I am so tired. I went to bed at 9pm Thursday night and 10 pm last night and didn’t get out of bed until 10am this morning. I haven’t been anywhere so I don’t think it’s possible for me to have gotten COVID (I’ve heard that the biggest symptom for people who are fully vaccinated is exhaustion) so I’m wondering if it is just the toll of working in vet med in 2020 and then public health in 2021 on pandemic and wildfire teams and I’m just tired. But I bought my new (to me) car yesterday and I am so excited to have freedom and independence again! (Maybe the stress of this also is playing into my exhaustion? Who knows.)
Instagram obsessions: #ndlpt
I’m going to play with my own format here, I started following a hashtag this week, and I really love it. A while ago I unfollowed all creators, influencers, brands, celebrities, etc. on Instagram and have slowly been re-following the ones that I realize I am missing. And the only reason I did this is because I felt like my feed was all ads and I was so tired of not seeing any of my real life friend’s posts because the algorithm shows us what we most frequently interact with, so my best friend who posts on Instagram 8x a year doesn’t show up in my feed because I can’t engage with accounts that don’t post very often. However, by following hashtags, I can see a lot of that content without drowning out my friends’ and family members’ content. One of the hashtags is #ndlpt, NDLPT is the younger needlepointers’ abbreviation for needlepoint and it allows me to see a ton of peoples works-in-project (WIPs), finishing, canvases, stitches, and tutorials without following 700 needlepoint Instagrams. It’s fantastic. It’s exposing me to so many other stitchers and designers that I would never otherwise see and encouraging me to be more creative!
TV/movie obsession: Salvation
So I’m kind of annoyed with this one, because it has been cancelled after the second season and I don’t think they knew that when they ended the second season because it is a massive cliffhanger ending and we’ll never find out how it ends. It starts with a humanitarian Elon Musk-type character (Darius) giving a guest lecture or a TED-style talk at MIT and our protagonist shows up super late to the class carrying his shoes and getting called out by Darius. Our shoe-less friend (Liam) gets hit on by a pretty reporter-looking character (she turns out to be a science-fiction writer, not a reporter – Jillian). Afterwards, Liam goes to a bar with his friends and sees Jillian at the bar. They end up going home together and after they hook up, Liam’s phone goes off. It’s his graduate research project alerting him to something new in space; he is trying to create a living map of space. Even though it’s the middle of the night, he bikes over to his advisor’s house and wakes him up. His advisor tells him to go home and go to sleep but then goes to his computer and verifies Liam’s results. He then makes a call, we believe to some authority that needs to know about new space objects.
The next day the Professor Croft, Liam’s advisor, doesn’t show up to teach his class, so Liam goes to his house and finds it trashed and Professor Croft gone. So Liam barges into the elevator with Darius and tells him his program has found an extinction-level asteroid headed straight to Earth. Darius has government connections and they get a task force going with the Pentagon to try and save the world.
That’s the basic premise of the show, however it starts to go completely off the rails. Like there was enough plot in the trying to save the world premise of the show, but it goes into like Scandal-esque territory of a cabal of people trying to take over the US government, Russian spies, betrayal, hackers, people being killed and then not, suicide cults, and teen pregnancy. It almost gets to be way too much to follow. Just the asteroid related plot-points would have been plenty to fill out the show, it didn’t need any of the other stuff. I would not be surprised at all if they lost viewers because the plot end-of-season-1 to mid-season-2 just got so convoluted. I definitely enjoyed watching it and never got bored, but god damn there was just too much plot.
Podcast Obsession: Dark History
This podcast is superb. Bailey Sarian is a make up artist who does YouTube videos where she does a makeup tutorial while telling a true crime story (talk about setting yourself apart from all the other beauty YouTubers) and kept finding all these other crazy history stories, but they aren’t really a “true crime” story, no murder or actual criminal activity but still bananas. She really leans into the racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc. of history and isn’t afford to straight up say that it’s based in racism, eugenics, etc. So good.
Random obsession 1:
As previously mentioned, I bought my new-to-me car on Friday and it’s not so much that I’m in love with the physical car. I’m in love with the access and freedom that having a car in the region I live gives me. To paint a picture for you, Wal-Mart, Canadian Tire, Safeway (grocery store chain), fast food restaurants, actual restaurants, the movies, the bulk refill store are all in Dryden, about an hour and a half drive away and there is a bus (that’s how I picked up my car), but it only goes each direction once per day. So I can get to Dryden by 3pm one day, but I can’t return to Sioux Lookout until the next day at the earliest. So if you choose to do that, you need to have a place to sleep in Dryden. I’ve also been carrying my big compost bucket on a 40-minute one way walk each week to take it to the pick up point. There is also no within town public transportation, so I hope you live close to the post office, grocery store, and your friends otherwise you will be completely reliant on other people for rides.
And that’s just not fun, so I’m super excited to be able to drive to trail heads, beaches, and be able to buy things like watermelon and big jugs of my favourite pre-made cold brew and not have to carry them.
Random obsession 2:
So while I was in Dryden after picking up my car I caught up on some errands, including one I have literally been meaning to do since I moved here in March. When I moved one of the knobs on my dresser drawers broke. It has the fancy “crystal” knobs on it, and the crystal ball portion separated from the silver base portion. I tried to superglue it back together, but the first time I pulled on it to open the drawer the crystal ball fell off (and apparently I was pulling really hard because I fell on flat on my butt). That was in April maybe, and I have just been irritated by this broken knob for months now. So I finally stopped at Rona in Dryden and got a replacement knob. It looks fantastic and took basically no time at all to repair.
Have a great rest of your weekend!
Laura
Thoughtful Millennial 