I played bachelor again for a good bit of the week. Diana spent three days in Anaheim, California for software training (and got to go whale watching). With Youngest Daughter in her last week of camp and Middle Son watching Youngest Son’s house while he’s gallivanting around New Orleans, it was just me, the dog, and the cat.
Man, it was quiet around the house. I got a lot of housework done, though not much writing at all. But that’s life, I suppose.
We plan our menu a month at a time. It makes the grocery shopping a little easier, for the most part. We schedule meals on Monday and Wednesday and alternating Saturdays and Thursdays. Tuesdays and Sundays are for leftovers, and we eat out on Friday night, most of the time.
But being all alone, I didn’t really want to cook Wednesday night this week, and I saw just how easy it is to fall into the trap of eating out every night. We tease both of our younger boys about that because they just don’t cook much. But I get it now. Tuesday night I went to Subway because I didn’t want any of the leftovers we had, and I didn’t feel like cooking up a piece of chicken. Wednesday night I didn’t even get hungry until well after 8 PM, so I just made a PBJ sandwich. I kind of wonder what eating habits I would have fallen into if I’d ever lived on my own as a bachelor. Probably nothing good.
Parkland
Scot Peterson, the so-called “Coward of Broward,” was found not guilty of the charges resulting from his inaction in February 2018. As I said in this piece at The Good Men Project, I think that’s the right verdict in the end. If he was acting as a cop, then he had no duty to protect anyone. If he was a caregiver who failed to protect, then so did every other adult who was there that day. Yeah, he’ll always be known as the Coward of Broward (and several news stories are using that nickname in the headline), but I don’t think he should be sent to jail.
Reading
California passed a law restoring the state’s ability to decertify police officers who have committed “serious misconduct.” That’s good news, says an LA Times op-ed, and I agree. We’re down to three states that don’t have that ability. I still think there needs to be some sort of national clearinghouse to keep bad officers from job-hopping. Ideally, the FOP should take the lead on something like that, but I’d be shocked to see them do it. That means if it ever happens, it’ll be the federal government doing it, which will likely turn it into a bloated, molasses-slow mess. But we can hope.
It’s good to see ranked-choice voting coming up for a vote in Oregon. The idea still has a lot of resistance here in Oklahoma, even though we have runoff elections already in place. Our voters just can’t seem to wrap their heads around the idea of speeding up the runoff process, which is what RCV does. Baby steps, I suppose. Oregon would only be the third state to use RCV if the measure passes.
Writing
Okay, this stuff isn’t technically writing, but this part of my blog posts is where I talk about professional stuff, so there.
I’ve been considering doing more with other my other social media presences for a while now. I have accounts on TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Mastodon, and Instagram, and I haven’t been making much use of them over the years. But I happened to check my YouTube dashboard Friday night while I was sitting at the fireworks stand and discovered I’ve got over 200 subscribers. That doesn’t sound like much, but realize I haven’t posted a whole lot of anything there. I’ve only got 16 videos up there, and the most recent ones were posted over a year ago. I sat back and wondered how well I’d do if I really applied myself.
One major problem I have with videos is that I hate looking at myself, and I hate the sound of my voice. I’m going to have to work past all of that to do much of anything on most of the platforms. And I haven’t even decided what “doing more” will look like. We all know I’ve got problems meeting goals and standards, at least when I talk about them. That’s one reason I never announced I was going to start posting here weekly. I just decided to see if I could. Then I made four posts in a row. Then two months’ worth. Now I’m up to 60 consecutive weeks of blog posts.
And I’ll admit to being a little leery of TikTok, or at least of its future. I don’t want to invest time and effort into the platform only to have it banned/blocked/restricted in some significant way. Then again, I’m not really clear about the constitutionality of the feds blocking a particular social media platform. Whenever we’ve seen other countries block a social media platform during civil unrest, we’ve complained about it, so shouldn’t we practice what we preach?
At any rate, I’m hoping to start sharing more on various platforms. I’ve got a good webcam and microphone for the laptop and my phone has a decent camera too. I think the biggest obstacle is going to be creating a workflow. Making a blog post is easy enough: I write it out, make a few edits, then copy it over to my WordPress backend. For photos, I use something I took in the last week. I use ChatGPT to create a good headline, then schedule the post and I’m done.
Creating for TikTok and YouTube takes a different skillset. I have to shoot the video, then edit it, and that means watching and listening to myself, which is not at all fun for me. I could use the same video for YouTube shorts that I post to TikTok, but that feels a little like cheating (even if a lot of creators do that). On the other hand, doing a completely different video for each platform seems like it would take a lot more time and energy than I have available right now.
It’ll be a few weeks before I can start making any real changes though. The fireworks stand is taking all of my time until the 5th of July.
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