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Setting goals for 2021 – Part 2: Family, home and reading

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
January 4 2021

As mentioned in my previous post, I already have much of my goal-setting broken down into various categories, so I’m using my well-established headings that work for me.

Family

I always struggle with this category from a philosophical perspective. “Family”, as a category, is not particularly amenable to goal-setting. But some parts are, and it those parts, i.e., organizing myself better, that I am targeting. This year, most of the effort is going to focus on five areas.

First and foremost is emotional, mental, and physical support for Jacob. We’re working on some potential surgical options for him for later this year, and while the surgeries are relatively straight-forward, they are hard for him to understand and process in advance. He’ll need help and guidance with that so that he’s comfortable with the decisions and the process. However, far more importantly, the potential rehab activities afterward can be quite extensive for some of the options. It’s a potentially tough road ahead, or at least some serious bumps, and he’s going to need every ounce of support we have to get through it in a positive mindset. On the more mundane side, we also need to set up an appointment with a new dentist for Jacob.

Secondly, I think there is a grouping of activities around “projects with Jacob”. We certainly have new Lego kits to build, including a couple of large ones. Other projects include assembling a robot, fixing J’s remote control car, constructing a paper penguin, some “Sonic Dad” projects to do with Jacob, and Jacob has a new paper airplane calendar that looks fun. I’m also hoping to do some monthly challenge ideas with him. Andrea does jigsaw puzzles with him, so I think those are “covered”, as they have a bunch to do. I have a bunch of Kiwi kits for Andrea and I to do, but I suspect those will be awhile.

The third area is grouped around the games we like to play as a family, as Jacob has been wanting to teach me Fort Nite for awhile and we do have Pokémon cards to try at some point. And we want to design some new cards and cheat sheets for a couple of our existing board games (Dice Forge, Q of Q). But Jacob has also taken board game design at summer camps and we want to transform two or three of them into actual printed games. Overall though, I think I might start blogging about board games too, based on perhaps a series of in-house family game tournaments we might play throughout the year.

The fourth area is larger, more about our family events. Most of them depend on a vaccine letting us return to travel, but we’ll likely take a decent trip once everything is “over”. Depending on surgery outcomes and recovery, of course.

The fifth and final area is about larger family stuff. I’d like to do some ancestry stuff that I’ve been putting off, and miscellaneous family stuff here and there.

Home

This area is huge. In fact, it is so massive, I’m not even sure sub-categories help me weed through. I’ll separate it from large-scale “home” changes requiring contractors vs. internal reorganization of various rooms by us. I’ve blogged before about feeling overwhelmed, and well, now you’ll see why.

a) For outside, we had initially planned some landscaping work before COVID. Some better setup at the front of house, edging perhaps, maybe some flower bed-type edging in the backyard. We also need to fix our fence (it hasn’t been replaced since the original build, 20+ years ago), and while the back is in good shape, the two sides need a lot of refreshing. We’ll likely just replace the whole thing. We’ve talked to the neighbours already, and one asked us to wait until Spring as they have some stuff just inside the fence they didn’t want disturbed before Winter. Since they’re also willing to pay half for their section, it’s all good.

Then COVID hit, and we’re considering a pool. The pool, though, is the easy part to design. The real challenge is the location of the heater and pump, in relation to the existing deck, fences and house. We can do “a pool”, but keeping all the other dimensions in play may make for a smaller pool than we might want. If we can’t get it done, we’re likely to go with a trampoline for Jacob and back to an observatory for me. Farther out, we would also like to redo the main bathroom upstairs plus the ensuite, but that also has some implications re: surgical rehab, so not sure how we’ll get to that soon. Two other things that were on my list were xmas lights (we didn’t get them up early enough this year so just gave up on them) and additional roof vents (identified as beneficial way back in our home inspection). We’ll likely have to redo our roof at some point, so we might be able to combine the timing for those two things.

More simply, we are also looking forward to eventually getting back into having cleaners come to the house, even if just for the bathrooms and kitchen primarily. And be more engaged to do this frequently ourselves in the meantime.

b) That first area ranges from minor (trampoline) to major (pool). This second area is about a massive reorganization in the house, with changes in contents for the basement, first floor, second floor, and even the garage & shed. Some of it is already done, but the huge list is intimidating.

Basement: As I mentioned early, I now work out of the basement. I have the basics of my office organized for work, but I’m still tweaking the setup for my home PC as well as filing (two things to be moved from the top floor and one to be assembled), lighting, hanging pictures, and curtains. Mixed with my office is a built-in crafting space. Adjacent to the office is my “fitness area”, with a Bowflex and an exercise bike to be assembled. I have my old stereo sitting in a cabinet, ready to be hooked up and configured so I can stream from my phone, but haven’t got to it yet. When I get to my media area, i.e., the TV room part, I don’t currently have my internet running to the VMedia box nor a PC set up to stream to it. I also have multiple video game systems to attach, although at least I have the TV stand already assembled from earlier in the summer. Somewhere in there I have to purge a bunch of old electronics, set up one of the Amazon Echoes that are waiting to run, sort through my movies, get rid of all our old CDs (once the library takes donations again), and clear off an area where we / I can display our various projects that we’ve built, aka a trophy area.

