works of wanderlust

Category: life & stuff

Generally just words and thoughts on the progress of my day-to-day.

  • Summer

    Where I live, there exists a short and precious span of time between snowfalls. It is when gardens grow strong, trails turn green, and daylight extends well into the night.

    SUHH - murr

    For July and August, this blog is on a summer publication schedule: still posting, but not-daily. Check back for sporadic summer check-ins and stay turned for my regular daily blogging schedule to return this September.

    In the meantime, my summer photo gallery will be updated as often as I can remember to post new pictures.

    Thanks for reading!

    – bardo

  • Dog Days of Summer

    It’s officially summer here in Edmonton where I live, and the days are marked by a sharp increase in temperatures and an equally sharp decrease in my motivation to move with any sort of speed … yes, even when I’m running!

    Also, it’s been a long, dark winter … at least sixteen months if I recall … and this summer seems more welcome than any of us can put into words, I think.

    With the arrival of summer, the re-opening of our world (locally at least) following a long, exhausting pandemic, the end of the school year for my daughter, and the wrapping up of a huge project I’ve been involved with at my real job, I’ve been eyeing the arrival of July with no shortage of excitement.

    I’ve been writing this blog for nearly six months, every day, and making it a daily exercise has not only resulted in one hundred and seventy plus blog posts since January, but has given me great motivation to go out into the world more openly, explore more deeply, cook and eat more adventurously. Six months is not long, but it has been long enough to kickstart a respectable quantity and tone of articles that I’m (mostly) proud to have online.

    Of course I never wrote about how I intended to keep blogging every day, well … forever. Because… to be honest I didn’t intend that. I intended to write daily for as long as I could manage to keep it interesting for myself and for my readers, and (more importantly) for as long as I wasn’t trading the living of my life for the writing about it.

    Summer is short and definitely for the living of life, and with all those simultaneous moments approaching with the first of July, I am in the important moment and existential position of asking myself if I’m following that very rule: I don’t want to sacrifice adventure to the publication cycle of a blog.

    You may have also noticed that more than a few of my articles lately have been a bit … um … navel-gazing? Bland? Space-filling? I’ll be the first to admit I’ve phoned in a few posts this month. Gak!

    So, here’s the thing…

    I’ve decided that I’ll be switching over to a summer schedule for July and August.

    This summer we have some mountain vacations planned, some technology-free camping trips in the north country to do, weekends at the lake or on the river to enjoy, and a whole of lot of intention to get away from our screens as much as possible. I will still be posting here, probably more regularly than I should, but look for my posts to be a little more scattered over the next two months as of the first of July.

    Expect your daily dose of cast iron guy goodness to resume to full daily schedule in September, and with any luck I’ll have a long list of stories to catch you all up on.

  • Work-Life-Balance

    I’ve had a busy week.

    While this blog tends to be a great outlet for me to find some balance between my time at my desk and my time in real world, sometimes that balance tips too far to one side and I find myself sitting on a Friday evening with not much to write about because I haven’t done much worth writing about over the past week.

    Today is kinda like that.

    Balancing Screen Time

    With dozens of readers coming to this blog every day you may be wondering why I still need to work.

    But seriously.

    I have a great job with lots of flexibility for time off and to live a life where I can sleep in my own bed every night. I’m grateful for that.

    That said … said job is ninety-five percent spent in front of a screen.

    So you blog in your free time? You ask. On a screen?

    I enjoy having a place where I can be myself and do something similar that I do for others, but do that thing for myself. But yes, not every day do I find myself savoring the idea of another few minutes in front of another screen.

    How does one balance?

    Balance comes from a having a plan, or so I find. Balance is the result of having something to do that pulls you away from the easy thing to do … too easy, like flipping open your phone and scrolling, or flicking the remote and queuing up the next streaming show.

    Balance comes from doing the things that you need to do in proportion to the things you want to do. Not everyone has that luxury, of course, but it is something that we all seek and for many a thing that we will spend much of our lives working for, looking for, striving for.

