Tag Archives: today I choose

Today I failed to make choices

The PolyBlog
July 12 2020

I feel like from the time I woke up, to the time I’m writing this at night (9:33 pm.), I failed to make any good choices at all. There were choices in there, but I wasn’t conscious of most of them, and for the ones where I tried to make better choices, I feel like my internal scripts ran stronger than personal will.

The morning was relatively simple, since I had ordered groceries yesterday for pickup today. Nothing exceptional, basic stuff. Then I drove to a friend’s house who makes masks for friends and picked up new ones for Andrea, Jacob and myself. I had two, but had broken the strap on one, and the other is a bit small, plus Jacob had kid-sized ones that were too small. The new ones are both larger for the face (women’s sizes for both Andrea and Jacob, since they have virtually the same dimensions) and adjustable for the loop length. Neither activity is really an “active choice” type of blog entry though, more passive reception (for the groceries and the mask).

Then I headed out to Bell’s Corners to Dusty’s, a local fresh fruit and vegetable stand. I considered claiming that as a “choice” in that I’m going out of my way to support a local business, but it is not even really “new”. I did it last Sunday too, and while I did it today, I don’t feel that committed to it. I could easily go to any stand, it’s just a little more work to go to that one in order to support them. We’ve shopped there for a couple of years, so I’m happy to see them open again. I didn’t need much — some fresh strawberries, some blueberries, cherry tomatoes and a red pepper just because they seemed fresh and we might do nachos this week. As I said, I considered it for the blog, but I wasn’t really feeling it as an empowering choice. I have to buy the stuff somewhere, and it’s minor to buy it there. If they weren’t open, I’d buy it somewhere else.

For lunch, I used up some leftovers, nothing exciting there. I thought I might have something from the afternoon, as a week ago we went to Preston Street for gelato and I was thinking of it as a potential Sunday night tradition we could do in the summers. Except tonight, Andrea was booked for a call, so I was thinking this afternoon. Which meant Jacob had to come with us for the two deliveries and then we would go for the gelato.

And TBH, I think this is where I started to completely crash. Jacob has been lethargic for a bit now, doesn’t want to go outside, and just about everything we suggest, his response is basically “I guess”. Even when it is things that he chooses. Honestly/candidly? As understanding as I try to be of mental stuff, as lord knows I have my own motivational issues, it’s beginning to piss me off. Today, to get him to go out, since gelato isn’t his favorite, I gave him the choice of what we would have…Dairy Queen, gelato, Baskin Robbins, Chocolats Favoris. Something he could choose. He grudgingly went. We did the deliveries, he prefers soft serve ice cream most of the time so DQ wasn’t a surprise, and we started thinking about what we wanted. Jacob’s choice? A slushie. Really? We’re going to DQ just for him, so he can have the ice cream he wants, and he’s choosing a slushie? Sigh.

Whatever, moving on.

We get back home, Jacob miraculously feels better (who knows, maybe he was actually feeling off in the car because he does get car sick, and playing on his phone the whole time doesn’t help with that). So I need to do some electronic reconfiguration for his room, with a new power bar, charging station setups, etc. Nope, he wasn’t feeling it, he just wanted to crash.

Okay, why not? It’s Sunday, I crashed too. Recharge the batteries. Except I didn’t. I woke up with a splitting headache, everyone’s in a crappy mood, and despite the fact that I work really hard to never let my true temper show, I came pretty close to just letting fly at one point.

I shake it off, play Rovio’s new Angry Birds 2 (what was the earlier sequels called? Seasons?), distract myself. Go upstairs, Jacob is just lounging, doing nothing basically, and I wanted to do the charger setup. Nope, not interested right now. Let’s do it tomorrow. Don’t get me wrong, I gave him the choice, and probably 8:30 p.m. is not the best time to interest him in something new for the day, but I would have liked to make progress on SOMETHING today.

So I’m giving up for the day. I don’t know what the “choices” are that I have left to make today, but I am not optimistic that I’ll make any progress, so I am definitely resetting the clock on this Seinfeld chain. My record for consecutive blocking on choices stands at: 8 days.

I’ll take a 2 day hiatus for Monday and Tuesday to get my brain ready to go again, and restart on Wednesday. Let’s see if I have better luck for my next attempt.

