Earth Day 2017

Earth Day, for me around here, is the more official beginning of spring, in that it prompts me to commit to a better lifestyle not available for me for most of the winter months. That is: less vehicle use, a move to a healthier lifestyle, more engagement with my community, breaking through a bad seasonal trough of depression, and having better intentions for living well in general. That’s a challenge to do around here in Saskatoon from the beginning of November up until the first half of April. Earth Day marks some sort of pivotal point of true alleviation from the stresses of winter.

This is my personal snapshot of conscientiously lowering conspicuous consumption, and basically an audit of the footprint I leave on this region of the planet for this day when I decide to note how to tread lightly on it. Taking account of just how much we really consume in utilities like our power, water, fuel, and the money and resources for which we are using and wasting for these things in our households, and in our communities, is something I think everyone should be responsible for doing, and Earth Day seems like the perfect day to be mindful for doing it.

Earth Day for me is the reminder of the pervasive perversion of what I call the Double F destructive cultural forces we humans indulge in that are killing our biosphere. The first destructive Double F culture is the Fossil Fuel culture, and its role in climate change, and the lobbying by their proponents to make movements towards renewable energy illegal in some cases. The second is the Fast Food culture, and its role in not only making us a toxic, devolving, weakened species of obese diabetics and cardiac disease patients, but it is also an overwhelming source of pollution in terms of discarded containers (bottles, cups, wrappers, straws, etc.) all for the sake of our selfish and foolish sense of convenience, and wasteful and unethical mass production practices which are under the control of a handful of corporations whose ultimate goal is to control all elements of growing, processing and distributing food on the planet, and squeezing out practitioners of ethical animal husbandry, organic food production, and removing natural genetic biodiversity in our food stocks. I could add a third destructive Double F cultural force: the Fascist Fathead culture, of seizure of political control by cretins like Donald Trump, aided by a population so ignorant to allow that to happen, who are not only climate change deniers and not only taking inroads to making this planet worse environmentally, but getting us uncomfortably closer to some reality of an approaching world war. I won’t comment anymore on such things, but I will comment on my initiatives for this day, and see if they lead me to action for a happier place to be.

Morning: Woke up. Washed up. Fed the dog, then fed me. We walked outside after breakfast out to our neighbourhood park and back. Like on previous Earth Days, we took some effort to be mindful to transfer stray bits of litter in the public spaces to a trash bin*, and collect whatever discarded recyclables to cash in along our walking circuit. This year, I must say that the area looks much cleaner. I suspect several positive and negative factors at play:

·         The laws cracking down on DUI drivers in the province, may mean less vehicular boozing, and hence there have been fewer beer cans tossed on the street

·         The earlier thaw this year got people out earlier to do their spring cleaning and less wind strewn litter has been coming out of the yards

·         The City’s street sweepers came through recently, hoovering up the extra stray human made debris

·         The kids from the nearby Adventist school perhaps went early on their own Earth Day programme to help clean up the park and surrounding area

·         The wretched oppressive austerity budget from this government is making people trying every means to save cash; buying less pre-packaged junk/fast food, hence less wrappers, and saving their bottles and cans for SARCAN refunds.

·         More indigent people around who are reduced to picking up waste recyclables as prices/(sin)taxes get inflated

Ella and I still found plenty of litter, but not one bottle or can was spotted along our walk. Mostly paper and plastic drinking cups. A 20 liter bagful was collected and cleared off our path and trashed. A small move for some better karma I hope.

I then cycled to the Farmers Market, bought a local product, and then returned home.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           .

Lunch Hour: Made a pizza – using the ingredients that I’ve either already had here, that were extras from other cooking projects (just like the way the original traditional pizzas in Italy were made, i.e. repurposing leftovers) or bought piecemeal through the week from a shop on the same route as my commute from work, thus no extra fuel expended for a special dedicated out of the way shopping trip for one project.

Afternoon: Reading, napping, daydreaming/meditating, doing sudoku, some house cleaning, language learning, dog-walking, attending a March for Science Rally (too briefly, but I at least got to sign some petitions), I went to the library to make returns and check out more new material. Except for the household cleaning, and language lessons, all of those things required neither power, nor fuel, nor water, nor extra money to do for the day. I’m writing this I suppose to tell those who are Millennials and younger that it is indeed possible to have a life for a large part of the day without electronics.

Evening: Drinking homebrewed beer, ate left overs for supper, more reading, listening to tunes (mostly bass-intense, shoe gaze Indie), writing this entry.

Power Used: Actively deployed power usage that I opt to turn on and off (apart from the constant utilitarian use of electricity like fridge and freezer operation, Wi-Fi router, etc.). One kitchen light, one bathroom light, one hallway light (combined 20 minutes of use), a toaster, 15 minutes of magnetic induction burner use (very efficient), kettle boiled, smartphone charge, 40 minutes of oven use at 170 degrees Celsius, ran the dishwasher, 2 minutes of microwave oven on high, my Bluetooth sound bar for music streams and running my laptop to write this blog (both for 90 minutes). I opted not to use the TV at all today (too much bad news). I read my books by natural day light. Including all my constant essential appliances running (fridge/freezer), I would guess that I used about 5-6 kWh today so far in total for my total power consumed if I interpolate the readings right from my last utility statement. The average Canadian, according to one statistic, uses  around 4500 kWh per year. Sadly, we are the highest per capita users on the globe, for the fact that we use power almost as liberally as the Americans do, but yet additionally have a climate that demands extra heating for homes, and more vast spaces to transmit power between centres where there is a significantly increased line loss. If my personal average use nudges up to close to 10 kWh per day, i.e. 3650 kWh per year, I'm still below the per capita national average for consumption of power.

Gasoline Used: Zero – I walked or cycled to everywhere I went today. As chilly and gloomy as the day was during the time that I was biking, I at least had the invigorating fresh air to breathe, the uncrowded Meewasin trail to use, the peace of not having to hear the awful screeching noises emitted from under my car’s hood (time to change some belts), and not having the annoyance of having to hunt for and pay for a place to park a vehicle.

Water Used: Health and Hygiene (brushing teeth, sailor shower**, and two toilet flushes, so far***), reloading the dog’s drinking fountain, making coffee, making ice, personal hydration, running my dishwasher (on economy setting as always), cooking and kitchen clean up. An estimated 40 litres used, or two brewing carboys’ worth. It’s good to know of this quantity should there be any planned water shutoffs for maintenance, like I already have been warned about coming in the summer months.

Personal Waste: As it is now, after three days, my 15 liter kitchen garbage is one third filled with stuff that is 85% compostable refuse (mostly fruit and vegetable peels and egg shells). I regret that there is no sort of composting station around here, and I wish my condo could be provided with one of some sort so I could reduce this waste volume further still. I’d use the matter to make enough soil to grow my own herbs. I buy very little canned food, but my building at least has the convenience of a recycling bin for such things when I do.

Purchase Today: Just ten dollars at the Farmers Market, for a jar of Sour Cherry Jam. I’ve been hunting around like crazy for this stuff (I have a special project in mind for it, which I may blog about later). It may be much more expensive than other commercial jars of jam, however from the perspective of living happily on the Earth while doing it a favor, and building stronger communities:

·         This is a unique commodity that I have not found anywhere else but the Farmers Market. For today, it seemed right to get something that came from nature. And it is delicious. Never willingly buy anything that doesn’t fix a problem, doesn’t educate you, or doesn’t give you pleasure! That is the essence of frugality.

