Duke of Chaos - Castle Chaos - Home of the Duke

298.3 lbs Really? Not Good Dude, Not Good.

Insight, introspection, and accountability? Maybe.

That was the number on the electronic scale when I foolishly thought to step onto it this morning out of curiosity.

First, I need to start journaling again, daily probably, and living an intentional life, rather than crashing, sleeping, and binge my way through everything, and I mean everything.

Second I have to outline this post before I get to writing it, or it’ll read like a daytime soap, unreal and improbable.

There, done, now let’s flesh out the talking points shall we?

I looked in the mirror this morning, I realized that I have the hair and beard of a Scottish Harlequin novel cover, and the body of a university comp-Sci dropout who plays video games and cheats the social security net for a living.

This needs to change. I am a mess mentally and physically of late, and as much as I goof along with my boys, they deserve a better dad than that. My wife deserves a better husband in her house. And we all deserve a better house, so …

Where to go from here?

I measured myself again just now, twelve hours later, and it reads 291.8 so yeah, weight fluctuates during the day, I am usually a +/- five pounds kinda guy, so no worries there, but still at six foot, bordering 300 is not a good place to be.

Life’s a mess, need to intentionally focus and clean it up, that starts with taking care of myself and paying attention to what goes into my body and mind, and what comes out of it…

Step one: Diet control

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/diary/DanielOCasey Try to keep it under 2000 Cal. Now this one is tricky. My metabolism (and indeed my whole body-ism) is insanely adaptable, if I only drop the calories to lose weight, then within a week I’ll adapt to only needing that much to maintain rather than losing. Thus there’s a second part to this, which is covered off in the next step. What is more, I can eat 2000 Cal easily within a four-hour time frame, hell I can probably eat that much within a one-hour time frame, thanks to growing up working for a living, you had short lunches and dinners, then back to work for the entire productive season while it wasn’t snowing. So I need to take a 24 approach to things, and intermittent fasting, while a godsend for some, just means I could eat it all in a burst and spend the rest of the day grumpy and cranky.

Step two: Get off my Ass

Https://www.fitbit.com Good, as I have a Charge4 on my wrist right now, and it helps me to keep aware (not track, but aware) of what’s going on with my body, heart rate, activity levels, even sleep things.

https://www.mapmyrun.com/activity_feed
Good app for tracking when I can actually get out the door, usually pushing a stroller these days, but whatever.

I have to get back to the baselines I was at five years ago, it’s going to be one hell of a long grind to be able to jog 5 km without pausing again (I can walk it today, but jogging is down to several hundred meters then I collapse). Bench-press of 200lbs (I’m @ 100×5), deadlift of 400lbs (250@5) and squats of 320 (back down to 120 because I can’t get it up)b about were where I dropped off the wagon to take care of my kids and my wife, and forgot entirely about taking care of myself. Now I’m at the nervous breakdown and self-doubt/depression stage of that where I have to do something to take care of me before it all goes toes up on me. I don’t want to be body-builder material, more like a daunting draft-horse build, big, solid and powerful.

While doing this, I need to take care of my own emotional being, so I don’t unload and download on those around me. That means journaling and AL-ANON or self-care practice more, as well as carving out ‘me’ time and activities into the day. I need to spend time being dad, not cook, housekeeper, referee etc extraordinaire.

So, Step Three: Writing time, journaling time, and general mental health time…

I do not trust online journaling programs, so that leaves me with hardcopy (pen and paper) or coded files on my laptop here, which is the most likely.

Finally, I am a licensed CPA in BC (accountant for clarification) and I’m only doing the bare minimums on that, I need to follow up and push that aspect of myself to excel, as that’s how we are going to live and survive for the next little while. But more on that later. Wish me luck. I need to go check out the coffee pot…. I’ve a plan in mind…

Duke.

Hunting Sane, or Losing my All

TL:DR – There’s a lot of shit that shouldn’t be posted, even if I need to write it. This is probably one of them.

Angry guy pointing a banana gun

Let’s start out by talking about the taboo topic. Never, ever, is a blogger supposed to take his personal blog on a tear like this and just doing an emotional brain dump, after all most people only come to these things through search engines, looking for specific topic or perspective, not looking for all the rest of the crap that is going to come out of my head in something like this post. I started typing the darned thing because I am losing my mind and trying to hunt my sanity.

