My Fall 2024 Musings
Logos, MRIs, Retirement and Books
I haven’t posted on this, my personal Substack primarily because I’ve been busy getting The Seaboard Review off the ground (out to sea? afloat?). It’s six months old and the changes in just a few months are remarkable. What started as a one-man endeavour to keep reading and reviewing after leaving my former site, has grown as others wanted to follow me and I couldn’t say no. Currently, there are almost 160 subscribers (free & paid) in total and the word is spreading. I’m trying to keep it small and manageable so things don’t get out of hand like they did “over there”.
Logo A-go-go
One recent change I made at TSR was to bite the bullet and get a logo that I didn’t design. In other words, “professional”. I saw an Instagram ad for Design.com and checked it out. I entered “books” as a design prompt and it came up with a few interesting concepts. Then, wanting to stay with a nautical theme, I tried “sailing” and it came up with what I thought was the perfect logo for TSR:
Pretty cool. Of course, it wasn’t free, but it was such a good design that it was worth paying for. It also comes with design templates for social media, letterheads, business cards and lots more.
In Other News…
Enough about TSR though. Recently, I observed that I am now 63.5 years old. I can almost smell retirement from here if not taste it. But a year and a half is a long time when you’re counting one day at a time, but the goal is there, I just have to stay reasonably healthy and keep breathing. I would like to go part-time at 65 and I’ve expressed this wish to my supervisor and manager. They want to make it work for me and I’m not ready to stop working yet. I work with a great team in the MRI department we all get along well. A little FOMO figures in there too, I suppose! One thing I’m proud of is our short wait times for an MRI, the shortest in the province.
Yay, team! The news is getting out and many NB doctors are sending requests directly to Miramichi, as no one wants to wait >300 days for an MRI. If they are willing to travel, we can scan them! The upside to this is that the patients that travel are so very appreciative of getting in quickly, plus they love our hospital as it is so clean and quiet (compared to the larger hospitals).
Fall!
Yes, we have attained fall here in NB and as I write this is peak season, I would say. I had planned to take this entire week off, as I typically do each year, but as we had no plans to travel, I took one day off and saved the other days for another time.
What I’m Reading
I always have more than one book on the go and here they are:
White by Aviva Rubin (Fiction)
Secrets Between an Ocean and a Sea by Carolyn Morgan (Fiction)
Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal And The Making Of A Great Nation by Peter L. Bernstein (Non-Fiction, History)
The first two are new releases and are for reviews at TSR. The third is a used book I picked up because I was curious about the Erie Canal and how it was built. I’m slowly making my way through it.
That’s all for now, enjoy the fall!
James
The new logo is wonderful! And I love that you take vacation time to simply enjoy the fleeting colours.