This morning, theoretically, I am on day one of my second sabbatical at WRI. I spent the last three months cranking on a big project at work and with a few small details left, got it over the finish line (more details on that soon). I’ll have to plug in for a couple of small meetings next week, but hopefully I can step away and enjoy the next five weeks doing some personal projects and seeing family—because in the fall, things are going to get very busy again. Brian is looking at a Nissan Leaf parked in his driveway and wants help disassembling it for his electrification project, and I’m hoping I can put in a couple of solid weeks helping him with that. I’d actually like to keep working on that through the winter because I am keenly interested in that project. And as always, there are projects here around the house to tackle, and I’ve got a red truck that I wanna get on the road before the snow flies. I’m also signed up to get my concealed carry license next week, and I intend to put some time in at the range.
I will never own a watch this expensive in my life, but watching this guy disassemble, clean, and reassemble an original Rolex GMT was fascinating. This watch is gorgeous, and would be everything I would want in a vintage timepiece. That bakelite bezel is beautiful—the rich color and typography are absolutely perfect, and the wear on the whole watch is just right.
I’m currently taking a class/working group for creative directors run by the CD at Ogilvy Canada. I found it through my social media feed and signed up for it on a whim. I was lucky to get WRI to pay for it (after 11 years, this is the first class I’ve asked them to pay for) and so far it’s been pretty good. The class size is much bigger than I was expecting, and there are a lot of people who are in the place I was after about two years at WRI—they had the title, had been doing the work, but are still trying to figure out how their role fits in at whatever agency/company they’re at. This Thursday we went through the creative brief and roughly half the class had never written or used one, which I found kind of shocking. But something I’m finding universal is the lack of any formal training or mentorship for this role; if you’re lucky you work for a CD somewhere as a design or art director and they show you the ropes. My experience involved little mentorship—I had to figure it out along the way, which has been the theme of my entire career. The class will run through most of my sabbatical but that means I’ll be able to focus on the homework better.
Speaking in an episode of the conservative “Ruthless” podcast released on Tuesday, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said the move was “basically driving a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion”.
The US is poised to gut its current carbon emissions standards as part of Project 2025, which is terrible, terrible news for our country, our children, and our environment. This clown referring to “Climate change religion” is telling; another way to weaponize words along the fascist playbook. Personally, I’m happy to belong to this religion instead of “soulless corporate greed fuck-you billionaire religion”.
For the first time in 11 years, I went on a company retreat with my department outside the office. In years past, we have gathered in the office conference room for six to eight-hour days to talk about strategy and planning, with brief side trips to local restaurants or activity areas. This was the first time we’ve actually gone to a different city as a group.
The planning team chose Charlottesville for its proximity and easy access by train. We made it to our hotel before noon, had some lunch, and gathered for a kickoff, then took a short drive to go to Monticello for our afternoon activity. Splitting up into two groups, I chose to tour the house and was pleasantly surprised to see that Jefferson’s complicated history has not yet been erased by the revisionist white supremacists. It’s still as beautiful and disturbing as it was the last time we were there, and that’s a good thing.
Retreats are always a tough balance between focused strategy sessions and teambuilding, and in years past our group seemed to lead heavily into days of focus and a lot less on teambuilding, which got exhausting quickly. This time the balance was much more in favor of talking to and interacting with people we don’t normally get to see. As our group has gotten more global we have more people on our team living and working remotely, so it was good to meet people from different countries and get to know them.
We spent 2 1/2 days in Charlottesville and I would say it was by far the best retreat focus on my group that I’ve been to since I’ve been at WRI.
While I was there I had two rolls of 35mm B/W developed from our trip to Portugal. Some of the highlights:
Jeff Bezos’s $10bn philanthropic fund has stopped backing the world’s leading voluntary climate standard setter, following rising scrutiny over its influence on the body, in a move seen as the billionaire’s latest effort to curry favour with US President Donald Trump.
WRI has several large projects funded by the Bezos Earth Fund, which have done excellent work so far. We learned that Andrew Steer was stepping down from the Fund last week; several other colleagues who followed him have also left. Make your own inferences there.
View this post on Instagram
Happy to have this completed. My team was awesome; I couldn’t be prouder of all of them.
WRI’s big Stories to Watch event went off well, with only a minor audio hiccup that was out of my control. Looks like we had more registrants but slightly fewer live attendees this year, which is fine, I suppose. This year I was even more heavily involved, to the point where I cut down and edited the four insert videos within the larger presentation. I’m glad I bought this new laptop, because the company equipment I have here would not handle the file sizes I was dealing with.
