I’m not one for parties; my introversion means I’m diametrically opposed to them.
Having said that, I’m actually attending a party this afternoon/evening. It is a 60th birthday celebration though and should be a nice one. It is incorporating a showing of Blade Runner. I haven’t seen that movie in about 20 years, so I’m interested to see my interpretation of it now.
Another party issue arising is planning to host a 4th birthday party for our youngest son. Trying to decide what to do for that is a puzzler as well. Do we host it at home, or out somewhere? Who to invite? We don’t have friends who have kids of a similar age, but it won’t be much of a party if he doesn’t have some similar-aged kids around. We need to get moving on the planning so we can get the invites out, but we’re having trouble generating motivation. That’s not good parenting, is it!
Our family might be about to lose our second animal of the year to old age. Our Standard Poodle, Jeff, is not holding up so well. He has developed large cysts under his skin, his teeth are wearing out and now he seems to have hurt his paw.
Earlier this year we had to say goodbye to our Airedale Terrier, Indi. Her absence seems to have accelerated the decline of Jeff. He relied on her so much to be top dog and I don’t think he has been the same since she has been gone.
I recall a couple of months ago when we were at the dog beach with Jeff, and we saw another Airedale Terrier. Jeff went running up to it, and you could just tell from his body language that he thought it was Indi. A sniff and a closer look confirmed that it was a stranger. If a dog can look deflated, Jeff did in that moment.
We bring animals into our lives knowing that it’s not forever and that one day we will need to make hard decisions about their future. The knowledge of that, however, doesn’t make the reality of the situation any easier.
About three years ago we did a house renovation. We had our kitchen gutted and rebuilt, our bathrooms reconfigured, wood floors sanded and interior walls painted, and a new front deck.
A huge job already was made bigger because we had to move all of our furniture into storage and move our family into a short-term rental for the duration of the project. It reminded me why I don’t like moving house. Packing is the worst!
The renovation grew our mortgage significantly but improved our quality of life. We spend so much time in our home that making it a comfortable environment was worth the investment.
We had an excellent builder on the project. I’m no handyman so it was absolutely necessary to employ a professional to do the job right. That’s an element of our renovation for which I hold no regrets. It’s also a standing principle of mine: if you’re not good at something and have no interest in learning the skill, pay somebody to deliver. Money is a resource that can be deployed strategically to save your own frustration and heartache. When it comes to a renovation, if I were doing it myself there would be plenty of both. I’d rather be without the money!
Recycling is kind of a big deal in our house. Our council runs a three bin system for rubbish management: one bin for food and organics, one for rubbish, and a third for recyclables.
My wife Hannah works in the recycling industry. She is the Head of External Relations at Western Australia Return Recycle Renew (WARRRL). This organisation has responsibility for establishing a new container deposit scheme for our State. That will mean that for every drink container brought back to a recycling point, 10 cents is given to the recycler.
As well as reducing the amount of waste going to landfill, or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the scheme provides an opportunity for community engagement. I could choose to have my recycled containers benefit an organisation that elects to participate. For instance, if my son’s local Scout group gets involved they can use it as a fund-raising measure.
Western Australia is a geographically huge State and this is rolling out across it all. Hannah and the entire WARRRL team have been working hard to get this initiative up and running and I am proud of the work they are doing. It will be exciting when the system is ready to launch!
My favourite beverage is coffee. There is no contest. There is not much better than an Australian flat white.
Italian coffee is great but it’s a transitory drink. You get it at the bar, drink it and leave. Don’t sit down because it will cost you a fortune.
American coffee is bad. It’s either sweetened and flavoured to the point where its more milkshake than coffee, or its drip-filtered and been sitting in storage for a while.
Australian coffee has the quality of the Italian style, but there is a social norm of sitting down at the coffee shop to drink it. Our baristas are great at frothing the milk to achieve micro-foam rather than aerated fluff, and we benefit from a delicious crema when they pour.
