July 29th, 2009 by Chris Eng

Well, I had a lovely if not entirely inexpensive weekend. But it was good. And super-touristy. It’s funny growing up in a tourist town, because as a teenager you instinctively disdain doing touristy things. Then you move away and get married to a girl not from your town and you go home in the middle of summer and she’s like “What’s fun to do?” and you’re all, “Weeeeellllll…” So let me tell you what we did:

DAY ONE:
- Took the ferry over to Victoria first thing Sunday morning.
- Had brunch with Carla, my parents and aunt and uncle at The Superior, an appropriately named Victorian brunch spot (both for the quality of food, and for the fact that it’s found on Superior St.).
- Walked around downtown, and went to the Chinatown Market (where they close off a block of Government St. on Sunday afternoons and local merchants and artisans sell their wares). Carla found a nice blue summer dress (c/o Lotus Designs), I bought some tea (at Silk Road) and then we wandered off to find Carla a belt to accessorize her new outfit with…
- Which we did at Value Village! And I found a signed copy of Wil Wheaton’s The Happiest Days of Our Lives there, which more or less made my day.
- Then we wandered back to Fisherman’s Wharf (known for that afternoon as Fisherman Worf—“I throw this salmon back! It has no honour!”), ate ice cream and looked at houseboats.
- After that we caught the bus to Masha’s house where we drank cider (purchased at the store) and somethink like kefir, but made with water instead of milk. It was slightly effervescent and refreshing. Then we made homemade pizza. Then we passed out.

DAY TWO:
- Went downtown and did some shopping at Plenty, which has moved up into my Top 5 Places to Spend Money in the Garden City. They call themselves an epicurean pantry and that’s about as good a descriptor as you’re going to get. Their chocolate goodies are to die for. We bought a buttload of brownies to nibble on for the remainder of our trip. Also… A CAST IRON MORTAR AND PESTLE! It’s hyoooje! And while it wasn’t cheap, it was one of those times where you figure you’ve got a little extra money and when are you going to invest in such a thing otherwise? A good investment, though, and it makes me happy.
- Scampered down to Pag’s to meet Shawn for lunch, which was lovely. Carla and I both decided that the 1/2 pasta and salad is the perfect amount of food for a hot day with a bunch of walking around.
- Ventured to the Royal BC Museum for their ‘Treasures of the British Museum’ exhibit. It was a excellently curated exhibition and we only occasionally made comments like, (assume horrible, faux British accent) “I say, what have those brown people got over there? Well, they’re only going to ruin it! Here, let’s get it away from them and put it on our trousseau where it can be seriously appreciated.” Then we spent a couple of hours in the rest of the museum. I could easily spend an afternoon a week for the rest of my life wandering the regular collections of the museum and never get bored. I <3 the RBCM so much.
- After wearing a hole in the bottoms of our shoes from all the walking, we walked even further down to the Beacon Drive In, where sugary and fried delights were partaken of. Then to Beacon Hill Park itself where Carla was shown the many, many peacocks that she did not believe wandered freely about the park. “How…? But…! Whaaaaaa…?!” It was cute. Then we napped on the grass behind St. Ann’s Academy.
- When we came to again we wandered over to the IMAX theatre (conveniently located about two blocks from St. Ann’s inside the RBCM) and watched Star Trek on the REALLY big screen in the company of awesome friends.
- Following that we retired to Masha and Bryce’s house and drank beer and whiled away the hours with them, Will and Kyla. Then slept, probably at too late an hour.

DAY THREE:
- Up before seven, so we could catch a cab into town, grab a coffee and get on the train to Nanaimo! It cost only $21/person since we bought the tickets a day in advance! How is it I never managed to do this at any point in my life? Still, despite the fact that we were both bone tired we managed to stay awake for most of the train ride, which was enchanting and a beautiful change from the view on the highway.
- Here are two awesome places I discovered in Nanaimo:
1) Bygone Books: Amazing selection. I forced myself to leave after spending an hour there but still managed to come up with $75 worth of goodies. Both antiquarian and general purpose books, as well as a huge selection of nautical and local history material. Recommended for Island book nerds.
2) Mon Petit Choux Bakery: They use all natural and organic ingredients. Their sandwiches are delicious and their lavender dark chocolate tarts? That shit is off the hook. Seriously.
- The ferry ride back was pretty painless, which is about all I could ask for.