SEO be damned, I tried to make that first paragraph fit the formulas, but yeah, not happening and it’s not worth compromising my feelings and delivery just to appease some stupid algorithms of the search engine gods.

That’s another thing, why the fuck are we bowing down to these megalithic corporations when in the very words of our lord, clear in black and white the first three of the ten commandments are

1- You shall have no other gods before me.

2- You shall not make idols

3- You shall not take the name of the LORD your god in vain

It goes on from there, but when you search up ‘ten commandments’ from one of the big five search engines, guess what? You get pointed to Zazzle,ca, Wayfair Canada, Amazon.ca and Amazon.us, respectively. Literally a subversion of the whole concept isn’t it?

What the actual chaos happened to our world, that it has become the literal anti-thesis of the ten commandments, killing, lust, stealing by any other name, and to speak the name of the LORD is to start a religious pogrom (not aimed at Jew’s this time however), but triggering a persecution of any form of religious observances as oppression of someone else’s religious freedoms. How the fuck did we get it all so assed backwards? I mean, yeah, ok, you can worship as you see fit, and so can I, in this country at least (Canada, in case you missed it), but that’s not how it’s all working out. It’s all fucked up. It really is. I am supposed to accept that the two gender’s I was born knowing existed, are not accurate, and that there are more than two, heck, more than ten different sexual orientations or genders? Men should be allowed to go to the ladies’s room because they’re identifying as women? Women should be ok going to the men’s room because they were born with wrong plumbing but still feeling masculine? I get it. I do. Everybody is different, and we all have our own hang-ups and quirks and nuances as individuals. Yep, to quote John Green, we wouldn’t be “Fully Realized Complex and Unique Individuals” if we didn’t. BUT! feeling unique and not the same as all the other guys, doesn’t entitle you to another complete gender specification. Like who and what you like, and make your own peace with it. Nobody else is required to conform to your standards, just as you aren’t required to conform to theirs. I can respect your need to not worship as I do, to not feel as I do about men, and women, but at the same time, while I will not force my religion or sexual orientation on you, I demand you not push yours down my throat either, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

I’ll be back, I need to finish ranting here, but I have to take a young man to work (he’s not old enough to drive, but found a job, that he’s trying to up grade and bring some semblance of honour and decency back to retail, I pray for his success and commend his zeal and drive, but worry about the backlash).

Ok, it’s been a couple of hours, and I’m not quite as vitriolic as I was earlier. I was ready to take on the whole of society because I was so incensed and upset. I will still take on society (as a whole, let’s be honest, our society is fucked up in lots of ways), but maybe not with quite so many profanities or so much aggression.

Look man, I get it. Social Media, marketing tricks, your buddy with that rocking new ride, it all conspires to keep you beaten down, feeling like you ain’t worth anything let alone God’s grace or your wife’s good intentions. You start to question your own worth in this shitty fallen world.

That’s what they want, that’s what he wants. If that twisted old serpent can get you to question your own God given grace, to cast it aside in favor of this world’s lures and deceits, then he is one step closer to winning over your soul.

But I gotta ask you, is it worth it? Forego that quick fix, take a deep breath and just look at what is handed to you on a divine platter here. We live in paradise, (for humans), and the old snake is trying to get us to spread his poison throughout Eden so that it becomes unlivable and corrupted.

So far, as near as I can tell, he’s doing a pretty good job of convincing us to damn ourselves, since he has new power on this plane that we do not give to him. His only authority is to speak to our free will and baser natures, to convince us we’re not worth God’s grace and Jesus’ redemption. AND SO MANY OF US BELIEVE HIM! We destroy ourselves because he says it’s the better path.

But I watch my friends race to oblivion, my children’s friends get addicted to endorphin hits before they can even drive (or really function as individuals themselves), I watch my wife’s family perpetuate the patterns they picked up decades ago, not aware of the toxins they spread as they live a repetitive life that they assumed only because they never learned to think before acting (to live from reaction and emotion only, rarely in faith with calm and considered heads), heck I stopped talking to an entire half of my family because of this exact issue, and only new, decades later am I able to approach that side of the family hesitantly and with trepidation, lest I get drawn back into the mess. Luckily my generation of the family tree seems to be intent on at least starting to fix the generational issues we were born with.

