works of wanderlust

Category: life & stuff

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

  • weekend wrap, fifteen

    Writing a weekend wrap on a Monday morning is very much a shakeout ritual. You see me posting some low-stakes content here summing up my random acts of nothing much on the opening day of a new week and wonder what’s the point, but getting back into the business of productive writing after a few days of schedule flux is not just as easy as it seems. Jotting a few sentences as a mental catchup, is as much a writers warmup as I’m ever going to do.

    All that is to say, this weekend was busy enough.

    Shaping the whole thing was the fact that the Kid was housesitting, so after a quick family dinner on Friday we drove her over and dropped her off for her housesitting gig. Tres exciting, non? 

    The rest of the evening we plonked on the couch and caught up on some trash television we’ve been enjoying. Not much to speak of, nor anything worth writing about, but it was a bit of weekend fare to ease out of a long-ish week.

    Saturday, I went to the doctor. Nothing urgent, of course. I’ve had a nagging cough for about a year and I’m seeing a specialist about it and the appointments are every three months on a Saturday. I get to sit in a glass box and blow into a plastic tube and then they adjust the cocktail of respiratory medications I’ve been taking and voila.

    I celebrated learning that I probably don’t have asthma by going and running my five klick lap around the neighbourhood. I’ve been working on a running streak and Saturday was day eight, the loop around day, particularly since day one was last Saturday when I did a Park Run. 

    Before it got too hot we took the dog to the off leash park and walked a lap. The highlight of that trip was randomly finding a fossil in the river. 

    And then while Karin went to The Mall, I stayed home and fuddled with some technology projects; I got a new memory card for my GoPro (delivered) which seems to have fixed the file corruption errors I’ve been getting and then I started poking at adding a new feature to my “unsocial media applet” software. I’ve been pondering some quality of life improvements for our upcoming trip to Japan, specifically simplifying the time stamping feature I had in a waaaay early version that let me tell the post I was in, say, New York and it would flag the time stamp to indicate that. I was able to pull in a location from the IP address of the internet connection and do some fancy pants stuff to automate that plus start building a kind of bespoke geographic database to simplify other aspects. Plus, I cleaned up some bugs. All in all, a few hours of coding work, but it’ll save me as much over the next year of posting.

    Another evening of chilling in front of terrible television with a beer and the day was done.

    Sunday, I met the crew for a nine klick run which was also the ninth day of my streak.

    And then I left coffee a bit early so that we could go to the thank you barbecue for the Heritage Festival French pavilion volunteers.    

    We ran another little errand to visit the Kid and drop off something she forgot, and then it was back home for more Sunday errands: a dog walk, cleaning up the kitchen, some more coding, groceries, and cooking dinner.

    I went for another walk to test my fixed code out in the “field” by which I mean, literally in the field but also on a connection that was not our house wifi, and that was about that for another late summer weekend.

  • weekend wrap, fourteen

    It’s September, and the last few days of August were a long weekend that was busy and activity-filled and definitely not wasted for the last day of summer holidays.

    Friday evening I got my board shorts on and sat in front of the computer for a a solid two hours attending the kick off board meeting for the start of the new orchestra season.  We start rehearsing again in less than a week, but being on the board (kinda—I’m more of a committee head) means sacrificing an occasional evening to make things work behind the scenes. Just too bad it was a Friday of a long weekend this year.

    With the heat wave, I hadn’t been out running all week, so I decided last minute to go check out Park Run. It just about killed me, but I pulled out a sub-30 five klick run.

    Otherwise it was a pretty quiet Saturday, up until Karin and I went out for dinner—and then stopped by the pop-up Night Market in the nearby Rec Centre parking lot. It’s a new event some group is trying to get going, and it seemed like a lot of fun and busy too.

    I went back later with my camera, walking over after the sun set, so I could play around with some low light night photography in a crowd.

    Sunday morning it was another normal day for a group run, which was a good thing that (a) we started early because the heat came on later and (b) ran at all, because the smoke came on later, too.