What choices are you choosing to make today?

Today I choose to blog (TIC00008)

The PolyBlog
July 12 2020

That doesn’t seem like much of a choice, does it? I mean, how hard is it to blog? Or why is it significant?

For me, it was an actual choice today. Well, almost last night really. I was thinking, “It’s the weekend…and although I’ve started the “Today I Choose” self-challenge, did I want to perhaps adjust it so it was only a Monday-Friday thing?” Could I do the Seinfeld method of the longest chain if it was 5d on and 2d off?

So I debated whether I would blog today, Saturday. Things are a bit odd already with the “choice” challenge I gave myself. I spend the day doing my choices, I write up the posts at night of the choice I made that day, but then I write in the “present tense” even though I already chose. I’ve been playing with it in my mind, honestly, whether I should go back and change all of them to the past tense grammar to be “Today I chose”.

Except that isn’t quite the right nuance. I am not writing about a choice I *made* today, I am writing about the future-orientation of the choice, that today and everyday I am choosing to go beyond the minimum in some area of my life, actively and consciously choosing to do something that I want to do.

And I won’t lie, it’s hard to know what to write about each night. I could have written about making whole wheat bread today, or a trivia game we played tonight online as a family team (alas, we came 4th, but we’re blaming it on technical glitches). Or a few other choices.

But the one that felt like the biggest choice to me today was whether to blog about choice at all. I already blogged about an article I liked (https://polywogg.ca/articles-i-like-10-small-habits-that-have-a-huge-return-on-life/), so it’s not a question about blogging in general, I have no issues with doing that any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Literally, in some cases.

It was a question if I would keep the TIC series going or wait until Monday. I decided that I wasn’t satisfied with the idea that Monday to Friday I would work at making conscious choices and on Saturday and Sunday I would slack off, or turn my brain off, or whatever. It doesn’t count as keeping the chain going if I drop a couple of links on weekends.

So, today I choose to keep the chain going and to blog about my choices.

What choices are you making today?

Today I choose to support some social communities (TIC00005)

The PolyBlog
July 8 2020

Whenever someone is doing some fund-raising, I’m usually fine to support their efforts. I don’t often care too much what the organization is, as long as the person doing the fund-raising isn’t a whackjob that makes me suspect the outcome, I’m happy that they are engaging with some organization and want to support it. I don’t necessarily support the organization, or even care about it, to be honest, I’m doing it to support my friend.

$20 here, $50 there, whatever. It’s a social decision. Recently, our local astronomy group was wondering about membership fees for a number of members who might be struggling with their finances right now, so an option was created to allow others to give a bit of money to help cover those fees, since most of them are not waivable but go to cover per unit costs for magazines, books, etc. So I slipped them a couple of bills to help out.

But as an introvert, I am a bit leery when it comes to personal commitments of time. I have been the star party coordinator for RASC Ottawa for the last two and a half years, although this year is basically a bust. I suspect it will be my last as I have other areas to devote my time and interest. This past week, I started to canvas RASC members looking for people with scopes like mine who need help getting going. A bunch of people stuck up their hands who need other help than I can provide, but I was fine to do the survey. For those with scopes like mine, I’m going to set up a socially distanced night where we can all go to a parking lot somewhere and set up all our scopes, to see what we are all doing right / wrong and get everyone going. Someone else can help those with other types of scopes. One woman wants help with her husband’s scope out in Merrickville, and I’ll do that as a one-on-two type training. Happy to help.

Why did I do it? Because I choose to engage. I could ignore it, I could ignore the need, but a few years ago, I was in the SAME situation and drowning. I finally had to wave my hands big and high to get the equivalence of a lifeguard’s attention to help me, and I want to both pay it back, and help them pay it forward by engaging them now to help others in the future.

I also run a small book club for friends and family. It’s not extensive, we don’t discuss all the books in detail, it’s really just a FB group with about 10 active members and another 10 followers. I choose some themes each month, there’s always a reader’s choice option, and I track everyone’s progress at the end of the month and award simple little badges for their efforts.

