Where Do I go from here.
When last I wrote here, I had explored where I had ended up and looked at some places I passed through on the way. A needed exploration of what was tried. While I no longer want the same jobs I have held in past it is not all regret. There were some good adventures and I am happy that I have settled in Vancouver. The pressing question is where do I go from here.
That question lacks a clear answer. The first response in looking for jobs is to try to find something the same yet different. There is a comfort in knowing there is familiar work around. Yet reading those job postings is dull. Being technically capable, does not make the job interesting. I read them and know some time after the learning curve levels off I will bore and my indifference will surface.
To make matters worse the job postings that best fitted my skills and experience were both in the oil and gas sector. I am only indifferent to getting gold out of the ground, I might be actively hostile in dealing with the burning stuff, and burning stuff extraction and transport industries. And yet my historic failure of imagination leaves me unable to see myself in the roles described in other job description. The process has only just begun, I will seek out jobs because well between boredom and the need for cash flow something will have to be found.
As I write this line it has been three weeks almost to hour since I had the talk at work. The lack of work is a mixed blessing. At first a relief, there was a pent up need for a vacation I never could get myself to take, I was feeling spent overall. But I was used to filling a chair for eight hours and providing useful services for up to 6 of them. The first week sailed by before I started to wallow in intellectual doldrums. As my brain scrambled for something to engage upon it tripped across a novella I started years ago and had last touched last October, it has been dominating my thoughts since.
Its terrible timing to take to writing pulp fiction. Both from the standpoint of my own professional best interest and on the simple fact that it is never a good time to try to become a write, now is worse than usual. Yet when I look back at inspirations, personal heros, the names that cross my mind are not geologists, cartographers or prospectors, they are writers. So I fail to answer the questions of what job I want and fail to imagine where my career is going, I can answer a different set of questions. Those answers doom me to a fate of poverty and drudgery.
Yet here is a field I have studied when left to my own devices, a hobby I have toyed with since forever. I have read and absorbed countless books. Talks and books on writing have made me think I could do that. Many free hours up north were spent learning a few things about writing. Perhaps I spent too much time learning a few things about the business without product of my own but that is past. So thinking about what I always wanted to do I find a body of unfinished work.
For ten years three major stories have been spinning around my head. There are others but they lack form. Three tails lodged in my brain for as long as I have been chipping at rocks and pining for chance to go home. Currently I have picked up the one that is the easiest to write. Yet I know its a terrible tactical move. No matter how fast I write how well I write, I will have an eviction notice before I have a rejection letter. Yet foolishly I have let these ideas lodge themselves in my brain.
There has been an underlying assumption in the majority of the professional choices I have made since I got my undergrad degree. Safety. I took the suring things when I could get them, I planned the last 4 years on making my life more secure. And those choices became increasingly passionless. Is it time to take a risk.
Find a job what leaves me with enough energy to consider writing more frequently. The mind numbing technical jobs have contributed to the sharp decline in blog posts. While I am trying to get my bearings I will live cheaply and type quickly.
In the words of Spider Robinson.
Do The Next Thing.
Cheers.
Friday, May 17, 2013
Saturday, May 4, 2013
There and Back Again.
Greetings again.
This is the second post on digesting my lay off. Here I will ramble about various factors that lead to my ending up here, and perhaps more importantly find a way of avoiding that fate again. Not simply the fate of getting laid off but the dissatisfaction that came with jobs I have had in the past.
Getting laid off, and having it happen after I was at my best is not an isolated event. Its not at all surprising considering the industry I landed in. I took my second exploration job just after I finished my undergrad. Gradschool was considered, but after the better part of 7 years chewing through my undergrad I was spent. So I took a job with a gold company in the Northwest Territory.
The opportunity to develop my career was there, the drive was lacking.
Work was not bad at first, and I can see the tone of this blog change over time as the stagnation set it, but it was largely routine technical work. Ultimately I am too much of a home body to endure collecting data for someone else's project while living on the far side of the middle of nowhere. It cannot be ignored that I saw too many folks in the field who were sacrificing access to friends and family for the job, when those were the things I most wanted.
