I’m not the most social of people, preferring a small group of close friends than a cast of thousands. For FB, for example, I know people with over 2500 friends…that number terrifies me. I’m not overstating that. It’s mind-numbingly scary. Me? I have 120 and once in a while, I have culled that to 100. I’ve picked up a bunch of work friends in recent years, so the number has grown and I’m okay with that. A surprise to me, I must admit.

But COVID has knocked even the most basic of socializing on its ass. Outside of family, I have had a total of four “social” visits in seven months. One friend from work, Sanden, we actually were going on meat runs together to the local butchery. We would arrange to meet at 9:00 a.m., stand in line behind each other and chat while we were in line, and then for awhile in the parking lot. A fake “social outing” that felt very rebellious.

Two others have been happenstance…I ran into two different friends on separate occasions while shopping and had a five-minute conversation while checking out.

And then there are our good friends, Paul and Mary-Ellen. Andrea met ME while on French training, Paul and I have a bunch of friends in common, and we get together several times a year. Sometimes it is for board games, sometimes just for Thai food, sometimes just to hang out and go kayaking at their house. Not so much this year, obviously, but back in June, Andrea and Jacob went kayaking with ME two weeks in a row while I sat on a socially-distanced deck chatting with Paul. One other time, sometime in the summer, we repeated the outing. It’s so rare, we can’t even remember when we did it.

Today, we went to their place for a campfire, some conversation, and to roast some marshmallows. Oh, and eat chocolate chip cookies. Our first social outing since August, I think, might even be June, other than family. It was heavenly. We sat around the fire, socially-distanced, and stared at the fire or the stars while catching up. I thought about taking Jacob’s telescope with us, and then realized we wouldn’t be able to let them use it too as ‘scopes require putting your eye to the eyepiece and there aren’t a lot of safe ways to do that properly. Sigh.

It also makes me a little sad that these types of carefree days have to be so formally planned. We didn’t go Saturday as J wasn’t feeling up to it, and we were also worried about me as I had something resembling pink eye. I think it’s just a sty, but we were worried about it initially. What makes me sad is that Andrea and Jacob need far more social interaction than I do, or at least crave it more, and even I am feeling stifled. I feel bad that Jacob can’t just be carefree while we do it, nor do we have an option to do the fire thing regularly. It is one of the few things from my childhood time at the lake that I really miss from time to time. I don’t want it ALL the time, but I do miss it.

Today I choose to spend time with our friends, in parallel bubbles.

What choices are you making?

So I had a bit of a strange end to my work week. I have mentioned, I think, that I retire in about 5 years, and so I expect that is probably 1-2 jobs in the public service before then, likely staying at my current level. I made a huge change about 3 years ago, screwing up a perfectly good job for what I hoped were greener pastures that turned out to be burnt crab grass. But you make your decisions going forward with imperfect information, and I don’t dwell when things don’t work out except insofar as I review what my emotions were leading me in certain directions. Understanding the choices I made, so to speak.

Anyway, I have a decent job, not the most exciting, and while I have had a couple of jobs available to me that would complicate my life, they weren’t anything that intrigued me. Then a boss offered me, or more accurately suggested to me, a change that would enlarge my duties, shift things around a bit, and generally give him a good solution to another problem, the proverbial two birds with one stone. And I said, “Sure, probably.”

But over the course of a day, as I had a couple of other conversations with people, a couple of them asked me the same question about an alternative I wasn’t considering and it got me thinking of the possible change not as a simple incremental tweak so much as a real choice. If I “take” the new job, it’s like choosing between my current job or the new one, not just adding to my duties. And I realized that I probably wouldn’t choose that second job in that A/B choice world instead of a simpler equation of A + some new stuff = B job.

And because I trust the people asking the question, and the way they framed it, I thought about it in a way that changed the options from A/B or A+x=B to A / A + x = B / C. Which is possibly leading towards a fourth option of D. It is not without complications to consider, but I’ve enlarged the conversation to include more variables about what I want to do with my last few years in government. And it might even lead to me choosing a single job that I will do until I retire.

Today I choose to listen to other people’s questions and it helped me improve my own questions and options. I’ll blog about it if and when things firm up more but it made for an interesting last couple of days.

What choices did you make today?

I have been feeling like a lot of my posts on my blog are mechanical of late. I have posts about trivia, choices I’m making, computer things I’m doing. Lots of experience, relatively routine topics. I wanted to poke myself to come up with something new.

I dipped into a book called “Question of the day” by Al Katkowsky that I got some years ago. I have others, including some that are tailored towards parties, like “Would you rather…” or “truth or dare” or “what if…” type questions.

But the one today also ties into questions of gratitude. It asked what debts you owe to people that you cannot repay. I had a blast writing it, and I’ll probably write about the same topic again next week, and maybe the week after, and maybe the week after that too. Hopefully not in as much detail as Part I about teachers.

Today I choose to ask myself a thoughtful question about who I owe.

What choices are you making today?