Regarding other beverages, I enjoy sharing a pot of tea at home with my wife. She is addicted to tea and doesn’t drink coffee at all. I think that’s weird, but there you go. I rarely drink soft drink. Perhaps an occasional Coke Zero. Never in my life have I had a Red Bull or other super-caffeinated beverage. I can’t see how they can possibly be good for me.
Microblogvember: I write this microblog from an event that I have been able to organise. We have a room of people undertaking strategy development and financial forecasting.
A smell can be a most evocative sense. It can stimulate memory, facilitate calm or revulsion, or provide us with timely information.
If I smell new carpet, I am transported back to my Year 1 classroom which had been renovated and new carpet laid. That’s an associated formed around 35 years ago. The smell of a basketball stadium: that combination of sweat, dencorub, and timber treatment to this day hastens my heart beat.
Today I was between meetings so I had the opportunity to park near the beach for a few minutes. As I opened the car window, my olfactory senses were treated to that wonderful scent of salt air traveling on a warm breeze. That is much nicer smell than that of a dirty nappy, which over the past 8 years I’ve become far to familiar with.
A smell I miss is the cooking of roast beef and yorkshire pudding. That was a staple of my childhood diet but I don’t have the time or inclination to make it myself these days.
Of all our senses, I think smell is the most associative. I don’t think vision, hearing, touch or taste can transport us back in time or recall memories of a person or place the way a smell can. We should probably take more time out to appreciate our noses.
I miss my childhood. It was such a different era; it’s hard to recognise my childhood as an experience compared with those of my kids.
The memories of my childhood seem like something that should be written off as me looking back through rose-coloured glasses. But I contest that not everything was great and nice, but it really was what retro throwbacks show the 1980s to be.
Some of my key memories across a relatively wide age range include:
Leaving the house to ride my bike around the streets without saying where I was going. I didn’t know where I was going - how could I tell others?
Staying out until dusk then going home to either my own home, or my friend’s house for dinner. I think I almost split my time 50:50.
Riding our BMX bikes through citrus orchards where dirt bike jumps had been constructed, and getting mega air.
Playing pick-up basketball all day, and sweating litres.
Playing multi-day games of Monopoly. Leaving it set up to pick up the next day.
Climbing trees - but never as well as my friend.
Spending hours throwing a ball against a wall, then playing a solid cricket stroke when it bounced back to me.
Backyard camping for days (maybe even weeks?) on end. We had a big block, so we could pitch the tent in the back yard and be invisible from the house.
Playing a season of Under 13’s cricket and being completely isolated by the other boys - and the coach. (Things are much better in this regard now, it seems.)
Abseiling, rock climbing and other cool activities at school that probably wouldn’t be allowed anymore.
I’m proud of my childhood. I had enough freedom to be adventurous and I managed to avoid any major dangers. I learnt to know my limits and stay within them. I had a sense of place in my suburb.
If I had a time machine, I would happily go back to the early 1980s and do it all again.
I’ve made a concerted effort this year to increase my volume of book reading.
In recent years my reading has been dominated by web pages, articles and RSS feeds. This resulted in a decline in my book reading - something I used to do a lot of.
To track my reading and add some motivation I set a target on Goodreads.. This has worked because I’ve read 23 books against my target of 20 - a target I revised upwards mid-year.
Another thing that has helped has been an Audible subscription. I think it’s fair enough to consider listening to audiobooks as reading. I’m still consuming the story; it actually takes longer than reading the printed version, and it allows me to read in ‘gaps’ of time, notably driving.
I’ve enjoyed my return to reading. Once more I feel like my mind is being stretched and my imagination activated.
There is so much high-quality television programming available now. We have Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Free to Air, etc. There was a time when it was necessary to find things off the back of a truck. I think those days are almost gone.
This overwhelming choice has led to a strange outcome, in that I’m actually watching less TV than I probably ever have. I feel like the onslaught is overwhelming so I’m just going to close my eyes and block my ears and hum to myself.
The competition now is for attention. As all the streaming services vie for our television attention budget, the television budget is being attacked by gaming, web browsing, reading, exercise and whatever else there is to do in recreation time.
