Andy Cerier

Last week was my annual Baxter Boys camping trip. We are a group of 5 guys, all close friends, with whom I’ve been camping (without spouses) once a year since the early 1980s.

In earlier years, we camped in Baxter State Park in Maine, most often at the South Branch Pond campground. This campground is my heaven on earth.

As we got older, we needed cellphone service to support our families and aging parents. Thus we moved our annual trip to Acadia National Park, where we have camped in both the Blackwoods and Schoodic Point campgrounds.

This year, for the 7th time, we camped in Blackwoods Campground. This campground is close to the scenic oceanfront, has easy access to some of the best hiking trails in the park, and has a free shuttle bus to the nearby town of Bar Harbor.

We were there for five nights. It was sunny and pleasant at the beginning of the week and later clouded up, with only a few daytime sprinkles. So, we have no complaints—another great trip for the books.

I live in Boston, and I subscribe to The Boston Globe. I get the paper edition seven days a week. It’s kind of like supporting public radio, which I also do.

I scan the headlines. I check the obits to see if anyone I know has passed on. I enjoy the comics, and I do the puzzles.

I am not a Christian, but I love the thought of a bright, sunny Easter morning.

I love the idea of little girls showing off their new Easter outfits on a bright, sunny morning.

I guess I’m a romantic.

I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the late 70’s and drove a taxi for most of those years.

This provided me with many opportunities to do drugs.

I smoked pot almost every day from 1976 through 1980. I quit this habit when I moved back to Boston in late 1980.

I did a lot of speed in the years I was a full-time taxi driver. I stopped taking speed when it almost killed me.

I took acid a couple of times in those years. It was always a great experience.

I did Peyote once, and my experience was both mundane and magical. Hard to explain.

I smoked opium once, accepted as a tip from a cab fare in lieu of cash. It tasted of roses and was a heavenly smoke. I understood immediately how people could smoke this endlessly and shrivel up and die and be happy.

PS: I did coke a couple of times in the eighties, and I always enjoyed it.

I have two computers, a laptop, and a desktop. Each has external disks.

Connected to the desktop computer, I have 4TB of SSD and 8 TB of HDD. These are used for backups, to store my electronic media (images, movies, music), and digital music tools and sound libraries.

Connected to the laptop computer, I have an external 4TB SSD. This is also used for backups. It also contains my “video workspace,” as processing and creating videos can take up a lot of space.

I had initially created a haphazard backup system as more disks were added to my collection, but now I am finally rebuilding my backup systems into a logical and documented whole.

I find this work quite fun.

I want to travel widely. I have the time, the desire, and the resources required to travel, but I have difficulty initiating travel due to my lifelong battle with anxiety disorders. And there are many other things I’d like to do with my life other than isolating myself at home.

Many years ago, I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD). At that time, I went through a program at the BU Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders, where I learned to apply Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to address these issues. After a few years of trying to use CBT for my anxiety issues, I gave up.

I began pursuing a different course of anxiety treatment: drugs and therapy. I have been following this path for many years. The drugs help suppress my anxiety, and the therapy allows me to better live with it.

I am no longer satisfied with my home isolation, and there are many activities outside of the house that I want to enjoy. Therefore, I am committed to relearning to apply CBT.

I am sitting in the backyard. It is sunny and below freezing, but I’m bundled up and enjoying my coffee and the sunshine.

I’m also enjoying the presence of my doggy, who’s hunting bunnies.

Today, rather than actually getting things done, I am writing Keyboard Maestro macros to control my task manager, NotePlan, and mapping those macros to keys on my Elgato Stream Deck Plus.

I am web shopping Black Friday sales. Huckberry produces custom backpacks and bags by partnering with well-known bag makers. Recently, they collaborated with Mystery Ranch and produced a bag I found very attractive, the Huckberry X Mystery Ranch Greenbelt Hybrid Backpack - 30L. I already own a Mystery Ranch bag, and I love it. It is extremely well-made and comfortable to carry. And it gives me that “just returned from combat” look (kidding, maybe).

I adore this bag. It’s a limited edition, and it’s on sale at a very good price. I don’t NEED a new bag, but …

Updated Tuesday, November 28: I gave in. I own it. It is cute. Should be a good day bag.

I first realized my attraction to boys in elementary school. Slowly, over my school years, I discovered that my feelings toward other boys were different from my piers. It was very confusing.

In those days (pre-AIDS, pre-Ellen, pre-Internet), it was very difficult to find any information about being gay or homosexual. And some of what was available was not very positive.

Slowly, through the years up to and including high school, I was able to dig up some media that referenced my feelings in a positive way. One was Psychology Today magazine, to which my mom subscribed. Another was a paperback novel from my parent’s bookshelf, “The Harrad Experiment.” And lastly, I’d like to call out the April 1979 Time magazine cover story “How Gay is Gay?”

So, by high school, I had a name for my feelings, but I was not ready to deal with my feelings publically. I was not ready to act on my feelings or come out. I stayed closeted.

I graduated from high school in 1975. The next year, I moved to Ann Arbor to attend the University of Michigan School of Engineering. I lived in South Quad, one of the largest dorms on campus. My dorm had a population that was larger than my entire high school!

As a good little GTD-er, Sunday is my weekly review day.

I have used OmniFocus on and off for many years. In the past, I have also used Things and Todoist many times.

OmniFocus 4 has been in Beta Test for several years, and I’ve been in the beta program since the beginning. It has come a long way in terms of usability and stability.

This year, I took a break from OmniFocus for a few months and tried NotePlan after trying several other similar programs like Logseq and Obsidian, neither of which stuck for me.

NotePlan, however, is a winner. Like similar applications, it has a strong user community, a sound vision of how it can be used, and offers the flexibility to be useful in many different productivity systems.

It also has some shortcomings, but I’ll save those for later.

Last week, I decided to return to beta testing OmniFocus 4, and I found it much more mature, although on my Macs, it still crashes pretty often. So, I decided to make it my full-time task manager again.

But that was last week, and for the past few days, I’ve been missing NotePlan again. So … I’m going back again.

NotePlan has many nicely integrated features I’ve found nowhere else. I’ll save these for another posting.

I have been camping with the same group of guys each autumn for the last 40 years.  We call ourselves the Baxter Boys because Baxter State Park in Maine was the location we visited most often in our early years.

This year, as most years, we went camping for a week in early September.  This afternoon, we are all getting together for the first time since our trip for our annual post-mortem gathering, where we discuss what went well and what could be improved on this year’s trip.   

We have done this for many years, improving our trips each year.

An internal battery powers the machine that is Andy.

My battery’s capacity is limited and has slowly decreased throughout my life.

I refill my battery by eating nourishing food and absorbing sunlight.

When my battery is low, I move more carefully and take longer to make decisions.

When I finally deplete my battery, I will be gone.

I live near Boston MA. This morning is overcast, misty, and cool. Gloomy.

The quality of sunlight affects my moods.

On bright, sunny mornings, I have more physical energy.

On bright sunny days, I feel more energized and productive.

On gloomy days like today, I find myself less energized. I move slower. Coffee seems to have fewer positive effects. I find myself spending more time on simple decisions.

On my Mac, in the Shortcuts app, I cannot drag a shortcut from one folder to another.

Drag and drop works everywhere else on the Mac. This was true in MacOS Ventura and is still true on MacOS Sonoma.

I have two Macs, and the problem is the same on both of them.

Perhaps it is a squirrelly setting I flipped sometime in the past?

Frustrating.