Start with No

 One of the challenges of going through a self-improvement phase is sorting through all of the micro advice you get from everywhere. It gets easier as you go along, the more books you read or advice you follow, the more you see the patterns – the things that everyone recommends. Things like journalling, meditation, exercise and setting intention-type stuff. But there are those little “just remember this one little thing” that sometimes stick around.

The one that’s been sticking with me lately is “start with no.” That doesn’t mean say no to everything, but enter a negotiation with the mindset that you’re going to refuse the request, then go from there. Especially if it’s a request that’s not serving your goals or intentions.

It’s been an interesting experiment, to be sure. On one hand, it’s failed. When my family changed plans the week before Xmas, I tried to say no, I wouldn’t be there on Xmas Eve. But of course, The Navigator was only going to be there that night, so that no turned into a yes. But it came with the sacrifice of a different part of Christmas. No regrets, but there was give and take and a true negotiation.

I’ve had a few friends who have been very needy of my time lately, and I’ve had to make some “no” assertions to protect my time. My Telemiracle taping is less than 2 weeks awa,y and I’ve got my fundraiser at the end of the month to prepare for – I don’t have time for a lot of distractions this month.

Start with no has also been really good at work. When some coworkers try to steamroll my time or hog my attention when I have things to do, I start by saying, “No, not right now.” I’m sure they’re a bit disappointed, but at the end of the day, I’m here to get a job done. Not to sit around watching your cousin’s, mechanic’s, dad’s best friend from high school play a cut-rate version of Interstate Love Song.

There’s other advice that people are very insistent that works that I just can’t seem to wrap my head around or make any use of. My job coach was really pushing one on me before the holiday. Basically, she was saying that when I reach a moment of indecision, confusion, or even just change, I should stop and think, “perhaps I can…”. I haven’t found a good context for this one, and I haven’t found a lot of use from it. I wrote it on a sticky note and put it up at my desk. I’ll keep pondering it. But it just doesn’t seem to connect with me.

Some days, it all just seems overwhelming. I’ve read about a dozen self-help books and watched as many impactful videos over the last year. I’ve been to counselling, coaching, and just done a ton of work. It’s hard to keep it all organized, to keep all the balls in the air while trying to work towards something real. But I suppose that’s where it becomes a bit of a “life’s work” project.

Something I've found to be really fun to help me with this is sending myself time-delayed emails. I got my first one on Jan 1, and it was pretty revealing. I noted what I was working on and asked myself pointed questions about my progress. While it wasn't perfect, in fact far from it, I could see that I had made some progress, and it reminded me of the bits that I hadn't completed. In fact, some of those were wrapped up very quickly on the weekend once I remembered I needed to do them! 

Do you have any intentions or goals for the year? Have you ever sent yourself an email or letter to read later? Start with NO!

Gratitude

Both my morning meditation and my page in the Daily Stoic tackled the subject of gratitude today, a subject that's pretty relevant immediately after Xmas and right before the coming of a new year. So let's talk about it! 

Feeling grateful is actually coming pretty easily to me this year. That's not to say I don't feel some of my usual urge to completely avoid the holiday season and the excess that comes with it. I don't think that point of view is going to change for me anytime soon. Somehow, we took a holiday ostensibly rooted in the birth of a deity and made it about consumerism and guilt. I don't want to observe it for religious reasons. I don't want to observe it for capitalist reasons. So why do I want to observe it at all? 

I am grateful for having a healthy family. A family that is caring, motivated, and creative. 

I am grateful that, coming to the end of 2025, not only did it not knock me down, but I really managed to build up this year. 

In a year where I lost not one, but two grandparents, I'm grateful that I got to see so much of my family this year. I even think I saw The Navigator more times this year than I have in any given year over the last 5. Some things you can't be grateful for. 

As frustrated as my job makes me, I'm grateful that it's showing me other paths and giving me the time and resources to chase other dreams. And that it's there and dependable when my health is low. 

I'm grateful that I have the space and the creativity to pursue my music again. And I'm grateful for all the new friends it's brought me this year. I think I enjoy the social aspect of playing again as much as I enjoy making music itself.

