Next step in buying my new place ...

My postings will be a bit random over the next few days, as I'm away from my normal computer and all my "stuff" ...

I couldn't sleep, so I did some repacking of the car, and took a shower, and still got to the Tsawwassen terminal well before the 5:15 ship sailed.  They wanted an extra $27 to put me on the 5:15, so I went back to Tsawwassen to the McDonald's, only to find that the McDonald's in Tsawwassen doesn't even open their drive-thru until 5:00 AM, or their lobby until 6:00 AM.  So I drove around the outside of Tsawwassen Mills, and the outlying buildings, to get some sense of what the place was like.  Of course, I don't have any idea of what the main mall is like, but at least I have an idea of how to get in, and out, and the businesses that are available just outside of the mall itself.

They let me into the terminal parking lot just after 5:15.  I, of course, used the rather lengthy waiting time that I had, by mapping BC Ferries wifi strength around the parking lot.  I use the term mapping loosely, since I could not find any rhyme or reason to how the signal was available in different areas.  It does seem to be radiating from most of the buildings on the site, with the singular exceptions of the control tower, and the two buildings with wash rooms in them.  The Tsawwassen Quay building, rather interestingly, has a much stronger signal on the north side of the building than on the south side of the building.  The south side of the building is, of course, where most of the cars would park.

Yet another oddity is that the consistently strongest signal seems to be under The pedestrian walkways for access to the various births.  Walking along this walkway, or below it, or just beside it, provides a relatively consistent, and reliable signal.

Off to "close," and later "take possession," of my new home ...

Compensating job-seekers

I came across an article that suggested that job seekers should be compensated for time spent in, and preparing for, job interviews.  I sympathize with the idea, although I see several problems.

I have always been somewhat annoyed that the time, work, and expenses associated with job seeking, are not compensated in any way.  You can write off the costs of moving, on your taxes, if you have to move to take up a new job.  But you cannot write off the costs of printing, photocopying, postage, envelopes, and other costs associated with looking for a job.  (You can tell that I have been at this a long time, since envelopes, postage, and photocopying aren't usual in today's job searches.  You're much more likely to just post your resume on LinkeDin, and get busy posting stuff on social media so that you get noticed.)

I have, probably, more experience than most in terms of job seeking.  My career history is not one of those where you start with one company, right out of high school (or sometimes even before you finish high school), and then spend the next forty or fifty years with the same company.  No, my career history is not so much chequered, as plaid.  I have never had a long-term job (other than a bunch of the volunteer work that I've done).  I'm not sure that I have ever had a job longer than two years at a stretch.  (Well, OK, I worked at the same hospital for four years, but that was when I was putting myself through uni.  Even at that I was flipping from situation to situation.  And, yes, I did seminars for the same outfit for over a decade, but that was on a kind of contract basis, in competition with a number of others.)  No, I have had to apply for lots of jobs, and, for the past thirty years, an awful lot of my work has been on a contract basis.

So, I have searched for, written resumes and letters to, and interviewed for, a very, very large number of jobs.  Even while I have been a contractor and consultant, I have been submitting applications for regular full-time work.  An awful lot of my friends think that I'm really lucky to have been a consultant and a contractor, and want my advice on how to get into the field.  I keep on telling them, you don't want to do this.  I never wanted to do this.  I'm basically a nine to five mentality person.  I don't like not having a regular paycheque.  I don't like all the sales work, marketing and promoting yourself, that goes into being a consultant, or a contractor.  (Which does relate to this issue of being paid for looking for work.)

Yes, I know, full well, that looking for a job is an awful lot of work.  Looking for a job is just as much work as actually having a job.  In fact, I would say that looking for a job is even harder work than actually having a job.  There is no one to tell you when to stop.  There is no one to tell you when your day is over.  There is no one to say that it's time to take a break, or have lunch, or that you have done enough for the day.  So, an awful lot of the time, you just work until you are exhausted.  And then you work in an exhausted state, which is very ineffective and probably doesn't do you any good in terms of actually finding a job, and certainly just exhausts you so that you are low on resources, and unready, when a real opportunity does come along.  Yes, looking for a job is a lot of work, and very hard work indeed.

There are, of course, other factors involved.  There are the expenses related to job searching, that I mentioned earlier.  There is the fact that you are always looking for opportunities contacts, possibilities, and openings.  You are always pushing yourself, promoting yourself, selling yourself, marketing yourself, and always looking for opportunities for yourself.  It is a very selfish and self-centered style of activity.  It has to be, in order to work.  But it's not attractive.  Other people don't like it.  You always run the risk of offending people.  And you really can't tell in advance what is going to offend people.  I don't like doing it, but I have been forced to do it, many times over many years.  I have been pushed to do it, I have been told to do it, lots of people who are telling me how I should run my business are constantly agitating for me to do more of it.  But it's not an attractive activity or personality trait, and I really don't like doing it, and wish it wasn't always seen as so very necessary.

So, yes, I sympathize with the position that job seekers should be compensated in some way, for the activities that they have to undertake when searching for a job.  But, there are some problems.

The work involved in finding a job, when you are looking for one, varies tremendously.  And it is a huge gamble.  Lots of people will give you lots of advice about how to go about finding a job.  All of these people are wrong.  Yes, I said all.  I remember going to a resume specialist at one point in my career.  At the time I had at least four resumes that I was sending out to various jobs, and I took two of them, which I considered to be the best, for him to look at.  He thought they were good.  He told me that both of them were about 98% correct.  I asked him how I am could improve them to 100%.  He said you can't.  He said certain things that you do to improve the attractiveness of a resume in one area, will make the resume less attractive in other ways.  And he was right.  That is why everybody who gives you advice about looking for a job is wrong.

Because you are dealing with people.  People are inconsistent.  People are irrational.  People are emotional.  Not always and in all ways, but very often, and in ways that you cannot foresee.  Over the years I have come to learn the look on the interviewer's face that says that the interview is over.  The time may not be up, and the interviewer may continue on with additional questions, depending on the process that they are using for interviewing (and over the years I have been through an awful lot of different processes in an awful lot of different interviews), but the interview is over, because the interviewer has decided that you aren't getting the job.  I know that it is something that I have said.  Sometimes I even know that it's a single word that I have said.  You can see the look in the face.  You can see the change in the eyes, the change in the posture, a slight stiffness in the conversation from then on.  As noted, sometimes I know it's a single word, and I'll even know which word.  I don't know why that particular word has triggered a negative reaction in the interviewer, but I know that it has, and I know that that reaction is enough that the interview is over: I don't get the job.  As noted, people are irrational.  And, because these reactions are not necessarily rational, there is no way to predict them in advance.  There is no way to guard against them.

