I'm thinking it's time I start applying to jobs and think about moving. There's a place where whenever I go and come back, friends and coworkers comment on how I seem just a little happier than normal. So I think I'm going to try to live there.
"Congratulations! You have earned 94 points which means that you could potentially immigrate to Canada as a Skilled Worker, and you would therefore have a good chance of being successful in this application based on your skills, qualifications and work experience." Well...I mean...maybe a weekend in Vancouver is in order.
I would like to think it wouldn't be terribly difficult given my profession?
Yup! We’ll take you in! Here are things that add you your points: - young - educated - married - young kid - speak English - speak French (disproportionately a lot of points if you want to come to Quebec) We have a lot of space and no people so... welcome!
I feel that’s true for all major cities in the world. But as a country we have PLENTY of space. Especially in the Atlantic Provinces. They have a pilot immigration program right now where if you get literally any job and live there for 2 years they grant you a permanent residence status.
I’m on the West coast, so the pub was either opening early or late. I saw a bunch of biotech entrepreneur people I haven’t seen for a while at an event in SF tonight. It was nice. Bio startups are a special kind of ridiculous, so it’s always therapeutic to share with them.
Still gyming, touch rugby season started and I'm not awful despite the hiatus. Shifting offices and packing up academics is a nightmare. Watched the election unfold like a fly on the wall. There's the local Craft Beer Festival this weekend, it's like a highlight of each year and I hope it's yet another awesome experience. The people helping shift our offices asked if I'd be around to oversee the shift if it goes into Saturday - I said "I'd be seven stouts deep by the time they called. Drop the boxes in the offices labelled and we can deal with it on Monday." They put off the shift by two weeks fluffing around then only turned up on the last day after I had given up trying to get a hold of them, so fuck 'em, I got beer to drink.
We just had an active shooter drill. For my fellow old people, this is where you are instructed to cower in the dark until someone comes over the intercom to tell you to stop cowering in the dark. That's our solution. "run, hide, fight." Of course, the first thing they do is lock all the doors. Apparently this school had six months of meetings before coming up with the solution "leave all the doors locked all the time and put a magnet in the jamb so that it can be removed quickly when the monsters come." "Run, hide, fight." My daughter is going to grow up in an environment where a couple times a year she's going to be instructed to cower in the dark and hope the monsters don't see her. Because there are douchebags who vote who are so afraid of the unknown that they need an AR-15 to cuddle. Of course, this is a class full of rednecks so all of them were OUTRAGED that they weren't allowed to walk around with AR-15s themselves because a firefight is going to solve the problem. The same people who explain that they unwind by getting into bar fights. Run hide fight. I wonder what would happen if every stupid fucking redneck insisting on his unassailable right to pack heat every fucking where he goes would do if twice a year, he was required to cower in a darkened classroom for fifteen minutes behind ineffectually-locked doors.
The previous school my wife taught at was a tiny K-thru-8 Catholic school with an inexperienced principal with no leadership skills. Same drills every semester - lock the doors, close curtains, lights off, cower silently. A couple weeks after the drill while it was still fresh in everyone's mind a 5th grade boy acted out all day then snuck into the kindergarten bathroom to hide before the last period. Principal put the school on lockdown while they went through the school looking for him. Most everyone knew what was going on since gossip spreads faster when the student has already pissed off half the teachers that day, and someone had gone to most of the classrooms asking "is X in here" before the lockdown started. But at dismissal all of 6th grade and the art teacher were missing missing because nobody had called off lockdown, so they had been in their somewhat isolated classroom in the dark for 45 minutes, waiting their turn.
What is it then that makes the latter not see that there's something inherently wrong with the former? Is it really that hard to grasp the concept of powerlessness when you're in a position of unreasonably strong power?My daughter is going to grow up in an environment where a couple times a year she's going to be instructed to cower in the dark and hope the monsters don't see her. Because there are douchebags who vote who are so afraid of the unknown that they need an AR-15 to cuddle.
I’m having a great week. I took a visit back home and it went surprisingly well for how much I stressed over it. I won’t go into detail because trust me it won’t sound like a sweeping success to anybody with a normal life but it was really great overall. So last night I was driving in a snowstorm and it hit me that I’m significantly less anxious than I was a year ago. I don’t feel like I did anything about the anxiety either, not directly at least. I worked on my confidence and developing a better sense of self and that’s really what I came down to last night. I didn’t even consciously think about it, I just trusted myself and bet on myself without any doubt. It’s really nice and reassuring when these little things happen after years of slow progress. Anyways, congrats on taking back the house, you’re almost there.
I voted. I got rear ended this morning. Damage wasn’t significant(we’re talking paint damage here) and my car is an established beater I have paid off. Don’t think I’ll be calling the other lady’s insurance. My position is if this car runs I’m driving it. But now my upper back is all stressy. Work is good. I am applying for a new role in the same department this week. (Possibly today.) I can’t remember if I mentioned this, I think I did. I am very excited. It’s good to do something different. Continuing to plan my move to VA in 6 months. Planning a haircut, too. All sorts of fun new stuff for a Fun New Refugee. Hell, I’ve been eating chicken, rice and broccoli for lunch all week, even. ;) Pretty happy with election results, I’ll say. Really want to finish Owen meany this week. I know a few of you guys have been interested in my thoughts. For now I’ll be brief; I find the novel disappointing. I have about 100 pages left to go. Cheers, Hubski, happy hump day.
