Better late than never...

Yes, I know it's a hoary old cliche, but it's all I've got for why I decided to write this post so late in the month.  I promised myself to write here at least once per month this year, and I still have 9 days to stay on track.

So, what happened in October?

Weather: October was, incredibly enough, tolerably "warm" for most of the month.  I managed not to need my sweaters until close to the end of the month when the week of Halloween brought days and days of buckets of rain.

Travel: I got the chance in early October to go to Sault Ste Marie for a meeting, and quite enjoyed the trip.  The fall colours were peaking, so the drive was quite colourful. This was my second visit to "The Soo" as it's called, and I finally got a chance to actually see the city as my first visit was at night in November, about three years ago at this time.  I quite liked what of it I got to see, and especially enjoyed glimpses of the St Mary's River, which separates Sault Ste Marie, Ontario, from Sault St Marie, Michigan.  A bridge spanning the river is one of the busiest border crossings between Canada and the United States.

Yoga/meditation practice: For some reason, I began to find the yoga flow I favoured for my morning routine quite stressful.  It is described as "invigorating", and throughout the spring and summer as I worked at doing it daily each morning, I enjoyed the way the practice challenged me.  It's only ten minutes long, and eventually I knew the sequence by heart, but by early October I would find myself gasping for air by the time I was done, instead of the usual feeling of being awake and engaged, ready to being my meditation.  I decided to try a different routine, one consisting of more calming, grounding poses, and discovered that this new flow was more suited to the much darker mornings.

DST rant: Of course, the more we got into October, the more impatient I became for Daylight Saving Time to end.  After three years in Canada, I have decided I am never going to like or enjoy this practice of shortening one day so that we can change the way the clock runs in the subsequent months.  Insofar as I am concerned, perhaps this practice made sense two or three hundred years ago when it was conceived, when electric lights were either still a thing of the future or so rarely found that making use of all possible daylight by shifting the clock forward was a good idea.

In a world where electrification is the norm and non-electrification the exception, where industry and business function twenty-four hours a day worldwide, and where everything and everyone is connected across multiple technological platforms, DST is an anachronism, and a case should be made for getting rid of it.  In more localised terms, I am not "saving energy" (the current reason advanced for the continued existence of DST) when I have to have the lights on for two hours prior to leaving for work because it's dark as pitch when I wake up and sunrise is artificially timed to just before I get into my vehicle.

Bullet Journal Junkie addiction: October also saw me borrowing an idea I saw cropping up often in the Bullet Journal Junkies group: habit tracking.  I've worked on a number of habits in 2015, the main one being to spend some time meditating every day, but I had been neglecting others I could do well to get back into, such as drinking enough water, consistently working out, and waking up earlier in the morning.  After trying a few suggestions, I decided to make tracking water intake, my wake up times and the days I work out as part of my set-up for November (so I'll be writing about how that's going in a couple of weeks, ha).

I also decided to institute a "15 Minute Clean" into my routine twice a week, which would see me doing whatever needed most doing around the house for 15 minutes, in an effort to reduce the need for me to spend all day Sunday getting the house back into shape, or (worse) starting my cleaning on Saturday because I was unable to relax due to the state of the house.

Driving!: October saw me making my first long drive, tackling the 170 KM (one way) drive to Sudbury, to take G to an appointment.  There is construction on Highway 108 South leading down to the Trans-Canada/Highway 17, so there were some delays.  The funniest moment of the drive came when I saw a spider on a tissue near the gear shift, and almost jumped from the vehicle (not fond of creatures with more appendages than I have!).  Fortunately, we were sitting in a construction delayed line of traffic, so I controlled myself and G carefully removed the creature and the tissue to outside the vehicle.

In all, I think it was a successful drive.  If there's one thing I have learned from all the traveling I did across Jamaica via public transit, it is that wherever I am going to is not moving away from me, I am moving toward it, so I will eventually get there, and I do not need to do so before anyone else.  Going anywhere for me is very much about the journey, and now that I drive it is about the process, as well, and I am going to tackle it the way I do everything else: knowing my limitations, cautiously aware of how what I do affects those around me, and abiding by the established rules/guidelines governing my actions.

