A proper introduction

I’ve spent a lovely morning catching up with some of the first NanoPoblano posts from my fellow Cheer Peppers.. and that’s when it struck me: I should probably introduce myself. I haven’t written here in so long that my welcome mat is covered in dust and debris.

So, breathe, and let’s try that again.

My name is Daniel, but you can call me Dan or Daniel, depending on your preference. I live in London with my wife Lizzie Cats and Chocolate and our cat, Chocolat. While I don’t use it so often these days, photos of Coco can found under the hashtag #ChocolatAndMarmalade. Sadly we lost Marmalade some years ago.

I work as a digital accessibility professional at a UK university. I intentionally said “I work as” rather than “I am” there. I’ve struggled for years to find my own identity. For the longest time, identifying myself by my careers in banking and later recruitment felt uncomfortable. Later still I found what felt like my passion in digital accessibility. However, my work became all consuming and I lost myself. While I still have a career, I’m trying to find a healthier balance these days. I currently work in digital accessibility, but i’m more than the sum of my parts.

My blogging journey started around 2005 on Blogger. I called my blog Sympathy for the Devil back then and the earliest cringeworthy post I can find is about discovering the term “podcast”😅 I’d written 50 posts by February 2006 so I was quite prolific in the early days. However, I daren’t link to the archived site, lest you discover just how full of teenage angst it was (despite not being a teenager!). Needless to say i’m a very different person now.

I moved to Wordpress in 2008 and I think this prompted the change of name to Stray Dog Strut. It’s a monniker I’ve continued to use on most platforms since. The name and the previous one are a reference to my favourite Anime, Cowboy Bebop. The series is about a found family of bounty hunters, living on a spaceship. It’s part western, part space adventure, and full of musical influences including jazz and rock.

Stray Dog Strut is the name of the second episode - where we meet the adorable corgi, Ein - and a reference to the song Stray Cat Strut, by US rockabilly band the Stray Cats. I still haven’t managed to get around to making the Cowboy Bebop fansite I always wanted to make. With my renewed interest in the personal web, I might make a shrine, who knows?

I consider my time on Wordpress the golden era of my blogging journey. It was during this time that I discovered Ra of Rarasaur.com, and a lovely blogging community that I still follow on social media, including: Jesse of Behind The Willows, Mica of The Acorn Forest, Jaysen of Jaysen Headley Writes, ~[Maria of Frills n’ Spills, and Sophie of Sophie in the sticks. Our approach to sharing might have changed over the years, but our stories still matter.

I also took part in NanoPoblano for the first time. Posts i’m most fond of from that time are my reviews of The Dream Machine and The shadows that run alongside our car, my posts about Madrid, and my as yet unfinished Project Ghibli series. I’ve long wavered on what the focus of my blog should be: at times games or film reviews, other times travel and hiking, and sporadically my mental wellbeing.

While I still have a Wordpress account, I haven’t written consistently on my blog since the end of the last decade. I’m starting things up once again and this time i’m building my own site. I’m using the Eleventy static site generator. I want to write about that, but purely out of self-interest: i’m not a web developer and this will never be a technical blog.

The last few years have not been kind to me and mine:

* Like everyone, we navigated a global pandemic and it took its toll. We live with immunocomprised family members and made the decision as a family to self-isolate, above and beyond the (incompetent) government guidance. Over those two years I felt my world become very small.

* I lost my mum unexpectedly at the start of 2022, something that still affects me today. I remain grateful that I saw her for the last time during my trek in the Lake District just a few months before she passed. I’ve really missed my family these last few years, and I worry about losing my dad. This was a big motiviation for moving into a new role this year, one that sees me working in Scotland once a month. I’ve been so grateful for the opportunity to spend time with my dad.

* In 2019 I had a mental health crisis and i’m still rebuilding. I’ve been going to therapy every week since and have learned a lot of uncomfortable truths about myself. I’m a people pleaser who struggles to perceive my own self worth and set healthy boundaries. I think the way other people would describe me is very different to my internal monologue. Unfortunately, when i’m stuggling I have a tendancy to withdraw from the relationships and interests that keep me safe, but I realise that now. I’m comfortable talking about my experience, but please pay attention to the content warnings I put on anything I write here.

As I alluded to in an earlier paragraph, i’ve struggled with my identity and my place in the world. Having spent my entire life looking outwards and defining myself by what I can contribute to others, I now find myself utterly burnt out. I’m trying to refill my cup by putting intentional focus on my creativity this year. I discovered Mimimoo Illustration's community which has been a lovely comfort. While my own mark-making has been painfully slow, it’s nourishing to see how everyone expresses themselves through their art.

As for myself, i’ve been exploring sketching and digital painting. I hope by the end of the year to have also developed an animation habit. I’m still copying things over to here, but I share my art on Instagram under @inkbynight and @marmaladeandmango.

When i’m not delivering training in digital accessibility, pretending i’m an artist, or tinkering with my website, I enjoy faffing about on my allotment. I’ve been planting veggies since September 2020 and it has been so good for my soul. I’m not the most productive or consistent allotmenteer, but having a patch of ground a ten minute walk from our house is such a nice escape. I share sporadic updates on Instagram under @theonewiththeapricottree.

My return to blogging this year has also prompted me to put renewed focus on my genealogy research. I’ve dabbled with our family tree on and off for years, but i’m really keen to start writing the stories of my ancestors. My hope is that this will help me make sense of my findings as well as create a valuable record for my extended family. We hail from Ireland originally but have spread to Scotland, England, the USA and beyond. I have a site at Celtic Family Chronicles that’s currently sitting on Wordpress. However, if my experiments here go well, I will probably migrate it to Eleventy.

If you’ve managed to read this far - thank you - you’ve probably realised that my interests are all over the place. While I still have a lot of tidying up to do, my hope is that my blog once again becomes my little home on the web. A place to share my interests and experiences. At the very least, i’m inspired to put something of my own out into the universe.

Thank you for stopping by today❤️

This is a post for this year’s NanoPoblano. From the Cheer Peppers website:

“National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) is a month-long blog event in November, celebrated by writing a post every single day. This tradition sprouted many other traditions– small groups that regularly go into the fray together, or even folks who level up and do it with the challenge of a theme. A million and a half years ago (est.), we started our own nano-tradition, and call it NanoPoblano. It’s different than most others.

It’s less organized. There’s less pressure. It’s more about the community than the challenge. We aren’t pulling people off rosters or anything if they can’t keep up. There aren’t qualifiers to sign up. You can be new. You can have a photo blog, or a recipe blog, or a haiku blog. Everyone can be a Participant.

We’ve taken “Post every single day” to mean– support blogs, every single day. That usually means writing every day (and that’s a challenge that everyone benefits from trying!) But we also recognize that the ones who read and cheer us on are important too. We have CheerPeppers who don’t necessarily post that month at all, but try to read or like or comment on a post of our participants every day.

We have Participants who do re-posts. We have Participants who spend the 30 days committed to bringing life to their blog, even that if that means not writing some days, while they work on their themes or leave comments from folks they’d like to build community with.”

List of 2024 Cheer Peppers participants.