I have already mentioned the garage reorg and my commitment to 30-minute increments to get it all done. I planned to only do the 30 minutes today, but my wife was helping, and the first 30 minutes or so blew past pretty fast. With her help, I got the rest of the stuff off the existing wooden shelves AND managed to move all the astronomy stuff out of the wardrobe cabinets to be temporarily stored in the living room. I need to sort it all before it goes back anyway.
But with all that done, the shelves were bare. I could move the wardrobe out of the way. Why not take a whack — literally — at tearing down the wooden shelves?
I gave it a go with a decent hammer and a small pry bar. I fully expected that to be a bear to do, and it was, a little bit. But with less than an extra 20 minutes or so invested, and the help from my wife earlier, I’ve jumped ahead two full days on my expected timeline. I’m pretty happy about it. Now I still have to take some nails out of boards, try to remove two more boards that are vertical, and assemble a metal bookshelf to do the next step, but we’ll see how far the next 30 minutes gets me.
I also did a ton of work on my trivia setup today, including pre-programming a slide deck that will pull my questions from an Excel spreadsheet, and show it all in Powerpoint, including the results page. I have trivia Wednesday for friends and trivia on Thursday for work, and I’ve done the work questions first as I need to get them translated, but overall, it’s all working relatively well. I’m pretty happy with it. Heck, we even had time to run errands today, buy groceries, and do three loads of laundry. Happy productive day!
Mind you, we also tried to play Terraforming Mars for the first time today, and it is SUPER complicated. Way over our heads and I don’t find the instructions particularly well done. Apparently there are videos online to give a better overview as we have been doing certain elements wrong.
Today I chose to do more on the garage, even going beyond my simple 30-minute embrace incrementalism. Good progress overall and ahead of schedule for the new timelines.
I have some big projects that I’m working on around the house, or maybe just one big one, which is to get my sh** squared away, as I’ve blogged about before. My garage is a disaster, and I had hoped to spend a fair amount of time on it today. But it’s slog time. None of what has to be done is anywhere close to “fun”, so I don’t have a burning desire to do it of course.
But I was up late, slept in (I’ve been enjoying a bit longer sleeps the last few nights, I think it is the antibiotics working overtime perhaps), and then this afternoon, Andrea and I ran a bunch of errands all over the city, from Bell’s Corners all the way to Trim Road. Fun times. I may even have picked up a speeding ticket from a radar cam in there. Nice.
Anyway, it took all afternoon, and when we got home, I was a bit fried. I really didn’t have the energy to work on the garage. We put some stuff in the shed, summer tires for example, and some golf clubs, but I even got the club selection wrong. I meant to keep a specific set out, and I jumbled them all together. Hopefully I’ll have time to rectify that before the snow comes.
But after supper tonight, I forced myself to do the slog for at least 20 minutes. I would have went 30, but Andrea and Jacob were waiting on me to play cards. Nevertheless, I did it. Because I *need* to do it, and I need to make the effort. So I moved a bunch of stuff around, got stuff off the wooden shelves I need to clear, and even moved some of my astronomy stuff into the house. Did I make amazing progress? Nope. But I didn’t really expect to do so. I just needed to make SOME progress.
I also did some work on my computer setup for trivia and threw in a load of laundry. Incrementalism to keep moving forward. Better than I accomplished yesterday.
Today I chose to embrace incrementalism. I didn’t make huge progress, but it’s something.
Okay, I admit it, we eat out a lot as a family. Most of that is my fault. We do well when we actually plan in advance, and organize accordingly. But often I let the majority of the weight fall on Andrea, and if we don’t have a plan for the week, it is easy to say, “Okay, it’s 6:30, nothing is planned, what are we ordering?”. It’s basically a plan to use our backup plan. Andrea doesn’t enjoy it as much as Jacob and I do, but she doesn’t tear my head off either.
But to avoid total chaos, we have a three-part rule that we follow. The first two are simple politeness, the third one was ingenious in hindsight.
Part one of the rule is that we take turns deciding. We don’t always remember whose turn it is, necessarily, as we all like similar restaurants, and have our favorite dishes from each. Ones that one of us doesn’t like much tends not to be in the rotation much. On pizza nights, it’s a separate rotation from the normal rotation, and is more rigidly enforced. I like Colonnade Pizza, Hawaaian with chicken; Andrea is open to moving around to different places like Milano’s or Toppers; and Jacob will choose Pizza Hut every time. For regular restaurants, we have fast-food staples of Wendy’s or Harvey’s, or if Andrea isn’t participating, McDonald’s. Subway is popular with all three. Other restaurants are Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese (low-end), Royal Oak, Swiss Chalet, Montana’s, Red Lobster. A few others in lesser rotation.
