As part of my new “choices challenge”, today I chose to make bread with Jacob. Bread-making holds a special place in my heart for memories of my dad.
My great-grandfather was a baker and he taught my grandfather to bake too. I never met either one of them, both of them having died long before I was even a glimmer in my dad’s eye, but my father learned to bake from them.
All through his later adult years, my father was an early riser. Even though he started work at eight, he would be awake as early as 4:00 a.m. some days, and although some days he might have grabbed a cat nap before going off to work, on weekends he would suddenly decide to bake up a storm.
At the time, it seemed totally spontaneous to me. I’d wake up on a Saturday morning to the smell of fresh baking. Yet now that I’m older and doing my own baking, I know how ridiculous that sounds. He must have had plans before that morning since he needed ingredients that we didn’t always have on hand, and not in the quantities he would have needed them. So it must have been planned. With a certainty akin to invading Normandy.
Before I was born, i.e., when he was younger, he would make pies regularly. However, by the time I was about ten, the list of products was pretty standard.
First and foremost were buns. Dinner rolls if you want to buy them in stores. Soft, moist, warm first thing in the morning. I’d end up eating 4-5 with my breakfast and I would have eaten more if I was allowed. They were awesome. Even now, a warm bun with some butter or margarine can take me back there. Even better if they’re still steaming when you cut them in half. Assuming you can wait to use a knife instead of just tearing into them. But we’re not talking a small batch. He would do at least 48, and more likely 72 rolls. Lots of kids, lots of buns got eaten.
Cinnamon buns were a specialty, and while I enjoyed them, it was always less so than the regular buns for me. Perhaps because they were big and heavy. At least two dozen of those.
And then it was time for the tarts. Pecan or butter, certainly, as those were his own favourites. Different kinds of berries, occasionally. Lemon for my mother. I never had the heart to admit I didn’t like most of them, except maybe the lemon ones. Oh, and apple. Whatever the combo, there would be at least 2 dozen of each type.
You would probably think this was a joint operation with the kids or my mother, but the baking was usually a Dad thing on those mornings. Clean-up, on the other hand, likely fell mostly to my mother.
As he got older, into his 50s and 60s, those baking mornings were few and far between, but I still remember them. And for a very long time, I have wanted to learn to bake. Although I’m not even sure that’s the right phrasing. It’s more like I want the capacity to bake, and to be able to do it without following a recipe. To feel comfortable baking. I’m blessed in that generally, when I follow a recipe closely, what turns out at the end is generally edible. I am not, however, fast at any of the steps.
So I have been a bit fearful as I considered my baking journey, that perhaps I would get overwhelmed and that I might not have early success, leading to a sense of failure. Almost like I’m somehow failing my father. Disappointing him, I suppose, or simply letting down his legacy.
A few years ago, Andrea planned a baking lesson for me with a guy from work who is known for his baking skills, he’s been interviewed on CBC, he does an annual big apple pie and bread outing for the United Way with many hands all going to his house to bake dozens of loaves in his multiple ovens as well as dozens of pies. Unfortunately, he seemed to stop running the lessons, and it kind of faded away.
And, for some strange reason, I am strongly attracted to making bread. I don’t know why. Maybe because my father never did. So if I screw it up, there’s no built-in comparison for me? Not entirely sure. But LONG AGO in a KITCHEN FAR FAR ACROSS THE CITY, Andrea had a bread machine and I always wanted to learn to use it, have some early success. So when Covid hit, and everyone fell into the “home baking” fetish, I thought, “Okay, why not get going again? You have some time.”
Until Andrea opened up the bread machine and we realized perhaps it hadn’t fully dried at some point when it got put away and under the bread pan, it was starting to corrode. Bye-bye dead bread machine. I thought, “No problem, I’ll find one online and we’ll order a new one.” (See https://polywogg.ca/my-experience-looking-for-a-bread-machine/)
I knew that lots of places early on had problems keeping yeast stocked, but that was usually fresh yeast, and I would be looking for bread machine yeast, and I knew people who knew people if I got stuck. What I *hadn’t* heard from ANYONE online was that bread machines were impossible to come by. Multiple vendors, multiple models — all out of stock.
However, based on all the reviews, it was clear that the grand-daddy was made by Zojirushi and called the Home Bakery Virtuoso Plus Breadmaker. Virtually EVERY review ranked it first by a country mile on everything except cost. And even then? They said it was worth it. But, as I said, nobody had it in stock.
I stalked everyone in Canada who normally sold them. And started to see suggestions that perhaps, maybe, just maybe, there would be some in stock at the start of July. So July 1st, I pulled up my browser, went to Amazon, and BAM! It was back in stock. I ordered immediately. And guess what? 5 days later it is out of stock again.
But it arrived Friday, Andrea did a quick clean of the interior items yesterday, I went to the Bulk Barn for ingredients this morning, and this afternoon? Andrea supervised Jacob and me while Jacob made the first loaf in the bread machine. He measured the ingredients, I assisted as his sous-chef (sous-baker?), and about 2:00, we turned it on. It was looking like dough should look about 60-90 minutes later, and after 3h15m of baking in total, the first loaf was done.
Jacob was playing chess online with his grandfather, and Andrea was chatting with her parents at the same time through Zoom, so I got to remove the pan, and shake the bread out onto the cutting board. We did a simple basic white loaf for the first loaf, and my first reaction was simply “wow”.
We set it for light crust this time, and it looked damn near perfect. None of the bread we have ever done previously in the old bread machine ever even came close to looking that perfect for size, shape and colour. I even showed it to the parental units through Zoom! It even came out super easy.
But the question, of course, is how did it taste? Andrea, Jacob and I sat down around 5:30 to have a slice, still warm, with butter. And while it may not be “buns”, it had the same taste (it IS simple white bread after all). Soft, moist, melt in your mouth. Watching Jacob have his first bite was worth any price, to be honest. It is the same look I remember on my family’s face when I was younger, and I assume on my own face both then and now.