But that is only one aspect of the gamble that is a major part of job seeking.  It isn't even the most important one.  Probably the most important one is that, much of the time, there really isn't much difference between you and the other candidates.  At one point in my career I was going to an awful lot of job interviews.  And, when the dreaded phone call came, informing me that I didn't get the job, the person conducting the interviews generally told me that, if it was any comfort, I was the second favorite candidate.  It wasn't much comfort.  After all, the important fact was that I didn't get the job.  And I think that the comment, that I was the second favorite candidate, was not merely a pro forma exercise.  The way the person delivered it was always quite sincere, and delivered with some feelings that this person was attempting to provide some level of encouragement and comfort for me in my continued job searching.  I knew that I was an attractive candidate.  I had a lot of experience, a lot of background, and a lot of knowledge.  They had just decided to go with someone else.

And the thing is, even when you're not the number two candidate, they're probably isn't an awful lot of difference between candidates one and five.  If you can even rank them that specifically.  I know that, in a number of cases when I have been on the other side of the table, actually doing the hiring, that there have been certain standout situations where one candidate was head and shoulders above the rest.  But, as I say, these are standard situations.  (In one that was particularly outstanding in my memory, the person to whom we wanted to offer the position, by the time we had done the necessary paperwork to offer her the position, already had a job with somebody else.)  But in most cases, after going through the resumes, short listing for telephone interviews, and then further shortlisting for actual in-person interviews, by the time you've got to that point, you know that you could hire any of these people.  It may be that something comes up in the interview to eliminate the candidate, but most of the time the options are crowded pretty close together.  So which one you choose, is a difficult choice.  Once you've made the choice, confirmation bias steps in, and you tend to find increasing reasons why you made the right choice, and that this person is the right person for the job.  But that's after the fact.  In totally objective terms, probably all of these people are very equivalent in terms of qualifications, and the possibilities that they will succeed in the job.  So which one you choose is a bit of a crapshoot.  So, when you're on the other side, looking for a job, whether you get chosen is a bit of a crapshoot.

And, if you are in the game long enough, looking for work, you get to realize this.  It's difficult to keep going, when you know that your chance of being hired for any given job is only partly based on your ability to do the job.  It's an awful lot based on random chance, and whether the interviewer had enough cream in his or her coffee that morning.

As previously noted, I have been through an awful lot of different interview processes in my time.  I have been through the fads and fashions that have swept the human resources industry over the decades.  I have been through hostile interviews.  I have been through group interviews.  I have been through active interviews.  I have been through sequential interviews, with multiple parties, that took an entire day, and sometimes even multiple days.  Recently I applied for a job in my primary field.  It promised rather extraordinarily high pay, and, in the job description, indicated that the grunt work of this particular field was being farmed out to other parties.  As they say with regard to online frauds, when something seems to good to be true, it probably is.  As I submitted my application, and then started to receive responses from the company, it became clear that this was a recent type of, well I hesitate to call it interview technique, because it's much closer to a outright fraud.  This is a process whereby the company gets you, as a candidate, to produce a fair amount of work, and sometimes even go to a fair amount of expense to yourself, in order to submit something to the company which they will then consider, to determine whether you are a suitable candidate for the job.  I very much doubt that they actually hire anyone for these particular jobs.  They are just taking the work that is produced, which is submitted to them for their consideration, at no cost to them, and using the fruits of that work in their business.  Therefore, what they are really doing, is getting people, who are looking for work, to do their work for them, for free.

So, there are various situations that you, as a job seeker, may encounter in your job search, and some of them are a lot more work than others.  Some of them are positively nasty.  So, how much work you have to put in, and how much you have to put up with, in order to apply for a given job, can very tremendously.  Therefore, any idea of compensation for job seekers is going to be immediately flawed.  Is there going to be a flat fee paid for whichever job you apply for?  The flat fee is definitely going to overfeed pay for a half hour job interview.  But it's going to underpay for a huge interview process that takes an entire week.  Are you going to pay by the hour?  If you are interviewing with an affable and enjoyable manager that's going to be free money.  If you are being dumped in front of somebody who has just discovered the hostile interview technique, well, nobody can pay enough per hour for that type of abuse.

And then there is all of the additional work that goes into looking for a job.  There is searching job boards, job listings, job centers, buying newspapers, finding out which social media platforms actually result in real job interviews, as opposed to being mere advertising platforms for sex workers.  Then there's finding out which social media platforms are most appropriate for your particular field of endeavor.

Then there's the actual reading, and parsing, of the job ads.  Figuring out from the phrases used, the description of the work, the percentage of actual information to filler buzz phrases, and, if at all possible, the salary listing, to find out whether this job is actually one that a you can do be they are likely to be actually hiring for, and determine whether you have a chance of obtaining said job.

Then there is the research that you are supposed to do into the company.  Trying to penetrate, and parse through, the layers of marketing that they put up on their website, in order to find out what they actually do, and how they actually work, and what type of culture is involved in the company.  You not only go to their official website, but you go to various sites that post reviews of companies, or businesses, and see what people feel about that business.  You try to weed out the promotional material that the company itself has had posted on these review sites under the pretense of being an unbiased review from a customer.  You find out from friends, and friends of friends, anyone who has worked for this particular company, and how they feel about it.  You find out from friends whether they know of any jobs that are going.  (And then, after some time, you find out which friends actually have useful information in regard to jobs, and which friends just like to present themselves as having lots and lots of contacts and knowing everything about everybody.)

And, of course, all of these things about paying compensation to job seekers, who are looking for job full-time jobs, are grossly unfair to those of us who are working as consultants and contractors.  Because absolutely nobody is going to pay us, in any way shape or form, for all of the excessive work that we have to do and looking for contracts, and consulting gigs.  Indeed, it is difficult to get companies to pay for the necessary administrative work, that you as a consultant, have to perform, in order to actually do the consulting or contracting work.  I have had all kinds of contracts, I submitted itemized bills, and I have often had the client either query the amount of time put into administration, or ask me to modify or rename the time put into administration, or redirect it to other areas of the itemized bill, or, sometimes, flatly refused to pay for any of the administrative time.  It's every bit as annoying as all the work that you have to put into doing job searching, and it gets recompensed just as little.

Poutine for Putin

Canada is being asked to supply more weapons to Ukraine.  I think we should do something.  I think we should send poutine.  To the Russians.

