A late start to the year…

The PolyBlog
April 5 2025

Regular followers know that I’m big on goals, and January is like the kick-off to my season. Not so much this year. The trip to the DR, being sick, stuff at work, juggling stress, all of it was just too much to add much else to it. Now that April is here, I’m trying to focus my attention back to my projects already in progress. I was almost tempted to call this post the “Island of Unfinished Projects”, but none of them were permanently relegated; I’ve just paused some of them for a bit. Time to blow the dust off.

Writing is at the top of the list

I have way more planned titles than I have time at present to do, and that could either be a source of stress or a source of motivation. Some aspects are demoralizing, as I won’t get to many titles until I retire. There are not enough extra hours in the day to devote to just writing, as I have other aspects of my life that I want to continue pursuing, too.

Yet an interesting thing happened after last week. Last weekend, I planned out the update to my HR Guide called Be the Duck and even started working on the rewrite of chapter 1. I was not expecting to get very far on it, as I have three different versions from previous updates that I’m trying to consolidate into a new version. In the end? I killed much of the past content and refocused the chapter on answering two questions for people: how did I get into government (aka how I learned what I know), and what have I done since getting into government? The chapter flowed nicely as I went, and although it wasn’t “quick”, I managed to finish it over two sessions, and now it’s “resting” until I go back to it in 2 weeks to see if there’s anything I want to change.

So I’m ready this coming week to tackle writing Chapter 2. For the book overall, I’ve got a new structure that breaks things down nicely and I’ve even started researching some of the other chapters where it will be primarily new content.

Some tweaks to the website

I need to tweak both PolyWogg.ca and ThePolyBlog.ca for a bit of content, but neither are huge projects. Simple updates for now. In the past, it was easy to get sucked into major rewrites, but that’s not my goal. I have a small manageable set of tweaks to do, and then I can focus on slowly populating additional elements.

For PolyWogg.ca, it is setting up the chapter list for the Astronomy guide. I have it working for Be the Duck, but I want to start working on the Astro piece. And I need a good structure to do that, so it goes “up” easily.

For ThePolyBlog.ca, I want to update layouts for humour and quotes, and adjust my structure for FlashForwardFriday and a new one called TadpoleTuesdays. I think for FFF, I need to move it from PolyWogg to ThePolyBlog. It doesn’t fit right over there, so a simple move will be fine.

Back rehab and other health stuff

Something super odd happened with my back. Last Winter, I killed it. F***ed it up something awful. Humongous pain, medical tests, everything. And I was left with four things to help with the symptoms:

  1. Chiro (I started with an osteopath but the chiro was doing a better job of release)
  2. Topical pain meds (BioFreeze and MedSticks)
  3. Robaxet-style pain meds
  4. A back brace that I bought off Amazon

On and off, on and off, my back bothered me all the way to December. In October, I had posted about my plans for back rehab (RetirePrep: My back rehabilitation begins). I came up with a complete regimen to get started on. Then life intervened and I did sweet f*** all.

  1. Group 1
    • General Exercise 1 — Knee raises to chest (either alternating or together)
    • Lower Back 1 — Hip rocker A (side to side)
  2. Group 2
    • General Exercise 2 — Knee rocking (laying flat on back, knees bent to 90 degrees, rocking side to side)
    • Lower Back 2 — Hip rocker B (forward and back)
  3. Group 3
    • General Exercise 3A — Modified cat / cow exercise (smaller range of up / down motion to avoid pain)
    • General Exercise 3B — Modified child’s pose (“less deep” engagement, pose)
    • Lower Back 3 — Mackenzie side wall (elbow at 90 degrees, healthy side only toward wall)
    • Piriformis 1 — Ankle pull (Knee to chest, close hand on knee other on ankle, pull towards opposite shoulder, 3 reps, 10s hold)

I did some more chiro through to December, but I was still having twinging. Then we did the trip to the Dominican. Part of the benefit of such a trip was that I was entirely out of my regular routine that can mess up my back at home — I wasn’t sitting in my work chair all day, I was actually moving around more; I wasn’t sitting on a couch watching TV for too long at night, my position varied more at the resort; and I was not in my regular bed which while supportive is also repetitive. Whatever “piece” helped, or all of it did, by about the 3rd day, I had stopped wearing my belt, intentionally so. I wasn’t doing anything that should aggravate my back, so I was seeing how I could function without it. It turned out that the answer was just fine. In fact, by the time I came home, I was barely wearing it all anymore. And my back has been relatively fine ever since. Yes, I still have twinges and a lot of tightness in my hips and thighs, but not anywhere near the level of discomfort. It isn’t “fixed” by a long shot. Yet I do need more mobility if I’m going to do the things I hope to do in retirement, so I need to restart that soon.

