How dumb is my idea...? Get conscripted. Go to Ukraine. Defect/get captured intentionally by the Ukrainians. (Note: Lots of hand-waving here... "I only joined so you could capture me and get me out of Russia!" and hope they take pity on you...) Continue west. Wind up in Belgium. Start your new life, free of Russia.
300,000 conscripted troops with a possibility of 700,000 more means a TON of possible deserters. Russia has an officer driven military. Those officers will be very few and far in-between and in charge of keeping large numbers of conscripts in line. The Russian logistical network is also rough, and I highly doubt they'll be able to keep up with 300,000 new people. Which basically means: 1. Executions for deserters will skyrocket 2. Food, medicine, and supplies will be minimal. Including winter gear.. 3. The Ukrainian POW system is going to be overrun with people. They are probably taking better care of prisoners than the Russians (recent footage from prisoner exchanges have been horrid). But not that much better. Best option is to get out before they can snag you. Deserting is the last ditch of all attempts.
Jesus, a decimation of young males. So much for learning from our mistakes
You have to keep in mind that it's a rare economist who suffers from their predictions being wildly wrong. But those predictions can be wildly wrong and still be really f'n rough for Russia, the Russian people and greater Asia in general. Considering all the jockeying between Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Georgia already a further weakening of Russia geopolitically is going to open a bloody free-for-all.
I accepted an offer on my condo. 99.9% excited to complete the sale, but a sliver is sad to let go of the home my old cats knew. But then on to home projects.
Just back from a ladies trip to Toronto to visit my sister for her baby shower. I always feel a bit out of place with the family, but it felt good to spend time with my mom, sister, cousin and aunt. 8 more days left at work, until i can fuck off to the woods. I really need to make plans for the future - and by that I mean puzzle in all the trips I want to do over the winter and not go over budget. There is the Detroit roadtrip already in the works, my mom offered a potential vacation to Paris with my father, talked to my playa crush over the phone yesterday and now i'm looking at flights either to mexico or oakland mid-november. And we've been scheming with my friend Jerome for a Taiwan bike trip and Nepal hiking trip over winter. Maybe it's time to consider that temporary move to Berlin I've been thinking about the past 5 years? Learn German and stuff. My issue is I only have about 10k CAD runway until I need to start looking for my next source of income. Many places to visit, people to spend time with but I don't want to blow through it all in 3 months and go back to the work life too soon. Time to plan and look for opportunities!
All my job issues have led me to apply for a role in IT as Desktop Support within my organization. Completely different direction to the management I've been doing, buuuuut I like IT. I've always wanted to work in IT, but have had no qualifications and so it's always been out of my grasp. I like the fact that IT stuff is needed everywhere, middle management has always felt very tenuous in comparison. I had a chat with the hiring manager when the role got posted, and explained my situation, experience and desire to shift. She not only encouraged me, but said that she is confident my salary could be retained. It'd be a drop in band, but I'd be brought in at a higher level on that lower band, to equal what I'm on now. So my ceiling for pay rises would be diminished, but that's only as long as I stay at that role. With management experience under my belt, I'll learn everything I need and climb that specific ladder instead. Quietly hopeful. My boss has been blessedly calm about everything, neither of us are poking at each other. She has other problem children for now so the spotlight is off me.
Climbed a couple of more mountains on Sunday and Monday and am looking at actual training plans for rock climbing so I can work towards some bigger goals. And for the fun of it. Training should be fun! Online dating though, sucks, it sucks a lot. I've been ghosted about 5 times now where I even get the persons' phone number, have a good conversation, make plans, and then never hear from them again. It's insane. I've gone on one amazing date with someone I'm still regularly talking to/flirting with but the problem is...she's only up here on long weekends/holidays/etc., as she's from up here, but is in an accelerated nursing program 8 hours south of here. So I don't know what to do about that. Easily and far away the person I'm most interested in and has the most commonality with. Kind of crushing in a poetic way. Sigh. Here's the big scary dream mountain range I'd like to climb in the next 5 years or so. https://www.nps.gov/places/arrigetch-peaks.htm Working backwards I need to: 1 - work my trad rock climbing lead abilities up to probably 5.11a/b from 5.9/5.10a. (lot of work) 2 - learn how to aid climb (lot of work) 3 - go on at least one smaller expedition that's more in the 1 week timeline as opposed to 3 and a half weeks
Dating: I've been talking with this girl I met at the YMCA. We do the same class every week. We text about once a day, sometimes less. She seems really busy, and when we talk I feel like she's really engaged in getting to know me better. She brought up dating without talking about us dating. Just, she seems open to it on however long of a timeline it might take. I might find someone on an app that would reply within an hour and be up for dinner this weekend, but I'm far and away more excited about the girl from the Y. While I'd love to talk and meet up more often, I have my life and the sense I get is she has hers. I want to integrate a partner into my life and have a huge amount of respect for someone else looking to do the same. So yeah, good luck with whatever you decide to do. I'm 42 and haven't found the right person. If it's her, if it takes another two months to do something together again and two more to have a proper first date, that time is an insignificant blip.
