The apartment.

Two years ago I moved into an apartment, after a year and half in a basement suite it was good to get ground, or at least level with it. Benefits included; a large and stable supply of hot water, living room, and it was pet friendly.  I would have taken it if pets were band.

It did not take long for the age the unit to come to light, in what little light there was.   Despite being south facing the cedars and cypress trees block the light. From May to September it is gloomy in here as the sun is too high the sky sky to slip under the tree branches.  There is no view to speak of as I look out on to what is now an empty lot, formerly a once nice duplex which decayed into a squat.  What I lack in light and view is made up in sound.

The northern stretch of Victoria drive, despite looking like a quiet residential street is something of a thoroughfare.  Squeezed between the popular Commercial Drive and the well engineered Nanaimo street Victoria Drive takes more traffic than is good for it.  These traffic volumes are at odds with the large number of parks and school zones along it.  I more than a thousand words worth of opinion about Victoria drive, and add a few more expletives every time I cycle down it.

 The short version is I am treated to an endless supply of engine noises.  The worst offenders are growl of small diesel trucks, and the occasional honk and squeal of brakes from near misses.  This is at it turns out a poor substitute for a view.
So rather than aiding in unwinding like nearly any portal to the outside world my windows and doors let in irritation.  A situation that leads to the home being stuffy and hot in high summer because my cat will try to escape if the window is too far open, and being ground floor makes keeping the patio door open too large a risk.  
The list of things that are wrong, have gone wrong, or are meh, is long.   The carpet a truly ancient drab gray that should have been replaced two tenants ago. The linoleum in the kitchen peeling at the edges. Duck tape in the deep recesses slowly losing its ability to hold things together. The building making the floor uneven. The kitchen is tiny. Even after my cat lost a foot of her tail, can not swing her in that small a space. Note never have I considered or tried to swing my cat or any other cat, least of all by their tail.

With such a case of buyer's remorse it could almost come as a surprise that I have stayed put as long as have.  Indeed moving was on my mind as my lease near the one year mark last year, but the layoff came first, I hunkered down and bide my time. Had my job continued I likely would have done some apartment hunting last summer.  Now precariously employed in temp work I know I can't hold the place without living in a state of near poverty at the same time.  If I want to reliably do anything fun, replace anything worn out, enjoy even a short trip out of town, I need to drive that cost down.

So as of right now I am seriously considering including my one month notice with my June rent. And then some how finding an affordable pet friendly suite or gods forbid becoming someone's roommate.  This prospect frightens me.  The moment I give that notice, I enter a near panic about trying to find a place, the haste has lead to inferior choices. But an empty fridge and bills tell me it is the right thing to do.

Wanted accommodations for a polite crazy catman and his cat.  

How a Hobbit takes a road trip.

Greetings.

An opportunity came up for me to get out of Vancouver.  It was taken with some trepidation, for the simple reason that the plan had some clear holes in it.  Good time allowed me to avoid the most chaotic parts of the enterprise.  The result I drove a moderately sized car from Vancouver to Merritt, unloaded a massively over sized U-Haul in Nakusp and squeezed in a terribly brief visit with the folks.

This post is not about the trek, but about uncertainty.  As a self described hobbit I like things to stay much the same day after day, and like Samwise Gamgee, I am fond of my food.  Knowing that the trip, on a good day, with a focused driver in a moderately speedy car is an optimistic 8 hours, and knowing that lumbering brick from U-Haul was about as likely to set a land speed record as a snail, I planned for a long day.  By planning for a long day I mean I packed food.  Because, driving takes concentration, I can't concentrate when hungry, and I don't believe others can either, so I packed extra food.

In all honesty I will likely pack food if I plan on not being back in the house in three hours.  Three hours is about the time after my last meal that I start to notice the decline in, attention, short term memory and mood.  So I try to plan for that.  The flip side is when I lack the funds to eat out or the resource to pack a picnic I become less adventurous.

Now as it happened was passing through a bread baking phase, which has slowed down, in part because of work and because it is simply too warm out to run the oven regularly.  Blessed with a few extra days off before the trip, I made bread, honestly I was bored and had a new cookbook.  The bread was not made expressly for the trip, but the timing worked out well.  The bread made was a Sicilian Scroll*, a hearty dense loaf made with semolina giving it a rich yellow colour.  Much to my surprise and pleasure it kept well enough to be enjoyable on Wednesday, despite being baked on the Monday.