On top of that, I’m doing a buyback for my pension that requires a medical exam to be completed, so I have that scheduled for May. Plus I need to schedule a hearing test and a dental visit for fun and giggles (not!). Oh, and I switched to some new multivitamins. Which seem to be giving me energy I didn’t have before. I didn’t change much else then, so I’m crediting it. Huh.

Retirement is a dish best served cold

I am seriously confused about retirement. My current plans have me retiring in August 2027. It’s a good date, has symbolic meaning, and plants me squarely in the middle between 30 and 35 years for work. Great.

And, if you read prior posts, you’d know that I wanted to do a deep dive into my planning of what I want to do in retirement and if I had the foundations in place before I get there. Health, finances, documents, etc. I even did a very deep dive into travel plans for the first year of retirement. I planned out a trip in a camper / trailer to go all the way from Ottawa to the Territories, over to Alaska, down through BC into the US all the way to San Diego with a slight consideration not mentioned of Baja, then over to New Orleans, and back up to Western Ontario, onward to Ottawa. An almost 4-month trip. Followed by a separate trip through Quebec to Labrador, through the Maritimes into Maine, and back home. Plus a third trip all the way down to Florida, and then back up, for all the states in between the East Coast and the Mississippi River. It’s a spectacular plan.

Except I don’t think I’m ever going to do it. The last year with my back and some other issues has pretty much convinced me that I can’t do that kind of trip on my own, and the only ones I would consider doing it with are Andrea or Jacob. It would be just too close quarters for anyone else, really. I’m old, I’m crotchety. Unless they were in a separate vehicle, maybe.

Equally, I’m a little uncertain about some aspects of our finances. I feel okay about issues related to our mortgage, but other things may encroach on our planning when I hoped to face an emptier nest. Plus, we do not have as much saved for J’s education as I thought we did. It’s easily fixed, but still. An extra wrinkle.

Which makes me wonder in both directions. If I’m not going to take that vast trip, and Andrea won’t retire for another 5-8 years after me, what’s the hurry to retire?

Alternatively, once I finish my buyback options, I could retire in August of THIS year. I was reading an article in the Globe and Mail today where a woman was talking about treating her first year of retirement as a “gap year”, which sounded interesting, but the part that resonated with me was that she had retired two years earlier than planned. She had gone to a meeting, came out feeling frustrated, and said, “There’s got to be more to life than this crud”. And six weeks later, she was done.

Once I can submit my papers, will I be willing to keep putting up with stupid stuff? Not stupid stuff unique to my job or anything, just the stupid stuff you see in any job, really. We’ll see.

But I’ve put a pause on doing any additional large-scale retirement planning. I had another 8 or 9 topics I wanted to write about for my retirement plans, but none of them have to be done before I am actually close to retirement. It can all wait. I really got obsessed about the trip, and a side benefit was a personal commitment to go to a writing conference at least, which I’m doing this year. But when the reality hit that I likely won’t be able to do that huge trip, it was a giant letdown. I was literally disappointed almost 3 years before I’m even set to retire. Not great.

I might, however, look into the kayak option this coming year if my back is strong enough by June.

Learning: Psych and beyond

I blogged previously about doing a psych course through The Great Courses, and the last two months put a kibosh on progress. But it’s time to dust off the app, engage with the lessons, and start watching again. I have other classes planned too.

I also have plans to work on my learning with GIMP and using AI. I’ve done some preliminary stuff, but I want to dive deeper.

But right now? My most significant investment of time is small but interesting…I switched from French to Spanish on Duolingo. I’ve done all I will ever do on French for work, and it was no longer enjoyable; I was just grinding. In Spanish? Everything is new; I learn something small every day. I was tickled to simply learn the word manzanas for apples the first time out. But the interesting part is that it is practical learning, with no theoretical base. I didn’t learn to conjugate “to be” or “to have” with all the different pronouns. It’s just teaching me sentences in simple situations. Is my suitcase here? Si, mi maleta esta aqui. Is my spelling proper? Not sure, don’t care yet. It’s fun again.