·         It would still be more expensive if I were to try to make it all home, plus I’d still have to wait until the cherries were in season, if I ever actually had the time to commit to make this stuff (home economics issue)

·         It was made here locally, from produce from a local orchard, and not trucked in from a half a continent away, or from someplace across either ocean (fossil fuel conservation issue)

·         You support a small business and not a giant corporation (corporations which are generally polluting on an industrial scale, and you directly help them to do it by buying their products)

·         An added bonus is that I have gained another reusable Mason jar to fill with my own crafted canning recipes later this year

The cost break down of my day is actually very different once I tabulate the information on my SPL Check Out Receipt. It tells me the monetary value in savings I made by loaning the books instead of outright buying them. I saved $81.89 today, adjusted to $71.89 subtracting the cost of my wares at the Farmers Market. I’ll whittle down that figure again accounting for the real cost of the ingredient proportions for the pizza I made, and the beer I brewed myself ($6.50 for the pizza, and $0.67 for the beer) the savings of the day is now $64.72. Let’s compare that with the likes of an impulsive spender, let's call him Joe Schmuckjob, who is probably the same kind of stupid bastard who's living in my neighbourhood and throwing his cups and food wrappers all around on my block. Let's pretend he is going to have himself the same sort of “cheap” weekend of entertainment as I am. He buys the $81.89 worth of books (though I doubt he really reads, we could substitute that material with the same value in dope and video games), he spends another $25.00 for delivery of the same quantity of pizza I made at home, drops another $20.00 for a six pack at an offsale place, for his beer ration, and let’s not forget the yummy $10.00 Sour Cherry Jam. His cheap weekend is turning out to be costing him $136.89 so far, and I haven’t even factored in the fuel his lazy ass is using, and all the extra trash he is making, which has an extra civic cost to clean up and dispose. Sloth, blended with impulsivity and stupidity, is expensive. Bringing all these facts to mind is making it a happy Earth Day for me.

I don’t want to get too sanctimonious about these measures I used, because I’m certain there are areas of improvement I could still work out, especially for my water usage and power, plus I also still lazily exploit food services at times when I don’t want to cook – I just don’t do fast food or delivery. This factoring of the SPL receipt also makes me pissed off even more that the Sask Party is taking measures to defund library services throughout this province as an austerity measure, hence my effort to sign petitions.

*- I’m like the average typical Canadian who thinks you’re a scum of the earth if you openly choose to litter.

**- Moistening the body first, shutting off the water, scrubbing down thoroughly with soap and a loofah, and turning water back on only long enough to rinse off shampoo and soap. Less than six litres used with a high pressure-low flow system.

***- Sadly, I don’t have a low flush volume tank.

The Swedish Project/Svenska Projekt: 50 Days/Dagar, 15 % Fluency/Flyt

Jag har varit lärande mig några svenska för sju veckor nu, och jag har använde mellan tjugo till trettio minuter per dag sedan starten av den ny år att lära det. Det var en speciell utmaning: eftersom jag ville se om jag kunde lära mig och använda de elementära delarna av ett ny språk inom två månader.

That's enough of that. Hunting for the Alt characters to make these accented letters is becoming bothersome. The translation of what I typed beforehand is this . . .

I have been learning some Swedish for seven weeks now, using 20 to 30 minutes each day* since the start of the new year to learn it. It was a special challenge: because I wanted to see if I could learn and use the elemental parts of a new language within two months.

This is my progress with the first of my self-imposed two month language programs. I have six of them lined up for the year. I tried a 100 day program before, but I was learning slightly skimmed modules of 10 languages at a time, to get a feel for both what I was most proficient at, and what was most challenging for me to understand in terms of grammar and other difficulties. There's not much that can be retained that way. So this time, I'll be diving into one language at a time, for two months at a time, with more intensified focus. Some of you are asking, "Why Swedish exactly?"

I present for you the following reasons:

1. It's one of the closer sibling languages to English -  The real test of this project, before I even selected a language to learn, was to see how competently I could master learning a new language with minimal effort. It's been a while since I made an effort to really learn something new. I'm taking the road to ground zero of language acquisition, since it has been a long time that I practiced any language. I don't want to start with, or have anything to do with, the messiness of extensive verbal conjugations. To sort of gain a sense of my maximum range of my potential, I thought I would put some effort into learning a language that's more similar to English than not. That is, something new (for me), yet loaded with enough common cognates to make it look a bit familiar in certain ways. According to one index I found, Swedish ranks as one of the top nine languages that are easiest for English speakers to acquire. It might not look like it when you compare the two languages from the sample I gave from what I learned to process so far, but English and Swedish are more similar to each other than French is to English, or Spanish compared to English, or even German to English. Even for those who are linguistically challenged people, who are completely talentless at using foreign languages, they might possibly read a Swedish phrase like, "Dessa män här är hungrig." and may be able to deduce correctly that it does indeed mean "These men here are hungry."  Many common words exist between English and Swedish, and the other Nordic/Germanic languages like Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic, due to the historical fact that the Vikings invaded the British Isles, and along with the raping and pillaging they did to that land, they impregnated the forming English language itself with a lot of common loan words. English words like they, them, their, egg, shirt, skull, stick, whole, wake, break, sky, skirt, law, and even the word earth, for example, are actually Scandinavian in origin. There are also lots of common words between Swedish and German. For the record, I've found Swedish a lot easier to learn than German. So, Swedish is also going to be helpful in bridging some vocabulary with that other language I already know a bit about, and would like to learn more of in the future.
2. It's multinational - There are only about 10 million speakers of Swedish in the world, but if I wanted to learn one of the languages that's closer to English, I would want to be able to use it in more than just one country when traveling. Norwegian is spoken by a smaller population, plus it's restricted to Norway, and as I understand it, there are so many dialectic deviations and differences even between communities that there are multiple dictionaries in that country for translating one form of Norwegian to another. That sounds too cumbersome and impractical to me. Danish is restricted to Denmark (and some of Greenland: a miserable looking island I wouldn't bother to ever visit anyway). More about Danish later. Icelandic is more archaic, more complex, and limited further still to just having a few hundred thousand native speakers of that language. Then there is also Frisian, which is said to be the living language that's most similar to English (although I can't see it), but it is also almost moving rapidly towards extinction. However though, Swedish is not only used in Sweden; it is also used in Finland (another place I'd visit) by a few hundred thousand more people. Therefore, it's perhaps the more practical of the Scandinavian languages to learn of the languages most closely related to English that I narrowed the choice down to.
3. The several easy things about it - Speaking as an Anglophone, along with the many common words and similar cognates, there are greatly simplified things in the Swedish language that are wonderful. The verbs are great; only one conjugation per tense form across the personal pronouns, quite unlike something as dreadful as a Latin language like Spanish, which has eight different conjugations to memorize for each person form [I, you (singular, informal), you (singular, formal), he/she/it, we, you (plural informal), you (plural, formal), they]. The syntax and grammar are more similar to English than German is. When using numbers, the Swedish ones accord to the way the English ones are used; not like the crazy way the French say quatre-vingt or "four-twenty" to say eighty, or the weird way German places the ones before the tens, as in einundzwanzig or fierundsechszig [one and twenty (21), and four and sixty (64), respectively]. It was one of the factors that eliminated Danish out of the picture also (for now), as I found out that Danish has number counting oddities like those of the other languages I mentioned. There is also in Swedish, different rules for grammatical gender to deal with. In fact, in modern Swedish, there is a movement to introduce a gender pronoun that denotes a person with no specifically known gender. There is the word man (meaning either "man" or more generally "one"), but for some Swedes that word seems to be too biased for the masculine side, and not entirely gender neutral. There is han (he), hon (she), and now hen simply to mean any one man or woman, or to refer to someone whose specific gender isn't known, or for the transgendered. I couldn't say how eagerly that word is being adopted there, perhaps it's even controversial. It would be useful in those awkward "Pat" situations where you can't figure out what the hell someone is supposed to be gender-wise. It's strange, yet true, and perhaps somewhat progressive in some way.
4. More Orthographic Spelling/Pronunciation- Like the blissful thing about German, Spanish, and Ukrainian (once you learn the Cyrillic alphabet), there are relatively fewer anomalies when comparing how the language is spelled and how the words are pronounced in Swedish than in English. Both of Canada's two official languages, English and French, are terrible ones to learn because of too many instances of the lack of concordance between pronunciation and spelling. I also eliminated learning Danish when singling out a language for this project as well because of this same issue in their language: just like English and French, it's polluted with so/too many words with silent letters. There are fewer stupidities in spelling/pronunciation in Swedish than in English, which has crazy things like the eight different pronunciations of words with "-ough" in it. So, I ended up with Swedish as my choice Nordic language to learn.
5. The accent is interesting and beautiful - Forget about the garble you hear from the Swedish Chef on the Muppet Show, and the "bork bork bork" stuff. The actual rhythm and cadence of the language is quite pleasing to me, plus it's that rhythm that is very helpful in audibly differentiating each of the words, quite unlike for me listening to the horrendous rapid fire staccato output of languages like Spanish or Tagalog, where the sentence sounds like one long word. Plus, Swedish sounds far less guttural (to me) than the other Germanic/Nordic languages, like Dutch**. Perhaps because Swedes seem like a more relatively introverted cultural group, the lack of guttural sounds comes from sounding more low-key, and not being so bold, loud, and boisterous. It sounds like a more intellectual language to me in that respect.  
6. The relatively very few hard things about it - The only trouble I have with its pronunciation is the one unique sound that Swedish has, denoted with the diphthong "sj" which sounds nothing like an s, or a j, or anything else in English, or any other language I heard. The other thing, as I complained about earlier, is the multitude of accented vowels, which unlike the French ones, actually do function 100% of the time, thus they become important to include in correct spelling. Swedish seems to have more vowel sounds than English and necessitates being more of a stickler to correctly pronounce them more so than in English. It makes typing Swedish a pain in the ass with my English keyboard, leaving me to use a hunt and peck method of typing using the Alt key characters. The other thing that throws me off, that's even trickier than the use of other languages' gender specific indefinite articles, is the more arbitrary use of "en" and "ett" (the so-called common gender, and neuter respectively), of which both are more gender non-specific (e.g. both "man", "woman", "boy", and "girl" use the same common "en" gender indefinite article). There is no distinct pattern or system in how to use them that I can recognize, although fluids (water, coffee, tea, beer, oil) seem to favour the neuter "ett" indefinite article. The other tricky thing is changing the noun itself to represent a definite case, in singular and plural form, (e.g. dog = hund, a dog = en hund, dogs = hundar, the dog = hunden, the dogs = hundarna). Along with using some prepositions correctly, those are about the only issues I find really grammatically challenging about the Swedish language.
7. It will serve as a useful cognate database for learning the other tricky Nordic languages - Maybe, if I do travel around someday, I'll get to use Swedish as a bridge language for learning German and those other tricky Nordic languages*** that are supposedly mutually intelligible to each other.   
8. Because I genuinely want to travel to Sweden one day - Therefore, it isn't impractical to learn it. I always feel a certain shame for North Americans in general (less so for Canadians, some of whom are bilingual; more so for Americans) who have so little interest in trying to be bilingual, or multilingual, compared to the Europeans. I hate the lack of consideration by such people failing to learn at least some basic greetings, manners, and polite request phrases, coupled along with this absurd and arrogant expectation by some to automatically be served and accommodated in English when traveling to someone else's nation. I find such behaviour burgeoning on being disrespectful and disgraceful. If you have a capacity to learn and express yourself in at least a few words of a foreign language, by all means, do it!
9. Possible Sanctuary - Sadly, it's also coming to a point where I'm also seriously thinking of places to exile myself to if the political situation on this continent really goes to shit. If Americans are trying to get into Canada because of the Trump situation, where would a Canadian go to if a Trump-like political catastrophe happens here? Certainly not to the US; not for me! The worst case scenario I can think of is Trump somehow getting a second term in the US presidency, and then one of the worst possible candidates for conservative party, up here in Canada, becoming the Prime Minister in 2019 (i.e. Kelly Leitch, or Kevin O'Leary). I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a nation that is becoming more like how America currently is now politically, and if the remaining English speaking nations of the British Commonwealth or Ireland wouldn't have me, or become just as deplorably divided politically and socially as America is now, I would opt to live in a place like Sweden, a country that tops a lot of the social wellness indices and scales, along with the other Nordic nations***.

So far, throughout my study of the language, my list of favourite/interesting Swedish words I discovered through my linguistic tour of it is as thus:

1. Lagom - the Goldielocks word which concisely means "not too much; not too little, but just enough. It is a unique word to Swedish. I already mentioned it in a past post.
2. Orkar - A verb (present tense here) that means roughly "to have enough energy to do something". Example: Jag orkar inte jobba i dag. Jag känns sjuk! Translation: I don't have the energy to work today. I feel sick! I myself personally would be applying this verb in the negative to mostly housecleaning, anticipating encounters with drama queens, doing my taxes, and, of course, hangovers.****
3. Samboskap - With so many Swedes opting not to live as married couples, this word summarizes a common-law household living arrangement.
4. Fika - a nice little word that's used as both a noun and a verb for "to break for coffee and snacks"
5. Dog - It simply means "died" in Swedish. It leaves me to wonder if the Swedes listening to the song Hound Dog are perplexed as to why Elvis is singing so merrily about his dog dying.
6. På - Sort of pronounced like "paw". It's like the Swiss Army knife of prepositions, mostly meaning "on", but I notice in some cases that it can be substituted for the English equivalents of "in", "at", "with", and  "by". When I get confused while running through the online test quizzes about which preposition to use, I can whip out på and have about a 63% chance of having it be correct or acceptable.
7. Klockan - it literally means "the clock", but it's also a conveniently simple way to express hourly time. Just as we say "It's six o'clock.", to say the same thing in Swedish you'd say "Det är klockan sex." Incidentally, sex is both the word for six and sex in Swedish, and it leads me to wonder if Swedes habitually have sex at six o'clock. Man kan alltid hoppas att hitta det för sig själv (One can always hope to find that out for oneself).
8. Sjuk - If you didn't figure it out already from the example in point 2, it means "sick". However, with the ghastly, God-awful sounding, unique phoneme this language has for the "sj-" pairing, combined with the "Ook" sound from the "-uk", this word becomes a perfect piece of disgusting onomatopoeia for sounding like you are genuinely becoming sick: like you're trying to stifle yourself from puking on your shoes.
9. Varandra - A much more lovely word than "sjuk", that's for sure. It's a nice, concise, almost poetic, word that means "each other". It flows so smoothly and nicely in a sentence like Vi älskar varandra (We love each other). Awwwwww . . .
10. Jävla Jävel! - I was going to reserve spot number ten to include the foulest, rankest piece of profanity I could dig up from this language, but honestly I think I failed. When I sound out these two words together, they sound too lyrical and musical in my English thinking mind to be even considered nasty and offensive words. If someone yelled this at me, I wouldn't even flinch at all. However, read or said together, they roughly mean "fucking son of a bitch!"  

