You may have heard there was an earth-shaking transition in the Canadian government this week. Oh no, not the whole Justin Trudeau thing – although that’s been pretty damn cool, too! No, the transition I’m talking about is that on Monday I started my new job as senior communications advisor on social media for Agriculture Canada. Exciting, right? It was very hard to leave my friends at CRA, and the CRA has been amazing to me in the last four years as I led their social media team. However, I am beyond stoked to be making the jump to a science department, especially in the midst of all the changes happening in the government writ large.
While I will be doing more or less the same thing I’ve been doing at CRA, I’ve learned in the last two days that the job will still be very different. I’ll be doing a lot of preaching and teaching on the use of social media in a professional capacity, for employees ranging from scientists to agricultural trade commissioners. Squee!
The learning curve is steep. In my first two days, I learned about seed potatoes, the TPP, confused flour beetles and geoducks, among other things. Go ahead, do a google image search on geoducks. Are you as surprised as I was to learn that there are no feathers on those ducks? But the people at Agriculture have been kind and welcoming, and our new Minister is from PEI. If that’s not synergy, I don’t know what is. And I love the idea of working with a department that has a stake in farming, and local food, and nutrition, and environmental issues. It’s easy to be passionate about your work when the subject matter is something you care deeply about.
When I was thinking about writing this post, I thought it was an interesting illustration of how the blog has changed over the years. Back in the day, I blogged every thought and whimsy that trickled through my mind, and you knew in (way too much) detail the minutiae of my daily life. You would have seen every angsty moment of the process, from the out-of-the-blue phone call about the vacancy, to me finding out I got the job (during that epic seventh inning Blue Jays game with the Jose Bautista bat flip, no less!) to the nostalgic departure from CRA. Now the whole thing gets a couple of measly paragraphs in a throw-away post.
I’m occasionally nostalgic for the bloggy intimacy of days gone by, and then I’m occasionally validated in my newly-minted taciturnity. Especially, for example, when a child casually mentions eight words at the dinner table that send me mentally scrambling over the last six months of blog posts: “we looked at your blog in school today.” On the smartboard, in class, no less. I guess the teacher had asked if any of the students followed any blogs, and boy child said, “I’m in one, does that count?” His classmates have since complimented me on my photography skills. In that moment, I was very, very glad that I had not yet completed or hit “publish” on the intimate, meandering post I’d been writing during the Blue Jays playoff run, recollecting how my first marriage disintegrated during the 1993 World Series. Procrastination FTW!
So that’s what’s new and exciting with me. How about you, bloggy peeps? What’s new?
Wow, so those are geoducks. Wonder why such an odd name for a clam? I would have thought those were grossly overgrown snails if I’d seen one before reading up!