    I’m here on a Friday afternoon after completing a very long list of things I needed to do.

    Meetings. Reports. Emails. Managing.

    I’m hoping my weekend holds an equitable list of things I want to do.

    Wandering. Cooking. Running. Creating.

    That’s my work-life balance.

  • Ready for the Weekend

    How do you prepare for your weekend?

    Do you pick away at your to-do list over the week, so that when you catch up with Friday night you are free and clear, ready to enjoy everything? Sure, this means that you’ve saved up all your down-time for those two precious days, but when Saturday and Sunday arrive you have nothing but relaxing to accomplish, right?

    Or, do you wait for those first few hours of the weekend and get everything done all at once on Saturday morning? The weekend is still young, you’re full of energy, and you can just sink in and get the work done before lunch on your first weekend day. By the time you break you’ve still got a day and a half ahead of you to rest and enjoy.

    Maybe you’re a take-it-as-it-comes weekend warrior? A chore here, a task there, and strike another item of the list then kick your feet up for a while until you feel ready to take on the next one. There’s no sense in being efficient about it, right? Weekends aren’t a job, they’re your life and you can take it as you please.

    Ideally you are not a procrastinator, but I can see how tempting it might be to put everything off until Sunday evening. Are you one of those folks? Enjoy every moment you can until the last possible second when you figure you may as well get back into the week by doing some yard and housework before bed on Sunday.

    Or perhaps you’re a little like me, and it’s a bit of each and a different take on the to-do list every time a new Saturday rolls around.

  • One Hundred (Incredible) Years

    I found myself in a local drugstore this weekend, standing in the greeting card aisle, picking out a birthday card.

    The selection was limited.

    Limited, not because the store was lacking in birthday cards, but because there was only one option with the correct age number printed on the front: 100.

    While we’ve spoken on the phone numerous times, I hadn’t seen my grandmother in person for well over a year. This, even though she lives a mere dozen kilometers away in a care home near the neighbourhood where she lived most of her life, a fifteen minute drive away from my front door. Fluctuating restrictions due to the pandemic have had us teetering on the knife edge between “probably shouldn’t” and “definitely cannot” go for a visit.

    Yet for a birthday celebration, her with double-dosed vaccinations and us with one each, we spared a bit of caution and met her in the grassy courtyard for a sunshiny visit and a cupcake.

    It’s not how any of us imagined celebrating a century of life.

    One hundred years is such an unfathomable span of time for most of us that to tell folks that a loved one has reached the milestone evokes reactions ranging from clapping and cheering to dropped jaws and gasps of astonishment.

    “One hundred?! Really?” They say. “That’s incredible.”

    Because it is incredible.

    Within some of that hundred years I’ve had plenty of overlapping time to experience the influence of this woman I call my grandmother.

    She loved to walk and did so every day of her life, until she couldn’t anymore, and then still tries to walk as much as she is able up and down the hallways of her care home. I don’t know that she was ever a hiker or explorer, per se, but I can’t imagine that she ignored those countless trails running through the creek ravines near her old house, some of the same trails I now run.

    With the exception of a small patio, her entire backyard was a vegetable garden and my oldest memories of visiting her in that house were of my grandparents fussing with weeds, and tinkering with soil. The rhubarb plant now growing strong in my own garden was a cultivar of her plant and after fifteen years I still consider that I’m just minding it for her.

    And as long as she was in her own home she never fell for the trendy upgrade to an electric stove, remaining in my mind the one and only cook who stuck by gas and her good sturdy kitchen tools. I missed out on the family cast iron collection, a regret I’ll have for a long time because the culinary gene skipped a generation (right over my mother) and all credit for my interest in making food goes back to that lineage, pots, pans, and genetics all.

    But there it is. I don’t know how to celebrate a century of life in these times other than to acknowledge it. Just say, wow.

    A piece of cake.

    A conversation in the sunshine.

    A card with a giant one-zero-zero on the front.

    Incredible.