There are very few songs that can make the hair on my arms stand on end.
This song, a reworking of an older song I loved growing up. But instead of focusing on men dying doing manly things as in the original, the update is about women dying in service of larger social issues. Incredibly powerful…
“Highwoman” – The Highwomen
Okay, maybe not 90% of the reason but having a two car attached garage is pretty nice after fifteen years of parking on the street, scraping windows all winter and not one but two cars totalled while parked on the street (one kid who hit my car fessed up, one was a hit & run and, unlike the movies, I couldn’t catch the offender running down the street after him!)
(We had a detached double-car garage in our old house but it was sort of built behind the house and because we only had a single driveway and Shea and I left for work at different times plus the garage was full of junk anyhow so we never really used it.)
Admittedly, it took us about a month after we moved into our new place to clean the garage enough that we could even *fit* two cars!
Of course, the Fred Eaglesmith song “Bleary Eyed Boys” with its indictment of suburb living keeps running through my head…
Maybe you ought to get a real job, become a mini-man with a minivan,
Move out to the suburbs, get some interlocking brick and some oak parquet.
Get a triple-glazed e-bay window, with ceramic tiles and kitchen cupboards
Get your lawn sprayed every couple of weeks, and a two-car garage.
And here I am…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc_Dvefyxf0
As so many sites/apps do at this time of year, one of my blog plug-ins also provided a “Year in Review” report for my blog traffic.
Now, I should back up and repeat my standard line that I tend to think of this blog as my “acreage in the country” – far away from the busy high rises that are Facebook and Twitter, the crowded mall that is Amazon, the business centre that is LinkedIn, the urine-soaked subway that is Reddit. 😉
My blog is my own little space where I can putter away with my thoughts, explore different ideas and the only people who pop by are those who purposely choose to get a bit off the highway to swing by.
There are times where I’ve wondered what would’ve happened if fourteen (!) years ago, I’d worked towards making this blog dedicated to a single topic – something library-related or one of my other interests – digital video/streaming, Saskatchewan politics, NHL hockey – or whatever.
Or whether I focused on a single topic or kept my current random “thought of the day” approach, what would happen if I made a more concerted effort to build my traffic like all the other travel bloggers and mommy bloggers out there with their very beautiful, very search-engine friendly, very loaded-with-ads-and-affiliate-program-offer web sites?
I mean, fairly soon after I started this blog, I did syndicate it out to Facebook but I pulled back on that fairly quickly as my uneasiness with Facebook and their approach to user data and privacy grew. I went for a long stretch where I didn’t promote my blog at all. And now I’ve reached a point where I basically syndicate it out to the raging firehose that is Twitter but I rarely use hashtags in my post titles which could also help grow my audience.
At any rate, given that I’m just a humble blogger on the backroads of the Information Superhighway, it’s still interesting to get some insight into who’s coming to my site.
I’m not going to share the actual numbers – not because I’m proud (or embarrassed!) but because they’re sort of meaningless – especially on a blog that’s not commercialized. So whether I get 1000 visitors, 10,000 visitors or 100,000 visitors a year doesn’t really matter. And honestly, I’d rather than 1000 people visit who enjoy my posts and learn something or maybe think about things differently than 100,000 people coming by to learn how to make a “rye and coke press”. (Okay, that’s pretty cool too that this continues to be one of my highest visited posts of all-time!)
I guess the other question is why I continue to blog at all on a platform I started while in library school to learn a bit about what was then still a fairly new technology, keep family and friends at home up-to-date on my Ontario adventures, and yes, have a platform for publicly exploring ideas and sharing opinions?
I think that’s part of it – though I don’t focus on getting a lot of traffic, when something does demand a platform like library cuts or a provincial election or whatever, I do see big spikes in my traffic (and weirdly, just being a long-time blogger gives you a certain “authority” with media, politicians and others that might not actually be deserved!) 😉 I also like the discipline of having something I do every single day. Blogging also helps me practice my writing (though in some ways, my informality and lack of editing probably hurts my writing too!), I like creating an archive of my life’s moments that will (hopefully) be there for anyone interested after I’m gone.
Anyhow, here’s some screencaps from the report about my blog’s past year…
First surprise comes right off the top. I would’ve guessed that 90% of my traffic comes from Canada but turns out 44% comes from the US, 33% comes from Canada and the rest comes from around the world including some people from the planet “ZZ” whatever that is! (not sure but maybe a visitor from somewhere that their country can’t be identified for some reason?)
