An Update on Justin and Wildfires

I know a lot of folks have been messaging me because they've been seeing clips like this on the news. This is where I live. I live in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, and there are multiple wildfires burning. There are three fires burning in our area right now. Thankfully, they are to the west of the city.

And the lakes we have here are kind of forming a wall of protection between us and the fires. The one thing we do have is a lot of smoke. And this is becoming a bigger problem everywhere. Now, North America, if you look at the fire map that comes out every summer, basically, the smoke is over a big portion of The United States and Canada. It goes over borders.

You know? It goes from Canada to The US, US to Canada, province to province, state to state. It's everywhere. So the smoke is just kind of hanging around and it really affects me mentally. It's not good for my mental health.

You have to stay inside. It gives me headaches. It makes my eyes burn. I'm not able to work and think. And so I was like, I need to get out of here to some clean air just in order to work and be able to focus.

So my son and I decided to do a road trip, go eventually end up on the island, Vancouver Island, where my colleague at Transistor, Josh Anderton, who's on the marketing team with me, he just moved there. So we thought, okay, we'll go there, do a day with him, and then just kind of get out of the smoke and be able to focus and work and also spend some quality time with my son. So yeah, we took off on the eighth and started driving. It was wild driving through all these wildfire zones. As we were going through Merritt over the mountain pass, the air quality index got up to a thousand.

The smoke just hung in the air like this kind of apocalyptic fog. It was really wild to drive through it. And yeah, I had to get out and charge the car at one point in it. It's like it instantly just suffocates you. The air is so toxic.

And then the funniest thing is once we were over to the other side of the mountain range going down towards Hope, it just cleaned up. And, you know, it was fine. Got to Vancouver. Stayed a couple nights in Vancouver where the air was clean and beautiful. Stayed right on the harbor and then caught a ferry to Victoria.

And the ferry is fun too. You kind of go over the ocean and get all these beautiful views. I was able to catch up on some podcasts this whole trip and then landed in Victoria. My daughter lives there and her boyfriend. And so we spent some time with them.

They took us to this show that I gotta tell you about. It was so interesting. Kind of an open air festival. And, you know, I've been to a lot of kind of festivals where the band is kind of playing, but no one's really paying attention. But then this band called The Thoons came on.

And I've never seen a band do this before, where they kind of show up and no one really knows who they are. And by the end, they just had the whole audience dancing. We had be all become new fans of this band. And I think it was because they were just so committed to their act. They're all wearing karate outfits and were playing all sorts of different kinds of music.

They were just having so much fun. They were in their own zone. Infectious. We all were infected by their vibe. And by the end, you couldn't help it.

You had to be dancing. And this one part, were literally worshiping them. Like, we were just enraptured by this band. They had thrown a spell on us. Anyway, that was just a wild experience.

Like I said, got to hang out with Josh Anderton in person. He's been working with Transistor for years, but we've never actually worked in person outside of team retreats. So we met up at a local co working place and spent the whole day together. Really, I'm feeling this more and more. There's really no equal to working beside somebody.

Remote work was really good for me, especially once I had kids and had a commute and had moved out to the suburbs. But I think in terms of just team dynamics and being able to get things done and being able to communicate in a way that the other person can grok what you're saying and there's true understanding on both sides. You're more in tandem with the other person. Working in person is just unmatched. I I don't think there's anything as effective.

Even though I'm a big fan of remote work and, you know, Transistor is a remote first company, I'm feeling more and more of a desire these days to work with people in the same location whenever I can. Another highlight from the trip is I got to spend time with one of Transistor's longest running customers, Mike Vardy, has been a friend, longtime creator. He works in the productivity space. He was one of the first people that I convinced to try Transistor, and he's been with us since April 2018. So it's always fun to see Mike and catch up.

And, you know, we had a great walk and talk together. It's helpful for me to see kind of what's going on in his world as a creator and in his business and how he's thinking about things and, you know, what he's working on. So, spending time with people, man, it's good. And being in the clean air. I I can't If you get clean air and the weather's nice outside, I just can't tell you how lucky you are.

Once that's taken away from you and you're in like a smoke covered fog, you really realize how valuable it is to have just clean air and sunshine and a blue sky. Don't take it for granted.