works of wanderlust

We Interrupt this Training Plan for …

Sunday Runday, and I woke up to a skiff of fresh overnight snow and a minus twenty world out my front door.

Yeah, you read that right: -20C. (Not even mentioning the “feels like” -33C wind chill estimate that accompanied the forecast on my weather app.)

As I was eating my breakfast, one of my running partners (who is a government meteorologist) texted me at 7am with the (I assume) professional advice of “stay warm, I will not be out this morning…”

And then I did the thing I’ve done too often this past year and a half…

What do you wish you’d done
less of this past year?

… I tried to get out of my run.

Sure, it was the coldest day of the season to-date, and sure, I’ve been feeling a little lazy since slowly nursing a sore heel back to health.

But the last twenty-one months has been full of countless excuses to curl up in a ball on the couch and ignore the realities of life, the universe and everything. Who hasn’t wanted to do exactly that? Sometimes multiple times per day.

This morning as I looked at the outside temperature, as stuck my barefoot out the back door, as I let the dog out at quarter past six in the biting cold, I immediately started thinking of additional excuses to stay home in my pajamas and curl up on the couch with a coffee and Netflix … y’know, instead of doing a training run.

I didn’t stay home.

I wanted to bail.

But the text message thread the followed left me feeling guilty that one of my other partners had already left his house and was en route to our meeting place. I complied. I layered up in my warmest gear, dug a fuzzy buff and an extra pair of wooly mittens from the cupboard, and made my way in my truck (switching on the 4×4 for the treacherous roads) over to the nearby parking lot from where we usually leave. Nine klicks later of slogging through the cold and snow and wind. The sun was barely cracking the horizon and as it lifted over the frosty treeline just to the side of the path a beautiful winter sunrise cracked a bit of the cold and offered a hint of apricity against the brutal, biting freeze. A cold run. A run at the limit of my cold threshold. Weather that literally hurts. We ran for nearly an hour with frost clinging to our lashes and ice crusting on the brims of our toques.

I wanted to bail, bail like I’ve done a few too many times this past span of time, but this time I did not. I ran. I froze. I kept running. And ultimately I returned to the warmth of a hot cup of coffee and some good conversation. But I wanted to bail nonetheless.

In 2021 I wish I’d done a little less of that wanting to skip the things that used to be the highlights of my everydays, runs, and adventuring, and getting out and about. I know there have been great excuses, often even mandates and strict rules enforcing those same reasons, but I wish I’d had less opportunity to slip into whatever pattern it has created for me and left me thinking first of a reason not to do something than the former excitement that launched me off that couch and into the world.

I don’t know for sure how to do that less, but I think it’s worth aspiring to.

December 5, 2021
How to be a Photographer.

Three dSLRs

Four GoPro action cams.

Two tripods.

One flash.

Nine lenses.

A fistful of memory cards.

Drawers packed with gadgets, clips, hooks, meters, caps, filters, batteries, microfibre cloths, and a random assortment of other camera accessories.

And in 2021 I took a lot of photos like this… on my iPhone.

What do you wish
you’d done more of
this past year?

There was a time I would have told you that my dream job was being a photographer. I worked to make money so that I could buy camera equipment and travel.

Heck, when I was a teenager I built my own camera. I exposed a roll of film, brought it to the local photo store, told the guys what I had done and that I wasn’t sure how the photos would turn out. They developed the roll for free and gave me some advice for my next attempt. It seemed for a moment that I was on some kind of destiny course to be the guy behind the lens.

It didn’t work out that way.

But I’ve clung to the dream and … well until this past couple years … spent my life filling hard drives with experimental photos, adventure pics, travel images, and family portraits.

… until this past couple years.

Yup.

Until this past couple years, when I stopped traveling, focused on some other creative projects, and rarely left the neighbourhood save to do masked expeditions to the grocery store or socially distanced runs with my cohort.

I wish this past year had been a bit different. I wish it had been different in that I neither had an excuse to stick so close to home nor had the inclination to allow myself to stop carrying a camera with me everywhere.

December 4, 2021
Not Created Equal

Not all websites are created equally.

Take this site. As a real estate analogy, this is a cabin in the woods. This blog is the digital version of a weekend getaway, stuffed with comforts and curiosities, eclectic bits of cookware, and eccentric tchotchkes piled onto the shelves to add an atmosphere of warmth while still giving it all a human touch.

What made your job
interesting in 2021?

On the other hand, the website that I oversee for work is a large glass-paneled government skyscraper downtown, with elevators speeding between the floors and strict rules for how the queues to each service desk are designed, and careful attention to detail given to the colors of the wall paint and the placement of the signage pointing out everything from the washrooms to the lost and found to the exit.

I don’t write about my work, at least not often, because there is such a stark contrast between what I am paid to build over there and what I build for fun over here.

And I think buried in that explanation is a little of what makes my job interesting, too.

Not everyone understands websites, and less so do people understand the vast chasm of differences that are buried beneath the design, purpose and function of those websites. Maybe that is a broad assumption, but I see evidence of such a conjecture if not daily, then multiple times per week.

We need to think more like Starbucks. Someone will say.