My sacred cow of TV shows over many years has been Survivor. I would always find time for this show. My wife and I would watch it together. Now, we are 2 seasons behind in that. If we can’t keep up with that show, what hope have I got of ever finishing Season 3 of Stranger Things?
This week I’ve had a massive technology upgrade. I’ve moved from a 2013 MacBook Pro (the generation of MacBooks which had great keyboards), to a 2019 27" iMac. I had been deferring this computer upgrade for ages, as I dithered between getting a new MacBook (and which variant?), an iMac or even a mac mini. I was hoping the iMac would gain the T2 security chip and possibly a new display with reduced bezels. I was waiting for Apple to return to manufacturing laptops with scissor mechanisms in their keyboards. By the end of October, none of those had come to pass. All the while I was becoming more frustrated with the slowness of my MacBook Pro.
I bit the bullet and bought the iMac. I’ve had a 27" Apple Cinema Display for years, so I’m used to a big screen. Yet this is the first time I’ve had retina resolution at this size. For my ageing eyes it is incredible. In use the iMac feels much faster with my old machine. I know it’s not near the processing grunt of an iMac Pro - but I don’t do video, podcasting or programming. For my productivity app usage and a bit of photo editing (and less than I used to do) this is plenty powerful enough for me.
A quick run of Geekbench on this Mac, compared with what I found in the Geekbench browser for my old laptop, highlights the difference:
iMac
MacBook Pro
Single Core
1053
710
Multi Core
4875
1565
It’s not all speeds and feeds, though. This new iMac feels nicer, supports newer features such as Sidecar, and has cleared clutter on my desk!
Technology upgrade cycle
All technology needs a regular upgrade cycle. Technology ages out and the industry moves forward. Inevitably devices need to be changed out. Obsolescence generally occurs before devices fail.
Over my most recent technology cycle, I’ve been depreciating my devices over a longer period. I’ve accepted not having the latest and greatest and have upgraded only when there has been a compelling reason.
For interest’s sake I maintain a spreadsheet to track how long I’ve owned major technology assets, and compute ‘life of service’ and ‘cost per week’. Two of our TVs, however, pre-date this spreadsheet, so they are definitely ready for replacement!
Letting the equipment age was fine in itself. Now though, we have a backlog of technology all set for replacement at the same time. The problem is I haven’t been reserving cash to replace the depreciated items. I responsibly saved up for the iMac, but other technology has not had a regular savings pattern applied to it.
Writing this post has prompted me to create a new line item for technology upgrades in my YNAB budget. I’ve set a monthly savings goal. This way I’ll be able to build my savings to facilitate a household technology refresh. I will keep ploughing money into this category on a monthly basis so that when the next device needs replacing, I’ll have the money sitting there waiting to be used. That beats going into debt - and don’t even get me started on the scourge of Afterpay! That’s a post for another day.
I’ve excluded the brand-new iMac from this calculation. ↩︎
All in all I have a pretty great job. I’ve been doing it for long enough that I feel I have well and truly mastered the fundamentals.
With my interest in personal productivity I have constructed a range of efficiencies into my process flow to make things easier for me. This enables me to increase my overall productivity, do more with no more effort.
Despite all of this I am still working with people, and they can’t be automated, and the margin for error is greater than that of machines and systems. As a result, sometimes I have days where I turn up for a scheduled meeting only to find out that they are no longer available or that there was a ‘diary mix-up’.
When this happens, I don’t get upset. I see it as an opportunity to either recover some bonus free time, or it unlocks the ability to get ahead on some other piece of work.
I enjoy the responsibility of self-management like this. I think I would struggle having to return to a job that was micro-managed, or doing something that was a small cog in a larger wheel. I like owning the process soup to nuts, and making things work the way I think is best.
Microblogvember: We tend to think that we always have complete agency over our lives. If you stop and think how much is actually left to random chance, it can be a bit frightening.
Microblogvember: I take my kids to the park and inevitably they find a stick to play with. Trees make the most versatile toys ever known to man. A stick can be a proxy for any number of imaginary things.