And now that I’ve run down three days’ worth of fun AT LENGTH, let me now tell you what I did not do:

- Take pictures. This was not done out of any particular hatred of photography as much as forgetting to bring the camera along with us or being slightly tipsy and not caring where the camera was. I know this is a blog and without pictures it didn’t happen, but you’re just gonna have to take my word for it that most of this occurred.

Since I’m home and have the camera now, though, I will post pictures of what Carla and I came home to, thanks to our crafty and clever friends Jackie and Liz:

Nothing like a little bit of craftiness on the part of your friends to really make you realize how good it is to come home. But it was a good trip with good friends all ’round.

July 24th, 2009 by Chris Eng

And following hot on the heels of my little rant on IKEA a couple of days back were two news stories about the box chain on The Consumerist:

- The first details how a breastfeeding woman in Brooklyn was forced to take her shame (and baby) into the washroom and think about what she’d done (or until she was done feeding her baby, whichever came first), despite state laws that say she doesn’t have to do that. Oh, then the security guards gave her a metaphorical kick in the ass on the way out, just–I guess–in case she was thinking about coming back in the future.
- The second (and this is the one that kills me) is on a report in the latest issue of The Atlantic which names IKEA as “the least sustainable retailer on the planet”. Literally a good 75% of my household furniture comes from IKEA. Excuse me a minute while I throw up a little in my mouth.

July 22nd, 2009 by Chris Eng

I love IKEA. Love it. And putting aside any discussion of my relationship to big box shopping for another day (which I do intend to explore in-depth in the future), I have always appreciated IKEA’s general attitude, as well as their meatballs.

It’s tradition for my wife and I (as well as all our friends) to scarf down some Swedish meatballs every time we make the trip out to the suburbs and yesterday was no exception. However, instead of being presented with the standard ceramic plate/steel cutlery/glassware combination, this time we got paper plates, plastic forks and paper cups.

Now, it was Carla who brought up the fact that IKEA’s reason for using actual, washable dishes is because they’re trying to project a more bistro-like atmosphere as opposed to any environmental imperative, and I understand that in a slipping economy every dollar counts and paying full-time dishwashing staff isn’t the cheapest thing in the world, but there’s a cost for the disposable supplies, and part of the cost is my peace of mind. Switching over to disposable dishes will put a massive amount of refuse into our landfills. I’m not going to say it’s more than McDonald’s or any of the other fast food chains out there, but they’ve been using throw-away wrappers all along. It’s not great that we’ve become inured to that particular wastefulness, but it’s certainly what we expect from them. IKEA, on the other hand, felt like more of a haven away from that. Their furniture, while cheap, is kind of classy (well, more classy than any of the other furniture warehouses, if not necessarily better-constructed) and it felt like their cafeteria was striving for that, too—it’s not fantastic food, but it’s cheap and it’s respectable. And I’ve got to say that a lot of that respectability just flew out the window for me.

I mean, the meatballs are good, don’t get me wrong—but if you’re going to dollop a bunch of guilt on top of them next to the lingonberry sauce and I’m going to have to worry about what I’m doing to the environment before I go and buy my cheap picture frames and DVD storage boxes, well, I’ll buy the meatballs frozen and take them home to cook. At least I know in my house they’ve got a part-time dishwasher. His name is Chris Eng, which I understand is half-Chinese for ‘common sense’.

July 21st, 2009 by Chris Eng

Now, I am all for high-quality items that’ll last me the rest of my life, but there’s certain things I draw the line at. Like, say, $450 axes.

Oh, I’m sure they’re good axes. They might even be fantastic axes. And they’re definitely fantastic looking axes. But I’m not going to pay what works out to over $300 for a paint job, just ’cause it was conceived by the fellow who did design work for Brian Eno and Philip Glass… no matter how cool that is.

However, should you be in the market for a $300 axe and have a thing for the guy who helped cement Isaac Mizrahi’s corporate identity, you should talk to the Best Made Company–they’ve got a wood-chopper with your name on it. Well, I mean, not literally–that would probably cost in excess of $500.

July 19th, 2009 by Chris Eng

Went on a hike around Buntzen Lake a week and half ago, or so. Know this streak of incredible warmth and sun we’ve been having recently? Take a guess as to what the weather was like when we decided to go. No, you don’t have to guess; I’ll show you:

Yes. It was wet that day. Or rather, it got wet when we were about halfway along. I know I look unhappy, but after an hour’s forced march through a torrential downpour, yeah, I was a little tetchy. Stella wasn’t that thrilled either and she’s one happy-go-lucky dog. What this hike proves, I think, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that even in the middle of summer we live in a temperate rainforest.

