Tag Archives: goals

My year in review part 1 – 2022 sucked canal water

The PolyBlog
December 30 2022

Each year, as January 1st approaches, I start thinking about the past year and my plans and resolutions from the previous January. I often have pretty ambitious plans, and up until a few years ago, I would say I did pretty well overall for any given year. I know I accomplished stuff, even if it wasn’t always as much as I wanted.

Yet, don’t get me wrong. I had impossibly long lists of options of things I wanted to do or at least work on, literally too many things to do in a single year unless I quit work, stopped sleeping, invented a really effective cloning technique, accessed time travel, or recruited henchmen and minions. And even then, it was probably too many things. That wasn’t accidental. The list isn’t meant to be a to do list in the normal sense, it is more of a master options list of sorts. In short, it is just a way of remaining ambitious so I don’t turn into a couch potato playing on my phone.

Last year at this time, I talked about the ghosts of previous years. I went back 31 years and looked at various docs from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. (https://www.thepolyblog.ca/the-ghost-of-new-years-past/)

As I went through that review, I identified some things that were important to me, some of PolyWogg’s Rules so to speak.

– Dare to dream but live in the real world
– An unexamined life isn’t worth living.
– To thine own self be true.
– Better I be a dolphin swimming with sharks, than a shark.
– Some of the saddest words are “unrealized potential”. Who begins too much, accomplishes little; who begins too little, wastes a life.
– 20% of your effort gives you 80% of your results, the remaining 80% delivers the next 20%.
– Being busy is not the same as being happy. You may not always be able to be around but at least be nearby.
– Every encounter deserves to be treated as sacred. There’s no such thing as a casual conversation.
– Never assume someone will say “no”, don’t be afraid to vocalize your desires.

The scary part though is that as I moved into looking at 2020, 2021, and 2022, many of the main items on my big to do list and my yearly to do list remained the same. I wanted to learn to bake, help Andrea and Jacob with their stuff/issues, improve my website and get into some astronomy areas, plus something “creative”. That kind of still holds for this year.

Wrapping up 2022

I often try to think of metaphors to bind years together. I was watching some YouTube videos as well as reading a recent post from Chuck Wendig, and a sense started to gel that perhaps 2022 isn’t a year at all. Not a standalone year. If 2020 was the lost year, and 2021 was merely a watered down echo year, then 2022 was supposed to be the rebuild year. The year that everything returned to normal. But in Chuck’s post, he noted a metaphor from his wife that 2022 was the mental equivalent of defragging a hard drive. After two years of everything getting jumbled across the whole disk, saved here / there / everywhere, a mental defrag realigns all the files back into some form of contiguous blocks. Extending the metaphor too far, you could even argue that some of those blocks had missing data, incomplete files that ended up just getting truncated or deleted due to gaps.

As I started the year, I had my paradigm (my development model, generally), and my tools for planning, plus my PolyWogg’s Rules. And it let me set some big goals.

Under Learning, I wanted to get a 3D printer. And I did. Well, sort of. I bought it in May, and then it sat in my basement for six months. I got someone in one of the local groups to assemble it for me in November, and it’s ready to go, but I have another big project to finish first before I let myself get sucked into playing. I’ll give myself two stars out of five for that one.

Under Reading, a lot of what I planned was my own Reading Challenge group. But something untoward happened early in the year with my online experiences, and I divorced myself from much of the online engagement I had created. The net effect of that was to remove my access to the Reading Challenge and send me off on a search for new homes for my engagement. I found a bunch, but they were too remote for me…if I do them or not, no one notices except me. As life intervened, I dropped almost all of it. I’ll give myself one star for this one.

Under Astronomy, I had grand plans that started with simple sorting and would have ended with trying out new scopes. The sorting happened, at least in rough terms, but nothing else did. One star.

Under IT, I had plans to set up a bunch of stuff in the basement, none of which happened, although I have done a decent job of sorting some stuff. Two stars.

Under Finances, I had some health claim stuff that mostly got resolved (some pieces outstanding) and taxes to be done (mostly by Andrea). We also pulled it together enough to switch all of our investments over to a better advisor, bank a bunch of extra cash, and generally get things in much better shape. Four stars out of five, although I could be convinced it’s five out of five since we went way farther than I thought we would on the planning / organizing side.

