Priorities

6FPS V5#9: September 11, 2023

chuqvr@gmail.com • @chuqvr@fosstodon.org • chuq.me
Glass • GoodReads • Photography

Subscribe & Archives: chuq.me/6fps

Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

Retirement update: I’m still enthusiastically unemployed and enjoying it. I have started losing track of weekends, which is nice. I am trying to remember that when I go out places, to do so on weekdays, when the crowds tend to be smaller, but overall, I’m kinda liking this.

Been working through a bunch of things this month. We had our summer run of hot days, and now, all of a sudden, we’re cool and damp with a bit of rain again. The alders are starting to change colors, so fall is upon us for sure.

We’ve been working with the group that maintains our irrigation systems to add a couple of circuits to cover some of the plantings we did this spring. Unfortunately, there were some technical glitches (a failed wire on a valve that failed AFTER final testing) that we didn’t catch until too late, so some of the azaleas we planted didn’t make it. It’s all fixed now, but I need to arrange to get the dead plants fixed. We also had one irrigation circuit fail become something (damned raccoons) bit one of the pipes in half, and that cost us a couple of the rhodies.

But that’s life in the boonies. The circuits are fixed, and I need to sit down with my landscapers and figure out when and how to replace the failed things this fall. On top of that, we have 400+ tulip and daffodil bulbs coming soon, and when they arrive, they’ll get planted for next spring’s glory.

I am also having a water feature put in, a two level unit with a small waterfall, which will live outside the deck upstairs. That’s going to be put in soon after this issue is in your hands, so more details hopefully next month. And I decided to go ahead and have sprinklers added outside my office, which currently isn’t watered, and then I plan to have it cleared out and replanted. That’s likely to happen next spring.

One final possible project: I’m considering whether or not to tear out the lawn where the water feature is and do something else with that space around the new water feature. Or maybe pull some of it out. Or leave it alone. Not sure, and we’re going to live with it for a while.

To get ready for the water feature install, I have the electrician out this week, doing a few minor things, but also a very needed update: the electrical outlet where the feature will go is currently a not-great plastic box with two outlets, which are protected from the elements by being covered by a plastic jar. Not. Exactly. Code. So we’re getting it updated with a proper outlet with a weather cover.

After this, I don’t really have any projects in mind for the place, I feel it’s in good shape.

New Yard Species

We’ve recently been having Coyotes visit, with what seems to be a mother and and older cub coming through the property a couple of times recently, and in the last couple of days, the sounds of a larger group yodeling from quite close by.

A nice new visitor, though, was when the security cameras picked up a bobcat, which wandered through overnight. We know they’re in the area, but first time we’ve actually seen evidence of one.

The only species that I’d expect to see here that we haven’t now is Mountain Lion, which, honestly, I don’t mind one bit…

Santa Clara County Audubon exploring a name change

It’s nice to see that SCVAS is now officially exploring a name change to remove the name of Audubon from the organization. This was under discussion when I was volunteering there, and I know making that change was the preferred option by most, but it’s a difficult and expensive undertaking. They did do a member survey on the idea, and I’m thrilled that it came out so strongly in favor of changing. I’m going to be curious what the naming choices they look at will be.

Olympic National Park (and other trips)

Last spring I had a couple of days planned to stay in Olympic National Park to explore, and had to cancel because allergies kicked my butt. I’m trying again, with three nights at Sol Duc Lodge in October, a couple of weeks before their winter shutdown. It’s mostly just to let me not have to drive 2+ hours each way and spend more time exploring, not driving, plus a chance to unplug and kick back a bit. I’m going to try to do this a couple of times a year, just for a couple of days mid-week on the edges of the season, and hopefully will get some nice weather to go along with it.

I’ve also tentatively planned a trip out to Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge in early November, depending on weather. The first Sandhill Cranes are already there, which has me seriously thinking of a day trip, but again, it’s 2+ hours each way, and while I can do that, it’s a long haul. Spending a couple of days closer to it lets me spend a lot more time birding than driving, which I prefer. I used to do that for my trips to Sacramento NWR (also about 2.5 hours each way from Santa Clara), and I much prefer doing that when I can.

