Blog Post No. 453
It all happened so quickly. The provincial government was rushing through their steps to reopen and my new boss sent me an email asking me if I was able to take a shift at a different facility. I agreed (eager to ingratiate myself, even though I had only covered shifts at that facility). The next day I was offered a shift at my regular centre for the end of the week, then I picked up three more shifts by the end of the day. That’s not to say I’m back at the day job full time (or even to the extent that I was pre-pandemic). Five shifts in two weeks isn’t much and it will be a while before the facility where I work is open for more than rentals (if at all). Continue reading “Back to the Day Job”
I haven’t seen any creepy crawlies in a few days, so I’m starting to put my room (and work space) back together. While it’s been a pain and my plans for the month have been blown out of the water, it’s nice that I got to do some deep cleaning. I pulled everything off of my shelves and cleaned it before putting it all back. And I took the time to do some reorganizing (one of my favourite ways to procrastinate). One of the things I changed was to put all my stereo components back together and making them front and centre in my hi-fi setup. I use the receiver a lot more than I use the CD changer or Tape Deck, but it’s nice to have them all together and connected properly. Plus, I have the matching Turntable on order (for the third time) and it will be nice to add it to the complete setup. 
I have a familiar feeling that lives somewhere in my bones (or in quiet places of my brain) that hits me every once in a while. The feeling comes whenever something triggers it, but it represents the time of day between about 3 and 6 pm. It’s a time that doesn’t mean much to me now, but back when I was in school, it was the time between being let out of school and before evening (usually around dinner time). Sometimes the setting sun triggers it, sometimes it’s the smell of a wood fire on the crisp evening air. Sometimes it’s as silly as having Poptarts for the first time in a number of years. 
Blog Post No. 450
I went back in this blog and looked up the first time I mentioned the Invasion Novel. I’m sure I spoke about it before, but the first time I called it the Invasion Novel was 
There’s a new He-Man cartoon coming out and when watching the trailer, I was struck with a thought. Throughout the shows I watched as a child, the villains were magic users and/or manipulators and the heroes were mindless brutes. It’s as if I was being taught that being upfront and honest was the same as being simple minded and that anyone with cunning is probably untrustworthy. It’s a theme that you can still see nowadays with characters like Thor and Loki. Sure, it’s all pop culture with questionable cultural value, but you can’t dismiss the popularity. 
There are a lot of little time sinks in my life and most of them are my own doing. Back when I was in university and had a laptop capable of some decent multi-media, I would often download and watch movies on it. There were many Sundays with a test or paper due on Monday where I would tell myself that I could watch just one movie before I got started. Now that I’m a writer and spend most days sitting at a desk, there are even more distractions at my fingertips. Like Youtube. I’ll watch a video to settle in, but some videos are an hour and some are ten minutes, so maybe a I’ll watch couple. It’s a slippery slope, but nothing seems to steal my time more than incremental games. Simple, browser based games where something counts up and everything gets more complicated the longer you play. Something that you can leave running in the background and check in on once in a while. 
It’s my birthday tomorrow and it’s one of the big milestone years. I haven’t really felt the same kind of excitement for birthdays since high school. Not to say that birthdays make me sad. I just see them as a marker of the years and my years are starting to add up. It’s all relative and as much as age is just a number, there are more battle scars each time the date rolls around. In my mind, I’m the same kid excited to get out of high school, sure that he’ll blossom in university, and bummed out that exams start on his birthday. That’s real, by the way. For all four years of high school, my first exam was on my birthday. 
I’m about a third of the way though the second draft of the Invasion Novel. It’s taking me longer than I would like, but making it this far feels like a good start. I would still like to get the story in much better shape by the end of July and to do that, I have to move faster. I’ve said it a bunch (but that never stops me from saying things again) but I plan on starting the fifth novella (Snow From a Distant Sky) in August, so time is limited. I plan on taking a break from the novellas after this one, but that is stuff for me to worry about later. For now, I have two more months to make some progress with this (still way too long) novel. 
I was struck with a thought the other day while trolling Youtube for new content. I am a huge Youtube viewer. That is to say, I am a huge viewer of the channels that I like. Some of the content that really grabs my attention is about old technology, vintage computers, and for some reason, radio. There’s something about the service and the technological object themselves. I have an old Realistic short wave radio that used to be my grandfathers. I used to turn it up way too loud (for the little speaker) when I would mow their lawn way back in the day. I have a nice Sony boom box that I use as my computer speakers that I picked up a few years ago. And I also have the tuner on my stereo syste