Backyard: Saturday (or, a list of rejected backyard blog topics)

In recognition of yet-another-local-lockdown due to the ongoing pandemic, I'm doing a week of feature blog posts about living in the backyard. From May 10th through 16th, my posts will be themed around life outdoors but as close to home as possible, a few steps out the back door.

After nearly a week of deeper restrictions that have left me (and most law-abiding residents of the city) without many places to go, I’ve turned that into an opportunity to enjoy my own backyard. Think of it less like a lockdown, and more like permission to do nothing but enjoy my own grass, trees, garden, and relaxing spaces.

If you’ve been following along for the week, I’ve posted a short list of reflective blog posts that haven’t done much for my Google search ranking, but certainly have helped me get a few things pried loose from my own brain.

Given another couple weeks, maybe I’d have stooped to writing about even more trivial topics, like these rejected titles and not-so-interesting daily blog ideas:

Backyard: Naps

Wherein I chronicled the joy of falling asleep on my new, hand-built patio couch under the shade of the pergola sail fluttering in the wind. It’s tough to see how I would have turned that into more than about a hundred words without a serious thesaurus.

Backyard: Chores

Having spent my Saturday morning tilling the garden, planting the potatoes, and dealing with even more weeds (gah!) this rejected blog post risked turning into a long list of all the things I need to get done, y’know, instead of writing blog posts.

Backyard: Chronology

As it turns out this idea was really only of interest to me as I sorted through fifteen years of photos of my own backyard and marvelled at how much my trees had grown since I’d planted them. Breaking news: trees grow!

Backyard: Music

As at least one of my neighbours always seems to be playing music, the distant and indistinct muffled tones of random streaming playlists wafts through the air. My music knowledge is average though, so guessing what songs were playing could have been an amusing blog game.

Backyard: Garbage

Imagine my slow-motion, hand-typed embarassment in reading a blog post listing all the weird objects my eight-month-old puppy has found in my I-thought-I-had-a-clean-yard backyard. A scandalous post idea, and obviously rejected. Photos redacted.

Backyard: Terrible Ideas

A tongue-in-cheek list of some deliberately bad blog ideas, loosely acknowledging the author’s commentary on how difficult it is to make writing about his own backyard interesting and how easy it would have been to veer that metaphorical wheelbarrow into a fence post …oh, wait.

Backyard: Blogging (a How-to Guide)

In recognition of yet-another-local-lockdown due to the ongoing pandemic, I'm doing a week of feature blog posts about living in the backyard. From May 10th through 16th, my posts will be themed around life outdoors but as close to home as possible, a few steps out the back door.

As spring approaches, and the snow melts into a nurturing moisture that slowly starts to restore the greens to the grass and the leaves to the trees in my little suburban backyard, I find myself looking for excuses to sit in the weak spring sunshine and do those activities I would have just weeks before found a quiet corner of the house to get done.

Daily blogging is not incompatible with an outdoor lifestyle, but it does take some special preparation to help ensure its success.

I don’t know about you, but I write best when I’m comfortable. A cushioned seat or a soft-bottomed chair of some kind. A flat level surface with enough space for my tools (see the first item) and a cup of coffee. It’s got to be out of the wind and sun, and the last thing I want is to have bugs swarming around my head or an angry wasp buzzing at my screen. I like a view of the yard, particularly when the birds are swooping in and out of the feeders I have set up. And so long as she behaves herself, the dog is happiest when she can sniff around or find a place nearby to curl up and enjoy the tippity-tap of the keyboard.

Some tips to successfully blogging outdoors:

Setting the Tools

Writing is a personal act and one that often involves a favourite keyboard, a certain pen & paper combination, or just the right screen font. I myself am fussy about how I write. I admittedly spend too much money on certain styles of keyboards that feel just the right way under my fingers. When I’m in the flow of writing, the last thing I want is to be distracted by an unfamiliar tool. Personally, I’ve taken particular care to set up my writing tools around these comforts and have multiple sets: one that is portable as well as a set that is more grounded at my desk. I have the same chiclet-style keyboard in the wired (desktop) and wireless (tablet) model for the precise reason that I sometimes like to write outdoors (or in the olden, pre-pandemic days, at a café in …gasp …public.) In short, backyard blogging starts with some investment in having a device or method that is capable of not just working, but working for you, in said backyard.

