works of wanderlust

lucid professionalism

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 made your job
interesting in 2025?

Some people may incorrectly tell you that technically I don’t have a job.

They are wrong.

I am not traditionally employed these days, true, but I do in a very real sense work for myself… which is a huge job and a lot of work.

Living the dream… or maybe the nightmare. It really does depend on the perspective and the day of the week… and how much sleep I got last night.

This state of existence is very much a privileged position emerging from a stable household income, a lack of consumer or property debt, and probably most importantly (I’m not even kidding) living a frugal lifestyle… at least relatively speaking. If anyone seriously asks looking for a serious answer I usually just tell them that we simply don’t buy anything we don’t actually need. We’re shitty consumers. We eat groceries not commercially prepared food. We travel for adventure and experience, not for luxury or clout. We shop to replace, repair and maintain, not to own more stuff.

But I digress.

This state of privilege has allowed me to spin up a sole-employee, self-owned small corporation and do bit contract work as a means to keep my skills sharp and my days structured, while still leaving a tremendous amount of free time to do everything from write fiction, dabble in side projects, make art, and hang out with the dog.

In the two and a half years since jumping ship on my last full-time gig, I have written extensively (mostly in private journals that will never be published) about the transition from salaryman middle-manager in a municipal government job to bumbling self-employed creative eking out a pittance of a living doing gigs. And as it turns out both roles are stressful, but in unique and different ways. The government work was the stress of deep accountability at multiple levels, accountability to a demanding public, to a corporate hierarchy, to direct reports, to technical fidelity, to process and security, to vendor contract fairness and a long list of other deep and abiding struggles that kept me awake into the wee hours of the night. The contractor work is the stress of building reputation, honest effort, uncertainty of next week, and the dark spectre of knowing that I am every role in my own company and no one is there to prop up any shortcomings if I forget to do something important.

And yet in my lucid and rational moments, as much as I occasionally get that grass-is-greener mentality looking across the gap from present to past self, I am definitely happier and healthier where I am now.

The daily variety of living this type of professional existence is both humbling and exciting.

Yesterday I was reflecting on this same notion from the perspective of perspective itself: what part of this transition am I leaving behind, and in effect giving myself permission to pull down the metaphorical scaffolding of this professional notion I hold of myself as fixedly capable, instead looking to the broader variety of both gig and term jobs I could take on. Why? Because a year ago I was in a very different place as a guy (temporarily) working part-time day-by-day for a small company job that I had stepped into to fill the void of structure and a paycheque. And it turns out those are the two exactly wrong pieces that drive what makes this stage of my professional life interesting. Sure, I need to get paid… who the hell doesn’t? And sure, having something to do when I wake up each morning is important. But both of those things are somehow right now, in this privileged moment secondary to the adventure of dabbling and learning and contributing to interesting work efforts that I would never have encountered as a middle manager in government.

It is a bit of a dream, after all. A bit surreal. A bit hard to explain clearly to anyone not experiencing it. And something that I know I will need to awake from …and then return to reality. But it sure as hell has been interesting, if nothing else.

December 3, 2025
cheap-ish therapy

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…

Who or what are you
leaving behind in 2025?

I was reading over old posts. I mean, half the reason I write this damn blog is that, as they say, writing is cheaper than therapy. That is to say… these words are mostly for me. It is a public journal of a sort, after all, with the key part of that being the notion of a journal.

Four years ago (to the day) I wrote a post called “Another Life Reset” in which in my first year of writing these reflective posts I lamented on the state of my life as a bureaucratic pencil-pushing middle manager staring down the barrel of another decade or two in government IT work. It was the middle of a pandemic, after all, and my life had become something of a chaos train of salaryman red tape and taking on the stress and angst of a team full of web nerds who were spinning through a time of societal change and whathaveyou. I was deeply burnt out. Charred from the inside core and right out to the part where I was a bit of a zombie. It would take me another year or so, but I manifested that “life reset” and left that job for an open-ended pursuit.

It has not been a simple reset.

I have rolled through a small collection of random work, a laundry list of job interviews, re-training programs, and kick-starting my own small business. And oddly enough, in the middle of so much risk and change and idealism it has been the spirit of the reset that has been the one thing pushed off to the side.

I might even admit I’ve panicked a little bit.

It is the thing to do, after all, when facing uncertainty. In the what-will-be two and a half years since I left my (un)comfortable stable income as a municipal employee I have found myself drifting back to the idea of that stability as a core tenant of my search rather than the reset that it was supposed to have articulated in my life. That is to say, I’ve been interviewing and pursuing familiar jobs that would literally reboot my currently reset life back into the same program.

Not that it has worked.