Demographically, there’s a fairly equal split between men and women and my audience tend to skew towards younger people. I always imagine my “typical reader” is someone like me – a middle-aged librarian with an interest in technology but yeah, probably a reflection of young people spending more time online means I get more younger people visiting my blog. (Also because younger people still don’t know how to make rye & coke presses like us grizzled veterans!) 🙂
No surprise that my home page is also the most visited page then the rest of the Top 5 is basically a “greatest hits” collection of posts that have been continually popular ever since I posted them – listicles, resort reviews and the perennial favourite on how to make a rye and coke press. 
Finally, the device breakdown shows the ever-increasing reach and use of mobile devices. 
Happy New Month/Year/Decade (and I already screwed up the time stamp of a scheduled post so this didn’t go up right at 12:01am like I hoped but instead, was going to wait until January 12 to show up – oops!)
1. What did you do this year that you’d never done before?
Went to a minor league baseball game in Weyburn during the summer and a big production outdoor NHL game in Regina in the fall. Enjoyed both equally!
2. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Probably quite a few on Facebook but none I can think of who are close to us since we’re now at an age that most of our friends either have kids or are moving into the stage of their lives where it won’t happen if it hasn’t already. With that said, I have twin cousins who are each having babies around the time in the spring which is kind of a cool coincidence.
3. Did anyone close to you die?
An elderly woman who was a very close friend of my grandparents (enough that I gave her a shout-out in my grandma’s eulogy), a guy I knew in high school that was only a couple years older than me, a great friend from library school who was a couple years younger (and I coincidentally heard of her passing on my 46th birthday), someone I didn’t really know but very sad to hear of the passing of the daughter of someone I consider a mentor in libraries and another woman who was also a bit of a mentor, both as a librarian but also in her community involvement including having also been a board member of Coteau Books as am I and the Sask Book Awards as was I. John Mann was probably the celebrity death that affected me the most. In happier news, a friend who has long surpassed the prognosis when diagnosed with stage four metastatic breast cancer eight years ago posted a profound quote on FB: “Today is the envy of all the dead.” Indeed.
4. What places did you visit?
Cancun for the best resort we’ve ever stayed at. Our seasonal camp site at Nickle Lake has become our second home. We made a quick trip to Calgary in the summer for a few days. And in terms of our first home, we not only visited but moved into a new home this year!
5. What would you like to have in the next year that you lacked this year?
Two weeks’ winter holiday like we did a couple years ago. Okay, maybe a month? Nah, it’s still a long ways away but I’m weirdly looking forward to retirement already (as long as I can still afford to take some holidays within that retirement!)
6. What date from this year will remain etched upon your memory?
Feb 24 – leave for Mexico
May 17 – May Long Weekend at Seasonal Camp Site (last year felt rushed and new, but now we know our neighbours and have much of what we need – though we’ll be doing another move next spring – this time to a site that’s bigger and closer to Shea’s parents’ site. Yes, our second big move in a year!) 😉
July 18 – as mentioned, hear on my birthday that a good friend from library school died young
Aug 15 – head to Calgary for a few days
The “New House Sequence”:
Mon Sep 2 – Go look at house Shea’s had her eye on for a few years
Sat Oct 5 – Offer Is Accepted on New House
Fri Nov 22 – Possession Date of Our New House
Wed Nov 27 – Our House Listed
Sat Nov 30 – Offer on House
Thu Dec 5 – First Night in New House
Wed Dec 11 – old house sells officially with all conditions removed (delayed slightly from initial date of Dec 9)
Fri Dec 20 – possession date on our old house for new owners (a date I’ll never forget except I mixed it up with *our* possession date and initially put Fri Dec 22!) 😉
7. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
I didn’t make a big show of it but I’ve gone from being pretty evangelical for Facebook and social media to despising so much about it – the privacy violations, the misinformation, the open racism/sexism/homophobia. I wasn’t brave enough to delete Facebook completely like some do as it is still the best way to keep up with the lives of people you know and love. But I did make a quiet vow to not post any original top-level content – only hitting “Likes” or making the occasional sub-comment the entire year or approving original posts where others tagged me even when I wanted to post stuff about trips or our new house or whatever. And even that felt really liberating. I’m by no means bilingual but I also managed to keep another promise to myself by using DuoLingo to learn a bit of Spanish on a near daily basis through the entire year.
