Category Archives: Daily-Ink

Let’s be careful out there

For the last couple days the roads have been snowy, icy, and very slippery. My advice to my kids regarding driving in snow is to go slower than they think they need to, and leave more room than they think they need to. With both kids, part of teaching then to drive was having them feel the vibration of ABS breaks, because if you don’t know what that feels like, the initial response to the feeling could be to release the breaks because something feels wrong.

I grew up in a pre-ABS era and was taught to pump the breaks in a slide on ice. The first time I was in a car with ABS breaks, I still pumped when I felt a side, and a friend in the car asked me, “Why are you doing that? The car does it better and faster than you.”

Our city is hilly, and I’ve seen a lot of people skidding and sliding over the past couple days. Most slides that I’ve seen have been little fish tails as people pull out of driveways and make turns. My wife was heading up the big hill to her school yesterday and the person in front was actually going too slow, which can be a problem going up hill, but more likely to get stuck than the idiots who feel their tires slipping and stepping on the gas.

I learned to drive in the snow in Toronto, with some fierce winter weather. My wife grew up in Nelson,BC, where it snows many feet more per year than the Vancouver Lower Mainland. Living here now, we can see the struggles of drivers who have little experience in the snow. It can be a challenging thing when you have experience, much less when you don’t.

So, no matter your skill, caution is probably better than confidence… and today is supposed to be pretty bad out, so be careful out there!

Shovelling Snow

I remember I time when I didn’t know what snow was. Sure, I’d seen it on TV, but it didn’t make any sense. I grew up on a tropical island and a party-sized block of ice was the largest concept I had for something cold that didn’t sit inside of a fridge or freezer.

My first snowfall (except for a spattering of sleet) was a cartoonishly slow snowfall of giant flakes that made me question how real the world was.

That was Grade 5. By Grade 9 I was absolutely done with snow and knew I was not going to live in Toronto the rest of my life. When I came to Vancouver as a water polo coach in ’93, I knew that I was going to move here, and leave Toronto and the snow behind.

Well, I didn’t quite leave it behind, and this morning I was shovelling my driveway (for the third day in a row) before 6am. But it was quite enjoyable. I had my headphones in, listening to a book, the only other sound being my shovel against the driveway. At one point my mind drifted to what I was actually doing:

Snow falls and gets in the way of our daily living. We take shovels and move it aside. It then melts away, with no indication that it was ever there. Snow falls…

I’m reminded of this silly gif of a man shovelling water and tossing back into the same puddle.

I’m also reminded of how we are at the whim of nature. This year in BC we’ve had forest fires and torrential rains that have completely affected our lives with road closures and damaged homes, even loss of life. The raw power of the natural forces around us is incredible.

And, in this part of the world, we have snow. White fluffy stuff that falls and gets in our way. Sometimes, like the fires and floods, it can wreak havoc, other times it is a mild inconvenience… and we scurry around moving it out of the way with shovels, then we watch it melt away.

Sticking to what works

On New Year’s Eve I shared my Healthy living goals reflection 2021. In this post I essentially said that I’m sticking with my old goals, with just a couple minor adjustments. Since then, this decision has bugged me a bit. I have felt a bit like I should have been more ambitious.

But this morning I realized that my goals are great. I have worked hard to maintain a healthy lifestyle the past few years and I’ve done far better than I have for a couple decades before that. Why should I add to this and push myself in a way that makes it hard to meet my daily goals?

I need to realize that when it comes to self care, maintaining a good plan is better than constantly striving to do more. It’s better to stick with what works than it is to push myself to a point where it gets too hard to achieve daily. Working out can include tougher workouts if I’m inclined, but I just had a few workouts that were really hard, then my body was begging for a rest. The soreness actually affected my sleep. That’s not healthy.

I’m not saying I won’t push myself every now and then, but I do need to realize that maintaining a good plan is better than creating a too challenging plan that I’ll give up on. ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’.

My healthy living goals are really good. They have worked wonders for me for the past 3 years, and I need to accept that sticking with the same goals is an achievement, and not something I need to feel disappointed about because I didn’t add more to them.

