works of wanderlust

Category: life & stuff

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

  • keyboard life

    I have developed a lot of little productivity hacks for myself in the past couple years.

    It’s odd, actually.

    Realizing that.

    Odd.

    For the first year of my career break I wrote about it all the time. The career break I mean. I was always writing about it. I was slightly obsessed with working through the whole thing in long rambling essays, very few of them published anywhere but in my own personal files, but all of them detailing my reasons and logic and emotions and everything to do with this whole deal of quitting a well-paying desk job (thanks stress and burnout) and spending the following months and months and months sorting through the effort of trying to rebuild myself professionally.

    So many words.

    It’s odd, because thinking about it right now I realize that I haven’t written much about career breaking in nearly a year now. And yet, no, I haven’t moved on, nor found myself breaking through the far side of that career break quite yet, but then too all the tangled complications of the last year have sort of left me a little less introspective on this thing that I did nearly two years ago now. I think about it. Write words. But those two haven’t really intermingled recently.

    Yet, it was the first thing I thought to write about now, just sitting here looking at the keyboard under my fingers, and I guess that means it still comes up, particularly when I start introspecting on some of the changes and habits that manifested in the meanwhile of my not quite but kinda still a career break era.

    Like, I’m typing on one of those productivity hack things as I write this.

    Yeah, the keyboard.

    About a year ago I bought myself this little portable mechanical keyboard.  Well, in fact I bought two of them, each for very different purposes. First, I bought a really nice one that is amazing to type on and which I carry in a little bag along with my iPad when I go off to a cafe to write. It’s wonderful. Clicky. Solid. Durable. And no I’m not selling them. But then I also bought a cheaper, smaller keyboard. It’s not quite as nice, though still pretty nice, and its a lot more plasticky, and it tends to live in the glove box of my truck. It is a little trickier to type on, I will admit, mostly because it is lacking about twenty of the more familiar keys like number digits and punctuation marks, and when I need them I need to access those with little function key combos that also make it a bit cryptic to type on, but I use it even more than I thought I would, squeezing in a session of writing before work or, like now, sitting in a park at a picnic table waiting for the run crew to arrive and taking these twenty free minutes to pound out a blog post.

    All of this is tangled together, of course, because this whole career break has given me this little new productivity skill of forcing myself to be much more free and effective about my writing. Impromptu. Spontaneous. Picnic table in the park free-ish. 

    Oh, and that’s the other thing I should mention. If nothing else comes of this career break, I am emerging from it feeling a lot more like a writer than I ever did prior. I’ve always fashioned myself a writer, but right now I feel it inasmuch as I would not hesitate to put it on a resume and defend it as a professional skill. 

    In fact. I’m a writer in the same way that I’m a runner, because I practice and practice and practice it a lot. I’ve just logged the time, you know?

    So, here I sit in yet another gap of free time writing on a keyboard in the park on this little keyboard. And the culmination of this anecdote is that I know damn well that I was not a type in the park on a little keyboard kind of writer before the career break. 

    That is the little productivity hack. 

    The hack is that I just write anywhere and everywhere now, shamelessly, even though as I’m sitting here in the park and cyclists and dog walkers and kids on skateboards are passing by looking at me with this idle curiosity, some weirdo at a picnic table typing away like a nut. That’s just what this looks like, I suppose.

    And that is a cool realization for me, fumbling and tangled and unfocused as I feel in the emergent spring. If nothing else, I’ve been productively hacked.

  • multitaskable

    I think a lot of us out there would like to think that we are superb multitaskers. I like to think that of myself. Or maybe you don’t. But we are out there and I know a lot of people who would fit that description: I can do everything, anything, as much as I want.

    Now…

    I have been doing this thing I’ve been calling a “career shift” —well, I mean, it stopped being a career break over a year ago when I started picking up odd jobs and part time work and going back to school. None of that is a so-called break anymore. It’s just a different kind of work, after all. My end goal is something different from where I was, but I am moving towards it with a careful, deliberate effort. So I’m calling it a shift. And in taking this approach I have been doing a lot—no, really, a lot—of multitasking. Or trying to, at least.

    I’ve been working jobs, volunteering, parenting, re-educating myself, writing, job hunting, trying to keep fit, coding, playing video games, reading more, socializing with friends, squeezing in a bit of travel—aaaaand, well… that’s the thing isn’t it? 

    As much as I’ve been doing all this stuff, I think I’ve become saturated. 

    Maxed out. Capacity reached.

    I am officially at the point where doing anything new seems to push something else out the back—and off the list.

    Some may think of this as just a bit of opportunity cost comparison, huh?

    I started blogging more and my coding efforts suffered. 

    I upped the number of shifts I did each week at my part time job and suddenly I realize that I’m not making art.