Laundry room: Our laundry room doubles as our basement storage area, and we have some camping equipment in there, some housewares, some basic household maintenance stuff, and long-term storage of some older electrical and computer equipment. I have a bunch of books in there to purge, but at least I’ve started on that, even though it is a longer-term project (3-5 years). Two things are hiding in the back area, hinting at larger projects. First, we have a replacement sink for the laundry tubs. Something a bit cleaner than the older one that looks like it was used to clean paint buckets at some point. In an ideal world, I’d love to have BOTH hooked up, one clean and one utilitarian, but that’s probably overkill. I’ll need a contractor at some point to do that, and we’ll likely use whoever does the upstairs bathrooms. I also have a small project to do, likely myself. Jacob and I bought Andrea a Christmas carousel last year (or the year before???) and there is “some assembly required”. Basically a bunch of pieces need to be formally glued in for the thing to work safely. We just have never got to it, nor even had a space for it. Oh, and I almost forgot. There’s a small access panel / window into the laundry room from a hall, and I have a couple of parts to install on it to stop the door from falling off. 10 minutes work if I can get all the parts and tools in the same place at the same time!

Garage: My garage is currently a disaster zone with a ton of dominoes to fall in order to finalize the layout. I had a small brain-fart earlier today that may upset half my design, I have to do some measuring first. But WHEN I do decide on the final layout, I have to store some sports equipment and tools (we already have the bookshelves assembled for those), and I have some decent options for my astronomy equipment (although a future observatory option would solve most of that dilemma, while ANYTHING is better than it currently sitting in the playroom). But what is outstanding is a decision about the workbench that I have that was a gift from my in-laws. It’s a great workbench, just can’t decide if I use it enough to justify the amount of space it takes. And I could put it in the basement instead but I’m loathe to do that and lose use of it for woodworking projects (I wouldn’t want to blow sawdust everywhere down there).

Shed: My backyard shed is relatively straightforward, I mostly use it to store my snowblower in the summer and my lawnmower in the winter. Plus various seasonal things that don’t have other places to go (like bicycles and sometimes golf clubs). Jacob has new golf clubs and unfortunately, I have three mixed sets spread between the shed and the garage which need to be consolidated and sorted. Plus for fun, my summer tires are stored in there during the winter.

Front hall with a small alcove: Back inside the house, we want curtains for the front closet, I have to relocate my drone to somewhere more appropriate, and come up with a new storage option for the bookshelf that is there (I’m thinking an old-fashioned desk of some sort would be really nice there. Maybe a roll-top? Not sure I can sell Andrea on that config). Oh, and I have a new e-deadbolt to install when I remember.

Living room: Our front room is not spared from the list. Most of the basics are covered, but we need to hang some pictures and paintings, I’d like new curtains for the bay window that will go close to full dark, and then just for fun, we probably need some new seating (couch or chairs) along with a new coffee table, and potentially an end table.

Playroom: The room next to our kitchen is where Jacob does his daily schooling, it’s our home for our annual Xmas tree, it houses all of our game collection (which is still growing), and a table for ongoing crafts and projects like puzzles or Lego projects. It needs a good vetting of content, as well as improved lighting, hanging some pictures, regrouping of games and trivia collections, an Echo set up for the first floor, and new window coverings for it plus the adjacent kitchen (either curtains or blinds that match).

Andrea’s office: While the basics are covered with a decent design, the room would benefit from hanging some pictures, setting up an Echo for her while she’s working, hanging a map, and getting new curtains for the West window and potentially the East too.

Guest room: The GR is functional, but would benefit from hanging some pictures, and adding new curtains. There are also two projects hiding in the room — one to repair a Casio organ whose speakers are dislodged, which should be an easy fix, and a much larger clothing purge for some of my old clothes.

Main bedroom: Like pretty much everywhere else, I need to hang pictures and curtains. We also need to come up with some sort of reading chair option for Andrea, purge some contents from bookshelves and then move them elsewhere in the house, and purge more clothing.

Stairwell: You might be forgiven for thinking the stairwell escapes modifications, but I’d like to hang some pictures on the walls.

Yep, that’s a really long freaking list. No wonder I’ve been overwhelmed.

Reading

With that long to do list, who has time to read? I do! I do! 🙂

At least I hope I do. The main “thrust” for my reading for the year is my own PolyWogg Reading Challenge, and for January, the books are:

  • A. Reader’s choice – any book
  • B. Category: Humour
    • Book 1: Any book by David Sedaris (Amanda Graham’s suggestion: When You Are Engulfed In Flames)
    • Book 2: Any book by Harlan Coben (My suggestion: Deal Breaker, the first in the Myron Bolitar series)
  • C. Challenge books
    • Book 1: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
    • Book 2: A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

I’m reading Harlan Coben at the moment. We’ll see if I get to any of the challenge books. I also have a bunch in my TBR pile, including some gifts. So those are on my list. A separate list, but “on the list” nevertheless.

I’ll keep the Reading Challenge alive for the year too as it provides a small measure of socialization too.

Other reading include lots of things I’ve saved in my email in a “bloggable” folder about a variety of topics. I’m hoping to curate those saved files over the course of the year, but maybe that is more about “writing for my blog” than simply reading.

And I should also mention I’m running the Penguin and Penguee Book of the Month Club for Jacob and Andrea all year.

What am I going to do in January?

So that’s my big list for the year. What am I going to include for January?

  1. Start a medium-sized Lego kit with Jacob
  2. Paper airplane calendar with Jacob
  3. First monthly challenge — memorization
  4. Play Fort Nite
  5. Cheat sheets for Q of Q
  6. Clean house more regularly
  7. Finish organizing garage
  8. Finish organizing office area of the basement
  9. Make a list for curtains and blinds
  10. PolyWogg Reading Challenge
  11. Book of the month club

Do you have any plans this year for family, home or reading?