Hear me out.  For one thing, an awful lot of people (mostly Americans), consider poutine to be a biological weapon.  They have a point.  If you come from a culture, and an ethnic and genetic background, that is not used to tolerating an extremely high level of cholesterol in your diet, poutine could definitely be a killer.  I understand that, someplace in the United States, there is a restaurant that styles itself as the heart attack cafe, and they specialize in big burgers slathered with cheese.  These people are wimps.  Potatoes, deep fried in lard, covered with cheese curds, and then the whole covered with gravy (which, you will recall, is primarily fat which has been made somewhat soluble in water, with the addition of flour and salt), now that's a cholesterol laden meal.  Serve that to somebody who is used to growing up on a diet of cucumbers and beets, and you're pretty much guaranteed to generate a lot of heart attacks.

Of course, initially, poutine does not look like a weapon.  It's delicious.  So this is one of those sneak attack weapons, that you can serve to an enemy, and they'll happily lap it up.  They won't know they've been poisoned until it's too late.

But there's more reason to serve poutine to the Russians.  There is the name.  Now president Vladimir Putin has his name spelled one way, and pronounced one way, in most of the English-speaking world.  (Of course, in Russia, his name is spelled differently, with different letters, since it's the Cyrillic alphabet.)  But I was amused to note that on a French report about Putin, that the French refer to him via a Latin alphabet spelling that is identical to poutine.  The thing is, there is a difference in the way that poutine is pronounced, in Canada, between the French speaking population, and the English speaking population.  The original joual word, which gave its name to poutine, is pronounced much closer to the way the English pronounce Vladimir Putin's name.  And, of course, the original joual word, which was used to name poutine, means mess.  I think it would be a very good idea to point this out at every possible opportunity.  Vladimir Putin, or as the French speaking people know him, Poutine, has created a poutine, a mess.  It is a poutine, a mess, of his own making.  It is only right that everyone, Poutine included, be reminded at every possible opportunity that he has created this mess, this poutine, and that he is the one responsible.  I think poutine is just the vehicle to do that.

McDonald's coffee creamer inconsistency

I have discovered a flaw in McDonald's quality control.

This is no idle discovery.  You don't get an opportunity like this; to critique McDonald's quality control; every day.  McDonald's is famous, or possibly infamous, for their quality control.  The burger that you get is almost always the same as the last burger that you got.  The same amount of ketchup.  The same amount of mustard.  The same amount of pickles.  The same cooking of the patty.  The same temperature when it is served.

McDonald's even went so far, when it opened a restaurant in Russia, as to build its own supply chain, creating farms, slaughterhouses, butchering facilities, and so forth, so that they could get the same consistent quality as they were used to getting everywhere else they had opened a restaurant.

(I do not, you understand, say that the quality is good: only that it is consistent.  The big Mac that you order will always be put together just as sloppily as the last Big Mac that you ordered.)

There are some minor variations in McDonald's around the world.  In Germany you can get beer with your burger.  In France you can get wine with your McFlurry.  In England, the soft ice cream is ... well, just order a cone in England.  Even if you don't like ice cream, order it.  You will be pleasantly surprised.  Pleasant surprises is not what McDonald's goes in for.  You might as well get one while you can.

In any case, not to belabour the point too much, McDonald's is consistent.  They serve the same thing, the same way, all the time.  Even the Big Mac has a weird consistency.  The Economist magazine has been using the Big Mac as an index to judge local currency, and whether it is over or undervalued on the world market, for many decades now.  It's an oddly accurate index.

But I have found a flaw.  This is no mere bagatelle.  It has taken me decades to find such a flaw.  So I have checked my data, and duplicated the experiment.

I would not have discovered it, even now, were it not for coffee.  As noted elsewhere, recently I have started to drink more and more coffee.  I am not exactly sure why.  Possibly it is the stress of being a grieving widower.  Possibly it is the stress of being a stranger, displaced from my marriage, my friend, my home, and even my job (since, for the last decade or so, I have essentially been Gloria's caregiver), and have turned for comfort to a warm and widely available beverage.  With a lot of sugar in it.

Since I don't actually like coffee, I have had to do a lot of research on the type of blend that different fast food places brew.  I have had to determine, for different sizes of cups, how much cream, and how much sugar, makes this vile stuff palatable.  Since McDonald's is so widely available, and has such a reputation for consistency, I have been drinking a lot of coffee at McDonald's.  I have determined, for a size small, and a size medium, and a size extra large, how much cream I have to order, and how much sugar, in order to be able to drink the stuff.  Generally speaking it is consistent.  McDonald's coffee is not the best blend available, although I do like it better than many others.  But, I have found specific sets of numbers that deliver me a drinkable cup of coffee.

Until recently.  I went to the McDonald's at Scott and 70th.  I gave them the same order I have been giving everyone else.  When it came (abominably late, as everything at 72nd is), I went to pick up the cup, and felt that it was stone cold.  I pointed this out to the staff (when I could get a staff person's attention) and got a warmer cup of coffee.  Which didn't have enough cream and sugar in it.  So I ordered more cream and sugar, and doctored it to my taste.  I figured it was possibly a one-off.  (The McDonald's at Scott and 70th is that weird.)

(When I talked to a staff person about the coffee being cold, she blamed it on the amount of sugar.  I am a physicist.  I know about specific heat, and also the latent heat of solution.  There isn't enough, even with all that much sugar, to make that coffee stone cold.)

Today, at the Queensborough Walmart, with the embedded McDonald's in that store, I ordered a cup of coffee.  Using the same numbers for cream and sugar.  Again, I got handed a stone cold cup of coffee.  I complained, once again.

This time the staff person blamed the cream.  She said that, when you put that much cream into the cup it feels it almost to the rim.  I said that was ridiculous.  I said I've been using the same numbers for coffee, for that size of coffee, at a number of different McDonald's, and most of the time it was fine.  She pointed to where, on the cup, putting that much cream filled it up.  She was right.  That much cream only left enough for a couple of inches of coffee to be poured in.  No wonder it was stone cold.  So I pointed, on the cup, to the amount of cream that I wanted.  She said that that was two creams, according to the McDonald's dispenser.  So, I said fine, give me two cream.  I watched her while she did it.  She punched "2" into on the machine, and then punched dispense.  The machine poured and poured and poured.  I wondered if it was ever going to stop.  It finally did stop.  She brought over the cup.  She was absolutely correct.  There was almost exactly as much cream as I had told her I wanted.  So, she put in the sugar, and then the coffee, and stirred it up, and it was fine.  With only two cream.  According to their machine.

So, a great big fail to McDonald's.  On something that must be one of the most common orders.  Coffee with cream.  A small double double, at some McDonald's, must be very creamy indeed.