The failure to connect with several branches of a field enforces the notion it is not for me. Leaving me with the question what do I want do when I grow up. So far I have a far better idea of what I do not want to do. Those technical but repetitive jobs are a mental cul-de sac that leave me spent and angry, this is true whether it is clicking a mouse in MapInfo or taking notes of drill core. Those posts lead to periods of slow decline and burnouts.
This leads me to believe that I want more control and intellectual engagement in my work. Beyond that I have little vision as to what an exciting engaging job could be. In a paragraph deleted from the first draft of this I rambled about the assumption that I would become an academic. It fit everyone's image of me and it is the only professional sphere where I can imagine what the work is like. However, assuming defaults is not the goal of this post. I want to cast aside a few things and reassess from there. So here then is a list of the knows.
One, I have always had a deep and abiding interest in space exploration. I think I read Red Mars 5 times. The sense of place that book built made me think of mars as a place. It has contributed to my love of deserts. I used to spent too much of my spare time keeping track of as many deep space missions as I could.
Two, I have read too much science fiction. And sometimes think that with my melange of science knowledge and science fiction ideas I should become a paper back writer.
Three, if you ask me to describe my dream job, I can't. I can image working in academia only because I have spent enough time around such things as to have some image of what a career there could look like. If you ask me what I could see me doing in the public or private sector I have no clue. There is a complete failure of imagination there.
4, The most creative period in my life was a brief period in Kelowna nearly ten years ago. I had finished the semester, I was working part time and was waiting for my field job to start. I had a computer that barely ran, no internet connection and time. It was during this period I started to develop the stories I still have to finish writing.
5, As awful as my grammar and spelling are, I still find the act of writing one of the most satisfying things I can do.
6, Work this spring was made extra difficult by many friends and acquaintances posting their academic or professional milestones, while my work was staying the same.
This list is incomplete and inconclusive. There is one conclusion I can draw, many of the choices that left me unhappy were safe bets. The devil I knew, because jumping outside the box was too intimidating. When you have been moving around the same box for 9 years and not finding either security or happiness its time to get a ladder.
This is the second post on digesting my lay off. Here I will ramble about various factors that lead to my ending up here, and perhaps more importantly find a way of avoiding that fate again. Not simply the fate of getting laid off but the dissatisfaction that came with jobs I have had in the past.
Getting laid off, and having it happen after I was at my best is not an isolated event. Its not at all surprising considering the industry I landed in. I took my second exploration job just after I finished my undergrad. Gradschool was considered, but after the better part of 7 years chewing through my undergrad I was spent. So I took a job with a gold company in the Northwest Territory.
The opportunity to develop my career was there, the drive was lacking.
Work was not bad at first, and I can see the tone of this blog change over time as the stagnation set it, but it was largely routine technical work. Ultimately I am too much of a home body to endure collecting data for someone else's project while living on the far side of the middle of nowhere. It cannot be ignored that I saw too many folks in the field who were sacrificing access to friends and family for the job, when those were the things I most wanted.
The failure to connect with several branches of a field enforces the notion it is not for me. Leaving me with the question what do I want do when I grow up. So far I have a far better idea of what I do not want to do. Those technical but repetitive jobs are a mental cul-de sac that leave me spent and angry, this is true whether it is clicking a mouse in MapInfo or taking notes of drill core. Those posts lead to periods of slow decline and burnouts.
This leads me to believe that I want more control and intellectual engagement in my work. Beyond that I have little vision as to what an exciting engaging job could be. In a paragraph deleted from the first draft of this I rambled about the assumption that I would become an academic. It fit everyone's image of me and it is the only professional sphere where I can imagine what the work is like. However, assuming defaults is not the goal of this post. I want to cast aside a few things and reassess from there. So here then is a list of the knows.
One, I have always had a deep and abiding interest in space exploration. I think I read Red Mars 5 times. The sense of place that book built made me think of mars as a place. It has contributed to my love of deserts. I used to spent too much of my spare time keeping track of as many deep space missions as I could.
Two, I have read too much science fiction. And sometimes think that with my melange of science knowledge and science fiction ideas I should become a paper back writer.
Three, if you ask me to describe my dream job, I can't. I can image working in academia only because I have spent enough time around such things as to have some image of what a career there could look like. If you ask me what I could see me doing in the public or private sector I have no clue. There is a complete failure of imagination there.