I am most comfortable within a nuclear family. I grew up in a family with my Mom and 3 siblings. We had a few extended family members, but most lived in different parts of the country or overseas.
As an adult the nuclear family is again the structure we are living in, except now I’m the Dad. My two sisters live in the same city, while my brother has recently moved to Switzerland. There’s no animosity between any of us, but we simply don’t see each other that much.
My wife has some family on her side, and those are the people we see the most.
In reality, we live our life as a small nuclear family of four. This is generally fine, except for when we would like to have a grown-up night out, or have some respite from children. Without the babysitting potential that comes from an extended family, we have to go to the open market and find a babysitter. That added cost and inconvenience does mean that we don’t get out as much as we might like.
While that’s not ideal, I also know that we are creating a strong and safe environment for our kids. They don’t have any fears of violence, abuse, drunkenness or any of the other things that occur behind closed doors that can lead to the destruction of a loving and peaceful childhood. That is a wonderful gift we are giving them, and I’m sure, as adults, they will appreciate that more than not having enough uncles and aunties to visit.
Right now in Perth we are in the perfect time of the year to enjoy nature. We are moving into nice spring sunshine with temperatures in the mid-twenties. This is a time to enjoy, before the Perth furnace gets cranking for summertime and I can’t step outside without getting burnt. The grass is still green from winter, before it browns off over the summer months.
I visited Queens Gardens in East Perth. Nature was in full bloom. Multiple groups of ducklings were running after their mothers. A group of cygnets were sitting under the shade of a tree. The cygnets were a grey colour, before they grow their unique black feathers; black swans - a feature of Perth’s naturescape.
There is a downside to Perth nature, and that is the flies. A few years I have a recollection of our then State government cutting the amount of funding dedicated to fly management by dung beetles. Over the last few years I am convinced that we have more bush flies than we used to. It’s frustrating, but if I want to take the good of nature I suppose I have to accept the bad.
You do get used to doing the what I know as the Aussie wave.
Microblogvember: When I was a kid my friends and I would typically play sport on the street. Cricket and tennis were the two typical games. I don’t see kids doing that anymore.
Over the past year I’ve been enjoying food a bit too much. Concurrently I’ve stopped playing sport. This has led to an imbalance in the food in/energy out equation.
In turn, I’ve seen the growth of a generous belly for the first time in my life. I’m not particularly pleased about this. My kid calling me ‘fat Dad’, is jesting that cuts a little too close to the bone!
I’ve been trying to do a little more exercise but time is a constant challenge. Plus, if the exercise in question doesn’t involve a ball, I have a hard time maintaining interest. While I’ve done gym work plenty in the past, I’ve never loved it and have a hard time sticking with it.
What I can do instantly is reduce the input side of the equation by changing (and reducing) what I eat. So I’ve put myself on a diet. I’ve turned to the service of Lite n' Easy to deliver portion controlled, dietician planned meals. The food is okay, albeit somewhat repetitive.
I miss the more flavoursome fattening food but hopefully the changed diet will pay off over the next few months. I reckon I need to lose about 10kg. That will get me back to what I consider my ‘standard’ weight. I don’t need to lose it all in the next month, but I need to lose it over this next year.
It seems that part of the human condition is to view failure as an end in and of itself. I think it’s better to consider it part of the process towards success.
A life well-lived encompasses a procession of trade-offs. We necessarily fail to do all the things we might want. We can’t be good at everything. We don’t have time to do everything. Are we failing because we don’t manage to do it all? Are we failing because we’re not multi-tasking our way to success?
That kind of thinking is probably a path to depression.
Failing is a trade-off. Failing is inevitable. It’s not possible to achieve the highest goals without accepting failure along the way. We shouldn’t beat ourselves up over our failures, because they are necessary to build success.
Time is limited. A failure to do something can represent a successful engagement with something else. I think I’m making the case for a Mr. Holland’s Opus approach to life, failure and success. Our greatest success might be hiding behind what was first thought a massive failure.