In a world that seems to be burning down around me, I'm grateful to start seeing society push back. And not just politically with protest. People are making the choice to put down their phones and go out more. I don't know if we're breaking free or just finding the balance, but even through the struggle that the next 5 years will bring, we're going to find some beautiful things, too. 

I'm grateful that I'm less worried about the mess my house is in this year.

I'm grateful that I have more ideas than time right now. 2026 will not be boring. 

And I'm grateful for me. That I can look at myself, see where I'm at, how I feel and what I need and that I have the capacity to make something of it. 

Today, I don't need to practice gratitude. Because today I'm all practiced up. I just AM grateful. 

What are you grateful for today? 

Admiration of the PS3

 The whole family was home on Saturday night. Rhonda and I sat down in front of the TV, and after about 5 minutes of picking through possibilities, it was clear we weren't going to find something to watch. Infinite choice is no choice at all. I even commented that there was a time when looking at what's on only required that you push "channel up" or "channel down" repeatedly until something you like happened. Now it's navigating 25 apps and entering 40 passwords. 

We live in the worst timeline.

During our journey through the options provided by this "smart TV" we discovered that there seemed to be a way to play GTAV through the TV. While we scratched our heads like the confused apes that we are, Kayah entered the room and reminded us that there was a PS3 upstairs, attached to someone's TV and completely unused. 

So within about 10 minutes, we had that old tank hooked up, and we had started crashing cars, shooting innocent people and looking up the nearest strip club. 

Before long, the whole family had gathered around as we took turns spreading mayhem around Los Santos. We stole tanks, we tried landing a jet in a military base, we went for a lap dance, and we tased a man to death. As parents, Rhonda and I are second to none. 

And we laughed. Like that good, deep, crying laugh you really can only find in a room with others doing ridiculous things. Plus, Jonas - or should I call him "Mister Maneuver" is just ridiculously funny. 

One of the things everyone was amazed by was that we had Netflix installed on the PS3. I reminded them that yes, and also YouTube and Blu-Ray DVDs on it. It was really an all-in home entertainment system. And despite some very old batteries in the controllers and a fan that sounds like it's clogged with syrup, the old girl still rocked. 

Also - GTA 6 When? 

Disco Napping

I think one of the reasons that the success rate in music goes down as people age is that after you turn 30 - no one wants to go out very late. 

I certainly run into this all the time with local open mics starting between 8 or 9 o'clock, ON A SCHOOL NIGHT. It's pretty damn hard to get out of the house after you've taken off your work shoes, doubly so this time of year when the air has been custom-built to freeze-dry your lungs. 

But I've come across a great life hack for this situation, the Disco Nap. Rhonda was the one who gave me the name of this practice. Something coming out of the rave/EDM culture. The idea is pretty simple: come home from work, eat your supper, do your evening things, then take 20 minutes aside and have a nap. Even shorter works, I've got by on 10-minute and 15-minute disco naps too. You wake up with just the right amount of oomph to get you out to that 8:00 boogie session, but didn't go down hard enough that you can't sleep until 4 am.

Last week I had a pretty intense disco nap.

I've been trying out the Calm app for a few weeks now. It's a meditation and mindfulness tool with a bunch of materials to help you find calm, sleep, etc. I had heard that SaskTel was giving away free 1-year subscriptions, so I figured I'd give it a whirl. This kind of stuff has been one of the self-care things I've been missing, so what's the risk, right? 

Normally, I just do the 10-minute morning meditation before going to work, but last Wednesday, I figured I could put it on as my timer and focus for my disco-nap ahead of going to Bushwakker for the folk night show a few of my friends were playing at. 

Looking through the 15-minute-long meditations, I found one on forgiveness. For some reason, last week I'd been thinking a lot about the role of forgiveness in the modern world. Do we need more forgiveness? Is misplaced forgiveness what's put us in some of the negative places we're in lately? What role should forgiveness play in my life? 

Normally, when I'm curious about something like this, I'd read an article or Wikipedia about it. But I thought this time, let's meditate on forgiveness. And holy man, did it take me places that night. 