Trying new restaurants and recipes

I wanted to try at least one new restaurant per month, but well, that hasn’t happened of late. We’re eating out just as often as before, but J rarely has the energy for anything new. So we default to the same list each time.

But for some “alternate” rehab that he’s doing, he’s going to do some baking. I don’t know if the first outing went as he expected, as he was doing it all himself, which is not always fun the “first time” you start something new like that, but he made the brownies. Maybe he’s willing to do them together next time.

I had a ton of cooking and restaurant options on my 60×60 plan, and they tend to have fallen off my planning grid. I need to kickstart them again, if only in curating recipes.

Renew my time investment in astronomy

I haven’t had a scope out for regular viewing in a while. I’ve done binoculars a few times, plus some naked eye observing, but I want to get going again with astronomy.

That includes both the potential for better viewing from the backyard, writing my guide, and just attending RASC events in person. I have some ideas for a project, but at a minimum, I need to get the scope out of the garage and view.

Fix my setup at home

My basement is still a disaster, and I need to clean it up. Move boxes, remove a table, put some stuff under a desk, just so I can get around better. And get to the exercise equipment, desk for doing projects, etc. Upstairs, we need to clear a bunch of crap off our “gaming” table so we can do stuff on it, which is usually puzzles or Lego. We have two projects ready to go for Lego, we just need the space cleared so we can do them.

And find a space for my new 3D printer so I can get that going while I work on repairing the first one. Without driving myself into frustration-ville. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

That’s my new list. And so what? It’s April, not January. I’ve updated my list 17 days ahead of what I call PolySpring, the date by which all the snow on my lawn is (almost) guaranteed to be gone (April 22nd). Maybe the first signs of Spring and progress will show up at the same time.

Convenience and a problem, inconvenience and a solution

The PolyBlog
April 3 2025

So, some years ago, we had some problems with our smoke detectors. They were getting close to a due date to replace them all, particularly as we had changed the batteries on one or two a couple of times in the previous year, but they were still prone to regular chirping. They were draining the batteries too quickly, but well, it was batteries, not a huge expense.

While we were doing some other work, we decided to replace all the smoke detectors in the house. The new ones would be directly wired to the electrical grid, come with battery backups, of course, and be linked together so that if one went off, they all went off. It was VERY convenient.

Now with our old stove (yes, I’m still on the same story), any time we used the broiler, it was easy to end up having some extra smoke come out of the oven when we were done, and the alarms would go off like crazy. So we knew they always worked. I checked the batteries for the first year, but with the convenience of direct wiring and the fact that they went off a couple of times a year, I knew they worked, so I stopped checking the batteries regularly.

Last week, there was a power outage in the middle of the night. This is kind of weird, as this has NEVER happened to me before — my CPAP machine had no power so it stopped, of course. Which woke me up. Okay, no biggie, take the mask off, roll over, verify power is out all over, back to sleep.

About 20 minutes later, the smoke detector chirped. Low battery. Ugh.

The power isn’t off for long stretches, sooooo I tried to tough it out. Nope, about 5 minutes later, chirp. It seemed to be happening at faster intervals, and it took me a while to figure out that it was ALL three detectors chirping at different intervals. I have zero desire to be climbing a ladder at 3 in the morning myself while holding my phone as a flashlight. Everybody else was still asleep.

I tried going to the basement only to realize that my incoherent comprehension of the chirping was all three chirping, with the one in the basement the loudest by far. I gave a shot at trying to remove the battery from that one, as it was easy to reach, but I couldn’t figure it out with limited light. I also couldn’t figure out a shush button, although I was pretty sure there was one somewhere. I went back to bed, finally dozed off when the batteries stopped even chirping upstairs, but my sleep was destroyed.

I woke up around 6:00 or 6:30 and the power was back on, but I never managed to recover.

So I added it to our list — put new batteries in the smoke detectors. Which, of course, means I have to take one down to confirm WHAT type/size battery it is — 9 volts. Great, guess which ones we’re out of? Oh yeah, 9 volts. So another day goes by. And the detectors start chirping. I have power, I get that I need to replace it, but we have other stuff going on. Yes, I found out there’s a shush button that keeps it quiet for about 12 hours and then it starts chirping again.

