works of wanderlust

Tag: backstory

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • performance anxiety

    There is a teensy chance that people are actually reading this site.

    I may have mentioned in a previous post that I wrote a blog for something like sixteen years, pulling it down about five years ago when I got into a management role at work and had employees who literally hated me because “me bad man enforce corporate rules and make them accountable for their work” and were subsequently googling my demise. I didn’t need that shit.  

    I have no management job anymore and frankly I may not have perfectly formed and balanced opinions but in the sea of stupid that reigns over the world these days, I’m probably ranking highly on the rational and open minded person scale.

    Point is, I restarted this blog. 

    No, I didn’t just start blogging again. I restarted THIS blog. It is a fresh new wordpress installation, it has a new name (though I’ll likely change it six times before the year is out) and I will not be reposting my sixteen years of archives. But. But. But it exists at the same address.

    All the old post links might be broke, but the important ones are live again.

    I naively figured it would take a year or two before anyone figured out it was back. A window of obscurity to savor and enjoy?

    Here’s the thing tho. Yesterday, just as an example, 884 people downloaded my RSS feed. And it wasn’t like a bunch of russion troll bots either. I think, maybe, y’know, maybe people kept this in their feed readers—which was almost as surprising to me as learning that at least 884 people still use RSS feed readers.   

    And bonus stat, a bunch of those people clicked the link and actually read the thing I posted. Crazy.

    That does change a couple things. I mean, if nothing else I thought I was screaming into the digital void. Sure, archives. I wasn’t writing anything I didn’t want angry future sleep-at-their-desk and clock out two-hours-early expecting-no-repercussions employees to read… but still. I figured slim chance, right?

    But you’re reading this right now. So… you either lurk in the depths of the digital void like a weird mythical creature or folks are still reading this blog. And that’s all the same difference as singing an a stage is to singing in the shower. It’s a lot different when people are watching.

    First of all, welcome. I don’t do comments. It’s a pain in the ass larger than I could conceivably explain. So what I’m trying to say is that if you feel as if you want to respond, I’m on Bluesky, yadda, yadda, whatever, wahtever. 

    Second of all, I know you’re here now. I’ll try not to overreact and just keep writing what I would normally write. I mean… this post is… I mean… it’s reflexive to seeing those stats, but after this… I’ll… well… you get it.

    *deep breath*

    Cue the music and… here we go.

  • pi day

    May fifth is definitely not pi day, that annual nerdy celebration of a happy mathematical confluence between the calendar and one of the worlds favourite pastries, pie. Normally the geeky among us celebrate with an extra helping of dessert on March fourteenth: three fourteen. Three one four.

    May fifth is, however, something of an anniversary for me relating to pi day. 

    See, in 2016, leading into that year’s pi day, I checked to see if anyone had ever bothered to register the piday.ca domain name, found it unclaimed, and placed my stake on the little piece of digital real estate.

    I had plans, and like many half-baked ideas it made a little progress before sputtering out. I wanted to make a website celebrating pi day, but I just couldn’t think of anything more clever to do with it besides essentially creating a brochure for this obscure, silly math celebration.

    One year later, pi day came and went and I tracked a few hits to the domain but nothing of consequence.

    But I had been working on another project at the same time: I had been designing and writing and drawing a web comic that I was pulling together under the name of “This Dad’s Life” which was a kind of kids-say-silly-things and fatherhood snapshots in cartoon form.  But I didn’t really like the name, to be honest.

    I wonder if he’ll mention the dad guy character. I remember that guy. Handsome fellow.

    Then pi day 2017 came around and the kid said one of her trademark silly things: she told me she liked pi day because it was dad joke holiday. She was nine at the time and threw herself into dramatic fits of jovial groaning every time I pulled out one of my trademark dad joke puns. Pi day wasn’t just a geeky holiday, it was a punny celebration and the pinnacle of oddness that any dad-joke loving parent could celebrate with their kids.

    And I had this domain name I wasn’t really using for anything.

    I renamed my comic effort to “This is Pi Day” winking at the parenting tangent that the observations of my kid had brought into focus, and on May 5, 2017 published my first strip of nearly two hundred to that domain name. Eight years ago today.

    I wrote and drew that comic for about three years. The schtick got old, the kid got older and became less a silly kid and more a clever teen, which was great for me in reality but terrible for my content inspiration. The pandemic happened, and… well… maybe not a half-baked idea but it sputtered out regardless.

    I still own the domain name, largely because I signed up for a bunch of social media and other support accounts using an email based on it. And because I printed cards that I handed out with it on there. And too, because I stamped it into the corner of every comic I drew.

    Every once in while I dig out a strip from my archives and share it, explain it, but for a while I was just a guy with a comic strip online and a couple hundred fans.  And every May 5th another reminder comes up in my calendar that This is Pi Day was today.

  • book reviews: may the forth

    (…be with you!)

    It’s Star Wars day and I haven’t done much of anything intergalactic, but I have been doing a lot of reading lately.

    A lot of science fiction, too. So. Almost?

    Worse than my neglect of Star Wars, I checked out a bunch of library books and in such a flurry that a couple have expired before I even got part way through them. I could be here writing a bunch of different reviews if it were not for my distracted self bopping and hopping between titles, I guess.

    That said, the last couple weeks I’ve read:

    Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis

    I don’t know if you’d call Ms Ellis a film maker, reviewer, or an influencer, but it turns out that she’s a helluva author. I’ll be honest, I put this book on my list way back when the algorithm was dropping her video essays into my feed with more frequency and yet my lazy, distractible reading brain took over four years to clamber this clever first-encounter-kinda story to the top of my book stack. But the story sucked me in from the start when I finally started reading it, twisting through the tale of a young woman who finds herself at the centre of an alien government entanglement. It evoked emotions. And it left me adding the sequel to my reading list (though if I’m continuing the trend of being completely honest, it may take me another couple years to finally get around to that one.)

    I Want To Go Home by Gordon Korman

    And speaking of algorithms, whatever secret formula was recommending me digital titles in the Libby app connected to my library account must have pegged me as a middle aged Canadian and realized that I, like a million other Canadian kids who grew up in the 80s, lived on a steady diet of Korman’s goofy stories. I have a whole writer-origin story that revolves around this guy that I’ll happily share in detail to anyone who asks, and so by the way that algorithm might have been onto something. Yeah, this is a kids book and yeah it was a still a little corny like it was when I read it forty years ago, but there is something about the over-the-top silliness of a kid trying to escape sleepaway camp that evoked not only memories of my own childhood reading this same book until the pages were falling out, but the aching familiarity of a youth spent in scouts and church camps I would have fled were I more resourceful. A quick read, but I won’t begrudge the algorithm for taunting me with my lost youth.

    Wool by Hugh Howey

    A different sort of algorithm sucked us into watching the Apple TV adaptation of this decade old collection of linked dystopian science fiction novellas, more plainly called Silo. I had read Wool, the first in the trilogy that is the basis for Silo, waaaaaay back when it first came out and have been telling people to read it ever since. It’s a fantastic story, particularly if you like dark science fiction driven by strongly developed and complex characters. I had told all sorts of people to read it, but sadly I had never read it since. Nor had I read any of the sequels. Having finally caught up with the show, then, I loaded it up and decided to work my way through all three books. I finished Wool this very evening and was reminded of just how much I like this story. I mean, I may let it breath before I jump into book two, but like months. Only months. Not ten years this time, I promise.