Can I buy bread? Sure. Can I buy special baked bread, hand-made, perfect flour? Yep. Do I? Not usually, we generally just go with loaves in bags for sandwiches and toast. And usually whole wheat. I grew up on white bread, so there’s nostalgia there too, so I’m curious to see how I react to the whole wheat loaf we’ll do next.
But regardless of whether it is cheaper and simpler to buy it from a bakery, I’m not making bread, I’m giving myself basic baking competency to build momentum. I do want to make buns, and I will likely use the machine to get the dough started. Pizza. Buns. Bread. Maybe tarts. Lots of things. And while it may be cheating a little, I have some tools to do it by hand when I get a better feel for what it should look like at different stages. I do really like the idea of doing stuff by hand, with the machine getting us started with the right dough consistency.
And Jacob is interested in learning too. So we can do it together. Which is something I never did with my father (although, to be fair, he was always doing it early in the morning while I was still sleeping, and I *did* make pies and cookies with my mom a lot as a kid).
In the end, that’s the choice. I can buy it or I can make it; I can do it by myself or I can make it with others.
Today, and from this day forward, I choose to make bread with my son.
Maybe it’s the current pandemic climate, a strange combination of massive change overall against a backdrop of ongoing “no change” day-to-day. Maybe it’s the fact that it is 1:30 a.m. in the morning and I’m still awake, and I’m choosing to type instead of drifting off to sleep. Maybe it’s that I’m sitting in a basement full of boxes around my new office setup, and I haven’t quite organized everything yet. Or maybe it’s simply the fact that I just finished watching S2 of Jessica Jones where much of her backstory was about feeling untethered in her world.
But untethered seems like a great word to me tonight. It isn’t about being unconnected, although there is an element of that. It is about being adrift, untethered to a True North sense of direction.
There is a phrase from the US Declaration of Independence about holding certain truths to be self-evident. And in our current pandemic world, some of those truths are not quite as firm as they might have been. Foundations are not quite as stable as we perhaps thought they were, or we live in more shades of grey than we originally thought.
And yet, as I hit the half-way point of the year, and thinking about things like goals and what I want to be doing with my time, I feel like much of it is about choice. As it always is, of course, with an act of choice, an act of free will even, being the most fundamental element of creating a new reality.
That each day we wake, we rise, and we start making more choices that shape our reality. And perhaps that’s the source of my unease. That my sense of “choice” has been missing from my repertoire.
I feel like life, in all its colours, is happening TO me these days rather than life being something I create with my choices.
And I need to reclaim it.
More importantly, I CHOOSE to reclaim it. I will choose which anchor points I to consider tethering myself to, even if only for a day.
And so, with that thought, I am going to commit myself to a daily choice. A daily affirmation of a life chosen, not life simply lived. And perhaps my choice is as simple as that…
Today I choose to choose.
Let’s see what I choose tomorrow. What are you choosing?
I have been thinking about friends, death and goals this past week, albeit not necessarily in that order. Our friend Jeremy passed away two weeks ago, a sudden death. An aortic aneurysm. One of those potentially “here one minute, gone the next” type medical events that can occur with no warning whatsoever. Inexplicable. It happened during the night while he was asleep. And today, June 24th, would have been his 50th birthday. This is not a pseudo eulogy or tribute to Jeremy, his story is not my story to tell, nor even attempt. I can only ever tell my story, and here are some of my thoughts and experiences from the last two weeks.
I don’t feel like I knew Jeremy as well as I should have or would have liked. I have been close friends with his wife for over 20 years, we met through work, I took a course from her father. I’m not the extroverted type to make and keep hundreds of friends, yet her and I have shared many a long night talking over the years. When Jeremy moved back to Ottawa, I was organizing the occasional “guys” nights for wings and ribs, and I got to know him better, as he would come out from time to time. We’d have a few laughs, talk about life, work, just some light fun for the night. We’ve also got together a few times as couples, etc.
But probably not often enough, apparently. Like most modern families, we all lead busy lives. Sometimes the schedule seems too full and you don’t make the time, thinking maybe we’ll get together one night next month. We would trade comments here and there on FaceBook, stay connected virtually, etc. And yet, even without having known him for much of his life, even without being best buds or anything, I find myself strongly impacted by the passing of a friend.
Since I feel no shame attached to tears, I readily admit that I cried when I heard the news. It didn’t seem like it could possibly be true. Jeremy died? Wait…that makes no sense, must be another Jeremy? Obviously not Aliza’s husband, that can’t be, they’ve been doing Lego together while in lockdown. They just went to Dow’s Lake to see tulips. It must be some cruel miscommunication. He wasn’t sick, was he? I saw nothing about him being sick, did I? The strange hops that brains make to deny unwelcome news.
But, no, it was terribly, horribly true. Nothing Covid-related, which people might “accept” as a random hand of fate but understandable, or a car accident, or a host of other things where your brain wants to somehow connect a rational explanation to the event and thereby help it process the news. Sudden inexplicable deaths of healthy 50-year-old men do not offer a pattern for my brain to easily accept. It probably also seemed even less real to me given that he was two years younger than me. Older is easier to fake-process; younger is not.
I was working the day I heard the news, an email from a mutual friend, and I had a lot of trouble concentrating afterwards. I was easily distracted, and often not even for things I could remember when I snapped back to the task at hand. Just with my mind gone for a moment. Or several moments.
After a death, I know most of us rely on rituals for both celebration and comfort. For everyone who knew him, the week after the news likely followed the normal patterns of shock, notifications, more shock. Of course, the rituals were, like everything else in our lives these days, transformed in a Covid world. A mutual friend summed it up nicely…”f***ing Covid”. We couldn’t all rush to our friend, his wife, and comfort her in person, no hugs could we offer, even knowing that nothing we offered would ease the pain, merely let her know we were pained by his loss and by her pain at his loss too.
The funeral by Zoom / Go Pro was odd but normal, unreal yet real at the same time, and I felt relatively fine during the service until my friend did her eulogy to mark his passing. Overall, I probably held it together less well than her, and when her voice wobbled near the end, I cracked and the tears came forth. I have done eulogies for my father and mother, lost it completely during my father’s and barely held it together for my mother’s. How she did it, I don’t know.