Part two of the rule is we can’t always choose the same thing in our rotation nor can we choose something we just went to, those are kind of “pre-veto” guidelines. Andrea reacts to that more than I do, and Jacob would eat the same place every time if it was Pizza Hut.
But as I said, Part Three is designed to save marriages and prevent family breakdown. Have you ever been in a situation where someone asks where you want to eat, you don’t really know, where do they want to eat, they don’t know, blah blah blah? Or someone says, “anywhere is fine with them” but you suggest Place 1, they say nah; Place 2, no; Place 3, it wasn’t very good last time. But yeah, anywhere is fine.
Both of those situations drive me round the f***ing bend. Seriously, it used to piss me off to no end. And so I finally got fed up one night and said, “Okay, NEW RULE”.
Here’s the eye-opening truth bomb.
If someone suggests somewhere to go, and you don’t like it, you can say no, BUT…wait for it…you have to propose an alternative.
You can’t just say no to other people’s suggestions and crap on their idea. You have to suggest something that you yourself are comfortable with as a choice. And if you don’t have a better choice to suggest? You shut the f*** up.
I wish I had thought of this years ago. Years of organizing things with friends, family, dates, and seriously, this rule has changed our discussions. No stress at all. We all know we can’t say no without an alternative to suggest. And surprisingly, it makes us all more collaborative.
For tonight, I probably would have opted for Montana’s. We haven’t done them in a long time, could be good. We all like their food, not regularly, but occasionally. Early on we had tried to go to the one local and it wasn’t open. We’ve gone a couple of times since they figured out how to be open, which coincided more with their patio being open too. We’re not THAT brave.
For Andrea, she has a craving for Red Lobster, and I bet it’s her next choice.
But it was more or less Jacob’s turn, hard to tell when some previous nights were collaborative decisions, but we called it as Jacob’s choice. Frequently he wants some suggestions from us to help him create a menu. We suggested Montana’s (he normally gets burgers), Vietnamese (won ton soup and pad thai…I know, not exactly Vietnamese, right), or Red Lobster (probably would get some sort of nugget). His choice? Swiss Chalet.
I like Swiss Chalet, and they have their festive special on right now. But here’s the small irritating part. Jacob doesn’t order their chicken. When he chooses the Royal Oak? He orders mac and cheese. Vietnamese? Some Thai food. Swiss Chalet? Cheesy pizza. With stuffing from the festive special as a side.
I did point out to him, as I have before, and will in future, that it is his choice. And that he might want to consider something else in the future. But it is his favourite food, even if it is not the best place to get it. I find it a bit ironic, and my parents would chortle at the experience. When I was a kid, well, Jacob’s pre-teen age, my parents used to take my brother and I out to the Miss Diana restaurant, sit in the “nice” section rather than the diner, and order. My dad frequently had veal; my mother too, but she varied occasionally. My brother had varying things. Me? I would look over every item on the menu, and in the end, I would choose fish and chips. Every time. Used to drive my dad nuts.
I didn’t really know how to articulate it back then, but later in life, I realized that it was perfectly rational as a decision. Not only did I know they did a good job with it, and that it was consistent, I also never had fish and chips at home. Most of the rest of the meals on the menu might have been okay, but the ones I was likely to choose were all dishes that would likely have been “different” from the way my mom made it, and different wasn’t necessarily better. She wasn’t some gourmet cook, but I liked her cooking better for most things. Sure, not veggies. But meats certainly, potatoes definitely. We could have burgers on the BBQ, her tenderloin was awesome, and I still salivate at the thought of her broiled pork chops. We tend to burn ours, I have no idea how she had hers perfect all the time. Maybe just volume.