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Setting goals for 2021 – Part 1: Health, fitness and cooking

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
January 4 2021

I like the process of goal-setting, reconfirming my sense of “me”, what’s important to me, to think “how do I want to spend the next few months of my life?”. That’s not really true, though. Like the cliché that no battle plan survives an encounter with the enemy, no life plan survives encounter with, well, life. So, while I like planning, and it gives me an illusion of control, I also know that I’m really planning about 10% of my life. Most of it is already set by previous decisions — choice of career, marriage, having a kid, working for the government, working from home, where I live, etc.

My goal-setting is really about how I use about 2 hours of day of non-linked time. And sometimes it is just going to be about vegging out (like the Pretty Woman quote, “Yeah, be still like vegetables, lay like broccoli.”) or spontaneous side-quests. But other times, when I feel like being productive, I can choose what I’m working on, projects that are important to me or that I think I’ll enjoy.

I already have much of my goal-setting broken down into various categories, so I’ll use the headings that work for me. Note that they are not in a specific order of priority, this is from my tracker. When I have the full list, I’ll worry about prioritization then.

Health

This category is about specific health concerns, so obviously the first thing is to stay healthy. Following pandemic protocols, continuing isolation, keeping the family safe. But honestly? That’s part of life now, not really a goal. I mostly just have it on my list so I’ll remember that I’m spending time and energy on it. Or having energy sucked out of me by it.

More pointedly though, I’m worried about my spending too much time in a dark basement with no light, so I’ve bought a Seasonal Affected Disorder (SAD) UV light and need to get that going. I also need to get curtains on the windows down there so they don’t have to be completely blacked out. I also have a social worker that I use for occasional chats about mental health, which I may continue; I want to get into meditation; and I have a gift card for a small B&B that I had hoped to use for a weekend getaway by myself at some point, but that will likely need to extend past COVID, alas.

I’m also monitoring headaches/sinuses and a sore on my leg, but those aren’t really a priority. I’m hoping my fitness goals below will have some benefits for this part too, but I’m also going to keep seeing chiro to keep my back in shape, particularly given that I’m spending a lot more time sitting at a computer.

Fitness

My fitness goals are much more ambitiously detailed. I’ve restarted tracking my weight, and have a spot to do it on my iPhone which will be easier than what I had been doing (mix of tablet and desktop). While my weight has been holding steady during the lockdown, I’ve lost muscle. Which explains how my girth increased, my stomach is larger than it was as evidenced by how my shirts fit and some less-than-flattering photos in October to December. Just as building muscle can initially increase weight, since muscles weigh more than fat, I’ve replaced less muscle with more fat. Sigh. That just won’t do.

Initially, I’m going to make sure I get out of the house twice a day for a walk, hopefully with Jacob (11:00 and 3:10 are good times for his schedule). But even on days when he can’t make it, I still need to go. It’s a small step, hehehe!

I have a small workout area almost ready in the basement, and hopefully we’ll (all of us) be able to use it for yoga and stretching videos. I need to get a good stretching routine going. But the real “boost”? I need to assemble a BowFlex and re-assemble our exercise bike. My goal is to have both up and running by February 15th. When the weather improves, I also want to use my scooter more. Of course, once I get the Bowflex and exercise bike up and running, I can merge it with walking, riding, and other activities into a larger fitness regimen.

Jacob and I are also going to go to the driving range at Hunt Club. We may have to do a lesson or two to get J and I back into the “swing of things”, so to speak, but that’s easy enough to do as the Kevin Haime school is operating there.

Cooking

This category is a bit of a double-edged sword. While it obviously serves the overall section if I’m managing to cook and eat more healthy foods, the real goal for me is just to make more things from scratch (usually healthier) and to do more of the cooking rather than leaving most of it to Andrea. Recipes help me do both. However, not all the recipes, such as the desserts, are going to be about health choices. Some are just tasty. 🙂

I tried to get a baking and cooking challenge going last year to help drive trying out new recipes, but it kind of fizzled. So I’m deleting that group.

Beyond that, let’s start off the category with some good old-fashioned bread. While, maybe not old-fashioned. I have a new bread machine that I want to use more regularly as well as some other tools for doing bread by hand.

I also would like to do more for breakfasts, and that likely starts with re-finding a good recipe I had for crépes. I also want to make ice cream, tiramisu, and come up with a really good apple pie option, as well as my mom’s peanut butter cookies that I miss.

Beyond those, I am going to give an attempt at a really complicated cassata recipe that a friend gave me years ago. But most of my energy, I think, will be more around trying out recipes of certain types:

  • More insta-pot recipes;
  • A special short-ribs recipe;
  • Some Dutch-oven recipes;
  • Ground beef recipes;
  • Some from the SEB Cookbook we did for GCWCC;
  • Some from the Coconut Lagoon book, a gift from Andrea and Jacob; and,
  • Some from a new subscription service for Jacob called Raddish Kids (i.e., “radical dishes for kids to cook”…we have a Thai one that is really good, we quite liked it).

I’m tying the “new recipes” in with family time with Jacob too, cooking them together when/where we can.

What am I going to do in January?

So that’s my big list for the year. What am I going to add to my plan for January?

  1. Set up my UV light in the basement.
  2. Go to Chiro every other week.
  3. Track my weight.
  4. Walk daily
  5. Finish setting up the work-out area
  6. Make bread.
  7. Try one new recipe per week, hopefully with Jacob.

