Welcome to stefanolandi.com

Category: Projects

  • Four day week

    Image of a calendar with four thumbtacks placed on the days Mon-Thurs to represent a four-day work week. There is also a small toy clock on the calendar.

    I finally took the plunge and have decided to reduce my full-time work hours at my job. I’m dropping down to a four-day week, which I hope will give me a bit of time to get back to some of my projects and past-times that have long since been swept aside. I’ll have more details coming soon as it’s been several months since I’ve posted anything on this site. In fact my last post was ‘supposed’ to be on my trip to Calgary and Banff and I realized I never finished that post.

    So just an update, I signed the necessary documents and so starting Sept 15th I will now be working four days a week, which, as I mentioned, will afford me some time to pursue some of my other interests. Now what will be a little strange is that I have an accompanying website, which will be my actual virtual workshop and lab, you can find it over at http://www.slandi.net, there I hope to post more in-depth articles about some of my projects and creative endeavours. Exactly what those are remains to be seen, as I have so many interests, hobbies, past-times and I’m constant finding new things due to my insatiable curiosity. So many, in fact, that more often than not I never finish I start. One of the reasons I’ve started this blog and also my slandi.net site is that I want to force myself to see some of these projects through to some kind of end, or at least give them some substance.

  • Four years and counting

    According to the date calculator on timeanddate.com I’m due to retire in 3 years, 11months and 5 days, but hey who’s counting, I’m looking very much forward to retirement, there are so many things I want to do, projects I want to work on, things I want to learn. During the next few years I will be slowly preparing for retirement by purchasing those tools and items for many of my past-times and interests, this might include specialized measurement tools for my electronics hobby, woodworking tools, mechanics tools, etc… Perhaps a nice new synthesizer is in the mix as well, we’ll see. I both anticipate my retirement but I’m also a little leery of it as I worry that I’ll have enough to do, enough things to fill my time. Then again, there are many things I haven’t thought of, like perhaps some meetups I could go to, some social events or perhaps other outside activities. I’ve always loved the theater, so perhaps something like that is in order. Who knows really, I just hope that I’ll be healthy enough to enjoy my retirement years. This brings me to another point, physical fitness, which unfortunately I’m sorely lacking at the moment. You see I have a life partner that is an avid fitness guru. She loves to exercise and has the discipline to do it, alas it’s not my case at all. I’m not so much a couch potato, as a desk potato and spend untold hours on the computer doing a myriad of things. I really need to find a hobby/interest that gets me moving, gets me out of the house at least and doing something physical. I was thinking of getting back into photography and maybe doing urban photography or hiking in the forest to do some forest bathing, etc… That is a possibility, I just wish I had more discipline. In any case, I’ve got a little less than four years and in that time I have to get my ducks in a row as they say…

  • Happy New Year 2025

    Wow, 2025! I don’t know about you but that number looks very sci-fi doesn’t it? It’s already seven days into 2025 and so far so good 🙂 In years past, in fact for most of my adolescent and adult life I’ve always taken January as a month of reflection to look at and plan my upcoming year, take hold of the year that passed and work towards resolutions, blah blah blah 🙂 Not this year, at least not in the same way. I’ve decided that this year will be a year of action. No more planning things to death but simply having a todo list and knocking things off of it. What exactly? Well for starters I had the installation of a new dishwasher, which was done two days ago. It didn’t go smoothly as our kitchen was built in place and isn’t standard at all. So at the moment, although the dishwasher is installed and works fine, it’s skewed forward so that it looks like it’s open all the time but in fact it’s closed. I will revisit it this coming weekend where I will cut away a portion of the top of the cabinet so that it will sit flush and at least look a little better. It’s kind of a moot point as one of the todos on my list is to redo the kitchen entirely. More on this in later posts.

    I’d like to wish everyone a Happy New Year 2025, may you all have Heatlh, Happiness and Peace as we embark on what might become a very divisive year with American politics very much in the forefront and our own Canadian politics in upheaval. We’ll have to hang tight and ride out all the storms and hopefully we’ll all be OK in the end.