Another navel-gazing blog post to start the week.

I would avoid fumbing into another blogging about blogging post on a Monday morning, but I feel like I need to plant a flag at this moment and explain some things.

I doubt you’re paying much attention, but if you were you may have noticed that the post count on this site went from 40ish on Saturday to about ten times that number on Sunday.

I did not have a mad typing frenzy and write a lot. Even I have limits.

Instead, while trying to figure out what to do with four years of blog archives living at at least two other domains I decided that I should just slurp all that content into this site and keep trudging forward.

Context follows.

On January 1, 2021 feeling (a) new yearsy and resolutionish (b) frustrated by ongoing covid lockdowns (c) blogless and oh there’s that writing itch again and (d) private enough that I didn’t want to write under my real name here’s what happened: I started a new blog called The Cast Iron Guy.

The Cast Iron Guy was a covid project. It was a hey, I’m stuck at home, let’s write something different that feels big and fun and wasn’t about being locked in the house in the middle of winter. I made up a pen name—bardo—and wrote a lot of posts—no, a lot of posts—about cooking and local adventures and life and the universe and of course cast iron, which was a bit of an obsession for me at that moment in time. I posted with abundance, almost daily for a year and then just frequently for the three years that followed.

A couple things happened. Covid waned. Career change shifted my life. And a bunch of other “cast iron guys” popped up online who were hard core, forged in fire, sandblasting frying pans to heavy metal soundtracks tiktokers. I was just over here writing sourdough bread recipes and poetry about mushrooms. My enthusiasm stuttered and puttered. But the site has always been online.

I don’t want to write cast iron guy stuff anymore, tho. That was an era and that era has passed. But there is a load of great content. So… what to do? I pondered.

Well, I have rebooted this simpler blog (the one you are reading this on) at my original web address url. Why not just slurp all those blog posts (and a few from another similar but much smaller project about writing on art I was doing in 2023) into this site and just keep going?

So that’s what’s happened. As of this Monday morning basically all the blog content from the Cast Iron Guy is now in the archives of this site. Essentially 95% of the posts prior to April 2025 are the ramblings of an adventure-seeking blogger surviving the pandemic era. I have some mopping up to do because some of the pictures didn’t import cleanly and a few of the links are broken (some of it is half a decade old after all) but for the most part it’s all there. And if you haven’t read it because you had never heard about it because I was being a little bit secretive about it then there is a literal novel-worth of content buried in the archives of this site now, gobbled up like a great big black hole blog.

And onwards it goes.