Finally: It won't be long before I have to write an entry for December, and will therefore be able to check off one of the things I was working on for 2015: Write a blog entry each month summarising the month before.  I'm also more than 320 days into my year of meditating, closing in on the 365.  December will see me spending a lot of what spare time I have looking back on how I came through 2015, and looking forward so I can get a handle on what I want 2016 to look like.

On the way to Sault Ste Marie

Halloween candy treat bags, all gone!

I tried making Jamaican coco-bread

"Spring Ahead"

Had anyone told me, as I contemplated all the changes and adjustments that would be necessary to settle into life in Canada, that one of the hardest adjustments I would face would be Daylight Saving Time, I would have disbelieved them.

While I was in Jamaica, I would tease G about his "fake hour" and complain about the fact that him being an hour ahead meant that he was ready for bed when I was still wanting to be up and talking.  I enjoyed watching our favourite series (Showtime's Dexter) an hour before he did, but then had to wait for him to watch the episode so we could discuss it, and bite my tongue to not spoil it for him.

When I first landed in Canada, it was June, so Spring Ahead (the changing of the clocks forward) had already taken place.  I essentially "lost" that hour of time sitting in the airplane on the tarmac at Lester B Pearson International, waiting to de-plane and "land" as a permanent resident.  The pilot announced the local time, I changed my watch forward by an hour, and it was over.  I had so many things to deal with that day, that the loss of an hour in this arbitrary fashion was the least of my concerns.  Once fall rolled around and the time came to "Fall back", I was conscious only that we were on the same time as Jamaica once more.

2013 was a different story, however.  I was present for the change (back) to Daylight Saving Time, and it was traumatic, to say the least.  I got up at the usual time that Sunday to do my regular list of housework.  However, my usual time was no longer "9:00 a.m." or so, it was "10:00 a.m."  I was an hour late getting started.  It seemed to only snowball from there, as I fell further and further behind the usual times I would be through with certain tasks.  It was very nearly 9:00 p.m. that night before I was through, an unheard of time for me to complete the cleaning and laundry.  Until fall 2013, I felt the loss of that hour keenly, and suffered from a constant, creeping sensation that I was always late.  Anal as I am about time, this sensation unnerved me.

2014 spring ahead this year on March 9th was not much better.  I actually set an alarm to wake me on a Sunday morning, something I have not done in years.  I got up, set all the manual clocks forward, and started my housework at what was now 9:00 a.m.  Time seemed to RACE away from me.  Each time I looked at a clock, another hour had gone by, and I wasn't done with whatever I had started the hour before.  It was past 6:00 p.m. when I finished the housework and went for a run, it was nearly 9:00 p.m. when I was out of the shower and ready to collapse into bed.

Things did not improve during the first week.  My colleagues kept commiserating with me, saying it would be a week or so before I adjusted, that was how long it took them.  I pointed out that this is my second YEAR dealing with this phenomenon in twenty years, I saw no improvement.  When I forgot basic things like turning off a burner on the stove and what pieces of paper to give a customer, I realised I was seriously short on sleep and close to burning out.  All for the loss of one hour.

I finally decided that my workouts would no longer be scheduled for the morning unless I was working an afternoon shift, and therefore had plenty of time to wake up and sort myself out, taking my time to make my brunch and get myself ready for work.  I also set my alarm a half an hour later, for 7:00 a.m., as the darkness that persisted at what was now 6:30 a.m. simply added to my misery.

Speaking of it being dark at 6:30 a.m. following spring ahead: spring is ahead.  Tomorrow is the Vernal Equinox, the official start of spring in the northern hemisphere.  The earth's tilt towards the sun begins tomorrow, and a few more precious minutes of daylight will be added to each day.  I am still tired, still feel that DST is a rip-off, am still convinced Jamaica's politicians made quite possibly one of their best decisions ever when they ceased to inflict it on the population.  If only I could convince Canadians it is unnecessary!