Overall, for those five areas under my “Mind/Intellect” quadrant, it would average out to about 2/5 per item.

In the Heart/Emotion quadrant of my human development model, Family is the first item. Looking back, it seems almost laughable. My goals were simple — help Jacob and Andrea with pandemic adjustments, plan some weekly family night activities, etc. I was looking to slightly improve our personal connections, a bit more support to my family if you will. I was not expecting that almost the entire year would be adjusted to only focus on this item.

For those who read my blog posts in the last year, you’ll know that we started the year with Andrea dealing with some lingering breathing issues and some leg pain. It was not entirely clear what it was linked to, only suspicions. Until we moved into February when it became obvious that her lymphoma numbers had jumped. After five years since diagnosis with no treatment warranted yet, it was time to start treatment. So she did. Six rounds of chemo, March to July. She was off work, some parts of the chemo treatment went well, some parts didn’t. Lots of appointments. Lots of trips to the hospital, labs, pharmacies, other things. While overall things went “well”, as they say, the mental energy required sucked all energy out of anything else. Other projects? Fuhgeddaboutit.

Was I the perfect father or husband for support? Nope. I didn’t suck, I wasn’t horrible, but I wasn’t the poster child of calm and support either. I did what I could, I suppose it is difficult to ask for more. But I found it really hard to balance work and family for the year. Many weeks I just felt pulled in too many directions, even after the chemo stopped, where I had to get Jacob to / from school, Andrea had appointments even for massage or physio, and I was trying to balance a busy work schedule around it.

In the end, I’ll give myself three stars out of five overall. I coped, I supported, I survived…I didn’t “thrive”. And some of that blows back too. Andrea could see me struggling with the stress, and if someone asks me, I talk about it. She doesn’t, she tends not to vocalize what she’s feeling, more able to articulate it in writing later when the immediacy is gone. Which is a vicious cycle for stress too. She wants to know what’s on my mind, but I can’t really talk to her about my stress without adding to her stress, yet she can’t articulate what she’s feeling, so I try to just push past it and talk it about where I can with others instead. In the end, I blog to release.

For Home, I’m a bit surprised looking at the list. I actually managed to hit most of the big items linked to organizing and purging. I’m almost completely done the basement, mostly in the last six weeks, and with Andrea’s help. I had hoped to finish all this two years ago and didn’t, last year and didn’t, this year? Mostly done. I’ll give myself four stars out of five.

Overall, for the two areas under my “Heart/Emotion” quadrant, I would give myself three stars out of five (heavy weight to the family side).

For my Soul/Social quadrant, it starts with my creative side and the Website Setup. Because I had some free time late at night, AND I revamped all my social engagement out of necessity back in February, I actually went pretty far in this category. I have reoriented both websites, added a new one for my niece, and maintained the other ones too. I actually went farther than I expected to last January, so I’m giving myself five out of five.

For Writing, I wasn’t surprised when the first 9 months of the year shifted in focus away from this side of my life. I did manage to add a fair amount of content to my websites, BUT I didn’t finish the HR guide that I recommitted to in November. I just didn’t have the mental energy to get there. I’ll give myself three stars out of five overall.

For Blogging related to reviews, I finished all my Book Reviews, added another 20 or so, AND moved almost everything over to a new format on my other site plus made new backups in OneNote that I’m pretty happy about. Five out of five, bumped by my joy and delight with the progress.

For Bloggables, aka other areas, it’s a bit hard to decide. I didn’t write about what I intended to write about. But I DID write a lot about mental health for the year. I’ll call it four stars out of five.

For Photography, the only thing I did was do a basic start on GIMP editing. I’m organized, but I’m only giving myself two out of five on that one.

For Volunteering, I had greatly reduced my commitments. I finished off stuff for RASC National, and still did the audit of the RASC Ottawa books. But I gave up star parties, offering only advice to the new person. My effort was more than I initially thought looking back, so I’ll give myself four out of five stars.

Overall, then, for the Soul / Social quadrant, I averaged around four out of five, being a bit generous.

