Simplify

6FPS V4#2 - Photography and More
A Newsletter by Chuq Von Rospach
February 14, 2022

 

Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

We’ve hit the equinox and the days are getting longer, and what’s fascinating up here in Washington is how fast that changes. In the last month I think we’ve gained about an hour of light, and I’m no longer starting and ending work in the dark. By summer, we’ll gain more hours and long, late evening twilights.

I’m happy to see that; I’m looking forward to getting out more, and it’s even warmed up a bit, where we’re seeing mid-40’s highs and maybe even a 50 soon, but if there was one thing I hadn’t really thought about in the move to Washington, it was 40 degree weather consistently for weeks at a time, and while I’ve long said I handle cold well because I’m self-insulated (and it’s true), what that means is very different at 50 degrees rather than the more typical 55-60 degrees in Silicon Valley. I’ve adapted, and own multiple coats with different number of layers in them now, of course, and gloves. Turns out my fingers turn traitor first.

Supply Chain fun

January was when a number of projects started happening. We bought a refrigerator in early November; at the time it was on a boat due to land in Vancouver and trucked over the border whenever that could be arranged. It was due to dock about a week after the crazy winter snow weather hit that washed out much of Vancouver’s ability to, well, go anywhere, of course. It actually arrived in Mid-January, and is now happily installed in our kitchen — and we’ve ordered the matching dishwasher, which will arrive… sometime in February, we think. Maybe.

There are a couple of challenging things we’re seeing consistently right now; one is supply chain and delivery delays. The other is simply crafts people being available. There will be some delay on the dishwasher in part because the installer is already booked into late February, because of everyone else buying things, and because there is only one installer available right now. We’ve seen similar things working with other trades; our landscapers are really short-staffed right now and struggling to grow their teams, for instance. While I’ve got the electrician scheduled to come in and update the garage and shop (and some inside projects as well), it’s taken us from early December to February (they are scheduled to be here for two days about when this hits your inbox), just to work out the details, get the quote and approve it, and find time on his schedule.

We started working with a company to install a stair lift here in October, and they are so backed up with work we still don’t know when we can get on their schedule. they’re working projects as fast as they can, and they’ve been trying to staff up more, but… hiring crafts are hard right now. It seems that one aspect is that Covid convinced some (many?) of the older craft people to retired, and so are out of the market. From talking to some of these groups, it doesn’t even seem to be “we don’t want to pay them more”, it’s simply “we can’t find people to try to bring in”.

This feels like a longer-term systemic problem that isn’t going away soon, either. And it’s not like I can just switch to a different firm; I’ve found in my talking to different companies that they are all in more or less the same boat.

In December I wanted to hire a handyman to come in and do a couple of smallish things. Three of those I tried to call had shut down their business, two more were out of state and not actively taking jobs, and every other one was quoting at least a month before they would have any time to schedule.

Another project going for a while was replacing the stoves; this place had a pellet stove in the great room, an empty space where a wood stove was downstairs (that the owners took with them with our permission), and a small wood stove in the workshop. In November, we put deposits down on three pellet stoves, with hoped for installation in Mid-December. As it turns out, we couldn’t get installation scheduled until January 28, and then the snow hit and nobody was going up on the roof until that melted, and then the installer team lost some people to Covid for a couple of weeks, and…

But in January we did get the three new stoves delivered; unfortunately, due to some parts that didn’t get delivered to the company, we could only get one (the one in the garage) fully functional. The other two have been standing in place, idle, for the last two weeks because, well, supply chain issues. As soon as a couple of needed parts come in, they’ll be back to finish the hookup. And… there are a couple of cosmetic parts that they think won’t actually arrive until… March?

But I must say having a working stove in the garage is nice, since it sits right around 40F k in the winter.

These kind of delays just seems to be the way it is these days. So patience is a virtue, but I’m finding with some planning and patience, things do get done…

The New Shop

The good news is, the electrician is due out just as this issue arrives, and after two days, the electrical setup in the workshop will be updated, and I’m having all the lighting in the garage and shop replaced with new, brighter LED fixtures, and so I will be able to start fitting it out soon. I’ve ordered a few things already, including a workbench, my dust collection and a miter saw. My table saw is next, but I want to get stuff up and running that’s on hand rather than fill the place with more boxes.

I did have a question about what I intended to do in the shop. For the first couple of months I think it’s mostly figuring out how to set up the shop, but what got me started down this path was wanting to get back onto a lathe, and learn how to turn bowls and hollow forms. I don’t expect to have a lathe in house until spring, but the goal is to spend a few hours each week in there puttering until stuff starts coming out that doesn’t go right in the trash.

My 2022 goal is to get to a point where I can design and create something to give away to friends for Christmas; this was inspired by my mom’s hand painting christmas cards to send to people every year until she lost the ability to. I’ve done this with my photography, but I wanted to create something with my hands for a long time, and this has turned into my first challenge; it’s something I hope to do every year moving forward, and gives me about six months to get to where I’m turning out things I find pleasing enough to share.

I also have started exploring the idea of creating things that I can donate to organizations doing fund raising auctions, and/or setting up a store to sell directly with proceeds going to some organization I support. It’s all nebulous, but it’s a thing I’m working towards.

Time will tell how this all works out…

My 2021 Photo chapbook is out!

After waiting so long to get 2020.1 out for my chapbook of images from 2020, I decided to dig into doing the same for 2021 early, and I’m happy to say that 2021.1 is out now, also.

It is a compilation of the images I took in 2021 that I liked; 2021 was a year of transitions and my photography was at times sporadic, but I have 66 pages of images, covering the last of my time in California and the first few months of living here in Washington.

