works of wanderlust

Tag: spring

  • 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.

  • book reviews: rainy spring

    Ugh. I didn’t read as much as I should have through the winter, and yet now, maybe only because I’m still riding the high of enjoying my new ebook reader, I have been power walking through a whole collection of books.

    That said, very little planning has gone into my May reads. I have very much been waltzing through the whims of whatever the universe throws at me, in the first case revisiting a book in print that I’d previously listened to, then stumbling into an unlikely girly memoire, and finally elevating a sequel I was pretty sure I was going to put off until autumn.

    But read what you want to read. Read what you feel like reading. Just read.

    And recently I read:

    Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

    This was a tough read, but for a strange reason: my first encounter with this book was when I listened to the audiobook version a couple years ago, and the narration and voice acting in that version is beyond top notch, bringing the whole story to life. Reading it as a novel this time through I could still hear the voices and cadedence of Porter’s acting chops. Beyond that, this is a delightfully nerdy romp through a first contact type story and a utopian perspective on why nerds should be in charge of everything. If you enjoyed The Martian, this is a completely different spin on the puzzling out life or death engineering problems in space by the same author, but with a pleasant stylistic overlap that bridges any of the plot differences. I have been making an effort these past couple weeks to avoid checking the star ratings on things (post upcoming in a couple more weeks) but I suspect that if you checked the reviews on this title you’d find no shortage of raves.

    Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

    Um, so yeah. What the heck am I doing reading a twenty year old quasi-spiritual memoire of a divorced woman traveling and meditating in the quest to clear her soul? I will admit, when The Algorithm recommended this to me, the low friction, low stakes, no cost value proposition of having the library on my ebook reader left me simply figuring that I would read the first chapter or two to quench my decades-long sidelong curiosity about this book which rode the bestseller list for like three years… and then move along. I read the whole damn thing. Maybe it’s a middle age quirk. Maybe I really have honed some previously emotional derelict part of my own soul these past couple years. Maybe there is a kinship between folks farted out the baskside of prim society and left to recreate themselves that bridges space, time, and gender. Who knows for sure. But putting aside my idle skepticism about the author’s spiritual awakenings and the manifesting of prayer and all that drivel, there was a relatable struggle to be found in these pages that has not uniquely been discussed in such books, but was certainly a perspective that I didn’t mind adding to my pondered-upon list.  

    Shift by Hugh Howey

    I lied in my last post. I surmised I might wait a month or six before jumping into the second instalment of Howey’s Silo trilogy. Instead, I had barely let the first volume cool off and I was onto the second. Sequels are always tough, I find. Part twos in a trilogy can be amazing tales of raised stakes (think Empire Strikes Back) or disappointing romps deeper into a story that can’t resolve until the final book. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I knew I wanted to dive deeper into the story. Instead what is here is a lot of backstory. Where in book one the mystery is the silo itself, what unravels in book two is a step back to nearly the present day (relatively speaking, at least) and we are introduced to the people and the politics that created the world in which book one exists, the histories of the world outside the silos themselves and the histories of the people who are stuck inside, too. I don’t just want to give a recap, however. Once again Howey is twisting dozens of very human stories together around this dystopic concept. Everyone is a complicated actor, both hero and villain, both struggling for their own survival and yet questioning their own mortality and morality. It is a romp through the psyche of post-apocalyptic humanity that is worth the trip.

  • accidental distances

    It was only a little accidental that I ran my longest run of the season yesterday. But heck, it wasn’t much to brag about either way: barely thirteen klicks all in.

    And barely one when it came right down to it.

    My running is not doing great these days. I mean, I have always had good seasons and bad ones. I’ve been tearing up the trails for going on eighteen years now so anyone is bound to have a roller coaster of ups and downs during that time, no matter who you are. Injuries have sidelined me for as long as half a year or more. Winters have often been scaled back. And race plans always seem to set the real tone of how my summers go: any time I’ve signed up for a marathon it would be foolishness not to focus on building endurance and strength and distance with every spare waking thought.

    My fatigue caught up with me in the last week, tho. I walked in our regular Thursday run because I was bagged. And then I started getting leg cramps overnight on the weekend that gave me at least one sleepless night laying awake hoping that the charlie horse in my calf didn’t startle me awake again. So, waking up Sunday morning I was barely fifty-fifty on going out for my regular run. I barely, just barely made it out for one. I ended up accidentally logging thirteen.

    I lack a coherent plan, I realize. 

    I have written quite a bit on my own distractable nature these days.