*Recipe linked to is not from the book I used but is close enough.

It was dropped on its head when it left the
oven. 

But man and hobbit a like can not live on bread alone, so the work did not stop there.  No, it takes more than one loaf to make me feel secure.  No, before I left, I packed a cooler sack with, prosciutto cotto, pickled artichoke hearts, mixed olives, apples, and soft goat cheese.  This would have been better had I packed a cutting board as it proved impossible to cut the bread with the pocket knife I had packed, but the bread lost nothing by being ripped to shreds.

As the day before the trip wound down I took stock, a few apples some bread, cheese and meat, along with things in jars.  I concluded it would not be enough. It was clear that the food lacked one key feature, it required some assembly.  The hours I would spend driving would take me past secondus, into elevenses and beyond, a hands free snack would be needed to extend my utility.  Enter cookies.

 Oatmeal raisin, modified after the Better Homes and Gardens cook book recipe.
The modifications to the recipe included a minor reduction in the sugar, dark chocolate chunks, dried cranberries, and walnuts.  I regret not having the orange zest used in making a previous batch, and found them a little too dry to be perfect.  A shortage of butter lead to making them entirely with shortening, not my preferred method but will do in a pinch.  Only after bagging the batch of cookies, such that both vehicles in our mad convoy could be confidently stocked with snacks did I feel I had enough.

Older than you and has been more places
than you. 

Only after a heavy breakfast of the bread and egg with enough strong coffee to kick start a zombie, did I leave the house.  When I did so left with a ancient backpack filled food water, and a sweater, and all the other things your mother tells you to pack.

The drive from Vancouver to Merritt, was uneventful, both human passengers and the three cats fell asleep somewhere past Hope.  The cookies were nibbled on along the way.  After Merritt I took the copilot seat in the stupid massive van, which had the fuel economy half that of a 1950's land yacht.  Leading to a gas stop in Lumbey.  After the driver discovered there was nothing fit for human consumption in the gas station, I pulled out goodies, and there was much rejoicing.

In the 20 km long fly speck of a community called Cherryville, a snack break was planned.  The plan fell through when it turned out that a cafe perched at the edge of the mountains, dependant on tourist traffic, was not going to be open for another week.  Faced with the threat of friends driving the most treacherous part of the route hungry, food was offered, eaten, and there was much rejoicing.  I can be a bit immodest around my foods, especially breads, but it would be fair to say that a good feeding on the last leg of the trip improved the mood all around.

It was never my plan to feed everyone, but when it comes to food security, the best way to have enough is to have more. You pack enough to share, not because sharing is the plan but because if you have to share you still have enough. My food was secure.  Points to my sister for the phrasing, which I have garbled.

Its funny how a selfish act can become selfless.  Its not to say I did not enjoy feeding my friends, of course I do, but on that trip it was a backup plan.

One of about four tall rats.

After a short supper with the folks, I sat on the front half of yard, enjoying the too many stars and loud nature.  My presence was noticed by a local deer, who huffed at me from the edge of the woods.  In the morning I saw the tree cull and it was good. This trip was the first one in years where I was there in time for the pond to be watered, there was a solitary mallard drake, who when started flew into the trees, and in fact into a tree, bushing against a top as he failed to climb.  It was a good little trip.

Sort of a pond

Techies go home.

Greetings.

For the last three weeks I have done janitorial work in a borg cube of a building down town.  The unnamed company is known, or rather I was informed once years ago, for its being a good place to work.  The word innovative may have been used. I see a cubicle farm, a pretty cubicle farm but cubes nonetheless.  In one wing a gym, in another a games room, with a pool table, table tennis and a few other toys.
It is possible to buy stuff from the vending machines with a quarter, like its somewhen in the 20th century.  The office screams of perks.

This hobbit is a bit cynical, and this hobbit distrusts the cult of long hours.  I see a workspace that is trying to be welcoming, and wonder if that is a ploy to keep the pawns in the office longer to get more work out of them.  The circus is on display, the toys, the gym, and countless little details, but I don't know if they are offered bread to go with it.  This hobbit hopes that the symbolic bread of good wages, benefits, and job security come with those perks.  Because, it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that those perks are barely a drop in the ocean cost wise when compared to what it takes to fund a fair package.