The laugh track

Growing up, every sitcom I watched had a laugh track. In fact, I think most of them had the same laugh track. My wife was watching a show and left the tv on. What followed was a new show I’d never seen before. The humour was bad, and the laugh track made it even more painful. I think the last sitcom to use a laugh track that actually didn’t take away from the comedy was The Big Bang Theory. But even there, I think they could totally have pulled it off without one.

Then came the commercials. Wow, they are awful. I really don’t watch a lot of TV, and when I do, it’s usually Netflix or some other streaming service that I don’t have to watch commercials on. Is there some sort of strategy whereby really bad commercials somehow work better than good ones?

Bad laugh tracks, bad commercials, bad sitcoms. How is TV going to survive in the next 5 years? Streaming services will be the way everyone watches their shows. I think most TV stations are going to go the way of the laugh track… and it won’t be a funny thing for them.

On the other hand, the old sitcoms I used to watch, like Friends, Seinfeld, and Cheers, are now the shows that my daughters are watching, or have watched. What’s funny about that is that I missed a lot of the shows because I didn’t see them on the night they played, and didn’t catch all the re-runs, but my kids watch episode by episode on demand. And that’s the difference now, shows can be watched any time, and without commercials.

The laugh track will live on in re-runs, but I think the days of the laugh track are long gone, and any good quality comedies of the future will rely on good humour and not a fake audience to cue the laughter of the viewer.

The boost

I finally got my notification and am booked for my 3rd, booster, Covid-19 shot. I still have to wait a couple weeks to get it, but at least I have a date on the calendar.

Our bodies are amazing things, and the idea that we can train our blood cells to fight off a virus before it can affect us adversely is incredible. That we now have the science to do so without even giving us a less harmful version of the virus is even more astonishing.

I’ve been big on pushing Vitamin D as a great way to boost our immune systems. It’s a cheap, easy to access, almost impossible to overdose, vitamin that is also a hormone which helps our immune system. It can’t and won’t prevent covid, but it can drastically reduce how covid and other ailments affect you, if you get sick. And, about 70-85% of people in the northern hemisphere are deficient in Vitamin D, due to a lack of sunlight, (especially in the winter).

I’m also a huge advocate for the vaccine. I had measles, mumps, and chicken pox in the same school year as a kid. I missed 40+ days of school that year. My kids didn’t have to go through that. My mother-in-law had polio, my wife and I didn’t have to go through that.

MNRA vaccines, and the science behind them, could potentially prevent a far worse (more fatal) virus in the future from ravaging the human race. And how could it do this? By giving our immune system a timely and needed boost.

Politics aside, profits to big pharma aside, possible covid treatments, after getting sick, aside. What we have here is a chance to reduce the likelihood of having a bad covid experience. Go to any social media site you like and search the hashtag #longcovid, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram… regular people of all ages and many in good health pre-covid.

Will a booster guarantee anything? No. But I am happy to give my immune system a boost, and hopefully you will too.

Tell me a story

I just listened to a short audio book, The Dispatcher, by John Scalzi,and performed by Zachary Quinto. The premise is far beyond the scope of believability, and there is no effort made to explain why this made up world works the way it does.

And it doesn’t matter.

It’s a wonderful short story and it is delivered with an engaging reading. That’s the power of good fiction and storytelling. You don’t have to believe that Hogwarts exists, or that there are mines in Middle Earth, or that there is an empire in a far, far away galaxy. What matters is that the authors take you on the journey with them, and that the journey is worthy to go on.

This year I plan listen to a lot more fiction. Recommendations are welcome!

Healthy living goals reflection 2021

It’s that time of year again when I look back at my healthy living goals sticker chart, and also plan for next year.

This was the post at the end of 2020. And this was for 2019, the year I started this.

2021 in review:

Workouts: 287days or 78.6%

Writing: Daily blog 100%

Meditation: 346 days or 94.8%

Archery: 129 days or 35.3% (Goal was 100 days so actually 129%.)

