works of wanderlust

Month: May 2025

  • one foot out of the nest

    I’m sitting here in a cafe watching out the window as a parade of goslings march across the parking lot let by a gaggle of parent geese.  They navigate the mostly empty asphalt in front of a not-open-at-8am restaurant, and then a couple minutes later are dashing out onto the main drive holding up the cars and trucks on their morning commute out of the neighbourhood.

    It is an apt metaphor for the last twenty-four hours of my life, I realize.

    Yesterday evening we attended the first of two granduation commencement ceremonies for The Kid who will be—is—already technically has graduated high school this year.

    The first ceremony, the one last night, was a smaller and more intimate affair  with just the hundred or so kids who successfully completed the language immersion program and will be graduating next week with a French diploma.

    There were tearful parents, thousands of photos, cake, silliness, and congratulatory handshakes. 

    We’ll repeat it next week on a larger scale will the full class, but the fun one—the one where I knew enough of the kids who had been through all thirteen years of school, the one with the gaggle of parents were a big group of familiar faces from years of field trips, sleepovers, birthday parties, drop offs, pick ups, and on and on and on—that one is blip, and done.

    I’ve been thinking a bunch about parenting lately. I mean, for about five years, tho lost to the buried archives of time and privacy those articles are long gone, I actually wrote a parenting blog. It was not an advice blog. It was a reflective, parenting philosophy blog. It took me down some interesting paths of thought and ideas and implementation of both. If only I could go back in time and tell the guy writing that blog that simply overthinking all those ideas was worth it in the end.

    And then I wrote a parenting blog of another kind. For a couple of years I posted a weekly comic strip over at www.piday.ca which was me drawing art and making commentary on the trials and troubles of being a dad to a kid who was about ten years old when I created them. I literally just spent a few hours over the last week restoring all those comic strips to a new website and in doing so re-read every single one making me wonder why I ever quit making them. They were not great, but they were pretty good.

    In a week that same kid will be graduated.

    In mere months that same kid will cease to be a kid—in as much as she will be able to vote, buy booze and make decisions for herself.

    I definitely know that parenting never really ends, but this week… this month… this summer is definitely a major milestone in my parenting journey, maybe as consequential as I remember feeling about this time eighteen years ago.

    Those little geese will be off and out of the nest in a month or two. And then the parents can get back to doing whatever they do best—pooping in the grass and squwacking at bikes and honking at five in the morning as they take off into flight.  I feel you, you angry birds, I feel you.

  • essays in downshift

    Of all the things I could be writing here, what I should be writing more of is words on the process of shifting careers.

    I’m practically overflowing with experience in that lately. *sigh*

    It’s funny, actually. I am sitting here in the sun of a cafe patio sipping my morning coffee and staring blankly at a keyboard. I was trying to prompt myself into writing something meaningful because the last twenty four hours has been something of a crest of yet another existential crisis dealing with parenting transitions and a funeral and a hundred other little quirks of reality. I was trying to write something meaningful because it feels like a day for meaningful things. Instead, I was reading through my old writings.

    Twenty-three months ago I quit my government job. About once a month now I seriously look at that decision and wonder if it was the right one—then quickly remind myself to read back through my letters to myself or catch a glimpse of the beurocratic trenches that burned me out and remember that quitting was the good decision. The tough decision. But the right decision.

    Existential crisis stand by.

    My old writings are in themselves grounding. If you ever decide to shift careers, or just quit a toxic career and look for a better reality I have only one piece of advice: journal the fuck out of that thing.

    A month. A year. A decade. However long it takes to shift. Just write and write and write. Keep track of the ups and downs. Plot the moments. Grasp the emotional state of each moment and put it into words.

    And then… go back and read it on occasion.

    Two years feels like forever and simultaneously feels like a blink of the eyes. That sounds incredibly cliche, but cliches are cliches for a reason, right?

    My journey over the last two years has been one of a hundred different mental states, from sinking into the depths of desperate projects to flying on the wings of new prospects. I don’t need to inventory here everything that I have dabbled in this past stretch of time, hobbies and habits, meditation and milage, part time work and unpaid pondering, and heck knows that if you told me that I’d be writing something like these words and staring down the metaphorical gate leading into year three of this process I may have reconsidered the whole damn thing, but then that’s why the words have been so important. That’s where the writing has grounded the ride.

    Want some tips? Here are five starting points for reflective journalling:

    1. Write yourself a letter describing your day. Date it. Be blunt. Why do you feel the way you feel right now, what’s driving you up the walls, how are you coping and how does it make you want to react?

