works of wanderlust

Category: life & stuff

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

  • war of the ants

    I really do hate using my entymology powers for evil.

    Yet, I have been waging a war out my front door on an ant colony as they wreck havoc upon a beautiful and otherwise-thriving plum tree I’ve been trying to grow in my front yard.

    Let’s back up.

    We’ve been in our house for twenty years, and one would assume that roughly nineteen years since completing the landscaping around that new-build home we should have had time to grow a maginificent tree of some sort in the front yard.

    Most of our neighbours have trees that tower as tall as or much taller than their roof lines, granting shade and a sense of maturity to the property.

    My tree is only about two meters tall, spindly and could use another decade before I consider it a success. Why? Because it is the third tree I’ve attempted to grow in that spot. The previous two perished because of, frankly and humbly, my presumptions about my own ability to thwart the climate in which I live—and too, that Home Depot is an asshoel for selling trees to people who don’t check closely enough these things in their local nurseries that are not rated for our climate zone.

    On about six year cycles I’ve had to replant, tend, try to rescue, and eventually remove the two previous attempts at a front yard tree. And most recently, in 2020 (I remember this because it was in the peak of the pandemic’s first summer) I found a plum tree in a pot, ready for transplant, similar if not identical to the one thriving in my neighbours backyard, rated for our climate zone, and I bought it and planted it in the hole from which I’d just dug the remains of the last stump.

    Fast forward to twenty-twenty five and past four bitter winters and a couple years of light but successful plum harvests from this young tree… and to me noticing that a lot of the leaves were curling up this year and—oh shit—the ants, I suspect a species likely lasius neoniger, had infested it and had built some kind of critter farm filled with hungry little insects and webby, silky, munching aphids turning entire branches into a tree apocalypse affecting about a third of the host organism. They were killing my third tree. 

    Here we go again.

    Or…

    My last week has been spent trying to rout the invasion.

    Diatomacious earth powdered upon the ground.

    Insecticides on the leaves to curb the livestock explosion.

    Bait traps seeded around the colony in hopes of poisoning the queen.

    And, most rudimentary, spirals of sticky tape twisted around the trunk face out to capture hundreds of drone workers and glue them to their doom. 

    I studied entomology in university. I often tell people it was an unofficial minor in my science degree—unofficial because I never took the time to declare it—and I could have, should have gone on to do something with that because I love insects, particularly the eusocial ones like ants who I used to rave to anyone who would listen about the fascinating properties of ants who did agriculture. 

    I mean, I just don’t want it in my tree, in my front yard, wrecking my stuff. A bit nimby of me, sure, but I’ve got property values to think of, right? And, I mean, what a waste.

    So I sit here writing this, drinking my coffee, and thinking with the backburner thoughts of a guy preoccupied by a problem what my next move in the battle is going to be.

    Those ants outnumber me for sure, but I won’t let them outsmart me.

  • weekend wrap seven

    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.

  • raising calvin

    I grew up on a steady diet of Calvin & Hobbes. 

    The still-famous cartoon strip by Bill Watterson was a fixture in our local newspaper during the entirety of my teenage existence, one of the sole reasons I read the paper that I delivered door to door, clipping out my favourite strips and then later buying the collections in multiple formats of increasingly crisply bound volumes. You could say it was formative for me, and that would be an understatement by a mile.

    The Kid graduated from high school this week and tho they were not allowed to decorate or bedazzle their gowns, they were given free passes to flare up their mortarboard caps.  She spent a whole evening in the basement and emerged later that night proudly showing off a collage affixed to the top of her cap: it was a collection of Calvin & Hobbes comic strips, arranged and glued to her lid, spattered artfully with colour and sparkles, and ready for a quick stroll across the diploma stage.

    This was not a surprise to anyone who knows her.

    To lay claim to some kind of parenting methodology that led us to this moment, my daughter walking across her graduation threshold literally wearing a comic strip that went out of print more than a decade before she was  born, that would be foolish of me. I mean it’s simple, really. She likes Calvin & Hobbes because (a) it’s a great and timeless cartoon, (b) I had numerous copies in the house, and (c) I read them to her frequently until she could read them on her own and then she read them frequently.

    Then, too, don’t forget that I even drew my own comic strip for a few years and you would not be the least bit surprised to read that one of my major influences for that effort was Calvin & Hobbes.

    That influence, it swirled through the rooms of our house for decades.

    Now, maybe it is that I may have internalized some of the lessons of a comic strips character who I adored because, truth be told, I was nothing like him growing up. Calvin was defiant of authority in a way that I could never muster. Calvin was wise and deep and whip smart with a purpose that I merely aspired towards. Calvin brought everything to a life lived with existential abandon that defied everything I understood about the metaphorical box in which I was raised and out of which I feared to step out. Deep down I knew that I was not Calvin, but that not just maybe, certainly, there was something aspirational in that defiant little character and his life of epic adventure and freedom.

    As we were driving home from the ceremony, I racing to get her back to the house so she could dress for prom, she was holding her cap in her hand and she turns to me and says something like “You know why I put this on my cap, don’t you? I’m basically Calvin, you know that right, Dad? You raised me to turn into Calvin.”

