The other stuff

So enough about work for now. That will sort itself out and I don't have much control over it.

There's been a couple swims this week. Both went well, with lots of kick and drill stuff I haven't done for a while. Both days my knees started off kind of creaky and I had to be careful not to push off the wall too hard. It gradually got better, and the swim went quicker.

My mouth is full of fillings. I didn't get many cavities as a kid, but got a bunch in my teen years. My current (wonderful) dentist thinks they are something out of the stone age. I'm pretty sure he is planning to replace them when his daughter (currently in grade 9) is going to university.

A while ago I had part of one tooth fall off. It didn't hurt a bit, I thought that crunchy bit was just another bit of granola. Turns out that tooth was just a thin shell over the filling, and the various stresses created tiny cracks, and eventually the cracks joined up, and off it came.

I opted for the crown, rather than just spucking on a bit of plastic. Drilling out the old stuff wasn't much fun, but it wasn't bad either. A couple weeks later the permanent crown went on. The temporary one was pried out, look Ma no freezing, and the new one put on. No muss, no fuss. Unlike some of my other toothy adventures. They matched the colour really well.

Today is a drizzly rainy day. Yes, the grass is green. So unusual for this time of the year.

Linda started a beef barley soup first thing. The scent wafted through the house as it slowly simmered. There is something very primal about the smell of soup in a warm cozy house on a cool rainy day.

Some friends dropped by. We had a perfectly lovely afternoon chatting, while drinking coffee, eating soup, and nibbling the many treats on hand. They've been retired a while now, and I've been picking their brains about it. I'm making more of it than it is, they say. It just isn't that hard, they say. You won't spend as much money, they say. You'll have more fun, they say. You'll still be busy, but doing the things you want to do, they say.

The way they say it, it sounds awfully tempting.

I'm trying to do more text messages by speaking to my phone, than trying to type. Going back to fix it is a pain in the butt. Every now and then I just let the message go, figuring my friends will either read between the lines and get it, or at least be amused. This is what got sent to my buddy Susi first thing this morning. I thought I was making sense at the time. Maybe not.

More to life, part 2

Thank you to all of you that have touched base to wish me well. Even having done the roller coaster before, it's still a stressful ride. You don't know that someone hasn't unbolted the tracks at the bottom this time.

It turns out that the afternoon meeting was NOT to correct the oversight of not firing us. About 8 of us met to discuss what we're working on, what gaps we see, and how to mitigate those gaps, with the (ex) boss's boss. Who isn't our boss anymore and he doesn't know who is.

Lots of crucial people aren't there anymore. I still am, but I think that's luck of the draw, nothing more. If I'd had to pick only 2 people from my team to stay, I wouldn't have picked me or the other guy. You could argue which of us is 3rd, depending on what the priorities are.

So long day cut short. I'm still there, with lots to do. For now. Maybe too much to do. Fundamentally nothing has changed. They can pull the plug any time.

I don't think the story is over. Seeing the people and positions cut tells me there's something we aren't being told yet. Stay tuned for part three. I'm sure it's coming.

More to life...

I'm a contractor, currently working for Penn West. Today Penn West told about 400 people to go away. Many of them were on my floor. Many of them were not people I knew well, but you chat in the kitchen. Some of them were people I've been working closely with for several years.

My whole team went away, including my boss. They were waiting for her when she got in. I was in late, coming from a dental appointment. The only people left from my team are me and one other contractor. As far as I know the only other people left on the whole floor are my boss's boss, and the pressure vessel chief inspector. They can't fire him till they have a replacement. I haven't heard how my buddies from IT in the other building made out, but I do not have high hopes.

I will be meeting with (ex) boss's boss tomorrow, and find out if my being there is an oversight (It's happened to me before) or if they've got lots (and lots and lots) for me to do. I don't know. It's going to be an empty place first thing tomorrow.

It was very sad saying goodbye to people that I've worked with for several years. Many of them went out for a drink after, but I couldn't go. I didn't want to go. I'm not in that space yet. I was told to take the rest of the day off. I cuddled cats and napped a bit.

This will be a big blow to some people. Not to tell tales out of school, but some of them need to be working. I am very fortunate that isn't true for me. I was already thinking about proposing part time work next year. I've been doing the math on retirement. If I get told to go away tomorrow, it's very easy to think of the break till my next job as the "semi" part of semi-retirement. I'm not quite ready financially or emotionally to not ever work again. But it's not going to break my heart to have some time off either. The price of oil will go back up, we just don't know when.

