The Writing Life of a Tadpole

Star Trek: Picard – Season 1 (PWTVR00013)

September 27 2020

Overview

The new show takes place after the movies and the end of the Next Generation timeline. There has been what appeared to be an AI uprising and a catastrophic attack that led the Federation to ban all cybernetic organisms (like Data or more inferior copies) and to withdraw from helping the Romulans as their planetary system collapsed. Picard fought for both communities and lost, and he resigned from Starfleet. Now he sits in his vineyard estate and watches his body and mind slowly stagnate.

The first episode sets up the premise of the show with a bang. A young couple are hanging out, getting to know each other in an apartment, and suddenly shock troopers enter the room, kill the boy, and are targeting the girl. She goes into super combat mode, takes them out, escapes, and while she doesn’t know how she did any of it, she knows she has to find a man she has never met — Jean-Luc Picard. » Read the rest

Today I choose to grind it out (TIC00062f)

September 27 2020

For my website management, it is probably trite to note that some parts are more enjoyable than others. Writing posts is fun; managing plugin updates is not. Solving gremlin issues is not.

A few months ago, I revamped the site. Mostly because I had accumulated enough little management issues that my site was running slow and I was starting to notice irregularities in different posts. You would expect that if multiple people were posting on a site, the back-end admin area might get a little cluttered. People might save photos in odd places, for instance. But my site is all me. Everything should have a place and everything should BE in that place. More or less.

Most of the time, nobody would ever notice. Except a lot of my posts are part of various series of posts. And on one page, I used “blah blah blah – blah blah” as the title, and on the next, “blah blah blah: blah blah and blah”. » Read the rest

Today I choose choices over outcomes (TIC00061f)

September 25 2020

Some days it is really hard not to measure my commitment to making conscious choices simply by the outcomes that result. But the process of “making choices”, of doing so consciously, of recognizing what choices I am making rather than drifting, is the intent. It doesn’t mean I’ll end up with a perfect outcome or even a better outcome.

It is about being aware of my life and the choices I make throughout the day.

As a small sideways digression, people are sharing a popular twitter feed this week about advice from Nora Roberts about balancing work and life, with the idea that instead of saying you’ll keep all the “life balls” in the air and prioritize those over work ones, her advice was that there are glass balls that are fragile and plastic ones that aren’t as important. So you prioritize glass ones over plastic ones. Some days that means you might prioritize a big work project over a walk with your kid. » Read the rest

Today I choose to buck the new normal (TIC00060f)

September 24 2020

I went old-school today to combat some of the impacts of COVID isolation. Early this morning, I had coffee with a friend and coworker at a local Starbucks. She and I have future plans to do ice cream, etc., but today we started with a coffee at Starbucks. We wore our masks in the store, sat outside on the patio a decent distance apart while we noshed and sipped. It was so much fun, I made her late for her 10:00 a.m. meeting, just sitting and chatting. Like normal people used to do.

I posted to our work chat area that I had done that, and that it was almost worth having showered, shaved, and put on real pants to leave the house instead of living in track pants and shorts. I had whip cream on my hot chocolate, but if I had remembered chocolate or cinnamon powder to sprinkle on top, that would have put it over the top. » Read the rest

Today I choose to go to bed early (TIC00059f)

September 23 2020

I am, by all accounts, a night owl. Growing up, I had a LOT of trouble falling asleep. Literally hours sometimes tossing and turning and staring at the ceiling, with or without music, too hot or too cold, screen time, no screen time, doesn’t matter. This pattern has continued through-out my life where I go from semi-normal for me (midnight to 1:00 a.m.) and going until 8:00 a.m. to not being able to fall asleep and pushing it to 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., and waking up at 6:30 or 7:00 at the latest.

Which of course then likely ends up with a crash sometime around 5:00 p.m. Earlier if I let it, later if I push through. The last couple of weeks have been tough. I feel like I’m sleeping but not getting any REM. My sleep machine monitor says otherwise. But I’m fighting migraines, sinus headaches, and just pressure in general, and it is sapping my energies. » Read the rest