#184 - March Challenge Completed!

I opted to sleep in the extra thirty minutes this morning and took the later 8:24 train into the city. I stopped by the café on the way, they were out of their delicious vegetarian breakfast sandwich, so I opted for a Croque Monsieur. I didn’t have the time for them to make me fresh veg sandwich.

As I reached to open the door I realized I had forgotten my key fob that opens the door. Luckily, some of the animators had already started for the day and my friend Kristin was there to open the doors and greet me. Another animator, aspiring writer and friend, Sean was there as well. It’s nice to see some of the old team getting back together.

I managed to secure some company notebooks for the rest of my Toronto team, I thought that there were none left, turns out we had boxes of them.

I ate my sandwich with an earl grey vanilla tea while my computer woke up for the day. I had a last minute ten AM meeting on the books, so did a few approvals while I waited for the meeting to start. After the meeting, I did some revisions that were called and then got back to doing approvals before I was able to start working on my own painting.

I skipped out of the studio for ten minutes at lunch and bought a feta and avocado sandwich at Pumpernickel’s. It was very tasty and hit the spot. I skipped writing at lunch in favor of getting more work completed. I was feeling like I was getting behind and though I wanted to use my lunch hour to get ahead of the writing curve, it just didn’t make sense today.

And the on the train ride in, I was in no shape to do anything but sit with my eyes closed. I have been fighting a bit of headache all day, like from the lack of sleep over that last week.

I walked to the café from the station and then jumped on a streetcar to go the rest of the way. I only got about a stop before we had to abandon the streetcar. An accident had shut down the street at both ends. There were seven streetcars all lined up weighting for all clear to proceed. It looked like a car accident. Hopefully everyone was okay.

Tonight is like to over me little sleep as well. It’s the last day of the word challenge for the month of March and the pressure is one to write about thirty-five hundred words tonight, minus whatever I can get done on the ride home.

I walked from the studio to the station stopping quickly at Rabba Fine Foods and then the St. Lawerence Market looking for pomegranate seeds and black cardamom. I found the pomegranate at the market but didn’t have any luck with the cardamom. I have some ordered, but I realised today around lunch that I forgot to finish the checkout on Amazon. Now I will have to wait another day to make my Ruby Chicken. Probably a good idea since I’ll have more time on Wednesday as the counter resets for the word challenge.

Today is my nephew’s birthday. I hope he has a good one. We’ll be able to see him on the weekend when we travel to my sisters for Easter dinner.

I’m on the all-stops train again tonight, and that is good for my writing. There are more stops and less people on the train, which means I get more written in trapped setting, and I can get a seat where typing is possible.

Robyn got a job offer today from a studio. I don’t want to say with what studio or for what position as of yet as I don’t think the contracts have been signed. But this will give her work well into the summer and relief some financial strain on the both of us. And I’m sure she is itching to get back to working as an artist again.

I managed to miss most of the rain today during the commute. The loud thunderclaps woke me up multiple times last night. I made the mistake of going to bed with the windows cracked. The wind picked up for a bit last night and was moving the blackout shades noisily.

Needless to say, that ate into my REM sleep quite a bit and I felt really groggy most of the day and found myself yawning frequently in the afternoon hours. I made myself a cortado from the work espresso machine and that helped for a while along with a judicious amount of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

It was nice to have some warm temperatures today. My body still expects to get spanked by cold wind every time I leave the safety of my warm confines.

We were having an interesting conversation about what it is like to attend TAAFI as a representative of the studio at our booth. We inevitably end up giving portfolio reviews and looking at people’s demo reels. We give advice to hundreds of students and aspirants.

We were talking about imposter syndrome and that even all these decades later, we all still feel it now and then. One of us said they thought it was a good thing to feel it because if you ever became one of those people who thought they were god’s gift to animation you would become insufferable and no one would want to work with you.

And I agree, questioning your abilities is a good thing as long as it doesn’t freeze you up. A little humility is healthy for the artist. There is a kind of unwritten rule in the industry; the people who talk endlessly about how good they are always the worst of the bunch, have the least talent and the most difficult to work with.

Thankfully, we do not have any of those people on our crew. Dealing with that would be a nightmare.

So far, I have managed to write just over a thousand words on this train ride home. Man, do I wish I’d had the time and energy to do more on the way in and at lunch.

We are forecasted to have another severe thunderstorm tonight. The skies are already looking dismal and dark grey. The weather app has blue water rising the likes that might even concern Noah and his ark.

Good for the plants, I guess. We should have a green spring for sure if everything doesn’t drown first. Might mean I am not going to sleep through the night again if the thunder is even half as loud as it was last night.

Sounds like my wife has supper on the go. She didn’t tell me, it’s the LG appliance app that told me the oven had reached its operation temperature. There is a good chance that dinner will on the table by the time I get home and not having to make a meal for everyone will be a nice break. I could sure use it this evening.

