Work has been terrible lately, and I have been in a creative slump as a result. It’s depressing, and I was already depressed to begin with. 

The Good…

Not all is doom and gloom however. An honest inventory reveals a few bright spots:

The Icemaker Cometh: I’ve always loved ice in everything, because I like my drinks (especially water) really, really cold. My last apartment had an icemaker in the freezer and I admit, I got spoiled. It was the first time I ever had a continuous supply of ice without any effort. (Ice cube trays be damned!) My current apartment (which sucks in more ways than one) does not have an icemaker, so after five years of living here, I decided to remedy it by purchasing one of these:

I figured out that I can make enough ice to fill the ice cube bin in a few hours, and then I have enough ice to get me through the week. It’s a small win, but I’ll take it. I have no regrets buying this.

Laundry Made Easy (or at least less difficult and less damn expensive): My last apartment had a washer and dryer in the unit. (Why the hell did I move? Oh yeah, bad management. Which is also what makes my current apartment suck.)

My current apartment has laundry facilities in the basement: two washers and two dryers for six units total, which is not a bad proportion. The only problem is that they are 1) generally filthy, and 2) terribly expensive. The capitalists that run this place have decided that $2.50 for washing a smallish load of laundry and $2.50 for drying the same is appropriate. 

Fortunately, a colleague told me that shortly after covid became a thing, she bought a portable washing machine that fits in her bathtub, and has been using it to wash her and her daughter’s clothes for the past four years. And it only cost her $90! After several discussions and lot of web searches, I finally found one:

Of course, I paid around $150, and it only washes clothes, it doesn’t dry them, so I’ve had to figure that part out. And while you can just follow the directions that came with it, there are a lot of tips and tricks that end up making it pretty efficient. I will probably write these up in a separate post, because this one is truly life changing. (Also, clotheslines are also your friend. But more about that in the next post.)

The biggest thing I’ve learned so far: You are probably using entirely too much detergent when you wash your clothes. Do you often feel itchy? It could be all that extra soap.

(Another also: my friend Cody donated some composite lumber that helped me build a platform that makes this much better. Details, like I said, are to follow.)

We Pay a Lot for Water: A few months ago I bought a couple of bottles of liquid hand soap because they were coconut scented, as I do love the smell of coconut. 

I didn’t realize until I got home and used them for the first time that they were foaming hand soaps. I don’t have a problem with foaming hand soap, but I also don’t have a refill bottle of foaming hand soap.

So I looked it up (thank you, reddit!) and found out that you can make your own by mixing regular liquid hand soap with water in a 1:2 ratio. I mixed 150 mL of liquid hand soap with 300 mL of water, and added about 10 drops of lemongrass essential oil, poured it into the now empty container, and voilà!—lemon-scented liquid hand soap—at a third of the price.

The Bad…

As I said earlier, work has been sucking it lately. In April, I took a lateral promotion that I hoped would turn into a vertical promotion at some point, but it did not. It just ended up being an entirely new set of hoops I had to jump through to get that vertical promotion, whereas in my old position, I had already jumped through most of them. This was a bad decision on my part, but something I could only realize in hindsight. But I’ve been taking notes:

1. I went from a line manager who always writes things down so that you know where you stand at all times to a line manager who never writes things down so that you never know where you stand. (On the plus side, my new line manager has a lot of energy, which my old manager didn’t always manage to muster, but new manager is basically a chaos demon. As someone described them to me, they are “all hurricane but no eye”. I didn’t get that before I took this position. I understand it perfectly now.)
2. My company has adequate management, but it is completely lacking in leadership. We did have good leadership when our former managing director was here, but he got promoted to a vice-presidency (of course!) because of his good leadership. We have a couple of line managers who are good leaders (including my former line manager), but that’s about it. 

If you are wondering about the difference between management and leadership, I define them this way: management is about making sure the paperwork is done correctly, and leadership is about making sure the people who are doing the paperwork are adequately supported. At least 50% of most jobs is about getting the paperwork correct, so good management is absolutely essential. But without good leadership—that is, ensuring that the people who are doing that paperwork have what they need on both a professional and personal basis—that organization is always going to suffer from burnout and turnover.

But don’t take my word for it…This is a well-known fact in the management community, but it is all too often ignored. If only you could do a web search for this and get some solutions, right? I mean, people have been managing other people for at least 4,000 years, because whoever got the Egyptian pyramids built must have been one hell of a motivator, since there wasn’t a single eJira ticket filed during their construction. If only the internet didn’t make this information so freakishly easy to find:

Like I said, I’ve been in a creative slump lately. I did create a zine called “Cleaning Tips” which is entirely drawn by hand and is about how to clean various things. I finally finished it up a few months ago, but have I managed to add it to my Etsy shop or even post about it on my social media? Nope. It took all the energy I had just to get it to the finish line, and it’s just been sitting there ever since. 