8. What was your biggest failure of the year?
I’ve written before how I sort of yo-yo my weight through the year – losing before a beach trip then putting it all back on *during* that holiday (!), gaining in summer while camping, losing in fall when holiday might be looming. This year, I felt like I was heavier than I wanted to be throughout the year including when we bought the house and all bets were off (literally – had a weight loss bet with Shea and her dad from end of the summer) and our diets went pretty crazy for a while with lots of fast food and takeout.
9. What was your biggest surprise?
The Calgary Flames had a magical year winning the Western Conference as the second best team in the entire NHL but then flamed out (pun intended) pretty bad in the first round of the playoffs. On the other hand, I haven’t watched basketball seriously since high school but got on the Raptors’ bandwagon as they took the NBA Title for the first time in franchise history. Having an offer on our house four days after listing it and then having someone want possession *before* Christmas was an amazing surprise and the perfect Christmas gift!
10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Knock on wood but nothing major – I did go down for about a day and a half in Mexico which sucked (and doubly so since it was such a nice – and nice & expensive – resort!) Dropped a shelf on my toe when moving which left a big blood blister so my history of damaging toes at inopportune times continues.
11. What was the best thing you bought?
We paid a premium for it but choosing a higher end resort was definitely worth it. Lots of great deals from being cheap – we got a great deal on a used BBQ for our camp site. I bought a used folding lawn chair at a garage sale for a buck. I bought a used bird feeder at a different garage sale for $0.50. A backup replacement tent for our rPod off Kijiji for one quarter of what it would cost new. But yeah, also a new house was a pretty cool thing we bought too! 😉
12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
It’s a backhanded compliment but after reading a story to a local class at their school, the teacher says that a local celebrity reader did the same story but “You did it a lot better” 😉 The Flames winning the Western Conference was pretty epic. My mother-in-law has made major progress with her eating after having a serious form of throat cancer last year.
13. Whose behaviour left you underwhelmed or disappointed?
On the other hand, the Flames losing badly in five games in the first round of the playoffs sucked. Alberta, Ontario and Saskatchewan pointlessly and ineffectively challenging the carbon tax. The rising right wing in the US. Whoever robbed my library during a long weekend in the spring – they got only a few dollars but the resulting efforts to reinforce the library’s security, the meetings, the changed processes probably cost the library thousands. 🙁
14. Where did most of your money go?
I was going to say that we booked a resort that was 25% more expensive than anywhere we’d ever stayed but then we bought a new house so yeah, that.
15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Planning. Planning our Cancun holiday including reading, researching, watching videos, reading fan pages, planning meals and activities to try. Then doing something very similar for our new house – planning out timelines, budgets, to do lists, to buy lists, etc.
16. What song/album will always remind you of this year?
“Median Age Wasteland” – Hawksley Workman. My “Camping Faves” playlist which was my “go to” at our camp site. Seeing Jason Isbell at Regina Folk Fest. Weirdly, anything with banjos in it! 🙂
17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
A) Happier or sadder? Much Happier – I don’t think I realised how much our old house which was a bit crowded, a bit cluttered, a bit small – wore me down.
B) Thinner or fatter? Probably fatter but our scale got broken during the move so I’m not sure! 😉
C) Richer or poorer? Poorer!!! It’s always been true to a degree but with our new mortgage, I feel I really work for the bank, not for the library!
18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Often wish I’d stuck with my creative writing more.
19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
I think it’s just part of my personality but I tend to worry/overanalyze things too much.
20. How did you spend Christmas?
With Shea’s folks in our new house for Christmas and Boxing Day then with my parents a couple days later.
21. Who did you spend the most time communicating with?
I mentioned my lack of participation in FB this year but I did spend more time reading messages on various private groups dedicated to things I’m interested in – resorts, books, politics, certain musicians, etc. (Read somewhere that part of FB’s plan is to focus more on groups so, if so, it worked on me.) Also everyone involved with the house sale/purchase – our realtor, mortgage broker, multiple banks, various tradespeople and contractors, utilities, people selling stuff on Kijiji, etc. etc. etc. Breaking the news to old neighbours, getting to know new neighbours.
22. What was your favourite TV program?
Game of Thrones (we actually watched the Series Finale in our camper bed the morning after it aired.) Chernobyl. Handmaid’s Tale. Most Flames game. Came close to cutting cord completely in the move to our new house but ended up signing up for a Micro Basic package plus a news package and a sports package.