This was an awesome year for fitness. I am about 6-8 pounds heavier, with a fair bit of increase in size in my upper body and small but noticeable increases in my quads. I feel fit and strong, and I think I only had a couple minor slow downs from back pain, with minimal recovery time. I still need to stretch more, and I still rely a bit too much on deep massage therapy to keep the pain away, but I know that slow, careful strength progress, and more time using my standing desk at work, has significantly reduced the amount of regular pain I’ve had to deal with in my lower back.

Last year I did one more workout in the year… but it was a leap year so I’m going to call it even. I hope to maintain this next year too. Working out slightly more than 3 out of every 4 days for a full year is an excellent goal.

My daily blog has been going strong since July 2019… and while I could probably stop tracking this, I want to keep it as a goal for next year. The chart is a good motivator, and there is nothing wrong with having one of my goals be something that I commit to every single day.

Meditation: I missed 13 days from January to November, and 6 more in December. It has not been a good month for meditation. My goal this year was supposed to be tracking days when I meditate more than once to increase my time. I did this 6 times in January and didn’t continue. It did not become a habit. This year I want to increase the total time by going longer than 10 minutes on weekends, and doing more self-guided meditations mid week, so that mini lessons on the Calm App are not part of my meditation time. This is a more realistic way to take my daily meditation to the next level.

Archery was a new goal this year and I hoped to shoot a total of 100 days. I’m thrilled that I hit 129 days, and my goal next year will be 120.

So, no new goals next year, just a couple adjustments on my current goals. I do plan to write more, but I’m going to calendar that, rather than chart it. So 2022 will be about keeping the good habits going… if you have a few goals you’d like to track, buy yourself a year long calendar and make it happen! (Here are my tips.)

May your 2022 be amazing!

8 Billion

The world population will reach 8 billion in late 2022, or early 2023.

8 billion people!

There’s are more people alive today than the total number of people who have lived and already died.

I’m reminded of this scene from The Matrix:

‘We’ need to figure out how to sustain ourselves and our planet. While we worry about the coronavirus that is locking us down, we also need to figure out how we can be less like a virus and more like a mammal cohabitating with all the other living organisms on this planet.

The trick is, ‘we’ includes 8 billion people in 195 countries. A virus has a singular purpose: to spread its genes through infecting more hosts, humans are a bit more complex than that. Complex, complicated, and carelessly destroying our planet.

8 billion people.

8 billion different perspectives. 8 billion different realities. One planet.

Morning cuddles

Well now I’ve run out of time to get my workout in before my first errand of the day… but when your cat decides to jump on your lap while you are meditating, and he snuggles in, it’s kind of hard to move.

He has hunkered down for a nap, and I can’t get myself to move him.

Our cat usually only gets on our lap when we have his brush, but he has become a lot more affectionate in the last few weeks. He’ll jump up on me, look my in the eye, and bump our noses. Then he’ll settle in for a good pet. Usually it’s about 2-4 minutes and he’s had enough, only longer if we are brushing him.

This morning has been a full on settle-in-and-get-comfortable moment and I’ve been ‘stuck’ here for a good 20 minutes. But if I’m completely honest, this is a nice place to be stuck.

If or When?

I haven’t had any (known) close contact with Covid, but I’ve reached the point where it has touched or is touching so many people I know… I’m starting to wonder, is it a question of ‘if’ or ‘when’ it will reach our family?

Looking a year into the future, I can see the end of the ‘end’emic, with optional vaccines for a covid strain, just like optional flu vaccines today. There may even be a single Pan-Coronavirus “Super” Vaccine that truly ends this. But that’s in the far future, what lies ahead in the next 6 weeks?

I’m afraid my crystal ball gazing conjures no clear images of what’s to come in the short term. What’s my best guess? Businesses and maybe even schools closing from staffing shortages; Tougher restrictions in public (indoor) spaces; and a lot of people self-or-family isolating.

What’s my hope? Less and less hospitalization with more and more mild cases that look like a ‘regular’ flu.

Time will tell. I’m setting a calendar reminder to look back at this post in 6 weeks.