This is the stuff I tell the young people I work with. There are only two ways to leave a company. One is when you choose, on your terms, because you've decided it's the right thing to do. The other way is for the company to spit you out onto the sidewalk like used chewing gum. Sure they make the polite noises about it being a hard decision, but there you are, drying out and getting hard while being stepped on. They don't care if you just had a baby, or bought a house, or whatever. They care about their profit and nothing else. You choose. You already know you aren't going to retire here. Think about that.

I admit to being thoroughly sick and tired of the oil and gas roller coaster. I've been on it since 1992 and experienced the fallout before that. Up. Down. Up. Down. Paid well. Laid off. Asked to do too much work. Not able to find any work at all. Over and over again. This is no way to run an economy.

It's making me think about what's important. Really important. Not just earning money, there's almost always places to earn money. Important as in how to spend the time I have left here. Doing what I want to do because I enjoy doing it.

Fish Creek view path

I wasn't sure about the whole darned thing today, starting with the alarm clock. Normally I'm on it before it goes off, but not today. It took a long time to get started.

By the time I got home I was mentally enthusiastic about a run, but my legs weren't so sure. They were feeling kind of creaky. But it's a beautiful sunny day, warm but not hot. No smoke. I had to at least try. As I was getting my shoes on I realized I didn't really want to run any of my normal routes. I wanted something new.

So I dodged down the garden path. Part of the neighbourhood has a central walkway with lots of grassy space. Today it was fresh mown. Quiet. A few people puttering in their back yard as I ran past.

From there it was sort of down into Fish Creek, then a hard left to the start of the path along the north edge of the park. The views are lovely! I ran along, having settled into an easy pace, lungs and legs both happy. My eyes were even happier! There are so many subtle shades of green, with some bits of red from some kind of bush just beginning to show up. Quiet. Peaceful. It was exactly the kind of run I was looking for. I ran a bunch of stuff out of my brain, and I'm happier for it.

Some of the path is paved, some is red shale. There's a bit of up and down. You can peer into the back yards of expensive houses to see how the rich live. At 3 K I had to decide if I wanted to go lots further or turn back for home.

My quads were feeling a bit tired, and I didn't want to turn this into a slog, so it was back home. More quiet streets, mostly. It ended up being 5 K, 36 minutes, all nice and easy and relaxed. Everything but the stairs were chat chat chat pace. I was careful on the stairs.

Lots of stretching once home again, trying to relax my quads. There is more than the usual amount of difficulty in writing this evening, because of a particular big orange cat who is determined to "help" me write. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned that paws can operate a track pad. One day he's going to put it all together and life as I know it will be over. Maybe you'll find him a more amusing blogger than me.

I'm thinking

So many things to think about. Some big, some not so big. Some with consequences, and some with no consequences to speak of. None the less, they are all competing for the very limited number of  thinking cycles in my brain. (No snarky remarks from the peanut gallery!)

Part of the problem is that one can't thoroughly think something through, then put it on a shelf and be done with it. Usually something else intrudes along the way and lucky if it's only one something else.   There is a cost when we stop thinking about something, and start thinking about something else. It's not just mental effort to let a whole bunch of stuff go, so you can load up other stuff so you can think about it. There's actual physical effort. It takes energy. The fact that nothing is seen to be moving doesn't mean nothing is happening.

I was tempted to list all the things that I'm thinking about, off and on, but that would just encourage the things further down the list to yell louder.

Where to start? The default thing in my brain now is my novel. I got some really good advice about a small part of it, but it applies to the whole thing. I'm trying to take a step back and look at it again. I want to clarify what the story is and who is involved for what parts of it. Then comes the part of arranging words on a page so that the reader knows what the story is too and what's more, has a reason, or reasons, to keep turning the page.

It's not just one of three large Scrivener files, each of which I'm pleased to call a novel. All three hook together, and I want to consider all three together. What is the actual sequence of events and why? What do I tell the reader about, and what remains hidden?

Part of the problem is that publishers like to label things. Mystery, thriller, science-fiction, fantasy, are just a few of the labels. They know which they are interested in, and how to go about selling them. The buying public is fickle, so there is a lot of uncertainty about the whole process.

There's a joke. How do you end up with a small fortune from farming? Answer, start with a very large  one. (badabump!) The same could be said for publishing.

