The PolyBlog

“60 x 60”: Goals 42 – 60 – Travel, actions and learning

August 17 2023

This batch is somewhat eclectic, so I’m grouping them all together.

42-47. Spend at least 1 week outside of Ottawa per year. In my tracker, I noted this goal as a travel goal. And at first, I was thinking “outside Canada”. But as I thought about it, I realized that it could just as easily be to Alberta or BC, the cottage, Mexico, the US or Europe. What I really want to do is “get out of my house” for a trip of “some” kind where I am not doing “the same old thing” at home. Before the pandemic, maybe that would have been “outside Canada” as a goal; now, it is outside Ottawa. And I thought about making it just a single goal with several sub-pieces for the years, but they are WAY bigger than that for planning, execution, and just overall effort and experience. So I am creating a separate goal for each of 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026, 2027, and 2028.

48. A weekend retreat. Before the pandemic hit, I had been thinking of doing a weekend away somewhere. While Andrea likes the idea of it being a couples thing, and I like that too, that isn’t what this goal is. This is about me doing a weekend by myself to just sit and think about my life, my goals, etc. Maybe it’s a writing weekend. Maybe it’s a vegging weekend. I don’t really know. I just like the idea of trying a weekend to just be alone somewhere, no phones, no connections. To unplug from my life entirely. To gain perspective. Or at least to get a different one. Maybe I last 5 minutes and I’ll be craving the connection; maybe I’ll drift into peaceful bliss. But I want to do it sometime, maybe even as early as this fall.

49. Photos of waterfalls. I love waterfalls, I confess. And as a semi-photography, semi-creative, semi-travel goal, I want to take photos of 60 waterfalls over the next five years. Some will be small, more rapids than falls. I’m okay with that. Some might be a small trickle of water instead of a raging torrent. And I’m okay with that too.

50. Photos of sunsets. Similarly, I want 60 photos of sunsets. Two of my favourite photos from our past travels is a sunset over the ocean from a beach in Hawaii and another of a sunset from a small pier area in Matane, QC. Not to mention numerous photos of sunsets from the cottage.

51. Volunteer at doing something different. I’m not sure what this goal means, exactly. Sounds odd, right? After all, I came up with it. But I guess I mean a new area of volunteering, different from what I am already doing for the HR Guide type mentoring, AstroPontiac or RASC. Recently, the Peterborough Astronomical Association asked for a volunteer to run their website. It’s more work than I wanted, but I considered it until I realized that the site is actually manually programmed. Shudder. I could have taken it, but the first thing I would have done was swapped it over to WordPress probably. But someone else stepped up, so I don’t feel obligated to take that on now. Maybe it will be a different organization that I don’t even know about yet. Something maybe Treasurer-ish? I don’t know. But it’s on my list. Heck, maybe it will be the public library somehow.

52. Ride an e-scooter. I used to want to try a segue, but never really got around to it. Now, they have the e-bikes and e-scooters. I’ll probably just rent one sometime for an afternoon to give it a try. A friend rode one back home over the summer with his brother and fell in love. Now he wants one of his own for Ottawa, and he’s going for a super-powered one. Seems overkill to me. Maybe I’ll eventually buy one, but for now, I just want to try it. Ideally, with Andrea and Jacob giving it a go too to see if they would be comfortable enough sometime on a trip to do a tour with them in some city. I’d love to use it to go all around the hills above Rome someday. It was a REALLY long hike the day I did it.

53. Ride a jetski. I have ZERO idea where or how I’m going to do this. I don’t know anyone who owns one, or where I can even rent one for an afternoon. I could do it at a resort somewhere I suppose.

54. Drive a boat. This one is, seemingly, pretty easy to accomplish. We have a boat at the cottage, and all I need to do is pay to take and pass the boating license test for Ontario which is pretty basic. Probably not this year, maybe for next year.