I’m pondering some longer trips, but nothing firm yet. The one I’m currently considering is to head out to Leavenworth, then down to Pendleton and back to civilization through the Columbia River Gorge via historic 84, probably 4-5 days, maybe a week. I’d also like to do something during a winter to get back to some of my old stomping grounds and see Merced NWR, and hopefully someday Morro Bay again, but I’m not sure that’ll happen in the next year or so. Other than that, I find right now I have little thought of exploring or visiting California; I don’t miss it yet.

Still somewhere on the long term planning list, a return to Yellowstone. It is “only” about a 13 hour drive now, as opposed to a 15 hour drive, but I’m still expecting to do it in two days in and out. it’s also a place that is always crowded now (like Yosemite), which isn’t fun, and in terms of lodging, it seems there’s never off-season pricing anywhere around it.

I need to start thinking about a plan on where I want to explore and what to prioritize, but that still feels too much like work. I do feel I should be emphasizing exploring the new areas living here opens up, and not going back into the old favorites, but right now, I’m just starting to think about all of this a bit more seriously.

There are no heroes here

The sad reality of the Oakland A’s continues. I wanted to note this piece about the owner talking up how much money he’s losing because it shows some of the real numbers that are involved with the income streams around even a lousy team like the A’s.

The reality is that since Haas sold the team, the A’s have been saddled with both lousy owners and a decrepit stadium that’s desperately needing replacement. Oakland, meanwhile spent huge sums of money on luring the Raiders back, building Mount Davis (which is horrible), and offering the A’s nothing but pushback and excuses. Both sides — owners and city — have failed the fans and let them down. The city of Oakland also then lost the Raiders again to Las Vegas, who, of course, left behind some significant loans that the city took on as part of luring them back.

The relationship between the A’s the the city is beyond broken. Chanting “Sell the Team” as the A’s fans do ignores the reality that this requires someone to be stupid enough to buy the team given it’s situation in Oakland, and a ballpark for them to play in, because the Coliseum is beyond fixing. City leaders have repeatedly botched and torpedoed deals that could have fixed this — and so have the owners of the team.

There are no heroes here, except perhaps those fans that still somehow believe there’s a way forward. It looks like the A’s are going to have a new home in Vegas, down the street from the Raiders, and I’m not suggesting they deserve it, but they definitely need it. It’s time for this long, sad chapter of failure on both sides of the stadium fight to end, everyone declare divorce and the A’s head off for a fresh start elsewhere.

The only thing left to figure out is just how messy and costly to both sides the divorce is going to be.

New Wallpapers!

I’ve finally done something I’ve wanted to do for a while, which is come up with a way where the wallpapers I offer can be easily downloaded and used onto phones and tablets. I also never loved offering them in batches (which made it way more complicated to use on phones and tablets, too).

It took me a couple of days to sort out, but I’ve come up with a new UI for the wallpaper pages that I like, and which I think improves the ability to review and browse the images, and download individual images that you wish to use — and which works with phones and tablets (at least on IOS, I can’t test Android)

I’ve put up a new batch of 12 images just for 6FPS subscribers, and you can see the thumbnails below. A fun bit of trivia is that these are some of the oldest images in my collection from my very early days in digital — they are all from 2006-2007, meaning they are getting close to being 20 years old. But, especially with modern processing tools, they’re still what I consider really good images that are quite usable today, which makes me happy.

Hope they make you happy!

Free Prints to Subscribers

Anyone who’s interested in a free 8x10 print of one of my images si welcome to it. All you need to do is check out the images in one of the four portfolio galleries on my photography page, and then send me an email with the request, including the title of the image (or URL to the image), your name and a mailing address. My only requirement is that the email the request comes from must be a subscriber to 6FPS when I get the request. I will mail these out at no charge worldwide for any request I get during November, as quickly as I can make the prints and get them packaged up.

And with that, see you next issue!

Priorities

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot is my life priorities in retirement, although at first glance, tying retirement to priorities feels a bit silly.

That said, I do think it’s important to figure out what matters. People who’s subscribed for a while might have noticed I haven’t talked about the workshop very much over the last few months. That’s because, in all honesty, that whole project and focus stalled, and I ended up effectively putting it on hold. Why?

Priorities. I found, honestly, that I simply didn’t have time for that set of projects. This bothered me for a while, because I see the value of shop time as part of my self-care, when I sat back and thought about it, I realized that both my birding and my photography were higher priorities in my self-care time, and that I simply didn’t have enough spare time to do all three well. That made it easier to stop fretting about the lack of progress.

I think it’s important to try to keep my priorities and where I put my time and effort in some kind of balance.

As a general rule, I’m pretty well aligned in my priorities. Before July 1, they were:

  1. My family

  2. My job

  3. My self-care

    1. Birding

    2. Photography

    3. Unwind time (reading, video games, etc)

    4. The shop

One of the expectations I gave myself was deleting the time I needed to dedicate to the job would allow me to allocate more time into the other priorities. So far that’s been the case, although I’ve added a lot more time into unwind time and not so much more into the shop so far — I really wanted to just unwind and let the personal batteries trickle charge back into full capacity.

I’ve also had one project — removing more of the built-in workbenches — that’s intimidated the hell out of me, and which I’ve worried about the safety of doing it solo. In the last week, I’ve come up with what I think is a low-danger plan, and so I’m going to shortly spend a few days working primarily on the shop and getting that task out of the way.

When I was younger, I had a tendency to think I could just bulldog my way through everything. That often involved not only lighting the candle at both ends, but putting a blowtorch to the middle as well. As you might imagine, that didn’t always work out so well, and I slowly started understanding that I did, in fact, have limits. That’s when I started trying to prioritize what I did and try to align time spent to the top priorities — if you set something as a top priority and then don’t actually commit the time to do it properly, you’re lying to yourself. Recognizing that is not a fun aspect of all of this, and fixing it can be really unpleasant, but I think it’s critical to learning to live happily in your own skin.

Now that I’ve been enthusiastically unemployed for a couple of months (time is flying!) I’m pushing forward again in various directions, and planning ahead for some of my new “no 8:30AM standups” life. I scheduled a few days in Olympic National Park, replacing my cancelled-by-allergies spring trip, and I have pencilled in two nights for a trip to Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge to photograph the Sandhill Cranes.

I hope to take one somewhat longer trip, itinerary still TBD, but it’s been another place where I’ve had to sit down and figure out priorities. Part of me really misses my old California winter birding in places like Merced NWR and Morro Bay, and taking a trip down there would be nice.

But… that would be comfortable and fun — but would it be my priority? On reflection, no. For now, I should be putting more effort into exploring and learning this new region I moved to, because, in part, that’s why I moved here.

So I’m currently considering taking about a week for a loop into eastern Washington and Oregon (Leavenworth and Pendleton, perhaps) and then down to the Columbia River gorge. Some of this area I’ve explored before, but I haven’t been to the gorge since well before the big fire it had, and it should be a great place to go and experiment with the camera.

There are some other things I’d like to do (Malheur NWR, where Ammon Bundy and his band of idiots holed up and trashed the place a few years back) but it’s far enough off the path I think it’s a different trip at a different time.

Have you sat down and thought through what your priorities are? And have you looked to see if that list of priorities matches up with where you put your time? If you haven’t, I recommend you try.

The results might surprise you. They might make you uncomfortable — but if they do, it’s a chance to improve yourself. Or at least gain insight into yourself a bit and get more aligned with your goals.

It’s worth an honest try. And when I finally stopped lying to myself about my goals and priorities and started getting everything aligned, I ended up being a lot happier with myself.

Not a bad thing to do…

For Your Considerations

Birds and Birding

Photography

Science and Technology

Interesting Stuff

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqvr@gmail.com).

Coming out monthly on the 2nd Monday of the month, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

Some links in this newsletter may point to products at Amazon; these are affiliate links and if you use them to buy a product, I get a small cut of the sale. This doesn't make me rich, but it does help pay my web site bills. If you use the link to buy something, thank you. If you prefer not to, that's perfectly okay, also.

Know someone who might want to subscribe? Send them here. You'll also find the archives there if you want to look at previous issues.