life and stuff

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Excuses Me

December 26 of 31 December-ish posts

We were driving home from the last of multiple family christmas gatherings today and, as we sped north down the highway, we passed the giant outlet mall on the outskirts of the city. Then we passed about five hundred cars driving slowly bumper to bumper in the southbound direction and queuing for the mall where the possibility of countless sales, deals, bargains, and boxing day shopping bonanzas waited therein.

We kept driving.

What did you want this year
… but not get?

As a guy who has a small category on his blog about “gear” I use and like it would be too easy to write about a “thing” that I was coveting and didn’t happen to find a way of adding to my collection this year.

On the other hand, my Christmas gifts included all manner of delicious coffee bean blends, running kit, microbrew beers, and spice mixes so I can’t really complain about my lack of holiday haul.

It has occured to me, particularly as I look at blank notebooks, missing blog posts, and a stack of unread novels on my bedside table, that I didn’t find myself with a lot of productive time this year.

I’ve been busy.

What a terrible excuse, huh?

When I did find a bit of time here or there I managed to paint many awesome sketches, upload a hearty collection of writing, and even crank out a healthy smattering of code. Not as much as I would have liked, but still… quite a bit.

But, all that said, work was consuming this year, consuming in the way that it followed me home and drained my evenings, and sapped me of motivation. I’ve been work busy. I’ve been dad busy. I’ve been family busy. I’ve been health busy. I’ve been paying the bills busy.

Also, put that all with the fact that I haven’t been for a decent run in over six months thanks to my knee injury, and the free time I did have was usually spent doing physiotherapy exercises and trying to get something resembling recovery going on down there. Not running and instead doing physiotherapy at the gym is far less exciting than running through the trails with my friends.

What I’m trying to say is that productive time was not my companion this past year.

I hope to change that up in 2023.

I hope.

Thing is, I can’t buy more time from the outlet mall, and no matter how long I queue on the highway I don’t think motivation will be waiting at the other end.

But I have started thinking about my 2023 projects: drawing comics, making videos, writing more frequently here (though still unlikely back to daily right away) and generally easing my foot off the metaphorical gas of my career in favour of some creative pursuits to balance out my life.

I didn’t get much of that in 2022, but maybe my personal boxing day deal will be to give myself this big ol’plan to put some productive time at the top my my 2023 priority list. Thanks, bud.

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Wisdom, Courage, Justice, Temperance

December 6 of 31 December-ish posts

I’ve been reading Marcus Aurelius.

Specifically, I’ve been reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor circa 161 -180 AD and noted Stoic philosopher.

What do you want to learn in 2023?

Wisdom is acting on knowledge, experience and understanding.

Courage is willingness to confront pain, danger or uncertainty.

Justice is seeking equitable treatment for all and for all what they deserve.

Temperance is voluntary restraint, patience and forgiveness.

These are four principles of a philosophical mindset and system of personal ethics that form the basis of what is modernly known as formal stoicism. I’ve always been cautious about pigeonholing myself into belief systems or rigidly categorized frameworks of ideology, but I’ve taken a liking to the tone of this particular way of thinking over the past year and adopted some of it’s practices as a way to tune and manage my own approach to the world.

For one, I’ve been journaling more. Arguably, blogging is a form of public journaling, but I’ve taken to recording more personal notes on paper with ink, and making a habit of self-reflection and adaptive growth around the notion of philosophical-based meditations.

Writing words on paper and noting the moments of success, gratitude, error, or struggle through your day, even through something as simple as a bullet-point journal, this is a moment of personal reflection that has helped me find a bit of center in the swirling chaos of my otherwise hectic days.

It is part of the way I have found a new kind of balance in my participation online, and my goal is not to suddenly start blogging about all this on the regular. It’s part of the reason I took a few months off. It’s part of the reason I’ve come back with a bit more focus of mid-life perspectives and my personal balance stemming out of these things that I write about, and not as some kind of social media influencer trying to get likes and shares and ad revenue from the words I post.

This next year is not at all going to be me jumping in and preaching any of this or really even writing about it (much), simply that as I reflect on the close of this year I’ve been contemplative on the benefits brought to my life so far from mindful practice and thinking about these principles and virtues. That will likely reflect more in what I write about, but only tangentially.

That said, I really do think that there is some clear parallels between all this stoicism thinking and the little blurb I’ve had for forever in the about section of this blog, that Cast Iron Guy is ”a journal of uncomplicated things, life lived, and a mindset that reflects the philosophical practicality of well-seasoned cast iron frying pan: enduring, simple, down-to-earth & extremely useful.”

Thinking about and acting through wisdom, courage, justice and temperance are all wrapped up in many of the kinds of folk who seek out simplicity, nature, healthy lifestyles, and positive contribution to the world, all things that I’ve written about here over the last two years.

All this is what I want to learn how to do better in 2023.

I’m aware that there are some fairly high profile folks out there marketing this philosophy as a way to sell videos, courses, and books, and perhaps it is all in good faith but the skeptic in me just needs to put that out there as what you may find if you were to do a web search for any of this.

I’ve watched some of it.

But so far I’ve just let these ideas flow through me, tried to frame my own interpretation of it all, and in doing so have though about them loosely and lightly framed around my everyday life. Now as we enter into a new year it seems like not that I’ll try to make a study or rigorous convent with this stuff, but simply that I want to learn to be a bit more mindful about how my own personal approaches to food, outdoors, and participation in the universe can benefit from a formalized philosophical approach.

Or, maybe that’s pretty deep for a Tuesday morning.

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Objectively Looped In

December 3 of 31 December-ish posts

What’s your favourite subject in school, I ask a kid.

