Today was a very very very long day. So, some context.

I mentioned that on Saturday we went to the Van Gogh exhibit. Most people were sitting on the floor to watch the digital show, I decided to do so too rather than trying to stand for 30+ minutes, but tbh, I’m not that coordinated these days, if I ever was anyway. The end result was that as I tried to get down to the ground without embarrassing myself too much or landing on someone, I over-compressed a stomach muscle, and it feels more like I pulled it. So I’m in a bit of discomfort. If I try to sit up too fast, or do a crunch rather than a roll to standing, my stomach says, “Duuuuuuude, what the frak are you doing?”. It lets me know REAL quick. It’s not serious, but it’s not comfortable either and makes it hard for bending or lifting.

The second piece of context is that I have a guy coming to setup my BowFlex gym on Thursday, and the spot where it needs to go? It’s a small disaster zone. There are tons of things in the way. Some are things I’m still sorting, some go into the back part of the basement, but they’re all piled together and need to be sorted. And some of the material needs to go on the shelves I bought from IKEA last week. Except the boxes are upstairs, they’re not assembled yet, and the spot where they go is in the basement. Yeah, so that’s the setup.

Except for my knights and angels in the form of Jacob and Andrea willing to help me get them set up and going.

Item 6.1 is therefore the big plan for shelving. We opened box 1 upstairs, took the pieces down in separate runs, and Jacob and Andrea assembled unit 1. Great. I wasn’t entirely sure where to put it precisely, as there are five to be installed, and I was trying to figure out the best order to install them while moving existing desks out of the way (they go in behind). Annnnnnd I discover that somehow in all the different configurations of the order, with multiple versions not available, and taking what I could get, and feeling at the time like I got longer ones than I intended, the lovely shelving units which should have been about 6-8″ shorter than a lower part of the ceiling are actually about 1/2 cm too tall. Hello crickets my old friend. I’ve come to listen to you again.

Which is better than listening to my cursing at the realization. Now, I do, in fact, have an alternate option. At the opposite end of the room are three other units that would fit just nicely. Except there is a ton of stuff already ON them, and lots of stuff in front of them, and the stuff that is on them will all have to come off before they move, etc. Domino after domino. Anyway, I decided I would install two of the new ones on a different wall, plus one of the ones from the far wall (after taking everything off it and putting into bins), realigning everything, putting the desks back close to the spot and then calling it a day.

After supper, well, almost 10 o’clock tonight in fact, I decided that I would just rearrange my computers so they were set up for the morning (I had to disconnect everything earlier). But then I got possessed. A second wind came to me and I decided that I would move EVERYTHING out of the way and put everything that belongs in the basement’s backroom away on the shelving in there. And then move some other stuff around. Essentially completely clearing out the space for the guy coming on Thursday.

Then I rearranged all the desks, put a whole bunch of stuff on shelves, reconnected all the computer stuff, adjusted a few other areas, and now my office area is big and open too. I’ve tested my work computers and my home computer, everything seems back to normal. Three hours of fun and games late at night wasn’t in my original plan, but it felt good to blast through, and the stuff didn’t really affect my stomach muscles, surprisingly. Plus when it did, I rested right afterwards. All good.

For Item 6.2, I mentioned yesterday that I was setting up Scrivener for all my works-in-progress. I also wanted to set up a blank template that would implement the Save the Cat layout, as well as introduce some other elements that I’ve been designing for my “plotting” tools. Character charts, etc. Nothing too elaborate yet, but I’ve drawn from other sources, and merged it all into a single “novel” template. It seems to be working, and it was fun working on the new laptop the way I intend to for the future.

Item 6.3 is following up on the websites. I mentioned that three are up, just waiting for one more to return. I’ve played with it today a few times, and it isn’t quite there yet. Soon, I hope, and I poked the company again tonight.

Onward…

My updates are giving me a bit of a challenge running a full day behind…I don’t always remember what it was I was thinking of as my “change” items some 18h later. So I’m going to do Friday and Saturday together.