    2. Write your backstory. Pick a logical point in time and explain like you were writing a memoir how you got from that point to now. Maybe you explain the course of your education. Maybe you lay out the path of your employment history. Maybe you detail the people and conversations that led you here. I dunno. But you do.

    3. Layout the events of the week. Do it narrative style. You are allowed to be the main character for a few minutes. Like, look back on the last seven days and explain how you spent them, the highs and lows, the blahs, the conversations that made your day or had you tugging your hair out by the roots.

    4. Explain where you think you are going. No one really knows for sure. We’re all making this shit up as we go, to be honest. But unless you’re sitting perfectly still you’re heading in some direction and you must have a destination. What do you expect to find there.

    5. Admit a misconception. None of us are perfect. We make assumptions and misunderstand things all the time. Own up to yourself in your journal. Write what you got wrong, why you thought one way when it was actually another, and call out the moment.

    Existential crisis be damned.

  • unrebellious

    Rebels, huh?  To me,  if you’re asking, three guys sitting on their deck smoking weed seems like conformity. 

    Again. If you’re asking.

    I mean never mind that it’s legal now. Never mind that you can more easily buy a mind-altering substance in a neatly packed plastic sleeve right there at the corner store than you can buy a box of chocolate chip cookies. It just seems so much like conformity now. Everyone is doing it. What’s counter about blurring your thoughts and losing yourself into a cloud of smoke?

    We’ve mistaken substance abuse for rebellion, but it’s actually, to me at least, all kinda sorta just a different layer of the economy now, isn’t it?

    Me, if I wanted to conform I’d buy a brown suit and a bible and go to church on Sundays and pray for my neighbour’s soul.

    Or, if I wanted to conform, I’d sit at a desk job and attend meetings day after day after day, file some reports and then dutifuly die at my desk on a Thursday afternoon with a cold cup of coffee by my side.

    Of course, if I wanted to conform I could also do just that by dropping a gummy in the backyard while my ass warmed a lawnchair and the dog slept at my feet and me there falling into a nap of my own and dreaming of speeding a noisy motorcycle down the freeway.

    These are all basically the same damn things, aren’t they?

    You disagree? Nah.

    They feel different, but only just feel different. They aren’t really. That’s the illusion. That’s the trick. They used to be fresh and strange and counter, but if someone is earning money on your back—collecting a tithe, collecting a profit, collecting a tax—that’s just conformity after all, isn’t it?

    If I wanted to rebel I’d quit my job and learn to cook my own food so I don’t need to tip a delivery guy for handing me a cardboard box or even the cute waitress just because she said some nice things to us sitting there at a table in her part time job. I’d make terrible art, spattering paint onto paper and pretending it had meaning when art has no meaning but what someone else wants it to mean and I’d keep it to myself for no one to see but me and hide it away to make people wonder how I spent all my free time. I’d write long novels that wandered through time and space and invented mindblowing ideas without care for purpose or practicality and then I’d promise to let everyone read them but secretly I would just keep writing them until I ran out of caring anymore and wrote something else instead.  If I wanted to rebel, to go out on the road of modern counter culture I’d find a trail that no one else was running and run on that even though there aren’t many of those left and the ones yet to be explored are often scorned for how foolhardy they are, how loose the footing, how vague the orientation. I’d run it anyways, and people would ask me if I was crazy and I would tell them that no, I just wanted to see something different and unexpected and that joining in the smoke up wasn’t my idea of a mind opening experience anyways. 

    And that’s how I would rebel because there ain’t nothing rebellious in much of anything these days, not even the things we got used to thinking of that way.

  • searching for theatre style

    Salt, oil and popping corn.

    Can you imagine how many iterations and combinations of that trio I’ve gone through over the years in search of the perfect pop-at-home theatre-style popcorn?

    I lost count long ago.

    I’ll try not to bury the lede here.

    Theatre Style Popcorn

    2 tablespoons of beta carotene infused coconut oil
    2 teaspoons of flavacol salt
    1 cup of popping corn

    That’s it. Heat the oil over a medium heat, testing the readiness with a few kernels. When they pop, add the corn and the salt.

    Stir.

    Mix.

    Pop.

    Eat.

    My personal pursuit for this particular combination is either the best kept secret behind the eleven herbs and spices …or I’ve just failed to run in the right corn popping circles for the last few decades.

    You can, after all, order all of these ingredients from your favourite online retailer’s website for prime next day delivery… though you really need to first know what to buy, I suppose.

    We grew up eating popcorn as a snack at home.

    We had an air popper, and we would melt (I want to say butter, but it was probably) margarine over it and then sprinkle table salt into the mix. It had a vibe. It was what I knew. And yet, by the time I was about fourteen I was already going to the movie theatre with some regularity and had figured out that my parent’s secret popcorn recipe was not a thing like the bag of deliciousness we scored when we went out.