As a person who has never worked in a large company, or any place with an apparent office culture I don't get the lingering about.  Quitting time matters to me, you get out, you don't linger.  Life happens off of the work site.  The blurred boundary this borg cube offers does not sit well with me.  Perhaps it is an IT thing, an export of the Silicon Valley culture, a world where the early leaders have been described by people with an intro psych textbook as being on the aspergers spectrum, but living the job is not for everyone.  Yet creating that friendly space seems to suggest steering people to that.

To the techies, I say, check if there is bread with the circus.  Don't give away your time because the office is cozy, go home, live your life, not every problem can be solved with long hours.  But these are the words of an under informed home body.  There has never been a job site that I wanted to linger at, and I have felt unclean going into the office on a weekend to get my phone.

Perhaps it is my resistance to joining the cult of long hours that has lead me to cleaning offices not unlike ones I recently worked in but I stand by the belief that the work is the means not the ends.  This is part of why I never felt at home in geology, the job as the life was the expectation.  Now I feel my sympathies are towards the working class.

Tune in or tune out

Greetings.

The question of why I hate the labour jobs less than I thought I would, and why I hated my office job far more than I ever expected has been running through my brain.  A tentative answer trickled through my brain yesterday as I was baking.

The problem is one of inputs.  Unless the subject in front of me is very engaging I will be quickly distracted. Office work, and the fine detailed but uninteresting work I did there did not hold my attention.  Failing to be enthralled lead to every distraction being more interesting that the job itself.  This is ignoring the fact that the job was also full of overly short micro tasks that I had not regimented into a manageable whole.

In the office setting I failed to tune out enough things to stay on track.  That is a normal failing of mine.  It is only a failing in the setting.  Yesterday I found myself working on three distinct breads at once, each with overlapping rising times and competing for the limited proofing and oven space in my house.  It was in juggling that small amount of regimented distraction that lead me to this.

Tuning out things is hard for me.  Tuning in on a few is easier.  And that is what I am getting out of the grunt work.  A distraction or a glance in the other direction reminds me of what I need to be doing next, or if I should be dodging out of the way of a speeding forklift.

So I enjoy a moderately busy environment, too busy and the poor input filters get overwhelmed and I flounder in overload based indecision.  So a job where being tuned in is a feature not a bug, and the task range is finite but not too fixed is something that at the moment makes me if not happy at least not miserable.  This frames better what I might want from a longer term job even if it does little to narrow down the scope.

Working.

Greetings.

This is my second attempt at writing this.  The plan to write about the work sits in my head but I have cycled between busy and tired without finding the time to compose. The writing has also been hampered by the fact it always felt too soon. Now is a good time for one reason alone. I found time to think. It is near enough midnight as not to matter, I have not showered yet, and I am fighting The Lady Baroness for control of the keyboard, but it is a good time to write.  

Its funny, I would not disagree with the accusation that I am a socially awkward, seemingly intellectual person, certainly I try to dress the part of intellectual, yet this identity has had little to no bearing on the work I have ended up doing.  No, appearances aside, most of my work has been in hard places often with hard people.  I tried changing that up once, worming my way into an office job, turns out to be a miss match. 

A bit of an detour is needed here.  Working again has gotten me thinking about my previous job.  The one where I tried to punch MapInfo into submission.  I was not happy there, for many reasons.  Key among them, working in visual medium is not something I have practice or skill for.  But at an even more basic level it was hard because, as it turns out, keeping a tight focus while glued to a desk all day is far harder for me than I could have expected.  A couple other things that should I ever digest them more fully will warrant their own essays, also added to my non adaptation to office life. 

Offices have a culture of what feels like to of enforced politeness. It can be understood why this, but I don't fit in it.  My brain's output filter is a little on the coarse size, but that was less a problem than the input filter. Too much politeness becomes ambiguity.  Knowing what is not being said, is a skill that remains under developed.  

