works of wanderlust

Tag: race weekend

  • weekend wrap, twenty

    I guess this was the final weekend in October, huh? I started this month with a personal art challenge, drawing every day, and so far I’ve kept up my end of the deal. But somehow whenever I immerse myself it the act of doing something daily over the span of a month it seems to speed up time and I blink and… well, it was the final weekend of October.

    Friday evening was a tiny little self-contained adventure.

    I had to go pick up my race package from the store up near Whyte Avenue. The wife had a little AGM meeting to attend with a big purpose right near there. Her meeting was for a board she sits on and it was the meeting when they were electing a new president to replace her—happily so—since the kid is no longer doing that particular extra curricular thing and she doesn’t need to run the organization and fundraise for other kids, huh? 

    I dropped her off and drove up to the Running Room and grabbed my race shirt and bib. Ran into Kim, because she was working, and PS, because he was also picking up his package at the exact same time.

    I got it into my mind to go back to the store where I bought my little sketchbook, the one I’ve been doing all my drawing in for the challenge this month. It turns out that they are only sold at like three places in the city, and one of those places was on Whyte Avenue. But Whyte Avenue, the city’s gentrified Uni-adjacent trendy shopping strip is a terrible place to try and go casually on a Friday evening. I could not find parking—at least not some free parking (and I was feeling a bit too cheap to pay) so I ended up driving laps around the neighbourhoods for a while until I got frustrated and just decided to try to drive back to the studio to pick up the wife… which is when I got trapped in a construction zone hell and it took me twenty minutes and a few middle fingers to navigate.

    I picked her up and we decided since it was almost 8pm to finally grab a dinner. There is a little sushi and rice bowl place on the way home so we swung in there and ordered, and as she hands us our food in to-go bowls (confusingly) she told us that they were closing at 8 and we could only stay if we ate fast. Ugh. So we ate our sad little bowls at home twenty minutes later and settled in to watch some television.

    I got paid for a couple of my contracts last week, so on Saturday morning I made my way to the store to (finally!) replace my laptop. I’ve been working on a mix of (a) the shared family computer, (b) a ten year old gaming desktop in my cold, cold basement, (c) a fourteen year old recycled MacBook Pro hacked to run Linux and (d) a six year old iPad that is starting to show its age. Since setting up the corporation I’ve always known that the best tax approach is to use the money and invest back into the company rather than pull it out as salary and pay a bunch of taxes on it. So, new laptop for the business was bought… and then most of the afternoon setting it up and getting all the softwares installed on it.

    We had a lite dinner and settled in for some more television on Saturday evening.

    Sunday I woke up to rain. Rain is not inherently bad, but Sunday morning was also race morning and I looked out the back door as even the dog refused to step out and tried not to think that I needed to be at a start line in a couple hours to run sixteen klicks.

    I met the gang for a carpool over to the race and we were plenty early to spend time wandering around and overthinking the weather. Of course, soon enough the race was run and it being the first real race I’ve done in over a year (Park Runs apparently don’t count, but they’re also only 5k) I was spent. 

    We piled in and went for a late lunch at some enormous asian buffet place on the north side that I’d never even heard of, and I stuffed myself to borderline feeling ill.  

    I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening recovering from the race (and lunch) and went to bed at a far too reasonable time for a guy with nothing much to do on Monday morning except write.

  • 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.