I didn't go into that meditation thinking I needed forgiveness or needed to grant forgiveness. But that meditation took me down to some actually kind of dark places, then slowly worked me back up with some ways to bring forgiveness and happiness in. Totally unexpected but very, very welcome to be sure! 

I rose from the meditation a bit stunned and full of thought, not just about forgiveness but how powerfully that meditation had affected me. In the couple of weeks I've been doing the meditation regularly, I've noticed a few little things. Getting on the bus in the morning feels a bit more detached and centred in a healthy way. My thoughts seem to have less static or bad tuning. They seem smoother. But nothing quite so overt as this. 

It's taken me a long time to find something to fill this particular bucket in my life. As much as we all hear the term "self-care" and how important that is, it's not easy to find. Each of us has our own needs in that regard, and the whole world we live in is so toxic - it can be hard to find all the things one needs. I think one of the benefits of reading all the self-help books I have this year is that I've started to see the patterns and the repeating things that we all need. Spirituality and mindfulness are a big one, and if you're in pursuit of that, I'd suggest giving Calm a try. If Calm isn't in your budget, find some meditation videos on YouTube or grab a book from the library on it. Or just fold laundry in silence for a while. You might be surprised what you find. 

Kindness in 2025

 Last week, I found out that one of the security guards at my office had lost a very short battle with lung cancer. We'd known for the last couple of months that he was sick, and it seems he didn't suffer long. Yes, I've now reached that age where every third conversation or so will include me talking about someone dying. 

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This particular gentleman sticks out to me because he was one of those overtly social people. He always said hello when you came in, knew my name long before I ever learned his and had the ability to hold you hostage for an extended time while he told you about his latest Eve Online campaign or about the go-kart he built. He was an interesting character, and his absence is definitely felt around the office. 

For those of us who worked at this office for around a decade, this one has hit particularly hard because we lost a similarly social and friendly security guard in 2017 - this history rhymes very, very well for us. 

Hearing this news has left me very pensive and introspective because, as much as I can remember and celebrate the kindness of these men today, I often just felt annoyed with them in the moment. And I'm not sure why I felt that way.

Part of it is just that the first hello is always the first thing in the morning, while I'm rolling in groggy and grumpy to work, just trying to get to my desk in time. Being held up to talk about the weather is an inconvenience. 

Another aspect is that the relationships started out weird. I think the security cards we use to swipe into the building probably show our names on a screen for the security people, so they always knew my name. But I was never introduced to them. So the relationship was unbalanced. Had they taken the time to say "Hello Jeremy, I'm ....." I might have felt a bit better about it. But it was always like "How do you know me?" 

Which is to say, I think sometimes that kindness needs to be handled with care these days. You'll often hear advice about treating others with kindness and having that returned. But I haven't always felt or experienced that. Some people really don't reciprocate, and if you bring kindness to the table too boldly, I think it turns people off. 

I have a co-worker who has a very old-school approach to being social and being kind - and it feels invasive sometimes. I'm just trying to drink my coffee; it's not your business when the last time I pooped was. I'm drinking my coffee- it will happen again soon. 

Plus, after 18 years in the corporate world, I've noticed an awful lot of assholes and idiots get promoted. Not that there aren't people who earned promotions or deserve it. But I also know a lot of friendly people who have been passed over in favour of the people you really wouldn't want to spend any significant time with on a desert island. 

So, all of that to say: in this festive season, maybe don't be kind to each other. Leave me a mean comment below! 

Tossin it out there

 I know I had some good ideas for blogs this past weekend, but instead of taking note of those good ideas, I allowed myself to forget. Now it's Tuesday, and I have no idea where I'm gonna go with this. 

So let's go free-form for a bit. 

I twisted my ankle really badly about a week and a half ago. In addition to the general pain and inconvenience being hobbled AGAIN is bringing, there was the embarrassment of doing it in front of my neighbour. Thankfully, he'd just recovered from one himself, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been. 

But it does mean I've been stuck inside, grumpy and generally out of touch with the world. I did get a chance to head out to Indian Head and play an open mic this weekend. I drove out with a new music friend, Jason and had a fun chat with him on the road out there. He wants me to head out to the O'Hanlon's open mic tonight. I'm inclined to go, I do like this open mic, but I'm also tired and sore and kinda just wanna hang out at home. I've got a gig this coming weekend, and I could use the practice.  But I could also use the live practice. Dammit. 