To shoot the prerecorded elements, we returned to the studio that shot it last year. They commissioned a behind the scenes reel during the production, which was really cool. Usually on these things I’m so focused on what I’m doing I never see it from the other side, so this was fun to watch.
Also, I’m noticing the fact that I’m losing hair at the top and rear of my scalp. Super.
Happy to see my boss (and one of our former leads of the WRI Climate program) getting lots of excellent press from COP28 this morning; our media and comms teams are firing on all cylinders. I’m also happy to see they’re holding this year’s COP President to account for trying to use the conference to secure new oil and gas deals.
I spent a miserable four hours trapped with no A/C on a MARC train yesterday attempting to get in to work; the brakes on my train stopped working about a mile away from Union Station and we sat on the tracks while they tried to sort things out. When that didn’t work, they brought up the following train with the intention of having it push us into the station. That train then failed and became stranded. So they brought up a third train next to us and disembarked two trains’ worth of rush hour commuters onto the third. I hadn’t had any coffee or breakfast, so when I finally sat down at my desk with some Blue Bottle and a warm burrito, I inhaled it with a couple of ibuprofen. Several of the trains headed north at the end of the day were cancelled but I was able to grab a seat on the first one out.
In happier news some new equipment arrived at the office last week and I was able to get it all organized: a new Sony A7Siii with a pair of new lenses in different focal lengths, as well as a shotgun mic and some other goodies. This doubles the number of Sony cameras we’ve got and almost fills out the full range of lenses we’ll need. I brought it home to set things up and familiarize myself with the menu system, and I think I’ve got things down. The new medium-range Sigma art lens I picked is absolutely glorious. I’m still wary of Sony gear, but we’re locked in now and we’ll see how it goes.
Well, this week has been a real test of my sanity; there were points when I felt like I was doing OK and at other times I was a terrible husband, father, and Co-Acting-Director-whatever. I’m not used to the sheer amount of meetings coming at us now, and the immediate need to be caught up with all of the inside information we don’t know is overwhelming. My friend Lauren comiserated with me last week, saying, one day you’re looking around for the adult in the room to make a decision, and you suddenly realize that’s you. So much truth in that observation.
Stories to Watch launched on time after an intense three weeks of shooting, editing, organizing, and producing. This year’s production was, in a lot of ways, easier than last year’s (and I wasn’t trapped in my bedroom with COVID, which was nice) but other stressors were still front and center up until the morning of the event. The video portion, if I do say so, looked fantastic. We got a lot of great feedback on the presentation, and when I was in the office later that day, my CEO found me and shook my hand to thank me and the team for all our work. That felt very good.
I was in the office not for the event, but because I had to help another team mix epoxy and glue laser-etched plaques to the front of five trophies that had been 3D printed with sand and shipped from Germany. Don’t let ’em tell you different: the life of a Co-Acting-Director-whatever is full of glamour. Due to some internal production confusion we had to source the plaques and some laser-cut felt to complete the pieces in-house, so I brought tools and a pile of nitrile gloves and we got down to business. They made me glue and set the plaques: no pressure. This coming Tuesday I’m headed up to New York City to help produce the awards event itself, where I’ll be shooting video. Two nights in Manhattan ain’t so bad, I guess.
Meanwhile we visited with Jen’s Dad last Saturday, and I got to work setting a subfloor in the common bathroom. This involved cutting and fitting two sheets of waterproof hardi-board, mixing a bed of thinset, and setting them in place before screwing everything down. It went in with only a few small hitches, and should be good to go for the next step: this coming weekend I’m renting a wet saw and laying the tile. It did involve a ton of work on my knees, cutting, fitting, troweling, and screwing, and I felt it in my back that evening. Between that and 9-hour days at my desk my whole body is pretty pissed at me right now. Hazel got her first walk in 5 days this afternoon; it was like we’d sprung her from Solitary.
And the built-in project is moving along. I found a decent 12′ board for the top shelf and cut it into place. Then I cut and fit small insets under each of the shelves that dress up the horizontals and give them a little visual weight. Jen and I discussed how to finish off the top and after some negotiation we agreed upon a solution to box in and frame out the top shelf with a section of moulding that matches the stuff above all our windows. So I’ve got to get a 12′ piece of that from the mill in Glen Burnie on a dry sunny day ’cause it won’t fit inside the car.