    Karin and I got rolling shortly after and got the kayak out on the river for a two hour paddle down the North Saskatchewan with the dog as our only passenger.

    But all that action darn near wore me out so we crashed on the couch that evening.

    Monday was a stat holiday, and as such we had planned a breakfast run meetup. The plan, as per usual, was to park near A&W, run five klicks and then go for breakfast. Sadly, the smoke had rolled in and the air quality was at a 10 plus. The verdict and consensus was to skip the run and just go for breakfast. Smart.

    I don’t really know where the rest of the day went. The kid has been filming her friends doing silly things in the backyard for a “Taskmaster” party she is planning, so we mostly just kept quiet and out of her way until dinner.

    I figured I should get some physical activity in, tho, so the Kid and I went to the Rec Center and I ran laps while she did some strength training.

    But that was that, and we came home so she could finish prepping for her first day of University (today) and I could settle back in for the end of summer… well, summer holidays.

  • weekend wrap, thirteen

    Oh, lucky. 

    Here we are on another Monday morning perched in front of a keyboard as summer wanes. The Kid was lamenting that her first post-grade-school summer flew by in a blur of summer job and a smattering of friend gatherings which seemed as tho it cheated her a little. Get used to it, I told her. That’s life. What’s two months anyhow? A couple of bill cycles and another season blows by.

    It wasn’t all a loss, though.

    I picked her up from said summer job on Friday afternoon and plunked her at one of those friend gatherings. Her high school pals have been successively hitting the eighteen-year old birthday milestone these past few months and I think she’s next.  We never really found out what goes on at these parties, but it all seems pretty tame. We idled on the couch post-dinner and a friend drove her home. Ah, Fridays as our responsibilities of parenting a kid dwindled into the final countdown towards her impending legal adulthood.

    Saturday, feeling a bit lazy and knowing that the local marathon weekend was going to disrupt Sunday running plans, I dragged my sorry butt to Park Run. You know Park Run, right? The Saturday morning 5k “not a race” but really a race free event in the river valley. It happens all over the world and in like a dozen locations in Canada. I have now done it eight times.

    The Kid and I took the dog for a loooong walk on Saturday afternoon, stopping briefly at the pop-up off-leash park one neighbourhood over. The dog could not have cared less about the off-leash, but a random chunk of field surrounded by a tall orange construction fence and which probably reeks of other dog’s markings was probably epic confusing.

    Later, it being our wedding anniversary and all, Karin and I went for a fancy dinner at a new Japanese-inspired fusion cuisine place, and then went home and watched another in our getting-ready-for-Japan Miyazaki movie marathon: Princess Mononoke. I’ve seen it a dozen times and it still rocks hard.

    Sunday I should have gone to cheer on the marathoners, but I slept in. That’s not a trivial statement: I never sleep in. Like, once a year, maybe. And yesterday was the day. I dunno why I was so tired.

    I spent a couple hours working on the computer. Literally. Lester had loaned me a graphics card which I had anticipated may work to get my VR setup working on my old desktop. He recently replaced that card and it was just sitting in the box. I spent too much time and the best I got to was it loading half way through Windows boot up and freezing the computer. Maybe after I finish this contract I’m working on I’ll risk blowing up the whole computer, but I had a minor panic and restored the old hardware. Computer 1: Brad 0.

    We set out early-afternoon for the Fringe Festival. We have a smattering of tix for the week, and two sets were for Sunday. We took in “Plays by Bots” (which we’ve seen annually for 3 years now) which is improv based on poorly written AI scripts, and then “Colins Back” which was a big, fun improv show with a local troupe hosting famed improvist Colin Mochrie for an hour of silly fun.

    Not a bad way to cap off the evening, which was otherwise mostly capped off by a quiet dinner back home and watching Japanese travel videos on Youtube until bedtime. 

  • pool blues

    Fate has kicked me in the gut once again.