I think I'm going to be happy by the end of December this year, and not for the reasons you might think. I've got a lot of gigs and practicing to do, but I also need to do some administrative stuff and get some projects wrapped and rolling on the music side. While 2025 has been a pretty great year for figuring out what I wanna do with myself, it's left me with a pretty big pile of things to do and it's hard to balance performing and doing the rest of it. I'd sure like to sit down and write some music again sometime! 

And then of course, I'm behind on Christmas gift-buying. I've gotten better the past few years at being on the ball for this stuff. But not 2025. I suppose some of that is being so busy. But also just haven't seen too much inspiration from the people I want to gift to in terms of what to get them. Maybe they all get toilet paper to celebrate 5 years since COVID. 

I dunno. Been thinking a lot about 2026 and the future lately. Sometimes it's hard to think of what to do next when you're worried the whole damn thing is going to collapse around you in the next few years. But at the same time - what better time to take a risk? If everyone is going to fail, might as well fail doing something I love and not talking corporate speak or having my soul drained at 7:30 am every day. 

Yeah - 'tis the season I guess. 

Let's have Moraff that

 Last Friday, The Navigator posted about a favourite piece of legacy software. It brought to mind the very old days of computers - pre Windows - and what that world looked like. 

It reminded me of an old game I played when I was younger, Moraff's World.

In the early 90s, my gaming PC was a Tandy 1000 TX, with a massive 640k of RAM and 16 blazing colours if you pushed it hard enough. Yeah, it was great in 1985, and I was still using it in 1996. 

In this pre-Internet age (or at least pre-Internet in everyone's home age), you had to go to a physical place called a "store" to buy video games. The games would be held on a physical object called a "floppy disk." In my hometown, there was a little shop that sold and fixed computers, software and general tech stuff. They had a little shelf full of blue discs where the owner would load the latest in Shareware games to be purchased for $5. I think that this is probably technically against the spirit of Shareware, but he had to do the work and pay for the disks, so... whatever, it gave me access to games I wouldn't otherwise have.

One of those disks I bought had the game we're featuring today on it, Moraff's World. I think it also had another Moraff game, Moraff Stones, on the same disc. Not quite a sequel, but set in the same universe as World. 

Moraff's World is a role-playing game with no real plot, and the only stated goal is to get stronger and more powerful. 

The player starts in a top-level town and needs to descend through progressively more challenging dungeon levels, encountering monsters to fight for experience and loot.  It's a lot of climbing up and down ladders and pushing "F" until you or the monster die. 

In addition to the ladders, occasionally you get caught in an invisible (and occasionally visible) chute that drags you down to ever deeper levels. It's like a high-stakes version of snakes and ladders. 

You start the game off by creating a character. I'm not a big D&D player, but I think that this plays out much like rolling your character for a campaign. You get to pick a race and a type that defines what kind of weapons, spells and actions you have access to. 

The top level town is free of monsters and has a number of shops you can enter, including the store, inn, temple and bank. These are each noted by a different colour square, and without a key of which is which, is super annoying. I'm sure in time I'd memorize them all or put a little note on my monitor. But for this short term play it was really frustrating. Additionally, when I was younger, I played on the 4-colour setting because my computer was such a beast, so telling the difference between shops was impossible. I wish there had been a letter or symbol representing each spot. 

On the subject of the graphics quality, an oft-repeated criticism of this game is the at best-childlike drawings of the monsters featured in the game. 

I never noticed this when I played as a kid, but as I say - I only had 4 colours to work with and everything looks bad when the graphics are this bad. 

Looking back on the game 20-30 years on, and I'm a bit mixed on how I feel about it. I was able to play long enough to recapture the depth of this game. Trying to figure out what spells to use when, building up my character and trying to get deeper and deeper in the dungeon. But playing it through an online DOSBox console is very unstable, and it would crash before I got too deep. 

