Dispatches from a happy Hullian

My whole reading page is full of people with respiratory stuff, including catching up on years of cold all at once. I hope you all get better soon and also don't breathe on me.

September is on us; the peer camping was a bit smaller than anticipated. One of our number got eaten by family stuff, another is a humanitarian worker and got dispatched to Edmonton to catch people evacuated from Yellowknife and area. Canoeing to the campsite was easier than I was expecting, and canoes can carry a lot of stuff. We three of us who made it spent all of Saturday doing nothing pretty hard, talking, tending the fire (it was chilly) and basically disconnecting. It makes me want to do it again!

Labour Day weekend we went to visit my parents Saturday and Sunday; it was short as recent visits tend to be and we didn't manage to do much visiting elsewhere in the area but we did get to explore the town garage sale and do our usual sitting around and catching up. Labour Day proper I took the kids to the parade in Ottawa. It was very hot which I think kept some of the people I usually catch up with home, but it was still a fun activity — the little ones got balloon animals, everyone got the barbecue lunch and we did loose bikes with one grownup supervising pretty well there and back.

I've got a bunch of teaching (technical and Positive Space) and writing (same) coming up, and I'm also trying to wrangle work for my team. It's busy! Union meetings the next couple of Fridays and this Saturday. Trying to decide what else I can take on or punt, and a bit down on the level of interest for Positive Space, but if I push some offerings back I can widen the net a bit. I feel like a few of my union people are a bit worn and I might lose some volunteers soon, might have to start reducing expectations or trying to develop some new people...

Fall isn't so bad, so long as you stay warm, says Elizabeth.

I just finished migrating my to-dos from September — I got a lot done, procrastinated on a bunch, and picked up a bunch of new responsibilities. I'd do well to make out > in this month, though! My page was full. I see themes emerging, though, maybe it's time to organized them into collections (or farm some out!).

I celebrated a birthday since last entry, kind of quietly. Oscar did too, and now Elizabeth's is coming up. A friend of mine asked if I was in the best shape of my life (with all the exercise I'm getting) — I figure I definitely was at some point in the pandemic; I'm a bit off my peak but still feeling pretty good. I signed up for the full marathon in May (early bird discount!) so I hope to hit a new peak in the spring!

Last weekend I spent Friday and Saturday with union folks — my first long meeting with that crew in person in a while. Got a few of those to-dos done there, wrapping up treasurer loose ends and picking up some good news to spread at other tables about improved gender-inclusive languages in our contract. Things are getting off the ground with negotiations; I just gave something like six months of availability to our negotiator for him to set up training, planning and bargaining meetings.

I went to the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation events last Friday, the mood was a bit odd but Andrea pointed out that not every culture's sense of how serious or sombre you need to be at a memorial event is the same. The Hon. Murray Sinclair compared the day to Remembrance Day but between weather and maybe a lack of shared understanding, it felt more like a typical demonstration. Maybe it will change with time. The sheer physical scale of the banner listing names of the dead in the residential school system was striking, and the event felt well-resourced and organized. There were a couple of convoy-esque people wandering in at the Parliament Hill part wrapped in Canadian flags; it looked to me like they were informed they had missed the memo and then they wandered off. I have a some aspects of my work that interact with Indigenous sovereignty (including data sovereignty), I hope I can do right by Indigenous folks in the scope of my projects.

This week my supervisor and one of my employees are coming back from long leaves, and I've got a couple of days of in-person union meetings with my CLC comrades. I'm going to need to be disciplined and get the right things done in the right contexts.

It's been a little while since I've posted; I won't try to catch up now, but here are a few tidbits.

I think I have all my tax stuff together — receipts, earnings, account set up. But the doing-my-taxes time horizon feels long. I'm going to do them, but I wish the world would slow down a bit so that taxes feel pointful.

I was bringing the car back after a museum adventure with the kids yesterday, and a grey-haired lady in a colourful sweater flagged me down and asked if Communauto needed you to have a cell phone to book and return cars (you don't — you can use a bus pass or a little plastic RFID dongle they issue). She chatted me up about language, puppetry, my kids, the neighbourhood — she's been close to that car drop in the same apartment since 1989. It was nice to have a neighbour chat. Maybe she'll come and listen to Libby and Cal at a farmer's market this summer.

I won an agency-level award for Inclusion on the strength of my work with Positive Space last month. I have the framed certificate up in my bedroom right now and used the purse to have a nice lunch with Elizabeth. The work I do feels like a lot of keeping the lights on but I'm recognizing that the keeping it alive is important, and every once in a while someone tells me that they're just heartened that the Positive Space Initiative exists and tries. I'll take that.