55. Language learning with DuoLingo. I haven’t quite figured out the specifics of this one. I have DuoLingo, and I do it for awhile and then get out of the habit. The “streak” motivates me but they have these options where you can “save” your streak if you miss a day. Which I don’t want to do, but you can’t turn them completely off. If you miss a day, it’ll ask you on the next day if you want to save it. If you say “no”, it says okay, and then if you have a free save already earned, it will use it anyway for you. To “help” you. I don’t want the help. So the last time this happened, I had three earned “saves”, and I had to wait at least 4 days to kill the streak after I missed a day. I don’t mind using it if I happen to do it at like 12:30 at night, just timeshifting. But if I totally missed doing it between the time I woke up, and the time I went to bed, that’s a miss for me. And so I got out of it, and never went back. It’s not a few seconds, it’s a good 10-20 minutes of practice. Sometimes I have the commitment to do that time, sometimes I don’t. Anyway, regardless, I’d like to complete all the training for French before I retire (for no real good reason), and maybe start on either Spanish or German. I’d love to try something like Mandarin, but I definitely don’t have an ear for tonal languages. That might be a really really tough one.

56. Go see professional fireworks. I thought about committing to this as an annual event, as just “any fireworks”, but well, that wouldn’t require much of an effort. So I upgraded it to “professional” fireworks but downgraded it from annual to at least once. Ottawa has options put on by the Casino du Lac Leamy. They offer four to five countries each year a chance to compete, and they are put on their display in the river behind Parliament Hill. It’s a huge crowd that gathers all along each side of the river, and there’s an option to reserve and pay for the “perfect” seats behind the Museum of History. But there are other venues too (Montreal, Vancouver).

57. Curate the best root beer. Recently, I became really interested in root beer choices. And so I want to do a side-by-side choice sometime to contrast and compare them to choose the one that I like best. Just something fun to do.

58. Curate the best vanilla ice cream for home. I like vanilla ice cream, as it seems like the purest form. Any vendor might come up with a great combo for cookie dough or raspberry or a host of other flavours, but to me, I judge their offerings when there isn’t extra flavouring, toppings, sauces, etc. added. How good is the purest form of the ice cream? That’s the test. And recently I saw an article that did the same in Ontario with everything they could find easily available for take-home ice-cream. But my immediate thought was, “Hmm, would I agree with their choice?”. Hence a new goal to repeat the process myself. I know, it’s a dirty job, but someone has to take the hit for the team.

That leaves me two open slots. One that I’m still considering, but which is likely to remain confidential until I’m certified, if I do it at all (59. Get certified as blah blah blah). And number 60 which is still “open”. I suspect that I’ll fill it with something “event-ish” or a “one-off activity” like the scooter or jet ski options. I’m not sure what it will be yet. But I can think of it as “60. Do something interesting” for now.

Gallery: 2023 – July and August – Trip to New England – Day 01 – Ottawa to Vermont

August 16 2023

2023-07b July – Day 01 Ottawa to Vermont

38 photos

NE Trip - Day 00 - Overview — New England Trip

NE Trip - Day 01 - To Vermont — NE Trip – Day 01 – To Vermont

Day 1 - Ottawa to Vermont — Day 1 – Ottawa to Vermont

Day 01 - Ottawa to Vermont - Bridge at Cornwall — Day 01 – Ottawa to Vermont – Bridge at Cornwall

Day 01 - Ottawa to Vermont - Crossing over — Day 01 – Ottawa to Vermont – Crossing over

Day 01 - Ottawa to Vermont - Mountains! — Day 01 – Ottawa to Vermont – Mountains!

Day 01 - Ottawa to Vermont - Lake Champlain — Day 01 – Ottawa to Vermont – Lake Champlain

Day 01 - Ottawa to Vermont - The Green Mountains — Day 01 – Ottawa to Vermont – The Green Mountains

Day 01 - Ottawa to Vermont - Stowe — Day 01 – Ottawa to Vermont – Stowe

60×60 – Formal progress report #1 / 60

July 20 2023

My normal progress reports will come in the middle of the month between the middle of June 2023 and the middle of June 2028. Five years to do the 60 things. Let’s see how I’m doing.