On the other hand, the terrible graphics are all the more clear the better the graphics quality gets. Go figure. Plus, the game is agonizingly slow even on a modern computer, and it's not something I can see myself returning to in much depth. I certainly don't feel like pursuing finding the full version. 

This game could be fun with a reskin, some more efficient programming and some quality of life updates. I think the core game really could be something fun on a mobile.

I took a poke at the sequel, Moraff's World: Dungeons of the Unforgiven, but didn't give it much time. The graphics are slightly improved, but the control scheme is all different and pretty frustrating. 

All in all, Moraff's World is probably best kept in the past. It was a fun introduction to the RPG genre for me, but looking back on it now, there were definitely better games available at the time. I'm not saying I had access to them, I'm just saying better was out there.

And if I want to scratch the same kind of dungeon-crawling itch, I could pick up one of the early Diablo games and get a far better experience. Although that's an addiction I swore I'd never go back to. 

Done did a football

 While my love of Canadian football and, in particular, the Saskatchewan Roughriders is well documented in this blog, I haven't written about ball in any real depth here since restarting a couple of years ago. At least not Roughrider football. So it might come as a bit of a shock to the uninitiated that my beloved Riders brought home the Grey Cup for the first time in 13 years on Sunday. (Well, technically, they brought it home yesterday, but they WON the Cup on Sunday)

It was a very good season for the Green and White. With a teenage son who's obsessed with football in the house, getting out to games has been something we put some work into, and it was early in the season that we were discussing how good the team worked and how maybe-just maybe- this was the year. 

Well, we led the league in wins coming out of the regular season, and we got a chance not only to attend the West Final to see them beat BC, but the winning touchdown happened in the end zone right in front of us. 

And so we reached last night - and a 25-17 win against the Montreal Allouettes in Winnipeg. We walked down to the Green Mile (Albert St. and Victoria Ave in Regina, and Albert St north/south of there) to join the celebrations. We'd gone down in 2007 and 2013, so it felt like a "must do" this time as well. 

We got there relatively early in the night; there was a group enough to fill the intersection, but it hadn't filled the streets yet. But there were fireworks being fired off and plenty of folks celebrating the win. It was a bit wet and cold, but nothing like the deep snow from 2013 or the bitter cold the night we won in 2007. 

I said it on the walk home - I've become so conditioned to being disappointed by the Riders, it felt weird to be celebrating the win. And it's gonna feel good for a few weeks, love being in this city when we're champions. 

Quotable Quotes

When I think back to some of the things that I miss from before the internet, magazines come to mind as something I'd love to have back in my life. Yes, I can still subscribe to Rolling Stone or Wired if I want, but it feels like that era has passed. 

One of the pivotal publications of my early years was a stocky little magazine called Reader's Digest. Now, I'm sure my only reader is aware that Reader's Digest was less about putting together a collection of new articles than it was more of a soup of articles from other magazines all over the world. It made the Reader's Digest a delightful view into a million subjects. Perfect for a polymath like me.  

One of the recurring features in the Reader's Digest was "Quotable Quotes", a page of quotes from famous or notable people. It was my least favourite of the recurring Digest pages. I much preferred "Humour in Uniform" or "Laughter in Medicine". 

I've always felt that way about quotes. We've all seen those Facebook posts from some Karen telling us to "Believe in urself" superimposed on a picture of a creek. Or like "Where's my wine" and it's just women laughing. Truly the very dregs of modern culture. 

I think it's why I love Disappointing Affirmations on Instagram so much

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So it's in that context that I find myself quite confused about my recent obsession with quotes.

I think it's coming from all of the self-help books I've been reading lately. If the information in a self-help book is the tile that builds the floor, quotes are the grout that keeps them together.

I've found myself writing these quotes into my journals and copying them onto my studio whiteboard on a regular basis. I don't think they're changing my behaviour or making my life any clearer. But I'm copying them. And this isn't me copying quotes from the books I'm reading. They're quotes I'm hearing out in the world, stuff I'm hearing people say.

Stuff like: 

"Money is the result of investing in hard work" - Susan Sneath

"Always move on. Take the next step forward" - Elder Harry Francis - Piapot First Nation

"You are playing the game of becoming more yourself every day" - Designing Your Life

Ok well that last one was from one of my books. But it's not a quote of a quote - it's right from the book. 