Exercising the mental task of acquiring another language is one of the most beneficial, enriching, practical, and not to mention cheaper things one can do to improve the brain's physiological health, and to prevent it from aging too rapidly and harshly. The injury I had last year, plus the trauma my lungs and heart took the time before that has made me wary that my work life has to probably veer away from physical labour to doing more cerebral stuff, so it's even more important to keep my wiring in check. It's to retest my mentally ability to adopt and adapt to things. It's also one of those great and cool Jason Bourne type skills to add to one's repertoire. Most other foreign languages intrigue me, and I am very envious of people who are genuinely talented polyglots. It's not just learning another language to me, it's gaining another world perspective and seeing what is enhanced or diminished with the addition and boundaries of another foreign vocabulary. Combining this, with more math skills and logic exercises gives me more of a clearer avenue to test out machine language programming and coding later on. I'll see and hope that my interest in this doesn't wane. As for now, I've applied it to playing against native Swedish speakers in Trivia Crack (. . . and beating some of them to at 6-0, hehehehe).

*-Finding 20 to 30 minutes a day to commit to a project like this is easy once you consciously start breaking the negative habits of watching junk TV and avoiding depressing news, avoiding toxic people, and dropping using other apps that aren't productive.

**- Dutch has some similarities to English, at least that I can see in written form, but it sure isn't pleasing to listen to with my ears. No offense intended to the Dutch; I'm sure there are some practicalities and nice and sensible inherent qualities about the language, but for me, it's like listening to someone talk while they are struggling to swallow a mouthful of live cockroaches. Afrikaans, being closely related to both Dutch and English, sounds just about as weird, and is further impractical for me to learn because South Africa isn't a place where I'd care to visit. Please note that I'm not touting English as a superior language. I get that it has lots of flaws and deficits.

***- I have Danish friends, and I don't want to demean their mother tongue, but I'm simply working at this project empirically. I simply find that between listening to and reading samples of both languages, Swedish is the one that is more comprehensible to me. It's so strange how a phrase translated into both languages, which in my eye have close to identical spellings in some cases, can yet sound so radically unlike each other. Sorry Danes; it's not you, it's me. I've even committed to trying to follow episodes of Dicte on Netflix, to study spoken Danish a bit, and I find your language far less inferable or intelligible than Swedish is (otherwise, it is a good show once you slap in the subtitles). It sounds more mumbled or slurred than Swedish does to my Anglo-Canadian brain/ears. Both are probably loaded equally with their own unique idiosyncrasies that I have yet to learn more about. I'm certainly not perfect linguistically, and I'd probably butcher the pronunciation badly of either of them, no matter which one of the two I dare myself to speak. Regarding point 9, I'd eagerly move to Denmark too were it not for the fact that the language is much more challenging.

****- I thought I should add an example reply (past participle): Med än, du hade orkat att dricka en hela flask av Absolut vodka i kväll går! Så, hur kan jag vara ledsen för dig? Komma, låt oss gå fika. Translation: But yet, you had managed to have the energy to drink a whole bottle of Absolut vodka last night! How can I feel sorry for you? Come on, let's go grab some coffee.

Big Weird Numbers (from Small Things) That Amuse Me

One of my random new year resolutions I will disclose is that I'm trying to smarten up mathematically again, and to regain some comfort with doing hard core ciphers: learning and getting reacquainted with stuff like calculus, matrices, statistics, and the like; plus trying to find some practical use and application for such arithmetical methods in my own life. Right now though, it is all impractical, yet interesting and impressive (to me anyway). I thought about simple objects and puzzles around my home; they didn't involve high tech things either. I did some recreational computations (with the help of the Wolfram Alpha app) and found research results to get some of these wild figures . . .

1. 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 ( ≈ 6.67 x10²¹) : The number of possible valid complete solutions there are for a 9 x 9 Sudoku grid. That's about 16.67 billion times the highest estimate of the number
   of stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Some lucky bastard mathematician out there also got some grant money to prove that the absolute minimum number of clue digits needed to solve one is 17.
   
2. 20,822,964,865,671,167 ( ≈ 2.08 x 10¹⁶) : The total number of  all unique sets of counter bead position configurations on my 2 bead upper deck/5 bead lower deck/13 column standard Chinese suan pan (abacus). That's 18 possible bead configurations (a base of 18, represented from numbers 0 to 17) for each of the 13 columns, representing the exponential powers from 0  to 12. That then is {(17 x 18⁰) + (17 x 18¹) + (17 x 18²) . . .  + (17 x 18¹²)}, leading to a maximum total up to the aforementioned number in the heading converted to decimal/base 10 scientific notation form. Meaning, if I flicked a bead (or beads) at one interval per second to tally all possible counter bead configurations on this abacus, it would take approximately 660.7 million years to do it. It seems crazy on such a little frame with only a total of 91 counting beads, but that's the math talking. If the figure for the placements on an 81 spot Sudoku grid is as high as it is, why not this lesser figure for the 91 counter abacus? If I'm wrong about this calculation, I won't mind being corrected. It seems too strange and mind-blowing to be right.

   

   It reads 2017 in base 10. Happy New Year!

3.  43,252,003,274,489,856,000 ( ≈  4.33 x 10¹⁹): The number of possible of configurations a Rubik's Cube can have. Amazingly, it has been calculated (by supercomputers) that the cube can be solved, with the proper programmed algorithms, from any one of these configurations in 20 moves or less. The last time I tried, it took me about 32 minutes to solve it . . . most definitely not in the same league as a Cray supercomputer.
4. 1 in 6,227,020,800 (or 13!): the chance of taking a full suit of 13 playing cards, shuffling them, and then turning them over, one by one, and having them turn up in exact ranking order from ace to king (A,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,J,Q,K). In contrast, I learned that the chance of winning the jackpot for Lotto 6/49 is roughly 1 in 14 million, and 1 in 28.6 million for the Lotto Max*.
5. 6.53 x 10⁹⁰⁹⁰⁵²: The number of 9 word sentences (a fairly average length of sentence) that can be composed out of randomly selected words from the language with the largest vocabulary in the world: English. From the sentences, "A, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a." to "We will never run out of things to say!", to "Big Weird Numbers (from Small Things) that Amuse Me.", to written onomatopoeia to denote sleeping,  "Zzz, zzz, zzz, zzz, zzz, zzz, zzz, zzz, zzz"**. _, inclusive. There's nothing around materially or temporally as an example to bring that number into comparison for adequate comprehension for the mind, since there are only an estimated 1 x 10⁸⁰ atoms in the entire universe, and its age is only about 4.3 x 10³⁵ in attoseconds***(super small time increments) since the Big Bang. Sure, a grand majority of them would be nonsensical, like "Shiver melon herring quickly kind zipper handy aardvark nipple". Like the random shit in English scrawled on teenagers' T-shirts in the Harajuku fashion district in Tokyo. If a password of nine random words like that were used, I would think that the world would be long vanished into oblivion before it could be hacked. Thankfully, we have few rules of grammar, syntax, context, articles, pronouns, prepositions, verbal tenses and conjugations, gerunds, participles, etc., to set limits and boundaries to things that would statistically and numerically whittle down that figure a lot. Even so, what is left is still more than what would have been, or will be, ever said by humans, past, present, and presumably the future. There's still lots of nonsense that comes from it, but we manage pull a few out that are real gems, and not from the cold dry probabilities of it, but from what's in the spirit of us as human beings. This fact brings to light a quote from Einstein: "Imagination is more powerful than knowledge". He think he got it bang on right . . . and with only seven words too.

