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The Writing Life of a Tadpole

My view from the lilypads

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
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Tag Archives: vacation

Family image, 2 pandas 1 penguin

Today I choose to take the day off to spend with family (TIC00030d)

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
August 20 2020

Since I broke my TIC series chain at 12 yesterday, I start series D today. And today’s is about taking the day off to spend time with Jacob and Andrea. Our original intent was Parc Omega as the main plan, and we didn’t plan it very well earlier. You need to buy timed entry tickets, and by the time we realized that, the only openings were for lunch or afterwards. I would have preferred to be there earlier in the day, eat lunch afterwards or during, and then stop somewhere like Petrie Island on the way back. But no worries, we bought for 2:00 and planned to go mini-golfing in the morning after basic errands like groceries.

Except by the time we were ready for mini-golf, it looked like it was about to rain. And the forecast for the afternoon for both here and Montebello showed a high probability of showers. Would the animals be equally “out and about” if it was raining? Was it worth the trip? In the end, we rescheduled both activities and stayed home.

For the morning, we went with playing board games, namely Centrix (which we bought through a kickstarter campaign). Plus a few games of Squarrels (like “squirrels” but you are having quarrels over acorns, hence the name). Then we had a brain wave…what about Lone Star for lunch? We had been talking about it for dinner sometime soon-ish, at Jacob’s request but with no objection from Andrea or I, and we substituted in lunch. While it wasn’t “fast” for prep, it was really good, as always.

By the time we were done, it was time for a chess class for Jacob that we had expected to have to skip but he could do since our vacation day was now a staycation day. When we finished that, Andrea and I were ready to play Dice Forge, the big board game we play when we have extra time for setup and play. But Jacob wasn’t up to it, and instead wanted to play video games.

Generally, that doesn’t work well for three of us with a big split screen, and the first attempt — regular Minecraft — was a bust for screen size. But we could play Minecraft Dungeons together, and Andrea didn’t mind it. It’s a bit mindless running around stabbing and shooting things with arrows, but as a cooperative game play, it’s highly functional. It worked well, and we played together for 90 minutes or so. Jacob was happy. 🙂

In other news, while Jacob was doing his chess class, I wrote a blog entry for my big astro reading project, Astro Echoes. And it turned out okay, even with 2500 words to cover the year 1941. Some really interesting stuff, and I think the project will be really fun and enlightening as I go. I even edited it slightly and sent it off as a draft submission for our local astronomy club’s monthly newsletter.

I feel good about the variety of choices made today for family, for my blog, for fun in general.

Today I choose to take the day off to spend time with family.

What choices are you making today?

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Posted in Family, Goals | Tagged blog, family, goals, vacation | Leave a reply
Goals image, meditation

Today I choose to stop making choices for 2 weeks (TIC00017b)

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
August 6 2020

While the date of this post will be July 24th, a Friday, I am actually writing it on August 6, a Thursday, two weeks later.

On that Friday, I was looking at my “Today I choose” chain and wondering how I was going to keep it going while I was on vacation at the inlaws’ cottage. Making conscious choices is hard enough on a given day, and when you’re thrown into a shared-space environment of joint decision-making about meals and times, or even activities, it is sometimes less stressful and more harmonious to just choose to go with the collective flow rather than try to make conscious decisions to “go my way”. On top of that, I wasn’t sure how I was going to be able to keep blogging consistently. And there is the escape phrase of “it’s a vacation” to excuse all laziness.

The short answer as it turned out was that I wasn’t going to be able to do either very well. So I made a conscious decision, a “choice” on the 24th of July, to break the chain at 9 days of choices, a new record.

Over the course of my vacation, and my return, I still made some conscious choices. One of them is about my computer setup, which I’ll post about later tonight.

I also actively tried to read “more”, and ended up binge-reading 7 books in a series (I Am Number Four, by Pittacus Lore, which is way better than the movie). Jacob was reading them too so it was fun to go through them sort of together.

I did some photography of the night sky just with my tripod and iPhone, no telescope involved. NEOWISE was missing in action, but I got to play with shots of the moon, Saturn and Jupiter, the Big Dipper, and star trails around Polaris. I’ll post about those sometime soon too.

And I reached out to my family in Peterborough to try and get together for a socially distanced lunch, and managed to do so with my brother Don. Not the most uplifting of experiences, but it was good to see him.

Oh, and Andrea and I got to check out a pub in Norland near the cottage that we’ve been wanting to go to for a couple of years and timing was never quite right. Plus, no word of a lie, you normally need reservations. It’s small and popular. One of Jacob’s short-term bucket list items was to go to a restaurant again, so we ate on the patio at the pub and the food was quite good.

A good vacation, extended by an extra day on the end, and then back to work this week on the Tuesday. A little rough on the re-integration, and I’ve been feeling a bit of separation anxiety, so to speak, with my computer being in the shop. I wanted to work on a couple of projects that are just way too painful to try and do on the laptop, and when I was at the cottage, my laptop’s wifi wasn’t even connecting. Now that I have the PC back and can get going again, I feel like I’m able to work on a couple of fun things. Just as soon as I reinstall all the software. Sigh.

Today (okay, actually 13 days ago from when I’m writing it) I choose to break the chain and just “be” for the next two weeks.

What choices are you making?

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Posted in Goals | Tagged computers, goals, TIC, today I choose, vacation | Leave a reply
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