Coffee

Coffee is our society's default refreshment.  It is available in any restaurant.  It is available in any fast food place.  It is available at pretty much any convenience store.  Freshly brewed, hot, the only hot beverage that is readily available.  It is available in most homes.

Not mine.  I don't have any coffee.  I don't particularly like coffee.  I don't particularly dislike coffee, and there are some coffee flavored desserts that I rather enjoy.  But I don't like bitter drinks, and, even though perking coffee does smell delicious, I know that coffee never tastes as good as it smells.

I've had a weird history with coffee.  It is so widely available that you almost need to learn how to drink it (regardless of how you drink it), in order to be social in our society.  Sometimes when everyone else is drinking coffee there's simply isn't any other option.

Early on, I learned to drink coffee, on a regular basis, when I was going to theological school.  Because I was someone who had a lot of experience with shopping, and, in the house that I was renting with six guys, I was one of the ones who was doing the shopping on a weekly basis, I volunteered, at Regent, to do the shopping necessary to get the coffee supplies for the week.  Having volunteered to get the coffee supplies, I then volunteered to be the one to make the coffee every morning.  Two, two-hundred cup urns, which I filled in a bathroom bathtub (left over from the fact that Regent's facilities had previously been frat houses), and somewhat convenient to the common area where we had the coffee set up.  Because I was making the coffee, and because coffee was always available, I started to drink coffee: not every day, but much more regularly than I had.  I suppose this is an indication of how stressful I found my year at Regent.

In my early experience with coffee, I did not find that the caffeine was affecting me all that much.  In those dim and distant, carefree days of my youth, I could drink three cups of coffee, in the evening, and go to bed.  And sleep.  That is definitely not the case anymore.  Now, I have to make sure that I don't drink any coffee, or even Diet Coke, after about noon.  Otherwise I may not be able to sleep at night.

However, at that point, in my youth, it wasn't the caffeine, and staying up at night, that was the problem.  But I did find a problem.  I could, as noted, drink three or four cups of coffee and not have any particular effect.  But I found, that if I drank one cup of coffee, every day, for at least three days running, I started to have stomach pains.  So that was another reason not to drink coffee on a regular basis.

Later on, in my fifties, while I was doing the teaching internationally, there was generally coffee as refreshment, provided in the training rooms, in the venues where I was training.  I was standing up in front of a group for eight hours a day (eight *solid* hours a day) and I generally had some kind of drink on the go.  By preference it was Diet Coke, but sometimes I was drinking so much that I got tired of Diet Coke, or sometimes Diet Coke wasn't available, and so it would be coffee.  Sometimes I was drinking seven or eight cups of coffee, and glasses or cans of Diet Coke, per day.  I do remember a few times when, later in the afternoon, I would realize that my chest was practically vibrating.  This is probably due to the caffeine.

(It still didn't affect my sleep, as far as I could tell.  Mind you, in those teaching days, I was mostly running on adrenaline anyways, and I was getting by, very often, on two hours sleep a night, getting up at three in the morning and going to see whatever sites I could see on a walk away from the hotel, but that seemed to happen regardless of whether I was drinking coffee, Diet Coke, or any other caffeinated drink, or not.)

And now, following Gloria's death, and in a new place, where I am a stranger in a strange land, I am drinking coffee, once again.  I should mention Gloria's coffee.  When we first got married, Gloria was drinking a lot of coffee.  She would, of course, have coffee available at work.  But I was also (because Gloria never did mornings well), getting up when the alarm went off, going downstairs, making Gloria a cup of coffee, and bringing it back up to her bedside table, because she hadn't got up yet.  Then I would go back downstairs, and make a second cup of coffee, in between whatever I was doing downstairs in terms of preparing breakfast, and bring it upstairs to the bathroom, partly as an inducement to get Gloria up and out of bed and into the bathroom.  So, Gloria would have at least two cups of coffee, before we even had breakfast.  She drank a considerable amount of coffee.  At a certain point (and this was before she actually retired), her stomach problems increased to the point where she had identified coffee as one of the triggers, and so she stopped drinking coffee.  At that point, she was still drinking tea, but later on tea became too much of an irritant as well.  So that was the end of coffee and tea for Gloria.

As noted, I don't like coffee.  When it's the only option, I drink coffee with lots of cream, and I definitely prefer cream, not just milk, and with lots of sugar.  Actually, in terms of a creamer, or whitener, I actually prefer Coffee-Mate.  This of course demonstrates my plebeian tastes.  I find that Coffee Mate 1) doesn't cool the coffee as much, and 2) is able to ameliorate even rather bad coffee.

Of course, what I consider bad coffee, is what some people like about it.  I tend not to like dark roast coffee, as I find that it's the more bitter type of brew.  Some people absolutely adore dark roast coffee: the darker the better!  No, for me, the lighter the roast the better, in general terms.  (Although I did find, recently, when I tried it in desperation, that our local convenience store, selling only dark roast coffee, does produce something that is actually drinkable.)

I drink coffee with cream, and lots of sugar.  It's not perhaps as healthy as drinking coffee black.  I accept that.  It's probably healthier when I go and buy an enormous glass of Diet Coke (for which purpose I carry with me a ziplock bag with lemon wedges, to add at least a little bit of actual nutritional value to the fluid replenishment.  And, yes, I know that drinking coffee is not exactly a great way of doing fluid replenishment).  As I say, I drink coffee more for the social requirement than anything else, although I am finding that heavily creamed and sugared coffee can be a bit of a comfort food in certain situations, so, yes, I'm drinking coffee in reaction to stress as well.  I try and take account of the amount of sugar that I'm putting in coffee, and on days when I have had coffee I'm trying to count that in terms of the total calories that I'm consuming on my ridiculous diet.

I put a *lot* of sugar in coffee.  So much so, that, when I order coffee in fast food joints, the counter staff are all ways repeating the number back to me to confirm.  At the very least.  Sometimes the person at the till taking the order will shout the amount of sugar to the station where the coffee is being made to confirm that, yes, this is the correct amount of sugar to put in that cup of coffee.  Like I said, I don't like coffee.  I have never been able to drink black coffee.  Warm, coffee flavored milkshakes, well, that's okay, that's acceptable.  But black coffee?  Who drinks that stuff?  Well, everybody, it seems.

But not me.  As noted, when people at the order counter have always have trouble with the amount of sugar that I'm putting in the coffee.  Sometimes the confirmation of, "you want that much sugar?" goes on for several rounds.  At which point, I generally tell people that I'm a diabetic.  This usually closes the argument.  It's ridiculous, I know, and I am only technically a diabetic, and a diabetic would only want heavily sugared coffee only in some very specific circumstances.  But when I play the diabetic card, that generally ends the discussion.  The person generally looks very confused, but accepts it.