It took me a day or two, but yes, I got them, and yes, we replaced the batteries. Of course, two are one style and one is different, cuz why not add to the fun of figuring out to get them down and change the batteries? I was sure I bought them at the same time with all three being the same, but who knows, maybe I didn’t. Or maybe that was one where we had the contractor buy them. I don’t remember at this point.

But it was interesting. The convenience of having them directly wired led to the problem that I stopped checking them, they always had power. The inconvenience of the chirping led to the solution of updating them.

Now I just need to remember in 6 months to check them again when we change the clocks. Although now I have a question…if I do the check, and it sounds like it’s supposed to, how do I know that’s not just the wired part working but that the batteries are okay too? I assume as is the case with these ones, if it’s too low, it will chirp again but the “test” may not necessarily tell me that, I guess.

Nevertheless, we’re updated.

A tournament of games

The PolyBlog
April 1 2025

Andrea, Jacob and I play a lot of games after dinner. We don’t really keep track of who wins what or how many times, but I’ve always wondered if we could create a pseudo-tournament idea by keeping track over the course of a year. We started the year while on vacation, so we didn’t capture EVERYTHING, but we did keep track each week on a calendar near our kitchen table.

I didn’t think it through in advance…while MOST of our games are the three of us, there are also lots of 2-player events where Jacob and I will play some cribbage during the day, or a Scrabble game that is usually just Jacob and Andrea (I don’t do well at word combination games).

Over the first three months of 2025, we played 12 different games:

  • Jeopardy — We have a calendar and do the questions each week, trying to beat each other by Sunday…Jacob won 5 weeks, Andrea won 4, I won 3, and Andrea and Jacob tied one game;
  • Alleys — Andrea won 10 games but always feels like she never wins, while Jacob and I won 5 each;
  • UnoFlip — only 1 game, with my winning;
  • Moonshot Euchre — 1 game/win for each of us;
  • SuperQuiz Trivia — 1 game that Jacob won;
  • Abduction — 1 game that Jacob won;
  • Scrabble — 1 game that Jacob won;
  • Epic Galaxies — 1 game that I think Andrea won;
  • Labyrinth — Not sure who won that one;
  • Catan — 1 game that Andrea won;
  • Cribbage — We have played a LOT of cribbage in the first three months, combining normal 5-card cribbage (with 3 players); 6-card cribbage (with 2 players); a variation with 8 cards (with 3 players); a variation with 9 cards (with 2 players); and a complicated cribbage board called Crib Wars…I lumped them all together, and as I said, Jacob and I played a lot of games just the two of us, but the end of the quarter has Andrea with 9 wins, Jacob with 24 wins, and me with 16 wins; and,
  • Backgammon — Mostly just Jacob and I, with Jacob winning 9 and me winning 11.

The end result was 113 games with Jacob winning 51, my winning 37, Andrea winning 27 (but again she didn’t play most of the cribbage games), and Andrea and Jacob tied one game.

If I count just the games that were predominantly three people playing:

  • Jeopardy: A 4, J 5, P 3, tied AJ 1
  • Alleys: A 10, J 5, P 5
  • UnoFlip: A 0, J 0, P 1
  • Trivia: A 0, J 1, P 0
  • Abduction: A 0, J 1, P 0
  • Epic Galaxies: A 1, J 0, P 0
  • Catan: A 1, J 0, P 0
  • Total: A 16, J 12, P 9 plus AJ 1

So it looks like Andrea is leading the First Quarter and sits as Queen of Games.

FFF: Quote layouts

The PolyBlog
March 28 2025

Over on my PolyWogg.ca site, I’ve posted a couple of “FlashForwardFriday” posts where I talk about an upcoming or current project, talk about where it’s going, etc. Today’s post is more appropriate to ThePolyBlog.ca as that’s where the posts will show up.

I confess I have a lot of writing sub-genres and things that I do. Music is on the list, reviews of tv shows and movies, etc. And on this site, I have 90+ quotes that I put up on the site in the past. My desire has always been the same…that a few times a week, maybe even 4-5 times a week, I’ll post a quote. Could be a pithy saying, could be funny, could be an idiom, could be poignant, could be long and detailed. But something that struck my fancy.

