works of wanderlust

Tag: december-ish

  • little or lotta lazy

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What do you wish you’d done more of this past year?

    A few months after my daughter was born and as the days counted down to the stereotypical New Years Eve regrets and resolution-making, my mind shifted towards fitness. Something compelled me to log onto the website for a local running store and sign up for a running clinic.  So it was that starting the second day of January a week or two later in the year 2008 I arrived in the door of the local run club and started their “learn to run 5k” training clinic.

    I have only taken short bits of time off running for injury (or maybe vacations and holidays) since. 

    That will be exactly eighteen years ago in just less than one month. *sigh* My running career will soon be old enough to vote.

    But 2025 has been a bit of a slide, if I’m being honest.

    Sure, I ran a streak in September and a race in October. Sure, I did a Park Run in Tokyo in November. And sure, I have not so much missed a stretch of time in my training… so much as I have just been maintaining.  But, it was not what I would call a peak running season.

    My doctor has told me on a couple of occasions that not only is running probably keeping me relatively fit and young(ish) but it is something of a alternative sort of diagnostic tool: if you ever find that you can’t run because of your heart or lungs, come see me, he said. Otherwise, you’re probably gonna live for a while.

    It wasn’t my heart or lungs, tho, really. Turns out it was my stomach and some secondary symptoms related to reflux and digestive health that has left me hesitant about longer distances for the last while. That, and I have been a bit lazy about it, too.

    Admittedly, it was probably a lot of lazy.

    And yet now that the year is coming to yet another close and I get to look back on my stats for 2025, I realize that it was a relatively grim year for my milage. I kind of wish I had pushed myself a bit further this year, to be honest.

    Yeah, yeah… health first, and there were genuine health quirks that slowed me down and shut off my desire to push out into the depths of the river valley wilderness this past year. Turns out that having a coughing fit what seemed like every ten minutes for six months throws you off your game. You are cautious. You are hesitant. You second guess your own ability. 

    Had I cracked that nut earlier, I may have jumped back into half marathon training or something. And now… well, the snow is flying out the window even as I write this, and the temperatures are grossly unfit for anything I feel like partaking in today. 

    Lazy? Or self preservation? You can make up your own mind. But I do feel a little sad I didn’t cover more trail in my footprints this past year.

  • lucid professionalism

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What made your job
    interesting in 2025?

    Some people may incorrectly tell you that technically I don’t have a job.

    They are wrong.

    I am not traditionally employed these days, true, but I do in a very real sense work for myself… which is a huge job and a lot of work.

    Living the dream… or maybe the nightmare. It really does depend on the perspective and the day of the week… and how much sleep I got last night.

    This state of existence is very much a privileged position emerging from a stable household income, a lack of consumer or property debt, and probably most importantly (I’m not even kidding) living a frugal lifestyle… at least relatively speaking. If anyone seriously asks looking for a serious answer I usually just tell them that we simply don’t buy anything we don’t actually need. We’re shitty consumers. We eat groceries not commercially prepared food.  We travel for adventure and experience, not for luxury or clout. We shop to replace, repair and maintain, not to own more stuff. 

    But I digress. 

    This state of privilege has allowed me to spin up a sole-employee, self-owned small corporation and do bit contract work as a means to keep my skills sharp and my days structured, while still leaving a tremendous amount of free time to do everything from write fiction, dabble in side projects, make art, and hang out with the dog.

    In the two and a half years since jumping ship on my last full-time gig, I have written extensively (mostly in private journals that will never be published) about the transition from salaryman middle-manager in a municipal government job to bumbling self-employed creative eking out a pittance of a living doing gigs. And as it turns out both roles are stressful, but in unique and different ways. The government work was the stress of deep accountability at multiple levels, accountability to a demanding public, to a corporate hierarchy, to direct reports, to technical fidelity, to process and security, to vendor contract fairness and a long list of other deep and abiding struggles that kept me awake into the wee hours of the night. The contractor work is the stress of building reputation, honest effort, uncertainty of next week, and the dark spectre of knowing that I am every role in my own company and no one is there to prop up any shortcomings if I forget to do something important.

    And yet in my lucid and rational moments, as much as I occasionally get that grass-is-greener mentality looking across the gap from present to past self, I am definitely happier and healthier where I am now. 