It also made me wonder horrible thoughts. Could I do one for my wife? Could I do one for my son? Would I even LET anyone else do that instead of me or would I feel it was my duty? I don’t know. There is a popular theory that doing the eulogy is a coping mechanism in and of itself, forcing your brain to accept the truth as you say the words out loud, as well as giving you something concrete to focus on. I understand the theory, and based on having done my parents’ eulogies, I think the theory was written by idiots who have never tried to eulogize someone.
My friend’s eulogy was brief, honest, raw, and brilliantly delivered. I felt honoured to hear it, to witness it, to see it, even if only virtually.
After the funeral, I took the rest of the day off work. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get any work done, as I had struggled the first day, and I wonder if it was partly an added “stress” on top of the Covid isolation that helped “break” me. Well, bend me I guess is a better term. I knew I needed to take the time and I did. Time to breathe. Time to think. Time to grieve a little.
Two days later, we attended his Shiva service by Zoom again, and I felt more or less “fine” until after the service, when people in the chat room started sharing little stories and remembrances. The rawness in their voices was hard to hear, but an important ritual, I felt, to share and be part of for our friend, for his wife, for his parents, and for us too. Up until my friend’s aunt spoke and her raw emotion wiped me out. I felt almost claustrophobic and had to leave the room, leaving Andrea to finish the chat portion. I was just completely overwhelmed.
A few days later, we did a Shiva dinner by Facetime with Aliza and our mutual friend Vivian, and we chatted amiably for two hours. An almost “fun time”, except for the cause, and a reminder that there is nothing stopping us from doing that with anyone anytime. Virtual dinner parties and chatting, even if you can’t be together in person. To be honest, I’ve thought about that a lot…we could have done those WITH Jeremy beforehand, we all had 12 weeks of isolation where we could have done those types of dinners. We did them with family, why not more with friends? But we didn’t. Busy lives, I guess, and we weren’t being “innovative” enough on the social side the same way we are with family and work. F***ing COVID, indeed.
As I said above, I am not trying to tell Jeremy’s story, but if anyone wants to read Jeremy’s obituary, it is published online:
Obviously, I have been thinking a lot in the last couple of weeks about death and “what it all means”, as they say. One thing that keeps resonating with me is the idea that all deaths are personal. It’s such a multi-faceted phrase. Of course, for the deceased, it was uniquely personal…we all face death and experience death in our own way. Our own experiences and beliefs, our own rituals, our own circumstances.
I feel it is also uniquely personal for family and friends in that Jeremy represented something different to all of us.
And while it seems selfish, I feel most of us experience the death of others in uniquely personal ways too…not just our own beliefs and rituals, but in that we often think not simply of the loss of life, or the impact on his loved ones, but also selfishly, self-centredly, of the impact on ourselves.
It’s ironic, but shortly after learning of his death, I happened to catch a rerun of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s from the first season where Tasha Yar (one of the main characters) is killed during an away mission and Data (the android without emotion) hosts/organizes the memorial service. At its end, he asks the Captain if he “got it wrong” as he has never experienced the loss of a friend before and while he thought he would be thinking of her during the service, he found himself thinking of everything he would miss for him. So he wonders if he “got it wrong” somehow, while the Captain reassures him he got it “exactly right”.
I miss Jeremy’s laugh, knowing I won’t hear it again. His sense of humour, his obvious love for Aliza, his concern for others. He’s one of those guys you think of when someone talks about an “all-around, good guy”, the ones who improve your life just by being part of it. A mensch, as they said during the service.
And part of what affected me most, as it frequently does, is the narrative arc of someone’s life. For Jeremy and Aliza, it is a compelling story of early love, separation through time and distance, rediscovery, new beginnings, being together “at last”, getting married, getting his “new life” on track with work too, and the time they have enjoyed together in recent months while working from home.
It’s a strange way to think about it, a strange phrase unique to me and my own thoughts, but almost like “At last, he has his life where he wants it to be with most of the pieces figured out”. If it was a movie, Billy Crystal could play the lead and talk about either finding his “one thing” (after Jack Palance teaches him to herd cattle) or a co-lead with Meg Ryan where he gets to tell her that “when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”
A compelling narrative arc that resonates with me strongly. One analogy I saw online is like earlier investments are now paying rewards into retirement and hopefully old age.
And yet.
I feel like Jeremy didn’t get to reap enough of what he sowed. And that saddens me beyond belief. Maybe it’s the personal side again, not just his loss or missed “opportunity” to grow old with Aliza, but thoughts of my own mortality.
So my thoughts turn to the “personal side” for me. Selfishly, naturally, strangely, realistically. If I step back for a moment, I see a larger arc at play. I feel like I too have been on a journey of discovery in my life. Finding a groove with my father (around 23 or so), figuring out what I wanted to do for work (around 24 or so), finding out who I wanted to be around age 29-34, figuring out the basis for an adult relationship with my mom (around age 32 or so), figuring out what I wanted in a relationship around age 33, getting married at age 40, becoming a dad at age 41.
Equally, I try to live my life with what I consider a “no regret mentality”. For example, with my dad, I knew when I went away to law school that there was a not-insignificant chance that I would end up coming home for a funeral. My father’s health was not necessarily sustainable, and things happen even when you’re in good health. So before I left, I made sure to tell both my parents that I loved them so there would be no chance of not having said it and then having one of them die on me. Each week, for both parents, I would say it before I hung up the phone. And while it was easy for my mom to hear and say, it took a while for my dad to be able to respond too. But he got there. So when he passed, while it was sad, I had no regrets. We “ended” on the best terms I had ever had with him.
It was different but similar for my relationship with my mother. We didn’t always see eye-to-eye on stuff, but I made sure that I loved her for who she was, not who I might have wanted her to be at any given time. And I didn’t alter who I was to please her or spite her or anything else. I worked hard to treat her not only as my mother, but as the woman who was born before the Great Depression, who lived through it, who helped raise her siblings, who lived through WWII and lost siblings overseas. The woman who worked retail early on, had eight pregnancies and six kids, who buried her grandparents and parents, and most of her siblings, who outlived her husband by 17 years and found her own way. I have no regrets about how we got along, and there is nothing I would change. Maybe little things here and there, sure, but those are “rounding errors” on a relationship.