I confess that I threw a bunch up on the site at one point, just in plain text with a little bit of formatting. But, well, they’re not that exciting. Or to be a little blunter, they’re not something you would likely share.

Partly because when you try to “share” them on any social media platform, all you get is the link, not the actual quote. What I have REALLY wanted is some sort of meme-like option. Yet I didn’t really have one. I played with some formats over time…I tried creating really interesting memes where there were pictures in them, quotes to the side (a bit like a photo card). I added my frog as a logo, and even some other clipart to give an ongoing theme perhaps.

But when you then uploaded that image to a website, all the text disappeared — it wasn’t searchable, it’s just the “image”. Which is theoretically more shareable but not necessarily any good on the website itself. It has been, quite frankly, annoying.

So I kind of forgot about it for a while.

Some small changes over time

Without getting too technical, when you share a link from a website to something like social media, the social media platform looks at the link, decides if there is an appropriately-tagged image on that site, and assumes that is the image you want to share. If you have a sophisticated website like a newspaper or magazine with lots of staff to play with all those settings and correct them manually if necessary, everything runs tickety boo. If there’s ONLY one image, it will probably use it by default, although not always. There are some technical settings about image size, resolutoin, etc. that varies for different social media sites.

If, however, you’re little old me, running a personal WordPress site with limited overhead and support, well, you have to code it yourself. Now, because I have very specific design aesthetics, not all of my posts have a nice glossy photo with it. Actually, most of them don’t. I do have genre images … like this one is a bit about the website, so I could do a featured image of a computer, or it’s about some struggles, so I have one of a person frustrated at the computer, or I could use a featured image (as I am) of a quote bubble. As that’s what the post is about — quotes on the website.

But that’s not an image of the quote itself, just something akin to being an oversized emoji. Soooo, often when you see my posts shared, the “image” it shows with it is either something IN the post (a pic of me travelling or a book cover) or quite often, the giant emoji image for that genre of post. Social media groups love images, and if it has to take an emoji, it will.

There is a way, on a website, to use something called OPENGRAPH settings which basically tell any site linking to it that if it wants an image, start by looking at the one with a proper OG tag on it. That works about 80% of the time, assuming the site being shared to recognizes the use of OG settings. WordPress added better support for it a few years ago, and I tweaked things enough that I half-implemented it. It pulled the emojis better, all good.

But I also use a plugin for Buffer’s social media manager to handle the interface between my WordPress site AND the various social media platforms that I’m part of — Facebook (I’m old), Twitter (it was a bit hipper when I started, and not so toxic), Threads and BlueSky (both new for me). I don’t have to manage a plugin for each of those, nor do I want to manage it directly. To be honest, FB is a giant pain in the butt to link to well if you have both a personal account and a page account. They tweak this or that and suddenly your posts won’t go up. I went through a number of different FB plugins that would “help” facilitate the management of all that, and I eventually said “Screw it.” I pay Buffer a nominal fee each month and in return they handle all the links with all the media platforms. They make it work for all their customers rather than all the customers figuring the latest tweak out themselves.

And Buffer has improved and tweaked things over the last year or two as well. Enough so that when I expanded to Threads and Blue Sky too, a nominal monthly fee rather than free was a good upgrade.

But as I went through the setup for other posts and genres, I realized that I had a few extra features available to me that Buffer has added to the the WP-to-Buffer plugin. In addition to all the normal and automated settings, I can actually go in and say, “Hey for this post, if you get confused at all, use THIS picture as your default”. And I can link to whatever I want to be the image of that post. Sometimes in it, sometimes the featured image (aka the large emoji). Before it was a pain in the butt to make sure it had the right image; now I can just click two spots before I press publish and confirm what I *think* the image should be.

I did it first for my book reviews. I have over 200+ reviews on my site, and often when the first 200 or so were written and shared, it did NOT want to share the book cover as the image. I would have liked it to do so, but often it would flutz on me. But with the improvements in the Buffer service, and the extra features in the app, and some better arrangements by me as well in terms of certain images being uploaded directly to the site as opposed to imported / linked from other sites, I have a bit more control. So somewhere around 20 book reviews or so ago, I was able to directly share the book cover of the book I was reviewing. No muss, no fuss, it shared with my review. Editorial use, for review purposes, if you will. It WORKS.