    The daily variety of living this type of professional existence is both humbling and exciting. 

    Yesterday I was reflecting on this same notion from the perspective of perspective itself: what part of this transition am I leaving behind, and in effect giving myself permission to pull down the metaphorical scaffolding of this professional notion I hold of myself as fixedly capable, instead looking to the broader variety of both gig and term jobs I could take on. Why? Because a year ago I was in a very different place as a guy (temporarily) working part-time day-by-day for a small company job that I had stepped into to fill the void of structure and a paycheque. And it turns out those are the two exactly wrong pieces that drive what makes this stage of my professional life interesting. Sure, I need to get paid… who the hell doesn’t? And sure, having something to do when I wake up each morning is important. But both of those things are somehow right now, in this privileged moment secondary to the adventure of dabbling and learning and contributing to interesting work efforts that I would never have encountered as a middle manager in government.

    It is a bit of a dream, after all. A bit surreal. A bit hard to explain clearly to anyone not experiencing it. And something that I know I will need to awake from …and then return to reality. But it sure as hell has been interesting, if nothing else.

  • cheap-ish therapy

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Who or what are you
    leaving behind in 2025?

    I was reading over old posts. I mean, half the reason I write this damn blog is that, as they say, writing is cheaper than therapy. That is to say… these words are mostly for me. It is a public journal of a sort, after all, with the key part of that being the notion of a journal.

    Four years ago (to the day) I wrote a post called “Another Life Reset” in which in my first year of writing these reflective posts I lamented on the state of my life as a bureaucratic pencil-pushing middle manager staring down the barrel of another decade or two in government IT work. It was the middle of a pandemic, after all, and my life had become something of a chaos train of salaryman red tape and taking on the stress and angst of a team full of web nerds who were spinning through a time of societal change and whathaveyou. I was deeply burnt out. Charred from the inside core and right out to the part where I was a bit of a zombie. It would take me another year or so, but I manifested that “life reset” and left that job for an open-ended pursuit. 

    It has not been a simple reset. 

    I have rolled through a small collection of random work, a laundry list of job interviews, re-training programs, and kick-starting my own small business.  And oddly enough, in the middle of so much risk and change and idealism it has been the spirit of the reset that has been the one thing pushed off to the side.

    I might even admit I’ve panicked a little bit.

    It is the thing to do, after all, when facing uncertainty. In the what-will-be two and a half years since I left my (un)comfortable stable income as a municipal employee I have found myself drifting back to the idea of that stability as a core tenant of my search rather than the reset that it was supposed to have articulated in my life. That is to say, I’ve been interviewing and pursuing familiar jobs that would literally reboot my currently reset life back into the same program.

    Not that it has worked.

    And I mean, look—the world is a crazy complex place right now.  It’s an employers market. I’m now less than a year away from fifty, and the whole notion of so-called career is as fuzzy as my chin on a Saturday morning. I kinda need to reset from the reset: to rethink the whole approach.

    I tell myself that over and over, but honestly it comes down to personal expectations and this lingering thought that I need a kind of self-granted permission to do something crazy.

    So that’s what I’m leaving behind. I’ve been thinking about it for a few months now, actually. My expectation for what this all looks like if and when it ever reboots needs to have a secondary reset. A purge of expectations. It is a leaving behind of mental frameworks for my professional self and looking ahead to a job that does more than “keep me busy” but rather gives back to the world in a meaningful way that counterbalances the whole drudgery of employment.

    I’ve set the pieces in place in 2025. Now it is time to pull down the scaffolding of my old concept of professional self and reveal what is possible. How’s that for some cheap therapy online, huh?

  • little green squares

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Describe your 2025 in tech or tools

    … to which I am going to answer with a picture of my Github contribution graph:

    If you know you know, but if you don’t know what this is, let me explain. Github is a code repository. It is like a cloud drive for computer code that keeps a hyper-detailed change record of writing software with the intended use cases being collaboration and tracking for software development. It is like a little library tool for writing and publishing and bookkeeping for code. Any time you are happy with your code, inasmuch as it runs and you want to snapshot something you built in case you break it or need to share it or just make a record of that work, you make a “contribution” to the repository. 