The Body / Health quadrant is often high on my priority list and low on my accomplishment list. For official Health, I wanted to focus on some basic stuff. I had started Ozempic as an injection, but it wracked my stomach too much and I couldn’t increase the dosage to something particularly useful. I dropped some weight, but not enough. Later in the year, it started to inch back up. I had planned to switch to a new doctor until I met him and saw the way he runs his practice. Hour-long waits were not uncommon, jammed in a small waiting room like sardines. Jacob and Andrea switched, and I thought about it enough to fill out some forms, but in the end, I decided to stay with my current doctor. I hate her bedside manner, but by the end of the year, that wasn’t an issue — she left to do something else (permanent or temporary, I’m not sure), and I have a new one. Sign me up and call me happy. What really took the hit, though, was mental health. I thought 2022 was going to be the year that I moved away from pandemic “survival” into something resembling rebirth, and instead everything else got washed away to focus on either work stress or home stress. Call it two stars out of five.

I felt good at the start of the year for Fitness. I had the workout machine set up, I’d figured out the plan for the year, and then life went in the crapper and I stopped just about everything. Call it zero stars out of five.

For Cooking, I didn’t have huge ambitious plans. Some basic stuff that I wanted to do to expand my horizons a bit. Instead? Not much. We have an air fryer and have done a few new recipes, plus a new toaster oven, but overall, zero stars out of five.

For Activities, I had about 20 little projects, mostly creative outlets for myself, and I did absolutely NONE of them. Some similar ones show up under other headings, and while I could compensate in those other areas, these ones had no such luck. Another zero out of five.

Overall, for the body quadrant, I averaged zero out of five.

I had some ideas throughout the year, little mental boosts here and there. A series of additional “fun” things to help perk up my day — I did none of them. I worked on some reorg stuff at the start of the year, and it took me the whole year to get back to it. I planned stuff around some “themes” for projects, and then my life focus changed. Zero progress.

One small project, similar to that of the reviews, was to recreate my “TBR” pile of all the books I want to read, not just the ones I’ve reviewed. I’ve made a fair amount of progress on it over the course of the year, and I’m quite happy with that progress. I didn’t think it would be as much work as it is, I drastically underestimated it, and it may take me several years to plug away at it to the “final” version so to speak. But it’s some progress at least.

Other elements

So I gave myself:

  • 2/5 for mind/intellect items;
  • 3/5 for heart/emotion items;
  • 4/5 for soul/social items; and,
  • 0/5 for body/health items.

Overall that would be about 2/5 on average. And you know what? I’ll take it. Cuz this year was mostly about survival. The fact that it isn’t negative or that I’m not literally dead is probably a win.

One giant piece is missing from my list, and it’s hard to write. Not because it’s emotionally difficult; rather, I feel at a loss for how to nuance or describe it probably in the right context and perspective. It’s my career. I’ll look at that next.

#MoreJoy – Day 31 of 31 – NaNoWriMo

The PolyBlog
November 1 2021

For those of you not familiar with the acronym, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing in a Month. Ignoring the awkward construction of the title, the premise is simple. People around the world are encouraged to write, write, write every day for the month of November — binge-writing, if you will — to produce a 50,000-word manuscript.

There are LOTS of views about NaNoWriMo, ranging from “everybody just writes crap, it’s quality that counts” to “what a great way to just blast through and remember what’s fun about writing.” There is an equal number of views about HOW to do NaNoWriMo, including from those who plot and plan in advance (plotters/planners) or who write by the seat of their pants (panters).

But I really enjoy the premise. This isn’t a Hallmark commercial thing, the “organization” that came up with the idea is a not-for-profit. Sure, there are lots of commercial options out there tied to NaNoWriMo for trackers, notebooks, mugs, websites, webinars, writing groups, etc., but at its core? It’s writers talking to writers and encouraging them to do nothing more than put their butt in their seats and write. Maybe the 50K will never amount to anything more than the wordcount itself. Maybe you’ll never turn the doc into a book or even look at it again. It’s a small writing milestone where the journey is the goal, not the destination.

Most Novembers, I ignore it. At least, I don’t aim for 50K, I don’t join the community groups, I don’t post updates, I don’t “do” NaNoWriMo in conventional terms. I often try to write a bit more, maybe blogging, for example. Or editing.

This November, I’m fully committing to writing SOMETHING, I just have to choose which WIP, as I have three that are up for grabs. Although, technically, there are six, I suppose, but three aren’t ready for primetime.

