More sad times

My cat Winnie died just before Christmas. Apparently, he had cancer but we didn't catch it until it was too late. He was my best friend since I was a teenager - over 15 years at this point - and was the nicest, friendliest cat. As soon as you would pet him, he would start purring ferociously. He was a big orange fluff ball. He loved being picked up and sat on laps, and could stay there for a long time. He never bit or scratched intentionally, and he was a joy in my life. Now he is gone. I miss him greatly. R.I.P. Winnie.

Bandaid times

It started with itchy, dry skin, the skin on my fingers. At my work, I use my hands a lot to place and replace objects, so it makes sense that it would get chafed. The simple solution that worked was just putting bandaids on the affected areas on the days that I work, and letting the skin breathe when I don't have work.

But then, I got into a bike accident. Nothing major, but on the first icy day of the year, I was biking back home from work when I took a corner a little too rapidly and my bike slipped on the road and I fell. It was a quiet residential street, but there was an SUV right at the intersection. The driver got out to see if I was okay, and thankfully I was - just a couple big bruises on my thighs and a scraped knee. It was almost 9pm, and the lady was super kind to offer me a lift home, but I was only a block away and was able to walk so I thanked her for the offer and went on my way.

A few days after the bike accident, someone in my house tested positive for COVID, and I become sick barely a day after that with milder symptoms than my housemate - just a slight fever, runny nose, sore throat and sore muscles. It was annoying, but I'm glad I'm mostly okay now.

2023 is coming to a close already. Time really does seem to go faster when you grow older.

Waterloo

 Gah. Waterloo is stuck in my head. Yeah, the song by ABBA. It's been in my head for the past week or so after it was played a couple times while at work. Can't say I know the lyrics very well, and I'm not looking them up for fear that the song will burrow even deeper in my head. So here and there, I find myself repeating Waterloo... couldn't escape if I wanted to-ooo and yeah, this song isn't escaping anywhere. It's not a bad song by any means - ABBA is always catchy - but I'd like something else, please.

Here's some bullet points of things I've been thinking about or observed:

• I saw two cats, on the same street, a few houses apart, tied up and leashed to a tree or porch in a front yard. Seems kind of sad if I'm being honest, but I guess they're getting fresh air and not cooped up indoors which I find sad as well. The cats I live with don't really go outside as much, they seem content to be indoors while the weather gets colder. And they seem happy, so to say it's sad isn't objectively true.
• I get very annoyed when drivers just skip on past an activated crosswalk light. Like, all you have to do is step off the gas pedal for a few seconds, and you can't be bothered to do that? It's just dangerous behaviour, and I actually find it safer to jay walk because I never know if cars are going to stop or not.
• The Raptors are a fun team to watch again. They had a rough start to the season, but they're actually demolishing top teams like the Bucks and Mavericks. Some players have some off days where they're not playing anywhere near their potential, but then other players step up and take over. It's fun.
• Who the hell thinks that launching a cyberattack against the Toronto Public Libraries is a good idea? Absolute scumbag behaviour - couldn't you attack corporations like Nestle or Big Oil or something instead? Libraries enhance the quality of life for so many people: from those without a home to scholars advancing human knowledge. I get that the hackers are trying to score big cash, but this kind of greed is so detrimental and is totally anti-humanist.
• I feel naked if I don't have a deck of cards to fiddle around with somewhere - either in my backpack, or on my desk, or in my room. Even if I don't touch them, just knowing that I have a lightly used deck of Bicycle playing cards lying around somewhere brings me a bit of joy.

Waterloo... toodeloo...

The light in the shed

There's this rectangular shed in the backyard that I go into fairly regularly. The shed's concrete floor has a long crack in the middle running length-wise, and the gap grows every year due to the shed being built on uneven ground. For now, the shed is still perfectly usable as storage because the crack is mostly hidden underneath some shelving.

The roof is in good shape. Every year during cherry season, I use the roof as an elevated platform to pick cherries from the tree growing right next to the shed. There's raccoon droppings that I have to circumnavigate when I'm cherry picking, but otherwise it's super convenient. Unfortunately the cherries sucked this year, but that's besides the point.

This shed, you see, has a single tubular fluorescent light to illuminate it. It does a good job - when it works. For some strange, unknown reason, the light only turns on 33% of the time when I flick the switch. The percentage used to be around 50% a few years ago, but it's gone down recently. When it's dark out and I have to use the shed, I now go in expecting it to not turn on and am pleasantly surprised when it does turn on. For the times when it doesn't turn on, a feeble glimmer of light still appears at the extremity of the light bulb, as if to taunt me. I can flick the switch on and off a couple times, and still that faint glimmer will appear - but no real illumination. It's only when I give it a couple days and come back another time to try the light that it will magically turn back on.

