#325 - Not Good Enough

Up at seven to catch a train into the studio today.

It’s the Toronto studios tenth anniversary today and of those ten years I have been there for eight of them. So, I thought it might be nice to attend and there was word there might be some give aways. I knew for sure a lunch would be provided at least.

I was in no hurry to get there early, as I needed to wait for my team to hand in some assignments. I took a later train as a result of taking to long to get ready for the day.

On the way out the door, I grabbed a can of Alani to give me a caffeine boost later in the morning. The drive to the station was pretty good all things considering. Well, there was a BMW driver in front of me who drove like a maniac all the way down the double laned road and then drove like a grandma once we turned onto the single laned road. And in the end, they scoped my parking spot. The BMW driver seemed to be a manifestation of my lack of patience for the world. Not that have much patience for BMW drivers purely on principle.

I took a deep breath and ground another spot and walked slowly to the platform reminding myself that I am not in a rush this morning.

Once on the train, I got my response email form my mentor and to put it bluntly it wasn’t great. She mentioned a bunch of structural problems, which once mentioned had me smacking my head and say, “Of course!” out loud.

She said my procrastination was largely the problem, although she phrased it in a much nicer way referring to it as my process. My process consists of waiting to the last minuet and then powering through until I get to the end.

Well, those days are officially over.

Time to turn over that new leaf.

I stopped at Au Pain Dore café this morning and ordered my usual breakfast sandwich. I took it outside to sit on the sidewalk patio and did a little people watching while I ate and sipped the 140 mg of caffeine courtesy of the Alani energy drink.

On thing I like about this drink is that it doesn’t upset my stomach at all. It was a small perfect moment to have in the morning. A little quiet before the storm. I left reluctantly and headed to the studio.

I was first in from my team and when I entered there were some familiar faces that shouldn’t have been there.

On of our Technical Directors was there and it was great to see him. He is a very happy person, and we have worked on a bunch of tools to help our artist when using photoshop or by automating repetitive tasks. We got a chance to catch up for a bit and then it was time to get to work.

I was also able to talk to a second technical director who works here in the office. He recently started sitting in the row behind me and we have never spoken until today. I was able to float another idea for a tool to help our teams out and I wanted to know if it was even possible.

He seemed to think it could be done and interested in trying it out and that gave some hope. This tool could help make our team even more efficient. And more efficient means more competitive in the market.

I wanted to take a smart object in photoshop and scale it. The convert the smart ocject back into its original layers but keeps the scaling. Normally this procedure causes the layers nested inside the smart object to revert to their normal size.

This could be a great advantage to our team in the future.

I had some approvals and things to do and that kept me busy until my supervisor came in. We chatted for a bit about work things and then got back to work. One of the things we decided was that we needed to set a meeting with the Art Director today so she could review some work and give us notes.

She agreed to a late afternoon meeting and that made me feel better about the current situation. This show needed a little direction, and a second set of eyes is always good.

Lunch came and it was time for the celebrations.

We were served pasta and salad with drinks that was pretty tasty. There was even some garlic bread to go along with it. When most people had finished eating, they started with the prizes and drew numbers. We were all given tickets to put into one of the prizes we wanted to win. I think they had about twenty prizes in all. My luck with raffles is prey consistent and I walked away with my lunch and that was about all.

There was cake served afterwards and I liked that it wasn’t too sweet.

And then it was back to work again.

We had our two thirty meeting with the art director which went very well and then all three of us headed into the next meeting with the client. It was surprisingly short and sweet.

The art director started going through our work right after the meeting and that meant I was able to start rendering the approved files to send to our scene set up department. And boy was the the supervisor of that department happy to hear there would be some assets for his team to place into the Harmony scene setups.

I took a break around three thirty to play a game of chess. I like to clear my head of work things by playing a fairly cerebral game. Odd, I know. But it works for me. I loved that I could get my daily chess game in while taking a break at work. My streak is in the two hundred plus days of playing at least one game of chess per day.

I spent the rest of the day rendering and organizing the tracker and being able to ship things to another department was a great way to end the workday.

I left with a little spring in my step and headed out to the train station under sunny skies and lovely temperatures.

