Hi all,
As promised yesterday, a little more admin clearout than usual this month.
TOA admin, part one
If it isn’t obvious yet, the TOA Book Award is once more locked in a desperate sprint against the end of the calendar. I do sincerely hope, one day, to have this all wrapped up much earlier in the year, but alas, those are the breaks. I think it’ll happen in December – no sooner, and certainly no later.
The summer of travel
I skipped over detailing my travels from the past few months as I allowed other updates to take priority in this space. I think the best approach here is to catch up sometime in November with a special proper admin edition.
One semi-related note I wanted to get out there was the arrival of the Seadog Sunfish in the zip code. What is the sunfish? The sunfish neither energizes nor swims – it is a beer. And what a beer! I encountered it first on summer travels in 2015 and ensuing vacations have seen one distracted eye on constant lookout for the elusive poison. But what a poison! I count the day this summer it appeared on draft at the Beantown Pub as among my happiest and I hope this is the start of a Sunfish invasion into Beacon Hill and beyond.
TOA admin, part two
There was a brief period of time earlier this year when I took down notes as I listened to podcasts. I’d thought at the time that this would become more of a regularly thing, perhaps enough to justify quarterly updates, but my pen has slowed and I think this idea is going into my discard pile. Still, I’ll post the first couple updates I glued together and then try to follow up with another way to build on the concept.
I need to buy more stuff
I thoroughly enjoyed my first interaction with Amazon locker. The locker is Amazon’s solution for doorstep package theft – how refreshing to see a company clean up its own messes! The way it works is that eligible items can be shipped to a secured location where customers can go and punch in a code to retrieve their item.
I had no expectations on the warm summer night when I walked into Whole Foods to get my running shoes. The locker itself was a wall of shelves arranged in a dull gray grid. Presumably, my shoes were in one of those shelves but there was no clear way to open the right drawer. I went to the kiosk, typed in my code, and was startled when a shelf close by on the left suddenly popped out of the wall. Inside were my shoes, the package labeled with the name of a customer who is, reluctantly, coming around to our eventual overlords.
TOA admin, part three
Just a couple of notes here as we wrap up. First, I know that these ‘third of the month’ posts have covered my daily reminders. Those aren’t over but I thought this month would be a good place to break the monthly pattern. I’ll return to them periodically to review any edits and share the ways I’ve used them in my daily routine.
The other comment is that although I like the timing of proper admin, I think starting in November I’m going to bump it out a few days. The main consideration here is that it’s a formulaic monthly post and I think having those spread out a little bit works better for my writing schedule. It also won’t hurt to have a month fully complete when I get to writing about it, a trivial concern but one that I should address if it doesn’t require a big effort.
Thanks for reading.
