works of wanderlust

  • refresh

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    One word that sums up your theme for 2026.

    Hey look! New year, new template.

    So, um…. that’s not exactly a rule, but when I rebooted this blog space back in April I tossed up a placeholder template to get me started, customized it lightly and kept rolling.

    (Well… typing and posting.)

    It was solid design, sure, but it never really grew on me. The value of a good template is that it (a) is reasonably unique to the author but (b) isn’t so unique as to be distracting from the words while (c) being somewhat timeless enough that maintaining it doesn’t become more of a burden than keeping the blog itself.

    I can offer such advice because 2026 will mark my 25th blog-iversary. 

    (I mean, it’s in April… but it’s also new years in a couple days so…)

    That’s right, I’ve been posting online in various forms for twenty-five years (nearly.) Gulp! You can’t read any of those posts from twenty-five years ago, I suppose, but they exist somewhere as files on some computer, in the cloud, and as experience in my fingertips. In that time I have designed hundreds (if not maybe thousands?) of web pages. Probably, definitely thousands I think.  

    This site, this blog, has changed as often as a couple times per year.

    (In other words, a template refresh is nothing new around here.)

    And that’s not all that is refreshed. My resolve to be better and to self-improve is back for another instalment of “hey, it’s new years!”

    I am, as usual, setting off into the fresh calendar with a resolve to switch up a few bad habits and re-energize the good ones. I hesitate to call the “resolutions” but sometimes a fresh calendar is a nice place to start a new project. A milestone of a sort, you know?

    I will be looking to kick off a new writing project on January first. I have plotted out a brand new novel and I’m going to slam a 500 word per day goal against that plan and see how much sticks.

    (I’m still prodding at the other novel, but I think some fresh writing in the same universe will help to unjam that one.)

    I have exactly six months left on my gym membership starting on January first, so a weekly swimming goal is brewing into the mix. I am fairly certain they won’t be closing the pool for maintenance again for at least another year or so, so… my only competition is laziness and lane space.

    (And maybe a threadbare swim suit.) 

    The run slate is clean once again. Those apps tend to reset everything to “year so far” numbers, so January first as the clock rolls over all of us are right back to zero milage for the year. And I have a reasonably fresh pair of shoes (and a couple new pairs of socks!)

    (I’ll quickly fall behind, but for a glorious few seconds all of us are on the same page.)

    I always write this, but I am going to read more novels. I was doing good for a while there last year and was ticking off like a book a week for a while. A reprise attempt is always on my bedside table, even if my success rate is a repeated rake in the face.

    (Those books are not going to read themselves!) 

    And since I won’t have my blog every day motivation from my december-ish blogging streak, this being the last post of the series, maybe having a refreshed blog template will motivate me to write and post as much as I did once… or just to keep at it regularly.

    It’s been a crazy year. Ready to refresh things a bit? I sure am.

    Happy new year. See you in 2026.

  • objectively spry

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    One quote that
    sums up your 2026 is…

    Flexibility.

    Now, before you go thinking this is some kind of subtle yoga reference, consider one fact: I’m writing this post on December 31st —and not on the thirtieth like I should be. Like, the timestamp will imply.

    I am being flexible.

    My life has been filled with hundreds (if not thousands) of little personal goals. I set out plans and mark milestones. I create bars for myself to jump over… and it’s starting to become a problem.

    I overthink. I get pangs of anxiety trying to keep up with my own little task lists. I state a win condition and then struggle to meet it. 

    And sometimes this is a good thing, sure. Having standards for yourself is a way that standards are met. Saying you are going to strive to write so many words per day, or swim so many laps per week, or run such and such a distance every month, or read a specific number of books in a year. It can be a real motivator.

    But it can also create obstacles. Real obstacles. You start to lean into those goals as unbreakable standards, and then if something does break—well, in my case? They often don’t just break but I often then turn around and give up. 

    Missed a couple days of sketching on that streak? Shrug. I guess I’ll draw again next year.

    Wasn’t feeling like a run today. Oops. I guess I’ll take the rest of the week off, too.

    Oh, you were planning on practicing your violin every day between rehearsals but missed one session. Oh well… why bother again tomorrow.

