Life
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Seek Balance, Grasshopper
by Because I certainly haven’t had it so far this term. I’ve been so deep in the academics (and with generally good results although a couple of things could have been less last-minute and worth a few more marks) that I’ve literally tossed everything else. Very little time with my family. A total of 5000 words making it to the computer in terms of writing. There’s maybe 1500 more long hand that needs to be transcribed. (I wrote the January Flash piece, btw, but it’s still on paper.) No blog entries since classes started and exactly one journal entry that’s part of a separate project I don’t track with the…
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590 Days in a Row
by On the 20th of March of 2020, five days after almost everything else had shut down for COVID, a week after I’d had to have individual conversations with the 70+ staff in my department that the casino was shutting down for a few weeks while society got a grip on COVID (and no, we didn’t know exactly how long, but the indications we’d been given suggested we’d be open again before summer – look back on that now and choose your emotional reaction), upper management gave most of the rest of us the same speech, ultimately leaving just the General Managers and the site Maintenance Managers for our district,…
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I Hate PVP
by I’ve been playing video games for as long as I’ve had access to devices that would let me play videogames, from begging my parents for quarters to our first home computer in 1983 to my computer, phone, and console today. Next to reading, it’s probably the biggest way I relax. I try new games regularly. Sometimes they hold my interest for a while and sometimes they’re gone quick. There’s a lot to be said for a shooter or an action game or a puzzle game or a platformer or… well, I enjoy a lot of different kinds of games, but I particularly like games that have a lot going…
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Another Trip Around the Sun
by I’m 51 today. If you’re keeping track, that means I was born in 1970. It also means I’ve spent the last few years growing more conscious of my age and the ages of the important people around me, particularly the ones who are significantly older. Strange how we grow more aware of our mortality in middle age. To go along with that, there’s the idea with deep roots in my head that I need to make the rest of my time in the universe as productive and meaningful as I can. In the neighbourhood of my 50th birthday last year, I significantly overestimated how productive I’d be on the…
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It’s been quiet lately, but I’m still here…
by Here we are approaching the end of the year, and I’ve managed exactly two blog posts since school started the day after Labour Day, and only seven since I started back at school for real in May. I should have suspected that would be the result of jumping back into university as a full-time student at age 50, but somehow, I thought I could manage a heavy course load (full or better so far), and still get some writing done. To be fair to myself, I’ve got a bunch of stuff on paper written at odd moments about going back to school and I’ve managed the third pass editing…
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The War On Christmas Gets Renewed for Another Season
by The mythical War on Christmas has started early this year. I usually wait until I’ve seen three people complain that they can’t say “Merry Christmas” anymore before I post the attached meme. I’ve probably missed a few, but I saw the third occurrence happened as I was scrolling breakfast this morning. It’s the 26th of October. Can we be honest about something for a moment? No one is taking away anyone’s right to say, “Merry Christmas”. People who want to celebrate Christmas are free to put up a gazillion lights and decorations, go to church every day in December, sing songs, play every version of “Santa Claus is Coming…
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Editing Woes
by So I still haven’t missed a day logging some writing activity since my last day at the casino when the first COVID shut down happened in March of 2020. In 2021, however, most of my writing time has been spent slowly editing a set of novels, the Troll World Quintet, formerly Quartet. I track editing not by time spent, but by net word count change. That means I have some days where I spend an hour editing and the net word count change is a single digit number. More frequently, it’s several hundred, either because I am removing significant portions of a scene and rewriting to make it better,…
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You Need Balance, Grasshopper
by So the question is why I didn’t post for most of May and all of June. I suppose the answer can be made very simple: school. Reality is a bit more than that, of course. It wasn’t really a secret, and I posted about it a couple of times before running silent, that I was returning to university for an undergraduate degree. I talked about the plans in a lot of detail yesterday, so I’m not going to go into it again. But it might be worth discussing exactly what that means in terms of a time commitment. You can find it a number of places on the Queen’s…
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Motivation
by Spring Term has let me figure out that I do, in fact, have the work ethic to be an effective university student at my age. Something I didn’t really have when I was twenty. If you look back at my academic record during my first sojourn at university, you will discover that I was an erratic student with a general downward trend. Every year I attended, there were good marks and bad marks, basically dependent on how interested I was in the course overall, but with each successive year both sets were a little bit lower. This time, with less of my life ahead of me after my potential…
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Smell That?
by OK, so it’s been awhile. More about that another time. A slightly more current event today. To help keep the peace with Vulcan, I do some off the books work for the Andorian Imperial Guard. Our most recent operation cost me a couple of fractures in the elbow of my dominant arm. It’s going to be a few weeks healing. My guess, based on what I currently know about the location and nature of the fractures is probably on the order of about six weeks. But, I haven’t been to the fracture clinic yet so there’s still some significant imaging in my immediate future that will tell me a…