23. Do you hate anything that you didn’t hate at this time last year?
My huge library of books, acquired over years of working in publishing and libraries and attending book sales and garage sales is something I loved last year but I *really* hated having to move (and shelf) this year! I mean, I work in a library – do I really need to maintain a personal library of hundreds and possibly thousands of volumes? (For now…yes!)
24. What was the best book(s) you read?
I seem to create at least one unofficial “trilogy” in my reading each year and this year it was about drug cartels – “Narconomics”, “Bones” and “To Die in Mexico” which I read fairly closely together around the time of our Cancun trip. Nothing I read was a clear favourite over everything else but I read a few good books – “Basic Income for Canadians”, “Great American Outpost” about the oil industry in North Dakota, “The Body” by Bill Bryson which wasn’t as good as “A Short History of (Nearly) Everything” (but what is?) But if I had to give the nod to a single book as my favourite of the year, long-shot Presidential candidate, Andrew Yang’s “The War on Normal People” did a pretty good job of capturing a lot of the issues of our day – automation, globalization, climate change – that are causing great societal upheavals and need to be addressed by our leaders.
25. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Not mine but watching Sasha get more into music, especially when she likes music that I do (Beatles! Hawksley Workman!) I knew him a bit already but I really got into Jason Isbell and really the entire “new outlaw” country movement (of which Isbell may or may not be a part depending on who’s doing the categorizing.)
26. What did you want and get?
I finally won the playoff family pool finally after ten years of being beaten by both more knowledgeable cousins and octogenarian aunts who pick their teams completely at random! 🙂
27. What did you want and not get?
Ironically, I was really close to winning the regular season family pool but got outpaced in the final week, mainly because a cousin who’s a huge Flames’ fan, had picked the Oilers’ Leon Draisital who lit it up and ended up with 50 goals on the year. (I then used some of what I saw my cousin do to in picking his team to win the playoff pool!)
28. What were your favourite films of this year?
Avengers: Endgame, Vice. Yesterday. Joker. We really don’t watch a lot of movies anymore and especially in theatres – maybe three all year (including all on that list except Vice which makes sense – the most anticipated, hyped movies are the ones we go to theatre for so I’m inclined to like them the best too.)
29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I turned 46 and am feeling older all the time – I take Omega 3 for my eyes, Robaxacet for my back, squint when reading or dealing with things like small screws, my beard is nearly completely grey. Even buying the house made me feel older – one neighbour commented on my college-esque “board and brick” bookshelves “You better not put those dorm room bookshelves in your new house!!!” And as mentioned earlier, while out running errands with Sasha on my birthday just before starting a two week holiday, got the sad message to a private FB group of former library school colleagues that a good friend who was two years younger had died, only a couple months after Shea had reached out to her after she posted on FB about some of her health struggles.
30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Honestly, not much. Maybe two weeks in Mexico?
31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept this year?
Realised that I’m the opposite of most men – I wear a beard when I’m working and tend to shave it off when I’m on holidays – going to Mexico or for our longer breaks in the summer. Also beard related – I have a new thing where I try to see how bushy/Santa/Marxy my beard can get if I leave it for a few months in winter.
32. What kept you sane?
There were a lot of potentially stressful moments – the offer! The mortgage application! The move itself! But we structured our move to be as low stress as possible with long, generous timelines between different stages, not moving to new area of city, kids not switching schools, not making our purchase conditional on selling our house, being willing to pay others to move and paint instead of doing it ourselves as we always have in past moves. So I guess, being at a place and time in our lives where we had the resources – time, money and otherwise – to even structure our move this way helped to keep us sane.
33. What political issue stirred you the most?
Trump 24/7 and my frustration that so many people don’t realise he’s taking his cues from professional wrestling and therefore, keep acting like marks. The carbon tax in Canada and impeachment (finally) in the US.
34. Who did you miss?
Not who but what – that weird feeling that the house you’ve basically spent every night in (minus holidays or weekends at family homes or whatever) for the past fifteen years is no longer your house all of a sudden. I also spent a lot of time thinking about my grandparents – how our family farm has been in our family for generations but that I’m the first in our family not to take it over. How my maternal grandpa was in the war (sparked partly by Sasha’s increased interest in Remembrance Day via what she was learning in school.) I never knew them but being presented by 75+ year old set of silver utensils that were originally Shea’s grandparents then gifted to her parents who have now passed them to us falls into the same category.