The chapbooks don’t have an over-riding theme, but document what I did during a given year. I’ve been doing them since 2019 as a way to have a printed, permanent record of my images I can browse through. I print those books for myself via Blurb, and then create the e-books to share with everyone. It’s available in PDF, ePub and Mobi format as you prefer.

And with that, see you next issue!

What's New from Chuq?

Simplify

A trend I’ve noticed among people I listen to is a shift away from the idea of a “new years resolution” more towards longer term planning for change, and to identify themes they want to explore and focus on for the upcoming year. This is similar to some of the ways I’ve handled a new year for a while, since I find resolutions are almost always a setup for failure. They are, more often than not, an attempt to instill a major lifestyle change without much thought and less planning, so of course they usually go knickers up fairly quickly.

Lifestyle change is about identifying habits and breaking old ones by replacing with with new, better ones. That takes time, and it adds stress to your life, because you’re now doing things that are uncomfortable. Most experts I’ve read suggest it takes about six weeks for you to rebuild an old habit into a new one that feels natural and becomes your new normal, and the bigger and more radical the change, the easier it is to fall back into old habits as you attempt to convince yourself to adopt the new ones in place. If you have a hunk of stress in your life already, then layering in this stress on top is a great way to fail at making the change stick.

There are a few ways to make this easier. A big one is to plan it out. “I want to lose weight this year” — that’s not really actionable, and often, it means someone just starts eating salads or skipping meals, until, of course, they don’t. So plan: how do you intend to lose weight, and what dietary changes will you make? More exercise? what’s the plan to implement that?

And then…. start slow and make the changes in small bits over time. A major reinvention of your dinner is tough to keep going, but switching to a bigger salad and a smaller portion of potatoes? That’s doable. That’s basically how I reinvented my diet, by finding and fixing one piece of it at a time over a period of a few years.

By switching from drama queen resolutions to a more thoughtful view of how you want to get from today to tomorrow, and by planning out the start of that journey by identifying what the first, and then the next steps after that. I generally do this by identifying “next”, and as long as “next” carries me in the direction I ultimately want to get to, I try not to think too hard about how many “nexts” there are before the journey: and by thinking mostly about next, I give myself smaller, easier tasks with a higher chance of them succeeding and building that new habit, while also increasing my ability to course correct, because as I move forward along that path, often, I find my goals change a bit, and sometimes, a lot.

I think of it this way: if I want to go out for a walk, I know where I’m going to start, I generally have an idea where I’m going to end up, and so a direction or path to get from one to the other. But if I were to try to just long-jump from the start to the finish, that will end up badly.

But instead, just take that first step, and then another. Along the way, some alternate path might appear and you wander that way instead. A walk is really a long series of individual actions and successes, if you think about it; and that, to me, is a great analogy for just about every life choice that’s made where you’re leaving where you are right now, and setting out for some other place you’d rather be.

As I considered how I want to move forward in 2022, I came up with a few key concepts to help me set the direction to walk. Two I’m currently working on are organize and simplify.

There’s a very subtle change to this newsletter you may or may not notice. It’s that the email address I display has changed from chuqui@mac.com to chuqvr@gmail.com. I’ve had and used both for many years but I’ve displayed the Apple email as my “primary” one for the last few.

I’ve made this change because it will allow me to simplify. The company I now work for uses Gmail and Google for their work systems, which means I’m now living in Gmail and Calendar and Drive. I realized that if I made the same change in my personal setup, I could simplify and reduce the sheer number of different tools and places stuff gets stored, and reduce how many places my data lives and how many vendors, servers, clouds, and providers I need to manage.

I’ve shifted my email, and I’ve been slowly shifting my file storage, removing things from icloud in favor of drive, and moving things from notes (and word, and pages, and numbers, and excel, and…..) into Docks and Sheets.

I also realized I needed better organization, and for that, I’ve started using a new system for managing my personal projects, called, ClickUp(which I learned about from Mac Power Users). It may seem that adding a new tool isn’t simplifying things, but when I went through everything to collect it in ClickUp, I actually found out I was project planning various bits of my life in five different places, and I found one project that I had planned out in mostly identical ways twice, having forgotten that I’d previously mapped out the project in a different tool. This is one short from simply writing down on yellow Post-It notes and hoping you can remember where you stuck that note four months later.. If you remember you wrote the note at all.

So I’ve consolidated my planning into ClickUp, and so far, I like it even if I’m not really using it deeply. I still use Todoist as well, but there’s a clear line between how I use the two tools: Todoist is about tasks I need to do in the short term, and ClickUp handles my more strategic, longer term planning: Todoist is tactics and ClickUp is strategy.

So, think about what you want to have difference as December 2022 closes in your life. Then figure out the first step in a year-long wander that takes you in that direction. Some of those steps will be easy and fast, others slow and grumpy, but just worry about taking that first step, and doing so without tripping, or stopping and heading back to the starting point again.

And consider what themes illuminate your view of what you want out of 2022. In my case, two of them are Organize and Simplify. I think if I were to add a third, it might be Outside, in that I really feel like I need to commit to getting out of the house and going out birding and using the camera more, but I haven’t decided how to break that up into actionable pieces and how to build to something I can define as successful or not down the road.

But it’s definitely part of what I’m pondering right now (and part of why I decided it was time to step back from working full time, which I discussed last issue).

Remember, small, steady steps will take you a lot farther over time than massive leaps once in a while, with lower risk of failure (or in the case of the leap, injury).

Photo Wednesday/Feathery Friday

These are the images I posted since last issue to the blog for Photo Wednesday and Feathery Friday. To see all of these images at full size and read the stories behind their creation, you can visit:

For Your Consideration

Photography

Birds and Birding

Science and Technology

Interesting Stuff

See you soon!

And with that, I'll see you in the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along. Until then, take care, and have fun.
 

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.

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