works of wanderlust

Category: life & stuff

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

  • Friday Finds: Pressed Flowers

    Fatherhood is funny.

    Finding honest and interesting things to do with a young child can lead one down all sorts of previously unfollowed paths of creative exploration and into all kinds of time-filling follies.

    For (nearly) fourteen years I’ve been nudging my daughter to try new things, to explore her creative self, and find fanciful ways to fill her mind with fabulous experiences.

    For whatever reason for which I can’t quite recall, I was recently exploring something far less fanciful: the closet in my office… which is in itself an archeological site dating back to my having moved into the space well over a decade ago.

    Finding my old university textbooks was not surprising, but finding those same textbooks stuffed full of dried wild flowers was something that I had obviously done long ago but almost forgotten about.

    Foggy though my memory was on the exact timeline, I recall spending the day with my toddler-aged daughter in the local natural areas of the river valley, filling our days with simple delights and effortless fun.

    Frolicking through the tall grasses and between the poplar trees, I remember that we picked flowers and I’d promised her that we would dry them and “make a present for mommy.”

    Fascination is an emotion so easily overwhelmed by impatience, especially for someone only three or four years old, and I assume the flowers were stuffed into some conveniently fulsome tomes, my old microbiology textbook for one, to begin the drying and pressing process, then…

    Forgotten.

    Fast forward to this week and the aforementioned archeological dig through the back corners of my closet revealed a small stack of flagrantly outdated text books filled with the feathered edges of wax paper pressings, and a dozen or so samples of decade-old dried flowers.

    Finding something meaningful to do with these fragments of my shared history with a daughter who is growing up and out so quickly may be a fruitless effort, or…

    Forcing some kind of nostalgia into something so fleeting, a single day from a forgotten timeframe shared by a father and daughter my prove old-fashioned to her teenage eyes.

    Faithless as that may seem, I almost stuck those textbooks back into the dark corners of my closet to wait out another decade.

    Flowers, dried and brittle, imbued with some kind of narrative for a long lost day would likely age further and form an even more fortified link to that flipbook past given a few more fleeting years of passing time, or…

    Forgotten again.

    Frail and lost to time.

    Famous to no one but my fleeting recollection of a fragile moment.

    Fatherhood is funny, and fumbling my forties with emotions and curiously fading memories in unforeseen forms on an otherwise quiet Friday morning.

  • Fire/Smoke

    The world is on fire.

    As much as I love a good campfire, heating a hefty pan over some crackling logs, I love even more that I can always walk away when the smoke wafts into my face, stinging my eyes. I can stand up and step into fresh air, take a deep breath, and reset my lungs.

    This past weekend all the air was a smoky haze, everywhere. There was no reset.

    Image: https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/

    Dozens of forest fires are burning across the country.

    One of my colleagues started his career as a forest fire fighter, spending years of summers helping to control burns and protect small communities surrounded by kindling. We had an amazing conversation on Friday as he talked about his knowledge of the history and strategy of forests in Canada and the different approaches taken by different regions of the country, all of which go a long way to explaining why and where those little orange dots appear on the map above.

    While people joke on social media about escaping or blowing it back west, the data shows that the culprit is actually intense wildfires to the north east that are clogging our throats and lungs.

    The short of it is that fire and smoke and wind and summer air currents mean that my house is not at risk of burning, but my lungs are now haunted daily by the thick, campfire-like smoke that permeates every corner of every breath of outdoor air.

    Image: https://weather.gc.ca/airquality/pages/abaq-001_e.html

    The effects are no joke.

    People call in sick from work due to aching lungs and throbbing heads.

    And we skipped our run yesterday, the prevailing opinion that we would be… might be… probably would be taking our health into negative concern by sucking down ten kilometers of smoky air from the “very high risk” and the literally off-the-charts poor air quality.

    The world is on fire.

    This is not new.

    A few years ago we spent five days hiking in the backcountry mountains near Lake Louise. The day we hiked inbound was a clear, beautiful, sunny day, but over the week a thick cloud of forest fire smoke descended over the valley where we were camping shrouding the mountains in what seemed a romantic fog but was actually an acrid, lung-burning, inescapable haze that made the air smell and taste of char.

    That same year I also ran a marathon, and due to the smoke the go-no-go call for that race was uncertain even as we stepped up to the start line.

    It was not the first time the air was smoky through the summer, by far. But it was among the first of many consecutive summers clouded by a shroud of burning forest smoke. Every summer since, it seems, weeks are lost to hunkering from the attack.

    Even today, the few people out and about on the streets are still wearing masks despite the lifting of the health-related bylaw, and I pass by them wondering if they are hoping to avoid a virus or to simply screen out the visible ash from the air.

    The world is on fire.

    Take a deep breath… if you still can.

  • 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.