What is the answer? Short and simple, it’s God and Faith; He’s laid it all out, how to live right in this life, to not lose it all to hedonism and debauchery, there are so many things I want to talk about but I find myself worn thin and out of passion for this topic at the moment. I’m sure I’ll be back, and if you don’t agree with me, then maybe you won’t, but that’s ok, it’s your life to choose. I just can’t abide the insanity anymore. The world is wrong, and getting more wrong, I can’t take it anymore, and it’s time to be true to my own self, try to raise my kids right and steer them clear of the cesspools of wrongness that is infiltrating our once blessed and graceful world.

In Exhaustion and Despair

Duke.

Progress is not a single path

Progress. What does that mean to you? What does it mean to anybody? So many people have so many definitions of progress. The truth is that progress is a cumulative effect on all the things that are important

What’s Important Anyhow?

Choosing the best path in the moment.

The image is one that spoke to me, because that’s how I’m feeling. And today’s post is literally just a journal entry because I have a few minutes until life starts.

See, it’s about ten to noon, and I tried to make it all make sense for my alleged mind, but the truth is that today’s going to be an insane crap shoot.

I got nothing more than 30 minutes of consecutive sleep last night due to the two little girls having what amounts to a rough night.

Top that off with there is literally only 53 dollars left in our family account so the weekend will be more frugal than was initially planned.

So, Friday morning, life is insane as usual (that almost doesn’t even need said anymore), I have two boys who are now in homeschooling due to this fucking COVID mess that our government is dragging out and on, and I got an email asking if I had done something for work that I naturally hadn’t gotten to yet, but it was due today or Monday at the latest.

Panic Time. Oh, wait there’s a note from the client, their bank is having issues and things aren’t going to clear as required, wonderful.

The end of the calendar year should be just one more day in the process, but it always comes with so many stupid issues that are often just plain preventable or hardware failures or something.

What is a guy to do? I have a meeting at 3:00 (Zoom, thankfully) but I look like a Sasquatch since I stopped shaving when the kids came home from school for Christmas. On top of that there’ is a stack a foot high of client files that I need to get through in the next few days, and of course the usual processing details don’t stop either.

So what’s the best path forward?

>>Work harder, longer hours, make more money and get everything caught up?

>>Find a second income stream that doesn’t take so much of my time.

Maybe I’m thinking too big on this one. I am tired, like stupid tired. At some point I am going to need a real nights sleep and some actual time off to go downtime and recover, maybe camping with the kids will be a good thing, but we need a better camper to do that with, which costs money and we’re back to square one, I need more, now.

I suppose that first thing right now is to go make some coffee, shave and shower and try to come back to civilization before the elusive Sasquatch is spotted in a Zoom call.

I know this didn’t go anywhere, but I had to post something to get my mind and my ass out of netural, and since this is my blog that I pay for, I get to be as offensive or irrelevant or both as I want to.

Cheers, and Happy Monday all,

God is watching, so is Santa Claus

Duke

On Owing Firearms and Private Property Rights

Hi.

Me and My Beautiful Wife

I am a dad. Six amazing kids and counting…

I am an accountant, legally and properly in BC Canada.

I am a husband for better or worse; sometimes she’d prefer she was single, but then again sometimes I’d prefer to be single for a week or two, alone in the bush, fishing and hunting. Only sometimes however, I mean, just look at her, the picture above doesn’t do her justice, she glows when she’s happy.

I am also subject to daily scrutiny by the RCMP on an ongoing basis until I die or my PAL (RPAL) is relinquished or revoked. (source: https://gundebate.ca/guns-canada-get/).

Here’s a picture from this morning. Exciting isn’t it? That’s my RPAL application, the background is my office floor, with filing cabinets, and such.

I can expect to wait a minimum of four months until I hear back from them. This is a paper application completed by hand and mailed from the left (West) coast to the East coast. Because it’s important, I could send it standard letter post, but choose to send it registered letter post (10x the cost) and have the proof that it was properly received by the government.

Four years ago I had to do the same thing for my standard PAL (should have taken the RPAL then and gotten it out of the way, but hindsight is always better, am I right?)

The point I am making here is that I can file a massive multinational corporation tax and financial return online in a matter of moments, and have an unofficial reply to the same in less than a week from the point I hit send. There is a chance of audit, and of course there are the standard disclaimers that allow CRA to come back on me personally (as the accountant, legal liability and all that). To form that corporation would be a matter of a few moments, a couple hours at most, online through their business portals. Once a year somebody checks to see if the mandatory reports and returns are filed. End of review and scrutiny. Easy Peasy.