    At the risk of evoking a critical level of pity and having that backfire at me in the second paragraph of this essay, I’m going to mention a sad little easily-solved problem that unfortunately knocked me low again this week: they are closing the pool where I’ve been swimming for “three months of critical maintenance.”

    “They aren’t doing it to you personally!” My wife rolled her eyes at me when I showed her the notice.

    “Maybe not, but the universe seems to have it in for me lately.” I replied.

    I’ve been a swimmer for years, but after a year-long hiatus I broke down and spent money on an annual pass to the local pool with the intention of getting back into my routine. I just bought the pass three weeks ago. According to the email, in a mere week’s time the pool will be closing for three whole months. The next nearest pool is a twenty minute drive from my house, and the activation energy that gets me from prone on the couch to jumping into a swim lane with my goggles strapped over my face does not seem strong enough to include a commute. One more barrier, my brain is telling me. One more kick in the gut by my friend fate. 

    Sigh. 

    I’m whining. I know that. But damned if the universe doesn’t seem like it’s decided to pick on me personally as of late. Objectively speaking millions of people might have it orders of magnitude worse, but personal struggle is both subjective and relative isn’t it?

    I was told that when I set out to make a life change, to upend everything I had built over the years in my career—in search of something more interesting, more satisfying, more purposeful—that by the end of it I would have experienced a range of emotions from high to low, buffeted by self-doubt, refined in crystal clarity, and everything in between all at once. I shrugged off the notion, not because I didn’t believe the prediction but because I figured I could roll with it, whatever came my way, all of it. 

    A voyage across an ocean without a map is an apt metaphor. Each day at sea is a little different—maybe closer to shore, maybe not. A storm may roil one day or the sun may beat down on another. Little things make all the difference in the world, and having my swimming pool closed for a few months felt like a man adrift at sea who had just watched his favourite hat fly into the yonder on a gust of wind. No the wind didn’t do it to him personally, but it is tough not to feel that way—for a little bit. 

  • weekend wrap, twelve

    I missed a weekend update last week, but mostly because it would have been more of a six day vacation update that spanned a weekend, and that whole trip was a bit of a blur of driving and eating and kayaking and by the time I sat down at a keyboard again it was nearly a new weekend and seemed like it was all a bit of a fading memory anyways. 

    This past weekend was another long one, but officially so with a statutory holiday dropped on the Monday. 

    That means it looked something like:

    Friday, after the Kid got home from work and we didn’t feel like cooking in the heatwave we drove out to one of the bedroom communities to redeem a coupon for a free piece of cake. Well, we ended up having dinner of course, and a dash of nostalgia at one of the two remaining locations for this nineties restaurant that used to be everywhere when I was a teenager. It was solid.

    Saturday we made our way to the Heritage Festival for our exploration day. I hadn’t done much work there this year because they were a bit more organized and setup turned into a quick one-night affair that I missed rather than the usual four day drawn out event and race to the finish line.  We ate and strolled and got way too hot in the summer sun.

    We all went our separate ways for a few hours, but the Kid and I reconnected at the house for a light dinner and then went to watch the new Fantastic Four movie at the theatre, burning off the rest of the day in air conditioned comfort.

    Sunday, Karin and I got ready pretty early and made our way back to the festival to work at least one formal shift.  I cooked crepes for a few hours and she ended up at the cash service counter.

    But our plan was short lived and we had made dinner plans with C&A (for various reasons, not the least of which was to celebrate the one year-ish anniversary of our mountain hike vacation) who dropped by for a home cooked meal, birthday week cake for A and then a couple of games well into the evening.

    I joined some last minute plans for a holiday breakfast run with the crew (at least the few who are still around in earlyAugust) and we ran five klicks and then went for bacon and eggs.

    While I was running I got a text that they could use my help at the festival whenever I could get there, so Karin dropped me off shortly after noon and I spent the next ten hours on site, mostly cooking but then helping tear down and pack up as we closed up shop around six and ended the festival weekend for another season. I got home pretty late and pretty much fell asleep as I was clambering towards bed.

    A whole week of fun crammed into a three day weekend.