Other things I have learned from this hike:

1) Stella is a good dog and I will walk her any time. I knew she was a good dog before we left, but she proved it several times over the course of that day.
2) Always have a spare shirt waiting in the car. Hey, if it’s extra sunny you might need it ’cause you’re sweaty. And if it’s rainy…
3) Have a towel in the car, too.
4) Waterproof shells (especially ones that collapse down to a fraction of their size and which you can shove easily in your bag) are invaluable.
5) The mini-suspension bridge on the far side of the lake is good times.
6) Not many people walk on the smaller, off-shoot trails. This makes the smaller trails more relaxing. On the other hand, there are also large hills involved. There’s a trade-off involved.

Overall, though, I’m looking forward to going back on a day when I don’t have to carry an extra few pounds of water around in my clothes. Pretty trails; good hike.

July 12th, 2009 by Chris Eng

I managed to spend three consecutive days this week gaming. Tabletop gaming, by which I mean board games, card games and roleplaying games (or ‘RPGs’). You know—dice rolling, good times. What you may not have known is that by playing D&D and throwing those funny dice all those years (assuming you have been), you were contributing to the welfare of the planet. It’s true. There are several reasons why, but let’s start with the obvious one:

1) Tabletop games don’t use electricity. You don’t need to plug in your D&D books or your Monopoly board. You don’t need to hook them up to the TV (unless you’re playing Scene It or one of those other DVD games, but we’ll put those aside) and you don’t need to have anything in order to play them except for friends and enough light to see by. They are, in most regards, an environmentally sound choice. In comparison, computer video games suck power from the CPU and monitor, and console games need a TV and video game system. For that matter, consoles also often suck power even when they aren’t turned on (not a lot, but consider how many consoles are plugged in around the world right this minute). And what are you going to do if the power cuts out and you’re in the middle of an adventure? If you’re playing a console/PC game, probably curse loudly and start yelling about the fact that the last save point was over a half hour ago. If you’re playing tabletop, grab some candles and keep going.

2) Tabletop games are social. “But,” the Halo fans splutter, “video games are social!” Yes, some of them are. MMOs, in particular, lend themselves quite well to social events, like raids—but you’re still talking about voice chatting, not actual face-to-face interaction. And even when things get out of control in a D&D game (which I’ve seen happen), you generally don’t say things to people in front of you that you might to someone over your headset. For proof of this, please refer to John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Having a 13 year-old boy yell “faggot” over and over at you during literally any given Xbox Live game isn’t socializing, no matter what you say. In the latest episode of THAC0 (a entertaining gaming and geek culture podcast to which I listen on a regular basis), they discussed their reasons for tabletop gaming and the most quoted reason was their social aspect. Roleplaying is collaborative storytelling—it’s necessarily social—and since the limits on what your character can do are literally the limits of your imagination, you are automatically assured of more options than any MMO out there.

3) Tabletop games encourage literacy. Roleplaying games sure do. What, you’re telling me you’re gonna play D&D without being able to read? You can’t—the two go hand-in-hand. For this reason, RPGs are great for kids with learning disabilities. They might not want to read generally because of the amount of work involved, but if you’re simultaneously encouraging their imagination through gaming, it gives them added incentive to push through the rulebooks. This, in turn, is imparting necessary skills to kids who might otherwise gloss over them.

4) Tabletop gaming encourages cognitive thinking. Strategy is a huge part of board games. C’mon—chess? It’s nothing but strategy. People spend their entire lives focused on developing that one new chess strategy nobody else has ever thought of. I’m not sure doing that is particularly healthy, but strategic thought, problem solving and thinking outside the box are more skills that can’t necessarily be taught but can certainly be fostered via gaming. RPGs also teach those skills, but in a less-structured way. While chess has very rigidly defined rules about how any of the pieces might move in a given situation, RPGs don’t—you solve a problem with the equipment your character has on-hand and whatever plan seems most likely for them to follow. Group strategizing in RPGs can actually be pretty time-consuming overall, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun—taking time to plan and then watching how your plan simultaneously comes together and goes awry is one of the principal pleasures of the hobby.