    I am trying to walk a creative path, trying to rebuild a professional self, trying to navigate a transitory phase of my parenting career, trying to stay optimistic in the normalized collapse of western democracy, trying to eat better, trying to read more, write more, be more, trying, trying, trying. 

    I’ve let my running take a bit role in the stage play that is my life this year.

    It turns out that I am recovering from an injury to my soul that I wouldn’t have thought would crack my running agenda but somehow that is one of the plainest examples of the damage.

    And oddly enough, the path back to the paths isn’t clearly one straight through forcing myself to just run more, dammit. Sure, it feels good for a bit when I do it, but there is something bigger going on in my deepest self that I haven’t quite figured out, and it seems as though might need a bit of work on those aches and pains before the deeper trails clear out for me.

    We ran down into the river valley yesterday morning, down the big hill towards the footbridge under the freeway bridge, along the path budding with spring green, basking in the glow of the May sunlight and still-fresh air and the cool breeze that made it almost perfect for a morning run. We ran out to meet the other half of the crew who had started on a longer training loop an hour before us, ran to meet them and run back to home with this little cadre which after all seems like the whole point of it all lately. Ran and ran and ran, further than any of us had planned when we set out. A little accidental, and not much to brag about, but the longest run of the year for me, the longest run in a year when something is seeming to be gnawing at my feet and holding me back.

    No coherent plan, after all. Distractable and accidental.

    Recovering, but uncertain, unsteady. Not great.

  • 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.

  • patio season

    It is only just the second day of May and I find myself sitting on the patio at the local Starbucks.

    Yeah, I know. There is a likely chance that you are reading this from somewhere in the world where (a) patio season in May is entirely normal and (b) eighteen degrees would not be considered patio weather whatsoever.  But I am writing this from a place in the world where the second of May is just as likely to be a snowy inside day as it is to be one facilitating a coffee from a suburban bistro table two meters from a bustling drive through.  So I’ll take it where I can get it, and celebrate it just the same.

    It is also my first writing excursion since walking out of my latest life phase: if you are a dedicated reader (but who am I kidding?) you may recall that I wrote earlier this week that I had quit my part time job. Resigned. Hung up my apron. De-shifted in order to pursue some more mentally stimulating contract-type work, and as I sit here sunning the light reflecting off a mini-mall cafe, it still hasn’t quit sunk in that yesterday was my last day juggling expired foods and lugging boxes of olive oil. It will, but there has only just been long enough to mark the space between shifts, so I could walk back in there this morning and only just be a few minutes late for work. I’ll let it settle out a bit more, but either way, I am free of that.

    And now here I am. It is in fact the first day of patio season and the first day of whatever comes next for me, and neither are lacking prospects. The patio function of the equation urges me to stop procrastinating with navel-gazing blog posts and finish my damn novel already, jeeze! The whats next(?) steps part of the same mysterious equation is a little less crystalized and may give me cause to write more about that in a day or a week or so, but not so much yet. There will be time for explanations when the dust settles.

    Patio season is different than the rest of the year for some reason, too.  It is a simple calculated fact that I spend a good chunk of my free winter morning agendas sitting at a table in this or that or other cafes around the neighbourhood. Everyone generally puts their heads down and avoids eye contact. But this morning, sitting and typing at a wobbly little bistro table, tilting my screen to angle it for best visibility in the glare of the outdoor ambiance, I’ve already had two jovial conversations with other patio folks. “What a great day!” “Do you live around here?” “Finally I can ride my bike to the cafe!” The glory of the finally spring mentality has burst through the hunkering isolationism of the winter chill and everyone is just happier enough to glory in the moment.

    Spring is such a cliche for new life I am reluctant to draw such an obvious analogy here, but alas it seems unavoidable. It seems cliche that I have timed my emergence from the chrysalis of career change in such synchronicity with the world around me.

    On my very first day of the job I just quit, back in August, when I arrived to a store-under-construction on a hot late-summer morning, it happened that the sun was shining and the dust was blowing and we all sat on the curb for our coffee break drinking cold pops and munching the assortment of salty snacks they had provided. It had been a hard morning lugging boxes and meeting new people and settling into a physical job. Yesterday, I stepped out the back door of the warehouse into that same alley, now just the cluttered space behind the store, the sun almost a parallel spring analog to that day last summer. We’d been through a winter, made a store, struggling in solidarity against the silliness of it all, and there I was on my last day on that same patch of asphalt almost a year later feeling about as full circle as one could feel about such things. Hardly a patio, but not completely different from where I am starting my day, this new era ahead of me, typing these words.

    It’s patio season. A new one.