4, The most creative period in my life was a brief period in Kelowna nearly ten years ago. I had finished the semester, I was working part time and was waiting for my field job to start. I had a computer that barely ran, no internet connection and time. It was during this period I started to develop the stories I still have to finish writing.
5, As awful as my grammar and spelling are, I still find the act of writing one of the most satisfying things I can do.
6, Work this spring was made extra difficult by many friends and acquaintances posting their academic or professional milestones, while my work was staying the same.
This list is incomplete and inconclusive. There is one conclusion I can draw, many of the choices that left me unhappy were safe bets. The devil I knew, because jumping outside the box was too intimidating. When you have been moving around the same box for 9 years and not finding either security or happiness its time to get a ladder.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Nine Years Spent.
Greetings.
I have come into some more time recently.
On the eve of my ninth year working in the mineral exploration sector I got laid off again. This is similar to the fall of 2008, where market forces drove my employer to abandon the camp. All in all I am rather sanguine about this. At some level I was always waiting for it. I knew I was the most expendable person in the office and the least engaged.
There were many draft posts about my relation to my now former job, and the industry I have worked for. These were either never written or were incomplete overly cautious fragments of the whole. Any readable narrative is incomplete, however, it will become clear why this state of play is more a relief than a burden.
There are many factors that cause tension between me and the mining exploration industry, there are the obvious things such as working in the ass end of nowhere, repetitive jobs and long hours. Then there are the less obvious stressors, the right wing bias behind everything, common global warming denial, and more.
Detracting from my motivation is the fact they are trying solve a problem I am indifferent to. To make people rich through finding a possible or real gold mine does not drive me. I honestly don't care about getting more gold out of the ground It emberases me to have stayed so long in professional world I fit so poorly into, this then is the story of my last best hope for the industry.
The job, I got sent home from was the job I had described in my grant application, prior to applying to BCIT four years ago. Land a desk job in an industry where I had past experience and apply my recent training. Everything about this plan was reasonable and logical but the execution was flawed and passionless. In the end I had landed exactly where I had planned to go and stayed there. It was still an improvement at first.
The job was a blessing after after bouncing between some no fun at all geology contacts I was happy for some security and work that kept me in the city. There was an undeniable satisfaction in having achieved a goal set two years prior through planning and work. Heck at the beginning I had an office.
As with any new venture the learning curve keeps things interesting. The level of engagement was high at first, it faded over time. There were only so many problems to solve in such a small office. To make matters worse, I had not quite enough freedom. I was stuck working under the company IT contractor, a man who equates, tens of cups of coffee a day with being well rested and equates doing lots of things at once as being productive. While he gets lots done, much of was support for outside ventures. Naturally he sucked at delegating.
This left me with either the option of trying to work around him and come up with my own fixes or wait for him to focus long enough on solutions related to in office problems. In the end, I would try to implement my own fixes and then change gears and work with his plan, neither got the attention needed.
During my post, I spent a lot of time with a software suite called MapInfo. A collection of bugs and patches intended to display and interpret mappable data. At first I was cursed with a compatibility bug, our old edition was incompatible with windows 7. Later we updated and it ran smoother. Even when it ran smoothly the style of the workflow and interface proved irritating for me. Producing any thing was a series of short attention sucking jumps from one point of view to another. Forever changing my focus and shortening my attention span.
This endless string of micro tasks fragmented my already flighty attention span. It would often take the better part of an evening to slow my brain down enough to read a novel, to decompress enough to write was almost always out of the question. It chewed at me, a slower drain on my resources than the stress of isolation in the bush but it built up. I felt I was getting dumber over time, I never got my head out of that cycle long enough to consider my next move. Office drone work took just enough that I could not reevaluate. It made me feel a little depressed for a long time.