*- This is someone else's findings, not mine. Actually, for Lotto Max, the chance of winning on a single line of 7 numbers is roughly in the neighbourhood of 1 in 85.8 million, but you are given three lines, so divide those chances by 3, so 28.6 million. That's a little more optimistic!
**-An edit. Initially I thought that Zyzygy was the alphabetically last defined word that I could think of, but it was a misspelling of the word syzygy: an alignment of celestial bodies in a gravitational system.
***- 1x 10¹⁸ attoseconds = 1 second. Very few things or motions in the physical universe exist that can be timed within ten attoseconds, but who knows what will happen in the future as using measurements such as these become realities as advances in research and development of nanotechnology and quantum computing come about. 

Ending 2016/Beginning 2017

I did what I could to make the final day of 2016 be an additional day that didn't suck balls, as I already summed up, so eloquently, in a previous entry about the rest of the year. The only good thing that happened during the weeks off work, being not able to fully function physically or participate socially while being injured, is the fact that I've had time for myself to do lots of navel-gazing for some more important life questions. Some made me very grateful, while others made me quite regretful. They are too private to list and post here. A great dump of snow finally arrived yesterday, and I'm not keen on traveling anywhere to be in some crowded place with strangers, despite the free transit service for the evening. Being at home in peace to ruminate and contemplate for the rest of the evening is fine enough for me.

Beginning a review and a rant about how abominable the state of 2016 was would be pointless. I can't find any heart to use in chronicling any of it. It can be simply summed up with the facts that too many good people passed away, more amoral and genuinely rotten people gained more power and have become emboldened, irresponsible, and abusive with it; my state of health went backward instead of forward with some pain, impairment, and suffering, and the news has not just been a stream, but an inundation of one disaster after another. Any good that appeared throughout the year was greatly overshadowed by a lot of evil and disasters.

So, with mindfulness, and some attempt to not let things become any worse, here is how I transitioned between the last hours of the last day of the wretched year, 2016, and the first few hours of 2017 . . .

Last Five Purchases of 2016:

• Groceries/foodstuffs (including a variety 12 pack of lagers and ales)*
• A haircut
• A lottery ticket ($20.00 richer from it)
• Service for my Nordic skis to be refinished/waxed properly
• A Virtual Reality headset - because, after this year's news, actual reality is apparently something I want to be less of a part of. It wasn't bought today, but it seemed significant.

Last Five Activities of 2016:

• Physiotherapy exercises
• Housecleaning, bookkeeping, decluttering and trashing stuff
• Fixing and refitting a shelving unit insert (thanks again, Mom and Dad)
• Nordic skiing - thankfully, my arm isn't buggered up from doing it, followed by a long cozy nap with the pooch and I by the fireplace, lit with the tinder of torn up 2016 calendars
• Drinking and snacking between IIHF hockey games (watching the fucking USA team beat Canada - another 2016 disaster), watching TV shows (historical and science documentaries mostly) and reading my chosen book (see below)

First Five Activities of 2017:

• Writing this entry
• Reading my past entries for the year
• Thinking about the people I miss most
• A sipping and savouring some fine Scotch (see below)
• Opening my first resolution envelope (January 2017) . . . too personal to post.

Last Meal of 2016/First Meal of 2017 (a huge deli snack platter to graze on, including):

• Rice Crackers
• Brie Cheese
• Liver and Herb Pâté
• Calamari Ring Ceviche**
• Cocktail Shrimp marinated in seasoned Lemon Oil**
• Smoked Oysters**
• Medley Mix of Cocktail Olives
• Celery Sticks
• Virgin Caesars** (this might surprise and shock some of you, but believe it or not, there are actually some cocktails I do prefer to drink without the alcohol)*** 

Scotch of the Year for 2017***: Twelve year old Aberfeldy, single malt. Definitely a lust element of Lists, Lusts, and Lost Precious Thoughts. Heavily endowed with a heathery floral aroma, entwined with a less-like-caramel and more-like-honey note in its sweetness, and a slight wafting of a secondary ester that's kind of reminiscent of banana. There is a slightly almond characteristic in the body of the base malt in the liquor as the other notes dissipate. There's no discernable smokiness, like some other Scotches have. Superb, delightful, and smoooooooth.

Last Project of 2016/First Project of 2017: Formulating my own Gin Infusion Recipe*** - the ingredients used are:

• Neutral spirit alcohol
• Juniper berries (dried)
• Jasmine blossoms (dried)
• Lemon peel
• Coriander seed
• Six more botanicals that I'm keeping a secret (if it turns out good, it will be my signature blend; if it turns out bad, it wouldn't be worth sharing anyway.) P.S. No matter what the outcome, I certainly won't be calling it "Victory Gin" (see below).

Last Book of 2016/First Book of 2017: A re-read of Nineteen Eighty Four, by George Orwell. It should be a prerequisite read for those who are so gullible and mistakenly/carelessly making and spreading fake news on social media, inciting fear-mongering with baseless conspiracy theories, picking out some unseen enemy to blame for [their] current troubles, and who blindly side with any political authority with a "might is right" (fascist) agenda that preaches isolationism, farcical economic bullshit, war for the sake of peace , and production for the sake of all of that, whilst at the same time cheapening and destroying the welfare of both human beings and the environment. As I re-read this with a more literary mind than I had the last time I read it ten years ago, I find more and more layers of meaning to this satire, which, sadly, is becoming more and more reflective, cautionary, and frighteningly truthful about the times we are living in now, and possibly approaching in the times ahead, as free speech and right to assemble is getting attacked more and more often, and technology is making us become more and more estranged from each other. If I was ever put in the role of an English teacher again, this book would definitely be in the curriculum, because I realize now that there is a whole generation of people who were born after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and never witnessed or experienced the posturing and fear of total domination by of totalitarian governments like the Soviet Union, or generally blissfully ignorant or the mechanisms of entities like the KGB or the Stasi, who like Thought Police, surveilled and invaded every element of people's lives. That era is completely out of the collective consciousness and historical memory of the Millennials, and that's what I believe the currant establishments are counting on, so this generation can be more easily controlled, as they are trying to bring privacy to extinction, and afflicting more corporate control through propaganda memes, and advertising. That's why I believe that this book needs to reach them most of all. It's a book that I would hope would challenge people to think and question motives beyond a three word slogan, than mindlessly complying to it, whatever it is. It's a reminder of how governments suppress and oppress with words, and language itself is twisted, corrupted, and perverted to obfuscate and hide more insidious measures and actions, like the real life examples of "right to work" in the anti-labour movements, or the term "transformational change"**** in the health care system in this province. It's a read for anyone living under a government who is expounding and touting how great and prosperous we all are, while at the same time is cutting and selling off services, hiking up fees and taxes, and clawing back wages as measures of austerity, putting us closer to enslavement to debt. I can only read about 10 - 15 pages at each sitting because there is so much more to digest of it now that I have more of it revealed to me with a mindset of a more engaged Unionist. Sorry for turning this into a long book review, but 1984 is a pivotal and profound piece of literature of the science fiction/alternative history/political satire genres that is still very relevant today.