And then there were nine

At the moment, I’ve announced 41 goals out of a planned 60. I know what another 7 are, which will take me to 49, I just haven’t announced them yet. And I have ideas about 2 more, although 1 is a different kind of goal, and I’m not sure if it’s a goal or just a side-effect of something else. Anyway, I confess that it feels weird that I have another 9 “unset”, so to speak.

I am never at a loss for goals. And sure, I could put a ton of things in those remaining 9, but most of them would be process goals. Clean up the basement. Redo the backyard. They are not, generally, stretch goals, which is what my list of 60×60 is supposed to do. Push me out of my comfort zone and do something that I wouldn’t accomplish if I don’t push harder. I don’t want incremental things, I want bigger concept goals.

But to be honest, I’m also worried that most of my 49 known goals are all within my comfort zone. Very few of them are “scary” in that sense. A couple here and there, and the level of commitment is a bit scary due to its ambitious nature, but I’m smart enough to know that if I commit to 60 blogs about topic X, and I only end up doing 35, that’s still an accomplishment. Since I’ve never done some of them before, I have no idea what my “baseline” performance should be. Should it be 60? 100? 20? I’ll find out. Others are one-time events, perhaps.

Yet I’ll still have at least 9 to fill in over the next 5 years. Do I ask friends for suggestions? Or wait for inspiration as I go? Time will tell. I saw an interesting article about starting new hobbies as an adult, and grabbed on to it thinking it would give me startling insights and exciting options that I hadn’t already thought of or considered on my own! It didn’t. Of the 10 options listed, I had 9 of them already covered and the extra one in the list was simply “get out into nature”, which isn’t a separate goal, just something that is part of other goals.

Of the two that are on my “possible” list, one is a certification in something. And what makes it interesting is I’m thinking of doing it without telling anyone I’m doing it until I’m done. Like, “Hey, look at me, I’m now a registered taxidermist!” or something like that. It’s something that would be a useful “skill” to have for some other things I have planned in the future, not something I would likely “use” to generate income. But I think it would be fun in its own right, only done for me, and an interesting story to tell when I’m done.

The other isn’t secret, it’s more a philosophical question. Should I set a weight goal? That doesn’t feel like “out of my comfort zone”, it just feels like regular business. And technically a weight goal isn’t a “goal” at all, it’s just a performance indicator of something else like health and well-being.

But I digress. I have announced 41, I know another 7-9, with 9 still to be determined.

Progress on 8 of my goals

3. Plan my retirement. I set my retirement date (August 27, 2027), am working on some of the financials, and I still have to work on the psychology and isolation adjustment. I might use some of my holidays in each of the next 5 years to “test drive” my retirement.

4. Read 300 books. While it seems odd to consider this one of my biggest accomplishments so far, it is. I have read 12 fiction books so far (out of 240), and a good chunk of my 13th. The Ben Aaaronovitch River of Thames series has fallen book by book for 6 of them so far; then I took a break to read To Die For by Lisy Gray; then 2 more non-fiction books (out of 60); and 5 novels by Galbraith (aka JK Rowling). Not a bad start. I’m really enjoying my new Kindle.

12. Restaurant Outings. So far I’ve done 3 out of the 60 that is my goal. Mexis (for dinner), Allo Mon Coco (for breakfast), and Merivale Noodle House (for dinner).

14. Cooking new recipes and 16. Curating 10 recipes. These two goals can be mutually reinforcing. For the new recipes, I want to do more with certain tools like the air fryer in our oven. Equally, I also want to curate a set of wings recipes. We recently did a batch of wings with Epicure spices — Chinese Five Spice and a Lemon Pepper. We did them as just dry spice rub, not “saucy”, and I would say the Lemon Pepper was the winner. Not that spicy, although we might put less on next time, good blend of flavour with the original wings. Next time, we’ll do some “control” wings with no sauce at all (Jacob’s preference). Let’s see if anything can knock Lemon Pepper off the top spot. Long-term, we’ll play with BBQ and oven-roasting as well. We’re using bone-in, skin-on wings for now too.