    I’ve been reading more books, but almost simultaneously my progress on my novel ground to a halt.

    It’s not something I’m formally tracking, of course, but just trends I’ve noticed. Start one thing new, something old vanishes from my life.

    And yet I don’t view this as a weakness. My ability to multitask, something that I’ve long viewed without context or care or introspection is something that I’ve also long thought was nigh limitless. But actually it isn’t. And that’s okay.

    Understanding that the mind has limits, time is strict, that multitasking ones life and projects is finite, and that getting the most from ones efforts is a work of good and strategic choices—this is a kind of self-awareness that, for me at least, has been hard to come by. Knowing that taking on something new will take away something existing, or alternatively, giving up something existing will leave space for something new: this is a variable to help me understand my  ultimate potential to create, learn, and contribute. 

    And it sounds all-to-obvious to write that, but I think if more people could consciously articulate that variable about themselves they would not only make better decisions about their lives and careers, they’d probably find a kind of comfort in knowing that limits are nothing to fear and the very idea of multitasking should be evaluated with a unique and personal lens.

  • weekend wrap one

    I write this blog for myself as much as others, so there is a piece of me that will be unapologetically using it as I would use, say, a public bullet journal.  As such, I kinda feel the need to start a little series, formally and officially, where I just remind myself that I actually got shit done this weekend.

    A guy’s gotta take some pride in his own accomplishments, no?

    This past weekend, I…

    Attended two family dinners, including one where I somehow managed to fit in helping my father-in-law purchase and set up a new computer and get his beloved genealogy hobby back on track. Also, finally delivered the mirror I picked up at Ikea for my sister.

    Voted in the federal election.

    Completed reading two novels, which to some might seem like a quiet weekday evening accomplishment… but my track record with reading these days is weak.

    Watched the son of a friend compete in a figure skating tournament.

    Demoed my game development project to the one guy who might actually have something useful to add to it code-wise, and he had some positive things to say about it as I fed him homemade fries and chicken fingers.

    Ran more than ten klicks in one sesh, which is the furthest I’ve run this whole month thanks to some nasty chest infection which seems to be 99 percent resolved.

     Reached the five week mark in my Duolingo Japanese lessons without either cheating or using streak freezes or other sneaky ways of skipping a day without it counting against me.

    Completed and submitted my homework for my fifth of seven courses in my continuing education program and got, hopefully, one step closer to professional certification.

    Was that all, huh?

  • cacio e pepe

    A little over a year ago we were wandering the streets of Rome in the blazing heat of an August scorcher. It’s a far cry from where I am sitting writing these words in a suburban strip mall Starbucks as the first flakes of snow for the season fall outside the window.

    It was hardly a food focused vacation, but I as whenever I travel, I had my heart set on trying new and interesting local dishes, from the unique and interesting to—of course—the typical and regional tropes. One evening, after a long walk through the narrow streets in and out of tourist shops and a museum or two, and maybe I think we strolled under the dome of the Pantheon that morning, we succumbed to the call of a barker who was standing at the entrance to the patio of a street restaurant and took a table for a mid-evening dinner. We perused the menu, ordered a bottle of wine, and noshed on some breads. It all looked great, but my eyes went to the cacio e pepe, a (literally) cheese and pepper pasta that is everywhere in Rome. 

    Properly made, this is basically a creamy pasta sauce of pecorino cheese melted over pasta and peppered with a hearty kick. Italian food likes to label itself spicy, but personally I find even the spicier Italian offerings generally on the milder side compared to Asian or, say, Mexican cuisine. But, I do find cacio e pepe, at least the offering I tried, ranked pretty high on the spicy scale. Peppery spicy, obviously,  and not melt your face off spicy, but certainly reach for the water hot.

    I hadn’t thought much about cacio e pepe since that evening Rome until, at work, I cracked open a case full of ready to serve pasta sauce that had arrived on the back of a delivery truck. This isn’t meant to be a brand specific review, so I won’t bother writing a run down of the quality or taste or any of that. Chances are you have your own brands at your own stores in your own countries anyhow. But I will say that I spun up my discount one evening last week and bought the ingredients to reconstruct a fresh-from-the-jar version of that Roman evening.

    The Kid hated it. She likes her share of spice these days, but hasn’t warmed up to pepper apparently. We had half a bottle of chianti left over from the previous weekend and so over some pasta secce cooked al dente we followed the jar directions and recreated a quick and easy cacio e pepe at home. 

    Couldn’t you have made it from scratch, you ask?

