Today’s schedule was brought to you by the letter S as in sh**show. I normally do chiro on Friday mornings, and since Andrea had an early morning appointment, I moved my chiro even earlier (7:30). Except I had trouble sleeping so dragging my butt out of bed to get there was not a pleasant experience.
Unfortunately, part of my back is being stubborn and refusing to release, so I take what I can get. Anyway, onward to a different appointment for Andrea and then back home. Series of meetings, staff meeting, and then out the door at noon to go to the telescope store. I know, you wouldn’t think that was work, but it kind of was. I was having them evaluate two donated scopes for our astronomy group, and so I took them in today. Two hours later, I had a wonderful time, but needed to be doing my real job. Grabbed some Tim Horton’s on the way for Jacob and I, ate quickly, and then off to a conference call at 2:30.
Then I had to double down on a whole bunch of taskings as I’m off next week from Monday to Wednesday. Yay me, boo stacking work requests so my team is busy. And then I realized that a simple project that I half-volunteered for can’t wait until I’m back, they’ll need it before then. So I had to do a ton of work to get it into a form that was shareable. Imagine 3 hours to send a doc by email with all the info together ready to be used.
Somewhere around 7:30, I realized I hadn’t heard any noise upstairs. Andrea had fallen asleep, and Jacob hadn’t eaten. I ran out and grabbed subs for us as it was too late to start thinking about home solutions with what we have in the fridge right now, and also realized that while I was binging work, Jacob basically spent the day all by himself again. FFS.
We have got to get our sh** squared away. That is not on.
So we hung out for an hour with him, played a game and then he was too tired to keep going. Not surprisingly.
For me? It was back to work. Another couple of hours and I have everything up, out, tasked, noted, planned, tweaked, filed, and my out of office is on. Somewhere around midnight. It was a long day. And I did all this so I can relax and take three days off without thinking about it. If I live long enough to enjoy it. F***.
Fifty posts ago, I started my “Today I Choose” series. The goal was a response, in part, to COVID isolation malaise. A feeling that I was in a holding pattern of sorts and wasn’t really making conscious choices about how I live my life. So I thought that perhaps I could focus on making at least one conscious proactive choice every day to move my life forward in some way. I didn’t have a specific agenda in mind, or even a clear goal from the choices, just the thought that making my choices more apparent to myself might have mutually-reinforcing effects.
Taking stock
Now that I’m at 50 posts though, I am going back to review them to see what those choices were.
Make choices
Make bread with Jacob
Complicated dinner
Contribute to groups
T-Rex
Flexible meal options
Right electrical gadgets
Blog
Learn about astronomy
Expand astro gear
Spoil my son
Safety over style
Simply read
Push myself on astronomy
Play more with Jacob
Time-shift my work
Two-week break
Upgrade my computer
Upgrade software
Reorganize data files
Treat for dinner
Play with glasses
Keep J home
New format for reading
Consolidate J’s files
Nuke old laptop
Assemble new TV stand
Start astro project
Offer astro training
Day off
New blogging workflow
Rearrange office space
Brave Ikea
Sick day
Cleanse the palate (nerdy brain stuff)
Revise gallery layout
Encourage son’s creativity (photography)
Clean up reorg space
Listen to nostalgia (music)
Musical rabbit-hole
Day off
Play a game
Purge
Search for the right tool (website)
Design a new layout (website)
Edit an old post (music)
Tackle the first part of the garage
Break rather than bend
Bend rather than break
Binge (WordPress and work)
It doesn’t take a supercomputer to analyse those 50 data points. Almost all of them are about one of four things:
Organizing my physical space
Organizing my digital space
Pushing myself on my hobbies
Managing social time for myself and with my family
There’s probably an “other” category, of course, but those are the main headings.
Organizing my physical space
I’m working on a huge reorg of our house layout, storage, functionality in different rooms. I dream that it will be done by October 1st, but I’ve slowly come to the realization that the date is probably irrelevant. I want to maintain momentum, sure, but I also don’t want to kill myself doing it. And I can’t keep up the pace I have been.
