There was a taste of smoke in the air all weekend. It has been hot and dry and the province is burning all over the place. You could barely open the window without catching a whiff of char outside. 

This past weekend looked something like…

Fridey evening we multi-car-tripped over to the high school for the Kid’s final improv club home show. It was sparsely attended because of the hockey playoffs, but the parents who were there were definitely lamenting the end of an era in our offspring’s theatre careers. 

The Kid herself bundled up in a van with a few of her friends right from the high school parking lot and dashed off to the wilderness for a weekend of post-graduation camping and river tubing, leaving her poor parents with a taste of imminent empty nest syndrome.

We filled our Saturday with some errands, making one of our rare trips over to West Edmonton Mall for some light shopping and then down to Burbon Street and into an excellent taco restaurant for lunch. The made-table-side guac  was divine.

Somewhere in the mix we walked over to the local cafe for chai lattes, but mostly we chilled and napped and chilled some more for the rest of the day—and wrapped up season one of a show we’ve been watching before basically falling asleep on the couch.

Sunday morning I joined the usual run routine, logging not quite eight klicks in the fire smokey air, and joining the crew for coffee afterwards.

I did a bit of yard work, watered a few things after a week of rainless skies, and set up in my chair in the shade to read for about an hour.

Then we dodged off to a local pizza place. Annually on June 8 we celebrate the move-in anniversary to our house—a day on which we ate our first meal of a communal pizza delivered there with all the folks who helped us move in—by eating pizza. Sunday was the twentieth anniversary of that move-in, so we got some classy pizza at the place over in the strip mall by the grocery store.

I spent the rest of the evening fighting ants that have laid claim to the plum tree in my front yard and who are starting to do actually noticable damage. It might be a losing battle, but I know better than to give up on day one—even though the flower bed fought back and gave me a splinter in my heel. Serves me right, I suppose, for going to war in bare feet.