What are you going to start your year with in the area of health, fitness or cooking?

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My personal progress in 2020

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
January 1 2021

Frequent readers know that I’m “big” on goal-setting annually, ripping off the New Year’s resolutions bandwagon timeline to do my own version of symbolic timelines, goal-setting and progress reporting. Bullet journals, self-help techniques, the Seinfeld method — I read about them all when I see a new tool. Radical incrementalism is my motto, and I’m willing to steal from any technique that might give me even a 1% improvement in my efficiency.

My overall system is aligned with the fundamental precepts of any good planning system:

A. Know where you’re going;

B. Plan how to get there;

C. Set milestones or markers for yourself along the way;

D. Monitor your progress; and,

E. Regularly restart the process to ensure the original destination is still your true goal.

And just for fun? Remind myself that the destination is not always as important as the journey. Singular focus is great, but just like in video games, side quests are fun too.

So let’s see how I did for the year.

1. I survived

Good news, I extended my streak to 52 years for the number of years I’ve managed to survive on this planet. I’d like to say I “lived”, but as I wrote about earlier (What I tell myself about 2020), it is more like “existing” than thriving and growing.

But it was a tough year, and I survived relatively intact. Financially, emotionally, physically, mentally. All were challenges, all were met. Not all equally, not all “well met”, but met nevertheless. I, and my family, are doing okay. Could we be happier? Sure. Could we be healthier? Sure. Could we exercise more, invest better, learn more, adapt better? Sure.

But given the level of the challenge, I’m calling it an accomplishment to not simply curl up into a ball and not get out of bed. I’ve been THERE before, and oddly enough, despite the challenge, I didn’t really come that close to that stage this year. It was tough, I had other mental and emotional issues going on, but not paralysis.

2. I adapted to working from home

I’d love to say I took to WFH like a duck to water, but I didn’t. Andrea and I started off sharing an office, but that wasn’t working, and I eventually moved everything to the basement. I have a decent setup, but even workflows took a while to get “settled”. I love not commuting and to be candid, I never want to go back to working in an office. But I didn’t really feel like I hit my stride until September when I took on the charitable campaign as my “surge capacity” file in my team, mostly relying on me to be the “surge”. Between regular files and the “extra” files, I accomplished a lot. Some in teams, some alone, all of it “pensionable time” as they say, but I mean productive time. In short, at certain times in the fall, I totally rocked being able to WFH.

I’d like to say I managed the work/life balance better for helping Jacob, but that’s a work in progress. We did have lunch together every day, something that wouldn’t be possible without home-based work and school.

I still want to retire in 5 years, but if I’m still able to WFH then, I’m not as against extending by a year or two, if it helps our finances and I have interesting work. I like my new files, made a small change in job responsibilities in the fall, and I feel like I’m on a good trajectory.

3. Purging and reorganizing

With the lockdowns, I started working on reorganizing a ton of stuff in the house. While I’ve stalled in the last month, I’m probably 75%-80% of the way there. I’m feeling less motivated to finish, but it will get done. It’s taking me way longer than I hoped, but I’ll get there. Hopefully by the end of January. I’ll write about it when I get there.

4. Astro outreach

I had an outreach session set for March 14th before the world shut down, but in the meantime, I’ve done some writing on my blog, outreach online to newbies both generally and with some people directly, and I even did two direct in-person sessions before deciding it was just not distanced enough. More risk than I was comfortable with continuing. Probably not “bad”, but not worth the risk.

5. Website redesign

I undertook a massive redesign of the back-end of my website way back in January / February. WordPress had moved to a new “block” design interface, and I had been resisting making the change-over. Ultimately, I decided the longer I held out against the inevitable change in tide, the more difficult it would be to adjust later, so I bit the bullet and did a deep dive. I had a long list of things to do, and if I was going to “fix” things, I figured that I might as well fix them all. Given the volume of content, this is probably the last time I can make changes to individual layouts myself. If I decide to do something like that in the future, I’ll probably have to pay someone who has better tools and workflows to do it efficiently.

Back in September, I summarized the changes (PolyWogg 5.0 – Ten significant updates to my site) and declared to myself that I was now at version 5.0 of my website. As mentioned, I switched my site from the classic WordPress editor over to using blocks. It was a massive undertaking to do that, some 1300 potential posts and pages to convert, but I bit the bullet and did it. I also improved the look and feel of my site (featured images, signature blocks, a calendar / date out to the left, more mobile friendly, limiting the use of tables, etc.) and figured out a way to better handle book reviews, movie reviews, humour and quotes. I also improved things on the back-end for myself (updated the admin menu, figured out auto-posting to social media, namely FaceBook and Twitter using Buffer again).

Between the reorg, and new blogging this year, I have 416 refreshed or new posts since January 1st last year. Overall, I’ve increased the volume on the site to 1487 posts + 160 pages, for a total of 1,588,374 words. Yep, 1.6M words in total. I find that number staggering, personally. Particularly as I don’t “blog” just to post, I post when I have something to say to myself, others, etc. I know people who blog just to have new content, that’s not me. I also haven’t done much in the way of guest blogs (two from my wife about her hobbies). The rest? All me.

I also did a deep dive on a coding conflict that lots of people with more expertise than me had said “couldn’t be done” easily. And I found a solution. Mostly because I thought outside the box. I was pretty happy with myself for that one. Oddly enough, I’m also doing a bit of support for a couple of new areas (WordPress, the gallery tool I use) for people who are struggling to make it do what they want.