In a timey whimey way this brings me to last week. Things had been slowing down for a while. I was spending more time on low priority longer term projects because there was little pressing work to do. Heck I estimate that the small project took about 6 hours to produce and that was the only concrete thing coming out that week. On Wednesday of the week I was downright depressed, even hung over I can't recall the morning passing so slowly. By 10am I felt like 6 hours had passed. Thursday saw me over caffeinated, with an attention span of a small bird for ever jumping from view to view. All I really wanted these last few unproductive weeks was to be outside in the cool sunny weather. Friday was greeted with the question of why am I getting up to go to the office, and the question of what the heck am I going to do Monday. I could not tell you what I did Friday morning, it likely amounted to little. I do know that after lunch I actually tried to cook up a going forward plan, collect all my loose ends and turn them into some project that could sustain my interest into the summer and have me ready for the field season prep. I did not come up with much. It was in the process of trying to cook this up when I got summoned.
Now I am free of that job. I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up. But I have added one more thing to the list of things I don't want to be. I want out of the Mining Exploration Industry for good. This MapInfo job was my last best hope, It failed. I am still open to work related to environmental sciences, geology or geospatial systems but mining exploration is something I am going to stay away from.
Coda
It has been just shy of 9 years since I took my first student job on an exploration project. The pattern has been the same since. At first the thrill of a new project in a new place. Field work can be great, but the thrill wears off quickly. Soon I am left drained, doing a repetitive job somewhere far from everyone I know. This describes very nearly every field job I have ever done, the only thing that changed was the burnout time shrank.
The four year experiment that ended in the secondary boardroom last week was not an outright failure. While I no longer want to work for that industry, I am in a better position not to. I have yet to take stock of what I have learned and what it could be applied, but I am less pigeon holed than I used to be.
I have come into some more time recently.
On the eve of my ninth year working in the mineral exploration sector I got laid off again. This is similar to the fall of 2008, where market forces drove my employer to abandon the camp. All in all I am rather sanguine about this. At some level I was always waiting for it. I knew I was the most expendable person in the office and the least engaged.
There were many draft posts about my relation to my now former job, and the industry I have worked for. These were either never written or were incomplete overly cautious fragments of the whole. Any readable narrative is incomplete, however, it will become clear why this state of play is more a relief than a burden.
There are many factors that cause tension between me and the mining exploration industry, there are the obvious things such as working in the ass end of nowhere, repetitive jobs and long hours. Then there are the less obvious stressors, the right wing bias behind everything, common global warming denial, and more.
Detracting from my motivation is the fact they are trying solve a problem I am indifferent to. To make people rich through finding a possible or real gold mine does not drive me. I honestly don't care about getting more gold out of the ground It emberases me to have stayed so long in professional world I fit so poorly into, this then is the story of my last best hope for the industry.
The job, I got sent home from was the job I had described in my grant application, prior to applying to BCIT four years ago. Land a desk job in an industry where I had past experience and apply my recent training. Everything about this plan was reasonable and logical but the execution was flawed and passionless. In the end I had landed exactly where I had planned to go and stayed there. It was still an improvement at first.
The job was a blessing after after bouncing between some no fun at all geology contacts I was happy for some security and work that kept me in the city. There was an undeniable satisfaction in having achieved a goal set two years prior through planning and work. Heck at the beginning I had an office.
As with any new venture the learning curve keeps things interesting. The level of engagement was high at first, it faded over time. There were only so many problems to solve in such a small office. To make matters worse, I had not quite enough freedom. I was stuck working under the company IT contractor, a man who equates, tens of cups of coffee a day with being well rested and equates doing lots of things at once as being productive. While he gets lots done, much of was support for outside ventures. Naturally he sucked at delegating.
This left me with either the option of trying to work around him and come up with my own fixes or wait for him to focus long enough on solutions related to in office problems. In the end, I would try to implement my own fixes and then change gears and work with his plan, neither got the attention needed.
During my post, I spent a lot of time with a software suite called MapInfo. A collection of bugs and patches intended to display and interpret mappable data. At first I was cursed with a compatibility bug, our old edition was incompatible with windows 7. Later we updated and it ran smoother. Even when it ran smoothly the style of the workflow and interface proved irritating for me. Producing any thing was a series of short attention sucking jumps from one point of view to another. Forever changing my focus and shortening my attention span.
This endless string of micro tasks fragmented my already flighty attention span. It would often take the better part of an evening to slow my brain down enough to read a novel, to decompress enough to write was almost always out of the question. It chewed at me, a slower drain on my resources than the stress of isolation in the bush but it built up. I felt I was getting dumber over time, I never got my head out of that cycle long enough to consider my next move. Office drone work took just enough that I could not reevaluate. It made me feel a little depressed for a long time.