My HR Guide

I have been promising / threatening to finish the damned doc for four years now, and I never quite get around to writing it from beginning to end. There’s a solid old draft, and I do bits and pieces, but then I think of something else and I restart a section. Or COVID hits and everything changes for the process. Or there are tons of “new” features to talk about in each section. It is truly evergreen, but I want to FINISH a version in time to release it on January 1st as the 2022 edition. Fortunately enough, it was about 50K words for the 2017 edition. Not a novel, not a lot of “fun”, but a workable product.

My Astronomy Guide

This one is probably too nascent in development to really start blasting through. A couple of the sections I could do easily enough, but there are some that require a lot more research before I can write them. Not really the best option for a NaNoWriMo binge if I have to keep stopping to research stuff. I’ll pass on this one.

Novel 1 and 2

I have two novels in mind for a character, whose initials are CC, and that’s about all I’m going to say at this point. I started writing #2 some time ago, and I was struggling with too much exposition to try and deal with some extended backstory. Until I realized that the main problem was that the novel shouldn’t really be the first book in the series. I actually needed to start with Novel #1, because a whole bunch of stuff that comes up in CC01 is enough to have a whole separate novel, and much easier to plot in linear order than constant flashbacks as a first novel. So CC02 is definitely “out of contention”, I have to do CC01 first. The problem? Well, there isn’t one. I could easily choose CC01 as a perfectly valid choice for NaNoWriMo. It’ll probably be closer to 80K, but that’s a small detail to be ignored. My only hesitation is that I feel like if I get sucked into the novel, I might never come back to finish my HR guide. Perhaps “work before pleasure” is the better side of writing valour?

My Performance Guide

This one is so far removed from development, it barely qualifies as an idea. And yet a little bit of work and I’d be off to the races. But I would never finish my other guides, and the performance guide can wait until I retire. I may even have a chance to do some preliminary work that will make such an endeavour easier but might be a conflict of interest, although more “perception” than “real”. So that one is out too.

Novel Series, YOTG #1-12

For a very long time, I have had a movie projected in my head. It’s disjointed, some parts are missing, but it is a story told in at least 12 parts. Over the last 18m of COVID, my view of that series has changed. I thought it was something I wouldn’t touch until I retire. And yet a few times recently, I’ve had a sudden flash of a scene that was missing, giving me an enhanced feel for YOTG01. I know what happens generally in #01 (80%), 04 (30%), and 12 (60%). I don’t feel I’m ready to write these novels, that I can’t do them justice yet, my writing ability isn’t good enough for them. So, again, a pass. I won’t be able to wait until my retirement to start them, but perhaps 2023 at least. I’m ruling this one out.

WIP Showdown

The showdown is between my HR Guide and my first CC novel. The pros and cons are relatively clear…

I want to finish the HR Guide, it is more “pressing” so to speak, and if I spend the next month on the CC novel and perhaps carrying over into December, I might not finish the HR guide by January.

The HR Guide is a manageable project, I know exactly what is required, and I can finish within the month. It’s almost a guaranteed win. The CC novel, by contrast, is still stuck in the opening chapters, and I am not sure yet if I’m sure who the extra suspects are, let alone how I get them all to the murder scene to make them viable suspects. Which means I could get stuck half-way through and NOT reach my NaNoWriMo goal.

By contrast, the HR Guide is NOT a novel, nor is it a new project. The whole point of NaNoWriMo is to blast through something new. Am I cheating by having something in draft mode, even if I have to completely re-write major portions of it? Novels work well for the binge. A guide? Not so much.

Yet the CC novel would be scary fun. I literally have no idea where parts of it will go, and I know sitting down at the keyboard, the words will come from somewhere. I know my style well enough to know that I can “dream my solution” as I type, although it may mean going back to cut some of the drivel once I know the path. Smoothing out the story trajectory, as they say; eliminating meandering streams of consciousness, as I say.

Pressing and manageable vs. new and fun?

And the winner is…

The HR guide. Another thought occurred to me, which is that if I do the novel first, I’ll likely push the guide back another six months. On the other hand, if I finish the guide in November and edit it in December for release in January, I just might be enamoured enough of the novel to start writing right away.