And I added some basic Trivia to the site, while also doing substantial additions on photo gallery management, even if it doesn’t necessarily show on the front end.

6. New writing

Early in the year, I started working on an update to my HR Guide, and while I’m happy with the direction it’s going, I didn’t make a lot of progress. The original plan was that Andrea would serve as my first reader/editor, but it was becoming challenging for timing, layout, etc. to do it in digestible chunks so I think I’m back to just me again. I had hoped multiple times to get it finished by the end of the year, but other life events tended to intervene when I was working on it, and it’s not like there is any formal deadline.

I’ve also been a bit slowed by a weird echo of an earlier decision. I reorganized the website, and I solved one problem that also created several others that I didn’t foresee. In the old layout, a bunch of stuff was spread across posts (not pages) and there were different versions of the posts. The end result was that people trying to get to an individual “page” often went to an old version, rather than the current version, and to a post rather than a page. But there were comments on those posts that I didn’t want to lose even though I wanted them to go to the current page. I ended up merging it all into one big page, along with migrating the comments, but I’m not completely happy with the result. There’s too much content for one long page. And I do see it as chapters that break out nicely. I’ll talk more about this in my plans for the new year, but I’ll likely update the layout to something completely different, partly related to my next item.

Just as I have my HR Guide, a “PolyWogg Guide”, I started a “PolyWogg Guide to Astronomy” too. And when I retire, there will be more PolyWogg Guides as well. Since I know that I’m going to do them, it is getting a bit onerous to keep it all in one website structure. Again, I’ll talk more about this later, but the expanded writing is driving me to make a change regarding my website, and I have a simple solution that doesn’t require a lot of work but DOES look like a significant change. I considered something way more radical, but instead, I can go more simply in a different direction.

I added lots of other new writing this year including book reviews, movie reviews (finally getting them back on the site), music reviews (some new stuff), recipes (mostly reformatted as opposed to new), and television reviews (a new layout on seasonal reviews gives me more options for the future).

I even started some astro writing that is more historical than current, and shared it in our local Centre’s monthly publication.

But probably the biggest contribution on writing was tied to “making choices”. I wrote almost 100 “Today I choose” posts to remind myself that I still have choices each day that affect my outlook on life, even if the big ones like staying home or going out are already made for me by COVID.

7. Building projects

That title sounds more ambitious than what it was. I don’t mean sheds or houses, just legos and kits. We did some Lego this year (the large Millennium Falcon), some wooden dinosaurs, a few other crafts here and there. I’m hoping to do more in the new year, and I even have a new crafting area for some of it. I also have a few projects I want to do in astronomy-related crafting so we’ll see how those turn out.

8. Recipes

We collectively tried a few new recipes throughout the year, including buying a new bread maker and making some new loaves. I need to get into that more in the new year.

9. Dental health

This one is a bit weird to take credit for, I suppose. I had been needing to see the dentist before the lockdown, and when it hit, I figured I would likely end up waiting it out. I needed a full cleaning, plus checking on potential cavities, etc. But I need sedation for it anyway, so waiting was easy enough to do. However, when my root canal happened, and the choice of timing was made for me, I piggybacked on it to make sure I got a cleaning in too.

10. Efforts to socialize

For Christmas, I got Jacob and Andrea lots of things for us to “do” as a family (as did they for me), so internal socializing is covered. Over the last nine months, we managed to go to the cottage and did socially distanced things with Andrea’s parents and our friends Paul and Mary Ellen. I had coffee with my friend Sanden, freezing my butt off in a parking lot, and another coffee in warmer weather on a patio with my friend Roula.

But I think the biggest thing I’ve done is organize some online trivia games for friends. It’s a fair amount of work to keep it interesting and fun, and I might do a “kids night” sometime, but for now it’s mainly adults. If people keep showing up, I’ll keep doing it. Admittedly, it’s not “super social” for me, as I’m the host. It’s more for Andrea, Jacob and the people who show up that week, but I do get a chance to chat before and after with people.

Oh, and I kept the reading challenge going for the year, which has a social component to it, albeit fairly passively.

And that’s my list. It’s not super impressive, but I did manage to keep making progress on some things that are important to me. I hope your year was satisfying in some way too.

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What I tell myself about 2020

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
January 1 2021

As I start to write this post, I actually have very little idea of what I’m going to say. I’ve struggled for weeks to figure out what I want to say about the year that is past or the year that is ahead. I have no words of wisdom, no reference point to help others understand something that I don’t understand myself, no insights to help me reframe my own situation let alone our collective experiences.

I generally pride myself on an ability to look at a situation, cast it in a different light, and find some way to structure my thoughts around it. Even the death of my parents did not challenge me to come up with a frame. I thought of it as, “What would a perfect day look like to them?”, if there was an afterlife and you got to live THAT moment forever in time when time was irrelevant.

Or about being a parent to Jacob and the experiences of the NICU, the angst, the worry, the stress, the joy, the love, all of it, I found it easy to know what to write about on my blog.

I have always been able to rely on this skill for work. I’ve done it for my HR guide, to help others understand the processes of competitions. And I’ve been doing it of late with astronomy stuff, helping people to understand how to think about different types of scopes or my specific scope.

I like doing it, and others often read my stuff and comment how, for the first time, they feel they actually “get” it. That I’ve presented it in a different way, with more accessible language, or a different structure or metaphor, and they came away feeling like they learned something. Even if I’m just regurgitating other people’s content, I put my own spin on it.

