You know how they say that no plan survives first contact with the enemy? Well, my plans barely survive first contact with the paper. It's so easy to make plan after plan, especially when you drive for a living and have hours upon hours to yourself and the open road just to think. Sometimes I get so caught up in my thoughts I have to pause my podcast or book or whatever it is I'm listening to just so I can focus on what I'm thinking about. And the worst part is I can't even write any of it down, because if I was pulling over all day to jot down the random shit that pops into my head, it would take me a week to haul one load of oil. I will admit to a bit of illegality sometimes when I open up the notes app and stumble my way through some Siri dictation in order to get some really juicy ideas down on "paper", but those are few and far between. For the most part I tell myself "this is such a good idea, you'll never forget it". Then I forget it. Sometimes within minutes...
Anyway I had plans to work out tonight, as well as put my laundry away and do some other small housekeeping things, but after cleaning up the kitchen and heating up some leftovers for dinner, I succumbed to the calls of my office chair. So I've been writing a few bits and bobs on ITP for the last 45 minutes or so, as well as spending time in a chatroom for the games community.
I really needed to make sure I got another post up today though to talk about a few of the things I forgot to mention last night. I even wrote them down on the notepad beside me and STILL failed to mention them in my list of plans post. To be fair, they are far less meaty than the ideas of podcasts and vlogs, and I rereading them now I don't even remember what one of them means, but screw it lets go with the flow here.
Before I get into it though we'll just do a quick day recap, because why not. I was planning on writing this earlier today, around 10ish, but as it is with the oil patch I was suddenly called into work. I woke up at about 8 am, which is way later than I would have liked to sleep. I really want to get into the habit of waking up before 6am every single day, except maybe the odd day here or there on my day off, because let's face it, I'm not a maniac. I have noticed though that when I get up earlier, I feel a lot better for that day and manage to get way more done. It started with wanting to get some runs in nice and early in the morning, but even on the days I don't run (or can't, due to nail in the foot syndrome), I enjoy waking up nice and early, making my bed, making a tasty breakfast, and enjoying a cup of coffee while I browse some news sites to see what's been going on in the world. Well, to be fair that does rarely happen, it's more of an ideal situation. The main issue of contention there is that my brain has far more fun browsing stupid cat pictures and ridiculous videos on reddit, but I like to tell people that I read the BBC instead. And I do! Sometimes... I just don't do it as often as I would like.
So I woke up at 8 feeling sluggish but managed to get myself upstairs and start breakfast. I made this new dish that I've done two days in a row now, and I love it. I toast some bread, then mash up some avacado with salt, pepper, and lemon juice, spread it on the bread and slap some black forest ham on there. I get some water boiling, throw some eggs in to poach, and toss the bread/ham/avacado under the broiler for a minute or two. When the eggs are done they come out, onto the bread, and crumble some goat or feta cheese over the top. You could do hollandaise too I guess, but that's a little impractical (not to mention unhealthy) to do every single day. Mix that with some home brewed, freshly ground coffee, and baby you got yourself a breakfast going!
If you're wondering why one of the eggs is already broken open, I dropped it when I was trying to plate :/
But, true to the depressingly sadistic nature of the patch, I got a call midway through making this breakfast that I would indeed be going to work that day. There go my plans of a nice early blog post, followed by a couple hours of writing, then maybe a bit of netflix before dinner. It's truly a double edged sword, because while I deeply hate disrupting my day for unfulfilling work, I need the money, and once I actually get out in the truck the jobs not that bad. It gives me a chance to devour my podcasts and audiobooks that I've come to love so very much. Plus every once in awhile I'll get hit with the grand scale of the earth and the universe when I consider how long I've been driving in essentially a straight line, and realize that when I look at a map I've barely moved half an inch, and that map is like a mote of dust to the solar system, which is a grain of sand to the galaxy, which is one of millions of grains of sand spread unfathomably far across the entirety of the universe. Yeah, try staying between the lines when that kind of grand scale smacks you in the mouth.
As usual, my "quick" recap of the day has taken up several paragraphs before I get to the actual content of todays post. Although, this one is a bit of a cheat post, since the actual content is just borrowing off of yesterday's content. Oh well, such is life.