To upgrade a firearms license like I am trying to do takes a full day’s attendance at an officially recognized RPAL course with a licensed instructor. (which you pay for) Then there’s the hand completed paper forms (minimum two guarantors, signatures and sign-offs from all conjugal partners you’ve had in the last few years (in my case, that’s a grand total of one awesome woman), and official photography (head shot, like a passport photo).

Once you get all that done, you have to send it all off to New Brunswick, (literally the other end of the country in my case) and wait.

Why would I do such a painful and tedious thing you ask?

For glory? For the adrenaline rush of being allowed to play with Movie Style machine guns (hint, nope, they’re prohibited, not restricted in Canada, you can’t get one if you wanted to). How about because I am afraid.

Fear is a thing, and it’s one hell of a motivator. I

See, the Liberal government took a rather back door sneaky approach and reclassified a whole whack of existing firearms, some from restricted to prohibited, some from unrestricted to prohibited. Ok, I get that sometimes reclassification happens, and there’s a tried and proven path for such a thing to happen. In a general way, the reclassification(s) is(are) proposed, reviewed, and if the evidence supports it then the reclassification is made.

This time the whole process was circumvented to accomplish some ideological policy of the current sitting government and their ambitions. I could take a left onto conspiracy lane here but with no proof or even an inclination, there’s not really much point in doing so.

The truth is that I have a pair of long guns that I bought from a friend/relation who wasn’t allowed to possess them due to an expired PAL. Then when things got weird a few years back I took possession of my father’s old guns and mom’s one antique 410, so with a bolted in hidden safe that’s triple locked against the kids and accidents, I thought things would be ok.

The problem is that two of the three sentimental family guns I took possession of (and have no intention of giving up), are only borderline this side of the general restriction clauses the OIC includes to cover anything they might have missed in their 1500+ specifics list of newly prohibited weapons.

The fear of having those long guns suddenly become anything other than what they are led me to do a rather esoteric search for my options, which are literally non-existent.

If these particular guns get re classed to restricted then I would need to be holding an RPAL at that moment. If they were to be suddenly prohibited then I would need to either surrender them (not going to happen, I have very strong feelings about the government’s right to just assume ownership of my personal property) or disable them (remove firing mechanism by a gunsmith or something). The problem with the second option is that I am not a gunsmith, nor do I know anyone who is.

Thus, while wallowing in the mire of the problem is a tried and true tactic, I am more given to doing what I can to change what I can, and leaving the rest of it in God’s hands to sort out. Thus, the search for a local licensed RPAL instructor or course had begun. Six months later I am mailing the envelope in the picture above at a total cost (so far) of just over $200 for the training, application fee, cost of the head shot, and mailing it registered post across this great (if temporarily) misguided land of ours to somebody in New Brunswick, who’s going to have to enter all the details by hand into their system and then if I am lucky, in 4-8 months I will have my upgraded license.

In the meantime, I think it’s time to teach myself to be a gunsmith if it’s not legislated in this province like everything else is. Time to go hunting for my next upgrade. Always learning after all.

Anyhow, this has been an odd and kinda unfocused post, which I’ll probably revisit later on. For now, it’s time to go to sleep and try again in the morning when I am feeling less like a potato.

Good night you amazing person, and thanks for reading this. If there’s any questions, just ask, I’ll try to answer.

Duke of Chaos

AKA

Daniel O Casey.

Start at Urk. Pass through WTF. End at OMG.

*Disclaimer, this is just literally an unloading post, because I almost truly can’t even…

How to describe yesterday? I am sitting here with my laptop open, trying with everything I can muster, to try to make sense of my reflections of yesterday.

We started with a series of crisis emails from my charity volunteer post,

And some manic critical errors with my one client who’s suffering the effects of corporate over-reaching incompetence (SAGE). Don’t get me wrong, the program is impressive, but this latest update they pushed through is just a step too far for most of us to be using. With everything trying to go online, storage, programs, software as a service, the whole of it get’s muddled and too complicated to use. Truthfully, it’s a matter of choice, but as of the end of yesterday, I was about to choose to go back to calculators, synoptic and good old ledger-books.