But this year is like no other year in my experience, no other event in my lifetime. I have no metaphor that will help me understand it. I have no reference point for comparison.

Of course it sucked, but not as much personally

It is easy to say it sucked. It blew chunks repeatedly. The death of a friend. The isolation from others. The fear, the loathing, the sense of helplessness with no obvious end in sight. And all of that despite the fact that I had buffers to prevent the majority of the effects from hitting my family.

My wife and I have great jobs, steady jobs with steady income. There was no change for us financially because of shutdowns, we transitioned to Work from Home, and we kept motoring along. Our son transitioned to virtual school. We’re actually probably better off financially as we had nowhere to go, no big purchases or debts looming.

We also had no major health impacts, which is surprising. In a household that would be classed as high-risk, the worst we dealt with all year was probably some normal dental surgery. We’re less mobile, less active, more sedentary than normal. But not permanently so.

Heck, we didn’t even get our flu shots this year until earlier today. Every time we were going to do it, the pharmacy was out of the shots completely or didn’t have dosages for kids. But a local pharmacy had some, and we did it this afternoon. They were barely even still set up, we had waited so long. Yet part of that wait was we never GO anywhere. Whereas in past years, we would have been out and about and made special trips to doctors or the pharmacy, we almost never go out as a family. I run errands, I come home. Jacob rarely goes anywhere, Andrea mostly for appointments.

For us, the worst has been the social isolation. I’m an introvert by nature, and even *I* find it challenging. I missed not being able to do star parties this year, for instance. Way back on March 12th, I made the call to cancel a telescope clinic that had been scheduled for Saturday March 14th. We didn’t know what was happening, or would be happening, but myself and two others all felt it wasn’t really worth the risk. Mind you, NOTHING had shut down at that point. At the time, lots of people thought we were over-reacting. But March 13th, everything changed for Ontario and our surrounding area, and in hindsight, it’s ludicrous to think we actually debated whether or not it should have been cancelled. Of COURSE it should have been cancelled. J has been separated from school friends, A has been separated from social outings.

We work, we study, we eat together. I’d love to say that it has been this whirlwind rejuvenation of close family ties, but it has been more frayed than that. Harsh words have been spoken at times, the harshest I’ve ever used in an adult relationship probably, both with A and J. We have all reached our limits at different times.

But it probably amounts to #FirstWorldProblems or the #BenefitsOfPrivilege.

So what do I tell myself?

The shortest description I have for the year is simple: trauma.

Unwanted, sustained, and uncontrolled / uncontrollable pressure over a period of time, with acute spikes throughout that can overwhelm your current level of resiliency, leaving you physically or emotionally vulnerable to whatever effects come through to lash at your body.

A friend regularly comments, if anyone talks about silver linings, that there can be no silver lining in a trauma. It’s just simply awful, you have to get through it, you have to survive. You can’t just make the best of it while it is happening, all you can do is find a way to stay on your feet and to keep fighting regardless of what damage is being inflicted on you.

One half of me finds that entirely logical. It resonates with me strongly. I want to embrace that metaphor, that this is a trauma to be endured. An outside event with a start and an end, and the only way “out” is “through”.

But the other half of me knows that one of the biggest “predictors” of future mental health, after a trauma, is how you interpreted the trauma while it was happening. What you told yourself. In essence, how you start “processing” the trauma before it even ends. There are countless stories of people in giant catastrophes, often front-page human tragedies, and there will be two people who had similar backgrounds, similar social supports, similar lives really, and yet have two totally different outcomes after the same trauma. One ends up catatonic, the other highly functional. Psychologists have no real idea why, although many like to latch on to concepts of resiliency, cumulative trauma management skills, etc. But one thing that often stands out is that the ones who emerge more stable afterwards, less in need of sustained supports, are those who pre-processed the trauma in some way. Such as those who talked to themselves in healthy ways while it was happening.

Generally speaking, saying you’re going to hunker down to weather the storm is not the healthiest of approaches for mental resiliency. Instead, it often reinforces that everything is happening TO you, that you have no control anywhere in your life, that you are flotsam and jetsam to be tossed about at the whim of external forces, that the Gods are playing dice with our lives.

So I have relied on some common tools that help me pre-process chaos.

Planning in chaos

Over the last 25 years, I have consistently set goals for myself for the coming year, New Year’s resolutions of sorts. They really have nothing to do with NY’s other than the timing. My birthday is in June, so the calendar year makes a good planning cycle with my birthday as the mid-year check-in. A big symbolic end-date and subsequent start-date.

Some years I go whole hog, all-in on planning, with literally dozens of goals for the year. I don’t expect to do them all, just to make progress on them. In the next few days, I’ll look back on 2020, and reflect on my “accomplishments” against my planned goals. And I’ll update my list and planning tools for 2021.

But tonight I’m more interested in the “game mechanics” of how I play, how I make moves, more so than the what or why.

One thing I did, which I have done before, is recognize that it is a terrible planning environment. I don’t have control of my game board. I can’t plot strategy if I don’t even know what borders are going to stay stable, or if some wild change is going to alter the rules from playing a nice game of checkers only to find out halfway through that the game is now Othello. Or that there’s been a coup, and pawns in chess now move like Queens.