So here's my problems with dating apps. I want to be clear to anyone reading this, i really do not give a shit about being single. But the apps. man. I will get matches if people see my profile. The people/algorithms behind these apps know this. So, if I throw down $20 for a boost on Hinge, which I did to test this out, I get ~10 people matching. In the two days leading up to that, without paying, I got 2. This applies to Bumble. This applies to Tinder. I am sure the business/tech people behind these things know that males are in the red on these apps, and will happily bury you and make you pay more to access what the algorithm identifies as better matches. Hinge and Bumble are especially guilty of this, where I have never come across a top pick outside of the curated selection they provide. Every single app works this way. I’m probably a week away from just deleting all of them and not even bothering to try and date. These things are bad for my mental health, and I’m sure everyone else’s. Plus I'm now up to FIVE times where someone says they're up to dinner or a drink or whatever and then just never. communicates. again. What the fuck is that, it is terrible behavior that is only enabled because of the low stakes environment these apps provide. Grumble grumble. kleinbl00 you called me a seeker (or was it searcher?) when we got lunch. I've been thinking about that and still don't really know what you meant. You can text me or respond here.
So WanderingEng's comment above: You: THIS IS NOT A VALUE JUDGMENT. However, if you look at the basic attitudes of the sentences above, the former is "I'm going to stay here and see what happens" while the latter is "I'm going to go over there and see what happens." You are not the guru on the mountain, watching the same sunrise every morning for fifty years in order to attain enlightenment through repetition. You are wandering the Holy Land until you find The Grail. Down to the pseudonyms: you are not "wandering". It would not occur to you to "wander." You are about the small changes somewhere else that lead to seismic effects. Fundamentally, you favor information and experiences that you must seek out, and discount information and experiences that come to you. There's nothing wrong with that. I merely wish to point out that your value system favors those things you pursue, and that given a choice between "static" and "dynamic" I've never seen you choose "static."Dating: I've been talking with this girl I met at the YMCA. We do the same class every week. We text about once a day, sometimes less. She seems really busy, and when we talk I feel like she's really engaged in getting to know me better. She brought up dating without talking about us dating. Just, she seems open to it on however long of a timeline it might take.
Plus I'm now up to FIVE times where someone says they're up to dinner or a drink or whatever and then just never. communicates. again. What the fuck is that, it is terrible behavior that is only enabled because of the low stakes environment these apps provide.
Arrigetch, man. That's either going to be my holy grail or my white whale. I'm tellin' y'all.You are wandering the Holy Land until you find The Grail.
Yeah we went on another date and it just feels like there’s a “click” there, if you know what I mean. Haven’t felt that way in a long time. She’s not consistently back up here til her next break in December. Which is a month long break. Would love to patch these together until then, somehow.
If there's more of a click than most others, I think it's worth pursuing. If it isn't going to work you'll know by the end of her break. That's easy to say as the person I'm interested in lives five minutes away and not eight hours, but her busy life (and to a lesser extent my own busy life) is limiting. If it might work out, it's worth working around.
I was going to whinge about something ... then I read that ThatFanficGuy has to basically hide inside his apartment to avoid getting noticed by Russian army conscription squads... ... and I'm just going to shut up now. My "problems" don't even register on that scale ...
I liked 2020 the best! 2021 the sound mixing was off I was a bit disappointed. It also felt like in a way it got ahead of itself and was a smidge too overdone.