blogging

Posted on episode 181

Summer

Where I live, there exists a short and precious span of time between snowfalls. It is when gardens grow strong, trails turn green, and daylight extends well into the night.

SUHH - murr

For July and August, this blog is on a summer publication schedule: still posting, but not-daily. Check back for sporadic summer check-ins and stay turned for my regular daily blogging schedule to return this September.

In the meantime, my summer photo gallery will be updated as often as I can remember to post new pictures.

Thanks for reading!

– bardo

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Dog Days of Summer

It’s officially summer here in Edmonton where I live, and the days are marked by a sharp increase in temperatures and an equally sharp decrease in my motivation to move with any sort of speed … yes, even when I’m running!

Also, it’s been a long, dark winter … at least sixteen months if I recall … and this summer seems more welcome than any of us can put into words, I think.

With the arrival of summer, the re-opening of our world (locally at least) following a long, exhausting pandemic, the end of the school year for my daughter, and the wrapping up of a huge project I’ve been involved with at my real job, I’ve been eyeing the arrival of July with no shortage of excitement.

I’ve been writing this blog for nearly six months, every day, and making it a daily exercise has not only resulted in one hundred and seventy plus blog posts since January, but has given me great motivation to go out into the world more openly, explore more deeply, cook and eat more adventurously. Six months is not long, but it has been long enough to kickstart a respectable quantity and tone of articles that I’m (mostly) proud to have online.

Of course I never wrote about how I intended to keep blogging every day, well … forever. Because… to be honest I didn’t intend that. I intended to write daily for as long as I could manage to keep it interesting for myself and for my readers, and (more importantly) for as long as I wasn’t trading the living of my life for the writing about it.

Summer is short and definitely for the living of life, and with all those simultaneous moments approaching with the first of July, I am in the important moment and existential position of asking myself if I’m following that very rule: I don’t want to sacrifice adventure to the publication cycle of a blog.

You may have also noticed that more than a few of my articles lately have been a bit … um … navel-gazing? Bland? Space-filling? I’ll be the first to admit I’ve phoned in a few posts this month. Gak!

So, here’s the thing…

I’ve decided that I’ll be switching over to a summer schedule for July and August.

This summer we have some mountain vacations planned, some technology-free camping trips in the north country to do, weekends at the lake or on the river to enjoy, and a whole of lot of intention to get away from our screens as much as possible. I will still be posting here, probably more regularly than I should, but look for my posts to be a little more scattered over the next two months as of the first of July.

Expect your daily dose of cast iron guy goodness to resume to full daily schedule in September, and with any luck I’ll have a long list of stories to catch you all up on.

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Work-Life-Balance

I’ve had a busy week.

While this blog tends to be a great outlet for me to find some balance between my time at my desk and my time in real world, sometimes that balance tips too far to one side and I find myself sitting on a Friday evening with not much to write about because I haven’t done much worth writing about over the past week.

Today is kinda like that.

Balancing Screen Time

With dozens of readers coming to this blog every day you may be wondering why I still need to work.

But seriously.

I have a great job with lots of flexibility for time off and to live a life where I can sleep in my own bed every night. I’m grateful for that.

That said … said job is ninety-five percent spent in front of a screen.

So you blog in your free time? You ask. On a screen?

I enjoy having a place where I can be myself and do something similar that I do for others, but do that thing for myself. But yes, not every day do I find myself savoring the idea of another few minutes in front of another screen.

How does one balance?

Balance comes from a having a plan, or so I find. Balance is the result of having something to do that pulls you away from the easy thing to do … too easy, like flipping open your phone and scrolling, or flicking the remote and queuing up the next streaming show.

Balance comes from doing the things that you need to do in proportion to the things you want to do. Not everyone has that luxury, of course, but it is something that we all seek and for many a thing that we will spend much of our lives working for, looking for, striving for.

I’m here on a Friday afternoon after completing a very long list of things I needed to do.

Meetings. Reports. Emails. Managing.

I’m hoping my weekend holds an equitable list of things I want to do.

Wandering. Cooking. Running. Creating.

That’s my work-life balance.

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The Value to Comment

Readers may have noticed that I don’t make commenting available here.

This is a conscious choice on my part to limit the conversations about these things that I write about to more open and public platforms and in doing so keep this blog something more personal and deliberately curated.

I tend to lean towards the idea that comments have a strong role in social media but not an obligatory one.

I only bring it up because yesterday the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, announced that they would be turning off Facebook comments for one month on their news posts if for no other reason than to give their reporters a break from the never-ending barrage of attacks that fill those comments.

(If you thought Canadians were polite, look no further than Facebook for evidence to the contrary, I guess.)

It makes me wonder if there is a better way to create interaction with people in a public space like this blog than simply having a text box for someone to type their thoughts into. Why? Because as I post each of these articles each and every day, yes, I do care that someone is reading them, I do care that someone has thoughts about them, and I do wish there was a better way to interact with my readers than the comment firehose that comes with creating a community around a topic I love to write about.

On a side note, I do not use Facebook. I have my reasons. In fact, I deleted my account a couple years ago and have no interest in diving back in.

I do use many other social platforms, however, and enjoy the conversations I have there.

I enjoy them so much that often I’ve been tempted, holding my finger over the toggle switch on some posts, to turn on the comments here just to see what happens.

I know what happens, of course. I’ve seen it for years.

Spam, mostly. Then a large collection of negative comments. All that peppered with a barely visible seasoning of enjoyable feedback.

Comments are not just about the positive love-giving vibes, but it helps. Comments are not exclusively for validation, but people who validate are often less likely to write something than those who are just out to quash ideas. Comments are meant to be about exchanging ideas, but too often boil down to anger and disagreement.

So… I don’t turn them on. Even though they would have some value to me, I would rather lose that value and continue to write, curate, and share in my own little bubble, than to have a few happy comments at the price of wading through the garbage that would certainly crush my spirit.

I get why those reporters need a break, and I’d rather not need one too.

So. Thanks for reading… even if you can’t drop a note back.