Most of it is about the physical movement of furniture or clearing out the garage and other storage spaces. Some of it is about aggressive purging. Or even just cleaning up the reorg space so it is less of a construction zone and more of a functioning room with some stuff piled against the walls. Other times it has been getting the right electrical gadget or the right table legs to make the setup work the way I want it to, rather than settling for what I have. Or choosing whole new furniture options like a new TV stand.
Organizing my digital space
I upgraded my computer and reorganized all my data files, but I’ve also been putting a lot of time into my website this year trying to get all the pieces and content where I want it to be. I have had to accept that I probably can’t get the configuration and software back-end to the level I would like it, at least not on my own, and definitely not without considering a massive nuclear option. I may have to go that route, but if I do, I’ll likely pay someone to do it.
I went even farther though. I’ve consolidated Jacob’s files, nuked my old laptop back to default settings, and even created a whole new blogging workflow for myself when it comes to photos. No stone left unturned, I guess.
Pushing myself on my hobbies
I’ve obviously been pushing myself on the website and blogging, but I’ve also done more on astronomy too. I’ve got two extra telescopes in my garage right now, although they are temporary for ownership. Helping out the local astro Centre. I’ve been pretty active in some online groups though, helping newbies with their scopes, and I even did two in-person training sessions here in town. Oh, and I even ordered some astro glasses, and started a huge project I have in mind for reviewing old astro magazines, culminating in some articles written for the local astronomy groups’ monthly newsletter.
Beyond computers and my astro fix, I’ve been trying to read more, including in different genres and formats. I need to get back into the Reading Challenge, but I haven’t been feeling it as much of late. I am however feeling a renewed interest in music, including an almost 20-year interest in the hits of yesteryear that I revised and revamped.
Managing social time for myself and with my family
I’m not sure that is exactly the right heading. Maybe it is more just “staying social in a COVID world” when it would be really easy to just hibernate. We’ve made bread, special complicated dinners, played a lot of games, building things like a T-Rex and a Lego Millennium Falcon + International Space Station. We’ve experimented with more flexible meal options, time-shifted my work at times, took a break at the cottage, took days off, etc. Spoiled him regularly to adjust for the isolation, and encouraged his creativity through photography.
And we decided to keep Jacob home from in-person school, going for the remote option instead.
So is my life “better”?
In short, I don’t know. I feel like a lot of the organizing and decluttering / purging is reminiscent of a phrase my mother used to like. “Shape up or ship out”. It’s a phrase she learned in the 1940s where if you weren’t pulling your weight at home, you would be sent overseas to fight. My father preferred the phrase “shipshape and Bristol fashion”, which originates from the seaport of Bristol in the UK. In short, it means basically “squared away”, a place for everything and everything in its place. Not that they ever had anything shaped up or squared away, but they liked the phrases.
I’ve never had everything squared away in pretty much any part of my life. Career, marriage, life, parenthood…they are all works in progress, of course. There is no “done” or “ready” state. Yet much of what I see myself trying to do is to strip away the detritus that lines certain parts of my life.
While my parents preferred other terms, for me it is more like getting my sh** together. Physically, mentally, emotionally. In a world that right now seems to want to rend those constructs and structures asunder.
And while I would be hard-pressed to say “better” was the right adjective for my current life with the “Today I choose” blogging, I am using it to remind myself that every day I have a choice. I can curl up and let the world rend my life, or I can push back. Not so much my old cry of “F*** you, universe”. More like, “Okay, universe, you do what you’re going to do. I’m going to do me. And today I choose that THIS will be part of the me I choose to create.”
Am I “there” yet? No. And I do have to remind myself there is no “there” anyway, it’s not the destination but the journey. Nevertheless, right now, I feel like I’m making progress. I don’t feel it every day, and maybe the 50 choices I made so far are not significant. Maybe I chose things that were easy. But they were still my choice.