Arthritis

I'm getting old.  I have arthritis.  Osteo arthritis.

I've had pain in my back and hips for a while.  Most of my joints get sore every once in a while.

Since Gloria died, though, it's gotten bad in my hands and forearms.  Particularly in my right hand and forearm.  (It would, of course, be in my dominant hand ...)

It's been particularly bad in my right hand since Saturday.  That was cleanup day ("late spring" cleaning, they called it) at St. Cuthbert's.  I went along to help.  Possibly a bad idea.  Not the heavy lifting: all the people who wanted to shake my hand and demonstrate what a strong grip they had ...

Actually, the next day my hand and forearm had eased off a bit, although my back was stiff.  (That eased off after about a kilometre of walking.)  But the ache has settled in over the past two days, so I guess this is the new normal.  Not looking forward to when the cold and rain settles in.  I guess hot baths are going to be pretty regular from here on in.

Tweed jacket

So, as part of my purging and packing, I had a look at the garment hanger in which Gloria stored her wedding dress.  (Her *second* wedding dress.  Ours.)  The hardware inside the garment hanger has completely fallen apart.  Everything, that was neatly hung (when the hardware was working), is simply in a heap in the bottom of the bag.

Gloria stored other things in that bag.  Besides her wedding dress there are a couple of other dresses in there.  Because I wore my dress kilt for our wedding, my dress kilt, and the Prince Charlie jacket and vest, and the dress shirt that I had to go with them, are all stored in that garment bag as well.  In addition, there is the Hunting Stuart kilt, that I had tailored at the same time as the dress kilt and Prince Charlie jacket.

I had a tweed jacket tailored at the same time.  But, when I went to move the kilts and Prince Charlie jacket to another garment bag, for safer transport in the move, I didn't find the tweed jacket.  Then I remembered that the tweed jacket had been hanging in the coat closet, beside the door, in North Vancouver.  The tweed jacket was just one of the jackets that I didn't wear.  Most of which I couldn't wear, because I had gotten too big for them.  Pretty much all of which I told the girls to throw out, because I was too big for them, and would never wear them, and in the panic move from North Vancouver to Delta it was one more thing that I could purge and get rid of.

So, apparently I instructed the girls to get rid of my tailored tweed jacket at that time.  I obviously felt I would never be small enough to wear it again, and there was no sense keeping it.   Well, thanks to my ridiculous diet, I am now small enough to wear it again.  But it's gone.  One more loss among all the losses associated with Gloria's death.

I'm not crying over this loss, although I can feel tears ready behind my eyes.  It doesn't seem to be quite enough of a trigger to generate a grief burst.  I am grieving, a little bit, about the loss of the jacket.  I think mostly I'm feeling more annoyed about it then grieving.  Annoyed over my own decisions, most likely.

Dreams

This morning I had my first (at least, that I can recall) dream about Gloria still being alive.

It was pretty brief, as far as I can recall.  Actually, I don't recall much about it at all, just that it involved Gloria, and we were doing something (some things?) pretty prosaic.  Nothing special.

Possibly the fact that it was so short, or so ordinary, or I recall so little of it, meant that I really didn't have much of an emotional reaction to it, when I finally came fully awake and realized what was going on.  (I sort of remember going through various stages of awareness before coming awake enough to realize it had been a dream.)

So, nothing special.  But it was the first time having one of those dreams (that I can recall).

Driving alone

I have, since Gloria died, been calling people and talking on the phone while I am driving longer distances.  (Don't worry: I do it hands-free.)  Initially, I put it down to the extreme loneliness of grief, and possibly the need to keep various friends and family in touch with what I was doing.

However, contemplating a longer drive in the next few days, I realized that it's been an awfully long time since I've done any extended driving without Gloria in the passenger seat ...

Spiritual gift of systems analysis

This is for my Christian contacts, so all of you unbelieving atheists can stop reading.

(That is, if anyone at all is reading any of this stuff.)

Recently there was a series of sermons, at one of the churches I attend, on spiritual gifts.  Spiritual gifts, of course, are gifts, or talents, or abilities, given to Christians, intended for Christian service, or in the service of the Christian church.  At least, that's the way most Christians think about it.  For the most part, these gifts could be used in a variety of ways, although the theologically correct would probably assume that using them for non-Christian purposes would be contrary to the reason that the gifts were given in the first place.

In scripture there are lists of spiritual gifts.  Not all of these lists agree with each other, either as to the total number of gifts or as to the specific gifts.  However, most sermons on the spiritual gifts, or workshops on spiritual gifts, would end up by saying that it is important to find your spiritual gift; that is the gift that you have been given; and to exercise it in the service of the Christian church.

I have had some difficulty with determining what my spiritual gift might be.  Sometime ago, in a workshop, one of the other participants opined that my spiritual gift was that of discernment.  I didn't know quite what to make of this, since most of the time the gift of discernment is said to be discerning between different types of spirits.  I don't think I have ever identified a spirit, either angelic or demonic, but I suspect that I might have difficulty in that regard.  I strongly suspect that the person who suggested that I have the gift of discernment simply suggested it because I'm really cynical.

I have better luck with determining what gifts I don't have.  I do not have the gift of preaching.  I thought possibly I might have the gift of teaching.  I am a teacher, and I love teaching.  That is not necessarily an indication of a spiritual gift of course, so while it was a bit surprising, I wasn't terribly shocked when, going through an online spiritual gifts assessment tool, teaching ranked well down the list.  I guess the spiritual gift of teaching involves more than simply being good at it and liking it.

What kind of threw me was that this tool threw up wisdom, discernment, and leadership at the top of the list.  (Oh, and it also suggested administration.  I am possibly more organized than the average person, but in comparison to Gloria, and the girls, there is absolutely no way that I could claim a spiritual gift of administration.)  (I know.  Discernment.  Again.)

The reason it threw me was that I am in a new situation attending new churches.  Or, at least, new to me, and therefore I am new to them.  There is absolutely no way that any church is going to call on a new attendee to fill a leadership position.  Nor is anyone likely to ask me to provide wisdom in any situation within these churches.

But a couple of recent occurrences have thrown up another possibility.  I believe that I may have the spiritual gift of systems analysis.

Of course, the theologically correct among those few of you still reading, will immediately cry out "this man is an heretic!"  None of the lists of spiritual gifts include systems analysis.  Indeed, the Bible is relatively quiet on the topic of systems analysis.  But systems analysis does have aspects of wisdom, discernment, and leadership involved within it.