Enter the quote area

Now, that really doesn’t do anything to solve ALL the problems. As I said before, I had essentially two issues. First, making sure the right image would share in a way that others would see the quote without having to click through i.e., see the quote, not the emoji. That’s working right. Second, I want the quote to be able to be meme-like, BUT I need the text searchable on the website too.

Not surprisingly, I’m not the only website owner that wants this. TONS of people have had similar issues over the years. They want images but they want the text in the images to be searchable. Or they have text that they have is searchable but they want it laid over an image so it LOOKS like a meme on the website but is really text. Except if it is really text, and you share the image, the other websites only share the background image, not the textual overlay. Some sites have gone in for high-end meme generation directly built into the website whic is fine if you have an unlimited bank account to have a really sophisticated website, lots of space, and/or a licensing arrangement with some sort of online meme service. I don’t have any of those.

Soooo, what to do, what to do. I was doing one of the book covers, and the obvious answer hit me over the head twice. I have a very linear filenaming convention for the images — “BR” (for book review) + “######” (the number) + “(title) – (author)”. So in actual fact, even though all of that info shows up in the title of the page, it is also showing up in the text too. Not a great double reinforcement, but better than nothing. The normal solutions that people would use are two-fold — some put the text in the page as either really small font that isn’t visible OR sometimes put the text in and make it white text on a white background, rendering it invisible. Neither of those are sanctioned coding techniques, it’s just laziness from doing it properly.

The REAL way to do it is to put the information in the ALT text box. Except with the plugins I was using, the ALT text was not as easily accessible as I might like. A couple of extra clicks, with a bit of scrolling, to get to the box. Recently, the overall interface for WP itself changed a bit, and voila! I can now SEE the ALT box more easily when I’m typing.

Huh…something is niggling in my brain.

Oh, right. Did the options I have previously not work because of the config I had but now the config would let it happen? Let’s see:

  • If I create an image with a quote on it and upload it to my site, I can show the quote with a simple but pretty frame;
  • If I take the same text and paste it into the easily available ALT box, it is fully searchable;
  • If I go into the Buffer info on the post that I’m creating, and tell the plugin to use the quote image with social media, it will show in the preview when posted; and,
  • If people want to share the image, they can — just click and share, with my link going along with it.

I tried it with the first quote in my existing collection, and it lets me make it look like a thumbnail, medium-sized, large-sized or full size. The best image size for most social media is 1600×900 pixels in landscape mode, and that is my custom size for the actual image (I just use PowerPoint). Thumbnail is useless in this instance (wrong dimensions), but any of the other three are fine. On the site, I like the large-size the best. I could add the ALT text to the overall image info in the image manager on the site, but not every plugin reads them the same way compared with manually adding it to the blog post, but that’s a minor inconvenience. It works.

I tested it, as I said, with all the social media sites to see how it would appear and it literally WORKS properly on all four of the ones where I’m active. I couldn’t believe it. Stuff I banged my head on some 4-5 years ago and it suddenly just works more easily.

So what does that all mean for me?

First and foremost, it means I have about 90 quotes to redo. That’s easy enough. I have the PolyWogg Quote of the Day at the top, a “series” branding idea that rolls over from my guides. I will keep my little frog in the bottom corner as my logo with my website address clearly visible. I am debating still if it should be www.polywogg.ca even though it is on ThePolyBlog.ca, but I’ll decide that really soon. And I put a simple little number tracker in the bottom right hand corner (PW Quotes #xxxxx). I’m never going to get to 100,000, but I hope to get above 1,000 sometime, hence five digits.

And I confess that eventually, I want to put ALL of them into a guide. I will consider changing the colour of the daily frame depending on the theme of the quote, and I’ve only done a couple so far. But theoretically the outer frame could be tons of different colours.

Now, here’s where it gets a bit dicey for the future.

Do I want to consider doing the same thing with recipes? Future book reviews? Future movie reviews? Putting them all into a 1600×900 image and sharing it? Rather than the prose I have now?

I don’t know. It would certainly make some of the pieces able to be shared more easily. And if I did it for jokes, that would be highly shareable. Something to think about.

For now? I have 90 quotes to fix.