I headed out of town for a few days, and while I had planned to keep blogging while I was away, I didn’t have a good internet connection on my laptop. This is starting to annoy me a bit…several times I’ve been hoping to write something, or work on a project, and my laptop is just struggling to do anything with the internet. I have a good tablet, I have a good phone, but I need to figure out a different option for online access where I need to be typing stuff. I was offline essentially for 5 days, so I figured I might as well drop the TIC series, it was just too hard to write.
And yet it wasn’t just about the writing. I was also struggling in the environment I was in, a basic holding pattern, to really feel like I was making conscious choices. All I could do was hold still. I thought about tricking myself into saying the TIC “drop” or break in the chain wasn’t my fault, but I could have still kept making choices even if I didn’t write about them right away. But I didn’t feel like I was. So it definitely has to be thought of as a clean break and takes me to series f.
Now that I’m back to the house, and at my desktop again, I’m a bit out of sorts as to what in my long list of things do I want to work on. One thing that is attracting my interest is that I have a series of blog posts that I have written but which are stuck in editing limbo because I haven’t quite figured out the right layout and format for them. I solved some recent layout issues for music, although not completely, and for book reviews, although again not completely. The structure is done, just some of the editing and population still needs work. Which is fine, no issues there. Just a question of time and discipline.
My TV reviews were a bit more problematic. Or at least they seemed to be. I have only compiled 12 of them on the website, 8 seasons of Castle and 4 seasons of Continuum. To do the reviews, there are a number of variables for consistency:
Format of the page title;
Layout of the actual review itself, including two images;
Four or five headings to structure the review;
A graphical representation of my overall rating of the season;
Closing signature block;
Two links to other reviews or the show on IMDB.com; and,
A list of the episodes for that season.
I knew generally what I wanted to do, based on earlier wrestling matches with the seasons of Castle. But I was not completely thrilled with my review of Castle – Season 1 (PWTVR00001). There was something about the start of it that kept nagging at me, like I didn’t have something quite right for format or design.
But I just had a similar problem with my music reviews, and I realized for that one that it was more about flow and repetition. Could this be the same problem? It was. For some reason, I had started my review with some text that should be paragraph 2 and 3, and buried my lede for paragraph 1 farther down. A bit of editing, some rearranging, some deletions, and voila, it held together. Now that I could see what it SHOULD have said, I could figure out the rest of the headings and framework. I then replicated it 7 more times, moving 8 reviews out of “pending” and into “published”.
I had a different problem with Continuum. I had tried formatting it earlier to sort of / kind of match the Castle layouts, and for some strange reason, I was getting a really weird layout as a result. Sidebars went missing, featured images weren’t aligning properly, word wrap was doing things in weird places. All four posts / reviews were messed up. And while I would love to know what the problem was, it was easier to just copy the text to a notepad, thus stripping out stupid codes that were messing it up, pasting them into a whole new post with the proper TV review formats and structure, unfortunately redoing some links here and there, but in the end, fixing 4 more posts.
Thus completing 12 TV reviews that were pending and giving me another big strike-through on my to do list. If I want to move on to other reviews, I can. And I will in time. But for now? The previous 12 are fixed, published, and done.
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.
So, yesterday I wrote about how I was overwhelmed and had, by default, chosen to break instead of bend (Today I choose to break rather than bend (TIC00048d)). A bunch of things were piling up, and when they overwhelmed me, I dropped.
Today, I’m trying to find a bit healthier way to adjust, but I have to start with a negative. For those who have dipped their toe into my posts about “today I choose”, you know that I’m numbering them, and while the numbers go in regular order, I’ve been adding a “series” letter to the end. Those basically are my Seinfeld tracking for the choices — how many days in a row I can go without breaking the chain. Well, although I did indeed make a choice yesterday, even if by default, it was not a positive choice about how I want to live my life. Which means I have to reset again, going from series “d” to series “e”. Not a big deal for anyone but me, but so far I have:
July 5th to July 12th: 8 days in a row
July 16th to August 6th: 9 days
August 7th to August 18th: 12 days
August 20th to September 7th: 18 days
I’m happy to see the chains getting longer, but whether it is making a difference or not, I haven’t been able to assess yet. Soon, I will.
Anyway, the point is that yesterday was a break, as I said, in more ways than one and today I have to restart the chain with series “e”. And with the restart, my choice fell to looking at something that was not really the cause of my break but rather what failed to mitigate it. Namely, my approach to my website.
I confess…
So, if it isn’t obvious, I love having my own blog. With 1.5M words and almost 1500 posts, I also know that I’m probably in the top 10% of all blogs anywhere for production and unique contributions by a single author: me!
I like wrestling with the words of a given topic, figuring out what I want to say, how I want to say it. Putting my stamp on things. I like the fact that I’m up to about 150-200 hits a day even if most of them are here for my HR guide or astronomy help when I’m blogging about lots of other things. I have almost 200 book reviews on the site, ones that I put time and effort into writing and nuancing. Do they get many hits? Hardly. But I love the process.
But managing the website creates some challenges. I never want to commercialize or monetize my site. It will never have advertising nor likely to have affiliate links (tried that for Amazon for a bit, but I didn’t really like it). I am not trying to turn it into a side hustle for money, I don’t want to offer training courses. Maybe, at some point, I’ll turn my writing into sales products, but that is as far as I want to go. So then the question becomes, “What am I willing to invest in the site to keep it personal?”.