Generally this means that I protect myself from myself. Whereas normally I might be a bit anal about tracking progress and berating myself that I wasn’t “doing more”, I had no standards to measure against, deliberately so. My colleague and I constantly joke at work about the term “baseline year”, the idea that if you keep changing your indicators every year, you never have to measure since every year you’re establishing a baseline. 2020 was definitely a baseline year. I generally threw my plan out the window up until mid-summer. Until I realized that knowing that no plan would survive engagement with the enemy that was the chaos of 2020 was not sufficient reason to have no plan at all. So I started planning again. With no sense that I would have to make progress on anything, just that I would try.

And overall, that’s probably the biggest single weapon in my arsenal. That I would try. In late summer, I started seeing it as “choice within chaos”, I still had daily choices I could make, even in the face of adversity. Some were simple choices about my website. Others were about safety and relationships with family. I needed to remind myself that I still had choices to make every day, and so I blogged about them (the Today I Choose series).

I would love to say I ended up racking up a series of impressive wins. I didn’t. I made progress on a serious reorg of our household contents; we have A in the office upstairs, J on the first floor, and me in the basement. There’s still a LOT to be done. Basement, first floor, garage. We have ideas about a pool next year perhaps. Or a trampoline and an observatory for me. Again, though, that’s the what, not the how.

For the “game mechanics”, so to speak, basically it is that my life is relatively unchanged at its core. I’m still employed. I’m still married. I’m still a father. I’m still an analytical introvert. I’m still me. And the way to talk to myself during this time, the way to help me through that trauma, to help me pre-process the effects, is to keep being me. The best version of me that I can be, if possible, given the circumstances.

So I planned. I blogged. I talked about it.

I feel what I feel

I mentioned above that it’s been a hard year, and sometimes my stress and emotions got the better of me. As the time increases, I find myself more emotional. I’d say more empathetic, but it’s almost the opposite of that, really. That’s kind of hard to explain.

So I’ll give two examples. First and foremost, I can cry easily at sad movies, and I don’t care who knows it. I cried at my wedding, I cried when my parents died, I cry at sappy commercials for Christmas. I’m comfortable with feeling those emotions, I don’t wallow in them or anything, but I’m fine for J to see me cry and to know that it’s okay for a man to do that. If anyone has a problem with that, they can take a flying f*** on a rolling doughnut. 🙂

And I find myself more weepy than normal when watching TV. Some of it is lowered resilience, some of it is fatigue, some of it is just the duration of the isolation and its cumulative effects. But I’ve bingewatched a bunch of shows, and sad scenes where people are saying goodbye to each other can wipe me out easily. Even tension between love interests can have me reaching for tissues. If there’s a sad death in the show, as opposed to a Jurassic Park snackfest? Yeah, I’m likely toast.

Normally, my first instinct would be to think of it as a heightened sense of empathy. That somehow, on an emotional level, I am bonding with the characters, that I’m feeling their pain. But I’m not. In effect, what I’m feeling is my own loss. Characters I’ve invested in for repeated shows, a show I like, and it’s “over”. I’m not ready for it to end. It’s not their loss I’m feeling, it’s my own. On top of other losses of other kinds in real life.

How do I know? Because of a second factor. I’m not sure how to word this nicely, or to not feel like a complete a**hole as I say it, but I feel like I’m out of f***s to give. It’s not depression, I know what that feels and looks like. This is something different.

Battle fatigue is probably closest to it. Or trauma fatigue. It’s gone on so long, and there’s been so much devastation, I feel numb. BLM. Thousands of COVID deaths. Financial ruin. People losing jobs or their businesses. Families getting destroyed.

In an abstract sense, I care. Of course I do. I’m still me. I still have my principles, my sense of injustice, I want to rail at systems, people, the universe. But when everything you see is an injustice, it’s hard to keep feeling the injustice very deeply each time.

In business management, the frequently recommended reaction to a giant temporary crisis was to “stick to the knitting”. It was said that it was not time to branch out, not time to innovate in new areas, unless your survival is threatened. It literally advised in the past to batten down the hatches and weather the storm.

Mentally, I feel like I have. If my wife and son are safe, then my priorities are met. Anything after that is gravy.

I see myself doing it frequently. I find myself reading a story about a horrendous black swan of circumstances swamping someone’s personal boat in the storm, and yet instead of being moved by their situation, I end up looking for lessons learned to further reinforce my own situation.

Should I do more? Should I reach out more? How do I help?

The boy in the plastic bubble

Way back when I was young, there was a TV show about the “boy in the plastic bubble”. I don’t remember the exact details, a kid who had some sort of immune deficiency and thus lived within a sterile plastic environment, so that was his life. It was all his body could handle.

At the end of each day, the reality is I often feel like I’m barely keeping my head above the emotional and mental waterline. Even with greater self-awareness and greater attention to how I talk to myself amid chaos, I have no extra energy reserves to expend.

I love my sister S and used to call regularly. Every few months. If I was in Peterborough, I’d visit. Equally, my brother D lives alone, and I sat with him back in the summer for a socially distanced lunch on his front porch. But months have gone by and I haven’t reached out further. It’s not that I don’t care, or simply that they’re not on Facebook, but that I don’t have the energy reserve to expend on reaching out. I don’t remember, it just brushes past and is gone. Another example? We ALWAYS talk on Christmas day. None of us called, in fact it was today before I remembered mid-afternoon to call. Normally when I remember it’s after midnight, long past her bedtime. I’m still playing tag with my brother.

