The Autobot McDonald’s Stopped in Their Drive Through

https://digitalcitizen.ca/category/writing/My province recently started a lockdown-ish to stop some newly uncontrolled COVID spread. Part of this was to stop indoor dining once more, though I wasn’t sure if that included ordering inside for takeout. I figured if it didn’t have to happen, then why let people inside and wait in lines, increasing risk of COVID spread? That’s why I figured I’d order via their drive through, but much to my surprise, they didn’t let me!

Continue reading

Writing Postcard Stories

https://digitalcitizen.ca/category/writing/Up to this month, I had never written any really short stories, like 500 words or fewer. I had also written very little fiction. However, with a postcard story contest I found out about from Vancouver Canada, I have “all of a sudden” (relatively to my life timeline), written five! I can’t share them yet, and may not be able to until fall, unless they get eliminated really early, but here were the postcards I chose.

Continue reading

Lessons Learned from the First COVID Lockdown for the Second

https://digitalcitizen.ca/category/writing/In many places in the world, people have gone through multiple lockdowns due to COVID-19. Where I live, we have been super fortunate to have sensible and law abiding citizens that we’ve had only one lockdown, when COVID first broke here in March 2020. Inevitably, with a place being attractive to those not wanting to be restricted, some will come with their gonzo ways to ruin it. Recently, we had some of that, with the ratio of close contacts to those coming into the province being like 5 to 1. There’s no way everybody coming into the province lived with an average of 5 people, who would have had to quarantine themselves as well. That’s assuming every one of these close contacts caught COVID, never mind some who might not have. Dumb traveling yahoos!

Continue reading

A Pub ic Practical Joke

https://digitalcitizen.ca/category/writing/Back on April Fool’s Day, I shared some really good and practical advice on removing “pubic” from spellcheck to avoid some potentially very embarrassing misspellings that wouldn’t be caught! Today, I’m going the other way with the same mishap, except now, I’m creating it instead of trying to prevent it.

Continue reading

Answers for Tim Ferriss’ Question 11 from Tribe of Mentors

https://digitalcitizen.ca/tag/podcastsignaturequestions/One of my favourite podcasts is the Tim Ferriss Show. Among the many things Tim is successful at in addition to a podcast host, is being an author. Of his books, there is one called Tribe of Mentors: Short life advice from the best in the world, presumably about life advice that is short rather than advice about living a short life. It is based on answers to 11 really good questions that Tim needed to answer for himself at one point in his life, and of which he asked some people who he most admired to see what they would say so he could learn from the best. A sample can be heard in this podcast episode link, along with more about the questions and their sequence.

Continue reading