Then when that’s all done and I’m home, we’re looking at cold cuts and good veggies again for dinner (this is a good thing), and I got some good cleaning done in the shop. With five kids a two adults in a four bedroom mobile we’re kinda running out of space so it’s time to R&R the interior of said shop so I can move my weights and some working spaces to that shop and reclaim some of our family space.

But then tragedy strikes! Somebody’s plugged the toiled (is there a picture of a removed toilet somewhere?) and I start with the plunger, move to the drain snakes (or in my case flexi-pipe) and finally pulled the whole damned thing off it’s base and flipped it over to unclog the mess from that side.

Once that particular adventure was completed, after getting the two littlest one’s to bed I might add, I got to reassemble it all, then totally clean the bathroom, because naturally a toilet that was being used by seven people is nowhere near as clean as that picture above.

Finally, at midnight, I got to start on the dishes, and cleaning the rest of the main areas of the house from stem to stern and somewhere around two in the morning I get to go to bed for four hours sleep so I can try to do it all again.

Tomorrow’s objective? Trying to impress upon my older boys that they need to start helping consistently around the house with things like dishes and laundry because one man, or two parents, or whatever, can’t do it all for everybody and still be good people. Tired makes us all just a little more cranky than I would be otherwise.

TLDR:: Parenting isn’t for the faint of heart. You’re going to end up with days that last more than the usual 18 hours, where you only get three or four to sleep before doing it all again. There will be days when your entire professional day is a crap shoot of mayhem fixing things you didn’t break, followed by an insane amount of crap that won’t go away. In today’s case, it was a literal amount of crap, clogging a porcelain toilet, which needed to be addressed before I could get to the usual mayhem that needed to be cleaned.

Thus, in summary, life’s a little too busy to be hoping for anything more than small accomplishments like this post here. I’ve big plans but I have a house to finish building, a brood to raise and a a career to actually pursue so that I can afford the first two.

Love you all, and God Bless you each one. Duke.

Where to start over? At the beginning of course!

I am going to be 44 in handful of days here, my wife will be 36 (what an awesome number, God’s I get excited by thinking of her as 36 years old, it makes me want to go wake her up and do things a husband must only do with his consenting wife).

Anyhow, I wasn’t starting to type this in order to brag about my wife, but well, when the opportunity presents, right? Ok, back to topic. I will be turning 44, and despite five-year’s worth of hoping to do some good and make some changes in my life, the now five-year old and the currently two year old have somehow conspired to derail every effort I have made to make any kind of positive impact on my work, sleep and exercise habits. I am still about 280 lbs, I can no longer bench press 200 lbs and dead lifting the 400 pounds I used to pick up feels like a thing of the past.

But humans can change. I proved that last night. I started back on a running program called “Couch to 10k” form Zen Labs.

Now, I’ve done the 5 k version about five years ago, and while I have amazing memories of being able to actually jog almost the full five kilometers, (not run, goodness, running with my weight on my knees and carrying this much weight?), the memories of being called, while at the far end of the loop, and something critical happening that I needed to be at home to address, those memories are not so good. But back to the point of the blog post, life isn’t about gains and resting, and then more gains.

Life is a loop, circular, repetitive, and endlessly hopelessly incomplete, until it is complete. On that day, it’s too late to make any more changes.

But today!

Today is a day I can choose to pick up the embarrassing pieces of who I was, who I am and who I want to be, and get my ass back into the shoes, or to the keyboard, and start over again. At the beginning as it were.

I pulled out what I thought were my good running shoes, and proceeded to dial up the app, and download it, again, on my phone so I could track the thing.

I use the Map My Walk App, here’s the link.

Sometimes, it’s the shoes. It turns out there is more than one old pair of blue running shoes in that cupboard, I picked the wrong ones. I can barely walk this morning and my spirits are lower than ever.

Where do I look for some form of encouragement and uplift? When focusing on the here and now, the immediate and urgent, it’s hard to forget that the whole of reality is ephemeral. Things FEEL so damned important, so pressing, so overwhelming and the need to address them NOW is paramount to us in the moment.

But. Moments pass. As with this morning, I am stiff, sore and can hardly move. Last night’s sleep was so poor that I feel I’ve not slept at all (thanks to the cat for waking me during the few times I actually managed to drift off). But to rise, stretch, get some water and start the day anew.

God’s given me one more sunrise, what shall I do with it?

What shall I do today?

