars: X-Wing II: Wedge’s Gamble
Michael Jan Friedman	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 016 – Fortune’s Light
Michael Jan Friedman	Star Trek: Day of Honor – 3 – Her Klingon Soul
Michael Jan Friedman	Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – 021 – Saratoga
Michael Jan Friedman	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 049 – Crossover
Michael Jan Friedman	Star Trek: The Next Generation: A Call to Darkness
Michael Jan Friedman;Dave Stern	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 021 – Reunion
Michael Jan Friedman;Kevin Ryan	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 042 – Requiem
Michael P. Kube-McDowell	Shield of Lies
Mitch Albom	Five People You Meet In Heaven
Mitch Albom	Tuesdays With Morrie
Nathan Archer	Star Trek: Voyager – 003 – Ragnarok
Nathan Archer	Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – 012 – Valhalla
Nimmo, Jenny	Charlie Bone and the Hidden King (Children of the Red King)
P.C. Cast & Kristin Cast	Marked
P.C. Cast & Kristin Cast	Chosen
Perry, Thomas	Death Benefits
Peter David	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 018 – Vendetta
Peter David	Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – 002 – The Siege
Peter David	Star Trek: New Frontier – 005 – Martyr
Peter David	Star Trek: New Frontier – 007 – The Quiet Place
Peter David	Star Trek: New Frontier – 001 – House of Cards
Peter David	Star Trek: New Frontier – 002 – Into The Void
Peter David	Star Trek: New Frontier – 003 – The Two-Front War
Peter David	Star Trek: New Frontier – 004 – Endgame
Peter David	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 020 – Q-In-Law
Peter David	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 005 – Strike Zone
Peter David	Star Trek: The Original Series – 067 – The Rift
Peter David	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 010 – A Rock and a Hard Place
Peter David	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 028 – Imzadi 1
Peter David	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 040 – Q-Squared
Peter David;Michael Jan Friedman;Robert Greenberger;Carmen Carter	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 013 – Doomsday World
Rebecca Neason	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 034 – Guises of the Mind
Robert B Parker	Double Deuce
Robert B Parker	Gunman’s Rhapsody
Robert B Parker	Playmates
Robert B Parker	School Days
Robert B Parker	God Save the Child
Robert Greenberger	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 046 – The Romulan Stratagem
Robert Ludlum	The Matarese Countdown
Robert Ludlum	The Altman Code
Robert Ludlum	The Bourne Betrayal
Robert Ludlum	The Aquitaine Progression
Robert Ludlum	The Ambler Warning
Robert Ludlum & Eric Van Lustbader	Bourne 4 – The Bourne Legacy
Robert Scheckley	Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – 014 – The Laertian Gamble
Robertson Davies	Fifth Business
Sandy Schofield	Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – 004 – The Big Game
Simon Hawke	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 045 – Blaze of Glory
Simon Hawke	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 033 – The Romulan Prize
Smoke & Shadows (Ver 1.1)	Tanya Huff – [Darkest Night 01]
Stephen Frey	The Fourth Order
Susan Wright	Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – 023 – Tempest
Susan Wright	Star Trek: Voyager – 004 – Violations
Susan Wright	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 037 – Sins of Commission
T. L. Mancour	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 024 – Spartacus
Terry Pratchett	The Colour of Magic
Thomas Perry	Pursuit
Tom Clancy	Red Storm Rising
Tom Clancy	The Sum of All Fears
Tom Clancy	T. Clancy – 02 The Hunt for Red October
V. E. Mitchell	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 026 – Imbalance
Vonda McIntyre	The Crystal Star
Vonda N. McIntyre	Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
W. R. Thompson	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 038 – Debtor’s Planet
W. R. Thompson	Star Trek: The Next Generation – 055 – Infiltrator
Walter Mosley	A Little Yellow Dog
William J Coughlin	The Twelve Apostles
William J. Coughlin	The Judgment

FtU #04 – Hating personal domino theory

July 2 2019

I hate the reality of personal domino theory. I do, even though I know most of you have no idea what I’m talking about. Psychologists have much more complicated words to describe the universe “overwhelming someone”, feeling you don’t know where to start, etc., and at first blush, someone could mistake that experience / emotion for the same as mine. But it’s not. No, my problem is not a feeling of helplessness, it’s a lack of motivation or lack of connection between goal and the means to achieve something. Confused yet? Let me explain.

I want to set up my new home gym, a Bowflex unit I bought back in December. My original intent was to have it up and running by the new year, and then February, March, May, June. And yet it is still in a box. I’ve achieved other goals, but not this one, so since I’m one to delve into motivations, why not this one? Is it fear of the project? Nope, although the explanations and reviews online suggest it is not 100% straightforward. Is it lack of desire? Nope, I want to use it. If it was set up, I’d use it today. So not the project and not the use, what then? The steps to get there.