I reply that Okay, yes… we can learn from Starbucks but Starbucks is a little shop on the corner that sells coffee and fills its humbly lit spaces with warm, inviting leather chairs and groovy popular jazz. We are required to use plastic seating and provide ample lighting. How can we translate that vibe into something useful?

The analogy breaks down quickly, obviously.

People see something that works and while they are not wrong in the simplification, they are also often unaware that there is a huge gap — technically, functionally, even philosophically — between what our corporate website does versus what Facebook does versus what that food delivery app does versus what a little blog in the winter wilderness (quietly run by one and the same person as the first) is meant to be… and do… and say.

And in that they are not wrong but merely interested in a design problem, the part of my job that becomes interesting in return is attempting to take the energy of such a vision and translating it into a plan for someone else to write code that can be uploaded and integrated and activated into a tool that, say, sells bus fares with the same fluidity that Starbucks dispenses lattes.

Meanwhile, I can write and say and post and design this little cabin in the wilderness exactly the way I want to. Right here. Warm, cozy, curious, and inviting.

December 3, 2021
Another Life Reset

Nearly every day for the last year this blog has given me space to think about and write about living a more simple, purposeful life.

Better food.

Longer walks.

Moments of captured creativity.

But so what’s my point?

Who or what are you
leaving behind in 2021?

I guess getting to the end of a year of being someone who works in digital technology but plays in the very analog world of cast iron, fire, wilderness, and trails has found me at a bit of a crossroads.

I turned forty-five this past month.

I’ve been working at a post-university career-type job for a little over twenty-some years.

I suppose (and if I’m lucky) I could expect to work for a little over twenty-some years until I’m supposed to retire and pack up my suitcase to see the world as an old guy.

But all this thinking and writing and pondering a different sort of life has left me with a particular notion of switching things up.

I seriously looked into finding a bakery apprenticeship (or something similar) over the summer. It didn’t work out, but it did put me in the mindset of what exactly might be encompassed in a career change, even one massively dramatic as moving from a keyboard to a cutting board.

So while I’m lucky in another way in that we didn’t lose anyone close to us this year (despite a global pandemic raging everywhere we look) I did lose a piece of me, a particular certainty of myself and who I am, and not necessarily in a bad way.

What am I leaving behind in 2021? I’m stepping away from the resolute and stubborn guy who knows exactly where he’s going to be sitting in twenty some years. I don’t think I do anymore. I think he faded away sometime over the summer and in his place is someone who wants … needs … a simpler bite of meaning in his life.

Whether that’s a result of all this writing, or just an obvious correlation, I’m not sure yet.

December 2, 2021
A Good Life, Well-lived & Enjoyed Aloud

As I write these words the final month of the first year of this blog has arrived.

It’s December.

And after a mind-numbing and depressing 2020 I’ve been penning my thoughts and opinions here throughout 2021 to the tune of one hundred and seven thousand, three hundred and eighty three previously published words into two hundred and fifty three posts inside this digital space.

It’s been exactly eleven months as of today.

Deep breath.

Describe your 2021
in tech or tools.

I’ve been blogging for over twenty years.

Unless you’ve cracked through my obfuscation of identity curtained across these words (hidden mostly because I work in an industry and culture where Google search results for my real name are akin to a business card and I like to keep my personal and professional selves separated) you are unlikely to know that while I’ve only been writing here for eleven months, I’ve previously managed a string of previous personal, creative, and niche websites over the past twenty-ish years. I’ve got a bit of secret tech cred. But just a bit.

In almost all those websites, December uniformly has become a time of self-refection and mindset adjustment for the upcoming year.

So, after eleven months of scattershot posting here about cooking, adventure, firepits, travel, sketching and all those other little analog and outdoor enjoyments, I’ve once again set December aside for a string of thirty one posts about … well … cooking, adventure, firepits, travel, sketching, and all similar sort of those things, but in the context of the past, present and future.

Call it a quasi-resolution-twist to wrap up the year with a bit of grace and style.

Because routine and tradition can be a good thing, even in technology where we seem to think we want fresh and innovative turned on like a firehose.

My 2021 was a technology reset year.

This year I came back to a pattern of regular writing in (and this is important) a space I fully control. We take that for granted because so many of us cede that control to the social media algorithms of big private media platforms, offloading the decision-making to money-generating, click-baiting software systems that slurp up our creative effort and spill it out to the rest of the world in a way that usually makes other people rich and famous. I was tired of shipping my photographs and art and writing off to the likes of Facebook and Reddit and crossing my fingers that an invisible software system saw fit to give it some daylight online before it disappeared into a vast, bottomless pit of old posts.

I may not have yet obtained the same quantity of folks reading what I choose to put online, but I think the quality of what I choose to curate here has elevated the whole experience for me … and hopefully anyone who chooses to join me here.

I’ve all but vacated those controversial social platforms, maintaining a minimal presence, and definitely not a preferential one.

This blog was my 2021 experiment, and the experiment was a success. Dozens of you read it and check in. And tho my daughter would scoff at that number saying “dad, such and such a youtube streamer has six million subscribers and makes more money that you do at your real job!” I would retort that I’m giddily loving entertaining any size of small crowd with genuine content that makes me as happy writing it as I hope it makes others reading it.

In other words, the experiment will most definitely continue into 2022 and beyond.

December 1, 2021

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!

There are currently 448,385 words in 588 posts.

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