    I made 687 contributions to my repositories last year. 

    That little chart is a kind of heat-map of when I was writing code… or at least when I was saving something I wrote to a permanent record of development.

    In among those green boxes are:

    • a video game I’ve been developing
    • my personal social media feed app
    • two public wordpress plugins

    And what you don’t see there are:

    • a couple of private professional projects (…which probably account for another 300 or so contributions) 

    All in all, I would guess I submitted to Github repositories (albeit my own) about a thousand times in 2025… which is to say I wrote a heckuva lot of code in 2025, kind of equally split between Rust and PHP.

    That’s not trivial. 

    I wish I could tell you that I wrote a thousand stories in 2025 or drew a thousand sketches in 2025. I cannot.

    I can tell you that I sat down at a keyboard and wrote out tens of thousands of lines of intricate computer code, some for myself and some for professional work, that turned into functioning software. I can tell you that my 2025 was a year of making, and that I am coming out of this year in a state of having made interesting and useful things in computer code that a year ago were either ideas or maybe not even that much.

    I just spent nearly three weeks in Japan and made over a hundred posts to my own micro-feed app, a lite-cms that I have been writing for three years and honing for the last few months.

    I have a game that is still deep in development but it runs on my SteamDeck and I have logged a few dozens of hours play-testing it and it is not terrible.

    I spent multiple weeks spread over five months writing code for professional clients under the flag of my new corporation and that code has now all been deployed and (I am assuming) helping those clients run websites and business operations.

    That has been my 2025 in technology: highly coded, and contributed, and there is a neat little graph that marks it all in a record of progress right there as a series of little green squares.

  • daily

    December 31 of 31 December-ish posts

    Oh, rich. Coming from the guy who couldn’t manage a daily post in December, huh?

    Daily?

    One word that sums up your theme for 2023.

    Daily.

    Yes. That’s it.

    It’s New Years Eve. Again. And rolling into 2023 leaving 2022 behind I got to thinking of how I want to spend the year.

    As it turns out (I find as I have two weeks off work and have time to think about these things) I’m happiest when I’m creating, y’know, anything.

    Oh, maybe I won’t be posting a blog article every day, or whatever, but my mind was churning on what it means to be creative and productive for every single day of a whole year.

    Writing. Drawing. Photographing. Video…ing.

    And not only the net results of daily effort but the meta-results: creative output about daily creativity. Like, making posts or videos about “How I Painted One Picture Daily for a Month!” or “What Daily Cycling did for My Mental and Physical Health” and sharing those.

    Daily.

    Daily stuff.

    Daily reflections.

    Daily.

    Tomorrow morning will be the two-year anniversary of this website. I set out on January first of 2021 to start writing a daily blog. We were in the middle of a pandemic (arguably we still are) and I had no idea that we would spend two more years slowly getting back to normal. I had assumed (like most of you) that 2021 was our year to climb back out of it and by, say, mid-summer we’d be camping and hiking and cooking on firepits with our friends. I was going to document that. Daily was my theme for 2021. And I almost did it.

    My perspective was wrong, though.

    I wanted to bring you all into this adventure and create a wonderful site full of amazing ideas. What it turned into was a journal of a guy trying to do that.

    If you’re still reading, or just recently joined, you may be a bit disappointed with my effort in 2022.

    I wrote about some of that yesterday and how I’ve been in a bit of a funk because of a knee injury. It sucks. And I know it. And I think I can will myself to do better.

    I keep telling myself that (a) since I’m not trying to make money off this blog then (b) I don’t need to follow any particular set of rules from all those pro-bloggers out there with their tips for maximizing traffic, so (c) this site can be whatever I want it to be.

    In 2021, it tried to be a daily blog about outdoor life, cast iron cooking, and running adventure.

    In 2022, it was a journal of healing and reflecting on a tough year.

    In 2023, I think I want it to be about that idea of daily. Creating daily. Living in the day. Being present and enjoying the moment each and every day, even if just long enough to capture a bit of it as art or photos or video. You’ll see more of that starting tomorrow. If you come along for the ride, or if you’ve been along the whole time, thanks. We’ll see you on the next day… and the day after… and the day after that.

    Happy New Year.