Here’s my personal domino world:

In order to use the gym system, I have to have it fully set up and usable;
To set it up, I’m going to need some help (likely from Andrea, maybe someone like a friend Paul who is good with tools and things, including instructions, and potentially bribe-able with good Thai food, conversation and board games);
I also need space cleared to put it when it’s together, and therein lies the start of the rub, as I’ve got my eye on the corner of the basement;
To get that space cleared, I need to move two coffee tables over and decide what to do with Jacob’s toy train stuff and whether we’re going to convert it to a Lego table or get rid of the tables;
I need to move a regular table to the centre of the room;
I need to move a couch and a chair, to new arrangements in the room;
I need to move the TV from one wall to another, including adjusting all the electronics in the unit to potentially ditch a Wii that might be malfunctioning, decide if I’m keeping a Playstation 1 and/or a N64, decide if I’m keeping the console stereo system in the unit or giving it away to my brother or father-in-law, and move a setup for an VCR so that my laptop can still reach it and allow me to rip a diving video that sits in VHS-land;
I need to reorganize three small shelving units which have a lot of “extra” stuff on it in front of DVDs, and potentially sort through some DVDs we no longer need;
I need to make enough room in front of the new TV setup to do yoga, and set up my laptop to play videos for working out;
I need to reposition a really heavy recumbent bicycle, and assemble the pieces that I disassembled six years ago when we moved, get it up and running, and within view of the TV so Andrea can watch TV while using it too;
And before all of that happens, take about 30 boxes of stuff that were moved out of my back storage area and now sort them into 2 or 3 piles so I know what I’m keeping, what I’m throwing out, and what we’re selling to clean that area up too, and then put it where it needs to go so I have some space to move.

There’s about another 8 small steps in there too, but you get the picture. I’m even leaving out the fact that there is a giant hole in my drop ceiling that they did to get the AC line clear. Regardless of how I sub-divide it, it’s a project and a half, at least.

But the only part I really care about is #1, which requires #2 and #3, they kind of go together. Maybe #4 too. So they’re connected to the main goal which is to get the gym going.

So, as I said, with depression hitting, I could go for the simple psych explanation that it is depression causing me to feel “overwhelmed”, but that’s not it. I don’t feel overwhelmed by the steps. I feel completely unmotivated because most of them I don’t care about. A bunch of the furniture moving is ONLY to make space, it doesn’t change anything on its own, I like the current config. It’s why it is IN the current config. It works for me. The extra stuff? Some of it is fine to have in boxes, and I sporadically use some of it, but not enough to retain it. I want to purge, but it’s not urgent. Steps 6-11 have no real motivation behind them, they’re transitory domino issues. I need them to fall to make room for the domino I really care about.

The domino problem happens regularly for me, and it is a great source of frustration. I frequently feel like I want to do X, but I can’t until I do A-W first. To do things “right” rather than “good enough” for today. I don’t want to push a bunch of stuff out of the way to get to a box at the back of a closet, I want to solve the first problems that are in the way. Yet none of them are urgent, and they sit there.

Classic “to do” list management would say, “No problem, write it down into digestible chunks and do one a day until you’re done.” Or set aside a time to do a big PUSH and see how far you get, knowing of course that what seems insurmountable often seems manageable once you get into it, it is the “starting” that needs to be overcome. Yet neither technique is really a problem nor the solution to the problem.

The main problem is committing to the first domino. I don’t care about it. I don’t want to care about it. There are 100 things I would rather be doing on my to do list than play with that domino. In terms of priority, alone that domino would be somewhere near the bottom of a long list right after alphabetizing my sock drawer. But if the first domino doesn’t fall, I can’t get to the 12th or 15th or 100th in that chain.

So July’s first FTU burst of “energy” allocation is to the domino problem in my basement. I’m going to do 30 minutes worth of work on it. When I’m done, I’m stopping for the day. Even if I’m in the groove or making progress, as in that vein likes the seeds of future disconnection when it wears off, I’m going to stop after 30 minutes. I’m not committing to a domino I don’t care about, I am committing to a 30-minute time investment in my final domino. Or as my kinesiologist suggested in a different sense, I can count setting up my home gym as my first “work-out” and exercise in and of itself.

Let’s see how my progress goes for the month.

FtU Update – 30 days in

June 30 2019

As a small peek behind the blogging curtain, I thought I would start with my thoughts going into this post. Partly I do so as a stalling technique. I have no idea what I’m going to write. Which is highly unusual for me.

Normally when I have a post in mind, my brain starts composing it far ahead of my fingers hitting the keyboard. I think about how I’m going to structure it, how I’m going to explain my take on something, how I’m going to convey my thoughts. And in so doing, I let my thoughts coalesce into something I hope is worth sharing about the topic, even if the topic is me, myself and I.