5) Tabletop gaming encourages concentration. I learned how to paint lead miniatures this week. Somehow, over the years, this became one of those quintessentially geeky areas of expertise that I never managed to pick up. To be fair, when I was a kid, I tried it, but since I didn’t have anyone to teach me even the most basic steps, my minis ended up looking like glazed shite and I stopped shortly after I started. This time around, I had an awesome instructor in my friend Neil, who paints regularly. As you can see, the results were much more satisfactory:

Yeah, the picture is kind of washed out, but you get a sense of it. This particular mini took me five hours to paint. Most professional painters (or ones who seriously pursue it as a hobby, anyway) will spend much longer than that on a single figure. It’s a long time committment on a tiny scale and it forces you to both look at the details and to pull back to see how it looks from a distance. It definitely promotes concentration and (maybe surprisingly) is quite relaxing.

6) Dollar for dollar, tabletop games give better value. A copy of Arkham Horror may cost the same as one of Prototype (for any given system), but I pretty much guarantee you’ll get better value from Arkham. Assuming you enjoy the game and treat the pieces with respect, it will last you quite possibly the rest of your life. Your new video game will last you until one of a few things happens: maybe you’ll get bored of it, maybe you’ll plough through it in epic time and not look at it again, maybe your system will become obsolete. Yes, you can absolutely get bored of tabletop games, but the well-designed ones stand the test of time. If I asked you to play a hit video game from twenty years ago and tell me how it stacks up to a next gen console release, what do you think you’d say? Sure, I play old video games, but I’m ancient (in video gaming terms) so I have nostalgia for Wizard of Wor and Infocom. But when gaming nostalgia requires that you either save every single console system you’ve ever owned (which can take up a ludicrous amount of space) or, in the case of computer games, that you continue to download patches so that you can play older games on newer OSes, it becomes a chore and starts requiring an outlay or either time or storage space. Even downloading ROMs for your favourite games requires that you update your software on a semi-regular basis. Scrabble, on the other hand, takes up exactly the same amount of space it always has and is maintenance-free.

Yeah, tabletop games have their drawbacks. Board game boards are made from carboard and many of them contain an ASSLOAD of plastic pieces; roleplaying books are made from paper (and hence dead trees). But nothing is cost-free. I mean, if you want a gaming experience with no environmental drawbacks, you could sit around with your friends in the dark and play “What Number Am I Thinking Of?”, but the replay value is poor and the next time Gaming Night rolls around your friends will just conveniently forget to invite you. If you are genuinely concerned about the pieces and packaging, though, I recommend you check out Cheapass Games. Hell, listen to their production strategy:

“Cheapass Games come with the bare essentials: boards, cards, and rulebooks. If you need anything else, we’ll tell you. And it’s probably something you can scrounge from a game you already own, or buy at a hobby store for less than “they” are charging you for it. Heck, if you need to, you can even buy the parts from us. And once you’ve assembled your collection of generic small parts, you can use them for every new Cheapass Game. We’ve standardized our designs so your gaming toolbox will last.”

And their games are fun. ‘Kill Dr. Lucky’, their flagship game, has easily as much replay value as anything in the $30+ price range, yet comes to around $10. Like their name says: cheapass, and hence better value.

I’m not going to tell you which tabletop games are the best—everyone out there has different tastes and there are games to cater to all of them—but I will encourage you to go down to your local games shop (most of which keep playable demo copies of the most popular and fun games) and try out something new. Because if we all work together, tabletop gaming will be on its way to saving the world… one die roll at a time.

July 5th, 2009 by Chris Eng

This amused me.

July 3rd, 2009 by Chris Eng

So, I’m back at the old bookstore, which still manages to make me squee a little with the amount of cool environmentally-conscious and just generally neat books it stocks. The work is good; the people I work with are good. Goodness abounds.

In other news, I was trying to think of what had been going since since the last time I’d done regular updates and I realized Carla and I had climbed a mountain.

See how happy we are? We’re at the top of The Chief, out in Squamish! Third Peak–you know, the far one!

It took us and our friend Liz about two hours to get up to the top, but when we got there, there was plenty to look at.

Like this tree:

We could also see what we think is Black Tusk where one of our best friends got brained by a rock on his 30th birthday and almost died. We are not in a hurry to climb that one.

And we saw this pond, which we’re pretty sure produced all the mosquitoes for the general Squamish area:

And after taking pictures of the surrounding area, we clambered back down and we ate gigantic, organic and kind of politically incorrect burgers at the Tomahawk which is awesome and everyone should go there. The end.

