Tag Archives: 2015

2015 – Twelve steps to spiritualism

The PolyBlog
January 7 2015

The twelfth item on my vaguebooking list was “12. Twelve steps to take”. I am not quite sure what to make of this commitment, to be honest. I started it two years ago, and it kind of fizzled on me. The goal was to come up with 12 questions for myself and what I believed spiritually. I started on the first one, ended up down a rabbit hole of disconnected tangents, and I didn’t get too far.

I want to return to the work that I started two years ago, answering one question a month approximately, and to ask myself, “What do I believe?”. To what end, I’m not sure. Just perhaps to know myself better. I’ve had my “faith” tested at different points in my life, and I often know what it is “not”, more so than I know what it “is”. Maybe I’ll just end up down a rabbit hole again. But we’ll see. Overall though I suspect this “small” commitment will end up being way harder than the 500,000-word commitment, as this one will require me to ask some fundamental questions of myself and to dig deep emotionally and spiritually, not intellectually, to find whatever truths are hiding deep inside. I’m thinking of combining it with an online course in comparative religions, although I’m unlikely to find myself a spiritual home in any organized religion, it isn’t the way my faith is wired.

When I do those “online tests” to find which religion is closest to your views, Judaism and Wiccan come up as the best matches. Don’t ask, I don’t know how those two are linked. I know the first gets flagged because I care little as to whether Jesus was an actual son of God or a metaphorical one yet strong prophet (making me a pretty weak “Christian” in the normal sense, although I agree with most of the catechism lessons/morals/ethics), and I think the second one comes from a strong sense that there is something more universal in the literal sense of the word, that we’re part of a giant cosmos connected through energy flows.

One way to find out — commit to the quest!

2015 – The photo scanning project

The PolyBlog
January 6 2015

The tenth item on my vaguebooking list was “10. Ten photos at a time”. (Yes, I know I jumped over #8 and #9 as I have another bit of timing stuff to do on those ones, be patient!). But this one is really, really simple.

When my mother died, I retained custody of all mom’s photo collection. Big pictures and stuff we already distributed, but the old photo albums, etc., are all in my office sitting in a bin under my desk. The collection of photos is immense. Terrifying even. Because I want to scan all of them. Digitize them, sort them, let some software package go to town on facial recognition. But it’s a LOT of photos. And the library science / archivist in me wants a complete copy before I distribute them back out to the family. No one is pressing me for them, heck most don’t even want them. But I’m going to give them a complete set on disk when I’m done. I just have to get back into it.

There are some digital scanning sites in Canada that will do it for you. $200, 1200 photos, ship them and get them back done. Great idea. Except there are absolute horror stories about each of the sites. Some don’t do the scanning themselves, they farm it out. And so the group of 5-6 up front services collapse to 2-3 actual scanner companies. With a few challenges of logistics in their operations. Some of the stories are relatively minor — photos that got missed in the scan, or were duplicated, or weren’t fully centred, etc. No big deal, although annoying of course. Of far greater worry, and this is the dealbreaker, some people not only didn’t get the scanned prints when they were done, they didn’t get all the originals back either. Some people even got 100 of someone else’s photos. I considered still doing it, with the small caveat that I would attach a sticker to the back of every photo but that still wouldn’t guarantee their return, and it’s just too risky to my taste to put the whole kaboodle in jeopardy to save the work.

So my commitment is to start doing it, 10 photos at a time (i.e. per day). At 50 a week, up to 2500 in the year, I should be done by the end of 2014. A perfect item to be tracked with the Seinfeld method. I just have to get started. That should keep me busy too. Oddly enough, the swapping and scanning is relatively simple — I can even do other things on my planning list while I’m doing the scanning. But I have to start somewhere. Soon. My goal is to start before Feb 1st, although Feb 1st could be the launch. Stay tuned.