    I need to break that cycle for myself. Thus, my goal of 2026 is flexibility. Fewer goals, more concepts. Less absolutes of full accomplishment, more experimentation with attempting completion. It sounds counter-intuitive, but I think in the end it will lighten the effort and bring me more fulfilment in my hobbies and side projects.

    So this post is an example of that flexibility. Sure, I missed writing a proper post yesterday (um, today) but I’ll just write it a day late and update the timestamp so it appears on the right day. Shrug… and keep plugging along. Happy new year.

  • facing the punching

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    One quote that
    sums up your 2025 is…

    Easy come, easy go.

    In many ways I signed up for a kind of trial of instability.  Not locking into regularly scheduled employment for a couple years, taking gigs, doing contracts, picking at projects, working part time, going back to school, et cetera, et cetera… it all added up to a kind of here one day, gone the next kind of changeability of my days.

    I was reminded again of that this evening as yet another thing I was working with unexpectedly seemed to have wrapped up just as the year was drawing to a close.

    Oh well.

    Does that mean I enter 2026 looking for more stability? Or does it mean I start to get used to it?

    There is an old idea that I’ve brought up before in my writing, which is the idea that you gotta be punched in the face a few times before you get used to being punched in the face. No one wants to get punched in the face, but being in a situation where you would be likely to be punched in the face for bad reasons means that how you react to such an event could mean the difference between survival and… not. So, overcoming that initial shock to being punched the first or second time is always the hardest.  

    I haven’t been punched in the face, at least not literally, but there is a metaphor tangled up in there somewhere that feels like it might have something to say about 2025.

    I’ve gotten used to being metaphorically punched in the professional face and things have started to feel like, you know… easy come, easy go. Onto the next adventure.

  • different

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What do you think the world will be like 25 years in the future?

    A lot can happen in twenty-five years.

    I know my little world has changed in ways that I never would have fathomed. And I think that is likely true for most anyone. Think about meeting yourself from twenty five years in the past, and vice versa, meeting yourself from twenty five years in the future. 

    Who the hell is that person? They are almost certainly unrecognizable. Twenty-five years can do a number on anyone.

    On the other hand, the world? After twenty five years have passed again? The people of the world change. The technology of the world will seem like magic to us. The politics will be damn near unrecognizable. Every kid of that world has yet to be born and will not even be conceived until the 2030s or beyond.

    The Kid turned 18 this year, which makes her an adult. The first time we took her out to a restaurant and she ordered a drink (you can drink at age 18 where we live) the waitress looked at her ID and exclaimed “but you were born in 2007!”

    In 2007 I was only just getting my head around the idea of being a dad. Twenty-five years ago I still pretty much felt like a kid myself. Yuh. A lot can change in 25 years.

    There are just a few days left in 2025 as I write this. The twenty-first century is one quarter over. The “kids” these days are mocking us people older than 25, reminding us frequently that we were “born in the 1900s” … what seems like a long time ago.

    Next year I will turn 50 myself.  That is twenty-five years twice, and it’s true what they say: you never really feel your age. I still feel twenty-five. (Tho my body sometimes behaves like its in its 70s, but that’s a different story.) I’ve only seen 25 years pass me by twice, and the first twenty-five were just mostly growing up and everything seemed pretty normal back then, I think because your brain is changing on the daily and twenty-five seconds or twenty-five years is all pretty much the same thing.

    What will everything be like in 25 years in the future?

    Prognostication, as it turns out, is something of a young man’s game.

    I can tell you what things were like twenty-five years ago. Some of it is still fresh. Some of it catches me off guard. Turns out that many of my favourite movies are much older than twenty-five. I have books on my shelf I haven’t gotten around to reading that have been sitting there for twenty-five years. My house is nearly that old, which only serves to remind me on this freezing cold day that my furnace is the same age as my house and it could stop working any day now… or last another twenty-five years. Twenty-five years, as it turns out, can just as easily seem like twenty-five seconds. It’s all pretty much the same thing.

    In twenty-five years a lot will change. A lot will stay exactly the same, too. Take your pick. What’s your perspective, I suppose. Are you looking in the mirror? Or are your looking at the horizon?