Recess, he replies.

What’s the best part of your job, I ask myself.

Working from home a few days a week, I almost write.

Except that’s not really true.

What made your job
interesting in 2022?

I’ve spent a few posts this year writing about the possibility of job change.

And I’ve been serious. Last week I marked the twelve year anniversary at my current employer, and at times like that, birthdays, anniversaries, new years, one tends to get reflective and contemplative about life, the universe and everything. It’s a double-shame for me because all those things tend to fall within roughly one month and I have a heckuva December feeling all philosophical about my life.

I try to keep the line between work and my words here pretty fuzzy because, well the thing is, I’m a public servant. We have strong codes of conduct, by which I mean documents that tell us how we should conduct ourselves in our roles inside and outside of the office, and those codes of conduct do include things like internet participation and having a public opinion particularly under the flag of our professional role. That gets tricky to navigate especially when I want to write about all the things I do in our parks and the runs and walks I take on our trails and even the various fun I have in my own backyard. Why? Because those are spaces sometimes managed or governed by bylaws and services provided by my colleagues.

For example, I have a fire pit in my backyard that I use to build adventures and that leads to me sharing stories and content here on this site.

But there are rules for how fire pits are allowed to be used properly. Minimum clearances. Fire bans get declared routinely. Good neighbour policies exist and overlap with smoke dispersal, and noise bylaws and ash disposal. If I was to declare myself such and such an employee and suggest (which I’m definitely not doing) that my job gave me some kind of authority to set an example or declare exceptions or shrug off proper processes (all of which I also am definitely not doing) I could get into a bit of hot water for implying that professional connection.

So, I keep a fuzzy line.

This guy who you are reading here is just a guy, a guy who lives and plays in this place. My expertise is personal, and I (and this is actually pretty true because all I really do is work in one of our technology teams and not any of those more hands-on services) have no special knowledge or influence on anything related to these places or spaces about which I sometimes write. And I definitely have no power over decisions or budgets or political stuff. I’m just a dwarf in the silicon mines.

That said, things do get interesting because I’m a guy who seems like he should have special knowledge, but doesn’t really. That I’m in this weird position to see behind the curtain of the show, but I’m little more than a set designer, and usually go take my seat with the rest of the audience when the show starts.

In the context of what I do, why I do it, why I continue to do it amidst the possibility of so many other options, and deep down how that is rooted in why my job can be interesting is this: I could have a different job. I could be selling or buying or moving or building or driving or talking or any of a hundred different tasks. But at the heart of what I do is that I’m creating and informing.

That is why things are so fuzzy.

I try to create and inform for fun. I build websites, I draw pictures. I write stories. I grow and cook and explore and tell more tales about all that.

And then for a job I build websites. I commission pictures. I post information. I watch as everyone else at work grows and makes and cleans and serves, and we share more information about that.

I work daily with the teams doing the interesting work of keeping this place running.

I know people who are integral to the functioning of our community.

I help a million folks who live here stay informed about all of it.

Objectively, I’m looped in. That’s a pretty sweet (and interesting) place to be even if it’s often a lot of hard, thankless work.

Reminder: Blogs are not a replacement for professional advice. Please read my note on safety and safe participation.

Posted on episode 367

when they go high (tech) we go low (tech)

December 1 of 31 December-ish posts.

Oh, how those billionaires-who-shall-not-be-named would factor into a good political-type post that I’m sure would attract all sorts of readers like wasps to a honeypot.

How would I… should I describe my 2022 in tech or tools?

As the year wraps up I’ve dabbled in what I’m (right now) calling the addict’s last puff on the drug known as corporate social media. I tried spinning up a Youtube channel over the summer. I posted with some frequency on Twitter and Reddit. Instagram was routinely at the top of my daily digital dosage. I even downloaded TikTok for a few weeks, though I couldn’t ever figure out why I would post there.

I grew up weaned on technology, but also I was part of that tech pioneer generation who co-opted the family phone line to connect to dial-up bulletin board systems over a 2400 baud modem hissing from beside my hulking CRT monitor.  We installed games from floppy diskettes and challenged copy protection with meticulously hand-copied versions of code sheets and game manuals.  My first website was coded by hand in a text editor and uploaded through an SSH command line to a server somewhere. I had multiple Geocities accounts and, for crying out loud, I had a paid subscription to Blogger.com before they got bought out by Google (and they actually mailed me a hoodie with both the Blogger and Google logos to thank me when that happened.)

This has never been a tech blog, but it is tech.

I use high tech to write and share about low tech.

I use bare metal and code to post about cast iron and food.

I had high hopes for social media’s role in the world. I was an early adopter of many of those platforms, bringing many people along and feeding them content on the near-daily for nearly a decade.

Is it unfair to say I feel a bit cheated by how things turned out? It is too much to feel that lots of low tech folks have used the high tech tools we helped build and refine for things that don’t jive with my worldview?

I’ve deleted many accounts and shuttered more. I’m reluctant to walk away completely if only because my usernames would get slurped up almost instantly and cause confusion to a few people I care about.

This site is not corporate. I’m just a guy who wants to write. I pay for my own hosting. I run my own technology stack and manage my own updates. I write. I post. I share. I do it all.  And I feel a nostalgia for that as I round out 2022 and consider the state of our online spaces and the chaos that is swirling inside them.  Perhaps stepping out of the “digital public square” will mean fewer people will read these words, but not caring as much about size of my audience versus writing for myself and few quality people, like you who has found this site in other ways, is where I am right now.

And as we creep into 2023 when I need to think less about the moral and ethical impact of my high technology use, I can spend more time thinking about and writing about my low tech fun, fire, food and cast iron cooking, right?