How have I connected with others? Mostly through FB. I can time shift it to later at night when it is less “urgent”, less “time intensive”, less likely to respond to something off the cuff and not nuance it properly. I have hosted trivia nights a few times, I’ve kept a reading group going.

Over the course of the fall, I “gave back” by taking on major duties for our workplace charitable campaign. It was “doable”, it was “controllable”, and it was “productive”, at a time when I wanted all three.

I’ve also spent a bit of time online helping people. A woman who was looking to buy a telescope for Christmas and just needed someone knowledgeable to help her through the decision tree to what she wanted. If it wasn’t for COVID, she could have gone to a local star party and solved her questions in minutes. Instead, we had long conversations over messenger. I’m more active in astronomy forums in general, in multiple places, helping newbies figure things out.

I’m more active in a group dealing with Cerebral Palsy, timeshifting my responses into the wee hours of the morning, openly sharing my experiences and emotions, in the hopes that it will resonate with the recipient whose Qs often show up in the group as raw, emotional, stressed.

I’m still being me

In the end, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I feel like I’m still me, I’m still trying to be empathetic, I’m still trying to be supportive of others in my universe, but it is a bit more structured. In ways that prevent me from being overwhelmed myself.

In some ways, I feel like I’m the boy in the bubble. I experience life, but it has to be on much more narrowly defined terms these days. Each day comes with new questions, each day comes with new opportunities and challenges.

Each day comes with choice. I know that. I tell myself. There is trauma overall but there’s still choice.

And yet.

It sucks. It overwhelms. There is no “silver lining” to be embraced, no positive benefit that outweighs the overwhelming cost. There are some benefits that mitigate the cost (“Yay, no more commuting!”), but that is far from the same thing.

So tonight, as the year turned from 2020 to 2021, I hugged J for the last time of 2020 and the first snuggle of 2021. I am so relieved that the year is over, that we are hopefully turning a corner towards a symbolic year of hope and light over despair and darkness.

J thought at first that I was laughing during the hug. I wasn’t. The tears were flowing, as they are again now as I write this. The rawness remains.

I am me. I exist. I cannot say that I am living.

Maybe the year 2020 will have been a chrysalis that leads to emergence in 2021.

More likely it is and has been a mere hibernation leading to a Spring awakening on a radically different world than the one before Winter fell.

Either way, I hope you and yours have a happy and safe new year.

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Today I chose to stop watching You (TIC00096j)

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
December 21 2020

Today’s choice requires a little context. On the face of it, I simply decided to stop watching a TV series that I’ve been working my way through. Not a big deal, right? Hardly worth a blog post.

Except the context is unique. I’ve mentioned before that I frequently approach a new year’s TV season like a fantasy football league, looking at returning veterans and scouting out new talent. I try to watch almost every new show, just to give it a try. Cable is easy for that, but streaming entities have huge catalogs, so sometimes I hear about a new show only to find out it is already streaming, and may even be in Season 2 or 3. It’s not new, it’s a veteran, I just never came across it before. Or it’s new, but it’s streaming, as I said.

I watch an EP, consider it for adding to the rotation, and if it has something to grab me, I start watching. Almost always to the bitter end. If I’ve deemed it watchable enough to go into rotation, it is REALLY rare for me to take it out of rotation. Some of that is just my connection to serialized storytelling. I want to see how the story unfolds. I might start skipping ahead in a show if it lags, watching a 44m show in 30m if it isn’t decent, but I usually want to see the major plot points. Seeing the choices the writer made to move the story forward. Some shows I watch and I know it isn’t very good. Magnum P.I. is not awesome, but I like the characters, the basic premise of the show, and I can put up with some schlock. Blue Bloods is another show that I know isn’t that good, and has some REALLY bad acting in places, yet I’m still watching. Others I will catch up on binge sets.

So simply deciding to “quit” a show is unusual for me. I’m a completist, I’ve already invested, and I just want to know how it plays out. Usually.

Then there’s the current show, You. Last year, I tagged it as a new show, something about a stalker, I assumed it was some sort of crime show. Nope. It’s almost a romantic comedy, without the comedy. And once I saw the premise, I thought, “Nope, this is stupid. It’s normalizing a stalker? Yeah, no.” But I watched all of the first episode. And it is quite dark, with the lead male portrayed as your lovable nerd who just happens to kill people who gets in his way. Parts of it is mesmerizing. It doesn’t hurt that the female lead is frequently shown in Piper Perabo-style soft light from Coyote Ugly-era. When she turns from self-obsessed to charming, she’s luminescent. And I stuck with it. There are sub-stories where he’s protecting a kid, others where he’s helping her confront some of her issues, he is almost a perfect boyfriend at times. As far as she can tell. It almost feels like a Sex in the City episode from a male perspective, except for the whole psycho reality.

Yet I feel like I’m watching a train wreck. There’s a season 2, and I have no idea if it’s the same couple, or what’s going on. I’ve made it through 8/10 episodes and as great as some of the parts are, it is STILL normalizing a psycho stalker. Half gaslighting, half Silence of the Lambs, totally creepy. And I just can’t stomach it for the other parts. It almost feels like fetish porn, some sort of stalker fantasy. Regardless of “what” it is, I find myself loving the writing, figuring out what they’re going to do with the premise, and yet hating the premise at all. I wonder if I could read it as a book and be done. I don’t know.

Today I chose to stop watching You. That’s not a normative thing, I’m sure there are people who are not emotionally f***ed up who could enjoy it just fine. I’m just not one of them anymore. There are too many other things to watch. Huh.

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