Five Things I'm Looking Forward to in 2017:

• Our Nation's 150th Birthday, there's going to be a good time had around here somewhere
• The Possible Decriminalization/Legalization of Marijuana in Canada - not for an excuse to get high (I really am not interested in that; it's not my thing), but to lay stronger inroads for a hemp economy, for commercial/industrial purposes and switching to fibres, plastics, pharmaceuticals, and oils that veer away from using toxic petrochemicals, and that will do more to protect the environment, along with maximizing diversity of production usage per hectare of arable land.
• Getting healed up enough to get the full use of my arm back
• A possible trip I'm planning to Eastern Canada
• Being able to commit to even 10% of the wild things and projects I've set out for myself in 2017 that I've randomly and secretly assigned for myself for each month of this year

Happy Year 2017, everyone. Let the adventure begin . . .

*- Beer is simply a liquefied form of bread, derived from generally the same basic ingredients of yeast, grain and water; a potable version of the staff of life. Therefore, according to my judgement, it's an item I categorize to be included along with groceries/foodstuffs
**- It seems I've rendered this place a veritable zone of death for anyone with a severe seafood/shellfish allergy.
***- Even though I'm experimenting with spirit infusions, I've actually cut down a lot on drinking hard liquor. I've substituted quantity for quality. I've made it my tradition now to have one glass of single malt Scotch on the first day of each month for the year, New Year's Day inclusive. I never really fancied Scotch for a long while, because the first time I ever sampled it, I was offered some cheap and absolutely gross and terrible blended crap. Distillers who blend Scotch should all be hanged. I got to recently starting to love it after trying a single malt (10 year old Talisker at the time). After testing and exploring every note and nuance of that, I found it to be a fabulously delectable libation that gave a sensation that could only be best described as a some sort of sensual simultaneous orgasm shared together between the nose and the tongue. The 750 mL bottle of single malt during 2016 was 10 year old Auchentoshen . . . almost as sublime. I'll stop prattling on about drink-lore now.
**** - The term "transformational change" in itself goes to show how stupid the people are who dreamt up this ridiculous tautology. The word "transformational" already indicates that there is already a process of change happening, so why include the word "change" after it? I wish George Carlin was still alive to be all over this one. 

Winter Solstice 2016

It's the day with the longest night of the remaining year, which has only 10 days left in it now. I still haven't made any significant effort to do any gift shopping yet for Christmas . . . shame on me. I thought I'd procrastinate yet some more with making another entry. I thought the previous one would be the final one for the year, but instead I'll make it the penultimate one. I sheepishly admit that I woke up right at sunrise (9:15 AM here) on what is already the shortest day of the year. Judging on that, I guess I'm already not too ambitious to do much with the rest of this day. After a copious volume of coffee just to open my eyes, I then finally finished the last stages of piecemeal piddling around with catching up on correspondence, and re-integrating the rest of my digital music library to cloud storage to play with all my Bluetooth devices (whoopy-doo). While doing that, I found some celebratory music for the day. The perfect sort of musical selection I picked out to make a uniquely sort of pagan-esque Canadian celebration of the coming of this solstice day is the progressive rock album 2112 by Rush  (21/12, today's date, get it?). The word "solar" is uttered a few times (in a voice that isn't in Geddy Lee's regular constricted-genitals sounding timbre) within the opening 20 minute overture. It seemed appropriate given that today marks a solar phenomenon.

It makes me wonder, how we (we, as in people like me who are of Northern/Central European heritage) would celebrate this time of year if Christianity, or any of the other two Abrahamic religions, didn't dominate or influence the ethno-cultures of this part of the hemisphere, and we remained true to more pagan beliefs*. The Celtic, or Germanic tribal holidays, like that of Yule (Jul) probably would take over. We've already incorporated so many of those pagan traditions into the Christian Christmas ethos. Like the author Jared Diamond**, I'm a believer in the theory that we are like any other animal: our biology and geography is our destiny. I believe that it would be just an automatically instinctual thing to build on traditions to make things look greener and brighter to counter the dullness, cold, and darkness of the year, to decorate such that it makes things look more alive and life-giving. We'd do what we could to get extra calories and fatten up for the colder season; we'd feast a lot. We'd drink more, play games, and do whatever it took to make more social merriment and fellowship, just like we tend to do now to stave off and slake away boredom and depression through the cold and darkness. I speculate that there would be very little difference in the appearance of the solstice holiday from what Christmas is now throughout these colder, darker latitudes of the Earth. If Christmas, or its precursors, never existed at all, given the environment we are in, we'd be doing a lot to make up some sort of winter festivities in lieu of it.

It also makes me wonder: if attempted European colonization was destined to occur on this continent in this alternate historical timeline, where Christianity wasn't an affixed part of Occidental culture,
would there have been other or better attempts to integrate solstice traditions with the Aboriginal cultures here, with the spirit of that we all live under the same sun, or would those native traditions be swept away like so many others with the rise of colonialism? It makes me wonder what that would look like. The Vikings*** who settled at L'Anse Aux Meadows in Newfoundland around a millennium ago, probably were the closest historical precedent for this paradigm (in this country, if we indeed became a country) in which they were the primary holders of such traditions. However, that didn't go over so well, and no (accurate) written records exist about the process of the settlement. Their colony collapsed: either by famine, disease, or from conflict and hostilities with the indigenous people, who may have eradicated the entire Nordic settlement, or other maladaptive factors, before it could have a chance to thrive and evolve. This sounds like a theoretical element of the PC game Civilization VI to test, play out, and observe.

I explain it this way to my readers who aren't Canadians. Making this land we call Canada a more tolerable and habitable place to endure throughout the winter with festivities has been a natural and necessary thing to do to as a cultural meme for European colonization to have a foothold here throughout this nation's history: from the times when the Voyageurs and Coureurs du Bois established L'Ordre de Bon Temps (the order of good cheer), that is to make provisions for the means for social recreations a mandatory thing by the fur trading companies, to quell the rigours of winter. to hockey leagues and curling clubs, right up to general making a prolonged Christmas season compared to most other nations.

I didn't realize just how deeply Canadian I was, a true product of my environment, until I spent my first Christmas in a tropical country. It was just too weird and unnatural for me to process for that season. It made me feel quite homesick back then. I was getting strange looks and responses from people, who never experienced a day colder than 25 degrees Celsius, as I explained them how much I was missing my sub-zero temperatures, and the snow and frost covered vistas, as I sat on some beach or drank at some outdoor café. I couldn't find a way for it make sense to them, or to myself either for that matter. I really do need my cold and snow for the yuletide season. Winter, as much as I can hate it at times, is just engrained in me that much. It makes me think of the new immigrants, who are coming from mostly the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, from desert, tropical, or more equatorial latitudes who are having the same degree of challenge of adapting to this climate and holiday season.

So, for those who celebrate whatever cultural event or religious holiday amidst or surrounding the solstice season, like Christmas, Hanukah, Aboriginal/Wiccan Solstice Day, the release of another Star Wars movie****, etc., take care, have a blast with it, but also be responsible.