    Well, sure. But that’s kind of the thing isn’t it? It is very easy to leap to these home cooking solutions, reaching to achieve great feats of regional recreation from your own kitchen post-vacation. Sure. But I also am a strong believer in incremental steps. Jarred sauces are not great, but often they are pretty good and set a base line for what a dish should be aspiring towards. I like to think of it as bracketing. I had tried a version in a Roman street cafe and I had tried a version poured from a  jar purchased from a local grocery store. I won’t put a stake in the ground and say those were the top and bottom of the scale, heck no, but they certainly have now given me some solid context for the flavours intended for this probably-famous dish.

    The same thing happened to us in Milan. We stopped in a little restaurant and tried a Milanese risotto, a dish heavy in saffron spices, creamy and rich and oddly enough reminding me of an upscale mac and cheese. Then, when we came home back to Canada, we bought a couple packages of rice and spice “just add wine and water and heat” mixes from the local Italian food market and made our home version of it. 

    In both cases, cacio e pepe and Milanese risotto, I now have a kind of bracketed expectation of taste and preparation and final result from two very different sources. And I suddenly have the confidence to, maybe when I have some time to cook, make each from scratch.  Ambition, in my heart of hearts, blossoms from familiarity and confidence in the pursuit. Both of these things are bolstered by, yeah travel blah blah blah, but also shortcuts and incremental steps. A bag of rice and spice, or a jar of sauce—both cut a path to a bolder effort to make these from rawer ingredients. After all, that store of mine doesn’t just sell jars of ready to serve sauce, it sells pecorino cheese, too.

  • the great pasta kerfuffle

    I alluded to this in my most recent post on brand loyalty: the great spaghetti sauce change up of 2024 and the “kerfuffle that caused” in our house.

    First of all, we’re not Italian. So when I write about “spaghetti sauce” I need to be exceptionally clear that we are basically talking about the red bolognese-ish sauce that we concoct on our stove top and pour over top of spaghetti pasta noodles boiled from a box. It is a Canadian-slash-North-American bastardization of traditional Italian pastas prepared out of raw convenience, and as I wrote in my previous post, a lot of brand habit and loyalty.

    Second, I’ve tasted great pasta sauces. We have been to Italy and I have eaten cacio e pepe and ragù alla bolognese, both on the narrow street cafes of Rome, and I know—I know—that what we make at home is not even a knock off, but rather a work night meal distant cousin-by-marriage thrice removed alternate version of these dishes.

    What we are very poorly copying is a kind of bolognese sauce, probably better known in Italian as a ragù alla bolognese or more simply something like a ragù bolognese.

    The difference is that for fifteen or so years our version involved a little powdered spice pack that got mixed into some browned ground beef with a can of tomato paste and a couple cups of tap water and rehydrated into a chemical after-tasting red sauce that took about fifteen minutes from fridge to table and was “good enough” to make it through the meal rush on average once per week.

    But then we went to Italy, as I mentioned, and I had some time on my hands over the winter and I started thinking to myself that I probably could use some of that time on my hands to come up with a better version of our weekly sauce hack that (a) was just as simple and cost effective to prepare, (b) didn’t come from a spice envelope via the grocery store and (c) sure, still wasn’t an Italian sauce but probably tasted a bit closer—maybe a first cousin, only once removed kinda thing.

    So. This is my new recipe.

    bardo’s sausage ragu

    400 grams of spicy Italian sausage meat
    1 onion
    2 cloves of garlic
    1 large can of tomato sauce
    1 small can of tomato paste
    2 solid glugs of olive oil

    Brown the sausage meat. I like to break it into hearty chunks, but you can crumble it, too. Either, or. Add the onion and garlic to soften. Add the tomato paste and sauce as well as the olive oil, and simmer it all for a while. Serve over pasta.

    In that previous post I wrote about the habits connected to this thing I was thinking of as brand loyalty. We were stuck in this rut of bad spaghetti sauce from a powder for years simply because there was a lot of cognitive load to go from that weekly routine and the ingredient list we had memorized over to this updated version.  I started cooking this new version, and yet the groceries would appear after a shopping trip with the ingredients for the old version. I would make a trip to the store to buy the stuff for the new version and then the wrong one would get made, or a broken version of the new one would get made (missing an ingredient or two) and then feelings would be hurt on both sides because “we knew the old one” and “you’re complicating things” and “but this version is nicer” and “yeah, it’s good but you need to update the shopping list so we buy the right stuff.” It was a kerfuffle. 

    Six months later we’re pretty locked in on the new updated recipe, but seriously—it took some leaping and jumping and planning to break the old habit—to break the loyalty to the old, easy way.

    And that is what I was getting at in my last post: walking into a grocery store and trying to unravel the list you might have built into your brain about how to make simple daily meals for yourself and/or your family is not as simple as picking up a new brand of ketchup or a new cut of meat or a different vegetable you’re not used to cooking with. It’s an extra step. And that’s a challenge when you shop while traveling, or just checking out a new food market—hopefully you’re the kind of person who is willing to step up to that kind of challenge.