27. Play 60 board or card games. We own Uno Flip, and we have played it before. Yet this past week or so, we dug it out looking for something different and quick to play, and we have been REALLY enjoying it. So I’m counting it as one of the 60.

35. Blogs not including reviews and 36. Write reviews. This is my 18th post in the last month, with 13 regular posts (out of 260) and 5 reviews (out of 300). I also cleaned up my recipes and TV season posts, as well as music, but I’m not counting those as new.

Not bad

As someone noted earlier, my goals are ambitious. And while I made “concrete” measurable progress on 8 of them, there’s another 5-6 that I would say I made progress on as well. I haven’t quite got enough in place to say “Yes, HERE is where I am”, some of it is more informal scoping of the goal (such as figuring out which websites will be good to use to start my improved knowledge of the world for my memory challenge), but it is progress of a sort. Not very quantitative though.

I’ll say not bad for now. Partly because as I was working on this blog, another “goal” popped up as a possibility in my email. I’m not quite sure it’s a stretch goal yet, so I’ll have to think about it a bit more. But maybe that means I only have room for 8 more. 🙂 Anyone have ideas they want to suggest?

“60 x 60”: Goals 25-41 – Embracing creativity

July 12 2023

Earlier, I talked about my “writing goals” for 5 books, which is obviously a pretty ambitious creativity goal already. Some of that will be back-ended most likely, and I have a lot of other creative outlets that I’m pursuing. But many of my other goals are activity-based — exercise, cooking, events, etc. While some of them, like cooking, may seem creative, they are not really what I’m thinking of when I’m tapping creativity. So today I’m going to list a LONG set of new goals designed to push my creative juices to the forefront.

25. Make 60 items with 3D printing. I have a 3D printer, and I haven’t got it up and running yet. There’s a lot of psychology tied up in the “why not”, too long to address here, and besides, I’ve already talked about it before. I’m sure everyone was taking notes on previous posts hehehe. Annnnnyway, I want to do more “fun” things for the future when I get it going, BUT for some of it, I want to design the prints myself. I was tempted to commit to more items than that, maybe one a week, or to require that the items be designed entirely by me, but that’s a bit unrealistic. I suspect in most cases, I would take an existing design out there and tweak it to what I want.

26. Make 60 items with other methods. That probably sounds vague, but it is a bit of an odd grouping to categorize. I have Lego kits to assemble. A plan for a Raspberry Pi. Repurposing old computers into a video game option with Jacob. A robot. Oh, and just for fun? I’ve had a very long commitment to wanting to learn more origami. Like, all the way back to Grade 6 when I first saw it. I’ve got paper, books, diagrams, everything else except apparently the will to commit to actually doing it.

27. Play 60 (physical) games. I want to call them board games, but well, there are card games in there too. Now, I could JUST play the ones we already have in the house, and that would reach 60 right there. But most of them wouldn’t count. We play them too often. No, for me, this is a bit like the restaurant commitment — it can’t be somewhere we would go without effort, and it can’t be a game here that we would play anyway. It has to be something that takes a bit of effort to do. For instance, I played Camel Up with friends a few months ago and really enjoyed it. But finding a copy to buy is almost impossible, it’s out of print currently. Soooo, if I want to play, we have to make time to go to their house and play. Assuming they’re willing to play again. Equally, I’m getting into Print ‘n’ Play games that I’ve found on the internet. Full games, ready to play, or at least ready to play once you download them and print them. With lots of fun little hobby-like tips and tricks to make it more creative when doing the assembly.

28. Design 5 board games. Jacob has lots of ideas about board games, and has already created a few at a camp he was part of during previous summers. I want to turn them into playable games, using the tools from the above hobbies. In a sense, I’ll use the techniques of 3D printing and the tools/approaches for PnP games to support building and designing 5 board games with Jacob.

29-34. Complete six learning courses. I’m assigning them by calendar year, so there’s a bit of a glitch in the planning where I get 6 calendar years including the current one for learning. I know the first one is going to be learning to use GIMP. I’ve already started, in fact, although I went a bit sideways of late. The other 5? I have some ideas, but not sure in which order or if my plans will bear fruit. I might decide I want to do something on Greek history and then realize it’s really boring. So it is more the commitment than knowing “exactly” what it looks like yet. But they are going to be significant enough that I want to treat them as separate commitments, not simply 1.