I am a systems analyst.  I look at a situation as a system.  I determine problems, either active or potential, and suggest solutions.  That is what I find I have been doing in the churches.  The problems may not always be major.  The most recent problem was a worship team participant who suddenly started to have a coughing fit during the service.  This went on for some time, without anyone making any move to deal with it.  So, finally I got up, went to the kitchen, searched in the cupboards until I found a mug, filled it with water, and brought it back to the person who was coughing.  Problem solved.

A number of the churches that I have been involved with have been holding community dinners.  These dinners are supposedly a chance for the community to get to know the church, and hopefully attend.  Apparently most of the congregants in these churches believe that the members of the community around the church will be so grateful for a free dinner that they, the community members that is, will besiege the church with demands to be allowed to be admitted as members to the church.  This doesn't seem to be happening.  So, I have taken a different tack.  When I'm helping out with the dinners, I actually talk to the people from the community who are not members of the church.  It's fairly easy to identify them: they are the ones looking slightly unsure and uncomfortable, standing on the edges of things.  I tend to point out where the plates are, and where the food is, and that you go to the guy who's manning (sorry, "personning") the barbecue to get your hot dog or a piece of chicken.  Having broken the ice this way, I usually get a chance to ask if they've ever been to the church and what kind of business they're in whether or not their kids like school.  Surprisingly, this often leads to a conversation.

As I say, not major problems, but problems nonetheless, and nobody else figured out how to deal with them.  I have been working on slightly larger problems on some of the cleanup days.  At one Church, nobody was had thought of what to do with all the kids that people had brought with them while they were working on other aspects of cleaning up the church.  So I collected the kids and got them planting in the garden.  When another church tore down a couple of sheds, we were left with a very high pile of very large pieces, sections of the shed, and a debris bin that was already pretty full.  Everybody else was ready to get six guys per section walking over broken boards with all kinds of nails sticking out of them.  I suggested that we parked the truck containing the sections of the sheds next to the bin and simply flip the sections over into the bin.  Problem solved.  There have been others.

I am not being entirely facetious when I claim to have the spiritual gift of systems analysis.  No, systems analysis is not included in the lists in scripture.  But most commentators would agree that the lists are not meant to be comprehensive or exclusive.  A spiritual gift of systems analysis could, as noted, relate to wisdom, leadership, or discernment, or even just helps.  (I tend to think that the spiritual gift of helping is a bit of a catchall grab bag, but will let that go for the moment.)

Disney Princess

I was helping out at another dinner at another church.  This one was a family fun night.  They had made arrangements to have a visit from one of the Princess Parties crew, which appears to have a license from Disney for Disney princesses.

I knew the character, and we'd seen the movie.  Gloria and I saw pretty much all the Disney movies, including all the Disney princess movies.  For some reason, though, this set me off on a grief burst, repeatedly.  I had to keep ducking back into the kitchen to have a cry.  (I don't think anybody really noticed, seeing as how I was in the kitchen most of the time anyway.)

I don't know why Disney princess movies, or the thought of their plot lines, or various aspects of their plot lines, set me off.  All of them are pretty formula.  There's only one that I really, really like, and Gloria didn't particularly like that one.  I can't think that it was anything specific about this particular character, or movie, that would generate a grief burst.  It certainly wouldn't be anything about Disney that would generate a grief burst.

Possibly it's just because they are love stories.  Maybe love stories are setting me off right now.  I haven't been watching any Hallmark movies, so I guess that would be the acid test.  If a Hallmark movie makes me cry, I must be in a pretty bad way.

The Satanic Verses

I have had a copy of Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" for more than forty years.  Prompted by the physical attack on Rushdie, I am finally reading it.

I'm not enjoying it. I can see that Rushdie is a good writer, with a good (if more than comfortably foreign) vocabulary, and a solidly creative turn of mind.  But the examination of important issues is fairly lightweight, from my perspective.  And, most of the book is of the modern style of novel: a great deal of activity without very much point to any of it.  It is what many of a generation slightly older than mine would have called much of a muchness: a lot of activity, much of it frenetic, with periods of observation of very ordinary activities, and if there is any point to it all, the point is not very important.

I am, however, now reading the final section of the book, and a description of the death of the father of one of the characters.  I am reading this in the aftermath of Gloria's death, and during my own grief and bereavement.  I am also thinking back to my own father's death, with possibly more emotion than I felt at the time over my father's death (possibly because of my additional emotional sensitivity over Gloria's death).

I am not saying that this last section redeems a rather enormous volume of what I feel is mostly pointless writing.  But I do feel that this last section is much better, and written with more feeling, and perhaps more insight, then a great deal of the rest of the tome.

Public grief

Queen Elizabeth II, the only monarch I have ever had, up until now, has died.  (Long live the King, etc.)

Sometimes the death of a public figure, and the attendant public grief that tends to go along with it, triggers, or re-triggers, your own personal grief.  Gloria was a big, big fan of Queen Elizabeth, and often talked about her respect for the Queen's dedication and commitment to a difficult job and life.  While I, to a certain extent, share that respect, so far the Queen's death hasn't re-triggered my grief over Gloria's death.  (I still get greif bursts over Gloria's death, of course, but so far it hasn't been anything about Queen Elizabeth's death that have triggered any.)

We'll see how it goes ...

Smoke gets in your eyes ...

 I didn't notice the smoke when I got up.  I'd done a bunch of work before I headed off, and it wasn't until I was outside that I noticed the haze in the air, and the smell of the smoke.  Apparently the fires in eastern Washington State had sent smoke down all the way to Puget Sound, and it combined with smoke from the wildfires in the interior, and a fire near Hope, as well as a building burning on the Fraser.

It cleared, for a while, while we were doing cleanup day.  But then it got really thick towards the evening.  Which was rather ironic, because it was the Luminary Festival.

It was reasonably clear while we were doing gardening day, but at times the light has that weird reddish colour that it gets coming through haze, and every once in a while you can taste the air ...

Operation Eyesight

I cleaned up Gloria's bedside table today.  I got through the birthday and Mother's Day cards the girls and the kids had sent her, and the Valentine's Day cards that I had sent her (and she'd kept), and various bits and pieces and trinkets okay, or so I thought.  Then I got to her glasses.

Gloria had very difficult and complex visual problems, and her glasses and lenses were always very expensive, and difficult to manufacture.  You can't just give glasses to somebody else, at least not that kind, with specialized eye problems to deal with.  Mine on the other hand, I get from the dollar store.  I only need readers.  I could give them to anybody else who is farsighted and only needs readers.