    I don’t feel like I’ve changed much but 2024 is barely recognizable to me at the moment. Five years ago seems like a dream. Stepping backwards into 2001? Hell, I rung that new years in on a cruise ship on a vacation with my family (the one and only cruise we ever took) and that is so long ago it seems as much a blur as reality. That year itself? I can’t even begin to remember it all.

    I suppose my point, if I have one, is that twenty-five years is so abstract as to hardly matter to the day-to-day living that needs doing—and yet planning and thinking about twenty-five years passing reminds us, too, that planning for a world that will have changed so much as to be unrecognizable to even ourselves, and yet eerily familiar, is vital to getting there at all. 

    So? What do I think the world of 25 years of the future will look like? Different, and that’s pretty much all I can be certain of.

  • social games, four

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What did you want this year
    …but not get?

    It was something ineffable. 

    Because all I really wanted this year was some kind of reassurance, clinging to the frosty winter air, that the raw stupid of modern society might be waning, that people have started to see through the fog of misinformation and impending societal collapse and are maybe, possibly, hopefully doing something about it.

    I know that the new year tends to be a time of resolution and change, and while we’re all renewing our gym memberships and swearing off chocolate for a few weeks, it should also be a time of a bigger reflection on the habits that have a much bigger impact on how we will live our lives in the coming year. 

    I did not get the thing I wanted most which was the waking up of the world to the dizzying harms of social media upon our world. I would tell you that I have logged off from corporate social sites about 85% completely. I still lurk occasionally. I still troll through Threads and Bluesky to see what a few of my friends are posting. I still occasionally treat Reddit like my morning paper while I sip my coffee. I still maintain a Youtube fever for political commentary. I updated Instagram on the daily while we were on vacation and still have a half dozen accounts that show up in my profile. 

    Yet, I did not log onto Facebook once in 2025. Not once! And I deleted my twitter account fully and completely this past year, too. I steer clear of the crazier platforms entirely. I won’t even name those: if you know you know.

    Here’s the thing tho: I thought something was true and I was not entirely correct: I thought that if we, the prolific posters, stopped posting then the people who came to those sites to simply witness our participation might … you know… lose interest. Leave. Quit social. But no. It turns out that between AI slop and propaganda engines and meme generators and marketplace listings most people are hooked like fish on the line and are slowly being reeled into a life of inescapable doomscrolling participation. They kept the apps, but stopped looking for their friends. Now they attend for the shit show.

    Worst of all, my province (while it may not have led the charge this year) had a giant float in the crazy parade. The mindless reposting of everything from political nationalist reactionism to medical misinformation means we have a local government bigger than their own britches who is is using antidemocratic tools to strip away basic human rights and a populous who has generated an eighteenth century style fear of medicine so strong that we brought back a near-extinct disease. Sadly, I know enough people cheering this all on that it breaks me a little bit more each time I hear it.

    I admit. Every year or so I vow to step away from social media, and realistically I don’t think it will ever fully happen.  But there is something ineffable and important about the way I still work quietly behind the scenes, online and on my own platforms, to keep my voice… and my sanity… a further step away with each attempt.  I continued to strengthen that resolve in 2025 but I still never really got it to where I wanted it to be. It never really landed. Maybe it never will. It’s forever worth the effort, tho.

    Next year? I have my typical list of new resolutions for 2026: Read more. Write more. Swim more. Eat better. You know, the standard sort of being better stuff. But nestled in there somewhere is the vibe that I plan to take yet another step further from those dank platforms and keep fostering my own personal voice somewhere else. Where that all leads? I don’t know, but I do know that each year it is less about screaming into the void and more about hanging onto reality with every ounce of strength. 

    I don’t know that it will get me the sense of hope that I am yearning for so desperately, but I do think that in the trying there is something important and resolute. Worth seeking, even if I never actually find it.

about

Welcome. I’m one of those weirdos who still writes a personal blog. In fact, I’ve been writing meandering drivel online for decades, and here you’ll find all my recent posts on writing, technology, art, food, adventure, running, travel, and overthinking just about anything and everything …since early 2021.

I write regularly from here in the Canadian Prairies about just about anything that interest me. Enjoy!

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