In a timey whimey way this brings me to last week. Things had been slowing down for a while. I was spending more time on low priority longer term projects because there was little pressing work to do. Heck I estimate that the small project took about 6 hours to produce and that was the only concrete thing coming out that week. On Wednesday of the week I was downright depressed, even hung over I can't recall the morning passing so slowly. By 10am I felt like 6 hours had passed. Thursday saw me over caffeinated, with an attention span of a small bird for ever jumping from view to view. All I really wanted these last few unproductive weeks was to be outside in the cool sunny weather. Friday was greeted with the question of why am I getting up to go to the office, and the question of what the heck am I going to do Monday. I could not tell you what I did Friday morning, it likely amounted to little. I do know that after lunch I actually tried to cook up a going forward plan, collect all my loose ends and turn them into some project that could sustain my interest into the summer and have me ready for the field season prep. I did not come up with much. It was in the process of trying to cook this up when I got summoned.
Now I am free of that job. I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up. But I have added one more thing to the list of things I don't want to be. I want out of the Mining Exploration Industry for good. This MapInfo job was my last best hope, It failed. I am still open to work related to environmental sciences, geology or geospatial systems but mining exploration is something I am going to stay away from.
Coda
It has been just shy of 9 years since I took my first student job on an exploration project. The pattern has been the same since. At first the thrill of a new project in a new place. Field work can be great, but the thrill wears off quickly. Soon I am left drained, doing a repetitive job somewhere far from everyone I know. This describes very nearly every field job I have ever done, the only thing that changed was the burnout time shrank.
The four year experiment that ended in the secondary boardroom last week was not an outright failure. While I no longer want to work for that industry, I am in a better position not to. I have yet to take stock of what I have learned and what it could be applied, but I am less pigeon holed than I used to be.
Monday, April 29, 2013
The Baroness
I have a roommate of sorts. Mind you she weighs less then 3 kg and is covered in fur but company she is. The Baroness, had the name Poppy at the SPCA, that did not stick with me. Something more regal was required. Something reflective of the cat human power dynamic. So she became The Baroness.
Well her full and proper name and title is Lady Baroness von Soft Paws of Gallifrey.
The Baroness introduced herself to me at the shelter looking me in the eyes with her huge amber ones and reaching out and touching my beard. You do not say no to a cat with a pink nose a sad face and curious paw. I have seldom said no to her since.
Well her full and proper name and title is Lady Baroness von Soft Paws of Gallifrey.
The Baroness introduced herself to me at the shelter looking me in the eyes with her huge amber ones and reaching out and touching my beard. You do not say no to a cat with a pink nose a sad face and curious paw. I have seldom said no to her since.
Monday, October 22, 2012
On creativity and drive
Greetings Bloggies.
This post has been started and stopped several times, with the first long destroyed sentences and sentence fragments being slapped together in April, with the overall thoughts behind it existing for longer still.
I have exceeded a year and a half at my current job, this has caused me to think about my goals.
This current position as a mapping tech with a small exploration geology firm is the product of
better part of two years of planning and work. Gaining this position fulfilled the objects I had set my self and described to the funding agency back in spring 2009. Stepping into an office job broke a nearly four year string of logging drill core in the ass end of nowhere. A stable job in the city has allowed me my first apartment where I can entertain a reasonable number of people, I have a cat now and I even bike to work. These are all good things, but the devil is in the details.
As a mater of both practical considerations and principles, I have promised that I would stay there at least two years. The rational is that I will gain a fuller understanding of my position and the industry and overall have an easier time getting work. Now that I have more time behind me before that two year point I find myself reconsidering my path. The choices that brought me to where I am now were driven by logic. I assumed that if I stayed in the field where I had the most experience but moved sideways I would minimize the time away from work and maximize return on the time spent in school. The trouble is in the application. Logic is great way to make rational decisions, it is a terrible motivator.
Logic landed me a job with a exploration geology company, we look for precious metal, we send geologist to far away places to try to find them. The trouble is I am indifferent to that quest. A half assed scramble for work at the end of my university program sent me on this path. Logic is now colliding with application. I spend far too long in front of a computer using a cranky piece of software, my body wants to walk more. I find my self increasingly having to push myself from one task to the next rather than having any momentum. When you are performing the n-hundreth iteration of the same task your brain starts to get a little funny with you.