But there's Operation Eyesight.  Operation Eyesight collected glasses, diagnosed the lenses and vision problems that they would correct, and donated those glasses to people in third world countries who needed vision correction.  We both knew Dr. Ben Gullison, and Marilyn, and so I figured that I would look up who was collecting glasses for Operation Eyesight these days, and donate them there.

But it seems those days are over.  While Operation Eyesight still carries on valuable work, they no longer collect used eyeglasses.  So Gloria's glasses are, basically, garbage.

It wasn't until I got to that point that I started crying.  And had the worst grief burst that I'd had in a while.

I haven't been able to throw the glasses away yet.  I will.

But not today ...

Busyness

Saturdays usually aren't that busy.  Not as dead as Sundays, maybe, but generally not my busiest days.

Today recently got quite packed.  And then, about twelve hours ago, got quiet again.

The friend who I was going to have lunch with has come down with something.  (Doesn't sound like CoVID, but that's always a worry these days.)  Which removes the need to hurry home from the fourth church's cleanup day.  (Although I'll miss seeing G.)  The easing of that pressure suddenly let me realize that I can pop on to the mens meeting (which is on Zoom anyway), and say a quick hi, and then get on with cleanup.

So, that leaves time this afternoon to possibly get a purge load over to Value Village.  Maybe.  Not a priority.

And still leaves time to possibly visit the Luminary Festival this evening.  Everybody is making a big deal of it, although I still don't have any idea of what actually goes on ...

Two books

I'm having a stab at writing another book.

Actually, two more books.  One is an outgrowth of the presentation that I have been preparing for the past two years, (possibly for the last thirty years? since I started researching the basic topic back then), which started life talking about NFTs, of necessity spent expanded to cryptocurrencies and blockchain, and is now extending to pretty much the whole of decentralized finance (aka DeFi), and everything else that goes along with cryptocurrency related topics.  The presentation is getting pretty full, and the presentation only barely touches on some topics.  So I am writing up the missing material, and extending it in certain ways.  I don't have a lot of background in the more technical areas of the cryptographic protocols and algorithms, and analyzes of the strengths, and weaknesses, of those areas.  So I'm making tentative explorations of getting a co-author who can cover some of those areas.

I have also been asked, a number of times in recent years, to write an autobiography or memoir.  I don't know what the difference is between an autobiography and a memoir.  I have the feeling that a memoir is just an autobiography that isn't as rigorous as it should be.  In any case, I have finally started to try and put one together.  I'm collecting stories for the most part, from various times in my life.  I don't know if it's exactly career advice, because I could never advise someone to take the career path that I have, but it might serve as some guidance, in some areas, or encouragement for those who wonder if they're life path is going in the right direction.  I have never been able to tell, in advance, what direction my life was going to be going in.

I'm facilitating the creation of these two books using Google's Gboard soft keyboard.  Generally speaking I really hate soft keyboards.  The first time that Gloria and I were convinced to get phones capable of even doing texting on a more extended basis, I got phones that had slide out keyboards.  Even those tiny physical keyboards were better than the soft keyboards that are available.  I don't care whether it's a tap soft keyboard or a slide soft keyboard or a swipe around soft keyboard, all of them are annoying to use and difficult.  Gboard has one huge advantage over all the rest of them: it provides for dictation capabilities.  (As long as you have a data connection. Gboard has to be able to contact Google's servers in order to do the actual speech recognition and transcription.)

Gboard very definitely is not perfect.  It makes an awful lot of mistakes.  Some of them I really cannot figure out.  Particularly when dictating acronyms and saying each letter, or saying a name a word that sounds like the acronym, Gboard will come up with a bewildering variety of variations on what you said.  Sometimes it will get it right, sometimes it will break it into multiple words, sometimes it will create something completely bizarre.  Gboard can also correctly identify and transcribe words like "egregiously," but then stumble and completely collapse over some very simple words.  (At the moment, Gboards seems to have decided that when I say "again," I actually mean "a game."  Pretty much every time.  Weird.)  However, overall, it allows me to get some dictation done, and therefore get the bulk of the material for the books into email messages to myself so that I can correct them, edit them, and put them into a document later.  As I say, it's definitely not perfect, but it is a help, even with all the massive amounts of editing that I have to do later.  (Such as the fact that Gboard decided that the word "even," earlier in the previous sentence, was supposed to be "he wasn't."  Go figure.)  (Sometimes I have to do the editing on the fly while I'm dictating, since Gboard can make such egregious mistakes that I will never figure out, later on, what it was that I was trying to say.  [For example, I said "a poke," and Gboard decided I meant "Apple."  Tech bias, there?])

Drivers

There is a certain predominance of a certain ethnic group around here.  I don't want to say that they are all terrible drivers.  Indeed, some of them are very considerate drivers!  I know that if I am walking down the street and one of the drivers does (as all the drivers around here do), drive right out onto the sidewalk and block it completely, getting ready to move into the road, and traffic, that, if the driver has a turban, he will back up for me.  (Well, most of the time.  If somebody's got a turban and a long white beard, then they look at my short beard, and figure that they are older than I am, and block my path anyways.  I figure it's an age thing, and that, at that point they figure they have seniority on me.)

Most women will back up, and about half of young men will back up.

If, however, the driver is driving a truck, forget it.  He'll block the path.  He probably won't even look.  He'll take off with a roar as soon as it's free to do so.

And young guys with muscle cars, or souped up pickups?  Forget it.  I think most of them take their mufflers off, to make the car sound louder.  And they'll just step on the gas, squeal the tires, burn rubber (if they can), and go as fast as they can until they are blocked by traffic.  (Which is usually in about a block.)

There are a lot of inattentive driver here, of all shades.  Any time I am crossing in front of a car, stopped on (not before) a driveway and waiting the chance to jump into traffic, or even at a crosswalk, when I have the right of way, but someone is turning right, and waiting to jump into traffic, I always watch the driver (who seldom looks around) to get some indication as to when they *might* be going to suddenly start moving (without, of course, checking to see if anyone has started to walk in front of their car).  Just about got mowed down this morning.  The young lady called after me, "Sorry!"  That would have been cold comfort, if I hadn't been able to jump out of her way in time.

Somebody recently opined to me that there are a lot of bad drivers here in Delta.  Yeah.  But mostly there's a real diversity of drivers here.

Where's the beef?

 I'm writing a fairly lengthy article (and possibly starting a book) on decentralized finance.  I'm using Gboard to dictate most of it.  For some reason, Gboard insists on transcribing "proof-of-stake" as "proof of steak."

When you're dieting, this can be annoying ...