Friday

Item 3.1 was simple, just running Andrea over for a massage. Her back has been bothering her a LOT this week, way more than would be usual, and home massage and biofreeze isn’t getting the job done. So she went for a massage, and I drove her over. We’ve been doing pretty well of late to make sure we do regular chiro and massage for Andrea and I, and massage for Jacob too. We’re not as active as we were pre-Covid, so anything we can do helps.

Item 3.2 was follow-up on my website. I have been actively trying NOT to go down a rabbithole trying to obsess about the recovery. It did make it up, and was mostly visible, but there were still some niggling details to test. I made the quick update, and then left it.

Item 3.3 is more of a look-ahead item. Jacob needs some new masks for his return to school, and maybe some that are simpler, solid colours, rather than the space theme ones he has now. So I did a small rabbithole dive on the internet last night and ordered a bunch. A small upgrade to his setup as he goes back to school.

Saturday

Item 4.1 was a surprise of sorts, and not really by me per se. Andrea’s back was still hurting, and she now had a significant-looking rash on her side. So she needed to go to a doctor to get checked today. We planned on it being a simple Appletree, but then they all seemed to be appointment-only, or telemedicine. By happenstance, I remembered a clinic near us that opened awhile ago, drop-in plus appointments, but when I asked if they were taking new patients some time ago, they weren’t. I hadn’t tried them for drop-in yet, but Andrea needed somewhere, and we gave it a go. It doesn’t sound like much, but it may be the first step in removing me from my current family doctor that I’m not too thrilled with at times. I’d love a new one. On the downside, Andrea’s problem was not a simple rash, so now she’s dealing with a viral thing, meds, pain, etc. Should be right as rain in a week, but well, still a week.

Item 4.2 was an outing as a family. The digital Van Gogh exhibit was still on at Lansdowne Park and we had bought tickets some time ago. We pushed the date past our holidays and before school, hoping there was less risk of shutdown or lockdown, and as it turned out, we were overly cautious. People have been going in Ottawa since early August. The basic premise is a digital tribute to Van Gogh with lots of big signage on the way in and then a big digital presentation in a giant hall, where the various prints are overlaid and projected on the ceiling, walls, posts, floor, etc. It’s like you are INSIDE the painting. The show wasn’t quite what we were expecting, and I wouldn’t call it a roaring success. Jacob found the display a bit nauseating and boring. I was expecting to walk through multiple smaller rooms, not stand around in one big one, and I also managed to pop a rib out when I decided to sit down on the floor. I’m not sure if it’s a rib out, or I just pulled something, but it ain’t fun, kind of painful. And of course Andrea was also in pain, as well as likely dealing with the disappointment of having two gloomy Guses as her travelling companions for the afternoon.

Item 4.3 is, regrettably, another foray into the website world. I really really really didn’t want to spend anytime trouble-shooting my website, but there was something that was a bit off with my PolyWogg.ca site. Almost everything worked, except for two little pages/links. I spent a bit more time on it today than I would have liked, and it is resolved, although I’m not entirely sure how. I’ll take the win, the site is back up, and I didn’t turn myself into a squirrel with it.

Onward…

I feel like I’ve been drifting for the last little while. Some of it seems almost like depression, particularly where I have little energy as well as little interest in some things that normally give me pleasure. My sleep has been messed up for the last month, I’ve got some projects to get to around the house, and I’m just, “meh”. Sure, some of it is Covid, some of it is the dead cat bounce dropoff after a post-vaccine high. I still enjoy listening to Razamanazz by Nazareth, but it’s less compelling to get my juices flowing.

I’ve been reading various blogs and books about change, motivation, and more specifically, articles around jump-starts to your lagging energy. Many of them talk about the little things to get you going, kind of the typical philosophy that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, regardless of the evidence out there that much of that visualization on step one doesn’t work for certain personality types, including analytical introverts (i.e., me). We know it’s still only 1 step, and we can’t “trick” ourselves into thinking otherwise.