Why do I do it? Because I choose to engage. I don’t “have” to do it, and even over the last few months as I have been overwhelmed or busy, I have let some stuff slide. Not keeping up with tracking, not awarding the badges. Basically, just noting what the goals are for a month and that’s about it. Remembering to like people’s posts when they post an update of a book they read. Yet I like the club, I like seeing people who don’t know each other except through Andrea and I interacting and finding common books they like or have read. Or others to read in the future. It’s fun. Work goes with it, but it’s fun. So last night I went through and did all the updates for May and June to catch up.

I am a member of the AstroPontiac board, mainly because I want to support my friend Stephan’s dream of building an active astroparc in Luskville, and because I have some computer skills to offer to run the website. Could someone else do it? Sure. But it’s easy to include on my website and host an active site for nominal cost. It’s not the fanciest design, but it’s functional, it meets the need. In English AND French.

Why do I do it? Because I choose to engage. I choose to help my friend, I choose to help build an astro community.

And then something showed up in my inbox yesterday. One of the big huge astronomy sites on the internet for amateurs and hobbyists is called Cloudy Nights. In other words, if you can’t do astro tonight because it’s cloudy, you can go to this site (on Cloudy Nights). If the people on the site can’t help you, the info you are looking for probably isn’t available anywhere. There are tons of sub-forums for outreach, technical discussions, photography, classifieds, reviews, etc. It has a formal sponsor from an astro equipment sales company, but it is pretty commercial-free. It looks a lot like an old-time bulletin board forum. Very much a 1980s, DOS-style design to everything. Millions of posts on there. Literally, an astronomical site for discussion. And sometimes? The friendly voice in the dark who tells you what you missed when your gear doesn’t work the way you thought it should.

The inbox visitor was a message from one of the big admins to all the members noting they were looking for new moderators to help run the site. One of my FB groups is also looking, but the CN one intrigues me. Most of the site is pretty well-defined, people know what is where, and you don’t often see an admin playing a heavy hand except perhaps to move a discussion from one forum to another when someone goes too far off-topic with a question. So CN interests/intrigues me in ways that the FB chaos does not. I set it aside for a day, and then today, I looked at it again.

They want people who have been members for more than a year; check, I’ve been there for about 7-8, the same length of time as I have had my scope, and even a bit before when I was choosing a scope. They would like people who are involved in several forum sub-groups, which I am, including Celestron mainly, but also some astrophotography, some other gear elements, etc. Computer expertise doesn’t hurt, although it wasn’t explicitly required, and they have training. But the only kicker was they would like an active member who has over 500 posts. I have around 100 topics that I’ve started and about 300 posts in total. I’m a bit shy of their desired total, but it’s not a mathematical eligibility requirement.

So I said, “Sure, here’s my specs for consideration.” Don’t get me wrong, they didn’t single me out and say, “Hey PolyWogg, we’ve seen your posts and you’re amazing, how would you like to be saddled with a bunch of behind the scenes admin/grunt work?”. They’re just doing a cattle call to see if they can help spread the workload. And maybe they’ll take me, maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll put me on a list for later.

Did I have to volunteer? Nope. So why did I?

Because today I choose to engage in a number of social communities and see if I can help.

I’m not saving the world, I’m just offering a helping hand. What choices are you making today?

Today I choose to make a complicated dinner (TIC00003)

The PolyBlog
July 6 2020

Back in about 2003/04, Andrea and I took a cooking course through the continuing education section of either the City of Ottawa or one of the school boards. It was a six-week course or so specializing in tastes of Asia, and each week was recipes from a different country.

Generally, as I recall (or as per Andrea and I talking about it tonight, while trying to explain to Jacob why I like the recipe), the class ran from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.-ish. It was over at a high school on St. Laurent, and we would leave work and take a bus to get there just in time. For the first 45 minutes or so, the instructor would walk everyone through the recipes and demonstrate some of the techniques to try that night. Then, we would break into about 5 or 6 teams and we would all make 1-2 dishes each, with lots of repetition. Sometimes it was 4 of us on the same dish, most of the time it was Andrea and me as a team making a dish or two. Since Andrea and I were still dating, and often ate out on “dates”, this was one of the first times we really made an effort to cook “together” and were happy to see we were compatible in the kitchen.