So I’m going to finish the HR guide for NaNoWriMo. Jacob is going to join me in the writing quest. He’s working on a novel, probably middle-grade level, with a likely length somewhere around 30-40K. He has a title and even the cover. I don’t know if he’ll stick with it, but I’m already proud of him for trying. Of course, he’s already a published author as part of a group writing course he did last summer, so he’s got a leg up on me. Maybe he’ll give me tips as we go. Andrea’s going to write some stuff for ToastMasters as well.

Writing as a family for NaNoWriMo? That sounds like #MoreJoy to me.

#MoreJoy – Day 29 of 31 – Music lessons

The PolyBlog
October 30 2021

I have almost no musical ability at all. I can’t sing, I have no rhythm for dancing, I can’t play any instruments. I hope to learn how to play a song or two on our piano just to keep my brain agile as I get older and for fun, but I admire those who can play anything. Even a kazoo if they can do it well.

So I’m not saying that I am taking music lessons and am enjoying them.

No, I mean that I enjoy that Jacob is doing music lessons. I like listening to him practice, I like his recitals when he participates. I like occasionally when I’m listening that he’ll play a couple of the older songs he learned a few years ago that I really enjoyed. Like even This Is It (the Looney Tunes song).

He’s not ready for a concert hall performance, of course, but he could be doing chopsticks, and I’d enjoy it. Well, for the first hour anyway. Just hearing him play anything brings me #MoreJoy.

#MoreJoy – Day 28 of 31 – SupperWorks

The PolyBlog
October 30 2021

I mentioned earlier that I do most of my grocery ordering online, and have been since about week 7 or 8 of the pandemic. Over the years (of life, not the pandemic), Andrea and I have experimented with a few “food boxes” to have them delivered to the house. Some were “fresh veggie” orders and others were special meal collections, but while the convenience was good and the contents were quality, we found sometimes the portions were off or we were getting things we wouldn’t normally choose to eat — sometimes we were choosing three dishes out of 7 for example, but only really liked two of them. The other five weren’t terrible, we didn’t hate them, it was edible, but they were often not dishes we would care to repeat. Or, for one box, the prep time was frequently off the chart. It would say “ten minutes”, and then Andrea and I together would spend 30-40 minutes. Not a great solution for a week night.

SupperWorks had a different model. It was designed, generally speaking, for you to book a spot in their calendar, go to their store, and assemble the ingredients into packages yourself. They would have perhaps 8-10 “work stations” set up for different meals, such as a glazed pork chop recipe at one station and a stew at another. You would go in, go to a free station set up for a specific recipe, and follow the directions. Kind of like an IKEA store but you assemble all the ingredients in the box yourself. For example, you would put two tablespoons of soy sauce into a bag, and then add the pork chops, a dozen or so other pre-chopped ingredients, and seal the bag while attaching a label with the cooking instructions. If you wanted a bit more soy or a little less maple sugar, you could adjust your assembly accordingly.

You do this a few more times around the store, essentially pre-assembling all the ingredients for a few meals, and you’re good to check out. When you get home, you freeze everything you can and any time you want to make one, you take out a bag, thaw it in the fridge a day or two before, and then just follow the instructions. Everythings is already pre-assembled with the right quantities and ready to cook.

It’s more expensive than buying all the ingredients yourself, but it is all pre-assembled and ready to cook. No re-measuring, you’ve essentially prepped all the meals in advance, with the store doing most of the sous-chef duties for you. At first glance, as I said, it might seem expensive, but my wife does most of the cooking and is generally frugal, and even she considers it value-for-money for prep and meal-planning options.

Some people used to make social outings of it. Find a friend or three, book a night, and go and assemble while chatting. It’s hard to have more than two people at any one station, and you might not all want the same recipes, but it was easy enough to find open slots. Weekends, weekdays, weekday evenings.

The pandemic messed that business model up entirely, of course. People couldn’t be in the store wandering around and touching all the food stations, even with having to wash your hands between stations so there’s no cross-contamination of foods (to prevent allergic reactions). You could always pay them in the past to pre-assemble the meals for you, but the cost differential was not insignificant. Take into account the fact that you were already paying a premium for their sous-chef duties, and the price of pre-assembled packages could get out of hand quickly. Not to mention the need for a large freezer to keep everything!

