Dispatches from a happy Hullian

It's National Public Service Week; yesterday they used the voice broadcast system to announce treats after lunch served by management on yummy lawn… I thought for a moment it was a fire drill in the middle of my lunch union meeting.

In other news, Cabinet has decided that unvaccinated people aren't a danger to the workplace working from home (for now). I get it, everyone should get vaccinated but if they're not breathing on other union members or the public as part of their jobs and are helping keep my workload down then they can have their strange religious beliefs (whether or not a panel of managers who mostly aren't experts in evaluating religious beliefs like them) and help mitigate labour shortages a bit.

Off duty I had a nice run last night — my June 10k — but twisted my foot/ankle on the gravel path up by P3 so I'm down to walking gingerly and biking for a few days.

1) What are you doing this spring that you weren't doing 1 year ago?

Making a habit of running or cycling daily.

2) What pandemic precautions are you still taking?

Giving people space, masking up indoors, seeing less of people than I'd like and giving strangers more personal space including stepping off the sidewalk as we pass each other. Also, got vaccinated!

3) What's a safety rule that's very important to you?

Don't surprise drivers.

4) What plants are blooming where you live?

A lot of the spring flowers have come and gone... strawberry flowers are still open, bleeding hearts too, and honeysuckle has some flowers holding on and lots of golden fallen petals under the bushes.

5) What was your most memorable summer job?

Probably working on web development in the mid-to-late 90s as part of a bold little enrichment program which connected talented rural kids with community groups that wanted websites. I discovered ramen, both ends of a job interview, Photoshop and Illustrator, hand-coding HTML, and doing tech projects in teams. I liked how us kids taught each other a lot of what we needed to do and I liked biking to work and having my own money.

Questions: thefridayfive

It's been a bit of a challenging winter and spring here, as everywhere. We're all still healthy here, employed, eating eggs from the backyard hens, so not as challenging as it could be, but still.

One of my union colleagues died last weekend. Mehran was quick to welcome me aboard when I got elected to the national Research Group executive, and quick to be friendly and to do what needed doing in general. He was also curious and open and talked happily of his love of food, dance and life in between matters of helping members and being good unionists. I'll miss him; there'll be a very empty virtual chair next weekend at the Group meeting.

Work is a bit of a slog... getting traction and coordinating people is hard and tiring sometimes, and there's a lot of staff movement and random requests going around. I might be able to make some good changes in an upcoming Lean process review, which would help me feel like I'm leaving things in good shape when I find an opportunity somewhere that fits me better. The return to virtual school for the kids, extended one week at a time since Easter, has thrown my routine and energy out of wack, even though Elizabeth has been taking the brunt of the daytime parenting. I have a fair amount of extracurricular stuff going on — Positive Space is getting more active again, union work continues with consultation and a stewarding case that might have legs. Those extras are work but they help make work more meaningful. In good pandemic news, our age slices are up for registering for a first shot next week... I'm hoping for Johnson and Johnson just so I'll be done (and apparently there are 300k doses of J&J coming into Canada now, but there are some possible bumps), but any shot in my arm is a good shot.

I've been mixing running and biking for my mental health/exercise time. I'm still shooting to run and now also bike every public street with asphalt and a name — I'm over half done on the bike and nearly two-thirds on feet. I've been varying it partly because if I run long distances too many days in a row my muscles have some concerns. But overall I'm getting pretty good at this, and seeing everywhere in the Hull sector at least twice, sometimes in different seasons, has been pretty cool. I know where our favourite tofu burgers come from because I've run past the factory in an industrial park. I can see new streets and developments go up, moving the goalposts for this whole silly game.

I'm missing seeing my Vanier loves in person — we've got our stopgaps — virtual D&D, grove rituals (happy Beltaine!), video storytime (Heather has finished the first book of Lord of the Rings with the kids) and various one-on-one chats. I used to do walk-and-talk after the kids were in bed by phone, but the 8 PM curfew has made that harder. Once the restrictions are loosened maybe walking and talking in person will be a thing again.

Rands muses on something I've felt has been rattling around my memescape over the past couple of years… being from the memescape, it's not groundbreaking but it's what tweaked me to post.

It's been a bit of an autumn… a little over a week ago we lost a radical elderly Druid (never a Druid elder, she insisted that was a kind of tree). Her passing was a surprise to everyone and I can still hear her voice in my head when I think of her. Elizabeth made a list of little tributes to her including picking up trash, gardening over more lawn, being kind to animals and looking for meaning, and the one thing I can think of to add is chipping in a little extra to the food bank and to people facing oppression (most recently the Mi'kmaw fishers being terrorized in Nova Scotia).

We're also trying to wrap our heads around holiday plans, avoiding as much marginal risk increase as possible and still make it happen — gathering with who we can, distanced present drops and walks with others, Zoom and Canada Post with further flung people and cooking up a storm. We're going to make it happen. And whenever things are sufficiently normal we'll gather again with people we haven't gathered with in a while. Not being able to visit makes me miss people more.

Work is also pretty intense lately; there are urgent projects and personalities to wrangle; I'm feeling like I'm more in manager than statistician mode right now. My supervisor says I'm doing fine but I'm not always so sure.

I've been running regularly and keeping track on Strava (find me there under my real name if you're interested). Quantifying it motivates me — in these first few months I've gone from being able to sustain a run for under a kilometer to being able to do 10+ km at a moderate run or a mixed stagger for over 20km when I'm feeling really ambitious. My shirts fit better too, and it makes the neighborhood feel closer together feeling that more of it is reachable on foot.

