works of wanderlust

Month: May 2025

  • weekend wrap five

    It may not be summer, but tell that to the weather. It was a weekend for wide open windows trying to keep the house cool enough to sleep at night. I may need to drag out the air conditioner unit soon.

    All that said, I barely pulled myself far from the house this whole weekend, studious pupil that I am.

    It was the calm before the storm. The next couple of weekends are going to be filled with activity and socializing and concerts and grad activities and getting ready for summer. This was busy enough, I suppose, but whatever.

    This weekend was spent doing…

    School. Mostly school. And not much else. I wrote a few words and few days back all about the final weekend of coursework for my professional development program through the university. I spent the best parts of both days sitting huddled under a fleece blanket in the chilly basement staring into a pair of eight-hour long video class sessions. There were only five people silly enough to be taking business courses in May, though, so I found myself needing to stay very engaged. No hiding behind the crowd. And at the end of it I was actually pretty tired. It did, however, mark the final module of classwork and all I have left in the program is a single homework assignment.

    We did find the energy to go out for ice cream on Satuday evening.

    And on Sunday evening, after searching the whole house for the second lawnmower battery, I found it hidden under a pile of jackets and then I was able to cut the grass which seemed to have grown six inches while I was hiding in the basement all weekend. I practically could have baled it. And the dog was creeping around the yard like she was an intrepid jungle explorer, what with the grass up to her literal eyeballs.

    While I was out in the yard I also did some adjustments to my garden irrigation system, plucked about a thousand dandilions, and spent a fruitless half hour trying to figure out if there was a wasp nest nearby that would explain the unseeming swarms.

    In the gaps I read. I did a lot of reading, actually. I splurged on a digital copy of the Hyperion Cantos, a four volume compendium of a thirty-year old science fiction series that I have read a half dozen times but is on my list of comfort reads. I curled up on the couch and read and read and read and pushed through like half of the first book. More on that later, I suppose, when I post a book review.

    And on we go.

  • did I mention vancouver?

    It has actually been a couple months since we took a spring trip out to the west coast and spent a five day long weekend in Vancouver. It wasn’t so much that I forgot to write about it, only that I wasn’t blogging much back even two months ago (having not yet rebooted this site) and tho I had posted a few pics elsewhere, none have made their way here.

    It was mere hours away from a monumental spring snowfall back home when we lifted out of the airport on a short flight to the coast. We would watch the city-stalling blizzard through our doorbell camera while sitting in the hotel later that evening, but like old times when we lived out here, whatever the hell was going on back in Alberta was out of sight and out of mind.

    There are a million great reasons to visit Vancouver. The climate. The ocean. The food. The bustle of the city. Us? We were avoiding California. No, really. We had a trip down to Los Angeles planned for spring break and cancelled it in the wake of political uncertainty down south and the elbows up vibe around US travel. Everything was refundable except the flight credits which we spun around into a flight to Vancouver instead.

    We visited old haunts from our days living out there.

    We ate some amazing food, inexpensive and wonderful sushi, burned our faces off with hot pot, and gobbled a whole pizza on robson.

    We took a trip out to the university campus. The Kid was still considering schooling there at the time and we had a friend who gave us a little tour.

    We took in an improv show on Granville Island.

    We scored tickets to the Juno awards.

    On our Sunday morning there I woke up and did something I had never done, even in the three years living out on the coast: I ran the ten klick loop around the Stanley Park seawall. Heck, I wasn’t much of a runner back then, but I had always regretted missing out on that little adventure.

    Pangs of regret filled the weekend. We like our life back here on the praries, filled with adventure and friends and affordable housing, but I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if we had stuck it out. Twenty-one years after bailing on Vancouver we might have made it work somehow. Owned a house, maybe? A condo, at least. Spent our days immersed in a place like that which is so much more nuanced than the suburbs of this sprawling prairie city where we are now. Life would have been something else entirely. Who can really say, but I walked through familiar streets and pondered it nonetheless.

    Noting that going back to New York or Chicago is off the table for us for the foreseeable future, I couldn’t help but feel one morning, sitting in a cafe in downtown that it wasn’t that I was missing those particular cities as much as I was missing the feel of urban life. I am a guy who is comfortable in the wilderness, unreachable and alone, but I also am a bit of a city dude, soaking in the crowds and the crunch and architecture of tall building pressing in around me. Vancouver would have fit both those bills, and I spent a few hours over that weekend wondering if I missed Vancouver because that’s who I am or if Vancouver caught me at some formative moment in my life and what I’m really yearning for is my long lost twenties. Maybe a bit of both.

    There was nothing to complain about on the trip. The flights were on time. The food was cheap. The sights were accomodating. The celebrities were spotted. The rain was gone before it could be anything more than a reminder that Vancouver is less a tropical paradise than a city at the edge of a northern rainforest.

    We need to go back more often, I realize. It may not be our next trip, but I can already see another one soon.

  • black hole blog

    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.

  • book reviews: rainy spring

    Ugh. I didn’t read as much as I should have through the winter, and yet now, maybe only because I’m still riding the high of enjoying my new ebook reader, I have been power walking through a whole collection of books.