Connecting Disconnected

And now that you have a computer, tablet, or some other writing device set up in a comfortable position outside, you probably need to link it up to the internet. Of course there is always the option of writing your post offline in a text editor and uploading later when you are back in the house or can push it to your blog platform in one effort. A good wireless internet setup that reaches out into a moderate sized backyard in not an expensive investment these days. Nor is tethering your device to a wifi hotspot supplied by your phone a thing that is going to drain most moderately-sized cell phone data packages. Provided you’re not uploading dozens of photos or expecting to share a full video, bringing the internet to your backyard should be a practical and straightforward way to extend your writing space into your green space.

Undistracting

Wind. Bugs. Varying sunlight. The birds fluttering to and fro. The honks of a car horn on the street. A siren passing by on the main road a few blocks away. A neighbour calling his dog. I sit in virtual silence, or listening to music, when I work inside. In my suburban backyard, as much as I revel in the life of the neighbourhood, distraction becomes a real thing when I’m trying to put my fingers onto that keyboard and focus on the words. On sunny mornings the sun comes up past the neighbours house in just the right way that a glare blots out any hope of visibility on my tablet screen. If I sit my chair in just the right angle it blocks most of that light, but it is distracting nonetheless. A pair of headphones and some music is a way to block it out if I need to, but mostly blogging outside means tweaking the way you work to work well with the distractions in the outside space, air, noise, and life.

Feeding the Inspiration

Finally, when the space is just right, the tools are working great, the bugs are shooed away, and the glare of the sun is not obscuring the screen, I find it never feels quite right to sit outside in the yard without a beverage and maybe a snack of some kind. In the mornings I write with a hot cup of coffee and a bit of sourdough toast. In the evenings, after a day of work fuels my after-hours wordiness, a cold beer or a finger of whiskey can often pry loose that tangled inspiration. Maybe you like a glass of wine or a glass of icy cold soda. Maybe you nibble at a snack of some kind, pop yourself some popcorn or crinkle open a bag of potato chips. Backyard blogging, if nothing else, feels like permission to enjoy the act a little more, and to feed your inspiration with the space, the fresh air, and something more literal to sip on. Or maybe it’s just me.

One Hundred Daily Posts

It’s Saturday, and while there are a dozen other things I could write about this morning I wanted to pause for a moment and reflect on a milestone.

One hundred posts.

I started this blog on the first of January and keeping apace of a single post each and every day since New Years Day means that this and the previous ninety-nine daily blogs account for exactly one hundred collections of words, images, links, and other miscellaneous thoughts published and shared here.

I don’t want to get particularly introspective or navel-gazing on the process of blogging.

Rather, I simply want to make a note of where we’re at: just getting started.

Inspired By Others

I also thought it was a reasonable-enough excuse to share some links to some of the YouTube channels that I‘ve been watching. Part recommendation, part inspiration, part this is what I’ve been spending my time thinking about and where my mind is at these days, here are some other folks putting out great video content and who seem passionate about their subjects.

Watching the energy that these folks put into their chosen niche topics makes me want to participate in the creative side of the internet. With folks like these as role models, writing a hundred daily blog posts has been a snap.

Beau Miles
An Australian filmmaker, outdoorsman, runner, father, and all-round interesting guy, Beau publishes quirky documentaries about his relationship to his world by posing questions no one else thought to ask, like what if I ate nothing but beans for a while, or what if I walked eighty kilometers to work and survived on what I found along the way. If we could all live by the Beau Miles philosophy the world would be a happier place.

TA Outdoors
Mike lives in the UK and seems to spend an enviable amount of time with his dad in the woods camping, building cabins, drinking good beers, testing out various survival techniques and generally being adventurous. He comes across as genuine and inquisitive and amplifies my own interest in these same things to the point that I ask myself why I’m not making more time to be like Mike.

Glen & Friends
Just down the road a few thousand kilometers here in Canada, Glen is a skilled cook and professional food photographer who produces a high quality cooking channel with his wife that spans the breadth of the culinary landscape while staying practical and interesting. It is very “Canadian” in style and tone and my wife and I often joke that now we don’t need a YouTube channel because Glen’s got us all covered.

Simone Giertz
Inquisitive soul Simone makes my list because she inspires both my daughter and I to try to be more inqusitive ourselves. While her niche doesn’t exactly overlap with any of the topics on my own blog, I am curious about many of the things she does in designing, fabricating, engineering, repurposing, refunctioning, and generally being creative from inspired places. You may have seen her work turning her Tesla into a truck or building quirky robots, but there is so much more to discover from someone like Simone who seems genuinely curious about the universe.