And with most of those “elements” in place, I have a pretty good life and I like where it is headed. If I had a magic wand, I might play with certain things, sure, but overall, I’m pretty fortunate with everything. I have more blessings than I can count, and yet, I don’t feel like I’m done reaping the rewards either.
I’ve often wondered with my son if I should record “just in case” videos, and Jeremy’s death makes me wonder again. Something to leave for Jacob, an extra legacy to leave behind if I should die before he’s old enough to understand most of it. To pass along anything of wisdom or thoughts that might help him in difficult moments in his life. To download everything I possibly could from my brain to give to him. Except that isn’t what he needs.
He needs memories of us doing things together. Like Lego. Or video games. Or puzzles. Or simply talking.
But with the passing of Jeremy, there are other things on my “to do” list that seem to be yearning. Heck, some weren’t even on my to-do list.
Thinking about friendship and goals
I am an analytical introvert by nature, and over the last few years and with the impact of Covid, I have let myself self-isolate somewhat socially. I modified some online tests and advice to create a “social connectivity” test, which I wrote about earlier this week. (A social connectivity test/)
I was surprised that my “nodal” number was 8-9 nodes. I thought it would be about 5. My wife maintains about 30, not including family. All of them I have seen more than once in the last two years, and I have actually done things with them at least once. Sure, most of the time it was meal-related. I was also a bit “relieved” to see that all of those friendships are ones that will survive my retirement in a few years. A friend noted that they can also be nurtured too through reconnection to expand the list, which is totally true, but it was meant more as a snapshot in time.
So whether it is Covid or the passing of Jeremy, I feel like I need to make more effort than I have. I don’t know what it looks like, but I need to get away from being on the computer by myself and “reach out” more.
I also find myself wanting to make sure I reap the rewards more while I can. Maybe that’s more time with Jacob, I still need to figure that out a bit more perhaps for the summer. I know it isn’t more time at work, that’s for sure. But I have three active siblings that I need to reach out more to as well.
I don’t know if that’s the lesson I should be learning, there are lots to choose from I suppose. But it is what I have been thinking about for the last two weeks. I don’t believe in regrets, but I wish I had learned the rest of Jeremy’s story from him before he died.
When my parents died, I comforted myself with an image of them doing something, a virtual “heaven” if you will where you get to repeat a moment in time seemingly endlessly or which simply doesn’t repeat but never ends either. For my dad, it was getting ready for a busy summer at the lake. For my mother, it was looking forward to having family around. For Jeremy? I suspect it would be something related to his relationship “at last” with Aliza. An almost John Keats-ish “Ode on a Grecian Urn” moment like the one captured on the Urn, a moment in time of two lovers about to kiss but not yet there:
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Keats went darker, I know Jeremy would go lighter. The gaiety, the expectation about to be realized. The reward for his life finally being about to be “complete” beside Aliza. For many, people would see that as a groom waiting for a bride at the end of an aisle, but to me, it comes way before that, before the planning, before the decisions and options, before even an engagement. A point when you both know, “This is it. This is the plan. This is really going to happen now.” That moment when the brain explodes at all the possibilities to come.
I don’t know that anyone else shares my view of a possible afterlife, but for me, I find those images strangely comforting. Hopeful even.
I miss you Jeremy. Happy birthday, mensch. I hope I can learn from your example and honour your memory.
I am an analytical introvert by nature, and over the last few years, I have let myself become somewhat socially isolated, partly by choice, partly by laziness, partly by circumstance. The pandemic, of course, exacerbates that condition. Even without it, though, I tend not to reach out to people to go out and do things. I do my own thing, often online, or with my family. It’s “easy” to do nothing to arrange social events when you’re an analytical introvert. It’s my default mode.
With the impact of Covid, I’ve been reading a few posts online about social connectivity, and how for many people, their network has changed over the years as they aged. At one point, it was likely their class list at school. Or a sports team they were on. Maybe later it was an address book, or perhaps an email list or contact list. But in the same vein that Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook and saw it expand, many people use their social media contacts as their “network” for friends. It is often a “social calendar” tool by default.
On one site, they had the equivalent of a “social connectivity” test and while it didn’t seem very scientific, and was just as likely to lead to spamming, I liked some of the ideas built into it and decided to use my FaceBook friends list as my data set to look back at my social “connectedness” in the last two years.
This isn’t a big data set as I am, as I said, an analytical introvert. I rarely “add” people as friends on Facebook lightly, and I’ve usually kept it to around 100 for most of the years I’ve used it. Recently, I’ve “let” it creep up a bit more and it nows stand at a whopping 126 people. Now, for the test of “social connectedness”, let’s triage those numbers.
If you want to play along, I recommend going to FB, clicking on your own profile, looking at your long list of FB friends, highlighting the whole list, and pasting it into an editor or email or notepad. Then, search and replace the word FRIENDS with “” (i.e., nothing) to get rid of it, and then do the same with the word “FRIEND” (they both show up twice for every entry, this just cleans things a bit). If you want to get really aggressive, you could eliminate multiple spaces and hard returns too, but not really worth it. When you’re done, you’ll have a long list of your FB friends with a bunch of extra spacing and formatting around them, but that’s okay, you’ll be editing soon enough. Alternatively, you could just go through the categories below to see the types of people you “eliminate”, and then just count the ones who still fit, just a lot harder to do that mentally.
A. Eliminate family members
Your family may be wonderful people, you may even be friends with them, but they are not “friends” in the normal sense. So they don’t “count” towards your social node total.
For me, twenty-eight people on the FB list are family. I see them sporadically, stay in touch, but for “my side” of the family, I usually see them once or maybe twice a year. I have a brother who I actually like (not all family members like each other, you know, it’s not a law) and he lives in town, but I still only see him maybe once or twice a year. I do better on Andrea’s side of the family, but there is a family cottage that everyone goes to regularly so it’s easier to see them then. Regardless, I have to take them off the potential “nodes” list.
