works of wanderlust

Category: life & stuff

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

  • the speed of summer

    Everything grinds to a crawl during summertime.

    Maybe it’s the heat. Maybe it’s just that time of year.

    I’ve got a half dozen projects on the go right now and I’ll tell you exactly how I feel about them: I feel like I shouldn’t be squandering the summer weather sitting in the basement writing code, but damn if it isn’t too hot to be anywhere but the basement writing code right now.

    I set myself up with some strategic planning tools for myself.

    I picked up (yet another) blank notebook and started a kind of quasi-bullet journal. But, instead of tracking my water intake and groovy moods like a moody influencer, I’m using it to keep a concisely organized list of ongoing projects, both personal and professional, as well as a tidy collection of daily goals to meet.

    For example, today my four (semi-personal) tasks to accomplish were:

    • – write a blog post (in progress, hmm?)
    • – add more detail to five of my professional portfolio entries
    • – write 500 words in my novel
    • – make some art

    It all seems pretty banal if you look at it in isolation, but each of those objectives is part of a larger project or hobby I’m trying to cultivate and work on, and each day I have 4 different things to accomplish meaning that each and every day I should theoretically (a) accomplish at least 4 things and (b) move slightly closer to some goal-based efforts.

    It’s either that or nap on the couch watching YouTube, so I’m thinking this way is objectively better. And summer heat excuses be damned.

  • weekend wrap eight

    The last three days have been punctuated by epic thundershowers meaning not only does the lawn now desperately need to be mowed thanks to the rain, but also that it was a good weekend for a time-consuming indoor actitivity.

    This weekend was filled with:

    Games. Anita scored a pair of tickets to the annual Game Con convention over at the expo center, three-day VIP passes, and she apparently had no interest in attending. One ticket to her husband, obviously, but I took the second and spent a huge chunk of the weekend, including Friday, there.

    Friday I got to the con just before lunch, did some of miniatures painting, wandered around, watched a couple demos, and then met up with Chris on his break, who was volunteering there all weekend, and we played some board games in the middle hall.

    I skedattled out of there around five, and chilled with the dog through another thunderstorm as the evening pressed on.

    Saturday I got up and got back to the con to meet Aaron. We did some wandering and product sampling, checked out a lot of the vendor booths and then watched some of the mainstage shows while we ate mediocre poutine. He took off around 2 and I stuck around a little longer to paint another free Warhammer miniature.

    Back home later that afternoon we made dinner and I retreated to the basement to read.

    Sunday morning was a beautiful sunny day and so we logged a nice ten klick run in the river valley.

    Sunday was also a dual event in our house, Karin’s birthday and also Father’s day, so the poor kid was juggling gifts and cards and being in a good mood.

    I had bought Karin a 2 player “duel” variatiaion of another board game we like. Finding good two player games is our new challenge as the parents of a kid just about to launch into university, and we played a couple rounds trying to figure out the rules… then the strategy.

    We walked the dog over to the cafe for something else to do later that afternoon, and then as the evening pressed on we went for a slow but tasty dinner at the nearby sushi place to celebrate the double celebration day.

    And then, just because it had been a busy couple of days, I hunkered down for the rest of the drizzly night to finish off another book in my queue so that I could move onto other things… not that it’s a race or anything.

  • war of the ants

    I really do hate using my entymology powers for evil.

    Yet, I have been waging a war out my front door on an ant colony as they wreck havoc upon a beautiful and otherwise-thriving plum tree I’ve been trying to grow in my front yard.

    Let’s back up.

    We’ve been in our house for twenty years, and one would assume that roughly nineteen years since completing the landscaping around that new-build home we should have had time to grow a maginificent tree of some sort in the front yard.

    Most of our neighbours have trees that tower as tall as or much taller than their roof lines, granting shade and a sense of maturity to the property.

    My tree is only about two meters tall, spindly and could use another decade before I consider it a success. Why? Because it is the third tree I’ve attempted to grow in that spot. The previous two perished because of, frankly and humbly, my presumptions about my own ability to thwart the climate in which I live—and too, that Home Depot is an asshoel for selling trees to people who don’t check closely enough these things in their local nurseries that are not rated for our climate zone.

    On about six year cycles I’ve had to replant, tend, try to rescue, and eventually remove the two previous attempts at a front yard tree. And most recently, in 2020 (I remember this because it was in the peak of the pandemic’s first summer) I found a plum tree in a pot, ready for transplant, similar if not identical to the one thriving in my neighbours backyard, rated for our climate zone, and I bought it and planted it in the hole from which I’d just dug the remains of the last stump.

    Fast forward to twenty-twenty five and past four bitter winters and a couple years of light but successful plum harvests from this young tree… and to me noticing that a lot of the leaves were curling up this year and—oh shit—the ants, I suspect a species likely lasius neoniger, had infested it and had built some kind of critter farm filled with hungry little insects and webby, silky, munching aphids turning entire branches into a tree apocalypse affecting about a third of the host organism. They were killing my third tree. 

    Here we go again.

    Or…

    My last week has been spent trying to rout the invasion.

    Diatomacious earth powdered upon the ground.

    Insecticides on the leaves to curb the livestock explosion.

    Bait traps seeded around the colony in hopes of poisoning the queen.

    And, most rudimentary, spirals of sticky tape twisted around the trunk face out to capture hundreds of drone workers and glue them to their doom. 