Around 8:00 p.m. or so, we would all get back together and share our combined efforts and eat. Supposedly there was supposed to be a bunch of conversation but by 8:00 p.m., we were all pretty hungry so it was more like wolves sharing a carcass of a hyena.

Each week, I think there was about 3-4 recipes in total and not all of them were keepers for us. Usually the result was good, but it was either too complex or too finicky for a technique or simply just not tasty enough to want to make regularly. However, there were two big exceptions to that.

I’ll mention the second one first. We have a recipe for siu mai i.e., a form of Chinese dumpling. Also written as shumai (and often pronounced that way too). Lemongrass, green onions, pork in tiny pieces, wonton wrappers. They were even fun to make and also easy to cook in a steamer. I have no idea why I don’t make them monthly other than I think a couple of other ingredients were hard to find at the time.

Our favourite story though is not about their taste (which is good) but rather about how we made them one night at Nelson Street, and the next day, with ingredients left over, I made up a bunch more. You know what? Chopped up lemongrass looks a lot like chopped up green onions. And when you use lemongrass in place of green onions and in the same quantity as the green onions, the resulting dumplings are rather potent. I can still feel the reaction. We ate them, but it was a bit deadly.

However, the real big recipe was a curry chicken. I have it on the website, although it needs to be edited aggressively for order and content. Plus add some pictures. (See https://polywogg.ca/green-curry-chicken-pwr00001/).

It is, arguably, one of the best recipes we ever make. But it is generally also the most work. I describe it as complicated, but really that is just because there are so many ingredients and so many steps. Although we have had the recipe for almost 17 years now, we probably haven’t made it 15 times in total. We did at first, maybe once or twice a year, often for special dinners like anniversaries. Since Jacob arrived, and given that it is a curry, we haven’t made it very often recently, maybe once or twice in the last 11 years. So we were due for another effort.

We tried making it yesterday, as it is really a weekend-type meal rather than a quick weekday one. Lord only knows what it is in a COVID, work-from-home world. But I wanted to do it. To make the effort. To say, “Today I choose” to do something other than what is easy, available or quick. I forget that it makes enough to feed an army and we’ll have leftovers out the wazoo though for future nights.

Our first problem for yesterday was groceries…I ordered an eggplant, but sometimes the website glitches if I go too fast, and while I know I clicked on it, it wasn’t on my order / receipt / pickup. We substituted bamboo shoots and water chestnuts instead. Our second problem was right at prep time. The last thing to chop was some chicken, and we had left it in the fridge a little too long. Normally, our fridge more than keeps things chill, but as I was cutting, I didn’t really like the smell. I have a very sensitive nose, and often overly sensitive enough to create false positives, but even Andrea didn’t think it smelled right. We had everything prepped and ready to go, and no chicken to put in the pot. Herbert Hoover would not have been happy with us.

We could have tried switching to thighs and defrosting some stuff, but we really didn’t have a good freezer option to thaw in the microwave. So we cooked the shoots and chestnuts, put the potatoes in water, put everything in the fridge, and ate pizza yesterday for dinner. Today, I ran out to the Metro and grabbed some fresh chicken breasts plus a few other things that I wanted for later in the week, as well as ran to Canadian Tire for garden hose (no, that’s not related to dinner!), and a local vegetable kiosk for some other things, now that they’re FINALLY open. It’s like there was a pandemic or something keeping them closed.

Interestingly, I chopped the chicken tonight, and then Andrea did most of the cooking with my handing her a few spice jars here and there and monitoring the recipe. It actually worked out okay that way, splitting the workload over two days. Something to think about for the future. I am determined to eventually adapt it to something we can nuke in a silicone steamer, but we’re not there yet.

It was different than usual, with a different consistency to our sauce, more potatoes, no eggplant, with water chestnuts and bamboo shoots. We even went easy on the curry as we wanted Jacob to try it. Not only did he try it, he liked it and ate it up. It turned out really well. Hopefully, it’s a promise of curries to come. 🙂

But mostly it’s a positive act of defiance. In a world where we get beaten down by time, workloads, other demands, once in a while we say, “Enough. We’re going to do a big recipe, with lots of ingredients, preps and steps. Because we choose to do so, not because we have to or that we should. We just decide.”

Today I choose to make a complicated dinner with my family.

What did you choose to do today?