B. Eliminate work-only friends
The research is mixed on this area, as many people’s identity is tied to their workplace and the people who are part of their crew. Teammates. Except it is a giant red flag for most social psychologists, not as definitively bad, but as an area that has to be triaged ruthlessly.
If they are “work friends” and you don’t do anything outside of work with them (no common hobbies, get-togethers, outings, online gaming, whatever), then they don’t count. Going for beers after work doesn’t count either if it was the whole team. And just to be really BRUTAL, you have to also eliminate anyone where you only see them in an “activity” context like church or volunteering, and you never do anything with them outside that context (it is just replacing work with non-paid work or a community friend). Same with sports teams. If you don’t socialize with them separately, and after game drinks doesn’t count, then they’re off. The one exception is if it is a friend who you joined that activity with i.e. you and a friend joined a book club, or a sports team, and so that is your “outing” together. You can still count them.
For me, this is a brutal purge. Thirty-five people on my list are “work friends” or “community friends” and while I like them enough to overcome my normal desire to keep my FB list small (hehehe), I’ve never done anything outside of work or that community with them. Maybe lunch at work. At most, we’ve chatted online occasionally. Just no real connection to trigger getting together except work or the community event, I suppose.
C. Eliminate accounts that are inactive, celebrities, commercial accounts, or internet-only friends
I thought this one seemed like a strange category until I started to read through some of the examples. And realized that I do have some.
Three of them are legacy FB accounts for friends who have died. Just the other day, I posted on one for her birthday, just noting for her family that I miss my friend. I didn’t know her real well, we met online a long time ago playing trivia. I never met her in person although I did meet her daughter once. Still miss her.
Ten more are various kinds of internet friends or friends of friends who I’ve met online for various personal and professional reasons, but I’ve never “done” anything with them. Most of them I’ve never even met. Another fourteen are people I met in person and whom I regularly interact with online, but I probably won’t see them anytime soon. We’re basically internet buddies, but that is about it, perhaps by mutual neglect. We’re friendly, hard to say we’re the type who do things together. Another three or so were commercial-style accounts of writers that I follow.
D. Eliminate any accounts of friends who do not live in the same city
Before you freak out to say, “But they’re my best friends!”, you are allowed to keep them in your “social bubble” for the test, but only if they can pass an extra test. Have you seen them in-person in the last two years? Doesn’t matter why not, doesn’t matter if they moved to Timbuktu, they are basically people you cannot call up on a moment’s notice and do something with, nor have you scheduled anything with them recently. You may reconnect, you may connect every four years, you may see them at reunions or funerals, but they don’t count for the test.
Well, crap. I have twenty-one people that we used to do stuff with who have all moved out of Ottawa in recent years, either temporarily or permanent, or they just simply live in other cities already. Some of them I would see if they lived in town, they were close enough friends that they were at our small wedding, but I haven’t seen them in person in the last two years. Sigh.
E. Triage what remains
The theory is that what remains is your “core” group of friends. They are not ALL automatically in your social connectedness bubble, they’re just your core group of likely nodes.
The second last triage is to first group any of them who are “couples”. If you regularly see them separately, you can count them separately, but if you almost always see them together, it is a single “social node”.
And the final triage? Similarly to D above, you eliminate ANYONE that you haven’t done something social with in the last two years. In-person. Not just a phone call, you actually have to have seen them in-person. If you want to adjust for COVID, go back 27 months. And sorry, major group events like weddings and funerals DO NOT COUNT. Group parties where you saw 20 people DO NOT COUNT. Or at least, they count, but only for 1 node (perhaps a couple).
F. Count how many nodes you have left
For me, it leaves about nine people in total, not including a few spouses that I’m not friends with on FB, and about 7-8 nodes. All of them I have seen in the last two years and actually did something with them. Most of the time it was meal-related, admittedly, but I’ll lie to myself and say that is purely to ease scheduling, everyone has to eat.
But you know what? I’m surprised it is that high. My original estimate was about four to five. When I analyse it more closely, I see why. 4-5 of the nodes are “me” nodes, and 4-5 are “inherited” nodes from my wife’s nodes. I get an extra little “bump” in my numbers by being married to someone more social than I.
If I am converting categories correctly, the normal scale is:
Analytical introverts (“blues”) –> 1-5 nodes;
Intuitive introverts (“greens”) –> 5-10 nodes (although if they count family, it often goes to 15, and longer duration interactions);
Analytical extroverts (“reds”) –> 10-20 nodes (they lose a lot in the work/community-only friends list);
Intuitive extroverts (“yellows”) –> 25+ per year (although many encounters are short, like coffee dates);
I have no idea if that list has any accuracy whatsoever. It’s using several sources together, not any one “pure” test. But I like the fact it is giving ranges for the types, not saying “everyone should have 22 nodes”. It recognizes that blues tend to have few, but that’s okay. If they have too many, they might get stressed, if they have too few, they’re isolated. Greens might be stressed if they only have 2-3 or more than 10; similarly for reds. Yellows can get depressed if they drop below 20. They just don’t get the positive energy to keep going, apparently. There is obviously more to it than that, since you could have 3 nodes that you have seen 20 times each this year or you could have 3 nodes you only saw once each in the last two years, averaging 8 months between interactions…a very different dynamic. I do tend to hibernate over the winter.
But I find the idea interesting as I near retirement, and that is often the source of the articles (helping people plan for retirement). Because many of those other categories will fall away, leaving your immediate social nodes.
I’m happy to see that all of my “core nodes” will indeed survive retirement. But I also need to nurture them too, to be grateful they are in my life, and the time we share.
Some time ago, I switched my site over to using the Next Gen Gallery, and at first, it was a great tool. The only limitation it has, in my view, is that it doesn’t really handle needing to insert a single image at a time. The NG Gallery infrastructure is designed around galleries, not surprisingly, and it wants very much for you to insert a gallery, not a single image. If people want to insert a single image, they should use the media library, or at least that’s the natural logic.
But I have about 15000 photos in my short-term photo collection (I haven’t processed everything yet) and when I’m done, it will likely be around 35-45,000. That’s a lot of photos in the gallery, and the main reason why photographers don’t use the media library, since it would just bloat the media tool that comes by default. NGG solves that problem by having a separate file structure for its uploads, but offers no tool to insert a single image from a gallery. Why would I want to? For two reasons, mainly.