It’s sad that I haven’t been able to really use the new oven or stove top yet. At least the rest of the family is getting some use out of it.

I’ll have about another twenty-two hundred words to write this evening. That’s not a terrible amount. The hard part will be thinking about the topics I want to say something about. It’s not like I live a terribly interesting life. Some days are jampacked with all kinds of different events and sometimes I stay in bed all day watching TV or movies because I am completely gassed.

One thing I am looking forward to getting back into is using my off-road standing scooter. I had lots of fun booting around the streets and trails in my neighbourhood. It was fun to take it just to pickup a few grocery items as well. Not as fast as the car, but way more fun. There is surprisingly a bit of exercise involved with keeping your balance and using your core muscles and legs.

Robyn made us some chicken stuffed with cheese and broccoli. There was an array of roasted vegetables as well. I scarfed mine down rather sharpish. I’ll have enough leftovers to have a healthy lunch tomorrow. She headed out to get do some errands afterwards and brought me back a couple of Snickers bars.

Life is good.

The director, Trevor,  on our previous show, “Vida the Vet,” gave me a desktop calendar he made with images of the characters he had drawn throughout the year. He had me take it home to give to Robyn, who was the Art Director for the show during it’s first season. It was a thoughtful gift he created to give to people that worked on the show as a Christmas gift. There are some great drawings on each page.

Thanks Trevor!

I received my strainer spoon today from Amazon leaving me one item left to be able to make the Ruby Chicken recipe. It’s looking like a tomorrow night dinner at this point.

At the end of the workday, we discovered a few more cracks in the pipeline. We are going to have another meeting involving more departments to get everyone all on the same page. Every time we do one of these, we move forward and get more things figured out. It’s kind of like building a bit of a rule book and tweaking the pipeline so it works smoother.

My supervisor was feeling the strain, her frustration was palpable and who could blame her. I sent her a GIF from Braveheart of a line of Scotsman turning their backs to the enemy and lifting their kilts and wiggling their arses. It’s physically impossible to be angry or sad while looking at that image. A thousand bare arses defy you.

We’ll be heading to my sister and brothers-in-law’s place in Stoney Creek for easter this year. Still haven’t heard what he is planning on making. It could be anything as he likes to try cooking new foods and using new techniques and gadgets. Whatever it ends up being, I am sure it will be amazing and delicious. And there will be far too much food for all of us that they will be eating it for a week after.

We watched the season finale of “Paradise” on Disney Plus this evening. They had the finale standoff but subverted it in an interesting way while introducing the whole premise for the next season, assuming they get picked up again. As far as I can see they are getting good reviews and you can’t say that for much of the shows in that streaming service.

I have been impressed with this show so far. It’s a little different than a lot of other sci-fi shows and it is exploring some interesting quantum science as the show continues on.

There is a show called “Mr. Inbetween” that recently came to my attention. I believe it is from 2018 and is from Australia. It’s about a criminal for hire who is also balancing parenting, taking a care of a sick brother and relationships at the same time. It was created and stars Scott Ryan who you have probably never heard of either. It is also on the Disney Plus service and listed under Crime-Comedy.

I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, but from what I hear it should be right up my alley.

Apparently, we had a double stabbing here in our little town and it happened in the bougie part of town. And area populated with massive house and estate properties with stone walls and backyards that back onto Lake Ontario.

It seems the number of violent acts and criminality in general has increased recently. I’m pretty sure a house was busted with all kinds of unregistered weapons being stored in the basement.

The world is getting more and more crazy I tell you. And at the same time, it gets more amazing. It’s hard to forget that when you see headlines like this all the time. I pften stop reading the news altogether just to stay in a positive state of mind.

But it’s important to remember all the cool things. Like tomorrow they are launching a manned craft into orbit and the slingshoting around the moon to return home again. A ten-day mission when all is said and done. And it is the beginning to even bigger planned missions including a mission to Mars.

I love that we are returning to space exploration again as a civilization. Maybe the old Star Trek series has me equating space with the best of all humanity, but who could blame me if it did. I feel that way about the Martian and Project Hail Mary. I like the positive roll models of people who are smart and solve problems to very difficult problems. Very little bellyaching and plenty of let’s just solve what we can first and then worry about the next thing.

I guess that’s kind of what it feels like at work these days. Solve what problems we can and then deal with the next one. It is exhausting to do it day after day to be honest. I know we are all feeling it. I wish I could say we handle it with the same cool and collected stoicism as Watney and Ryan, but that would be a lie. And we are real people not fictional characters.