When I embarked on this journey, I thought I’d probably do about 20 or 30 posts maybe. Doing my 50by50 goals was a lot of work to write about, and I wasn’t sure I was up to blogging every day. In an ideal world, the superficial habit formation research suggests that if you do something for 30 days straight, it moves into the habit world. I don’t feel like “conscious choice” is a habit yet. So I’m going to keep using the blog to measure my progress. To push myself. To hold myself accountable.
Today I choose to continue making choices, hoping to shape up instead of shipping out. To get my sh** squared away, shipshape and Bristol fashion.
I was out the door at 7:30 a.m., which is not that early NORMALLY, but in a COVID world, it is unheard of, in order to get to a health appointment with Andrea for 7:45 a.m. Easy for me, I watched Monk episodes on Prime while I waited.
Then drove Andrea home and went to McDonald’s to pick up a treat for the three of us — McMuffins for Andrea and I, hot cakes for Jacob. Then I was in meetings pretty much all day.
I don’t just mean a lot of meetings. I mean that I was in meetings most of the morning, went upstairs to grab lunch just after 2:00 p.m., ate at my desk while preparing for other meetings, did more work until almost 5:45 p.m., finished off some stuff on my computer in time for dinner at 6:30 p.m., and then was back to my PC at 7:00 p.m. for a night-time Ottawa Meetup for WordPress users.
The local group was presenting on Blocks, and since I’m struggling with a bit of block stuff, AND that I will eventually need to engage some of this community to help solve my WP problems, I need to make the effort to join in for their meetings when I’m available. I was practically asleep by 8:00 p.m. in my chair, and I can’t swear I didn’t nod off at one point.
Good presentation, got a lot of great info on things I didn’t know, flattening the learning curve in this instance, but it was 2 hours of extra learning tonight. Just in time to try out two collections while it was all still fresh in my mind.
I’m totally fried. Not completely in a bad way, just a really long day.
And tomorrow morning, it starts again with an early morning jaunt to pick up a telescope that is being donated to our astronomy group, so early morning volunteer work. Hopefully I can stay awake for some later meetings in the day!
The reorg project has been in full swing for some time, and part of the challenge is the mish-mash of items that are stored in multiple places:
Tools like small hammers or screwdrivers in the garage, in the first-floor alcove near the front door, in the basement where I have my desks now, and in the office upstairs;
Books in the bedroom, office, basement, Jacob’s bedroom, and even the guest room;
My clothes in the bedroom, closet, guest room, and front hall closet;
Housewares / camping items in the laundry room storage, main basement, alcove, garage, and basement;
Astronomy stuff in the alcove, basement and garage;
Sports stuff in the basement and garage;
Power tools mainly in the garage, but a couple of smaller items in various parts of the house;
Movies in the bedroom, basement, laundry room storage, and first floor;
Electrical stuff in the main basement, laundry room storage, and garage;
Video game stuff in the laundry room storage, main basement, and first floor;
Photo books in the office and bedroom;
Games in the office, bedroom, family room, living room, main basement, garage and laundry room storage; and, of course,
Papers in almost every place.
In most cases, that mish-mash made some sense on a case-by-case basis. But since I want to do some purging, it’s kind of hard to purge a collection of screwdrivers, for example, if they’re in three different locations. I pretty much have to put everything close to its final resting place before I can do a proper organized purge.
I have frequently called it a domino problem. For example, organizing some of the housewares and camping stuff is a bit painful when it is in at least two different locations, and moving it from one to the other requires me to move a bunch of other stuff out of the way to make room, which in turn means making room somewhere else for THAT set of items. Dominoes.
But paralysis by domino is a poor excuse / rationale for not being organized. And quite frankly, I don’t have the luxury of some of it anymore, not if I’m going to get my office working and organized properly.
I’ve already made a GIANT dent in the office and basement, Andrea has done a lot of stuff in the family room and toys from the basement to the office storage area, and we’re pretty close to being able to say things are all grouped somewhere. Like, “Okay, this is ALL the audio-visual stuff in the house all in one place, what am I keeping and what am I purging?”. It’s still not going to be easy on some of it to decide to get rid as much as I hope to purge, but regardless, if I’m going to finish by the end of September, there are two giant areas left untouched. I need to dig into them just to figure out what’s there even, beyond the general idea I have already. I still have the first-floor alcove and the garage.