35. 260 new blog entries (not including reviews). There are times when I get away from the blog, just sort of drift. By contrast, I know there are people out there who commit to one post every day. And I might average out to that in fact when some things are posted. But I’m not talking simply about counting ANY blog topic, as many of them are out of bounds for the goal. For instance, posting my writing for books contributes to other commitments, not this one. Equally, I’ll have a separate one just for reviews. So those will be out. Mind you, somewhat ironically, this blog post itself DOES count. Basically, I want to blog about my thoughts and what I’m doing, not just meeting quotas. Call it free-range blogging. 🙂 About once a week.

36. 300 new reviews. Remember those board games I’m going to read? Books? Movies to go to or TV shows to watch? Recipes to curate? Well, I’m going to blog about them in the form of reviews. All added up, I’m aiming for 300 reviews. I haven’t quite decided if it is 60 per topic or just 300 in total, as I could probably meet most of it just from reading books. Or posting old TV show reviews of seasons. But we’ll see as I go. I would like a bit of a balance.

37. Curate a list of 300 of my favourite songs. I think the final list will ACTUALLY be a bit longer than that, but not sure what the rate will be for the next 5 years. I want to commit to 600 songs on the list. Maybe even 1000. But I’ll commit to 300 for now.

38. Learn to play the piano. Okay, this requires a bit of explanation. No, I’m not going to start the Conservatory plan and try to do tests or anything. I will rely on books, videos, maybe a lesson or two here and there, plus guidance from Jacob and Andrea. My goal, such as it is, is basically to get to the point where I could play 10 songs relatively well, albeit with errors. I don’t want it to be cringe-y I guess. Kind of songs that my mother would have enjoyed hearing, even if not perfectly played. Yes, it’s a separate goal from the learning courses above. Those are more knowledge, this one is more creative. And the goal is in-house performance, not some recital or public performance. Maybe a random video for evidence.

39. Do a memory challenge. Do you remember way back in high school when you took chemistry? I don’t, because I didn’t take it. Not because I wasn’t into science, or wasn’t intrigued by chemistry, but in part because the idea of memorizing the periodic table looked really hard and seemed ridiculously stupid. If you watch Jeopardy, you frequently see people talking afterwards about how they learned x or y, and often it was flashcards to help them get ready. There are whole internet sites and fora where people debate the best ways to prepare. For me? I am not very good at geography. I probably couldn’t label more than 15 states on the US map, maybe 20. European geography? Probably 10. Asia? Here and there okay, other areas would be a total wash (particularly islands). And Africa? Fuggedaboutit. Soooo…here’s my thought. I want to be able to turn myself, for a one-time performance, into … wait for it … Yakko Warner. Remember the Animaniacs? He did two renditions. All the US states and their capitals AND all the countries of the world. It was updated a few years ago for the list, although set to the same music. Jacob did it a few years ago, and I want to follow suit. Except that part of my learning is not just the words to the song — I want to be able to memorize where on a map they actually are…when we play trivia together, I avoid geography questions like the plague while Jacob and Andrea double down on geography, worldwide, and travel and leisure. Soooo, I’m going to do it. I’m going to memorize the US states AND the countries/nations of the world.