And speaking of solving problems, our national mail delivery service, Canada Post, has received authorization to end door to door deliveries of regular mail. Where I live, we have those communal post office boxes. So, we haven’t enjoyed home delivery since we moved here in 2012. Nothing to miss from our point of view, but for many it maybe the first time in their lives that this has changed. There are some arguments about how this might affect the elderly, who now have to leave the house and walk down the street a little way to post box. And for some that might be an impossibility due to illness or physical health.

But the sad truth is, our post office loses money every year and it is costing the taxpayer to keep it functioning as it currently does. Drastic measures need to be taken of we still want to have a national mail system. These cost cutting measures are the way to accomplish this as well as combining post offices and selling under used assets. I’m not sure that I could come up with anything better. It seems like door-to-door service is the obvious place to make cuts. Another area they are considering is to change unurgent mail to overland transport from air transport. Since the volume of mail being sent is much lower than in decades previous, before the advent of texting and emails, not to mention affordable face to face video calls, this cut makes sense to me.

I brought a bunch more AG1 single servings to work today and then promptly forgot to make myself some. I was going to have some when I felt low in the afternoon, bit opted for a cortado coffee instead. So, here I am at ten forty-five at night shaking up a new batch, because, you know, gotta keep that streak alive!

I am so terrible at remembering to drink this stuff. And there is the resistance to making it in the first place. I bet if it came in a soda can, I would be popping two or three of these a day. That would be a waste of money, but I know myself well enough to see that future.

Even so, the little brown notebook keeps me on track, because normally I would have let it go and not drank my portion for the day. The only thing I have, streak-wise, left to do today, is get some reading done. And if I can, this will be a restart back to day one, as I missed reading the other night. But if anything was going to give it would be the AG1 or the reading. There are the two easiest, because I careless about them as a streak. But maybe that will change when and if the streak number gets high enough.

Today is the last day in March and that means I have to meet the 2026 words per day quota for the month. I am in a much better place than I was at the end of last month, in which I struggled at the very end under the strain of 3150 words per day for a week straight. That week definitely made me stressed out but it also showed me I could write that much about practically nothing if I put the time in. and in broke something inside me that said I couldn’t do this, its too hard. Now I could write that amount every night if I chose to.

Spending the day writing for my assignment racked up the word count for sure and reduced my stress level the last few days. But the month in general, felt like a marked improvement over the previous month. I guess it’s like exercising a new muscle, it really hurts at first and then after a little time you need to make it harder on yourself to keep interested.

Another aspect I have noticed a change in myself; is the amount of time I spend writing everyday. And of course, the fact that I do write everyday now. I couldn’t have made that claim in 2025. But it’s been true for all of 2026 so far. I am writing on the train, at lunch, at the diner and nightly from the comfort of my own bed. These are all things I just wouldn’t have done in the past.

Writing was always reserved for special places like my desk. It was done like a marathon often at the very last minute. I still have to do some work on the last-minute part, but even that is starting to shift a bit. And it is like moving a monolith. So, any movement in the right direction is a win.

There is also the increased sense of self confidence that is emerging from this, what at times can feel like self abasement. The more I do this, the more it starts to feel inevitable. Like I can see the path that lies ahead and all I have to do is keep walking. When you first start out, the path isn’t even visible.

My touch typing has continued to improve as well, in both speed and accuracy. And I feel I have a better intuitive sense for punctuation and syntax. Although, I have a long way to go when it comes to all the forms of punctuation. I maybe someone who is a bit overzealous with comma usage. But, I do love a good comma, even when it’s not supposed to be there.

Well it’s getting to that point in the night where I need to get some reading done if I want to still be somewhat functional in the morning.

I have to go into the studio again tomorrow, and as usual, I would like to be able to get some breakfast at the diner while I still can. This means getting up at seven AM again and I am not sure I can manage it. I am a bit sleep deprived this week and last week as well.

Really looking forward to sleeping in this weekend!

And maybe I will get to sleep in this Friday as we are off for Easter. Saturday is likely a bust as we go to visit at my sister’s place. Leaving Sunday for second day of luxurious sleep.

Maybe all this lack of sleep and early mornings is the universe’s way of turning me into a morning person. I may have wished this into existence myself!

This morning a co-worker sent us all a good morning message at seven o’clock in the morning. I found that to be very disprespectful. Not to mention it is against company policies. I am convinced that people who need to work from seven to three do it on purpose to indicate to everyone that they were working early. Not the kind of flex I admire.

And yet, when I am yanked from a sound sleep by that gratuitous morning cheer, I cannot make the reply that automatically comes into my mind. It would mean an uncomfortable meeting with the entire HR team. And you know when they are all in the room something bad is about to happen!

Anyways, I am happy with all the progress I have been making and I am stoked to see what the future holds as I continue to push my limits with writing and creativity,

Have a great night!

And don’t be fooled by things tomorrow!

Night all!