First and foremost, if I’m writing a blog about an amazing sunset I saw, I might have 20 pictures to share for the day, but only one really good one of the sunset. So I just want to show the sunset photo. Or if I was using it as a product gallery, I’d like to only show that one image without having to play with other images at the same time in a carousel or grid or even a slideshow. I *just* need that one photo.
Second, I’m a blogger and my post style is one of narrative arc most of the time. I tell stories. And if I’m telling a story of, for example, a trip to Mexico, I might want to write about something I did on day one, with a photo from day 1 right next to it. Several paragraphs later, I might want to talk about something that happened on day three, and again, I want the photo right with it. And so on for day four, and day six, and saying goodbye on day seven. Five photos, spread out throughout the text. I don’t want to just put a gallery at the top or bottom of the post and force people to scroll back to see it.
I want to be able to simply insert a single photo, and move on to the prose. Is that so unreasonable?
Dreaming the possible dream in the classic editor
Originally, before Gutenberg, there were 7 main ways to insert an image by itself:
a. Insert from the media library. This is the recommended default approach for all of WordPress. WP gives you a media library, you upload your photos there, and anywhere in your site you can use them. Which works well when you have, say, up to 300 photos. Once you start getting above that threshold, the requirement to browse through all your photos at once is a pain in the patootie. Because the media library doesn’t give you folder options by default (although there are other plugins that CAN simulate that functionality) and so when you go to insert a photo, it shows you ALL the photos in the library at once. Images you use regularly as featured images are side-by-side with Aunt Petunia’s birthday party pics. Or intermixed. Finding stuff can be annoying. So most people go with some form of enhanced insertion tool once they get above a certain size. But, on the positive side, once you find the image, all you have to do is click “insert” and BAM! it’s in your post.
b. Simple galleries that use the media library. Many users using the ML look at the chaos of all the photos in one directory and decide instead to go with a gallery tool. The simplest galleries use the media library as their default storage area. They give you a replacement browser for the ML, essentially, and you go through to find the image you want (often in albums and galleries and folders, oh my!), find your image, and allow you to insert it. As an aside, there is also no common nomenclature for organizing photos…some tools have folders that include albums and then the lowest level is a gallery. Others have galleries with albums inside them, and then within albums, folders. The complete opposite of the first one. But I digress.
The only real downside is that if you go to use the default ML for something else, like a featured image, you still see all those photos in one directory. The “browser” you use is a bit of a sham — your photos are still all in one directory, it’s just showing you an interface that fakes you into thinking it’s a structure. Great if you use the gallery tool for EVERYTHING, bad if you still want to use your media library normally for anything else.
c. Hotlink from somewhere else. This may not quite be fair to include as it is what you could do anytime. There are plugins for example where you can host an image somewhere else (often on paid photo sites like Flickr or SmugMug), and then you just paste the URL from the other site. Some of the plugins will actually read the other site’s structure for your account (you have to provide login/pwd details to connect the two), and bob’s your uncle, you can insert images. But you are storing your photos SOMEWHERE else. I used SmugMug for awhile, but it was annoying to pay for extra storage when I already have my own site that I am already paying to host.
d. Hotlink from a self-hosted gallery. Again, this may not be quite fair to include as it is still outside WordPress. Before using the gallery tools built-in or NextGen, I had a copy of Piwigo running on my site, a full separate gallery software tool, and I did that because I couldn’t get a good gallery working properly within my original WordPress site. Rather than continuing to pay for SmugMug, I installed Piwigo, connected it to WordPress, and I could, for the most part, insert individual images wherever I wanted. Except, again, it’s not “within” WordPress and sometimes the plugin connection was wonky. It also requires me to run a whole separate software package / installation with all the admin overhead that goes with it (updating themes, tweaking plugins, etc.).
e. Use NGG with the SINGLEPIC shortcode. While NGG doesn’t give you a tool to insert the image directly, you CAN create an NGG shortcode that will do it. If that sounds like it solves the problem, wait a second. Here’s how it works. First, you go into your admin back-end. Open the gallery that has the image you want to use, or where you think there are some images to consider. Go through the various photos until you find one you might want. Note the ID number for the photo (when it gets uploaded to NGG, it gets assigned a unique number). Now, go back to your post, enter a shortcode that looks like this:
You put in the ID #, set the width and height manually, some options for a mode (don’t worry about it right now, I don’t use it) and then whether you want it to float left or right. Those are the official options. And when you’re done, voila, the image is inserted. Now, gee, doesn’t that sound like a fun process for a post that has MULTIPLE IMAGES in it? Maybe you can save a few steps by noting the numbers at the same time of all the photos you might want to use.
Let me add a kicker. The SinglePic shortcode isn’t even advertised anymore by NGG as a working tool. They have instructions on how to use it on their website but you pretty much have to search for it by name to find it. If you instead click on their documentation menus and work your way to the page where it says “Insert a single image”, the recommended solution is the next one.
f. Upload a second copy to the Media Library. Yes, you read that right. The NGG official solution is to not use NGG, but to re-upload the image a second time and create a copy in the Media Library and then insert it from there. If that sounds like you got on the crazy train, lots of users have boarded that same train. It makes no sense to most users that the solution to inserting an image from your gallery is to not use the gallery. And, if you’re a blogger like me, and you’re following best practices which are to use lots of images, even 2-3 per post, it would mean I would be adding around 5K images to my media library at this point. Yeah, no.
g. Enter the original hero. Now, since NGG didn’t provide an option, were the 800K+ users all just “screwed”? No, a plugin developer created a tool called the NGG Image Chooser. It is, in short (no pun intended), AWESOME. The developer had an NGG installation and the lack of options to insert images easily was annoying. Since he had good programming skills, he developed his own tool and then shared it.
Here’s how it would work…you would:
Write your prose;
Click on the icon in your toolbar for NGG Image Chooser;
Browse the file structure of your NGG galleries;
Find the image (or images, you could select multiple ones);
Enter some basic info about width and height, etc.;
Choose a specific type of “insertion” tool (* explained below); and,
Click “insert”.
