Several weeks, a few dozen photos and four thousand words later, we’ve finally made it—the Casey Palmer, Canadian Dad 2017 wrap-up, filled with stories aplenty of 365 days spent in my not-so-orthodox life.
After wrapping the year up on a quiet note (because two sick children under five will do that to you), I still felt it necessary to do this. These year-to-year changeovers offer a lot of perspective for me—with so much happening all the time, I often forget what I had for breakfast, so I write everything down. And if the height of the pile on my desk is any sign, 2017 was quite the year. But it’s also the time where I’m the most transparent, looking back objectively at everything I’ve done and celebrating successes, owning up to failures, hoping all the while that I’m somehow growing from the process.
But yeah—let’s do this as we did in 2016: look at the year in excruciating detail, figuring out what’s worth taking with me into 2018 versus what doesn’t feel part of my world anymore.
Ladies and gentlemen, let me present—the 31 things I did well in 2017! Let’s get it!
From talking to a lot of my friends, I find that many people waste their free time. There’s so much out there to distract us—television, “news” (think about how much of your newspaper is taken up by ads and information that has no effect on your life whatsoever), entertainment—but these are all designed to dull the senses; to let us forget that we’re not using most of our time to do what we actually want to be doing.
Usually, we simply accept our lots in life—we accept the jobs that we have and rarely consider a different life. We usually keep the same social circles, habits and routines, rarely breaking away from them to flirt with reinventing ourselves.
And if you’re doing that, you’re doing yourself an injustice.
Some of the things I’ve always liked doing are drawing, sorting information and coming up with cool ways to communicate information. So when Niya told me about the Toronto Service Design Jam, I thought it would be a cool weekend to firm up my design chops and maybe learn how to take my infographics game up a few notches.
But what I learned was something else altogether.
So the entire idea behind the weekend was to take the tools that they’d shown us and use them to create ideas on a specific theme that would help to solve problems in the environment around us.
We worked hard, we had lots of ideas—but when it came to communicating our idea, there were other groups that kicked our team’s ass.
Seeing the other groups present was quite the experience—I could complain about the nature of our groups and winding up working with far less resources than the other groups; the fact that I don’t work too well in groups where you have to actually rely on one another to produce a completed product; or perhaps the fact that whenever we got advice and critiques from our mentors that it threw me completely for a loop, immobilizing my thought process and forcing me to re-think about everything I was doing… really, it all comes down to one simple truth:
I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.
Coming from someone who’s used to being good at what he does, this was a very humbling yet frustrating experience. I wanted to be as good as the people I saw with polished presentations. I wanted to have an idea that would change the world. But all I felt from the judges is that we hadn’t gone far enough.
Why didn’t we go farther? Why were our ideas all over the place? I don’t really get what you’re going for….
It left me feeling a bit dejected after, but it also reminded me that we’re not always meant to swim upstream and fight against our strengths.
I learned a lot about presentations outside of the formal and conservative style that I’ve grown used to—how to really get into the details of mocking services up—how to really draw someone in to your idea if you were pitching something like a startup or seeking funding for something.
You can get an idea of what we wound up creating here:
Good evening, world! Hope you had an above-average day at the LEAST!
Oh man, I can’t believe I didn’t post about this earlier! It pretty much stems DIRECTLY from something I’d been looking at doing for the 2010 20K, but never ended up making time for it—T-SHIRT DESIGNS.
So I cashed in a couple of lieu days, and here I am—it’s been a day of relaxation, sketching and coin counting.
Coin counting? Oh yes. You didn’t think that my local bank branch could have a coin counting machine and that I wouldn’t want to try it out, no? There was about $100 worth of change in the bin—it went to a good cause. (Paying bills quicker—the ones I’d much prefer to never see again.)
But seriously, I can’t say there’s much I can offer in the money-saving tips world today—discussed the merits of using WordPress to power my sites-to-be with Kevin, thought about the option of finding Canadian game shows where I could be a contestant after completely obliterating the Wheel of Fortune contestants on their puzzles (I estimate that I could’ve raked in $80-$90K easy if I never hit bankrupt with the luck that they were getting) and just did a lot of sketching. Please refer to below for today’s sketchdump:
Also, I just went to town on this piece of paper (with more punishment to come!):
Which resulted in these poor victims of my hate crime against art tools:
Anyhoo—if there’s something you want to see in the next few days, feel free to suggest. I’ll be here! All day! Just working on stuff!
Los Numeros:
The 2010 20K Running Total = $108.14
All the best,
Tell your wife, tell your kids, tell your husbands:
Today was a good day—wrapped up the week of work—the next couple of days should see some serious work get out of the way! Expect improvements, planning and all-around goodness from yours truly!
Today was also a good day due to some talks with a potential client—it’s a fresh project that’s a little different from things that I’ve taken on as of late—I hope to only bring good news about it in the coming weeks, but of course, as with many of my projects, it’s all hush-hush for the moment ????
So to all y’all waiting for designs? Updates to projects? All that Doomz goodness you know and love? Keep an eye on your email addresses in the next four days ????
I don’t want to leave you guys without anything for today, so here—a quick colour prelim for yesterday’s sketch—the final will very likely be different from this, but I hope you get the idea from what you see.
Anyway, I’m more bushed than a National Park. Have a great one, y’all, and check in over the coming days—I’m going to try and churn out so much product that heads will spin!
The Numeros:
The 2010 20K Running Total = $108.14
Toodles!
Tell your wife, tell your kids, tell your husbands:
