{"id":62,"date":"2018-12-06T11:11:58","date_gmt":"2018-12-06T19:11:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/?p=62"},"modified":"2018-12-04T22:23:03","modified_gmt":"2018-12-05T06:23:03","slug":"uncle-josh-pokes-2018-with-a-stick-1-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/2018\/12\/06\/uncle-josh-pokes-2018-with-a-stick-1-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Uncle Josh Pokes 2018 with a Stick (1\/3)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The big thing this year was my internet provider, web host provider, and personal website were crushed when John Ogden shuttered SpiritOne. I started with SpiritOne back in the 90&#8217;s on dial up when I was on a Mac and a few other local ISPs told me they didn&#8217;t support Macintosh connections. I had stopped using my SpiritOne email address years ago, but the internet access and web hosting were nice. I have a backup copy of my old WordPress site but I haven&#8217;t had much luck restoring it. My new page and new blog are hosted on BlueHost and my phone provider has a decent enough DSL for our purposes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Without the blog, recounting my year could be a little more difficult. I&#8217;ll have to scan Facebook, Twitter, and the pile of Moleskine notebooks by my computer (and bed, and chair, and under the bed, and under the chair\u2026.).<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One thing I recently remembered was taking an online happiness course: The Science of Well Being which started in May or June. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I usually do these things month by month, but that can be kind of boring and I don&#8217;t have a list of publications to squee over, so maybe just some bullet points on the highlights.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">2018 was the first year I worked a real job with real pay and real benefits, which has led me to not fearing homelessness or starvation or premature death. I was a contractor for a couple of years which was pretty good, then I was brought on full time in November for about 60% more pay. Last Christmas was good.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I took my first Goodreads challenge with 50 books. I&#8217;m sitting at 62 and haven&#8217;t recorded all the books I read. I&#8217;ll save that for a different post.<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Flew to Las Vegas for work. Got fatshamed in both flights. <\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Did Broadway Night, our annual church music program fundraiser. I sang a tepid version of Sit Down You&#8217;re Rocking the Boat, marking the second year in a row I had to pull a song out of a hat to fill the program.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">At work I had to learn Power Query and Power BI to do a lot of magic. Mischief Managed.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Flew to Reno for the memorial service of Father Paul Towner, who was my rector from 14 months old to 18 when I did my petulant &#8220;I&#8217;m too good for God&#8221; shtick. Saw old friends. Beth Hastings and I looked at the list of people confirmed in 1984, remembering all the names and the pointing to one name \u00a0and saying &#8220;who was that?&#8221; in almost perfect unison. Fatshamed by too-small seat belts.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Bought Stephanie a car for her 50th birthday: A Kia Niro. Damn good car. We feel better knowing we&#8217;re helping the environment and really enjoying it when we get out of the car and see &#8220;AVG TRIP MILEAGE: 67&#8221;. We used to cry out &#8220;Fuck you Rex Tillerson&#8221; but we&#8217;ve calmed down now.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Went to a Deadlift Seminar in Bellevue from the <a href=\"https:\/\/startingstrength.com\/\">Starting Strength<\/a> program. Also went to Seattle Art Museum MoPop history of Marvel. We followed this up by buying rubber matting for the garage and bumper plates for the bar so I could deadlift on something better that bare concrete. Things went swimmingly until early October when I damn-near hurt myself failing a 345 lb squat.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We walked Southwest Walking Trail number 4, which we should have done last year, or the year before. There are parks and stairwells in the crevices all over this city.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I replaced my dying Pebble with a FitBit. Someday I will have the smart pocket watch of by dreams.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The June Ashland trip triggered some sort of Sword and Sandal Serialized Saga but for the life of my I can&#8217;t remember what it was. <\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I made a prediction in September that the blue wave of November 18, should it happen, could be followed by &#8220;Trump is a Democrat Sleeper Agent.&#8221; I was wrong. The accusation never came up that I found.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The October Oregon Shakespeare Festival trip coincided with a big move in the office. I came back not sure where I was, who I was, or if I had a job.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I failed NaNoWriMo, and I&#8217;ve already autopsied that bastard.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did create a Twitter Bot called &#8220;NaNoWhineMo&#8221; that spat out excuses all month. Got some attention from the self-pub crowd.<\/span><\/li>\n<li>I instituted a new holiday in honor of Douglas Adams: Hoopy and Frood day. I called out several people on social media and in my life who were good to me in small ways.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Reality continued to suck with more school shootings and public shootings that made the news than I care to contemplate.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Some things I posted or saw on social media that I want to remind myself of:<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When you find yourself contemplating exclusions to the Golden Rule you are on the wrong path.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t post it but I shared it and it&#8217;s worth keeping around:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">&#8220;What happened to civility? You labeled it &#8216;political correctness&#8217; and decided it was a bad thing&#8221; &#8212; Posted by Gabriel Gentile on June 26<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And I said this:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I always thought true geeking-out fandom involved &#8220;I LOVE THIS THING AND I WANT TO SHARE IT WITH YOU&#8221; and not &#8220;I LOVE THIS THING AND YOU&#8217;RE NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR IT!&#8221; <a class=\"twitter-hashtag pretty-link js-nav\" dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/Comicsgate?src=hash\" data-query-source=\"hashtag_click\"><s>#<\/s><b>Comicsgate<\/b><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">https:\/\/twitter.com\/JoshuaREnglish\/status\/1034204544039710721<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And this:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Whenever I try to kill time it fights back by piling up on my to-do list.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I will cover movies and books in other posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The big thing this year was my internet provider, web host provider, and personal website were crushed when John Ogden shuttered SpiritOne. I started with SpiritOne back in the 90&#8217;s on dial up when I was on a Mac and a few other local ISPs told me they didn&#8217;t support Macintosh connections. I had stopped &hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[1],"tags":[37,38,22],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-37","tag-comicsgate","tag-nanowrimo"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions\/63"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}