Of the three files that I'm pleased to call novels (call me an optimist), one is a mystery and sideways love story. One is mostly science-fiction with a hint of mystery. The last one, well, I don't know. Modern life. Beyond one tiny very plausible thing, it's all life as we know it. A big mix of stuff.

Expect me to be working on this for a while. At the moment I'm trying to think about it as a unified whole, broken into reasonable sized chunks, each individually packaged. Later, with great fanfare I'll announce a boxed set, a few with autographs for the faithful fans. (You remember what I said about being an optimist?)

Friday afternoon was spent with my buddy Sean D, drinking beer, eating appetizers and dessert. Neither of us had to go back to the office, so we had several hours of leisurely conversation. I won't say we solved all the problems of the world; we didn't drink that much! But we talked about lots of stuff, including the state of Calgary's market for our profession, that is, business analysts in oil and gas. It's a pretty precarious time. Many of the people we know are not working. One just got a job after looking more than a year.

One of the rules in our business is that you have to make hay while the sun shines. We never know how long till the next contract. I was in a right spot when the music stopped this time. That hasn't always happened. At the moment the job is tough sledding for some reasons I don't propose to get into. The advice, "suck it up, Princess" applies, and is being applied. But I don't think anybody is going to lose the narrative thread if I mention that the words vacation, and retirement, are coming to mind a little more often.

Some lighter topics. We went to the Global fest fireworks show last night. Impressive! If the issues involved in getting many tens of thousands of people out of the park were easier to cope with I'd go every night. As it is, they close 17 Ave for blocks in each direction, and it's full of people heading for wherever they parked, or hope to find their shuttle bus. We did very, very well to be home 45 minutes or so from leaving the park gates.

As it is, we strolled some of the booths, hung out with a buddy, and watched the excellent show with the full moon as a backdrop. It was beautiful. I didn't even try to take photos this year, other than the one of the moonrise below. Why bother when you can go here and look at stunning Neil Zeller images?

And the cats. They had the right idea today. We settled for lunch with buddies, and puttering around.

The prettiest yet

The smoke cleared a bit this morning. Long enough to go for a short run and get the photos below. In the space of a 2 K easy run the air went from fresh with a slight taste of smokey, to just smokey that was beginning to dry out my mouth and make my lungs unhappy. Still, it was my first run in a week or so.

Linda has started some garden clean up already, figuring if she leaves it, the job will only get bigger. In the mean time, there are more lilies! And cats, don't forget to scroll down for the cats.

The cats have been a bit more determined lately to be in my lap. Poor Curtis, Celina curled up on top of him.

The inner shark does CSS

Considering this is one of the pools at Talisman for the next month, the other pool wasn't all that busy. Maintenance. It has to happen. I didn't mind so much, but the good hot tub was closed. Sigh.

I've been sleeping really hard lately, but not enough. It was a bit of an effort to drag myself into the pool. Normally I don't do warmup. I just get in and swim. Today I put in about 250 m warmup, slowly getting it together while I tried to decide what to do.

Then I realized I hadn't done the CSS thing for a while, and started that. Normally my first one is fast,  and by the third I'm in the groove. This first 100m was slow, about 1:44, which isn't a good sign. The second was a bit faster, and the third 1:38.

Then my inner shark buddy visited, and I got in the groove, then next 10 or so were 1:41 or 42, cruising along nice and relaxed. The shark was not impressed with the prey at all. We chatted about stuff as I zoomed along. My catch was working really well and it seemed effortless. My reach and roll was spot on, though I noticed a slight hitch as I breathed to my right. Then there were a couple where I was working a bit to maintain pace, and for the last one I busted out a 1:37, just because. I was beginning to feel my arms and shoulders a bit. New goggles made me realize how gunked up the old ones were.

15x100 was enough, and a totally lovely swim with a whole short course lane to myself. Pretty pleased at that, though I can't expect that to happen much in September. Cool down, stretch. I think next time I need to start shortening the rest interval, even though that makes watching the clock and figuring sent off times more complicated. Such is life.

On the way out the sun was just barely visible through the murk.

Still murky this evening. The iPhone camera doesn't do the colour any justice at all. It was a beautiful orange.

We went out for dinner to Patisserie du Soleil. I've been there many times for coffee or lunch, but this was the first time for dinner. I'm really pleased with it. Nice to have a good restaurant within walking distance.

Right behind it is something I'm less pleased about. Do I have to worry about being tainted with it so close? Still building a head of steam, never fear!