Staying to render files meant I was a bit late getting to the station and therefore I missed all the usual trains. Not to worry though, another express train was only twelve minutes away and I made it on, getting a seat to write in, with little effort.

The train ended up being a busy one, with a few people standing in the aisles. I was just happy to get about one thousand words written in that time, reducing the workload for the evening. I was hoping to have a few hours of relaxation tonight if possible.          

I’m not sure if there are any programs for us to watch, but it’s been a few days since I had time to read my book too. I’d be more than happy to end the night doing that for a change.

My stop arrived and I headed home to an empty house. On the porch was a hand decorated box with the word, Willy, on it. I thought it was safe to assume that the injured bird did not survive the night under the care of kiddo #2’s careful ministrations.

Robyn had cooked some breaded fish and roasted vegetables but had left to pick up kiddo #2 from work. I decided to wait for her so we could eat dinner together. I took advantage of our new-used reclining chairs on the front porch and read a chapter of The Sand Pebbles until she returned.

We had our dinner then headed upstairs to watch a little television. The only issue was that there were no new episodes of the shows we are watching. We put on the Masters of the Universe movie mostly just to see how bad it was. And it was really bad. Tonnes of overacting and cheap looking costumes were only topped by the bad writing.

Sure glad I didn’t pay to see it.

We stopped watching after about twenty minutes, which was nineteen minutes to long and put on Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed. I had no idea going into what it was about, but in the end it’s a bit of a murder mystery. I enjoyed it so far and I think we will keep watching it.

It stars Tatyana Maslany who does a good job playing the mother who’s life is all over the place while still be a good mom to her daughter.

The kids biological father called kiddo #1 today and completely shattered her will to live. He shit all over her plans for the future and made her question everything about her life. He may have even triggered some suicidal thoughts.

Real father of the year stuff!

Life for us has been good lately and one of the reasons is that he hasn’t been around to mess up the kid’s minds. I sure wish he could just take them out to the movies or something gfun instead of trying to show them how they do everything wrong.  Our little family will be paying for his outbursts for weeks now.

In other news….

I bought myself a thing magsafe charger, the same one I got Robyn the other day, because of how thin and light the thing is. It only has about 5000 mah but that’s enough for me to charge my phone from zero to fifty percent. It’s small enough to fit in a pocket a 7 mm thick. And it’s not heavy at all and can fit in your pocket. It’s about the size of four credit cards stacked on top of each other.

I picked up some more magnesium glycinate and vitamin D3 gummies with that purchase as well. Need to make sure I ‘ve got a good dose of my sleep aids. I was getting low on the magnesium pills.

Now that I have been using the tart cherry and magnesium for a month or two, I can say that is has helped me regain my ability to have restful and deep sleep. I think the kiwi was best at accelerating the time it takes to fall asleep, but the other two seem make sure the sleep you get is much deeper and undisturbed. Definitely worth the small amount of money it costs to have them at hand.

As for my writing challenge, I am currently two days behind and that gaps keeps closing little by little. I expect to do some writing on Sunday towards my mentor assignment that should help me get my numbers all caught up.

Fingers crossed with that one.

Once again, I proved today that writing in separate spurts makes getting the quota number so much easier than trying to do it all at once. Moving forward this week, that is something I need to keep in mind. Even getting five hundred word a day of my assignment done would be a real help.

My mentor has asked me to hand the assignment in on Friday instead of Saturday as a way to make sure I don’t wait to the last minute. Although she still gave me the full time to hand in the assignment. The idea being that if the story needs more space to be told I’ll have the extra time to make it happen.

Ideally, I would start working on this tomorrow evening after the day is done and I’ve had a moment to relax. I could also do some brainstorming during the train ride as well.

I think what I would like to do is write a 1500-word blog and five hundred words of the opening for the assignment. That should give me a good idea by Sunday where the story is headed.

And an update on the Alani Energy Drinks.

I had one this morning with my breakfast sandwich as mentioned.  I noticed that I didn’t hit a wall today around three o’clock. Usually be three I am exhausted and ready to go home. Too bad there are still two to three hours of work left in the day. I can’t tell if it’s the Alani working or if it’s the sleep aids making sure I am getting a better quality sleep.

Maybe it’s a little of both.

Anyway, time for me to go to bed.

Another early morning tomorrow.

Until then.