Maybe it's helping me to put all of these new ideas I'm grinding on into context. Or maybe knowing someone else said this stuff gives it more legitimacy. 

I dunno. But I'm pretty into quotes lately. 

Share your favourite quote in the comments. Or better yet- write me your own quote that I can put in my journal and write on my whiteboard! 

A story about gitch

Gitch. Gotch. Ginch. 

Call them what you want, they're all underwear and of late, I've needed some more. It's a combination of realizing that my 10-year-old Pac Man underoos have very few outings left in them and the fact that the Fruit of the Loom pack I bought last year never really lived up to their promise. 

So it was in that environment that I was on the search for something new a few weeks ago. I investigated some new styles, learned about breathable cotton and all sorts of things. Through this sea of options, it occurred to me that maybe I could be finding something Canadian or local to buy. And that's where I found Do + Dare. 

It's a small company out of Toronto that makes underwear here in Canada out of bamboo. They've been on Dragon's Den and overall seemed like a good match for what I want. 

I put in an order for a couple of different styles, including, of note for this story, a 3-pack of "Shorties Undies" which were listed under the Unisex section of their site. Honestly, what I'd been looking for was something closer to a brief over boxers, and these seemed to be the closest thing they had. 

Now, I'm not so naive that I didn't clue in right away that these really looked more like women's "boy short" style underwear, but I thought maybe there was something about the material or make that I didn't see. They were listed as "unisex" after all. 

A few days later, a little paper-wrapped package arrived with my new underwear! It was with the type of glee one can only experience when new underwear arrives that I ran upstairs to try them on. And they... they weren't right. 

To the uninitiated, wearing women's underwear is a strange thing. Sure, there's the kink of it all. We can all enjoy that. But they just don't fit. And it's not just the pouch in the front. It's like they aren't tall enough. Like the bottom of the underwear comes up just a little too high. That's the experience I had putting on these underwear. 

But fret not, this wasn't a waste! By some serendipity, while Rhonda and I are of very different heights, we are nearly identical around the waist. So Rhonda got herself three new pairs of Canadian-made underwear. Everyone wins. 

A few days later, I got the usual "review our product email" and did so by giving the product 4/5 stars and commenting that maybe they shouldn't be categorized as unisex because they're clearly designed for people with female anatomy. 

Imagine my surprise when I got a personal text message from the owner of the company asking to discuss the issues I had and offering to make things right! We had a really productive and open conversation about my experience, and he was very open to my observations that this wasn't an issue with the product but an issue with the marketing. To his credit, he shared that the underwear is indeed designed for women, but they found a lot of men in the LGBTQ+ community were buying them, so they thought they'd give this a shot. I didn't say it to him at the time, but the thought occurred after that: maybe there's some kink to buying women's underwear, and you're actually taking that away with the permission that unisex grants. We also talked about sizing and how maybe an XL of this product would have been a correct fit.

All this to say, a company saw that I had even a minor issue and reached out to see if they could fix it. I do note that the shorties are still listed under the unisex category, and there isn't a change to the sizing guide. But maybe that's coming. You can't change every time someone makes a complaint. Plus, they gave me a $10 credit, which I used to buy some 4" Boxer Briefs, which fit great. 

And wouldn't you know it - there was another minor problem in that I ordered a 3-pack and the colours I wanted were out of stock. So in came another text message to make a few quick substitutions and another text from the owner saying he'd made sure my new order was sent out with care. 

All in all, it ended up great. The new undies fit like a dream, and I have a company that I'm prepared to sing the praises of. 

Oh, and there's an epilogue to all of this. Wouldn't you know it if I got an email last week inviting me to test drive their new underwear style - men's briefs. Dammit. By the time I got on the website, my size was sold out, but you can bet that I'm going to be waiting with baited breath for them to go on sale!

Incidentally, I understand that my only reader is my brother, so a post on underwear is uncomfortable. But I spared you the details of the thong, and I didn't post any pictures of me in the shortie undies to illustrate the poor fit. So just say thank you and move along.