As an aside, back in my single days, if I was eating out by myself, I appeared to be a definite creature of habit. If I went to a specific restaurant, I might have soup if they had a good choice (anything but tomato or vegetable usually, or pea, blech), maybe chicken nuggets, fries, diet coke, and perhaps some ice cream afterwards. One of the waitresses thought I was crazy cuz I always ordered the same thing. I was like Sheldon from Big Bang Theory. But not really. What the waitress didn’t know, was that I could have gone ANYWHERE for dinner. I decided I was in the mood for nuggets and fries, and so, I went to that restaurant as they had decent nuggets at an okay price. With possible soup and ice cream added to the front and back. If I had wanted steak, I would have gone somewhere else. Pasta? Somewhere else. Thai? Burgers? Italian? Pizza? All somewhere else. I would occasionally ask about specials just to see if anything enticed me away from my plan for the night, but not often. I had decided 2 hours before what I wanted, that’s why I was there. Not for the restaurant, not for their menu. Just that dish. In a COVID world, you can just order it. Heck, we could order three different take outs if we wanted to do so.
So if Jacob wants to choose Swiss Chalet and order pizza? Sure. If we want to veto it, we have to suggest somewhere else AND feel strong enough to override someone else’s choice. Neither Andrea nor I felt strongly enough, so Swiss Chalet it was.
Today I chose to follow my own rules. I only wish I had those rules long ago.
Does that title sound as confusing to you as it does to me? Cuz it’s been driving me nuts.
I’ve been wrestling with two very different principles/concepts over the last few months writing about choice. The first is one about the nature of choice. It is always moving “forward” in time. I can’t make a choice about something I was deciding yesterday, it is always the future. And so when I write my posts, to make those choices properly oriented, I always write “I choose to…”. Reflecting on how I approached the decision that day, and reflecting too that it has implications for the future. It’s a great argument, I believe in it strongly. My choices are always about moving forward, whenever possible. I avoid regret, I don’t believe it’s a useful pasttime. You make the decisions you make with the best information you have at the time, and if you do it consciously, aware of what you are doing, and in touch with who you are, it’s relatively impossible to make a “wrong” decision. It doesn’t mean everything will turn out the way you want, you won’t get the results right, but the decision itself is and was rarely “wrong”. You might learn from how you made the decision, or the info you relied on, and you can review for “improvement”, but anything else is just Monday morning quarterbacking.
And yet the grammarian in me finds writing the posts weird for tense. I write them at the end of the day about my exploits in the last 18 hours, and so it is always past tense. So saying “I choose…” annoys the grammarian in me. It also seems a bit odd to say at 11:59 p.m. that “Today I choose…”. What? In the last 30 seconds of the day?
I liked the immediacy of “I choose…” and the reaffirmation that I live with decisions going forward. But I’ve danced on the head of a grammar pin too many times. I’m going to switch the title.
I know that kind of “meta” discussion doesn’t matter to anyone but me, probably, but after all, it’s my choice. 😉
And today I chose to choose choice, and my choice was to choose chose.
The bad news is that my dental problems persist; the good news is that the antibiotic has worked well enough that I can still function today, even though one tooth is really tender. I was pushing 8 on the pain scale before the antibiotics, today I went up to about 6 or 7 at the worst, and more like 5 most of the time. The better news is that I ran an online trivia game tonight.
I’ve been blogging for awhile about my past trivia options, and my nostalgia for when I used to run a trivia game by email. 25 questions a week, plus some bonus features, and anywhere from 50-90 players I guess. Anyway, I’m working on some options to get some trivia on my website, but in the meantime, I’ve been organizing some trivia for work. Tomorrow (Thursday) is my first live event for individual players, and honestly, the biggest challenges have been making it bilingual and making sure people can access the score sheets to enter their answers.
I’ve also been thinking of running a weekly trivia game through a Facebook Group, or more accurately, organizing the players through Facebook but running the game through Zoom. My wife has a paid account so she can do Toastmasters events, so why not?
I was going to wing it this week, and then with my tooth pain, I cancelled; with the reduced pain today, and the fact I had a deck of questions ready to go for work tomorrow, I thought, “Pfff, why not?” again. It was confusing for the 20 or so people who are likely to play, were we “on” or “off” tonight, but in the end, we had five screens…Mike and Terry (brother and sister-in-law), Vivian and Phil (friends), Bruce and Jenn (cousins), Stephan (friend) and Andrea (my wife). It took me a bit to work out the various screens and which order I had to go back and forth from, but overall it worked. I think with five screens, we were okay doing individual scores. Next week? I’m hoping to do breakout rooms and add in a “team” component to boost the social component. 🙂
I had a blast running it. And at about an hour’s running time, it was about right. I can speed up the question reading a bit for next week, I gave a bit too much time in places I think, and it will take time for me to do scoring and provide updates.
Today I choose to embrace the past and run an online trivia game with friends with a bit of socializing. It felt good and right.