June 30th, 2009 by Chris Eng

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller
Jeff Rubin
(Random House)
ISBN: 978-0-307-35751-9

The premise is simple: there is a finite amount of oil in the world and pretty much everything we consume relies on it. Therefore, as oil supplies dwindle, everything is going to start getting a whole lot more expensive.

Your groceries? Shipped from California and New Zealand. Your consumer electronics goods? Shipped from China and Asia. And the shipping boats and cargo planes they come over on use a cubic assload of fuel. Jeff Rubin’s prediction is that as the cost of fuel rises, the cost of shipping those goods will also rise to the point where it is simply more cost-effective to make them domestically.

But while he asserts that industry will start to come home, that’s not as small as he thinks your world is going to get. The most obvious side effect of expensive oil is expensive gas. Driving will start to become untenable; plane flights almost unthinkable. We, as a world, will return in many regards to the situation over 100 years ago when most people stuck close to home. Vacations were had in your own province or state and not in a different hemisphere. We aren’t going to reach a point where the gas runs out and we turn to a Road Warrior-esque standard of living (not in our lifetimes, anyway, all you Lord Humunguses-in-training), but our lives will be less luxurious and more spare.

And if that were the only thing Rubin had to say on the matter, he probably could have condensed it into a long-ish essay without too much of a problem, but he has also taken pains to explain everything in depth and make connections to things that you may not have automatically assumed were associated with the problem of peak oil, i.e. that the underlying cause for the financial crash last year wasn’t subprime mortgages, but in fact oil prices. And that leads to the double-edged sword of going in-depth on financial issues. Rubin needs to do it, because various fiduciary concepts are central to his arguments, but in doing so he creates sections of the book that are bone dry. I’m interested in what he has to say—deeply interested—but you just cannot make talk about inflation gripping. To his credit, he tries, and he has crafted an otherwise very readable book, but in order to get across various ideas connected with the forces at play he needed to explain some economic concepts which do not make for a breezy read. They’re not impenetrable, but they do require extra effort to assimilate and often bring the pace of the book to a screeching halt.

The other problem with talking about economic concepts is that it’s hard to objectively evaluate what he’s saying. “Oil caused the financial crash last year,” he proclaims. “Here’s why!” And what he says sounds right, but since I have no background in economics I can’t actually assess it with any degree of confidence. Still, his background in economic journalism makes for a more even-keeled book and its tone is much more grounded and practical and less hysterical than many of the other “surviving peak oil” books on the market these days.

Economics aside, though, most of his basic arguments are basically unassailable, like:

- “The key to downsizing the role of oil in our economy is micro decisions made every day by households and consumers, not macro decisions made at the level of monetary or fiscal policy.” (Because while fiscal policy is incredibly important, none of the decisions made at the top is going to have lasting significance if we keep consuming goods and energy at the same rate we always have.)
- “Figuring out how to get the most out of what we have at our disposal is going to be the key to adapting to a smaller world, and that applies to assets like infrastructure and trained workforces more than anything else.” (Which will come into play as we switch to a more locally-produced economy and our former-barista friends and neighbours figure out what other skills they have to contribute to it.)

One of the main arguments in the book—not explicitly delineated, but made plain in the subtext—is that we can choose now to reduce our energy consumption and move toward a local-based economy as individuals or we can have the decision made forcibly for us at some point down the road when it’s much less convenient. Nothing we do is going to make moving into a post-peak oil world entirely painless, but shifting toward a sustainable lifestyle now will make your life—maybe all of our lives—easier in the future.

June 24th, 2009 by Chris Eng

So, I should probably explain to you all that I’m a crow. Not THE Crow. I’m not Brandon Lee and I’m not sitting around in my makeup and black clothes listening to Nine Inch Nails as I type this. But I do get distracted by shiny things. Or, closer to the point, I get fixated on one or two things at a time and if something comes along to supercede my interest, I’ll focus on that at the expense of other things I want or need to be doing.