The first thing I had written down here was blog reviews. I don't really know what the purpose of this note was, because I already touched on my desire to do some reviews on the blog, but I know that there was a purpose to writing it down when the deed was done, so let's see where this leads me. Right below that I wrote "weekly blog", so from this I can only surmise that I wanted to touch on my idea for weekly posts that have a theme to them. When I was experimenting with calendar events and setting them up in my calendar app, I added one that reads "Blog Post: Podcast Review/Recommendation" every Sunday. If it's not already clear here, the plan as of now is to write a post that can go up every Sunday talking about a new, or possibly old, podcast that I really like, or maybe one that I didn't like so much. As I've already professed several times, I am an avid podcast listener. Along these lines I would love to do something regarding TV shows, movies, books, etc. I had the idea while driving today of doing a book report type post maybe like once a month, where I research a book really well and write a detailed report about it.
The nice thing about these scheduled type theme posts is that on my days off I can write up a whole bunch and set them to auto publish on the days that I want them too. That way I will have a steady stream of content, even on the days where I might be super busy at work and not be able to write a blog post that day. The downside is the amount of time each of these projects (including the ones I talked about yesterday) could take up, and it would be really easy to do a whole bunch of things half assed instead of doing a few things really well. Mayhaps the best way to counter this potential inevitability is to roll stuff out slowly, one at a time. This could also be helpful when content for certain segments start dwindling. For example, though I have a nice backlog of podcasts I like so that if I can't find a new one that week I'll have a fall back, that list isn't infinite, and neither is my time, to my great dismay. Eventually I am going to run out of podcasts to talk about, so that weekly segment might have to turn into a monthly one.
Something else I was toying with the idea of was maybe voice recording my blog posts and including a link at the top of the post to the audio version. This might seem a bit silly, but it hits two buttons. The first is that I really like recording stuff, even if it's just very minimal. It's kind of relaxing. The other is that I know I really, really enjoy audio content, probably even more than written content, so I'm a big believer in audio versions of everything. Once I got into the groove of reading, recording, and exporting, it really wouldn't be that hard. When work was slow awhile ago I spent some time recording other people's stories on ITP and posting them, and I got so that the time between deciding to record and publishing to soundcloud was sometimes less than 15 minutes. It really doesn't take very long once you get used to the rhythm.
This all sounds like a lot of work, and I know it's really easy to throw this stuff out now with intentions of following through, but not actually doing so. Consider this my disclaimer that not everything I talked about here is a sure thing. Some of it might happen, some of it might not. If I had my way, I would never have to sleep and the days would be 10 hours longer and I would win the lottery so I didn't have to work and could spend all day making and consuming awesome content. But those things will never happen, and I've got to deal with what I've got. The harsh reality is that the main reason for this blog is to get me writing every day, and to improve my writing. Yesterday I finished writing and published the post, then went to bed. It wasn't until I was driving around for work that I remembered there was some stuff I had left out that I wanted to include. Undoubtedly tomorrow at some point I will think of something that should have been put in this post. In the end it's not a huge deal, I can put it in the next one, or if I forget time and time again it probably wasn't all that terribly important to begin with.
I just want to quickly go over the potential projects I've listed in my last two posts so they are nicely condensed in a single paragraph I can reference later. I want to start a vlog. At least 2 videos a week talking about stuff that's happening in my life. I want to make some other videos that may be one off ideas or may be recurring things. I want to start a podcast. Ideally I would start a bunch of podcasts for different topics, but let's go with one for now. It'll most likely be about worldbuilding and creating settings for my writing. I want to do more review posts for things that I buy. One will be coming in the near future for my backpack that I used in Europe. Keep your eyes out in late September or early October for that. I want to write posts reviewing lots of non material things like podcasts, books, TV shows, movies, etc. I want to write some formal posts that could be handed into a university as an essay project. Researched and sourced essay's about things that I am interested in or feel strongly about. Possibly most importantly, I want to continue to write here every day. It's some of the best therapy I can think of, being able to just spill all my stresses and frustrations out into writing. Way cheaper than a shrink too.