*Key up the Pippi Longstocking Theme Song from my childhood*

Anyhow, life does not proceed in a straight line, most times it can be likened to driving up the seemingly endless loop of a ramp in a parking garage. Around and up, around and up, or we get turned off of the ramp and it just goes around until we learn that lesson, then we move up, or in my case, we end up on the downward spiral and find ourselves back at the bottom.

Chaos is just that, it’s chaotic. If you don’t watch the processes of your head, then you will scuttle your best efforts at everything.

Just keep that in mind, before you go out of yours. Cheers, and good luck out there friends.

Duke

Accepting yourself, who you are is where you start

Courage To Change – April 1, 2020

Photo by Sapan Patel on Unsplash

How can I change myself if I have no idea who I am, or who I want to become? I have been at this ‘recovery’ stage of life for more than half my life now. I honestly thought I’d be done with it ages ago, but recently I came to a new understanding of my situation. See, I was stuck on a problem for work, and couldn’t figure out how to proceed. Upon analysis, it became clear that I had no idea how to complete the task because I had no idea what I was starting with. Even if you know the required end-point, if you don’t know where you are starting from, then the whole thing is almost impossible. In recovery, accepting yourself, who you are, is where you start from.

Quick and Simple Disclaimer: The readings in this post are literally taken wholesale out of the book entitled Courage to Change. You can find it at Amazon, Here. The portion entitled Alleged Insight, well that mess is all me.
If you’re an introvert, go buy the book, if you’re a broke introvert, the text from many good books can be found HERE , if you’re in dire straits however, go find an Al-Anon Meeting, it saved me. *None of these links are affiliate links,

So onward to Today’s Reading

I’ve heard acceptance mentioned at meetings as one part of the “Three A’s” – Awareness, Acceptance, and Action. However, I am inclined to try to jump from awareness to action without even pausing for acceptance. My thinking goes like this: “Something’s wrong! Quick, let me fix it before I have to feel any discomfort.”

The problem is that until I accept the situation, defect, or memory that has come to my awareness, I can rarely take effective action or live serenely with the consequences. The action doesn’t work or it makes things worse, and I feel helpless and hopeless. Even if it does work, I am usually too full of self-doubt to realize it. Most of the time, I still have to go back, sit still, feel the feelings, and come to some acceptance. It helps to be reminded that my Higher Power already accepts me and my situation – and loves me on the bad days as well as the good.

Today’s reminder

Moving from awareness to acceptance to action takes time, but the benefits are worth the wait. As I learn to accept my defects, circumstances, and feelings, I learn that I am a worthwhile human being just as I am. With that kind of self-acceptance, I begin to see my options, and slowly I can begin to take action, to change.

Today’s Quote:

“. . . Someone suggested I stop concentrating on changing myself,

and think first about accepting myself. That gave me the boost I needed.”

Al-Ateen – A Day At A Time

Closing thoughts:

Oh, Lord, where do I start? Talk about living one day at a time. Life is insane right now. The virus is taking down the planet, and people are living scared, literally scared. How do you calm your spouse when you are also so unsettled that you don’t believe in the power of tomorrow and today?

The story or reading above rings true, and I can’t really add much to it. In today’s world of ‘shelter in place’ stay at home, quarantines, with all the kids still home after spring break, it’s starting to get to the best of us (I am not one of the best of us, my wife is pretty damned close however).

Can I ask you a question? Do you know who you are? Do you know who your spouse is? Do they really know who you are? It is so very likely that in the last few weeks, you’ve seen a side of your spouse that until now, had remained hidden. People at work are different from the people at home, and different again from the people we are in our heads.

I am not sure I can describe it better than that. It’s like the mirror effect. You are the only person who sees the person you see in the mirror. Everybody else sees the same person, but the other way around. Don’t believe me? Take a sharpie and draw something on one cheek. Now take a self-portrait with your phone or something, and finally, compare that to the image you see in the mirror. Backwards? Yes, it has to be, because that’s how our awareness is built.

The best thing you can do is take the time, since we have so much of it lately, and truly, simply, figure out who the hell you are. Once that’s done, start on the acceptance. Finally, bring your family into the loop, otherwise they’re going to think you’re crazy.

P.S. We need to start talking about this crap, or our kids will have to fight our demons. I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell don’t want to leave my demons for my children. Duke.