The sad thing is that I can’t figure out if this is my ADHD causing this (what did I do with that to-do list?), or if it’s my anxiety (what if I post this and everybody hates it?), or my depression (what’s the point of posting this, because everybody will just hate it?), or just the chaos that is work just leaving me too exhausted to even bother? I have absolutely no idea at this point, because I am both exhausted and depressed and feeling entirely too anxious about everything (I fully expect to walk into work tomorrow and be fired, even though The Powers That Be have given me exactly zero expectations that I will be fired—welcome to the world of anxiety disorders). 

I do have some data points, however, thanks to Git. 

I spent a few days working (or trying to work and not succeeding very much) on the codex, my zine about Linux. A quick check of my revision history shows that the last time I worked on this zine was over half a year ago:

What the actual hell?

But this really shouldn’t be a surprise at all. I mean, look at my public heatmap:

That’s just damn sad, if you ask me. (This is public activity, mind you, and I have a lot of private projects on there that I was contributing a lot to up until May. My private heatmap looks a lot different up to that point. But after that? Nothing. Nada, rien, zip, zilch, zero, niente.)

Anyway, I fully intend to get the next issue (#6) of the codex out in the next four weeks. 

The Ugly…

My stepdad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease last week. I have no idea what this means for us going forward.

In general, neither of my parents are in the best of health, and I have no idea what to do. I have no siblings that I can rely on, and nobody to ask for help. 

And Now For Something Completely Different

I am experimenting with making pizza crust. Because let’s face it, toppings are basic. But good pizza starts with a good crust. (Or a crappy crust in the right context, which is what we all loved about that school cafeteria pizza we ate for years.)

I started with two different recipes, one from Austin Kleon, and another that was chosen at random just because it came up at the top of Google’s search results. (Reminder to myself to write a letter to Mr. Google about how crappy his search engine is. That will teach him!)

My local grocery store had actual bread flour on sale last week, so I bought a five-pound bag of bread flour, which I’ve never used before. (I’ve always been an all-purpose flour kind of guy.) My breadmaker has a “dough” function, so I thought this would be its time to shine. 

Alas, it was not.

I tried by cutting the recipe in half, so I started out with 180 grams of bread flour. That turned out more like a batter so I kept adding bread flour until we had a dough, but my breadmaker was really struggling at that point because there’s a lot of gluten in there. I like my breadmaker and don’t want to kill it, so I took the dough out and finished it by hand, and it’s proofing now. Again, I took notes:

1. I could make this by hand or using my KitchenAid stand mixer if I want to go with 100% bread flour, but if I want to use my breadmaker’s “dough” function (which I do, because I’m lazy efficient) I will try half bread flour and half all-purpose flour next time. 
2. Kneading dough by hand is always a pleasant experience, but kneading dough made with 100% bread flour is really different. It’s a stronger, firmer dough (because of all the extra protein), and I had my doubts throughout the kneading. I was, in fact, constantly thinking “I’ll get there, but it better be worth the trip.” I got there, but the dough is in the oven proofing (that is, the oven is turned off, but the light is on) and I probably won’t have the energy to bake anything today, so we’ll find out tomorrow if it was worth the trip, I guess.

What I love about having a breadmaker is that it takes a lot of the tediousness out of making bread. But that is also its downfall. The point of kneading bread dough is that you rest when either you are tired or the dough is tired. You know when you’re tired because you feel it in your arms and your hands and your wrists. You know when the dough is tired because it fights you when you try to push it or fold it. As an apprentice breadmaker, you will get tired before the dough gets tired. But with experience (and exercise), you build your endurance and you get to a point of strength where you can push past the dough fighting against you. You can over-knead it.

A good baker is one who has learned where those two lines cross. It’s okay to push a little bit past your own fatigue to get the dough to where it needs to be. But it’s also okay to stop before you’re tired if the dough is ready to rest. As with all things, it’s about balance.

At this point, I think I’ve come full circle, at least on the job front. There is a decided lack of balance here. I can knead the dough of my job all I want, but it’s never going to rise. All that will happen is that I will exhaust myself and accomplish nothing. I think the yeast here is dead, and no matter how much I knead it, or how much I let it rest, it will come to nothing. It’s time to move on. 

Which is what I need to do. I just need the time and energy and space to do that. I have about three weeks of leave saved up, so I guess it’s time to start using that.

About the Featured Image

Almost three years ago, I felt like I wasn’t pushing myself creatively, so I gave myself the task of spending the entire month of October taking photographs every day and posting them to my gallery. You can see the results here. And realizing that this was three years ago makes me so sad. I love photography and am terribly burdened that I can’t do more of it. (But more of that down the road.)

This picture is part of that project. 

But also, the irony that you can pull an alarm that doesn’t actually alarm the right people seems apropos for the current times.

So…

I guess I use the word “so” quite a bit. If you know me in real life you’re probably used to it by now. If not, all I can say is that I’m in good company:

Peter Gabriel is good company, right? 

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