*- I should add that thoughts like these have been prompted by entertaining myself with more than one alternative history scenario with a.) playing the Wolfenstein: The New Order video game, with a storyline where the Nazis end up taking over the world, and b.) re-reading 1984, by George Orwell; though fictional, it's a sobering book everyone should read and to note the parallels that are occurring now with the manipulation of the truth in the media, the end of privacy, and the assertion of a military-industrial complex moving toward totalitarianism keeping us in a state of perpetual war and conflict. 
**- His book, Guns, Germs and Steel, is the best book ever written for a concise overview of cultural anthropology, and global human sociological development and evolution of civilizations: from our rise as homo sapiens, to our continental migrations and colonisations.
***- Watching tonight's episode of Vikings and the debate between King Egbert and Ragnar about Heaven and Valhalla was also a prompt for me to write these thought experiments with alternative histories that model/result in a non-Christian medieval Europe.
****- It's valid to include that. There are a lot out there who (sadly) are going to find a more spiritual experience for themselves watching this modern folklore than appreciating the other traditional holidays.

The 12 Month Random Resolution Game

There has been a long lapse between entries, mostly because there has been so little that has been good or positive, or of any importance to comment on. Four months of this year that I wished to make better have been stolen from me, and I've simply been trying to make moves toward getting back to some sort of normalcy: if there ever was such a thing for me. People who know me know that I've just been trying to work and move towards a full recovery, which has been progressive, but going so slowly in my mind that it has been a real test of my patience. Physiotherapy can be refreshing and relieving on one day, and then torturous on another, as micro-traumas are being worked out of the joints and muscle tissues in my arm. There is some noticeable nerve damage, but thankfully it's only slight. Given what I had going on during the initial days after the accident, things could have easily turned into something much worse. On top of that, I've been depressed and disappointed about the elections down south, and the state of the media coverage used to be corruptive for such an affair already laden with controversy and conspiracy. It was a shameful display all around. The latter third of this year can be summarized in three words - it sucked balls. There's nothing at all about it that I really want to recollect or recount.

Year's End is just 20 days away, and I'm already making plans for trying to have a better go in 2017 even before I attempt any Christmas shopping. I invented a sort game for myself: something that has meaningful projects and acquisition targets set up for me to try and gain for each month of the coming new year. Perhaps it's a flaky idea: one that evolved out of the combined urges of defeating some boredom, wanting to play cards (but no company for it), to play with odds and sort gamble a bit (without staking any of my Christmas shopping funds), and inventing a game of chance where I'll somehow always win*. I found a way to deck my halls with a deck of cards. I am sharing it for those who are also wanting to use it to make a more hopeful and prosperous coming new year.

Materials:

• pen and paper (enough to create up to about 144 slips, plus to write a category list)
• scissors (for cutting such slips)
• 12 sealable envelopes
• a deck of cards, OR alternatively, if you aren't a card player . . .
• a pair of dice, or a 12 sided gaming die (if you are a Dungeons and Dragons geek)

Method:

1. Make a list of 12 categories of 12 things or deeds that you what to have or do during the new year. They can be of anything you want: charitable or selfish, serious intellectual pursuits or something fun and foolish, skill building or talent oriented, material possessions or intangibles, whatever, so long as each category involves things that genuinely go towards your sense of well-being, happiness and life satisfaction. Have them be all affordable within a month's budget, and overall achievable within a month's time, and such that they can be available to have or do at any time of the year. Here's about 12 things as examples that may or may not interest you. (Some of) these categories below aren't necessarily reflective of mine. It's deeply personal thing, so make up your own 12 categories of 12 things to list in each. Strive for 12 things to list in each category, but if you can't, you can repeat some items to make up twelve if practical, or stick to some number under twelve. Some examples here are: 
• 12 career skills you want to build on
• 12 tools/implements you want for your workshop/space
• 12 items you want as home decorum, or things you want to change in your home
• 12 thing-a-ma-bobs you want to collect
• 12 subjects you want to study intensively
• 12 people/places you want to visit
• 12 books you want to read/memorize 
• 12 songs you want to learn to play on your[whatever musical instrument you have]
• 12 charities you want to donate time/money to 
• 12 exotic ingredients you want to sample/experiment with
• 12 restaurants you've never eaten at yet, but wanted to try
• 12 novel liquor ingredients you want in your cocktail bar**
2. Take one category, and write each of the 12 items you listed from that category on a seperate slip of paper. You'll have 12 slips of paper if you've listed 12 items in the category. Put them face down on the table and mix them up.
3. Lay out all the 12 envelopes on a flat surface with the open side up.
4. If using playing cards, take a full red suit out of the deck to use, discarding the king. Shuffle the 12 red cards and place one card, face up, on each envelope. Then, take a full black suit out of the deck, discarding the king. Shuffle the black cards and put them face down on the table. Draw a card from the top of the black card stack. Take one of the face down slips of paper, not looking at it, and tuck it into the envelope with the red card with the matching face value as the black card (i.e., if you draw a black 3, put one slip of paper in the envelope with the red 3 on it.). Turn the red card over, or remove it to indicate that this envelope has been loaded. Repeat the same steps for each draw of the black cards in the rest of the stack. Once all the slips of the category have been put in each of their respective envelopes, re-shuffle each stack of the red cards and the black cards, shuffle and lay out the envelopes again, open , side up, and repeat for the 12 item slips of the next category. Repeat until all remaining category list slips are packed in the envelopes. Alternately, if you prefer handling dice . . .
5. If using a 12 sided die***, arrange the envelopes such that you can visually mark them as 1 to 12 (like the face of a clock, for example). Roll the die and place the slip into the corresponding envelope that matches the number on the die. Turn the envelope over once it gets its one slip. Remember, no peeking at the slips! Reroll the die if the number is repeated, and continue rolling, and filling the corresponding envelopes with their single slip of paper until the slips are gone. Shuffle and redistribute the envelopes again, turning the envelopes open-side up again, and repeat for the slips of the next 12 items in the next category. Repeat this process until all categories are done.
6. Once all the envelopes are filled, seal them and shuffle them. Select one and write "January" on it, select the next and write "February" on it, and so on until each envelope is labelled with one of the months of the year from, January to December****, inclusive.
7. Keep these envelopes in a safe and secure place. On the first day of each month, open the envelope labelled for that corresponding month. Set an alert on your smartphone calendar if you need to be reminded.
8. Start, do, or get the stuff listed on the 12 slips of paper that you find in there. You have the entire month to plan and/or try to commit to whatever is listed on those 12 slips of paper throughout it all when you start on day one, be it starting page one of that book, or collecting materials for a month long project. It would be a good idea to journal your progress, or monitor your interest while you do it. If you failing at it, or if your interest is waning, you get to ask yourself "Why?"

I rationalize things with this betterment/resolution "game" this way. The road to hell is usually paved with good intentions. Resolutions are usually broken because people pile up all their ambitions at the start of the year, which only serves to overwhelm them. Some then drop them within 12 hours of New Year's Day. It's not a good way to practice kaizen - that is small and continuous progressive steps toward improvement. The lesson, if any, that I'm drawing from doing physiotherapy, is that small and continuous steps eventually build up to some more powerful things. Committing to major resolutions, more likely than not, involves throwing one's life out of balance which one is rarely prepared for. I've had enough of life out of balance happening since August - thank you very much; yet I still seek structured improvement for my welfare. The novelty and excitement withers away quickly too when things are over-planned, and there is no chance for surprise and spontaneity.  I hope this strategy is one way to improve upon that. Twelve things per month, be they leisurely or ambitious, amounts to about three things a week with which to reward or better oneself. That's as many times per week as I do PT, and I'm getting results for the better. That sounds enriching and progressive enough for me.