But, I still want to do SOMETHING in September, maybe harness some of the age-old “back to school” excitement in some way. Which has led me to the “3×30” idea. Basically, three things that I choose to do in a given day that is a bit out of the normal, something I am doing just because it makes some part of my life easier or moves me ahead on some project. Three items a day, thirty days in the month, ergo –> 3×30.

Yesterday was my first day, and I deliberately chose NOT to put anything big in the day. I didn’t want it to seem to myself that I had held off on something big, or that I was going to trick myself into thinking I was doing 90 big things for the month. Some of them are going to be quite small.

Item 1.1 is pretty small — I cleaned my work desk and installed a new work surface. I bought a vinyl deskpad a few weeks ago, saw some benefits to it including for example that I can use it as my mousepad. My existing mouse pad was a bit bigger than I wanted, and it didn’t work well to sit partly on one surface and partly on the desk beside. By contrast, the vinyl goes up and over the “lip”, and it’s flush with the desk. Everything fits well, all slides around nicely. Not “big”, but it is a bit different.

Item 1.2 was even smaller — I charged my Kindle. I have been actively trying to read more in the last four months, and while I did some of that on my phone, I really want to do most of it on my Kindle. After I uncovered its hidden location back in June (it was in a backpack I had checked several times expecting it to be there but it was tucked down in the bottom under two books I had never lifted fully all the way out to reveal the treasure!), I ploughed through some 50 books in June and July. I’m down a bit for August, not quite getting the re-energy boost that I normally do from reading, even though it is CLEARLY in the simple interest / mystery world. In August, I did some personal writing and have been reading some classic writers on writing (Lawrence Block, Stephen King, Syd Field, Blake Snyder, etc.). But my Kindle was getting low again, and I don’t have a great charging setup for mini-USB hubs at the moment. But I dug out a cable, hooked it to my desktop, back in business.

Item 1.3 is a bit of a cheat as it is more redoing previous steps than taking new ones. My host, WHC.CA, was the subject of some vandalism last weekend, and they have suffered fairly significant loss as a result. One result of the internal attack was that a bunch of website servers, including one that hosts three of my accounts, were reimaged and their backups wiped. For some people, it’s catastrophic. Everything they had is lost. If it had been last January, it would have been a pretty significant loss for me, and I’d be pulling out my hair. But I had that meltdown last February, my website situation is part of a more nuanced perspective now of my life, and, well, it’s easy to say all of that because I have a full offsite backup.

While my website is down, I was going to leave it a day or two more to see if the recovery process might produce better results, but in the end, I thought I would give it a small “go” myself. It’s not complicated — upload your backup, click a few buttons, good to go. Or at least it should have been. There’s a small niggling issue that the host has created what they call “lifeboat” accounts, which my backups don’t want to connect to, preferring instead to connect to the regular old account. As a result, I have to upload it manually and reconnect the database manually. Which I can do, but it’s a small pain in the patootie. And, well, I don’t have to. The hoster had the problem, not me, so if I upload to a specific directory, they’ll put it back together for me.

Which I decided to do. I turned it all over to them to fix and get going. If it doesn’t work, I can engage, but honestly, it’s more hassle than I need to take on. That’s what they’re paid to do. It might be faster for me to do it, it might be more satisfying for me to do it, but well, why take on work I don’t need to take on? I uploaded the files, stored them on the server, and said “Go to it”. They fixed it last night or this morning (I got confirmation early afternoon it is “up”) and I can see it, even if it isn’t fully public yet. That’s not on them, I had to change the internet DNS (domain name server) addresses to match the lifeboat over the regular accounts, and it usually takes about 24h for the internet to share those addresses with everyone. But fingers crossed. It seems to have worked so far. As such, I’ve given them the other two ZIP files and now I just wait for them to do the recoveries.

Three small “incremental” things to improve my life, although one is recovery more than progress I guess. Not big, just some small steps I’m taking to move the needle a bit. The big or important stuff often crowds out some of the smaller things, but some of those smaller things make a difference. Or at least I hope they do.

Onward…