So, change of plans, On account of the fact that it’s going to storm all weekend and the Whacker still isn’t fully put back together, I’m staying home.

The new dashboard is now mounted (and looks fuckin’ gorgeous if I do say so myself), and the speaker brackets are installed. I had the neighbourhood shaking to some Pearl Jam, Walleye Whacker style. At the Home Depot I bought some angle trim for the floor of the boat along the sides. The carpet’s starting to rise a little, and rather than slap more glue down, the trim should hold it while looking half-decent. This week I’ll install that, along with tidying up the wiring behind the new dash, and installing the steering wheel. After that, it’ll be time to start tweaking the Suzuki.

My Clymer manual for the Suzuki motor has arrived from Kansas. It’s something like 500 pages long and it’s all about tweaking, repairing, tuning, and adjusting Suzuki motors.

I hope to throw the Whacker into Lake Ontario later in the week if the bad weather tapers off by then.

~80 more days to go at work. A large part of me has shifted to the opinion that it’s corporations which I am not suited for. I don’t follow protocol; never have, never will. So maybe it’s wrong for me to have written off technical work completely. After all, there has to be degrees of technicality.

I break down an employment experience into three major areas:

1. The work itself.
2. The atmosphere of the workplace.
3. The people.

In terms of relative importance, in this ordering they are ranked least- to most-important.

But beyond the employment itself, there’s also the environment you’re in. Having a great job is of course good, but then there’s what’s after work as well. What’s in Toronto for me? Not much. Sure, my family is here, but the city itself is flat, largely concrete, and boring for me.

So, if I could get a Great job in the Ideal setting, then I’d be in paradise. Allow me to speculate.

The place foremost in my mind is Calgary. It’s a large city, but it rests on the edge of a beautiful mountain setting. Being a large city, there should be jobs in line with my education somewhere, and jobs not immediately in line with my education in abundance. A short drive should place me in said mountains, on a lake, or in a forest.

But I’ve lived in a big city my whole life. I’m not sure if the change will be radical enough for me. After all, I’d still have to drive to get to the mountains or lake. Why not try for a place that’s contained within the wilderness?

The next place is Yellowknife. Four-hundred kilometers south of the Arctic Circle, home of the Midnight Sun and the Northern Lights. Situated on the northern shores of the Great Slave Lake. An outdoorsman’s paradise.

The only issue is whether there’s work up there for me. If there is, it would more than likely be infrastructure- or government-related. My ability to find work up there would rely almost entirely on connections. And I get the feeling that there aren’t many people who know a friend of a friend who’s looking for a junior software developer in Yellowknife.

But that might prove to be a good chance to see how my education transfers to another type of job. Don’t ask me how it would, but it might.

Another thing on my mind is this logic: the smaller the city, the less chance there is to meet people. But the higher the chance to meet people who share the same interests as me: the outdoors, good music, solitude. I’m leaning toward taking a chance on the latter.

Then there’s the other extreme; a place like Greenland where I’ve been given notions of work, but that might be too far extreme on the isolation scale, especially if I’m there for a long period of time. The setting would be striking, I may end up working with some of the best people I’d ever meet, but no one else speaks English, and the loneliness might get to me after a while. Especially after three seasons of darkness.

For the short term, say a few weeks or maybe a couple months, yea, it would be an unforgettable experience. But no longer than that.

The Eagles were incredible, I can’t say more than that about them. There was plenty of Joe Walsh (Funk 49? Rocky Mountain Way? AWESOME!!), just the right amount of Don Henley (Boys of Summer? Dirty Laundry? AWESOMER!!), and all the necessary Eagles songs.

I thought that this tour was for Long Road Out of Eden, so I was more than a little distraught when their fourth song was Hotel California. Then I realized that they were doing songs in chronological order, which upset even more. The songs from Long Road Out of Eden would be last. Not that it’s a bad album. I don’t like going to concerts for music I haven’t heard beforehand.

As it turned out, I don’t think they played anything off of that album; they were all songs I had heard before. And they were all flawless.