This is also a very deliberate way to exploit stuff that I already have, it's just the element of pacing and time that really is the thing that needs to be adjusted. For example, lots of people have books on their shelves that they haven't touched yet, so list them and use them. The same goes with other stuff that they may be hoarding. This then becomes a practical measure to prevent thoughtless and impulsive spending. I hope calling this a game will perchance draw some kind of fun into the whole process, despite the fact that it does involve some discipline. The cards/dice aspect of it brings in a bit of a mysterious element of divination of sorts. I just like the math and probability calculation of it. It is making a personal lottery where you can (choose to) win every time. All in all, after dealing with the spells of bad luck I've had, my true ambition is just to be somehow happier. We'll see by the end of next December.

Since I have nothing else to reflect on, or share for the rest of this year, I'll only bid everyone happy holidays. I hope that I'll have better things to share for 2017.

*- Because I was playing a video game, and became too frustrated at being stuck at one level with monster robots constantly blowing my head off. A not so productive way to use my recovery time.

**- Unless you are already in a 12 step program with AA, disregard this idea.

***- If using a pair of six sided dice, the last slip of paper left of the 12 in the category automatically goes into the envelope designated as #1.

****- If you would rather devote your time, money, and energy for preparing for Christmas (or other primary holiday month), just simply play this game with 11 envelopes, 132 paper slips, and pull out the red and black queens (if using cards), disqualify the 12 roll if using a die/dice. The parameters are thus adjustable.

Two Weeks Gibbled

I don’t know why I’m troubling myself to write this. It’s not like this is a life event that I’d like to ever remember happening. Perhaps, it’s for the sake of reading it later in the future when I’m going through a rough period of real misery and suffering to remind myself that I have some ability to cope when I’m going through some sort of limbo when dealing with impairment. It’s now 4:51 AM, and I had nothing else to do. I’m sleepless because it’s been a full two weeks plus a couple days without being set in a regular rhythm of a typical workweek cycle. I’m also an insomniac due to being woken by either jolting surges of pain, or failing miserably to find an alternative resting position that has been relaxing enough to have a decently long stretch of recuperative nighttime sleep almost every night since the accident. The rest of my muscles in my neck, shoulders, and upper back are becoming loaded with tension with the exhaustion, and from hauling my defective arm around in a sling much of each day. Maybe the problems are also exacerbated from me being too stubborn and frugal, by not opting for a full and regular dosage of pain medication that I should perhaps be using. I’ve been reluctant to just cut loose to take the pills every time I feel pain and soreness. I’ve been trying to make three days worth of meds stretch out for a week. I’m not fond of how they make me dull-headed and absent-minded; taking away from my lucidity. They also seem to be harsh on my stomach; until recently, my appetite has been poor* because of that. Even though I know I don’t really have an additive personality, I’m not interested in approaching a place where I’d be constantly reliant, or hooked, on using opiates or codeine as a crutch to get me through an average day. The pain has finally at least become more tolerable: at least to a point where I don’t feel I need to bite on a leather belt to ride around in a lurching vehicle. It is tempting to gulp whatever hard liquor I have left around here to tranquilize me and knock me out for the count for some sleep, but I’m not curious as to what it would be like mixing poisons, especially while I’m trying to get my blood chemistry right again. Except for a brief tour of Beerfest last weekend for some small samples, I’ve had no alcohol since my accident.

Before I sat down to write this, I used the past half hour I’ve been awake to check and re-dress the wound site (looks OK), to hand wash my sling and hang dry it, and to piddle around with other light housework that wasn’t too noisy. Inadvertently, I’m also being a creepy security presence for the building. Having a light on behind me, and being this eerie-looking, black robe clad, shadowy figure in the window (as would be seen from the view from the parking lot) has made a couple of hooded sketchy-looking little bastards quicken their step to disappear out of the alley way as they walked past the building at this hour. I filled a glass of water, fitted on an ice pack, and stepped outside onto the balcony, with my housecoat draped sloppily around me. The sky had nothing interesting to display or reveal astronomically speaking, but the air was at least somewhat soothing and refreshing. It’s rich and saturated with the signature smells of early fall. I think about the one with whom I’d like to share this moment with: be it with this same silence, breathing this same air, or else for me to be simply absorbed in the pleasure of listening to her talk. It was she with her good heart and positive attitude, more than anyone, despite the distance between us, who has helped me to focus on better things and helped give me the mindset to endure all this by myself.

I’m trying not to get hung up on the hundred other things that put me in a peevish mindset that I’m encountering with losing full use of an arm while trying to manage everything alone. It’s frustrating not being able to do some things like: entering and driving my car**, flossing my teeth, opening containers, tying shoelaces, or even simply putting on and fastening a regular pair of jeans, or anything else requiring two arms and heavy lifting. I’m trying to think of the comparisons and differences between this spell of long-term recovery time, and the time when I came out of the hospital with impaired heart and lung issues. This ranks as only slightly better: in that my energy and capacity for activity is a lot more predictable, my brain isn’t being starved of oxygen, and it’s nothing from which I could potentially collapse if I strain too hard. If something does snap again, I can at least get myself to the hospital more conveniently.

The issue with my circulation after having the hematoma removed is still a little finicky. My coagulation (INR) numbers aren’t quite right yet; my blood chemistry still needs work on being normalized (normal for me). I’ve been given some extra doses of Tinzaparin injections for the next few days for the time being to treat that. My stomach is going to look like a dart board, with my bellybutton as the bull’s eye. That’s where the injections go, and there is usually pronounced bruising around the injection sites. The palm of my left is still a sickly shade of bluish purple and tender, but the rest of the swelling and bruising along my arm has gone down substantially. There is still feeling and (stiff) movement in my fingers, but I can’t yet pivot my wrist at all. I haven’t dared to try flex arm yet without the doctor’s say so. Thinking about all the bloody craziness I had to go through just to get treated, I’m very disinclined to do anything that would put my progress in jeopardy, and going through the hell of waiting to readjust my blood again, and repeating another risk of a dangerous bout of internal bleeding, all for the sake of preparing to get cut open again because of trying to do some unnecessary and foolish movement.

I realize that my birthday is soon approaching. I hardly think that I’ll be in a celebratory mood for it. I don’t really care to enter and note the beginning a new year of life being at a state where I’m far from the better version of myself. I’m scheduled to have my dermal stitches removed next Thursday, and then getting an assessment and fuller picture of what to plan and adapt for thence.

*- Since the day of my surgery, it wasn’t until yesterday that I’ve really put some effort into doing some food prep. Operating a knife one-handed is a test of my patience for sure. Handling a vegetable peeler and food shredder isn’t much easier either. I managed to make some homemade soup, and dabbled with East Indian food for my supper prep. I was just trying to use up the stuff in my fridge and freezer, but maybe I subconsciously chose to make Indian food to draw some lesson from it, because of the cultural etiquette of handling and serving food with just the right hand. Offering or passing food with the left hand is considered a major no-no. Some street vendors in India, cooking for all the public to see, go so far as not handle or touch any food at all with the left hand while preparing it. It would be bad for business if one is witnessed them touching food with the hand, in their no toilet paper culture, that’s reserved for such personally hygiene ablutions.   

**- I just think that driving with half the physical capacity, while one’s brain is doubly fogged with analgesics, isn’t a very bright idea, even if I could successfully squirm into my vehicle without feeling tortured.