SupperWorks pivoted with the pandemic and now everything is pre-assembled for you. It’s the only option. But we like the meals, partly because we get to CHOOSE which foods are in our order. No need to pick something you don’t like to fill a quota; no need to pick something with a huge prep time.

Prices vary as do personal thresholds for cost. They have a cheesy mashed potato-bacon casserole that we like, and yes, we could easily make it ourselves. This is more like a store-bought one, but tastes fresher. It runs $14.00 and is big enough for all three of us for a meal. That’s not bad for price. Meanwhile, we also have Cranberry Chicken with Apples, done up as a split meal (instead of serving 4-6, we split it into two orders to serve 2-3, which is just right for the three of us usually). With the full meal split, we get six servings for $48.00. Some orders come up with sides, some don’t. Lots of DIY sites could offer the same meal so you could get it down to less than $4 per person instead of $8, mostly by buying in bulk, buying stuff on sale or in lower-quality cuts of meat, and substituting sweat equity for cost up-front.

We find that we (aka I) tend to slightly over-order in a month, so if I do two months in a row, we tend not to order the third month as we are too backed up in the freezer department. If you reorder from month 1 to month 2, you get a discount for month 2. Similarly for subsequent months. Discounts range from 10-25%; my discount for October was 15%, and I ordered five different types of meals.

First, there are the full meals split into two meals each. For this category, I ordered Cranberry Chicken with Apples, Maple-Kissed Pork Chops, Creamy Lemony Dilly Chicken & Orzo, and Italian Herb-Crusted Pork Tenderloin. They’re a bit heavier than we normally eat, so we don’t often do more than two in a week, and often only one, hence why with four meals split into eight dinners of three portions, we often end up having to skip a month after two orders in a row.

Andrea and I are often of two minds on these ones. The meals are excellent, no issue there, and it’s nice to have all the prep work done, BUT Andrea also sells Epicure and it wouldn’t be that difficult to Epicurify the recipe to do it ourselves. Except we would have to do all the prep, have all the other ingredients ready, plan in advance to do all of that, etc. These are easier, and particularly so for mid-week meals. The only other catch is that Andrea’s version would likely be better than these ones, after a bit of experimentation. Still, it’s a pretty good set of dishes and makes for easy meal-planning.

The second category is what I considered fully pre-assembled meals, like the Cheesy Mashed Potato-Bacon Casserole. Basically, you open it up, wrap it in tinfoil, throw it in the oven, and you’re done. They’ve already got it fully ready to cook, no additional assembly is required. These are pretty close to just store-bought, and can’t be split.

The third category would be soups and sides. I ordered Asiago-Herb Mashed Potatoes and Andrea chose a Butternut Squash and Coconut Soup + Italian Wedding Soup. But the one I am excited by, and I’m surprised to ever utter these words, is a Maple-Crumble Mashed Sweet Potatoes. Here’s the thing. We don’t really like Sweet Potatoes. Yet I accidentally ended up with it as a side for something small last month, and it was AWESOME. So I ordered a full-sized one for this month.

The fourth category on the list is lunch-time meals. They’re kind of like small TV dinners, I suppose, except it’s higher-end obviously and often smaller versions of the larger dishes for the month. They’re about $9-$10, you throw them in the microwave to cook them from frozen, and they are good lunch-time options for work to have something hot for lunch when we don’t have a lot of time. I picked up an Apple Maple-Glazed Chicken, Dad’s Favorite Meatloaf, and a Quinoa Veggie Stew (yeah, that one’s not for me hehehe). I did a turkey dinner one in October around Thanksgiving which is how I ended up trying the sweet potato side, and they’re pretty good for a change of pace.

And finally they also have some dessert options. Most of the time, these are like the storebought solutions, pop them in the oven to bake, and voila! One Fudgey-Fudge Brownies. Pretty rich, though. SupperWorks also usually throws in some sort of extra bonus, which is often six chocolate chip cookies, ready to bake. Pretty good ones too, no mess or mixing required.

Some people do hard-core ordering each month with 2-3 per week because they love the time advantage of avoiding prep or the convenience of weekday cooking after working all day. Some do it because they love the taste.

We’re not hard-core, but we are regular customers. Because the meals bring us #MoreJoy. And inspire us sometimes to find a personal recipe version of the meal to do on our own.