I would go ahead and get it checked out now. Because if it gets worse in 6 months, you're not going to be able to prove a causal connection unless there's something documented now. Where in VA will you be?But now my upper back is all stressy.
I've been trying to leverage there daylight saving change to get up early. It's only been a couple days, and it's possible this will only last a few more days, but I actually kind of like it. I got up and swam half a mile before work Monday which gave me time to go to a spin cycling class Monday after work. I'm currently at eight workouts per week and edging toward nine. My swimming seems to be at an important beginner plateau. I need to be able to swim continuously without needing a break. I think I'm starting to get there, and it has a lot of similarities with a post I know I made on hubski. Slowing down lets me not feel so exhausted and out of breath. Kick a bit less, think about my form, think about getting all the air out of my lungs. I think my goal is 450 yards in ten minutes. I can swim 100 yards in a little over two minutes, but I can't sustain that pace.
Everything has come to a head all at once, and I am swamped. Work. Sports. Health. Travel. Motorcycle. Writing my Will. Home projects. Every one of those headers have about two pages of notes and topics underneath, that all need to be managed and dealt with. My brain is so full...
I would love some ideas on home projects. I have been stuck at home more recently. Also, I cannot comprehend writing my own will at this point in my life. I am probably a little bit younger than you, but it is disappointing that I didn't think it through that far.
So I've been thinking about your question/conundrum for a couple of days, and I have an idea: One of the things you need to do for a Will, is to define all your "items of value". So basically anything you own that is worth more than $1000, or any collection of similar things that are worth more than $1000. So while your car is in the first category, your XBox isn't. But, if you have an XBox 360, XBox One X, PlayStation, Nintento Switch, 700 games for various platforms, and custom controllers and sound system, your "Gaming Hardware" classification may be worth more than $1000. So make a list of everything you own that is "valuable". Just do it in Excel. Easy peasy. Item Name, Description, Location, Approx Value. Then add a column titled "Who gets it", and write the name of the individual, organization, or charity that you want the item to go to if you fall over dead tomorrow. "Gaming Systems, All my gaming equipment and games, Living Room, $1100, Bob Smith" You can do 90% of this while sitting on the couch, looking around the room, and thinking about the things in the other rooms. Here's the fun part... So while this is nominally needed for the Will, what you will find is that you have a lot of useless shit cluttering up your life, and you will want it GONE. So pack up 4 boxes of generic shit that you don't want any more, drive down to Goodwill, and give it to them. Go back home. You now have more space. Things are more orderly. Your brain is happier because some of the shit it was having to juggle - ("... gotta remember where I put that extra toothpaste tube..." - has been taken care of, and freed it up to do more productive things. And this will feel good. And inspire you to further action. And then you'll discover Marie Kondo and go totally insane. Or not. Your choice. :-) But, either way, you have done two things: A bunch of home projects while stuck at home, and done some baseline organization that you can push forward into a basic Will, with about 2 google searches and a generic form you can find online and fill out. Bam! Accomplishments up the wazoo!
Celebrated my birthday properly for the first time in a long while. Sister couldn't make it because she spent the night in the hostpital. Wanted to visit her but couldn't. Found out that I am pretty good at bringing my D&D characters to life and improvising for four hours straight. Also found out that my parents almost lost their new home and were at risk of plummeting into a debt trap. (They're not anymore.) Had a great weekend where my girlfriend (finally) met my parents for the first time. But when that was over I had to work a 14 hour day of mentally exhausting work to get a project done in time before the two-day retreat / training I just came back from. Which was very valuable and taught me more about myself, but was also emotional and confrontational at times. In other words, life's in rollercoaster mode. I'm holding on but I am looking forward to catching my damned breath again.
Looks like there are machine recounts for FL Senator. I'd like to think its the same for Gov, but not expecting a a delta of 50k votes to flop the other way. Seems like next to none of my dogs won the race, but hey, we banned actual dog racing. Weirdly all the amendments got voted in. My understanding is re-districting this time around still favors red for FL. Going to run back through the list of good things to come out of this midterm. Also going to review which states are going to have similar climates in the coming decades.
Post election night confession: I've started using bing. Google's search quality has degraded to the point where I don't really notice a difference between the two. Anyways. Greetings from flyover country. The Dems should have gotten KS-2 too. My county tried to drag Davis across the line, but we couldn't quite de-snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Not exactly a surprise. He ran for Governor in 2014. And lost to Brownback. Brownback. H e l o s t t o B r O w n B a C k That was a state wide race. KS-2 robs him of several bases of support that kinda sorta made him competitive. Doubling down on that was a choice. It isn't even pure gerrymandering. In all the counties I checked he under-delivered what Lara Kelly got by 2-5%. In the long run, though? They're gonna need to do another round of gerrymandering to keep KS-2 and KS-3 from becoming blue. KS-3 is back in democratic hands, and they did it without the eastern portion of Douglas county that Moore had when he got elected in 1998. And now all of Douglas is in KS-2. We had 59% turnout. Almost as many people voted as in 2012. Davis carried us by 71.5% (again, less than Kelly). We're up to a population of 120,000. Doesn't sound like much, but this is Kansas.
I voted. -still don't have a car -working on two screenplays -I have a conference call in the morning -still don't have a car -said that twice because I can't believe it I'm also getting over being sick. It's not fun being sick.