I tried other blogging platforms, I like WordPress. But right now there are three things that would improve my website dramatically, and I’m not doing them. First and foremost, I can improve my search engine optimization. I played with that on the weekend, along with the next two items, and it is part of what messed up my site. I used to use YOAST SEO and forget now why I removed it, I think it was conflicting with something I wanted more, and I tried Rank Math over the last few days. Essentially it prompts you on how to structure your pages, and gives you a score for the page. For example, if one of my key words for the site is book review, then it should appear in the title of my post, I should make sure I use the verb review repeatedly including in the title, I should add it as ALT text to any pictures on the page. A lot of stuff that I have ZERO interest in doing.
Because I realized that while I don’t want Google to block me or anything, I really don’t particularly care where I rank on most things. Most people using my site come to my site for MY site, not because of a google search. I’m not serving the world, a page at a time, most people who find my site are doing so because they are looking for something VERY specific to my site, and on those searches, I rank in the top 10. So why am I trying to kill myself on SEO? It’s an enormous amount of work to switch formats over to match what they want, and some things I tweaked and the system still said “0 points” for my tweak. In short, I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m not willing to invest the time and energy for something that is merely a “nice to have”. It’s not what my site is about.
A second thing that is problematic is my use of tables in a few places. They are NOT, as they say, “mobile-friendly”. But equally, some of my other design choices are not mobile-friendly either. I should be running CDN caching, not local caching, so that a fast site like Amazon AWS can serve my graphics and videos much faster than I, all behind the scenes. But I kind of like having my site keep it local. It’s silly, it’s not efficient, the tweaks are easy to make, and I just don’t want to do it because it goes hand in hand with the third element.
Namely page optimization. In other words, my site is slow to load. The infamous “they” recommend that a load times should be under a second. Some of mine go to 3-4 seconds to load the whole page. That’s NOT because I’m wordy, it’s not about the content, not really. Some of it is the local full size images, sure, but most of it is that I’m running a lot of plugins, a lot of things load every page run, I have a lot of style sheets that are getting called, and my HTML file ends up being quite long. None of them are dreadful, but each one slows the overall page a little bit. I tried running some minify scripts over the last couple of days, combined with better remote caching, and a few other tweaks here and there. I was basically following tips / best practices on how to speed up the front end and back end of the site.
I did accomplish it, things sped up. And I hated the way it looked on the front end. Every time the page loaded, for a quarter second, it looked like some stupid DOS based HTML link page with no formatting. Ugly as sh**. And I would really love to not have it be slow, but I don’t know how to fix that, and honestly, I don’t have the time or energy right now to learn.
Let it go, let it goooooo?
So I took a bit of time today during a break from work to undo all the stuff I had done in the last couple of days to try to improve the load times. I didn’t even really remember them all, so I had to go to the tip list and work my way backward undoing certain things. I hadn’t uninstalled the OLD way of doing things, but I had installed a bunch of new stuff that I had to remove. And then reactivate the old stuff.
Hell, I even considered some nuclear options in there first, like blowing everything off and uploading the content fresh again (more like an export / import situation), and I even was considering switching photo galleries or moving everything to Flickr. It sure would make my life easier in many ways, and Flickr will now let me have videos if I want. Tempting. If Mylio’s direct upload to Flickr was working, I’d be seriously tempted to go that route. But in the end, I reset back to the way it was, no need to go nuclear.
It’s a personal site, it’s mainly for me, and if it runs a bit slow, well, f*** it. At least for now. Maybe in a year or two if I feel like it, I’ll hire someone local to upgrade and optimize the site, basically to clean out a lot of crap that is probably clogging the setup. Which sounds simple, just letting it go, but it really isn’t for me.
Is the issue significant to the site? Yes.
Do I care about the site? Absolutely. It’s my in virtual form.
Do I care enough about this issue RIGHT NOW enough to be screwing up my site? No.
If I had a magic wand, I’d do it. But I don’t, and I have to accept I’m not good enough in WP to figure it out, at least not anytime soon, maybe not ever. I could probably renovate the behind the scenes system, strip the walls back to the studs so to speak, but I’m barely keeping my head up. I can’t let it add to my stress nor can I have it failing to mitigate it. I need the f***ing thing working well enough to use, even if it gives me lousy rankings on speed or search engine optimization. I know generally WHAT needs to be done, but not enough about how.
And I just have to let it go. I want it, sure, but I can’t really have it. Kind of like my observatory problem.
The part that is hard to explain is that to accept it, and to let it go, I have to accept that it is beyond my mental abilities to figure out. I can accept that I’ll never do 4D mathematical modelling, sure, nor calculate rocket trajectories into space, but basic setup of a website with WordPress? That SHOULD be something I can figure out, and it’s just not coming together for me. So I’m setting an upper limit on what I can do. I’m setting an artificial cap on my site that it will be “this good” and no better.
I rarely do that. Maybe it’s arrogance, maybe it’s confidence, maybe it’s naivete, but I like to believe the hype that you can do almost anything you put your mind to, outside of physical realities. But this ain’t one of those situations where I can live that belief. My site is about as good as it is going to get unless I pay someone to fix it.
Which leaves me back where I always am, focusing on the content. I can DO that, at least for now. Long term? If my brain starts to deteriorate to the point I can’t even write, I will likely not be the type to rage against the dying of the light but rather more likely to find a nice hospice in Vermont to end things. That’s the true nuclear option I guess.
For now, I’m in the world of being flexible on my standards and accepting a lower quality outcome than I would like for my website. I don’t really have a choice, but I’ll pretend I’m choosing to accept it.
Today I choose to bend rather than break, and I’ve put my site back to the way it was, even fixing a stupid problem with commenting that I caused on the weekend, thanks to Matt pointing out it wasn’t working. Yay, I fixed a small problem at least!
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.