While potentially ambiguous interactions may leave me wondering if offence was caused, they come in second to my troubles with ambiguus work.  As said, I had one office job, working in a media I had limited experience, often unclear outcomes.  It was forever a guess for me if the project was ready.  Hours could be spent on one set of details at the expense others.  The cycle of missed details and resulting revision repeated too often for everyones tasted.  A cycled made worse by a tool that at times was as likely to eat my progress as to allow me to adjust things.  It was a couple years of practicing the ancient Dutch tradition of pushing water uphill. 

That cycle, those tools, and the real possibility that some people on the team were not really nice, made it a tiring period. Coming home with aching jaw and a head full of unresolved, but not particularly interesting problems was common. All this under the fear that gold would tank and I would again be made expendable.   All while telling myself and others I want this, and am enjoying this. 

It is in that light that I think about the jobs I am doing now.  None of the work I have been assigned I would want to do as a full time gig, but I can in retrospect say the same about all the jobs that were part of what I thought was my career.  The work, has fallen into two main clumps.  Warehouse, shipping and receiving and janitorial.  The cleaning job work is by far the toughest.  

The jobs are hard, but they have a wonder finality to them.  The day ends, the work is forgettable, my body may ache but my brain doesn't, most of the time.  Admittedly the evening shift 4 to 11pm is harsh, and the job even more so.  No single part of the job is all that hard, but to fit them all in the scope of the evening it is go go go.  Not since the Rabbit lake job have I had to maintain a fast pace as consistently.  

For a baltering thermalphoeb such as myself the working conditions are extra tough.  Trying to work in a coordinated manner in a overly warm office is trying.  But I do, by mid shift I am so heated through that it takes half my break to feel like I am no longer glowing from the endless movement.  Thats the thing endless movement.  Physical labour is nothing new to me, but on nearly every other job there are chances for breaks and pauses in activity, outside of a restaurant rush, I can't recall maintaining pacing like this. Yet there is camaraderie, the work does get done even if sometimes my new guy slack needs to be pulled in.  In the end it would seem that for now being a grunt makes me happier than wrestling MapInfo, or looking at rocks.  

The notion of getting a real job, and regaining stability still holds water, but the range of things I might yet do is not narrowed down yet. 

   

.

An Open Letter Cambie Road Richmond and its drivers.

Or how to avoid a shouty angry cyclist.
Repeatedly I have been called to a site about 5km down Cambie road in Richmond, just down the street from the IKEA that I am not shopping at is.  The job is tolerably mundane, but not the subject of todays opinion.  On paper the site can be reached by transit alone. Indeed on my second day there after a klutz induced flat I did just that.  However I live far enough away from reliable buses that a bike makes a logical part of my commute.

Rest assured this hobbit is not going to start bragging about his 20 mile commute uphill both ways in the snow.  No, I ride to Broadway station and take the train south to Aberdeen.  That places me on Cambie road and a nearly straight shot from my work site on nearly flat ground, not a bad condition for riding.  And yet I find I turn into a shouty cyclist.

Richmond, I know as a someone on a bike on a road I am potentially a new, scary, and oddly slow vehicle, but I am legally allowed to be there.  Richmond, you are generously paved and blessed with long lines of sight something that factors greatly into how I view your handling of my presence on your roads.  For context I live in East Vancouver, on Victoria drive, it is narrow with parking and hilly.  Cambie road is none of those things.

The length of Cambie Rd. I ride is four laned, the only hills are the over passes.  The lanes  are near as wide as some streets near my apartment.  The line of sight often nearly 1km or even nearer 2.  During the off peak hours I ride, if I am working early I am on the road at 6:30am, there can be many hundreds of meters between vehicles.  It is in this context I will ask you nicely please move fully into the other lane to pass me.

You have two generous lanes, of good clean pavement, in the morning, you have a great deal of lead time, you have no good excuse. And I mean all the way into the other lane.  Its not hard, mirror, signal, shoulder check, repeat, once done I will be nicely behind you.  If you do this I will polity just keep moving.

Now I don't want to have to use my outside voice on you so here are a few things to remember to avoid that.  The bike is wider than its one inch wide tires, act like it.  Slipping half way out of the lane is just sloppy and I will judge you, and harshly, you have two wide ones. Passing me without even leaving our shared lane makes me angry.  I will shout at you.  Also Signal.