Gratitude for snowblowers…

The PolyBlog
January 4 2015

Gratitude post for day #4…Today I had planned to get up a bit late, drive the cub and wife to swimming and go on to grocery shopping. Unfortunately, I completely forgot about having to clear the driveway this morning. Brutal ice and snow, but not yet frozen, so I’m grateful for that at least. However, mostly I was grateful for the snowblower I was using. I bought it about five years ago at the old house where I had a huge driveway and walkway. I could easily get rid of it with the small area I have now, but honestly, it makes life so much easier that I’m reluctant to part with it. I’d love not to have to worry about space for it, but a couple of times a year it is worth its weight in gold. Today was one of those days.

That’s my single item for today! Onward in the journey…

2015 – New areas of writing

The PolyBlog
January 4 2015

The seventh item on my vaguebooking list was “07. Seven new topics”. These are new “subject areas” that I want to write about on my blog.

Pop culture is likely one of them, although it might be more narrow than that, maybe “pop culture intersecting with the news”. I didn’t comment on Jian Ghomeshi or Bill Cosby’s news items when they hit, but I loved watching people post and take sides, often looking like internet trolls in comment forums except they were posting the same comments on their own social media feeds. My take is a bit different and is primarily about the law, and the court of public opinion vs. the court of justice or law. I may yet blog about it.

Equally, I love the law. So much so that I couldn’t become a lawyer. I’d like to take a subject area and blog about that, but I haven’t yet found my niche. It may very well harken back to my days at law school when I was working for the Ministry of Education in B.C. and focus on the law, schools, education, and children. I haven’t quite decided yet. But there’s an itch there that I’d like to scratch again.

In the realm of writing, I have three areas that are of interest to me. First and foremost is the changing nature of the business model of publishing. I’m very much in the world where “everyone must choose their own path”, and I may turn my attention again to the world of disrupted publishing. Second, I think there is a lot of general information out there about marketing of books in the modern age, but not a lot that gives a comprehensive list of “here’s everything you COULD do, choose wisely”. I started work on this at one time and would like to go back to it. Finally, I also think there is a ripe area for a different slant on books and publishing, and that’s measuring the performance of libraries. I did some research and even some preliminary writing about three years ago but never brought anything to fruition. I think libraries are going to come under increased fire in the digital age, and while they have a strong role to play, I don’t think many of them are telling the right story or using the right yardsticks. When they tell their story initially, they act as a community centre; when their funding is threatened, they claim critics are burning books and destroying literacy if the library goes the way of the dodo. The balance is off, and maybe I can find something I can contribute to the conversation.

In a similar vein, I’m wondering if I have something to say about charities. I feel that much of the rhetoric out there is a bit one-sided, or at times, diametrically-opposed two-sided. I know, for example, that there is not much out there giving people insights into different types of charities. I also have some questions for myself that I want answered on local basic human needs programming and the most effective means of contributing donor dollars.

Finally, I do reviews for books, movies, TV and music, or at least my website says I do. I’ve been a slacker-doodle for my reviews, and I want to get back into them. I am not yet ready to commit to exactly what the other six categories will look like when I’m done, but I know this one pretty well. So, I commit to:

  • 24 book reviews;
  • 250 reviews of TV episodes (tweets);
  • 24 movie reviews; and,
  • 3 new reviews of Billboard year-end results.

That should keep me busy too.

Gratitude for friends and garages

The PolyBlog
January 4 2015

Gratitude post for day #3…Today I am feeling grateful for 2 things. First, that Jacob has friends. That probably sounds like a no-brainer to some people, but it isn’t. Jacob is an introvert, has some sensory issues, and wears glasses and walks differently. And he never really bonded with his daycare friends early on, at least not enough that we wanted to do playdates. Add in that we were so tired the first couple of years (more on that later in the year), and the neighbourhood didn’t produce automatic peers, and the result was that he didn’t have a lot of “friends”. School helped change that, and he has a friend coming over tomorrow. Today, one of Mommy’s friends came over and brought her son Conlin. Jacob was SOOOO excited and loves to have visitors.

I’m also grateful for a garage. I had to scrape the car a couple of times today when I was out and about, and that was the first time this year. It was nice to know that the garage had room in it for the car when I got home.

That’s it for today! Onward in the journey…