#MoreJoy – Day 27 of 31 – Jacob’s growth

The PolyBlog
October 28 2021

It likely goes without saying that parents get more out of kids than they ever expected, and that is certainly true for me. I couldn’t fathom my life without Jacob right now, how empty it would be in comparison. That isn’t a slam against anyone else, not my wife, friends or family, just a reality. He is the centre of our being.

I like seeing him get taller, so there is the physical growth. Getting out of the carseats I mentioned earlier this month, going towards more independence.

But a bunch of little things happened this week. We tried on last year’s winter coat, the one we’ve had for two years at least for him, and he’s finally outgrown it. Similarly for his snowpants. We already got him a fall jacket, and he’s wearing that this week without a liner, and he has one to get him into colder fall before he switches to the winter one. We already have a new hat for him and gloves. We’ll need new boots likely later this week. Those are small things, but it isn’t something we do often. They are small milestones. We picked up some pants and some shirts while we were at it, and he went in the change room all by himself instead of with Mom or I helping him. Another little milestone.

On a far bigger scale though, he has agreed he needs a bigger desk. Something that Andrea and I knew 8-12m ago, but whatever. He’s agreed. And he wants a monitor and separate gaming keyboard and mouse. He’ll keep using his laptop for now as his CPU, but we’ll add peripherals around it for him.

For both the monitor and the desk, he went online and found what interested him. He compared features, price, reviews, etc. Some of them didn’t have much info, but his rationale for each choice is sound. Maybe not exactly what Andrea and I would suggest, but it’s his decision, and they’re viable. Maybe they work out awesome, maybe they don’t work out great. Either way, we ordered the desk and bought a new monitor, keyboard and mouse today. He’d like us to buy him a full gaming PC too, but I’ve argued him back to trying it the way it is for a few more months and I’m hoping I can extend that to 2y when he starts school. Of course, if he starts playing Call of Duty-type games that have more graphics needs, I might not be able to hold out that long.

But he asked good questions at Best Buy and Canada Computers, he had opinions about what he wanted and didn’t, and overall, I was a trusted advisor/interface for his negotiations to help him get the info that he wanted, but in the end, it was mostly his decision.

And afterwards, I talked to him about things like commissioned sales, things we sometimes have happen when we’re dealing with salespeople who are eager to sell vs. eager to help. He saw that the first person we dealt with at Best Buy was more like “here’s what you should get” before even asking what we wanted vs. the person at Canada Computers who asked us how we would use it, gave us all the pros and cons, dealt with some misinfo I had about GSync vs. FreeSync tech for compatibility, etc. It was why we went to CC after BB…the salesperson at BB “flamed out”, and so we went looking for more help, which was what CC provided.

Yet, even with all that aside, one of the best parts of the day was that Jacob had a long conversation with one of his teachers today. He’s struggling a bit in PE with things everyone else can do and he can’t. Or at least, not anywhere near their level. A test done a few weeks ago was done to be inclusive but accidentally singled him out as not being able to do it…he bombed out at level 1.3, while the next person didn’t bomb out until 24 levels later (3.7, with ten sub-levels in each phase). So we’ve exchanged as parents with the teacher, just conversing about other options for him, and today Jacob told him what he wanted. Which is a milestone of self-advocacy on its own, and was his choice. He didn’t need us to write back on his behalf, he can do that himself in person. Which he did.

But the awesome part was that when he got in the car tonight, he COULDN’T WAIT to tell me about his day. He talked to the teacher and told him what he wanted to do. And then they talked about this, and the teacher told him about that. And then this happened, etc. A whole story from the conversation with the teacher, sharing blow-by-blow with us. After computer shopping, he went into the house, and went STRAIGHT to Andrea to retell it all again.

I sent an email to the teacher tonight to share the “bump” that Jacob had after the conversation, and to basically say, “Nice job, dude!”. That is the second time that he has been superexcited to talk about someone, and both times it was because they knew what CP even WAS. I think we’re seeing some craving there for a CP-type connection, or at least a connection that is direct to Jacob’s experiences.

It’s been a big couple of months for Jacob with back to school, and a new school at that. He’s adjusted to a lot. And he’s handling it well, for the most part.

Being proud of him gives me #MoreJoy. How could it not?