Life is a treadmill…
Irene and I are not people who exercise much. Yet over the years we have collected a stable of expensive exercise equipment, the primary purpose of which is to collect dust.
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Fuse go ‘boom’
I have a healthy fear of high current electrical equipment. Anything over an amp and I’m looking for a way to disconnect the mains and insulate myself. I don’t mess with microwaves or the internals of old CRTs without serious trepidation.
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Just carrying on…
This has been an interesting year so far. I’ve posted some fairly lengthy diatribes expressing my thoughts and feelings. But I am just a powerless voice in the woods of western Canada, so shaking my fist at the sky is more personal therapy than any kind of action towards solving a problem.
But my life, despite its human difficulties, frustrations, and times of sadness, is actually pretty good. Every once in a while the world spins in a way that restores a bit of my tattered faith in humanity… or just brightens my day. Our Federal election results this week here in Canada are one of those positive rotational incidents.
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Spending time
My days since retirement have been very relaxed. I don’t fret too much about what I do or do not do, I enjoy an afternoon nap most days, and I wake up around 8:00 am if I feel like it. I rarely feel rushed. “Mañana” is my favourite word.
But I think I have recently hit a new peak of ‘doing nothing’ behaviour. For the past week or so I’ve spent the bulk of the sunny spring days we’ve had sitting on our deck. Sometimes I feel bad about this, considering it ‘wasted’ time, but I think I need to start thinking of it as time well spent.
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Trumpcession…
I have been pondering what to write about ‘Liberation day’ since April 2- the day itself. Trump unleashed the stupidest tariff war, writing off over six trillion dollars of stock market value in the two days that followed. The stock market isn’t the economy but any time the stock market drops 10% in two days it is time to be concerned.
I’m going to try to break this down a bit for myself and hopefully doing so will help others who are attempting to parse the events. What follows is an expression of my opinion based on actual analysis: you may disagree with me freely, but I am reasonably secure in my understanding of the facts. This is a long one- Buckle up, and feel free to use the table of contents to jump around to what interests you!
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Trailer fittings
I purchased a cargo trailer a few weeks back shortly after working out my plans for having one. It is a basic 7 foot wide, 12 foot long, 6’6″ tall box on wheels with a cargo ramp on the back and a human-sized door on the side. I got it home from Kelowna on March 10th and have been assembling a few bits and bobs for it since then.
What have I added to the trailer and why? It isn’t a great mystery but owning a trailer is all ‘new’ to me, so I thought I’d capture some of my choices here.
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Throwback: Personal Philosophy [2003]
From time to time I look back at something I wrote on this blog years ago. It sometimes feels like I’m reading the words of a completely different person whom I barely recognize. Other times it seems like past me knew exactly what he was talking about.
Back in June of 2003 I wrote a post in which I tried to explain something of a self-revelation that I had recently experienced. I had felt a moment of tangible… disgust I guess, regarding a cliched phrase that was then and remains today distressingly common.
Have you ever heard “if you’re not growing, you’re dying“? This innocent phrase, at least as interpreted by late stage capitalism, is a rallying cry for never-ending growth in revenue and profits. We are to believe that any business, or individual for that matter, that isn’t making more profit each year than they did before is a ‘failing’ enterprise.
This falls in line with the theory of shareholder value maximization for which Milton Friedman is famous. The ‘Friedman Doctrine’ basically says that any executive’s primary and only fiduciary duty is to increase shareholder value i.e.: raise the stock price. The only way to do this reliably is to perpetually increase profits.
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Fresh Air…
I received my new MacBook Air on Friday, and finished migrating my configuration to it a few hours later. This 2025 model replaces the 2020 version I’ve been using happily as my primary ‘browsing’ computer. And so far at least I’m happy with the upgrade.
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Things that make me happy
It has been an… interesting? … year so far. What is going on to the south of us here in Canada is beyond weird- every day makes me feel more and more like I’m living in the world portrayed in the movie Idiocracy. Coming off an end of 2024 that saw the passing of two of our loved ones, it has been a bit much.
But February and March have also been a couple of months wherein my wife and I started to think about fun things we want to have and do in our retirement. We have plans! And some of those plans are actually in progress!
And then I saw a post over on Lou Plummer’s blog that listed the things that make him happy, and that is a bit of inspiration to add to my energy reserve. So what’s on my happiness list?
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Happy WordPress Anniversary?!
I’ve been doing something akin to ‘blogging’ on the Internet for quite a few years. I don’t have an exact date that I started and the definition of ‘blogging’ is kind of tenuous. But my notes indicate that I began sharing my thoughts and opinions on the web sometime around 1998 or 1999.
Every once in a while, though, I get some reminder of the durability of this strange pastime of mine. Today I noticed I had an ‘achievement’ from WordPress in my notifications that got me thinking.