    That said, very little planning has gone into my May reads. I have very much been waltzing through the whims of whatever the universe throws at me, in the first case revisiting a book in print that I’d previously listened to, then stumbling into an unlikely girly memoire, and finally elevating a sequel I was pretty sure I was going to put off until autumn.

    But read what you want to read. Read what you feel like reading. Just read.

    And recently I read:

    Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

    This was a tough read, but for a strange reason: my first encounter with this book was when I listened to the audiobook version a couple years ago, and the narration and voice acting in that version is beyond top notch, bringing the whole story to life. Reading it as a novel this time through I could still hear the voices and cadedence of Porter’s acting chops. Beyond that, this is a delightfully nerdy romp through a first contact type story and a utopian perspective on why nerds should be in charge of everything. If you enjoyed The Martian, this is a completely different spin on the puzzling out life or death engineering problems in space by the same author, but with a pleasant stylistic overlap that bridges any of the plot differences. I have been making an effort these past couple weeks to avoid checking the star ratings on things (post upcoming in a couple more weeks) but I suspect that if you checked the reviews on this title you’d find no shortage of raves.

    Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

    Um, so yeah. What the heck am I doing reading a twenty year old quasi-spiritual memoire of a divorced woman traveling and meditating in the quest to clear her soul? I will admit, when The Algorithm recommended this to me, the low friction, low stakes, no cost value proposition of having the library on my ebook reader left me simply figuring that I would read the first chapter or two to quench my decades-long sidelong curiosity about this book which rode the bestseller list for like three years… and then move along. I read the whole damn thing. Maybe it’s a middle age quirk. Maybe I really have honed some previously emotional derelict part of my own soul these past couple years. Maybe there is a kinship between folks farted out the baskside of prim society and left to recreate themselves that bridges space, time, and gender. Who knows for sure. But putting aside my idle skepticism about the author’s spiritual awakenings and the manifesting of prayer and all that drivel, there was a relatable struggle to be found in these pages that has not uniquely been discussed in such books, but was certainly a perspective that I didn’t mind adding to my pondered-upon list.  

    Shift by Hugh Howey

    I lied in my last post. I surmised I might wait a month or six before jumping into the second instalment of Howey’s Silo trilogy. Instead, I had barely let the first volume cool off and I was onto the second. Sequels are always tough, I find. Part twos in a trilogy can be amazing tales of raised stakes (think Empire Strikes Back) or disappointing romps deeper into a story that can’t resolve until the final book. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I knew I wanted to dive deeper into the story. Instead what is here is a lot of backstory. Where in book one the mystery is the silo itself, what unravels in book two is a step back to nearly the present day (relatively speaking, at least) and we are introduced to the people and the politics that created the world in which book one exists, the histories of the world outside the silos themselves and the histories of the people who are stuck inside, too. I don’t just want to give a recap, however. Once again Howey is twisting dozens of very human stories together around this dystopic concept. Everyone is a complicated actor, both hero and villain, both struggling for their own survival and yet questioning their own mortality and morality. It is a romp through the psyche of post-apocalyptic humanity that is worth the trip.

  • study’s end

    Twenty four hours from when I started penning these words will mark the start of the final module in a bit of professional upgrading I’ve been working on. That’s to say, class starts this time tomorrow and then after this final weekend of lectures—and one more big assignment to submit—I’ll be complete.

    On a weird side note, one of the reasons I decided to take the course was to spend a small bit of inheritance left to me by my grandmother, and to spend it on something both experiential and useful: education. The last class of the last modules is on Sunday, two days from now, which would have been her one hundred and fourth birthday. Unplanned. Coincidence.

    I spent over a decade working for the local municipal government, and that was after a previous decade spent hopping around between project and program coordination and management roles.

    I was trained for none of it.

    I had done a pair of degrees, one in science and one in education, and both pursued out of some vapid obligation to a sense that I was “supposed” to do something both useful and that would pay well. I hated lab work. And then I emerged from my education degree in a hiring freeze.  Instead I landed at a sweet job in the not-for-profit sector out on the west coast. 

    Long story short, I never went back to any job that used either of those degrees directly, but instead I bopped around using all those critical analysis sciency and stand up and educate others skills to become an ad hoc project manager, systems designer, and eventually a straight up middle manager guy.

    …with a science degree.

    After nearly a year and a half of a career transition, having done some personal projects, part time work, and personal reflection, I figured my next obvious step was to put some credentials behind all that experience I had gathered on my meandering journey through the work world. Sure, I could do it. Sure, I had a seventeen page resume giving examples. But there is just something about those educational bonafides that throws a brick through the glass walls of future employment prospects. So I’ve been working on a business certification: a piece of paper from a high class university that says, hey, Brad studied this stuff formally, listened to experts, wrote words about it, handed in assignments, and got adjudicated on his effectiveness in these things.

    And in a week or two, when that final grade appears on my transcript and they tell me I’ve completed all the pieces, I will be able to add to my resume an extra line that says “Business Analysis Certified, University of Alberta, 2025.”

    Thanks Grandma.