Speaking of brains this job has not been the most kind to mine. While there has been some room for intellectual play during the summer months as I spend a few weeks dabbling in a scripting project, too much of this is mouse clicking and the endless fight with a cranky software and my weak organizational skills. This work, should be fairly easy, but because it fails to engage my creativity 9 times out of 10 I leave the office tired. This feeds back on it self.
Creativity and motivation are things that take practice. There is a quality of momentum to those processes, because my work is uncoupled from most of my creativity and removed from what drives me those qualities such as they are in me are weakening. My attention span has seemingly gotten shorter, a job consisting of too many short interconnected tasks, has reconditioned me away from the longer clearer focus needed for things like writing. I want a change.
Now the trouble with change is change towards what. I have deemed the resource sector good enough since 2006, but never felt much for it, sure there was some adventure, but once the novelty wore off it became a drag disproportionate to the returns. My current job is the longest running since I spent my two and half years in the north, it is a better fit than much of the work I have done. Yet I still feel the clock ticking, and when that runs out I will have had enough. The question hidden in plane sight is what next and how do I get there from here.
This post has been started and stopped several times, with the first long destroyed sentences and sentence fragments being slapped together in April, with the overall thoughts behind it existing for longer still.
I have exceeded a year and a half at my current job, this has caused me to think about my goals.
This current position as a mapping tech with a small exploration geology firm is the product of
better part of two years of planning and work. Gaining this position fulfilled the objects I had set my self and described to the funding agency back in spring 2009. Stepping into an office job broke a nearly four year string of logging drill core in the ass end of nowhere. A stable job in the city has allowed me my first apartment where I can entertain a reasonable number of people, I have a cat now and I even bike to work. These are all good things, but the devil is in the details.
As a mater of both practical considerations and principles, I have promised that I would stay there at least two years. The rational is that I will gain a fuller understanding of my position and the industry and overall have an easier time getting work. Now that I have more time behind me before that two year point I find myself reconsidering my path. The choices that brought me to where I am now were driven by logic. I assumed that if I stayed in the field where I had the most experience but moved sideways I would minimize the time away from work and maximize return on the time spent in school. The trouble is in the application. Logic is great way to make rational decisions, it is a terrible motivator.
Logic landed me a job with a exploration geology company, we look for precious metal, we send geologist to far away places to try to find them. The trouble is I am indifferent to that quest. A half assed scramble for work at the end of my university program sent me on this path. Logic is now colliding with application. I spend far too long in front of a computer using a cranky piece of software, my body wants to walk more. I find my self increasingly having to push myself from one task to the next rather than having any momentum. When you are performing the n-hundreth iteration of the same task your brain starts to get a little funny with you.
Speaking of brains this job has not been the most kind to mine. While there has been some room for intellectual play during the summer months as I spend a few weeks dabbling in a scripting project, too much of this is mouse clicking and the endless fight with a cranky software and my weak organizational skills. This work, should be fairly easy, but because it fails to engage my creativity 9 times out of 10 I leave the office tired. This feeds back on it self.
Creativity and motivation are things that take practice. There is a quality of momentum to those processes, because my work is uncoupled from most of my creativity and removed from what drives me those qualities such as they are in me are weakening. My attention span has seemingly gotten shorter, a job consisting of too many short interconnected tasks, has reconditioned me away from the longer clearer focus needed for things like writing. I want a change.
Now the trouble with change is change towards what. I have deemed the resource sector good enough since 2006, but never felt much for it, sure there was some adventure, but once the novelty wore off it became a drag disproportionate to the returns. My current job is the longest running since I spent my two and half years in the north, it is a better fit than much of the work I have done. Yet I still feel the clock ticking, and when that runs out I will have had enough. The question hidden in plane sight is what next and how do I get there from here.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
The Accent of the Hobbit
...And the Halfling Fourth shall stand.
