The Daily

Ok, I feel like I'm tired of Ghost's fancy image insertion features and the silly title restriction I put on myself. So let's try this again.

Here’s a fun one for you. Last night, my home lost power for much of the day. That meant we had to escape and go live in a hotel for the night. No power in a fully electric home means no light (Obviously), no drinking water (fridge water tap won’t work), no way to cook or heat anything (stupid electric cooking range), no way to bathe the child in comfort (kids do NOT like the dark), no way to monitor the child when sleeping (no baby monitor).

Luckily we had the privilege of heading to a hotel and we did. It wasn’t comfortable and we packed for it way too quickly. Still got the essentials but also got stuck with a massive bill for one night of stay. What a way to bring in the horrid Daylight Savings BS this country makes everyone suffer through.

So what has this got to do with publushing daily? I definitely missed posting last night. Well, see… this blog is actually hosted in my home on a tiny server that sits in a corner and barely makes any noise. During the blackout, that server was down too. So though I did write my blog post for last night, I couldn’t publish it. I’m doing that now. What follows is my post as written last night. Cheers.

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Such a strange thing to happen. A large part of the island lost power, affecting about 3000 folks. Since they didn't have a good estimate of when the power will come back, we decided to come stay the night at a hotel.

The power came back around 8 pm but with no confirmation that this was it. Either way, we were settled in and there's no reason to waste the money we've already spent on booking the hotel room. So we're here while our home awaits us.

All of our systems are down, including my blog, Plex etc. So while I'm writing this post today, it'll get posted tomorrow.

C'est la vie.

Aha! It's almost 10 pm and I'm going to fall asleep any minute now! Was almost about to miss out on today's post.

Luckily, I just sat down to read some, and with that relaxation, came the realization that there's another interesting thing I wanted to do.

Good thing too, because today I wanted to talk about traveling. Specifically, traveling for work. I know it's a big part of American Western culture. Some people proudly say that they travel for hours to get to work.

But that has always seemed silly to me. Maybe because I've lived my life in a string of small towns and cities where a commute meant going out of town altogether? When I think of the idea of traveling for anything more than half an hour for work, I simply cease to think of that as a daily commute and think of it more in terms of time that must be filled with some other activity.

That has its pros and cons. I've done it before in my childhood and youth, where I had long commutes to get to school and back. That gave me ample time to read books, without realizing that it meant my eyesight would be ruined for life.

It also means that I have to decide what to spend my time on. For a long time, before COVID, my commute meant I'd listen to the podcast Philosophize This. But now, I want to listen to audiobooks. It's a little painful because I love that podcast and want to continue listening to it. I even have a backlog of twenty or thirty episodes. But I just can't bring myself to drop my streak of book reading/listening.

Maybe I should alternate - in the morning, listen to the podcast, in the evening, to an audiobook? Might be my best bet to listen to most of what I want to. I say most, not everything, because there's always an immense backlog of things to do, articles to read, books, movies, TV shows, YouTube videos to go through and laugh, learn, be inspired, and understand more deeply. But who the heck has all that time??

I need one of those physical time tracker thingies, that you can flip and it starts counting down from 30 minutes or an hour. My meetings are running out of time lately and I need a way to know when five minutes are left so I can leave some breathing room at the end. Both for me and other attendees.

It feels good to hear good feedback from coworkers. It's fine if the feedback is critical, as long as it builds up rather than tears down. Because good feedback is hard to come by, it's all the more cherished when you get it.

Why am I talking in generics? Because I'm still superstitious. I don't want that good feedback to dry up just because I talked about it.

When I first started posting here, I thought, "wow, this is a proper blog, but one I'm not telling anyone about! So I can post about Politics here!!!"

But... The more I enjoy writing here, the less I want to write about a specific topic and more and more all I want is to be able to write. Just write. Anything and everything. Yes, some days it'll be about Politics. But not every day, and not in any particular order.

While my main blog is more of a conversation with others, this blog is mainly a conversation with myself.

I've always thought of my obesity as weight I need to lose. Today, I was resting and I realized what I should instead be focusing on - I don't want to reduce my weight any longer. I want to gain muscle mass. That should be my focus. Till now I've always shunned the idea of gaining muscle, thinking it can be a side product of my quest to lose weight.

But I realize now that I should take weight loss as the side product. The nice to have. Only by doing this can I be free of the bad decisions that plague my health.