The day to day aspects of life: what is happening around the house and in our family
I returned home yesterday after being away for a week. Home these days is a lovely, peaceful place, and I am very lucky to live here. Now that I am retired, I can sit out on my porch and allow myself all the time I want to ponder life’s oddities.
One of these ponders: if I like my home so much, why did I go away on a motorcycle road trip for a week? Or any trip, for that matter?
Continue reading Back home after a road trip
I’ve arrived on my motorcycle in Edmonton, and have navigated thanks to my GPS from the West end of the city to my hotel in the city’s South East area.
I lived in Edmonton for the first 35 years of my life, but this is the first time that I’ve returned that I could barely recognize … well, anything.
Continue reading Edmonton, I hardly recognize ya…
I’m on a motorcycle trip that I will detail later on my Geek on a Harley blog. I’m heading to Edmonton and the highway through Jasper has re-opened recently. I found out last night before starting on today’s ride that limited services have become available in the townsite, so I decided to stop for fuel there.
I have a few observations from my brief visit to the site of July’s tragic forest fire.
Continue reading Jasper: A personal glance
I spent much of my working life with a perpetual ‘to do’ list. Things were added, things were removed, but the list persisted. This was a supplement to an even bigger ‘to do’ list in the form of a project plan, but the concept was always the same. No matter how carefully I planned, new tasks always found their way onto these lists making any concept of ‘done’ rather elusive.
I’m retired now, and yet the To Do list lives on. I’ve had a household list of some kind for a decade or so, but now in my ‘golden years’ (where’s the gold?) I find the list is filling and emptying far more frequently. Yet some tasks are evergreen and never seem to make their way off the list…
Continue reading Perpetual To Do list
We had some visitors for the past several days. Irene’s cousin Anne and Anne’s husband Lester spent a couple of days with us as they travelled east through the province on their way to Alberta.
We had a really nice visit. I’m not exactly a social animal, but once I get going I probably can talk the ears off of a brass monkey. We had some good chats about a number of things we can’t really control: economics, politics, artificial intelligence, social media, and health. Good meals were prepared and eaten and a few drinks were consumed. And we had some lovely evenings sitting on the porch chatting as the light of the day dissipated.
Continue reading Visitors depart…now getting ready to ride
I went into some detail early in 2024 regarding Irene’s cancer diagnosis and how the treatment had progressed to that point. Back then we were still figuring out our ‘new normal’, and although the outcomes were positive it was still a very uncomfortable situation.
Not much has changed medically since January but I thought it was appropriate to give an update on how our life with cancer is progressing.
Continue reading Steady as We Go: Cancer, Retirement, and Making the Most of Every Moment
Blaugust 2024 was my very first blogging event of any kind. As August comes to an end so too does the Blaugust festival, and the topic of this final week is ‘Lessons Learned’. I obviously learned a lot since I’m a complete neophyte to such events.
I suppose that the most obvious thing I learned from Blaugust was that participating in such an event can be fun! But what else did I learn in the process? A bit of introspection is in order…
Continue reading Some things Blaugust 2024 taught me
It is the third week of Blaugust2024 now. Unlike some folks involved in the event like Blockade85, I have little interest in posting daily. I don’t see this as a ‘competition’ with myself or others. There is nothing to win, and posting daily won’t suddenly make me an object of respect and adoration.
I’ve already exceeded my original goal for being involved in the Blaugust event: to post at least once per week. In fact, I’ve more than doubled my ‘stretch’ goal of posting eight times. So what keeps me coming back to continue writing here?
Continue reading Motivation for continuing to post
I have been working through some technical issues regarding upgrading the operating system on the web server that this blog runs on. This post isn’t about those issues, although I’ll likely write a long post on that topic someday soon. Apologies for the frequent outages over the past 48 hours, though!
What I am talking about here is a strange quality or aberrant pattern of behaviour that I possess regarding technical problem solving. I am basically almost entirely unable to walk away from an unresolved issue.
This oddity fuelled my technical career. Someone would say “I don’t know how to do that”, “That can’t be done”, or “No one has been able to make that work”, and off I’d go. More often than not no one said anything: I just saw the problem myself and got mentally trapped into fixing it.
So this post is a brief look into my brain’s misbehaviour around ‘unsolvable’ technical challenges: the good and the bad.
Continue reading On being tenacious
I read a post over on Monsterlady’s blog today about her regular rituals. It got me thinking about my own daily patterns and how they affect me: this is food for a nice, easy-to-write post, and that feels just about right for a Sunday.
Continue reading My daily rituals…
