works of wanderlust

Tag: shopping

  • weekend wrap, ten

    I spent this past weekend either prone on the couch entering a vegetative state whilst playing video games, or scouting out the north side of the city for various barely-connected reasons. The weather was hot enough to be uncomfortable, but not so hot to be an excuse, and the smattering of rain here and there only helped me avoid mowing the lawn and feel guilty about spending time in front of the screens.

    All that laziness aside, we did accomplish a few things this past weekend…

    After a chill Friday evening, Saturday picked up considerably.

    The Kid had a party to go to across town, so we dropped her off and headed up to the north side, a part of town we only rarely visit and only rarely because it is just a pain to drive all over town when the only big difference is the names on the restaurants. But we were over there, so we went for burgers at a place called Fox Burger up in the Highlands and sat out on the rooftop patio sipping beers and enjoying the sun.

    A little stroll around the area brought us back to where we had parked and then we made a kind of backwards trek to our own party to hang out with friends who were having a board game gathering.

    That was short-lived however, and we only stayed long enough to play one round of a mediocre and what seemed to be a pretty unbalanced chaos game called Dragon and Flagon—which I lost miserably at, which may have clouded my impressions.

    We skipped out before they ordered dinner and went back home to spend some quality time with the dog before we were off again to the theatre. The touring production of The Lion King was in town and we have had tickets for about a year—and Saturday was the night.

    After the show we took another meandering detour to the northside, skirting around a literal detour on the bridge where the cops had it shut down with a “forensics” investigation—ugh—and picked up the Kid from her party before she turned into a pumpkin at midnight.

    Sunday morning a got a little shafted running again. Everyone was off in the mountains doing or working the big Sinister 7 ultramarathon, so it was either run solo again or change into my swimming gear and do laps. I chose the latter.

    After drying off and scarfing some lunch we went shopping for clothes. I have been stumbling into some professional efforts lately and needed some fresh work-appropriate threads. This took us on an adventure to West Edmonton Mall where I found a great pair of dress pants but the colour I wanted was in the wrong size and the size I wanted was in the wrong colour. Back to the northside we went where the store staff had checked inventory and sent us up to Londonderry Mall, the mall that time forgot, where my new digs were waiting.

    The Kid and I took a pair of dogs for a walk, one of them being ours and the other being a favour.

    Then we cooked a nice bit of salmon for dinner on the barbecue and settled back in for the evening.

    Not bad for a lazy weekend in July.

  • hobbies defined, or why investing in things you love is not wasting your money

    I keep telling myself I am not a musician. Call it imposter syndrome, but despite having all the music-connected skills that I have, I still just think of it as eclectic side-hobby.

    Here’s the thing tho. 

    I’ve been playing in a real orchestra for the better part of my 40s. (Second violin, in case you didn’t know that about me.) I am literally in a kind-of-band with a chair to sit in and a part  to play and a rehearsal schedule to follow. It’s a real thing.

    And those bona fides extend beyond a bit of bowing too: I read music, I played the alto sax in grade school, can plink out the basics on a piano, own a chanter, used to consider myself something of a penny-whistle enthusiast, and definitely pay a mean recorder. 

    On top of that, I have done some loose digital composition of electronic music, exclusively in software of course (and as will become clear in the next few paragraphs) and never really more than dabbling in vibes and personal entertainment.

    I like music. I make music. I play music. I perform music. I buy music. I am kinda, sorta a musician. Self-doubt be damned. 

    I bring this up now because I have been sporadically poking at product and functional research around hardware synths. About five years ago I found a channel on youtube where this guy would collect, restore and review retro keyboard synths. It’s a weird hobby, really. And yet watching all those videos took me down a rabbit hole of interesting related topics, most of it looping back to the fact that I have been a electronic music fan all the way back to my CD-buying years and have a respectable collection of collected tracks and more. Simply, I like this stuff and found the art of it fascinating. There is no bottom to that rabbit hole, but my five years of bumbling, fumbling research of course had me playing around with software composition on my computer again and ultimately realizing that what I really wanted was something more physical—tanglible, real. The answer to that bit of musical envy, of course, is a hardware synth with lots of buttons to press and knobs to turn and samples to shape, sitting in a dark basement as one does when composing electronic music. I’ve been researching my options to buy one for the better part of a couple years, watching vids and reading reviews and trying to understand the technology with enough expertise to buy one that makes sense for me as a kinda musician diletante.

    Synths tend to look like pianos and can imitate them, but even in their most simplistic beginner formats are all manner of gateways to electronic sound manipulation, creating digitally aucoustic sound patterns, linking them to an input mechanism, looping mechanism, and other sound enveloping technology things. It all outputs as something we all would recognize, from dance to trance to ambient chill to 8-bit game soundtracks.

    The problem is that we already have two pianos in our house. And. And. And! And I hear you folks who know what I’m about to explain rolling your eyes: synths are not pianos, even tho they often look very much the same.  My point here tho is that if were ever to invest a couple hundred bucks into a synth I would need to make it very clear to the other members of our house that no, I was not buying another piano, I was actually buying a synth and it’s almost as much to explain to someone who ask why are you buying those new pants when you already have a toothbrush at home? You get it or you don’t. 

    The other (not so minor) problem is that I am currently between incomes. I hope to be gainfully employed again by the end of the summer if all goes well, but these things are couched in vast levels of uncontrollable uncertainty that have almost zero correlation to the effort involved. If I had a regular income a new synth wouldn’t even register as a purchase: it’s a couple tanks of gas or a week of groceries, and even jobless we are just fine financially thank you very much anyways. Yeah, it’s a bit more money than splurging on a new video game, but only marginally more—and definitely a better investment. 

    (Look at me talking myself into this.)

