Periodically.org

This summer we planned to hang with our family friends at a private camping area. In BC, private camping generally means a parcel of land packed with as many camping spots as possible, geared towards young people who view camping as generally: drinking outdoors and sleeping at unreasonable hours.  As a middle aged dad with as much enthusiasm for the outdoors as an albino with a compromised immune system I more or less subscribe to the same definition, but I object to the hours. We made the great trek down a highway populuated by inpatient vacationers and semi drivers with a dulled sense of mortality.  The road is too narrow, the drivers too fast, and I'm driving to a spot where I have to setup my own shelter, and cook with a cooking set that could generously be called rustic (but in reality screams "anything more than mac and cheese with this setup is gonna be an ordeal"). Voluntarily.  And there is gonna be a lake, the standing water resevoir that makes me think of leech...

NOTE: I started writing this mid Marchish.  Here I am, 8 years later, standing on the edge of another precipice. Moving to a new job. That smoke jump into the unknown.  You can read reviews, look up the executives, read their mission statements, parse through and try and evaluate the Glassdoor reviews. But in the end it's a gut feeling from the people you talk to.  And now in the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic, it's not even 'meet people'. It's kind of sort of meet someone over zoom (with botchy mic output while both wearing what I assume are vietnam era chopper pilot headsets).  There is a groove to work. A familiarity with how things fit together, who gets back to you right away, who needs incessant prodding, what specific processes to ignore if you can at all help it,  office politics (which I've so far avoided like the plague) . So much of work is hundreds of individual other bits of works, the flotsam, the jetsam that becomes so much muscle memory tha...

  It's an old adage that time flies when you are having fun. Which can't be right, because these Covid Times have been anything but; yet time has sped by in a streak of horror filled disaster news and covid variants and just a malaise of burnout and fatigue. Maybe the adage should be "time flies when you are having fun or the world is trapped in a whirlpool of climate change disasters and a healthcare crippling viral pandemic" Bit of a downer, that adage.  Which is all to say that the blur of 2021 fails to bring up anything different, all days melding into one. We are all healthy and alive, which is a weird thing to put in a Christmas Letter. That it can be news is worrying. I say that now but I’m sure in 2035 it’ll be ‘the robot overlords haven’t breached our perimeter yet’ and we won’t blink an eye. We managed to do some local vacations. One was at a resort/spa which was more of a spa than a resort. Our room was entirely too big, the kind of suite your reserve for a...