works of wanderlust

Category: life & stuff

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

  • 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.

  • weekend wrap five

    It may not be summer, but tell that to the weather. It was a weekend for wide open windows trying to keep the house cool enough to sleep at night. I may need to drag out the air conditioner unit soon.

    All that said, I barely pulled myself far from the house this whole weekend, studious pupil that I am.

    It was the calm before the storm. The next couple of weekends are going to be filled with activity and socializing and concerts and grad activities and getting ready for summer. This was busy enough, I suppose, but whatever.

    This weekend was spent doing…

    School. Mostly school. And not much else. I wrote a few words and few days back all about the final weekend of coursework for my professional development program through the university. I spent the best parts of both days sitting huddled under a fleece blanket in the chilly basement staring into a pair of eight-hour long video class sessions. There were only five people silly enough to be taking business courses in May, though, so I found myself needing to stay very engaged. No hiding behind the crowd. And at the end of it I was actually pretty tired. It did, however, mark the final module of classwork and all I have left in the program is a single homework assignment.

    We did find the energy to go out for ice cream on Satuday evening.

    And on Sunday evening, after searching the whole house for the second lawnmower battery, I found it hidden under a pile of jackets and then I was able to cut the grass which seemed to have grown six inches while I was hiding in the basement all weekend. I practically could have baled it. And the dog was creeping around the yard like she was an intrepid jungle explorer, what with the grass up to her literal eyeballs.

    While I was out in the yard I also did some adjustments to my garden irrigation system, plucked about a thousand dandilions, and spent a fruitless half hour trying to figure out if there was a wasp nest nearby that would explain the unseeming swarms.

    In the gaps I read. I did a lot of reading, actually. I splurged on a digital copy of the Hyperion Cantos, a four volume compendium of a thirty-year old science fiction series that I have read a half dozen times but is on my list of comfort reads. I curled up on the couch and read and read and read and pushed through like half of the first book. More on that later, I suppose, when I post a book review.

    And on we go.

  • weekend wrap four

    Used to be that May Long Weekend was a rite of spring to which we all looked forward. Maybe people still do. Entrenched as I am, it was just another weekend, albeit one where the family hung around the house for an extra day. In fact, the Kid has a five day weekend and as far as I know is still at home asleep as I write this.

    But long weekend or not we continue with the inventory of accomplishments to mark the passage of time.

    This past weekend we…

    Spent Friday evening playing host to the penultimate performance of the Kid’s high school musical debut as Rosie in Mamma Mia! A dozen friends and family made the trek to the high school theatre for the show, and what is better for the ego than the soothing tunes of ABBA while watching one’s nearly adult daughter play a randy middle aged washed up rock star?

    I must have eaten something funny Friday night tho, because Saturday morning was a wash of me recovering from a terrible night.

    We did manage to play host to my sister, niece and nephew who came up for the Saturday matinee and then joined us for burgers and milkshakes at the Varsity.

    I went to be early.

    Sunday was a great morning for a run and I wrote a whole post about my longest run of the calendar year.

    And then with the great weather temporarily bringing out the sun, I set up the solar-powered bluetooth speaker, blasted some tunes and planted my garden. Everything is seeded and watered and irrigated in a kind of haphazard organizational scheme of square-foot gardening meets my knees are not up for this anymore.

    We dug into the latest Star Wars series Andor over a glass of wine later that evening.

    And the next morning the kid came with me for coffee, yeah coffee, and we sat in Starbucks for an hour me writing and she doing her physics homework.

    I started a secret series behind the scenes of this blog. I’m going to try doing more month-long self-improvement experiments. You can read more about the first of those in a month when I post the results.

    I spent a chilly afternoon adding a bunch of security fixes to this blog because I noticed that along with the increase in readship traffic there has been a parallel increase in bot hackers trying to barge through my password. Suck it hackers. Go use your powers to hurt some greedy billionaire corpo, not some asshole in a starbucks trying to hold his sanity together.

    Of course, what with it being a long weekend, Monday was the regular orchestra rehearsal night, not cancelled despite the holiday because we have a concert in less than two weeks.

    And then I went to bed a little early. It was a long weekend, after all.

  • weekend wrap three

    How the heck is it already the middle of May? Didn’t we just do Christmas last week? I mean. C’mon!

    Next weekend is the long weekend, but this past few days have been a bit of a hectic hot mess. That’s okay, I guess. Everyone needs a hectic weekend here and there.

    This past weekend I…

    Alas, it is the week of the Big Show. The kid is performing as Rosie in her high school musical production of Mamma Mia starting tomorrow, so it’s been us doing late night pick ups at the theatre, transfers to other important things, and on and on and on.

    I met up with my former boss for lunch on Friday. It was pretty much the weekend for her. It started out as a chat message asking her if it was still cool I used her as a reference, and next thing I knew I was picking her up at her mechanic’s appointment and we were chowing down on a local Indian buffet.

    The upcoming show has us doing a few theatre parent chores, specifically we got put in charge of the concession, so it was off to Costco for our semi-annual visit and to score a bunch of concession-sized snacks to sell. Saturday morning is not the day for that, but our options were limited.

    This spun around and did a one-eighty and by mid-afternoon we were out in Sherwood Park at a dance competition. Oh, that’s right. In the middle of the high school main stage final week of rehearsals we still had dance choreography competitions to work around. Though the final sadness of it being her last ever didn’t ever really set in, what with the hectic hot mess and all.

    We stopped for dinner on the way home and it was… ok. Less ok for the price, but I’ll save that rant for another post.

    Mother’s day morning we made crepes before I rushed off to do my regular Sunday morning run club. Ten klicks sounds less impressive mid-spring when everyone else is training for marathons and such.

    We capped the mother’s day events off with a lap of the local dog park and a chill stroll in the masses and throngs with the same idea.

    Oh, and I paid for my business license. Woot. Excitement abounds.

    And that was that.