    And yet, after multiple years of research on synths I find myself in a hot spot of a dilemma: I have pretty much decided on the particular synth I want to buy—eventually or sooner—and yes I do have money set aside for mad irrational purchases, and oh it turns out its on sale this week even as speculation about store stock repleshiment dwindles on the verge of tariff-related price increases and—well— you might even recall that I am kind of sort of actually a musician and it’s would be a fun new instrument to play around with, no?  

    I’m going to go into the store to look at it later this morning. And it would be something like an impulse buy, but too, one that I have quietly researched and pondered for at least the last two years. Still a guilty pleasure. A musical guilty pleasure. 

    So there’s the rub.

    People who define themselves as things should invest in those things, right?

    I am an artist, so I buy paint and paper and take classes.

    I am a writer, so I have lovely keyboards and document management skills.

    I am a musician, so I play music and explore sound.

    We each and all of us define ourselves by a such a finite list of attributes in our life. My relatives camp and so they buy expensive RVs, htings to stock them with and rent lots at the lake.  I have friends who buy and maintain expensive sports cars. I have other friends who travel the world, cost be damned, because they are enthusiasts for such things. I have friends who pay too much for tickets to sports games or concerts because those things are how they define themselves to themselves and to the universe. These are not all things I would buy, but who would begrudge any of them for indulging in their hobbies and shaping their lives around non-functional investments of time and money? 

    We work, or don’t, and we can too easily live our lives in a purely functional way. And even those of us who nary can afford to do so sometimes allocate money that would best be spent on other things, smarter more functional purchases, to these pieces of equipment or supply or training or content that help us better define ourselves as something less purely functional and bound to sheer survival: these things that define what we call our hobbies or interests, perhaps even our humanity.

    And those are the things that let us explain to the world that we are more than even what we sometimes believe to be true ourselves.

  • loyal out of habit

    I’ve been thinking a lot about brand loyalty lately.

    I’m surrounded by food these days. Overflowing shelves packed with things that seem delicious and interesting and unique—but yet I don’t recognize a single brand name.  It might sound like I’m describing some kind of weird suburban middle-aged man’s nightmare. But no. On the contrary. I’ve just been wandering the aisles of a local grocery store that specializes in importing and selling products that either originate in Europe and Asia or serve a more eclectic low-volume local food producer niche (like organic and vegan and gluten-free, say.) And my “regular” grocery store doesn’t stock much of this, or if they do it is relegated to a single aisle down which my cart rarely turns because, well—I have this kinda sorta outdated idea of brand loyalty stuck in my thick craw.

    I’m going to be shopping at this new place a lot more in the foreseeable future. Reasons. If you know you know kinda reasons.

    But that does mean that I’ll really need to get over my brand loyalty complex and get a little less picky about scanning the shelves for those familiar brands which I’ve been eating my whole life. 

    Because I just have.

    After all, brand loyalty has a lot to do with habit, doesn’t it?  We like to tell ourselves it’s about quality or consistency or other jibber-jabber ideas, but in the end—I mean if we’re really being honest with ourselves—it’s a lot to do with habit.  How many of us, honestly, have tried a different brand of ketchup with enough gusto to give it a proper chance? How many of us stray from our regular brand of margarine? Or even try a unique variety of salad dressing, let alone a whole other brand name?

    Oh, I know you adventurous types exist—maybe you’re even in the majority in this little subset of readers reading a food-ish blog—but take your average ordinary grocery shopper and I have a gut vibe check on that, and know how I personally shop, and so long as price isn’t really a factor then—well—I’m a brand loyal guy through and through.

    But it’s all just habit. Lowering the cognitive load of changing things up. Climbing out of that rut is hard work, right?

    We shop when we travel. 

    I mean, even when we go to the mountains for a weekend, we hit the grocery store and buy at least half our meals to prep in a rental kitchen (assuming and assuring the condo or whatever we rent usually has some kind of kitchen.)  The grocery store in our favourite mountain town, though, is just another cookie cutter version of our local everyday store. Maybe that’s a bad example. 

    But here’s a better one: when we traveled to Europe last year—we went shopping. We hit up the local markets and grocery stores and bought up breakfast foods and stuff to make sandwhiches and you know what? Gasp. Surprise. How odd? We couldn’t find all those North American brands in the corner grocery store in Paris or Milan. Who’d have thunk it, huh?

    Of course we didn’t.

    And yeah, its the adventure of travel. A different brand of milk. A strange box of cereal. A little jar of jam with a label in a foreign language and I’m pretty sure that says “strawberry” but I could totally be wrong, right? Adventure!

    But then you go back home, settle back into your routine and you’re there, right back there, buying the familiar brands to which you have built up a habitual loyalty. And that’s okay, too? It really is.

    But why?

    Brand loyalty. Maybe it’s just really good marketing. Maybe it really is about quality. Yet, I like to think it has more to do with something I alluded to a couple paragraphs back: you gotta think more when you shift brands. There is a cognitive hurdle to leap over. There is a decision to make. If you’re already trying to figure out what to make for dinner for the next three days, who wants to add to the complexity by deciding if maybe we should switch up the brand of soy sauce, coffee, or cheese we’ve been buying for twenty years.  Some day I’ll write a whole post about the day I invented a new spaghetti sauce standard in our house and the kerfuffle that caused—and yet now that we’ve cleared the chasm between the old way and the new way, we can’t imagine doing it the old way any more.  It was all brand loyalty and breaking habits.

    I think about brand loyalty a lot when I’m wandering those aisles. People are going to shop at a store like this one, maybe for the first time or maybe over and over for a few things here and a few things there, and every new product they put in their cart is a decision they need to make? Right there. Every break from a familiar brand is a barrier to busting down an old habit.

    So, how many habits are you willing to change while visiting your local market, huh? I’m going to bend my mind a lot in the coming weeks.