And I mean, look—the world is a crazy complex place right now. It’s an employers market. I’m now less than a year away from fifty, and the whole notion of so-called career is as fuzzy as my chin on a Saturday morning. I kinda need to reset from the reset: to rethink the whole approach.

I tell myself that over and over, but honestly it comes down to personal expectations and this lingering thought that I need a kind of self-granted permission to do something crazy.

So that’s what I’m leaving behind. I’ve been thinking about it for a few months now, actually. My expectation for what this all looks like if and when it ever reboots needs to have a secondary reset. A purge of expectations. It is a leaving behind of mental frameworks for my professional self and looking ahead to a job that does more than “keep me busy” but rather gives back to the world in a meaningful way that counterbalances the whole drudgery of employment.

I’ve set the pieces in place in 2025. Now it is time to pull down the scaffolding of my old concept of professional self and reveal what is possible. How’s that for some cheap therapy online, huh?

December 2, 2025
little green squares
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…

Describe your 2025 in tech or tools

… to which I am going to answer with a picture of my Github contribution graph:

If you know you know, but if you don’t know what this is, let me explain. Github is a code repository. It is like a cloud drive for computer code that keeps a hyper-detailed change record of writing software with the intended use cases being collaboration and tracking for software development. It is like a little library tool for writing and publishing and bookkeeping for code. Any time you are happy with your code, inasmuch as it runs and you want to snapshot something you built in case you break it or need to share it or just make a record of that work, you make a “contribution” to the repository.

I made 687 contributions to my repositories last year.

That little chart is a kind of heat-map of when I was writing code… or at least when I was saving something I wrote to a permanent record of development.

In among those green boxes are:
- a video game I’ve been developing
- my personal social media feed app
- two public wordpress plugins
And what you don’t see there are:
- a couple of private professional projects (…which probably account for another 300 or so contributions)
All in all, I would guess I submitted to Github repositories (albeit my own) about a thousand times in 2025… which is to say I wrote a heckuva lot of code in 2025, kind of equally split between Rust and PHP.

That’s not trivial.

I wish I could tell you that I wrote a thousand stories in 2025 or drew a thousand sketches in 2025. I cannot.

I can tell you that I sat down at a keyboard and wrote out tens of thousands of lines of intricate computer code, some for myself and some for professional work, that turned into functioning software. I can tell you that my 2025 was a year of making, and that I am coming out of this year in a state of having made interesting and useful things in computer code that a year ago were either ideas or maybe not even that much.

I just spent nearly three weeks in Japan and made over a hundred posts to my own micro-feed app, a lite-cms that I have been writing for three years and honing for the last few months.

I have a game that is still deep in development but it runs on my SteamDeck and I have logged a few dozens of hours play-testing it and it is not terrible.

I spent multiple weeks spread over five months writing code for professional clients under the flag of my new corporation and that code has now all been deployed and (I am assuming) helping those clients run websites and business operations.

That has been my 2025 in technology: highly coded, and contributed, and there is a neat little graph that marks it all in a record of progress right there as a series of little green squares.
December 1, 2025
japan-oramas, one

November has ended, and on the last weekend of the month I time travelled across sixteen timezones, arriving back home before I left Tokyo. Weird, huh? Our flight left Narita airport at 18:30 on Saturday evening and we arrived in Edmonton at 16:20 the same day.

International travel can mess with your mind… and your circadian rhythms. It took me most of Sunday to glom back onto Mountain Standard, and then just when I thought I was doing fine I tossed and turned until 3am. Ah, jet lag, you nasty witch.

All that is to say, our near-three week vacation in Japan is done.

I have many thoughts, and (a) there is no possible way, still slightly jet lagged, to get them all into even a couple blog posts, and (b) I do want to break the surface tension of that reluctance and my lack of posting here for that duration and write something.

We landed in Tokyo nearly three weeks ago. Phew! Has it been that long already? I was equally jet lagged as I am now, but going in the opposite direction. Sixteen timezones is no joke. But, we got out on foot (and train) and explored the city for five whole days.

And you can see a lot of even a massive city like Tokyo in five days. I mean, you can’t even see enough of it or even a significant portion of it, but you can see a lot. And a city like Tokyo throw a lot at you.

We stayed about six blocks from Shibuya Station, which if you know nothing else about Tokyo you might know it for that crazy scramble crosswalk where millions of tourists flock to simply cross a major intersection in a bustle of people.

We did the stereotypical thing and filmed ourselves crossing it. And I think the locals hate that in their beautiful bustling and glowing city what people get kinked about is crossing an intersection whilst making a selfie. I did not selfie.

The thing I noted most strongly about Tokyo is that it seems a lot like a lot of cities that have been mashed together into one super city. We would catch the the train, ride fifteen minutes through three or four or eight stops and then get off, only to emerge from the chaos of the rail system into a brand new place. You’d pop up by the Imperial Palace one day and stroll by some lovely gardens surrounded by a serious business district. Then we’d take the train a few stops and suddenly I’m in Akihabara and I feel like I just popped into a video game level, or another stop and boom: temple, or yes another stop and wham: fish market.

