works of wanderlust

Category: life & stuff

Generally just words and thoughts on the progress of my day-to-day.

  • Ready for the Weekend

    How do you prepare for your weekend?

    Do you pick away at your to-do list over the week, so that when you catch up with Friday night you are free and clear, ready to enjoy everything? Sure, this means that you’ve saved up all your down-time for those two precious days, but when Saturday and Sunday arrive you have nothing but relaxing to accomplish, right?

    Or, do you wait for those first few hours of the weekend and get everything done all at once on Saturday morning? The weekend is still young, you’re full of energy, and you can just sink in and get the work done before lunch on your first weekend day. By the time you break you’ve still got a day and a half ahead of you to rest and enjoy.

    Maybe you’re a take-it-as-it-comes weekend warrior? A chore here, a task there, and strike another item of the list then kick your feet up for a while until you feel ready to take on the next one. There’s no sense in being efficient about it, right? Weekends aren’t a job, they’re your life and you can take it as you please.

    Ideally you are not a procrastinator, but I can see how tempting it might be to put everything off until Sunday evening. Are you one of those folks? Enjoy every moment you can until the last possible second when you figure you may as well get back into the week by doing some yard and housework before bed on Sunday.

    Or perhaps you’re a little like me, and it’s a bit of each and a different take on the to-do list every time a new Saturday rolls around.

  • One Hundred (Incredible) Years

    I found myself in a local drugstore this weekend, standing in the greeting card aisle, picking out a birthday card.

    The selection was limited.

    Limited, not because the store was lacking in birthday cards, but because there was only one option with the correct age number printed on the front: 100.

    While we’ve spoken on the phone numerous times, I hadn’t seen my grandmother in person for well over a year. This, even though she lives a mere dozen kilometers away in a care home near the neighbourhood where she lived most of her life, a fifteen minute drive away from my front door. Fluctuating restrictions due to the pandemic have had us teetering on the knife edge between “probably shouldn’t” and “definitely cannot” go for a visit.

    Yet for a birthday celebration, her with double-dosed vaccinations and us with one each, we spared a bit of caution and met her in the grassy courtyard for a sunshiny visit and a cupcake.

    It’s not how any of us imagined celebrating a century of life.

    One hundred years is such an unfathomable span of time for most of us that to tell folks that a loved one has reached the milestone evokes reactions ranging from clapping and cheering to dropped jaws and gasps of astonishment.

    “One hundred?! Really?” They say. “That’s incredible.”

    Because it is incredible.

    Within some of that hundred years I’ve had plenty of overlapping time to experience the influence of this woman I call my grandmother.

    She loved to walk and did so every day of her life, until she couldn’t anymore, and then still tries to walk as much as she is able up and down the hallways of her care home. I don’t know that she was ever a hiker or explorer, per se, but I can’t imagine that she ignored those countless trails running through the creek ravines near her old house, some of the same trails I now run.

    With the exception of a small patio, her entire backyard was a vegetable garden and my oldest memories of visiting her in that house were of my grandparents fussing with weeds, and tinkering with soil. The rhubarb plant now growing strong in my own garden was a cultivar of her plant and after fifteen years I still consider that I’m just minding it for her.

    And as long as she was in her own home she never fell for the trendy upgrade to an electric stove, remaining in my mind the one and only cook who stuck by gas and her good sturdy kitchen tools. I missed out on the family cast iron collection, a regret I’ll have for a long time because the culinary gene skipped a generation (right over my mother) and all credit for my interest in making food goes back to that lineage, pots, pans, and genetics all.

    But there it is. I don’t know how to celebrate a century of life in these times other than to acknowledge it. Just say, wow.

    A piece of cake.

    A conversation in the sunshine.

    A card with a giant one-zero-zero on the front.

    Incredible.

  • May Long Weekend

    Just like the saying goes not to wear white after labour day, locally there seems to be a start line for the summer season: May long weekend.

    As of posting this I’ve wrapped up my work week and I am planning how to spend the first official three day weekend of the vague, loosely-defined stretch of relative seasonal warmth that begins… um… now.

    Planting the Garden

    As evidenced by the mid-week snow storm we experienced on Tuesday night I was right to put off planting my seeds until, as my grandmother advised me, the May long weekend. Now I’ve got a small collection of packets containing seeds for lettuce, carrots, beets, radishes, beans, peas, and other eclectic veggies that caught my eye… and they are going in the ground before I go back to work.

    Priming the Yard

    While I’ve casually poked away at this for the last month because the weather has been cooperative, it’s time to get serious and get up to my elbows in soil and grass clippings. Everything needs either a trim, rake, edging, turning, tossing, or pruning, and this weekend is prime time to tackle that chore before the real growth season kicks in and I can’t keep up. That new lawnmower is going to get broken in by the end of the three-day break.