35. Who was the best new person you met?
I meet so many interesting people via my work at the library – both staff and patrons. People whose families have been here for generations and new Canadians. Young and old. Male and female (and others who have differing gender identities.) People with physical and mental health issues. People suffering from addictions who live on the street and people who have amassed great wealth. I honestly believe that if people could get the same exposure the full beautiful range of diversity that humanity encompasses, the world would be a kinder, more empathetic place.
36. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned this year.
Your first offer is usually your best one! 🙂
37. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year?
One day, I aim to have myself a family
And a cabin on the hill
And I might have to come off of the highway
To help with the family bills
But when the kids have got a little older
On the day that I retire
I’ll take her somewhere warm for the winter
Pulling our Country Squire
“Country Squire” – Tyler Childers
38. Link to a photo that sums up your year
39. Best App of the Year
Spent a lot of time on Kijiji (and similar sites – Facebook Marketplace, VarageSale, UsedRegina.com) hunting down all sorts of deals on things we needed for our new house.
40. What single moment defined your year?
We’ve basically only been in the new house for a month so though something connected to that seems like the obvious answer, it’s actually a moment from this summer – laying in the front bunk of our tiny camper with everybody crammed into the bed Shea and I share, watching *ET* on DVD and thinking about how it encapsulates so many things – childhood memories (both the movie and camping itself), the mix of laughter and tears you get from a great movie, even inappropriate moments and how my kids are growing up in a different world than I did (“penis breath”, “You’re dressed like a terrorist!”) where things I heard without question now raise an eyebrow or spark a discussion.
I’ve written before how this annual post where I share the first line of my first post of every month of the past year is one of my favourites of the year. Part of the reason is how it seems completely random (I honestly don’t think about what I’m posting for the start of every month and how it will look when compiled in December) but manages to do a good job of capturing the flow of the year.
Of course, you never know what direction your life will take on any random day and who would’ve guessed in January 2019 (or October 1, 2019 for that matter!) that by the end of the year, we’d be laying our heads into a newly purchased house that we ended up making an offer for on October 5! After our offer was accepted, I felt like this blog became “all house news all the time” but in November, I was worried about being “all Calgary Flames all the time” and it was only my first December entry that ended up having any reference to our new house even though it was a process that started in early September and had been informally happening in the background for at least a couple years beforehand with us casually watching the real estate market for a house we liked enough to make a move worthwhile.
January – “Let’s start the New Year off right – with a list of Five Books That Explain Why The World Is Fucked.”
February – “No idea if I’d meet their qualification for this deal but would be a great way to get a discount on a flight to Mexico if I did!”
March – “Back from a one week all-inclusive holiday (even from blogging if you can believe it!) but lots to start catching up on – a review of our resort for sure (last year, it took me three weeks to cobble together a review of our resort – I wonder if I’ll be quicker this year?)”
April – “This song is usually interpreted as being about acid rain but on the day Saskatchewan (and three other provinces) has a federal carbon tax enacted, I thought it was appropriate”
May – “SPOILERS!”
June – “Shea and Sasha went out to our seasonal site this weekend while I stayed in the city to work and Pace stuck around to play video games visit his Aunt Sandi who is visiting from Kelowna.”
July – “Happy Canada Day!”
August – “Got to a summer BBQ hosted by Weyburn NDP constituency association and joked to NDP Leader, Ryan Meili that with all the money Shea and I donate to the NDP, we’ll go to any event they have to recoup our money in free hot dogs!”
September – “As we begin the sad process of closing up our seasonal site for another year, it feels like a good time to do a list of the reasons Shea and I enjoy camping so much:”
October – “The camping season’s over but I can’t help but share this funny video…”
November – “So I don’t mean to turn this blog into “all Flames all the time” but after that unfortunate OT loss in the Heritage Classic last Saturday, it was amazing to see the Flames come back from a 3-goal deficit to tie it with three unanswered goals in the third period last night.”
December – “We’ve got our house listed, have already had a handful of showing and I find myself watching videos like this in the small hours of the night (not bad advice but not sure it’s highly top secret knowledge either!)”
I think Shea and I are going to enjoy having a beautiful green white space outside our back door in our new house!
After our trip to the Calgary Zoo this summer, we had a bit of a panda-theme for some of the kids’ gifts including both a stuffed panda and a panda hat for Sasha.
Pretty cute until Pace pointed out that this is actually looks like a living panda has put the skull of another dead panda on its head! 😮