Claire Saffitz
My daughter and I were fans of Claire at her last YouTube gig and still are with her own channel. With my daughter owning a copy of Claire’s cookbook, the kid is determined to be like her hero and bake all the desserts. We watch Claire’s posts multiple times then invariably out comes the stand mixer and bag of flour and the the house smells like lemon or cinammon for a while.

Primitive Technology
Even though my wife recently bought me John’s book and despite watching hours and hours of his channel, I don’t know much about him or where he’s from. His elaborate, wordless videos show him working as he spends time in a jungle of some sort building with his hands primitive tools which he uses to forge primitive kilns which he uses to bake primitive bricks which he uses to construct primitive huts and so on and on. Watching John work is a special kind of peaceful and meditative experience.

To At Least One Hundred More

I hope if you’ve been reading along with this jumble of things I’ve been posting you’re enjoying it. Cooking, travel, outdoors, and cast iron are things that swirl around my days and fill my mind and it has been a pleasure to write and share about these things here.

That said, I have no plan. No end game. No ulterior motive.

Posting one hundred blogs over the last one hundred days has been a mind-clearing experience, has given me more direction for the summer and some reprive from the groundhog-day existence of living through this pandemic with all of you.

What else can I say? Thanks for reading this far… and stay tuned the year is just getting started.

(Now I’m off to bake some bread!)

Two Months of Blogging Lessons

The thing about writing a daily blog is that you’ve got to, well… write daily. I’m not looking for pity or sympathy. In fact, I signed up for this and I’m loving it as a way to start my weekdays or settle into a weekend.

It does often take effort to figure out my topic, though.

Today is the start of month three of daily blogging, and this post is number sixty.

Yes, sixty!

I’m not looking to ramp up my traffic. Obviously I’m not making money from more traffic. (No ads!) But I am interested in why people are visiting. Two months of data and fifty-nine previous posts are not much data to go on for a tried and true analysis of what people are interested in reading about, but it might be enough to give me an insight or two into coming up with some new topic ideas.

According to my internal stats, my top five posts of the last two months are:

1. Comics: Backpacking with Kids, a post where I shared some of my old comic strips recalling the deep woods inspiration and the struggles of parenting in the wilderness.

2. Snowshoes on a Frozen Suburban Creek, a fairly long “adventure journal” post about an afternoon spent snowshoeing on a local frozen creek, and had some pretty photos to go along with it.

3. Honey Brown Sourdough (Part Two), a post detailing the results of my honey brown been sourdough experiment, and a post I dropped into the daily thread of a local morning radio show conversation about bread giving me lots of new visitors.

4. Backpacking: Foggy Mountain Bridges, a post talking about a multi-day backpacking adventure, the experience of hiking with kids, and with a pretty nice photo to accompany it.

5. Guinness Sourdough (Part Two), another post detailing beer bread and the results of my Guinness beer sourdough experiment, and not unintentionally dropping the name of a famous stout into the title.

Yet none of this makes much sense when it comes to what people are actually searching for and clicking on. Based on my Google Search Console results, the searches that castironguy.ca appeared in most were:

chasing waterfalls iceland
backyardultra
cookout cast
rome waffle iron
campfire waffle iron

The only reasonable conclusion I can make from these bits of data is to mash this all together and generate some random blog posts I should probably write.

Right?

For example:

Backyard Ultra Race Comics could be a series of dramatic cartoons detailing the epic story of an underdog runner training for an ultra-marathon but then ultimately settling for the disappointment of an online-only virtual event hosted on Zoom during a pandemic where instead of traversing the wilds of Canada on foot, he does laps around his suburban neighbourhood. I could probably re-use a lot of my background scenery art.

Backpacking Beer Bread for Kids could be a deeply researched article on the effects of the family spending a week in the woods with a bag of flour, a sourdough starter, a case of beer, and two teenagers who are still too young to consume alcohol (at least in Canada!) The premise of this writing would be that since kids complain about nearly everything they eat (unless it’s chicken fingers and french fries) eventually, far from civilization, they would come to love and cherish the nutty flavour of campfire baking.

Icelandic Sourdough Campfire Waffles could be an article (or a series of articles) about a weeklong trek to a remote Icelandic waterfall under which I will set up a campsite, make some batter from a blend of fresh glacial water and my sourdough starter, and then cook waffles in a hot cast iron. The photos will be spectacular. I’m currently open to a sponsor to pay for this trip after the pandemic ends.

…or, maybe I’ll just stick to my regular, simpler topics.