I think this phenomenon is weather dependant. May be not the temperature, because the likelihood of it turning on doesn't seem to change from winter to summer in any given year; perhaps the humidity, then? Or barometric pressure? Something affecting the electrical connection, somehow. An electrician would probably have an answer, but for now, I'm content with playing a sort of roulette with the light in the shed.

Break a fast

I've eaten every day for a long while now. I haven't been sick much lately, but even when I was sick, I also remember eating that day, so I can't say I've taken much of a break from eating in a long time.

Today, and tomorrow, and the day after will probably not be exceptions. Right now, my breakfast is a simple hard-boiled eggs and some hot pepper olives. I don't have much of an appetite early on in the day, so most of my weight gain comes from when I eat after dark.

It's hard to change the habit of eating most of my calories later in the day, for numerous reasons that I won't go into.

At least I'm cognizant of my dietary habits. I have been for some time now. And yet, I still make the mistake of consuming 1. way too many calories overall and 2. the wrong kind of calories. If all I ate for a while were some fatty olives and some protein-packed hard-boiled eggs, I would definitely lose weight. But I would struggle. Because I'm so used to variety. Because carbs are addictive. Because the ease of reaching for something high in sugar overwhelms my rational desire to be fit.

I take pleasure in cooking things from scratch. I don't do it enough, but there's a solid foundation there.

I have hope that I will build on this foundation in a meaningful way, so that I can finally move on from struggling with my food picks.

Reddit doomscroll & a Journey

I spend too much time on Reddit.

I've improved things - by getting rid of most of the default subreddits like, for example, r/worldnews and r/AmITheAsshole and r/facepalm that add nothing positive to my life - and curated my front page feed so that I'm not mindlessly doomscrolling. But I still spend too much time on there. I realize that I'm living vicariously through the comments - even on the most innocuous subreddits like r/whatisthisplant - that are found in any given post. And I still occasionally leave a comment here or there, especially on the gaming subreddits, because I do enjoy that limited interaction with other like-minded people. I don't think I can realistically cut Reddit out entirely because it's incredibly useful, but being mindful of my time on there is a good foundation to a more balanced life. I think.

So instead of going on Reddit and feeling like I've wasted more time again, I figured I'd write here what I originally felt like writing on r/books: a short overview of the books that I've finished reading and what I've started recently.

Okay, so last week I finally finished Voyage au centre de la terre (Journey to the Centre of the Earth) by Jules Verne. I'm so happy I read this book! I read it (pun unintended) entirely in the original language of publication, which feels great because I haven't read a novel in French in a while. Plus, many of the novels I have read in French over the years have been translations from the English, so to have an actual French novel to read is, well, novel to me.

This is the edition that I read

I've never read any Jules Verne before, but of course I'd heard of him from such other novels as Journey Around the World in 80 Days and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. As I've done for other books I've read in the past, I happened upon this particular novel by browsing my local library for anything that looks familiar, or interesting. In this case it was both, so I checked it out and read it over the course of a couple months, usually during my break at work. It was a french learner's edition, so there were beautiful full-page drawings littered throughout the book that helped with visualizing the carefully crafted settings that Verne lays out so eloquently. So eloquent, in fact, that I found myself seeing brand new words that I had no idea were in the french lexicon and that I now might recognize again in some of his other works that I intend to read eventually.

The gist of the story, without spoilers, is really all in the title. After discovering an ancient document explaining how an explorer once made a path to the Centre of the Earth, a scientist and his nephew decide to travel to Iceland (in the 19th century) to explore whether there really is a way to make it all the way down. During their expedition, they experience various natural (and, it has to be said, supernatural) phenomena that add interesting twists to this epic sci-fi adventure. Verne does a great job of suspending disbelief in my opinion, and provides solid (but imaginary, of course) explanations for how heat and lighting and geology work in this fantastical, yet almost realistic, universe.

Because I enjoyed this one, there's a good chance I'll read Verne again. For now, though, I've started a collection of short stories titled Hidden Girl (and other stories) by Ken Liu, which is also sci-fi but from what I've read so far, focused on aliens and space travel. I'm enjoying it, and I've finished 3 stories (with about a dozen or so left to go). Perhaps I'll summarize my experience with this book in a blog post later down the line, too.