    Summer Training

    The trails are bare and the weather is perfect. While I may not be tuning up for any particular races, for the last dozen years spring and the May long weekend has always meant that it was time to get serious about summer running training. I would like to run a half marathon this summer, even if it is just a quiet, lonely run tracked by nothing other than my watch. That said, my whole crew is vaccinated and the restrictions start to lift next week so something more social is probably on the agenda somewhere.

    Family Campfire

    I’ve already been excitedly posting about my early dabbling with the backyard campfire, and have posted a couple learned lessons from the action-so-far. That said, the summer plan was to crank up the heat (literally) on my outdoor culinary efforts and May long weekend is looking to be a beautiful, sunshiny opportunity to spark up some coals, break out the cast iron and roast up some meals outside.

    Local Adventure

    And finally, while we still can’t go too far I plan on taking the dog and the family for a good local hike to explore some river valley trails or the winding paths through the local creek ravine. The news was already warning folks to heed crowds in popular parks and recreational areas around town and outside the city, but my years on the trails have earned me some secret knowledge about interesting places to check out that will likely be less crowded.

  • Backyard: Saturday (or, a list of rejected backyard blog topics)

    After nearly a week of deeper restrictions that have left me (and most law-abiding residents of the city) without many places to go, I’ve turned that into an opportunity to enjoy my own backyard. Think of it less like a lockdown, and more like permission to do nothing but enjoy my own grass, trees, garden, and relaxing spaces.

    If you’ve been following along for the week, I’ve posted a short list of reflective blog posts that haven’t done much for my Google search ranking, but certainly have helped me get a few things pried loose from my own brain.

    Given another couple weeks, maybe I’d have stooped to writing about even more trivial topics, like these rejected titles and not-so-interesting daily blog ideas:

    Backyard: Naps

    Wherein I chronicled the joy of falling asleep on my new, hand-built patio couch under the shade of the pergola sail fluttering in the wind. It’s tough to see how I would have turned that into more than about a hundred words without a serious thesaurus.

    Backyard: Chores

    Having spent my Saturday morning tilling the garden, planting the potatoes, and dealing with even more weeds (gah!) this rejected blog post risked turning into a long list of all the things I need to get done, y’know, instead of writing blog posts.

    Backyard: Chronology

    As it turns out this idea was really only of interest to me as I sorted through fifteen years of photos of my own backyard and marvelled at how much my trees had grown since I’d planted them. Breaking news: trees grow!

    Backyard: Music

    As at least one of my neighbours always seems to be playing music, the distant and indistinct muffled tones of random streaming playlists wafts through the air. My music knowledge is average though, so guessing what songs were playing could have been an amusing blog game.

    Backyard: Garbage

    Imagine my slow-motion, hand-typed embarassment in reading a blog post listing all the weird objects my eight-month-old puppy has found in my I-thought-I-had-a-clean-yard backyard. A scandalous post idea, and obviously rejected. Photos redacted.

    Backyard: Terrible Ideas

    A tongue-in-cheek list of some deliberately bad blog ideas, loosely acknowledging the author’s commentary on how difficult it is to make writing about his own backyard interesting and how easy it would have been to veer that metaphorical wheelbarrow into a fence post …oh, wait.

  • Backyard: Clean-Up

    It’s always striking to me that we live in a deeply seasonal place.

    I’m sure that other parts of the planet go through their own share of seasonal variation, but living in one of the more northern capital cities on the Earth also makes places us in a group where vast differences exist between the heart of winter and the edges of summer.

    Today I sit in my backyard in spring and enjoy a mild temperature, barefoot kinda day.

    Four months ago I hardly dared open the door to the brutal cold.

    Four months from now I’ll be picking fruit and veg from trees that at the moment seem barely alive and from soil that is little more than a crusty brown patch in the corner of my backyard.

    I’ve been busy spring cleaning for the last couple weeks.

    Grass to be raked. Leftover leaves that didn’t get sorted out before the snow last fall were starting to rot on the lawn. Flowerpots are full of crusty dried remains of last year’s greenery. Weeds are emerging and poking through the lawn and garden beds. Winter dust and the bits of residue from the long-melted snow needs to be wiped down. And that’s not even to mention the various bits of fence, deck or furniture that need a touch of paint or a tightened screw.

    My lawnmower died as well, and neither wanting to see it dropped into the landfill nor having the patience or skill to repair it myself I hunted down a guy online who takes them as donations, fixes them up, and gives them a new life. But of course that meant a big clean-up of the shed, and rearranging all the various things I’d stored in there over winter, all to extract a broken tool and roll it out to the curb.

    Spring cleaning is a real thing here, not because it’s a good time to get it done but simply because the season ticks over and that it needs done becomes obvious.

    The trees are budding with their baby leaves and blossoms.

    The grass is turning from a pale yellowish-brown to a vibrant green.

    The bees are buzzing through the air and investigating the spring-waking world.

    A few weeks from now it will all be just another summer, but for the moment spring is in clean-up mode, as am I, and the passing of winter feels like a barefoot kinda day in the backyard.