    I studied entomology in university. I often tell people it was an unofficial minor in my science degree—unofficial because I never took the time to declare it—and I could have, should have gone on to do something with that because I love insects, particularly the eusocial ones like ants who I used to rave to anyone who would listen about the fascinating properties of ants who did agriculture. 

    I mean, I just don’t want it in my tree, in my front yard, wrecking my stuff. A bit nimby of me, sure, but I’ve got property values to think of, right? And, I mean, what a waste.

    So I sit here writing this, drinking my coffee, and thinking with the backburner thoughts of a guy preoccupied by a problem what my next move in the battle is going to be.

    Those ants outnumber me for sure, but I won’t let them outsmart me.

  • weekend wrap seven

    There was a taste of smoke in the air all weekend. It has been hot and dry and the province is burning all over the place. You could barely open the window without catching a whiff of char outside. 

    This past weekend looked something like…

    Fridey evening we multi-car-tripped over to the high school for the Kid’s final improv club home show. It was sparsely attended because of the hockey playoffs, but the parents who were there were definitely lamenting the end of an era in our offspring’s theatre careers. 

    The Kid herself bundled up in a van with a few of her friends right from the high school parking lot and dashed off to the wilderness for a weekend of post-graduation camping and river tubing, leaving her poor parents with a taste of imminent empty nest syndrome.

    We filled our Saturday with some errands, making one of our rare trips over to West Edmonton Mall for some light shopping and then down to Burbon Street and into an excellent taco restaurant for lunch. The made-table-side guac  was divine.

    Somewhere in the mix we walked over to the local cafe for chai lattes, but mostly we chilled and napped and chilled some more for the rest of the day—and wrapped up season one of a show we’ve been watching before basically falling asleep on the couch.

    Sunday morning I joined the usual run routine, logging not quite eight klicks in the fire smokey air, and joining the crew for coffee afterwards.

    I did a bit of yard work, watered a few things after a week of rainless skies, and set up in my chair in the shade to read for about an hour.

    Then we dodged off to a local pizza place. Annually on June 8 we celebrate the move-in anniversary to our house—a day on which we ate our first meal of a communal pizza delivered there with all the folks who helped us move in—by eating pizza. Sunday was the twentieth anniversary of that move-in, so we got some classy pizza at the place over in the strip mall by the grocery store.

    I spent the rest of the evening fighting ants that have laid claim to the plum tree in my front yard and who are starting to do actually noticable damage. It might be a losing battle, but I know better than to give up on day one—even though the flower bed fought back and gave me a splinter in my heel. Serves me right, I suppose, for going to war in bare feet.

  • raising calvin

    I grew up on a steady diet of Calvin & Hobbes. 

    The still-famous cartoon strip by Bill Watterson was a fixture in our local newspaper during the entirety of my teenage existence, one of the sole reasons I read the paper that I delivered door to door, clipping out my favourite strips and then later buying the collections in multiple formats of increasingly crisply bound volumes. You could say it was formative for me, and that would be an understatement by a mile.

    The Kid graduated from high school this week and tho they were not allowed to decorate or bedazzle their gowns, they were given free passes to flare up their mortarboard caps.  She spent a whole evening in the basement and emerged later that night proudly showing off a collage affixed to the top of her cap: it was a collection of Calvin & Hobbes comic strips, arranged and glued to her lid, spattered artfully with colour and sparkles, and ready for a quick stroll across the diploma stage.

    This was not a surprise to anyone who knows her.

    To lay claim to some kind of parenting methodology that led us to this moment, my daughter walking across her graduation threshold literally wearing a comic strip that went out of print more than a decade before she was  born, that would be foolish of me. I mean it’s simple, really. She likes Calvin & Hobbes because (a) it’s a great and timeless cartoon, (b) I had numerous copies in the house, and (c) I read them to her frequently until she could read them on her own and then she read them frequently.

    Then, too, don’t forget that I even drew my own comic strip for a few years and you would not be the least bit surprised to read that one of my major influences for that effort was Calvin & Hobbes.

    That influence, it swirled through the rooms of our house for decades.

    Now, maybe it is that I may have internalized some of the lessons of a comic strips character who I adored because, truth be told, I was nothing like him growing up. Calvin was defiant of authority in a way that I could never muster. Calvin was wise and deep and whip smart with a purpose that I merely aspired towards. Calvin brought everything to a life lived with existential abandon that defied everything I understood about the metaphorical box in which I was raised and out of which I feared to step out. Deep down I knew that I was not Calvin, but that not just maybe, certainly, there was something aspirational in that defiant little character and his life of epic adventure and freedom.

    As we were driving home from the ceremony, I racing to get her back to the house so she could dress for prom, she was holding her cap in her hand and she turns to me and says something like “You know why I put this on my cap, don’t you? I’m basically Calvin, you know that right, Dad? You raised me to turn into Calvin.”

    And what does that even mean? Are you a mischievous troublemaker? Are you a socially misaligned youth? Or are you a creative soul unbound by rules? A philosophical genius wise beyond her years? A dramatic soul unleashed by existential undercurrents? Or maybe a bit of everything all rolled into one?

    Calvin & Hobbes was formative for me because while I was not Calvin, then too I could pretend to be that guy, act the part, read the strips and embody the spirit of this quirky kid, not so much unlike a neurotic rule-following father-figure guy in not but a mask and striped shirt.  But whatever I made of myself, there could be a chance—a risk—an epic possibility that I influenced something else. Did I actually parent my own Calvin into being?

    Formative, indeed. Formative squared.