All this faffing around

This will be another grab bag of random topics since I am still struggling to get myself focused on writing about any one topic in particular. When day-dreaming about spending some time unemployed I imagined just cranking through projects one after the other. So far that hasn’t materialized in the way I imagined. One factor I didn’t anticipate is that the days can go by surprisingly fast.

I’ve had it pretty good commute wise. When we were in Seattle I rode the bus or a bicycle the vast majority of my work days. I was spending time commuting but not too much by American standards and I was either experiencing the outdoors and using my muscles or I was reading a book. Once we moved back to Virginia I rarely traveled for work and was full remote so my commute was mostly up the stairs to the guest bedroom or in the early days sometimes I’d go to the community center, coffee shop, or library for a change of scenery. Later in my 12 years of full remoteness my job had changed such that I took a lot of meetings and thus was pretty much always at home and it was kind of isolating despite being on video and talking to people so much. But again, pretty good on the commute front. For a long time this felt like payback because before all that I had a job where I was driving 70 miles each way to go to work. This took about an hour fifteen on average. There were parts where I carpooled or vanpooled but there was a lot of time behind the wheel. It felt like too much of my life was being spent there in the front seat.

Now it’s worked out that between one kid in a high school specialty center and one kid in a private school that once again I’m spending a couple hours a day in the car most weekdays. The one school is on the south side of town, the other on the north side with our house pretty much in the middle. We had this idea that the high school kid would take the bus some or most days but that was before we got the bus schedule and found out that the bus would pick them up almost two and a half hours before their first class. It’s hard to ask for that given that after all I don’t have any hard commitments that prevent me from just chauffeuring. I get out of my little VW feeling stiff most days when I get home. But at least in this new version of my 1 hour plus commute I have someone in the car with me for most of the ride and in this age we have podcasts, and audio books you don’t have to borrow from the library, and I get to cross and admire the James twice.

So the way that my days work out is that I get back from school dropoffs around 9. I take the dog out for a walk around the neighborhood. Then I come back, grab more coffee and fart around for a bit. Then it’s a couple hours digging into my list of tasks for the day. Then the dog is usually complaining about being ignored so I’ll usually take her out again and then have lunch and then it’s a couple three more hours of doing whatever and then depending on the circumstances of the day I’m getting back in the car at either 3:10 or 3:45. On most days I’ll either go for a run or go to the gym and lift weights somewhere in there. Now it’s not that this doesn’t add up to a lot of time out of pocket. It definitely is. But it’s also easy to get into couple of chores that need doing, get distracted by a couple random things and boom my day is done and I haven’t moved the needle on anything I really care about.

Which is basically how employed life was too. So shrug.

Music and a home for it

I’ve been making slow progress on a few songs that’ll probably go on the next Bound to the Earth release. This weird one is the furthest along. If you click on that please see it as a rough demo Everything including lyrics, recordings, and mix will get redone and/or polished before it’s released. Lyrically I guess it’s kind of about being sick and tired of how stupid everything seems and wanting to opt out and feeling reminiscent of a time when everything seemed simpler and better. It feels too navel gazey frankly and the POV Is naive but at least it’s honest. The Choose Again theme is a tie-in to the novel Rise of Endymion and if I’m cool and skilled and keep these lyrics I’ll figure out how to make that tie-in stronger.

There are a few other songs that haven’t progressed to the point where I’ve posted them anywhere yet. A couple are similarly slow burners and one is all fast and maybe crust punk would be the best description. I’m trying really hard to give all of these plenty of time to marinate.

I mentioned previously that I’d like to have a better place to post stuff in progress to share with anyone who’s interested. I did a little research and Faircamp is going to make that super easy. It’s another static site generator just like the one I used to generate this page. But before I do that I feel like I need to have a proper frontpage for countingdays.org so it’s waiting until I can get the motivation together for that. I’ve also been getting myself into brain loops over how much I want to disclose on this site, how much I want it tied to my actual identity, how much I want to connect my different projects together. Should I be creating separate social media accounts for Bound to the Earth? Etc etc. I keep coming to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter that much but it doesn’t stop me from going around in circles on it.

General faffing around

We’re rewatching Parks and Recreation again. There’s this episode in the fourth season where Ben Wyatt, played by Adam Scott, is unemployed. He’s considered a couple new positions but found himself unmotivated by them. His old boss and friend Chris Traeger, played by Rob Lowe, visits him and Ben shows off the ways he’s been spending his time. He’s been learning to make calzones and has a (bad) idea to create a chain of low-calorie calzone (Low-cal Calzone Zone) restaurants. And he’s spent 3 weeks working on a claymation movie called Requiem for a Tuesday which he’s surprised to find is only about 4 seconds long when he plays it for Chris. After this Chris gives Ben some real talk, pointing out that he’s obviously severely depressed because the Ben he knows wouldn’t be happy just faffing around like this.

Needless to say this episode hit weird. I don’t think I’m depressed, at least not relative to my normal baseline. I have on the other hand definitely been faffing around.

1. I’ve made bread a couple times and I’ll probably do it again. I’ve had pretty poor results when I’ve tried in the past but it’s been a bunch of years. This time around I used this no-knead recipe which is fairly easy and produced delicious results. If you try this one, definitely use bread flour rather than all-purpose. Also when they say things like “minimum flour needed”, that still means put a bunch of flour on it because this dough is crazy sticky and will make a mess if you let it. I also second the commenter who does the final rise in a greased bowl rather than the cotton towel shenanigans specified in the recipe.
2. There are dozens of fifty to one hundred year oak trees in my neighborhood. Driving in certain spots sounds like bacon sizzling. I’ve been long bugged by the idea that potential food is literally falling from the sky and we just leave it for the squirrels and if you’re like most of my neighbors, hiring people to sweep them off the yard along with the leaves using gas powered blowers. So I’ve been collecting them and am in the process of turning them into acorn flour which you can apparently use to make quickbreads and cookies and maaaybe substitute for some of the flour in proper breads. We’ll find out hopefully. Cracking dried acorns and pulling out the meat while streaming Jeopardy is a pretty good time.
3. I’ve gone fishing about 5 times in the last month. For those of you unaware, Richmond, VA sits on the fall line of the James River. We have pretty decent rapids adjacent to downtown. And we have the James River Park System which is an absolute gem. I’ve been spending a lot of time wading around in the rocks meeting geese and deer, one heron, and even a couple fish. I haven’t been taking enough pictures but here’s one that has a deer friend in it if you look close enough

Generally speaking I’m a little worried that I haven’t been able to cobble together the motivation to get started on some bigger things but I’m also trying to be patient and to assume that the motivation will come when I’m ready and the right thing comes along. I can’t stay in that state forever but I’m okay for now.

Generally trying to have my shit together

I’ve spent some time recently doing some thinking on disaster preparedness which I was going to write about here but this post got longer than I was expecting so I’m going to dedicate the next post to those topics.