Lastly don't act so surprised.  I have lights, often a reflective jacket, I am clearly in the lane.  Learn to watch for bikes, they are not going anywhere and watching for them rather than acting all shocked when one that has been in front of you for a mile is at last on your bumper will save you some property damage and a cyclists life.

So if you don't want angry shouty cyclists, signal, give plenty of room, and learn to see us.

Jobbing

Greetings.
My mother requested I write this.

After both a delay in starting the process and similar length delay in results I have started doing Temp work.  After a month on one agency's roster, I got called in on a warehouse gig on short notice, after a couple weeks of moderately steady work I have a few more thoughts on the subject.  It was suggested that I should write about how different this work is, from what I had done, the striking thing has been how different it is not.

Early Train to Richmond. 

As it turns out the office that started three years ago was the outlier.  Jobs in rough places with rough people have been more my style than not.  The majority of the gigs I have been assigned to have been in warehouses, a setting not unlike where I spent much of my time in geology.  Industrial spaces with concrete floors, corrugated steel shipping boxes and people who's most frequent word is FUCK.  As was the case when I worked geology I move awkward boxes from one pile to the other.   I do skip the part where I break open the box and take sciency measurements of the contents, a process I don't miss. Nor do I miss the weight and dimensions of standard NQ Core Box. The NQ sized core box is 5 feet long, 1 foot wide and can contain between 30 and 70 pounds of rock. As an added bonus they are made of plywood, and are often greasy and or wet.  So after a few years of shlepping those at any thing from -35 to +30 degrees a simple cardboard box is a near pleasure.

In the coarse of three weeks I have worked for, a clothing distribution warehouse, a garden centre, a restaurant supply warehouse, a large scale shipping centre, and the aquarium.  Four of the five followed the pattern of take boxes out of trucks stack on the correct pallet, repeat.  The aquarium gig was a job of making sure things were not sticky.  These jobs are united in their need for the people doing them to have the same basic qualities, bipedalism, arms, and semiliteracy.  Clearly I am bringing enough of those to the table because more than one place has asked for me back, even if I have only had repeat gigs at one place.  In doing these things I rediscovered the things I learned when I was not looking.

Years ago during another period of unemployment, in the gap years when I fell out of university I did a day job in a garage door facility.  It involved you guessed it moving things from one pile to another.  This was before I had worked in a kitchen, and years before I would work in the field, back then I had hardly worked before.  On that job it was hard for me to stay out of harms way, let alone be productive.  Now things are different, I am not 20 any more.

Its sneaky, you spend years working in out of the way places doing jobs that demand specialized knowledge and occasionally helicopters, and while you may be planing to learn about the rock of the area, the helicopter is ready to teach you a few things too.  I have forgotten too much about rocks but much of what I learned around helicopters, drills, and other big moving bits of metal has stuck with me.  The intangible skill of situational awareness, it was learned, when I doing other things.  Scraps of bush craft, the skill of pacing yourself, listening for the machines you want to avoid, these are the the things I learned when I was out.   So now I find myself in warehouses, a setting I have never worked in before and while I may not know how any one place works, I have a solid idea of what to watch for.



A few other notes. I never got the rhythm of office work.  The environment was new to me, I have still to learn what to watch for.  The current batch of labour jobs are delightful because they don't follow me home.  Between the jobs and the pool I am slowly getting back into shape.  I am enjoying the access to feed back that working with the agency is providing.  It is prompt and clear.  As an alternative to wondering and assuming the worst it is a grand improvement over several jobs I have held.

As it stands for a mix of reasons I would be unlikely to take, or apply for a full time work with any of the places I have contracted with.  The best reason I will give here is I hope to try more things out before settling. It is also worth noting that upon closer retrospection not every one I have worked with was particularly nice, and I could find a crew I mesh better with.  Lastly I am not yet of the habit of making the best use of my down time.

I really should be writing in the mornings.  There is a window between 7am and 10am when I am up, and the agency is unlikely to call me.  Currently this time has been wasted. It has taken two weeks to get this entry started and it feels incomplete.  But I have  been working, and with that gaining some new vision.  If nothing else I will need to bring in some new money, I am almost finished breaking the vertical blinds in the living room and want to get a budget drape for a replacement.

A sunny friday afternoon.