Today, Andrea and I tackled the garage. Most of it was going through about 25 small shoebox-sized plastic tubs that had everything from screwdrivers to drillbits, from Allen keys to tape, and from screws to brackets for shelving. Some of it went GREAT. It was easy to see where things went, easy to group them, easy to dispose of some stuff.
Other areas were not so great. Like, for instance, a bunch of things I have for curtain rods. Which I would LOVE to get rid off, but Andrea and I have at least four or five places in the house where we want to change the existing window coverings. So it seems premature to purge curtain rod holders before we know what we’re doing for those locations.
I also haven’t quite figured out what I’m doing with multiple sets of sockets and wrenches that are all jumbled together. Most are labelled well; some are not labelled at all or worn away. I’m tempted to keep the newest and/or best quality set, and ditch the rest. I have this vision of two small tool bags, one in the garage and one in the house, both relatively identical with a good set of each size of screwdriver, for instance.
But as I said, I need all the sets together in one place to then start dividing them up properly. Today was phase 1 of the garage, and we went through two large shelves of small items. It took about two hours and wiped me out. While it didn’t empty large areas of the garage, it was the major parts that take time since we had to open each little box, sort through it, decide what to keep or purge, and even for the purging, seeing if it was something that Andrea could give away on the local “free” Facebook recycling groups or if it was just garbage. Or even if it was garbage, was it e-waste or chemical or recyclable or just plain garbage? A thousand little decisions and it’s exhausting. The electrical work is going to be worse as most of that will be just me going through it, today I had Andrea helping me decide.
The funny thing is it likely looks worse after we were done with lots of piles of things all over the garage on tables here and there.
Phase 2, which I’ll do sometime in the next two weeks, is also going to be a bit brutal. A lot of “big” things to decide if we’re keeping or not. Tarps that we found useful for x or y purpose, but do we need all of them? Some toys of Jacob’s in the garage … do we keep toys for going to the beach to build sandcastles? Which we haven’t used in 5 years probably? Are we keeping all the balls we have looking forward to maybe having a pool next year to play with them in? Or do we purge them now?
And a giant set of questions for me around what I’m doing with my astro gear. I have an option to build a small enclosed parking area in the garage to put a rolling wagon in that would let me haul all my gear to the backyard relatively easily. But if I take that option, I would keep some nails and screws, plus a bunch of wood, AND I’d have to get rid of the workbench. Or I can try to fit it in where there’s a wardrobe now, maybe even using some of the wood from the wardrobe to build the cover. Or do I scrap the covered idea, and then I can get rid of the fasteners AND the extra wood that is there. I am definitely not going to be building any more shelves, and so I have a bunch of shelving that can be purged. Unless, as I said, I build that astro box. Sigh.
25 days left in September, so it will be crunch time.
And these are not the only things left to do, just some big areas on the list that have to get going so I don’t end up having to repeat purging steps.
Today I choose to tackle the first phase of the garage work, with two other phases to go. We (Andrea and I) made good progress, but there’s still a lot to do.
So my last two posts about choices have been somewhat inter-related. I’m working on a project that I started some 17 years ago. I’m now calling it “A PolyWogg Guide to Music”, just cuz I like naming my projects. And I didn’t want to call it Dave.
The intent is that I will look at the Billboard top 100 list each year, as well as some other songs from the year that maybe didn’t make Billboard’s sales lists, and see what I think “endures” past the year. There are lots of songs I listen to from the 1980s or 90s and think, “How the heck did that chart?”. The song was mildly entertaining, maybe a bit of a riff that was catchy, but after one year, pffft, it was gone.
And back in about 2003, maybe even somewhat earlier, I started looking at the idea of doing every year. I originally thought, maybe I’d start with around 1980. And I did 1980’s list, made some playlists from it, burned some CDs, and I really liked the result. But the more I messed around with it, the more I started to see “missing” links to earlier music. 1980 was an interesting year to start with, as I saw some songs from the tail-end of the disco era, some others starting into the big hair phase, early sounds of what would become things like Miami Vice themes, etc.