We ascended two towers whilst we were in Tokyo: the Metropolitan Government Observatory (pictured) and walked around inside there for about an hour just looking at the endless city, and then later The Tokyo Sky Observatory, at night, and seeing endless lights stretching to the horizon made us realize that we were in a sea of millions of people and millions of stories, and there was no way we could ever see even a fraction of part of it all.

Of course it is really the culture shock of Tokyo that caught me off guard. I feel like I try to be open minded enough that nothing truly shocks me. I am a trained scientist after all, observing the world with a rational mind of curious interest. And maybe it is only that as foreign as you expect a place to feel, it usually turns out to be foreign in ways you didn’t expect. That is to say, a lot of things feel mundanely familiar if only because we live in a great big interconnected global village and a lot of the world has been homogenized into a grey paste of sameness. But then the other bits that you didn’t expect rise up above the sameness of bank machines and traffic lights and potato chips and homelessness and starbucks and those differences are so stark against that grey backdrop that they are all the more surprising because of it.

We went to temples and museums and markets and seven-elevens and ramen shops and kabuki theatre shows that brought us new experiences in Tokyo that will stick in my head for decades.

And yet, here we are back home again.

It had snowed a day before we arrived back in Edmonton. It was cold and grey, but grey in a freshly arrived winter sort of way. And lots of people were happy to see us back, asking about our adventures and to regale them with stories of what we’d seen.

So much, I’d tell them. Where to start?

I think it will need to dribble out as I remember it, little bits of it will poke up into future reflections or recollections as I write and remember in the coming months. And that is a good kind of travel experience, I think, the kind that worms into your brain and fills it with so much that you can’t possibly explain to anyone in any coherent way what it all meant.

December 1, 2025
head over feets, thirteen

Lucky.

All good things begin with the number thirteen, right?

The race kinda wrapped our season, however you look at it, and as an autumn overseas vacation looms I’ve been contemplating things besides long distance training. That said, I’ve been trying to get in some physical activity amid dealing with a minor health issue this past couple weeks.

On my docket were…

Tuesday, after a full day and some of post-race recovery, I drove across town to the pool. Gah, I’m getting so tired of not having a pool close by… but I deal and in a couple weeks the local one will be through it’s refurb and I can get back into that groove over the winter. For now tho, laps in Mill Woods.

I didn’t do much the week that followed the race, but on Sunday (in the wake of the daylight savings time change) we were back to our regular meetup and coffee club run, logging eight klicks in what suddenly felt a lot like impending winter weather. The leaves are all well-gone and there were icy patches on the trail because the temps were hanging out below zero when we started. Long pants weather for sure.

Did I mention that I gave up caffeine? I don’t know that it is a permanent switch up quite yet, but I’m testing out a theory around this persistent cough I’ve been fighting and I feel like it might be less of a respiratory issue and more of a reflux issue. Too much info, I know, but them’s the reality of my so-called fitness life. So I’m off caffeine for a month or so… meaning I spent most of this week in full on withdrawal. Headaches, muscle aches, general tired and grumpiness. All that, along with a dose of snow late in the week meant I didn’t really get out much at all for a few days.

I did make my way to the pool again on Friday morning and I swam a bunch of laps. The post-caffeine withdrawal phase felt pretty good and my lungs feel like they’ve opened up. I actually had a mighty good swim and then a nice long soak in the hot tub. I doubt I’ll have a chance to get in another swim before vacation tho, and hopefully my home pool will be open again when we get back, so fingers crossed that’s my last drive across town for a swim for a long while. It is a really nice pool, but a thirty minute drive was a little much.

Of course, Sunday despite the flipping cold weather, we met up at the rec centre as usual for an eight klick run. Just as much to remind me of my caffeine withdrawal as anything else, it was a slog. I ran out of gas around six klicks in and ended up doing some walking. I have been doing a whole nutritional reset as part of trying to get this reflux issue under control before our trip, so I’m sure I was just in a bit of calorie debt, too. Ugh! Getting old.

On Monday I sat down and worked out a game plan for Japan: I’m bringing along one change of running gear, my watch (of course) and I bought some new running shoes to double as fresh travel, walking around shoes but which will more than serve in case I opt to go out running. My best bet is to hope I’m not too jet lagged that I can make a Park Run just a few days after we arrive, and if not that, there is another one much later in the trip. Otherwise, it looks like I might just scope out the streets and parks of Tokyo and try and find a nice homemade route. Travel running is always a glorious challenge.

November 11, 2025

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 436,015 words in 576 posts.

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