*My* garden

 I find that I am taking an oddly proprietary interest in any of the gardens that I have had anything to do with.  This is especially apparent at Deltassist.  (Which is particularly odd, in that Deltassist is the one garden that is definitely a group effort, and I am the least knowledgeable member of the group.)

Most of the time, being the person with the least gardening experience and knowledge, I am doing bulk work type jobs, like watering.  Anybody can drag the hoses around and water.  However, when I have been given a task to do involving a specific planter, or crop, I tend to take a great interest in that crop, from then on.  For example, I was given the job of harvesting the garlic.  From that point on, I seem to have considered the garlic mine.  Today I have a lot of jobs to do; I am watering, and trying to get that out of the way before any of the cars come in, I am going to be turning over yet another of the compost heaps which is a time consuming and heavy task; and yet the garlic should be finished up today.  I did about a third of the garlic, in terms of cleaning it up and cutting the stalks off and getting it ready to be bagged, about two weeks ago.  Now, with my other jobs this morning, it feels like I may not have enough time to finish the garlic as well, and yet the garlic needs to be finished today.  I am feeling oddly forlorn at the thought that somebody else might be finishing up the garlic.

A week or so ago the boss gave me the job of burying the leeks.  You don't bury them completely of course; you add dirt around the young plants, an inch or half an inch at a time, until the plants are buried about five inches more than they were when they were originally planted.  This provides for the white stalks to develop farther and longer, and prevents them from having the tough, green, outer skin on them.  As I have been watering the leeks I have been feeling oddly possessive, and wondering if they are being buried by somebody else.  (As far as I can tell, nobody has been adding extra dirt to them.)

Sandra also gave me the job of planting green onions a week or so ago.  As I have been watering that bed I have been checking, rather feverishly, to see if there was any indication of new growth and to see if the green onions were in fact germinating.  Yesterday I noticed one green shoot which might have been a green onion or might have been a weed of grass starting to grow in that bed.  Today I have seen at least four shoots in the bed.  All of the shoots are in the lines where I planted the green onions, so I'm pretty sure that I can say that these are in fact green onions and not weeds that are growing there.  I am feeling right chuffed!

Graveside

There is the poem, frequently used at funerals in Memorial services, that starts out "Do not stand by my grave and weep ..." [1]

Well, small chance of that.

I actually have wept beside the grave where Gloria's cremains are buried.  A couple of times.  But I'm just as likely to weep walking down the street, or in the apartment, and even more likely to weep while I'm in church, for some reason.

I don't get over to the grave much.  It's in North Van, and I'm not.  When I'm on my way to something on the North Shore, and I allow for too much margin for traffic problems, and so show up early, I am likely to swing by the cemetery.  But not always, and not all that often.

I feel kind of silly there.  Gloria is not there, even though her ashes are.  If Gloria and I are right, Gloria is in heaven.  If Gloria and I are wrong, Gloria is just dead, and nothing much matters anyway.  There is the grave site, and there are the plaques announcing Grandpa Campbell's death, Grama Campbell's death, Stu and Sulla's deaths, and Larry.  I can still see where they dug the hole to place Gloria's ashes, but her plaque isn't there yet.  "Supply chain issues," doncha know.  And, like I say, Gloria isn't there.

So, it seems silly to sit there in the graveyard, when I can speak to Gloria anywhere, anytime.  It feels kind of embarrassing.  It's not grief inducing.

I don't know.  Maybe I'll feel differently at some point.  Gloria didn't.  We didn't go very often to visit Sulla's grave.  I haven't gone very often to visit Fiona's grave, or Mom's or Dad's graves.  It's just sort of, what's the point?  It doesn't provide any additional comfort, and not going doesn't make me feel guilty.

I do hope that they place the plaque before I move to Port Alberni.  It'll be nice to at least see that it's been done.  But I doubt that I will have any great desire to drive to Nanaimo, get on the ferry, get up to the cemetery, and visit at the grave site.

And weep.

[1] - "Immortality," by Clare Harner, published in "The Gypsy," December, 1934

Gboard, again ...

Gboard seems to be a pig slow tonight.  Is it because it's a Friday night?  Are a lot of people using Google?  Is Google bogged down, and so Gboard is bogged down?  Well, this time around it seems to have sped up again ...

Another transcription oddity.  I was using the word "deign," and Gboard wouldn't deign to transcribe it.  At one point it used "Dane," or "bane," and then later used "gain."  Not sure why it thought "gain" was preferable, because earlier it had trouble with "again," instead transcribing "a game."  (At least that one was easy to figure out ...)

Daytime walking

The immediate heat wave seems to have abated, at least for today.  My body seems to agree, since it apparently allowed me to do a bit of catching up on sleep last night.  I got close to nine hours sleep last night.

With the result, of course, that I started out a bit later than normal today, in terms of a walk.  I haven't been to Queensborough for a couple of weeks, so I decided to try that today.  I may even try to go over the Queensborough bridge all the way to New Westminster.  After all, it's Saturday, and there isn't quite as much traffic on the bridge.

More things are open, of course.  This gives me a slightly greater range of options in case I need to get a drink, or find someplace to use the toilet.  Although, it doesn't increase them all that much, when I'm going over the bridges.

I don't have any particular appointments or duties to perform today, so I suppose it doesn't matter if I walk late into the afternoon.  It was nice starting out this morning, even though it was already 9:30, the sun was shining, and was definitely warm, but any breezes were actually somewhat cool, so it was nicer than it had been walking for the last few days.

I brought my backpack, and packed some water in it.  I've stopped at the casino, and had a cup of tea to keep up hydration.  I think I'll do some shopping at Value Village: the other day I saw that they had Tilly type hats, and I might see if I can find one that will fit.  I think that that might be a good idea for later on in the winter when the rains start again.  My current hats could probably actually use a soaking, since they are definitely getting sweat and salt stained, but I'm not sure that they'd survive a soaking.

I'm actually starting to get quite fond of the casino.  I'm not gambling of course, but I did register for their frequent gambler card, in order to get a discount on the buffet.  There is a kiosk as you enter the casino that you can swipe your rewards card in to get various prizes, such as free gambling points, discounts on the buffet, or other things.  Today, when I entered, I swiped the card, and I got a free $10 gas card.  So that's better than a poke in the eye with a shark stick.

Be good shoes?

I'm doing an awful lot of dictating via Gboard these days, what with two huge articles, and my memoirs as well.  Sometimes it is really hard to figure out what Gboard originally heard, from what it transcribed.

But today it outdid itself.

When I said "pizzas," Gboard transcribed "92 be good shoes from" ...