There's been some sort of screw-up with an issue ticket and my new team member. I got confirmation that I did click submit (the next person got the request — I'd been worried I'd been the missing link), but I'll be helping fix up the mess now that I'm back from March break.

Lastly, I read Wild Seed by Octavia Butler earlier this year and am reading The Parable of the Sower now. Some folks might say her genre is "science fiction" (I think she resisted the category) but as far as I'm concerned, it's "harrowing" and she is scarily good at it. Go read her stuff if it's your kind of thing.

I turned forty yesterday… sometime before March I threw out that my fortieth birthday would be nice if it was anchored in beer and board games — get a bunch of people who like one or more of those things and want to celebrate with me and make a day of it.

We had a scale down a bit but both of those things happened (not all at the same time) — Elizabeth and the kids had gotten Gaïa and I played a couple of rounds with Oscar and Ada after breakfast. The standard game feels like it's a bit to draw-dependent with few interesting decisions or back-and-forth opportunities, but the advanced version (especially minus the mean cards — volcanoes and thunderbolts in our game made it so that you kind of had to ride out the violence and then play in earnest once everyone was out of ammunition) is a nicely-balanced short game.

The kids gifted me with many supervillain-themed pictures, a felt medal and a hat made from a pop bottle with an antenna and googly eyes.

In the middle of the day we had a backyard party. Elizabeth had made lime meringue tarts, we barbecued some veggie sausages, we took cover when it rained :) Heather, Andrea and Morgen came for the first while until Morgen needed her own bed for a nap, and my folks turned up as they were heading out. It was the first time this year I've seen my parents in person. I hope we can figure out a visit down there; either a day trip on a nice day or a weekend if we can tinker with our bubble configuration or get to a better place in the pandemic.

Turning forty has been kind of overshadowed by the circumstances. I'm no longer young in the terms of my union, I guess when it seems prudent I'm due for a medical check-up. Ten years ago Oscar was still in utero and I was a young and promising Methodologist, more I'm more established and shifting to be a manager and Oscar's going to be a teenager before long. I'm more readily out as bi and polyamorous and organizing workplace things for Pubic Service Pride (which wasn't really a thing in the Federal Public Service ten years ago). I'm trying to be a bit more conscious of taking care of my body — choosier about food and letting there be leftovers, morning walks, an actual ergonomic chair in my basement lair. I feel like negotiation is a theme of the last little while: bargaining, working out pandemic safety measures in our bubble, trying to line up a working like that's as good as possible. Stabilizing the wobbly bits of my life, too.

Maybe I'll have a bigger party for 41 or 42, but I liked being celebrated yesterday. It's a nice round number, but it feels like a kind of transitional time for me.

Waiting in line at the workplace flu vaccine clinic with about 200 people wanting to contribute to herd immunity… apparently we're warmer in Ottawa than in Toronto today!

It's been awhile since I've posted here. I'm starting to feel useful in my new position — taught a bunch last week and got certified to access the big repository of business statistical information today (my unit does sufficiently abstract work that six months in isn't bad). It's still only mostly official, but over the winter I get to hand off my duties to my second in command and do a "micro mission" of record linkage work supporting equitable labour practices in the federal public service — I'm looking forward to it, and to being able to walk to work — the office is maybe 20 minutes from home!

I've been in pretty deep in union stuff lately, the PIPSC AGM was Friday and Saturday, and it's always that mix of solidarity and reminders that we're diverse enough that values vary widely, even among the activist core. We made some decisions, some of which were ambitious and others of which prioritized saving money and keeping pressure off our dues which are collected in nominal dollars and so actually squeeze real resources invested per member by the rate of inflation each year — and we probably can't keep increasing membership to compensate. Maybe next year we can deal with this. Our smaller constituent bodies got an increase in their funding formula, though, so rooms can be rented and volunteers can be fed in contemporary dollars.

I'm also taking point on a couple of steward cases. Managing member expectations is tricky, and in our relatively low-conflict workplace, everyone is leaning on all the guidance they can get and being very careful. Things move slowly that way.

I had a dream about shopping for dress pants last night, in two parts (the trying on right before close! The buying later!) I found a hole yesterday in a pair of pants, so thanks, literal brain.

I'm back at work and also writing away at the current step in the promotion process. Looking at what I've been up to through a technical competencies lens and thinking that whether I get a promotion or not my involvements are due for a prune. Had a conversation with one of my career-knowledgeable friends who backed up this idea.

We had a late morning start at home and a discussion of daylight savings time over rushed breakfast this morning. The take-away the we could agree on came down to us being at the wrong latitude for all this (or maybe we should just go full Saskatchewan and go to UTC -4 year round).