And just as with the media library, BAM! instant insertion. It was glorious. And his options for insertion were really robust. Separate from bells and whistles for templates, etc., he had eight different options for inserting the image:
NGG tag of image
NGG tag of thumbnail
NGG tag of multiple thumbnails
Thumbnail with link to image (HTML)
Thumbnail with link to custom link (HTML)
Thumbnail only – no link (HTML)
Full-sized image only – no link (HTML)
Text link to image (HTML)
Options 1-3 are basically SINGLEPIC shortcodes — but it writes them FOR you. Click on the image and say insert. That’s it. Options 4-5 were for people who wanted clickable images that would either take you to the full-sized image or somewhere else entirely (like a button). Options 6-7 were the opposite, no links. And then option 8 was a simple text link that would open the full image.
If we’re only talking single images, options 1, 2, 4, and 7 were the most likely choices, depending on whether I wanted a thumbnail or the full image. And for me, it was really just a choice of #1 or #2 to take one approach (the shortcode) or option 7 (if I wanted to avoid NGG risks completely).
Here was my risk analysis…since NGG doesn’t particularly encourage use of the SINGLEPIC code, perhaps #1 or #2 was a bit risky. If they ever eliminated it, my site would suddenly have empty links. The shortcode would stop working. By contrast, option 7 (which would insert the full HTML link to the image) was almost risk-free…as long as I didn’t move the image file to somewhere else in the structure, it would work.
I’m a paid user of NGG, so I reached out to them for support, and they told me that SinglePic should be fine as LOTS of people are using it. I started using it liberally in my site, and it worked just fine. It doesn’t have a “float: center” option, but that was easily fixed after the fact in the editor. I could adjust size easily, it was glorious.
I don’t know what the other 800K+ users are using, since there were only about 10K users of NGG Image Chooser, but based on the support forums, I suggest they simply weren’t using anything else. Many people wrote and complained they couldn’t insert single images, and were told to use some sort of subset of the methods above.
I felt like I had found the Holy Grail of plugins with NGG Image Chooser. Life was good.
And then WordPress screwed it all up.
Dreaming the impossible dream in the block editor
When WP upgraded to the Gutenberg block editor, the NGG Image Chooser stopped working. Well, okay, that’s not ENTIRELY true. Options 1, 2, 3 work; options 4-8 don’t. Now, I was using options 1 and 2 mostly, so that shouldn’t be a problem, should it?
Well, I wasn’t sure. For one thing, it’s a short-code…in the classic editor, it would show you the actual image. In Gutenberg, it shows you the image briefly, and then replaces it with an empty image folder of thumbnail size. It is no longer sized to the size you will actually see on the front end, partly because you have to wrap it in a Classic Paragraph block in order to get the SINGLEPIC shortcode (it’s the only block that gives you the “image chooser” toolbar). Once you GET the shortcode, you can paste in any other block you want, but it still isn’t going to show you the WYSIWYG version of the image. I have to continually bop back and forth to the preview screen to see how it looks in “live mode”. Pretty annoying.
And again, looking at the official website for NGG, it doesn’t even tell you to use SINGLEPIC. I reached out to Imagely again, just to be sure there were no immediate plans to deprecate the SINGLEPIC shortcode, but relying heavily on something that they don’t even use makes me really nervous.
So I considered my available options.
a. Ditch NGG and go with another gallery tool. Umm, no. That’s not a real option. 1400 posts and an enormous amount of work already invested in the current tool? Ditching it would be a nuclear option and I am far from that point.
b. Find another tool that integrates into the block editor. Great idea, but there isn’t one. NGG Image Chooser was it.
c. Upgrade my current tools to cover it. I reached out to Imagely for the NGG tool to see if they had anything in the works to support singlepic insertion, but people have been asking for it for over five years, and nothing has showed up yet. They MIGHT have something at some point but I’m not holding my breath. Even their “block” has no options built into it. It’s just a simple block to insert a gallery. Sigh.
I’ve been using Stackable as my block collection of choice, and I reached out to them too as I’m a paid user. I cheekily suggested that perhaps, if they wanted to pick up 800K+ users pretty fast, they could offer some sort of built-in tool for their blocks that would let NGG users insert directly from their Gallery files, not just from the ML. 🙂 For me, it’s a no-brainer market niche, since NGG is the most-used gallery in the WordPress environment. In my opinion, this would also likely be the BEST solution, since Stackable has tons of styling options for their blocks and NGG has none.
I reached out to the developer of the NGG Image Chooser tool to see if there was anything in the works to upgrade NGGIC to be more block-compatible and the short answer is “no”. He doesn’t have any particular experience with blocks, so finding the time for such a big conversion probably won’t happen soon.
So I got thinking. Could I develop my own block, edit his code down to just the two options I need? Yeah, no. There is a very slim chance I could come near-functional, but almost zero chance I could get it to work in a separate block that I could style successfully. I don’t have anywhere near the skills, knowledge or experience to pull that off. Sigh.
It really is an impossible dream, isn’t it?
Achieving the impossible
With all that context, it seemed hopeless. And when that happens, I try to remember to take a step back, identify the key parameters and limitations, as well as the goal, and see if there is a totally out-of-the-box way to solve the problem. Again, based on the support forums, nobody else seems to have done it, but I’m stubborn that way. NGG, the developer and Imagely told me “no dice”, and I should probably listen to the experts more often than not, but I was motivated. Let’s reframe the parameters:
NGG is focused on supporting the Gallery tools.
NGG doesn’t like SINGLEPIC well enough to actively support it and promote it.
The image chooser plugin only works now with SINGLEPIC.
STACKABLE has a bunch of great styling tools, but nothing that works with NGG directly.
I thought about those four elements for awhile, letting them swirl around in my mind, and came to the realization that if I want my site to not be at risk, I should really think seriously about ditching the SINGLEPIC option. So that removes #2 and #3.
That left me with only two variables: NGG does galleries well but doesn’t have an option to insert a single image nor does it have block styling options while Stackable has block styling options out the wazoo but nothing that works with NGG.