At the time, I was just doing it to see if maybe there was a good way to do up killer playlists for myself. Then, as I started to see trends crossing years, the analyst side of me kicked in. Later, I was listening to a couple songs from about 1955, the early days of rock and roll, and a couple of songs were almost post-40s swing, a bit of R&B, and pre-rock.
It’s kind of a thing with me, casting my eyes backward on what came before. I would love to review all the Best Picture Oscar winners, so I started with 1927 and Wings. I want to review some award-winning mysteries, so I start with the first year of the Edgars. For a current project I am doing on astronomy, I’m starting with the first issues of Sky and Telescope from 1941.
For my review of music, the first year for which I have a reliable set of lists of top songs is really 1943. And while there are lists for R&B, soul, country, classical, jazz, etc., I am focusing on the pop and rock charts (often together). But that wasn’t what my “choice” was about today.
Today, I decided to fix a post. Over the last two days, I’ve made choices about ways to do the formatting and layout, or more pointedly, choices about how much time and effort I want to put into getting the formatting and layout right. I wrote the first post 3 or 4 years ago, and reviewed 1943. There were 117 songs in my working list, and I don’t remember how long it took me to go through them. The point isn’t to rush through them, maybe I’ll do 2 songs one day or 20 the next, it is just that I have a list to work from and I can take notes as I go, marking down ratings or even if the song has some sort of audio glitch in the middle and needs to be replaced.
Yet even if I get the formatting right (which I did) and finally decided on a working layout (which I did), the prose was NOT hanging together. The main pieces were fine, but there was something off with the flow. It had always seemed incomplete to me.
You should know something, I guess, about my editing style. I edit as I go. I am not a writer that plunges ahead, does a whole draft and then goes back and fixes things, nor do I write to an outline usually. If I am in THIS paragraph, and I start to take it in a slightly different direction than I was thinking 2 or 3 paragraphs back, I might finish the sentence here, and then go back and tweak that other paragraph before going on. I tend to think of it as my “edit” window is the last three paragraphs. They are constantly in pencil, so to speak, and as I go, I will indeed frequently edit something several rows back.
But this was more than that. I felt like I had no consistent flow, no real message, kind of like I was lacking a storyline or narrative. Which seems silly for a non-fiction piece, until I realized what I was really lacking was my normal voice. I had comments here and there, other facts I dropped in, but what was really missing was “me”.
So I stepped back and did what I used to do at work when reviewing speeches for Ministers when the flow seemed off. I basically wrote a reverse outline of what I wanted to say, and the problem was obvious. I had 2 or 3 pieces that were linked, but I had separated them by several paragraphs, so it was jumping around. An easy fix. But once in the weeds, I let my inner editor go crazy. Lots of places in the piece were expressed a little too casually, while others were more formal. I smoothed them out, made them more consistent, made them more “me”.
I spent way too much time on a few headings, trying them in regular text, then in a table format, as a large header, as a small header, as a header with multiple colours, and finally as medium headers with one colour and some italics for the song names. Then when I got to my final comments, I grouped them in order with a common structure and feel to them, so it makes a better sense of what I was trying to convey about my review methodology. All of which was helping “me be me” in the piece.
Why am I fussing? Because generally speaking, if I do this for every year from 1943 to 2020 and beyond, I want the structure right before I start, as well as the general approach to content. I hesitate to raise it to the level of saying that I want to do a “professional job” of it, not the right nuance, more just that I have pretty high standards and I feel like it finally meets them. Am I going to have any amazing insights into music that will revolutionize the industry? Hell no, I know less about music than most 11-year-old piano students. But I have views about what I think endures and adds to the cultural collective and what should probably remain a footnote.
I spent a LOT of time editing one single post. And while it IS 3500 words, my edit:writing ratio was pretty high for this one. I don’t know if it was really worth it, but I’m pretty happy with the result. A PolyWogg Guide to Music: 1943 – Pop is the first of many posts about music, I hope other people like them too.