A month ago, I chose a different path to healing from depression than I normally would choose. Normally, and I use that term loosely, I would choose to either weather the storm and try to push through (often unsuccessfully) or I would shut down, drop some balls that I was juggling, and take time to “heal my busy mind”. Instead of my tried and true methods, I choose to say Fuck the Universe and ignore whatever signals I seemed to be getting and just plow ahead. Not pushing through the storm, not shutting down, more just ignoring it.

I realize in hindsight that it was kind of like “fake it til you make it”. I chose to behave as if I wasn’t depressed to see if I could fake my body out of the depression. I dressed it up a bit more than that, drew on a different form of internal energy (anger) than I normally do, and started blasting as if I was at the top of my game, not the bottom of a valley.

And it sort of worked. I knew it wasn’t sustainable in the long-run, I knew I was going to pay at least a small price for my energy burst, but for the first couple of weeks, it worked.

I re-started doing memes, and deliberately chose not to try and get a formal format that was uniform, coherent, formal. Instead, I went almost willy-nilly in choosing images I like, marrying them to old memes that I had done before, and sharing them. How did I do? Well, it is 30 days later, and I have produced 37 new memes and shared 28 of them. Almost every day I did one. Let’s see – 2 book quotes, 8 humour, 4 lunch notes, 2 music quotes, 12 quotes so far.

I also started working my way through a backlog of “comics of the day” that I have saved, and shared those too. About the same number of memes for the month, over 25. Almost one every day. Plus I sorted literally hundreds of other ones and filed them away…ones that I liked, but not enough to share at this point. [FtU #01 – The universe can go meme itself]

I also started pushing ahead on finishing a MOOC about metaliteracy, although I only did another week or two. I’ll finish the assignments, but I don’t care about clicking the boxes to get the note that it’s complete in the system. I can take what I want from it, write a few blogs, move on. [FtU #02 – MOOC this, universe] In the meantime, Jacob has been taking a coding course, and it got me a bit more interested in Unity. I found an online MOOC for programming in Unity and C#, downloaded and installed Unity and Microsoft Visual Studio, and completed the first couple of exercises (much like my high-school coding course, it starts with output commands to a raw screen to say something like “Hello World!”). It’s pretty basic, but that’s okay, I need to ease back into it. I also downloaded a whole whack of other learning materials too for coding, we’ll see how those go.

Finally, I broke down and reconstituted my astronomy hobby, chose hope as my passion and mantra, and tried imaging some astro targets. And I had some success. I rebuilt my astro log book in a Word doc I can use on my tablet, took a whack of images, tried stacking, reviewed some software. I threw myself into it. And it worked. Just in time for the weather to thumb its nose at astronomers here in Ottawa, but still, I’m back in the thick of it. [FtU #03 – My astronomy hobby – Here’s looking at you, universe!]

I had more activities planned, even though the astronomy took over more of my time than I expected (setting up a portapotty for the star parties, buying my son a scope, ordering some extra accessories, etc.). I had my birthday in mid-June, turning 51. I was even doing better at work, so much so that my boss even commented on it. I was producing more, volunteering more, being more “positive”. An online friend noticed too.

Except I also know that it was feeling a bit false, which is really hard to explain. I was doing better, but that isn’t the whole story. My energy lasted until just past mid-month, and then slowly started to fade. I knew it was coming, I fully expected it, but still, it’s a bit annoying. My wife was traveling for a week, so I was doing single parent duty, and that part was fine, although a bit more tiring. But even when that was over and she was back, I noticed my energy levels were down still. I was still faking my positive energy glow, or rather I knew it wasn’t completely the whole story. The foundations weren’t quite as strong as they were earlier in the month. I can’t keep up the same energy boost the whole month. I can kick in afterburners for a short while, but then they shut off and I have to rely on the boost to coast me through the rest of the month.

And as some form of gravitational depression started to drag on my trajectory, I let myself slide a bit the last few days. Which also gave me time to take stock. Blasting through a few barriers was fun, quick wins to give me more confidence, but I also know that I dropped a LOT of other balls to be able to focus on those quick win areas. Like my weight, eating healthy, etc. My weight has slowly crept back up in recent months, as I knew it would, and my A1C number rose slightly in there too. Not enough for me to panic or anything, but a reminder that the rocket boost was nice, but it was in areas that are not my core goals right now. Just nice ones to raise my quality of life for a bit.

But if I want to also improve my quantity of life, i.e. living longer, I need to get back to some of those other goals. I’ve got some ideas for my next “blast” for July. But I also need to get back into making my lunches for work, taking my snacks, etc. And working on a long-term health project in the basement.

I don’t know what the FtU campaign will look like specifically for July, but it starts tomorrow. Let’s see how I do. And maybe next time I write, I’ll know what I’m going to type before my fingers hit the keyboard.

The PolyBlog

My view from the lilypads

Category Archives: Pondside Planner

#50by50ish #50 – Lose weight – Two strikes down

♫ I saw the sign ♫

#50by50ish #46 – Purging some of my library

FtU #04 – Hating personal domino theory

FtU Update – 30 days in