40. Do a brain challenge. This one is a bit harder to figure out what to do. Lots of articles out there talk about using your brain, challenging yourself, doing Sudoku or crossword puzzles to stay fresh and active, don’t let your mind turn to mush. I have an app on my phone called The Puzzle Page. I wonder if I should use that, it’s simple, and I enjoy doing the puzzles. I used to do the puzzles on my Android app, and the status didn’t transfer over, unfortunately, so I restarted from scratch. Back when the app started, they had about 4-6 puzzles per day of different types. Now it’s closer to 8-10 from a longer list of x puzzles. Some are really easy — Armada is a bit like a picture cross except there are only a set number of “blocks”, almost like a negative-space picture cross. Circuits, Ox and Xs, Picture Block, Picture Cross, Picture Cross (Colour), Picture Path, and Word Search round out the list of 9 easiest ones. For a medium level of challenge, I would put Bridges, Charge Up, Cross Out, Cross Sum, Futoshiki, Picture Sweep, Quote Slide, Wordy. and Word Snake on the lower end while Codeword, Kakuro, One Clue, Sudoku, and Word Slide at the higher end for me. I find Crossword, Killer Sudoko, and Link Words the hardest, just an extra set of parameters or more the need to see “letters” in permutations and combinations that are not the way my brain thinks. I’ve always struggled with more advanced crosswords. And this one has three or four variations of crosswords for their daily. Call it about 26 official types, around 30 unofficial types. According to my progress, I have completed 4800 puzzles on this app, 322 days worth of puzzles, 158 special pages, 14 special issues, and 17 events. It takes me to level 199. Some I find easy and boring, others I find hard and boring. Others in the middle are fun, but the completist in me wants to keep going. Is it the best way to keep my brain stimulated “formally”? Or do I do something more test-oriented. Like downloading some math contests from various sources out on the net and completing them. I like logic puzzles, could do more of those, but often my challenge is how long they take to work through the hard ones. I’m not looking for an activity that takes me 45 minutes a day to do. The app is good, I can try something out for 5 minutes, and move on. I don’t know if it’s the right “set”. Is my goal 10 a day? Or do I do something really off-beat. Like set myself up that at some point in the next 5 years, I’m going to pay to re-write the LSAT or GMAT that I last took when I was 23. It’s certainly an external arbitrary standard way to gauge change in brain power, at least by focusing on the percentile aspect.

41. Learn to juggle. I don’t have very good hand-to-eye coordination. But I’ve always thought that it would be fun to be able to juggle, at least basic stuff. Three balls. I’ve thought about other things like rolling coins on my knuckles, the pen spin people used to do in school (and which Jacob does now), but I never really had the dexterity for it. I think I can do juggling? Or at least try and create some funny embarrassing videos of myself. And no, I don’t want to develop a routine with 5 oranges, a knife and a chainsaw. I just want to try the basics.

It’s more creative than I am now. Maybe there will be other things to add, but that’s my list so far.

Governing Canada by Michael Wernick (2021) – BR00228 (R2023) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

July 10 2023

Plot or Premise

Michael Wernick is a former Clerk of the Privy Council in Canada and his book provides advice on the “tradecraft of politics” i.e., what Prime Ministers or Ministers do or should consider doing while in office…or at least the “how” of a given day.

What I Liked

The opening was quite strong, I felt, with some good information on life from the view of being the Clerk. It had a very down-home, practical feel to it, and I was excited to see where it was going to go. I particularly liked that it was not about reform or how things “ought” to be, but stayed pretty focused on “how it (currently) works”. As Wernick notes, there are lots of other books out there that talk about reform or changes in general or comparisons of how certain leaders have governed. While much of the book is about the decisions of PMs or Ministers, I was more interested in the elements around the roles, behaviour and attitudes of political staff, as well as the operational aspects of being a DM. I particularly liked his insights into the structural imbalance that “…political offices tend to underestimate implementation risks and costs and to be impatient about timelines, whereas departments tend to be overly cautious and are likely to go to what they are familiar with as a solution.” There were also some good insights into the way Comms people view announceables or deliverables from the political side (short-term, pointed) and departmental side (potentially longer-term, incremental).

What I Didn’t Like

The middle section of the book lagged for me. What started off as down-home guidance that would benefit anyone started to read more like a memo to the PM or a Minister for a transition note. At times, it even veered somewhat into Machiavelli’s The Prince, minus the advice that it is better to be feared than loved. Yet much of that detailed or pointed behavioural advice is likely of little interest to the average reader, and I felt my interest dropping with each passing page until the DM section started.

Disclosure

While I do not know the author, I have worked closely with his sister and respect her immensely.

The Bottom Line

Great insights into the hidden world, with just a twinge of memo language.