Wondering how to get back on the wagon

Hi there, my name is Maven, and I’m an overbooked procrastinator.

Well, not really. See, what I am is a father of six amazing busy kids (one is grown and flown, but I still count him as one of my kids), and husband to an amazing beautiful woman who is also working full time. So, while procrastination may be one of my faults, it’s hardly the biggest concern in my world right now.

The absolute hard limit of 24 hours and half a second is the one I have to contend with these days.

This will be a short post specifically because of that had time limit, and the fact that I am needed to get the damned life back on track. See, I have five blogs to my name if you include the Medium Pub in those blogs, along with a full time career, and that all takes a back seat to my “I’m a husband and father first and foremost” commitments.

I was about to say obligations, but there is no obligation here, I made a commitment when I married that beauty and chose to have kids with her, and I shall honor that commitment to her and them first and always, above any career choices I make. Naturally, some juggling is needed.

So, I have a few moments before I have to jump up and get back to working like mad here, I thought I’d ruminate on what needs to happen.

See, the recovery blog and the personal home blog (Chaos is a thing after all), are both intentional but fairly similar, so posting the one and the other is really kinda redundant. But expanding on one to the other is probably a good idea, seeing as how one is about learning to live in recovery, while the other is about handling all the mayhem life throws at you.

Can you see how the second blog ( the-castle-chaos.com ) might be expanded upon from the posts that originated in recovery at the https://chaoticfoundations.siterubix.com/ site?

Secondly, there’s the Medium accounts that I need to populate, since that’s where the readers are all coming from at this point. I pay for and carry the full on blogs as a means to keep my own work as mine, rather than handing it off to Medium or any other platform.

Next, there’s the business and the writing sites that I need to start getting back online, and subsequently the pipelines that I get to push the posts down for social media and other sites, the learning curve is steep. To say I have no clue is a good measure of the man on that point.

Finally, It’s December 18, 2019, today, that leaves me with fourteen days to the end of the year, if you count today. That means, since January first is an arbitrary start point everyone uses, that I have just under two weeks to revamp and map out my next year’s activities. I pay real money for the internet presence I have, site fees, hosting fees and such, to the tune of a few hundred per year, which while not going to break the bank on me (I’m an accountant after all, and not as broke as all that), if I’m going to do this, it’s time to treat it like a business and start making it pay for itself. I have one year (-ish~, black Friday was recently and that’s the billing date of one of the biggest recurring costs I have, the second comes due in February, but that’s Dropbox, which I have some thoughts on that need addressed as well.

If only there were enough time to do the things I need to do as well as the things I’m committed to doing.

Ah well, aim high, fall short, and I”m still ahead of where I started. Time to start making waves.

Until later, thanks for reading my meandering monologue.

Orion or Duke or somebody. Wonder who I’ll be when I get to the office later?

Cheers!

Grandma Casey’s Relish

Now, I know that this is not a proprietary recipe, hell, it’s probably in the Burk’s Falls Catholic Church cookbook from about forty years ago, or even further back than that.

This recipe came from a time when cookbooks were family affairs, not something you could write and sell on Amazon.

Something will be lost if we lose these historical links to our family roots. I can remember being somewhere under ten years old, feeding the ingredients into the old hand crank grinder/mincer while my aunt or grandma seasoned the resulting mash.

And the aroma, as this stuff was steeping and combining overnight, then the cooking next day. Few things take me back to my childhood harder than the smells I grew up with.

Fresh cut hay fields; newly tilled fields; the peculiar raw meat smell of freshly cleaned game; and of course canning, preserving and storing foods for the 6 month long dormant winter season in Ontario.

But enough about the walk down memory lane, let’s see if I can translate the verbal recitation of a recipe into text that makes sense. See, things used to be much more verbal, with only the barest of written clues to keep us on track…

*think of your typical grandmother, short, round, happy and trying to feed everybody every time they show up, that’s my Grandma, and I haven’t seen her in far too long*

How to make green relish, per my grandma Casey,

– Grind up a dozen large cucumers, them one’s that’s too big to slice into pickles.

– Find the onions that are about to go to seed, pull them and clean them up, feed a dozen of them into the grinder while you’re at it.

-Now, peppers, if you managed to grow any this year, they’ll do, otherwise check with the market, or the neighbor and see if they’ve got any, three or four of each, red and green. You guessed it. Grind them also.