    Was it a trade secret?

    I would occasional glimpse the theatre employees filling the popping machines and my takeaway from witnessing this sacred act was that whatever magic concoction they were keeping on the hush behind the counter, it was emerging pre-mixed from unmarked brown pouches. I suspected not even the teenagers making the good stuff knew what was in the blend.

    Over the years I fumbled into various online rabbit holes of perfect popcorn speculation. I mean, who hasn’t? While you were researching celebrity sightings and video game rumours, I was poking around forums suggesting that the secret was in using clarified butter or finely tuned temperatures or the stirring mechanism.

    I mean, now that I’ve figured it out theatre popcorn is actually just so simple, it almost seems that all those other theories are so much witch-craftery that they are barely worth mentioning. But seriously… that is the path upon which I strolled trying to figure this out.

    Theatre popcorn just has this, I dunno, an undefinable quality. The blur of the yellow salt and the chemistry-experiment butter-ness. I think what I had stumbled upon over and over and over and over during those years searching was people acknowledging that theatre popcorn is not necessarily great popcorn. There are definitely better ways to make popcorn. Of course. Undoubtably, the quest for good popcorn and the quest for theatre popcorn are probably not the same adventures into flavour town. There are superior popping recipes, yes. But theatre popcorn has something that is as much soul snacking nostalgia as it is food quality.

    I had figured out the Flavacol aspect about a year or two ago. Some of that online research stirred that brand name out of the digital depths and sure enough I could order it online. I popped dozens of batches and cross-mixed the fine yellow salt with all manner of methodology and popping oils. I could tell that it was close. There were hints of the theatre in whatever Flavacol was bringing to the party… but still it wasn’t quite hitting the mark.

    One night I was sitting on the couch flipping through some or other social media dreck and the second part of the clue scrolled into my feed like so much serendipitous fortune: coconut oil. But then not just any coconut oil. Of course I had already tried plain old coconut oil and it was close, but not quite right either. (Luckily it is great for seasoning cast iron!)

    Instead, there existed a coconut oil product out there specifically for popping popcorn. Dyed bright yellow by beta carotene and blended with a bit of that chemical romance of fake buttery goodness, this was the missing ingredient.

    And that’s it. Three ingredients.

    I have dabbled in variations of the trio for a couple months now, making myself a big bowl of theatre-style popcorn every other week or so, hunkering down to watch a movie at home.

    That’s the recipe. Stupidly simple, but deceptively specific.

    I mean, don’t look at the nutrition information, but Cineplex eat your heart out.

  • six years of sourdough

    Well, I have just spent the last few days working on the migration of a bunch of old blog content and… I apologize. if you clicked on this expecting a more “bready” opening paragraph, well, sorry. Nerdy things beget nerdy things, and sourdough bread and blogging are both pretty nerdy things walking hand-in-hand through this house.

    My blog archives are stuffed to the rafters with foodie content.

    That was even more evident when I realized that I had accumulated over thirty posts on the subject of sourdough while I was writing the Cast Iron Guy blog a few years back.

    My starter, the same starter I pulled out of the fridge today in what has become part of my regular routine of warming it up to start the bread-making process later this evening, turned six last month.

    No cheating. No fudging. No malarky. It’s legitimately six years old.

    And I’ve not gone longer than three weeks without making bread (and even that was just the once because we toddled off to Europe for a summer vacation in 2023 and of course I wasn’t baking bread!)

    As I moved and cleaned up all those old sourdough posts, tho, it struck me that compared to the early days of my baking I have not been nearly as experimental as I was back in 2021 through 2023. The last couple of years, in fact, have seen but a single innovation in my loaf approach and that is the acquisition of a large covered Emile Henri loaf pan (not cast iron!) which has become my exclusive go to bread baking vessel.

    Shape and pan aside, I used to experiment a lot more.

    I dabbled in flours.

    I attempted hydration with beer.

    I tried sweet breads and savoury loaves.

    Lately, tho? White bread, sandwich loaf style, ready for my breakfast toast with butter and strawberry jam. Simple, staple, and kinda boring… at least in as much as it makes for interesting blog posts.

    So I guess if you came here looking for sourdough ideas you should know that there are quite a few scattered through the archives of this site, neatly filed under “sourdough” … but you should also know that while I’ve stopped writing as the Cast Iron Guy, I am still quite a bit of a nerdy sourdough bread guy. (I’m making a batch tonight!) And I will be looking for, thinking about, and scheming up interesting ways to expand that thirty posts to a much longer list as this updated blogging effort continues.