Case in point: there was a secret I mentioned in my last blog entry. Well, it never quite resolved itself to the point where I could talk about it, and the actual secret (not to mention the secrecy involved) more or less took over most of my waking thoughts, to the detriment of my blog (among other things). The secret is this:

Carla and I were going to move back to Victoria—possibly in fairly short order. See, around the time of my grandpa’s funeral I got to reconnect with a lot of my family and friends in my hometown, many of whom I haven’t had much of a chance to talk to over the last several years. And it was nice. On top of that, Carla was really fed up with certain things that were going on at her job and she wasn’t sure that she wanted to continue with it if that’s the way things were going. So we started debating about whether we needed to be in Vancouver over the next few years, and we couldn’t come up with a good reason why we should. I mean, if it’s all about paying down our debts and saving, we could do that pretty much anywhere. If it’s a matter of our friends in Vancouver, Carla has a few good friends that she would miss very much, but most of my close friends are moving or have moved away. And as for the things that both of us moved here for in the first place, well, neither of us goes out to the bar much anymore and all of our favourite restaurants/stores in town seem to be falling prey to gentrification one by one. We’ll miss the food when we move away—A LOT—but that’s one of the few things.

So, we thought about this between February and March and eventually came up with a game plan that could have seen us moving back to the Rock (as Vancouver Island is affectionately known) as soon as June. A lot of prep-work was done on my end. I basically disassembled my office (which was no big loss, because no writing was getting done in there anyway) and turned it into a storage room, and into that I packed up about twenty boxes of books and other random stuff. I assembled about ten boxes of books for the The Purge IV (I think that’s right—God, I can barely keep track of how many times I’ve gotten rid of books this year) and generally tried to get my possessions into a state whereby if we needed to move with a few weeks notice it wouldn’t kill us.

And I succeeded. Our house isn’t in that bad a shape right now and I have less stuff than at probably any point in the last decade. Plus, things will get slimmer with subsequent cleanings. The problem was that moving wasn’t really something Carla and I could talk about publicly, due to our jobs. I mean, you don’t just go and make announcements about making plans to skip town in a place where your employer can read it.

“Uh, Chris, I wanted to talk to you about your blog and these plans to leave Vancouver.”
“Okay.”
“You know how we’re overstaffed right now?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re fired.”
“Ah. Can you wait to fire me for another few weeks—maybe more—until my plans gel?”
“No.”
“Hm. All right, then.”

It might not have gone exactly like that, but it’s still not the kind of thing you want to be declaring until you’re ready to go public (as it were). So we sat on it and sat on it, and the plans I had for spring kind of disintegrated. I wanted to go and work on the UBC farm, but since all signs pointed to me leaving in fairly short order I decided not to. That decision made me slightly miserable after it became apparent I wasn’t relocating immediately and I missed my chance to work through the entire grow cycle (at least this year, anyway). My depression grew, my responsibilities slid and I bounced from one writing project to another without any real sense of commitment to any of them. My one resolution for the year (look back a few entries and you’ll find it) was to speed ahead full-bore, learn and experience as much as possible, and not stop. Well, I stopped in almost every important regard. I let the indeterminate state of affairs in one area of my life (a fairly large area, but still…) engulf most of the rest of it, and I’m currently paying the price.

The status updates since then are these:

- The factors at Carla’s job that were driving her nuts no longer are. She’s quite enjoying it at the moment.
- I’m moving from the comic shop back to a book store I worked at a couple of years ago (and miss very much). I may stay on for a day or two a week at the comic shop, but that’s up in the air. The book store also knows about my medium-range plans, hence the fact that they’re no longer a secret and I’m talking about them.
- We’re still looking at relocating to Victoria, but it’s not as pressing a concern as it was a few months back.

Taking our time with the relocation means we can be more choosy when searching for jobs in what is essentially a depressed market, and it means we can look for an apartment we might actually want to live in (as opposed to the first one that crosses our path). That’s fantastic, no two ways about it, but now I also have to put the pieces of my shattered plans and resolve back together.

Having the attention span of a crow is great when you’re just leading your regular old geeky lifestyle—it enables you to change course at a moment’s notice and chase after some new and cool thing from halfway ’round the world. In terms of trying to keep your life on track and stick to a course of action that runs contrary to most of your instincts, though—not so good. It’s become clear over the last few months that staying on target is something that will require most of my energy, willpower and determination in order to succeed. It will be hard work. It will most certainly kick my ass on more than one occasion. But it will be worth it in the end, no matter where I end up living.

(Also, as a brief aside, I’m not sure why the website has decided to spontaneously put the sidebar on the bottom of the front page, but I’ll look toward dealing with that when I have a bit more time in the next couple of days. Grrr…)