As of today, April 18 2012 I am officially moving to ground level. A few compromises had to be reached. I will have a smaller stove and the lay out of the kitchen will be a little more cramped. I gain a living room, dining area. The real compromise I am not sure I can live with yet is having to have a retail shop in line of site from my balcony. I might not like having an Italian specialty shop with a good deli and an excellent cheese selection next door. Then again people can get used to the weirdest things.
Other things that change, I will be farther from St Augustine's and the train station. That said the #20 bus is close and can bridge the distance quickly. The population density is more than double what it is around here as there are many more apartment units. Restraint will have to be practiced now that I will be 5 minutes away from my favorite bakery as well as a larger collection of ethnic grocery stores and bakeries.
Now here is the good news. The building has modern windows, is very clean. And the very good news I am a deposit away from having permission to have a cat.
The hobbit can has cat.
As of today, April 18 2012 I am officially moving to ground level. A few compromises had to be reached. I will have a smaller stove and the lay out of the kitchen will be a little more cramped. I gain a living room, dining area. The real compromise I am not sure I can live with yet is having to have a retail shop in line of site from my balcony. I might not like having an Italian specialty shop with a good deli and an excellent cheese selection next door. Then again people can get used to the weirdest things.
Other things that change, I will be farther from St Augustine's and the train station. That said the #20 bus is close and can bridge the distance quickly. The population density is more than double what it is around here as there are many more apartment units. Restraint will have to be practiced now that I will be 5 minutes away from my favorite bakery as well as a larger collection of ethnic grocery stores and bakeries.
Now here is the good news. The building has modern windows, is very clean. And the very good news I am a deposit away from having permission to have a cat.
The hobbit can has cat.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
The rise and fall of the Hobbit hole
Greetings Bloggies.
It was the summer of 2010. The job was bull shit, because the boss was possessing a large series of negative personality traits. The job proved that I had burned through my life time meters of logged core. So a few days after few points of balance left the job I buggered off too. I just packed my things and drove off the site, everone should do that once in their life, its a wonderful sense of power.
A couple weeks later I was staying in a sketchy motel on Kingsway in Vancouver. It had a weekly rate, I was hunting for a new home. Money constrained the form of my accommodations life style biased me to nearer the city core. It became a Goldie Locks situation. The first place was too old, too creaky. The second place was too expensive and too far from any where, even though back than I had a car. The third place would do.
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| Stand back I'm going to do Science I mean cooking |
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| The blank slates |
The first year was good for it. I worked a few bush jobs before landing my now long term position. Between jobs I enjoyed cooking and cleaning. I gained access to a garden and through that garden a handful of good friends. And low life was good. I had Friends Credit Cards and Keys. Much food was made, people were had over for dinner.
The furniture trickled in, in torrents at first as I snagged a table and chairs and a bed as soon as I could. Despite have made solid money at jobs I hated, because I was effectively homeless for that time I did not invest in any domestic hardware beyond some kitchen stuffs. The Hobbit hole became a starter home a place to raise my standard of living to functional. In January I got a new couch. This was the trigger.
The couch a simple thing from IKEA that half of Canada likely owned at any one point in time tipped the scales. It filled up as much space there was to spare, yet it was only a love seat, I could not fit the 220 cm length of the full size model. Then I knew a side from some details this home was nearly wrapped up.
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| Kitchen Stuff |
The new couch was trigger for starting the choice for moving but it was on its way for sometime. Prior to that bit the positive qualities of the Hobbit hole were eroded . The neighbors for all the right reasons moved to a better home. I discovered, that when there are 6 people a washing machine and maybe a dishwasher, there is not enough hot water for me to get a proper hot show at normal times of day. The smoke detector is over sensitive. The kitchen sink needs to be babied to drain proper, and that is using the strainers. The garden is a no go for the 2012 summer, and I can no haz cat.
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| Making a home the early days. |
So now I am looking. It will cost more to live in any new place that meets the criteria. Above ground for starters, a generic 1 bedroom in not too old building would do. The prospect of central hot water is enough to really make the best starting place. I want it with in 10 to 15 minute walk of Commercial drive skytrain station. It would really be sweet if a cat could be wrangled in the deal. That would give me room to get more seating, more book shelves, and a feeling of being more grown up.
Now I just have to pressure myself in to actually doing stuff. I have been coasting without, post work mental challenges for months, its time to break that habit.
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