We have four two-week-old chicks in the upstairs bathroom right now… Elizabeth found an ad in Kijiji for chicks now, as opposed to many offers of getting on a waitlist for chicks, so I drove to Tay Valley to pick up chicks. The kids are super excited. Given that the offer came as a bit of a surprise, we scrambled a bit for bedding and supplies, so they're in deluxe pet store bedding.

Earlier in the week I dreamt of flooding in our area… maybe Michigan got in my unconscious, or maybe it was the high river here a couple of years ago that had me staying home (and working from home a bit… but we lost a lot of time because telework technology and policy were pretty limiting back then). In any case, I dreamt my basement office lair was full of water. I think the risk this year is mostly passed!

Tuesday I took a distanced walk with Heather… first time near her since March, and first time in Ottawa as well. People were out and about in pairs and threes mostly, spaced out and enjoying walking and talking photos on the closed-to-car-traffic Alexandra Bridge (police blockades were down but bridge repairs continue). It felt refreshing, and will probably be a first step to carefully seeing more of other. I'm looking forward to a walk with Andrea and sitting safely far apart around an outdoor hearth with both of them soon!

The older two are going back to school next week — school is open to Québec kids for optional classes, especially for kids who need a bit of extra support, and ours are both square pegs in their own ways and are missing school. With Elizabeth and me both being home-based workers at the moment, we can end the experiment pretty quickly if we need to, and we are all pretty robust and not in contact with anyone in an at-risk population, so it seems like an acceptable risk and we can be a dead-end for any contagion coming from the classroom. We got a message from Vivien's teacher and her class will have 10 kids, with rearranged desks and staggered recesses and lunches to avoid big congregations of kids. As a political decision, the Quebec approach might be flavoured by a belief in reopening the economy, but as a project with important health aspects, I think the school is doing pretty well and the kids are starting to get squirelly. We have to come up for air eventually, and this seems like a lower-risk way to do it. I think it's ethical especially if we share that we're doing this with people we might have contact with.

Ada, at four-almost-five, can pronounce “social distancing” pretty well. She was really keen to go to Kaleidoscope (August) with social distancing in place… we’ll see. One can hope (but I trust the organizers will be vigilant and careful)!

Us grown-ups have been thinking a bit of how we’ll proceed when restrictions lift, too — clearly deliberately and with some fulsome conversations, but the bridges will open eventually, and it sounds like some jurisdictions are encouraging people to pair households for mutual aid and companionship. With our relationships, a pair would still leave people out and probably result in some lopsided reconnecting, but with any luck it will be safe for us to rejoin some loved ones outside the house and the rules and good sense will let me see my Vanier loves, Heather and Andrea, soon enough. We'll have talked about it inside our polycule before the rules change, too, so we'll be ready!

Played D&D with the kids, Elizabeth and (video-linked) Heather today… we're all still getting our sea legs in 5th edition (or in D&D in general) but the party is doing well — offering to help NPCs, working together grumpily, blasting and stabbing undead in the fen…

I'm adapting an ancient second-edition adventure and some of the tropes and gender politics are iffy but I think their drive to fix them will lead to further adventures. I hope they learn to keep the wizard away from the front lines!

After three weeks of hunkering down and working from home, mu managers all managed to agree on an extension of my secondment — with any luck by the time my extension runs out mid-June, we'll be back to the office or at least good enough at telework that bringing me back will go more smoothly than in less than a month. We're still trying to figure out just what we can do and getting upper management to pick some priorities but I think our team is adapting pretty well.

I'm feeling… variable. Finding our feet at work and the new routine here is tiring. Some days I feel like we're rocking it and other days there's a lot of just spinning our wheels. Vivien is a bit cranky and Oscar lets use know they find the whole situation unfair. Their understanding and desire to talk about how various parties can make things fairer about cancelling stuff and travel restrictions makes me think of my kid self. Ada is mostly unflappable but a little clingy and mischievous by turns. I think the heavy-handed orders (checkpoints, now) are something Elizabeth was dreading and I was hoping we'd avoid. The quickly changing rules and uncertain length of the return to normal are wearing on me and us, like everyone.

On the other hand, our neighbourhood is full of rainbow signs saying "ça va aller" and there are little painted rocks with smiley faces scattered in our neighborhood and the early flowers are poking up and it smells like spring and we're not completely bored yet.

So for me, there's a bit of "we're managing pretty well" and a bunch of tired and anxious — real anxiety from uncertainty, from changing rules and from missing people and hoping they stay healthy, plus the anxious that we're all swimming in.

Going into the third week of distancing… my colleagues have made a big deal out of making it through each week of working from home each Friday so far.

I'm doing pretty well, have the home office set up and everyone close to me is healthy so far. I'm working, getting paid, getting fresh air, eating healthy food — we all are doing pretty well in this house.

But I'm missing people too. We'll probably be doing Easter in place for the first time in many years rather than going back to Ormstown to feast with my relatives. And I'm missing Heather, Andrea and Morgen — the Vanier end of my pod, who are hunkered down over there. Heather is continuing to read Watership Down to the kids remotely, and we try to keep in touch via the Internet. And I'm glad I got to visit them the weekend before we all went to ground, which was Heather's and my fourth anniversary. I've got lots of loved ones here, but also quite a few outside the epidemiologically sensible boundary. Households are a real thing, but they're definitely not the only thing.

Here's to getting through this, to reunions to come, to traditions we've adapted and to ones we'll have to pick up again. Here's to the couch runneth-ing over again.