Now that you’ve got a huge bowl of mushed veggies, cover it all with a strong salt brine, then top with lots of salt (a solid layer of salt on top); cover it up tight, and let it sit overnight. Drain it come morning before you start breakfast.

Now, having aired it out a little while you fed the critters breakfast, it’s time to mix in the other bits.

First, get a medium sized bowl, add a big pinch of celery salt, and one of mustard seed, then about a quart of vinegar and a whole pile of sugar. Mix this all up and add to the biggest pot you have along with the vegetables from the grinder.

Boil the whole thing for a good ten minutes. While that’s cooking, mix up a dash of turmeric, three tablespoons of prepared mustard and three-quarters a cup of flour into enough water or vinegar to make it a thick liquid.

Once the relish has cooked for ten minutes, pour in this mix, and stir it all together. Then can it into pint jars, them big ones are too big, it’ll go off before you use it all.

I miss those days of working in Grandma’s kitchen, but I’ve got five little ones (ok, the oldest is 12 and more than 150lbs) of my own and my wife’s amazing at this stuff, so I get to help her now instead.

Therefore, in the interests of accuracy, here’s the pared down version with numbers attached.

-12 large cucumbers – minced or ground up.

-12 onions, mild or sharp depending on preference – also minced or ground

-3 red peppers, 3 green peppers – ground up as well

>>> cover with strong salt brine (water and salt, until saturated solution is reached), also add layer of salt on top of ground vegetables. Let sit overnight. Drain in morning.

– 1 TBSP Celery Salt

– 1 TBSP Mustard Seed

– 4 cups Vinegar

– 9 cups Sugar

>> mix these into Cucumber mix, stirring thoroughly. Now, boil the mix for ten minutes.

>> mix together

– 3/4 cup flour

– 1 tsp of turmeric

– 3 TBSP of prepared Mustard

– vinegar to mix it with, just enough.

>> Add to relish mix, stirring thoroughly.

>> Can the resulting relish into pint or smaller jars, quart jars are too big.

That’s about it. I had to get this down so it made sense to me and so that the paper in the picture above could be reproduced if needed, when it inevitably succumbs to age and kitchen mishaps.

Time to get cooking.

Duke.

AAR. Christmas Survival at Castle Chaos.

So, evidently we survived with minimal casualties, two plates, one glass, a few of the less sturdy toys and ornaments, and one swollen bruised nose. But only two of the seven of us were sick with something at all. The littlest two caught -something- that gave them fevers and yucky tummies.

What else do I need to say here? There’s so much, but life’s taken a back seat to surviving, and the brain is gone, more than you can imagine. Creativity is completely absent in the name of this game. I am so tired… when does it all end?

See, there’s the run up to Christmas, then Christmas Eve, and finally, two weeks with the kids home after Christmas, when they should be back in school, or at least not at home driving me nuts… It’s half way through that two week period, and I’m ashamed to say that I’m not the best version of myself that I could be. My patience is frayed, and my tolerance is lower than it’s been in ages. I am without physical outlets, I am without recourse and oppolrtunity to do anything positive wiht my negative energy (firewood is done, the rest is too cold and frozen to do much outside).

That reminds me, I have to go and pull a plug and faceplate to take to the office, they’re short one there for the boardroom renovations.

There’s so much going on in my head right now that it’s almost impossible to get anything straight. I was thinking of trying to do -this or -that or -the other thing. Life is too crazy, and I”m getting to the point where I can’t function on a professional level or a mental level. It’s about the point where I could manage a walk with them, if they don’t push back too hard with their own complaints. Being a parent at Christmas time is hard to say the least. Hard is an understatement I would think. I am going to go clean things up a little bit, then try to get the kdis to town where I can meet up with Angie and she can bring them home while I get a pile of work done… that doesn’t sound like the worst idea. I’m going to go have a shower, then get tidying up and getting moving towards town…

Wish me luck. I need some space in my soul where I can begin to think forward. My amazing wife and I set a budget the other day, so that’s one thing we did right for a start. Now to figure out the professional, writing, and this online income game that I started trying to learn. There’s so many goals, so much to get straight, and I need a few drinks before I can get it all lined up I think.

I have a date with my gorgeous wife tomorrow, that will help… and getting these two files scanned and lined up, and the GST for the main company lined up will be huge. So, time to get to work.

Duke.