I felt a brain itch. There was something there crying out to me to reframe further. Neither tool could do the whole job. Wait…what if I used them together, even though they’re not designed to work that way, and try to get the benefits of both. Hmm…could that work? On the surface, most users would say no. The blocks just aren’t programmed to interact that way.
But I mentioned already that I’m stubborn. So I reframed the problem further. Here’s how I worked through the elements of a possible solution:
START WITH A GALLERY: NGG wants to work with galleries, so who am I to argue? I used NGG to choose the gallery and inserted one from my TV show reviews that has about 13 images in it which I displayed in a BASIC THUMBNAILS layout.
NARROW THE NUMBER OF IMAGES: NGG wants to display a full gallery of images as the one did above with 13 showing, along with slideshow buttons, etc. But if I go into the options, I can choose which images to include/exclude in a gallery. I went into the image inclusion/exclusion option, and excluded all of them but one.
FIX BASIC STYLING: Since I don’t want any extra “elements” included, I went into the gallery options, turned off all the extra bells and whistles (like the slideshow link), reduced it to a single column view, overrode the thumbnail sizing and set it for 300px, and went with the DEFAULT VIEW template, since I want it to “always” work (and NGG is likely to keep supporting their default options).
Okay, so I have the basic image there. But here’s where the challenge starts. That “block” takes up the full width of the page, even though the picture is small, and the NGG Gallery block has no options for tweaking the size or layout. It is a container that just holds the gallery as content. What I really need is a way to style that container.
Normally, at least in the old classic editor, I could have put a DIV tag around it, gone into my theme and defined some special CSS code for that type of DIV, and it would essentially have added some extra options. But I don’t have the Classic Editor options and if I have to go into defining a bunch of special CSS styles for multiple image options, I’m sunk. I would have to play with too many CSS options — float right, float left, float center, top alignment, captions, fonts, etc. — without any tools to help style them quickly on the fly.
All the kind of stuff that you are supposed to be able to do in the Block Editor much more easily. So how do I do it in that Block Editor? Hmm…there is a default GROUP container…But the default block doesn’t have much styling, at least not like Stackable does. Hmm…
WRAP IT ALL IN A STYLABLE BLOCK: Stackable has a CONTAINER block with styling controls out the wazoo. By default, just putting it in a CONTAINER block doesn’t do anything unique, it’s only when the styling starts to get applied that things “happen”.
If all I wanted was an image in the centre, I could go with the gallery style above. But the real challenge is integrating it with other blocks so text could “flow around it”. The equivalent of having the whole gallery float left or right and not occupy the whole width of the page.
Stackable’s CONTAINER block (and all their blocks really) comes with three types of tweakable options.
First and foremost, there is the LAYOUT tab. While it can add some bells and whistles, I wanted the most minimal options in the block so as not to interfere with anything else, so I went with the PLAIN style.
Second, under the STYLE tab, I set the height to normal content width of 100% and the background to no padding. Oddly enough, I tried adding a background colour to the block just so I could “see” it while editing, but with the colour on, it immediately went to full-width and I couldn’t collapse it. So all the background options have to be “off”.
In the ADVANCED tab, I set the block spacing to the smallest possible height, the vertical alignment to the top, the horizontal alignment to the right (but could have been left or centred), block margins and paddings to 0px, column spacing to a minimal height, vertical alignment again to the top, and column spacing to 0px.
That leaves me with two “tweakable settings”. First, in the block area, there is an option to set the “maximum content width” of the block. I set it to 250px so it would be “smaller” than the above examples (and thus show that it was working). Then in the CUSTOM CSS setting (yes it’s still custom CSS for the page), I added:
/* Container */
.ugb-container {
float:right;
}
I could add some other styling in there, but I was really going for proof of concept.
Did it work? You tell me. The picture to the right that the text is flowing around? That’s an NGG GALLERY block set within the Stackable CONTAINER block, and styled as per above. It does EXACTLY what I need it to, and nothing else.
More importantly, it uses the default gallery options of NGG, so it shouldn’t ever “break”…it’s their default settings, using their preferred / supported default option of using a gallery, and the container doesn’t really care what’s inside it. I could put ANYTHING in there, I just happened to do it for an NGG gallery.
OMG. I did it. I achieved the seeming impossible dream.
Checking my math
I reached out to Imagely and Stackable under my paid support options for them to look at my solution to see if there were any gremlins hiding in the weeds.
Imagely gave me four responses:
SINGLEPIC should live long (if not prosper) since lots of people are using it (not a ringing endorsement) so I *could* just use the other shortcode for small pics (I had already found out too that it will support float:centre which the documentation doesn’t say, but only if you specify the width first so it knows how big it is for centring calculations, I guess);
The gallery option will work, but might get cumbersome if there are a LOT of images and I load it multiple times on the same page;
The gallery works by excluding all the other images by number (not including the one), so if I have, say, 20 images, and I want to just use the last one, it will then insert the gallery code to INCLUDE ALL and EXCLUDE 1-19. That sounds fine until they pointed out that if I ADD to that gallery, say a 21st image, then the INCLUDE ALL command would now be 1-21 and then only exclude 1-19, meaning it would show both 20 and 21. In other words, it doesn’t really work for dynamic galleries that grow. If I can prepopulate stable galleries, then it works perfectly.
They like the solution and have forwarded it to their developer’s group as a potential future solution / feature request. I’m not holding my breath, but at least they aren’t saying “NO, NEVER DO THAT!”.
Stackable’s response was a bit less effusive. They basically said, “Well it’s working, so yeah, that’s the right way to do it.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but I had hoped they would either tell me “Hey we’re building it another way” or “there’s another tool over here you could use” or “well, you don’t need the height setting here or the horizontal alignment setting there if you’re using FLOAT RIGHT later”. But for now, it works. I’m not thrilled about it only working for relatively static galleries. But it works.
And no one else seems to have found that solution so far, so I’m pretty stoked that my limited experience, skills and knowledge in coding didn’t stop me from thinking outside the box for a solution that I could actually do.