    And what does that even mean? Are you a mischievous troublemaker? Are you a socially misaligned youth? Or are you a creative soul unbound by rules? A philosophical genius wise beyond her years? A dramatic soul unleashed by existential undercurrents? Or maybe a bit of everything all rolled into one?

    Calvin & Hobbes was formative for me because while I was not Calvin, then too I could pretend to be that guy, act the part, read the strips and embody the spirit of this quirky kid, not so much unlike a neurotic rule-following father-figure guy in not but a mask and striped shirt.  But whatever I made of myself, there could be a chance—a risk—an epic possibility that I influenced something else. Did I actually parent my own Calvin into being?

    Formative, indeed. Formative squared. 

  • weekend wrap six

    Summer marches ever closer, even though the temperatures would argue  that it arrived a couple weeks ago. I worked with a guy once who would argue obessively that we did seasons wrong, and that the solstices and equinoxes —equinois? — equinoctes?, whatever, should in fact mark the mid-points of each season and that the transition was much fuzzier than a June such and such a day is now summer. To his point, this would mean that summer would have started on or about May 6 and run through mid-August when autumn begins. And I mean, he’s not completely wrong… but it’s not a fight I’m picking up here. The point being is that it did strictly become June this past weekend and is definitely feels very summery.

    In that summer vibe, this past weekend we:

    Went to bed early on Friday. Maybe I’m in my autumn years, but I knew I was up for a long and busy couple of days and the heat of the past week had tired me out.

    Had a medical appointment on Saturday morning. That’s not really something to hold up and brag about I suppose, but I’ve got some little minor nagging cough that I’ve been dealing with for over a year now and the medical system is a series of appointments and tests and more appointments and trying not to gaslight myself into thinking it’s all in my head—which it isn’t. Alas, so much for keeping this lighthearted, huh?

    Drove to Red Deer to drop off the dog because apparently she is not considered part of the family enough to attend the family reunion. Or maybe it was a facility rule, I dunno.

    Attended the family reunion marking the century status of my paternal paternals immigration to Canada.  Yeah, my great grandparents bumbled their way across the Altantic a hundred years ago this month or something and now a whole bunch of their descendants think they own the damn place. Not so much me, I’d argue. But that’s a post for another day. Instead I’ll just say I spent the afternoon bitching and gossiping in the sunshine with my cousins. Yikes. 

    Drove back to the city in the biggest damn not-quite-summer windstorm I’d ever seen, clouds of impenetrable dust blowing off the fields with people going half speed down the highway with their blinkers on at points.

    Ran a lovely 10k morning run with the crew.

    Filled a small concert venue with fellow orchestra-mates and a sold out house for our year end concert. Apparently there is potluck party tonight, but then our season is over until the fall and I have some violin maintenance to attend to.

    Read. Read. Read. And finished another book. Review… eventually. 

    And of course, listened to the wind which never really seemed to stop blowing all weekend.

  • one foot out of the nest

    I’m sitting here in a cafe watching out the window as a parade of goslings march across the parking lot let by a gaggle of parent geese.  They navigate the mostly empty asphalt in front of a not-open-at-8am restaurant, and then a couple minutes later are dashing out onto the main drive holding up the cars and trucks on their morning commute out of the neighbourhood.

    It is an apt metaphor for the last twenty-four hours of my life, I realize.

    Yesterday evening we attended the first of two granduation commencement ceremonies for The Kid who will be—is—already technically has graduated high school this year.

    The first ceremony, the one last night, was a smaller and more intimate affair  with just the hundred or so kids who successfully completed the language immersion program and will be graduating next week with a French diploma.

    There were tearful parents, thousands of photos, cake, silliness, and congratulatory handshakes. 

    We’ll repeat it next week on a larger scale will the full class, but the fun one—the one where I knew enough of the kids who had been through all thirteen years of school, the one with the gaggle of parents were a big group of familiar faces from years of field trips, sleepovers, birthday parties, drop offs, pick ups, and on and on and on—that one is blip, and done.

    I’ve been thinking a bunch about parenting lately. I mean, for about five years, tho lost to the buried archives of time and privacy those articles are long gone, I actually wrote a parenting blog. It was not an advice blog. It was a reflective, parenting philosophy blog. It took me down some interesting paths of thought and ideas and implementation of both. If only I could go back in time and tell the guy writing that blog that simply overthinking all those ideas was worth it in the end.

    And then I wrote a parenting blog of another kind. For a couple of years I posted a weekly comic strip over at www.piday.ca which was me drawing art and making commentary on the trials and troubles of being a dad to a kid who was about ten years old when I created them. I literally just spent a few hours over the last week restoring all those comic strips to a new website and in doing so re-read every single one making me wonder why I ever quit making them. They were not great, but they were pretty good.

    In a week that same kid will be graduated.

    In mere months that same kid will cease to be a kid—in as much as she will be able to vote, buy booze and make decisions for herself.

    I definitely know that parenting never really ends, but this week… this month… this summer is definitely a major milestone in my parenting journey, maybe as consequential as I remember feeling about this time eighteen years ago.

    Those little geese will be off and out of the nest in a month or two. And then the parents can get back to doing whatever they do best—pooping in the grass and squwacking at bikes and honking at five in the morning as they take off into flight.  I feel you, you angry birds, I feel you.