works of wanderlust

Tag: the mall

  • weekend wrap, seventeen

    Ahh… one short.

    This should have been my eighteenth weekend wrap. How crazy would have that worked out!?

    I have been feeling all the feels this last week because as I write this my daughter is off to school on her eighteenth birthday. All grown up and my legal obligations as a parental unit caregiver done, I now get to lean back and consider what remains of the moral obligations and how to navigate being the parent of an adult.  So weird.

    This weekend was busy in relation to all that.

    Friday I added to my rewatched list My Neighbour Totoro, one of the more famous of the Ghibli films, a list that got a little bit more important since we officially scored tickets to the Japanese park in a few months. Refreshing the sights and sounds of these films in my head will add to the enjoyment of the visit, I presume.

    Saturday rolled in and The Kid (I guess it was the last weekend I can call her that, huh?) and I scooted over to Starbucks. She had an essay to work on. I had my regular writing vibe going on. Her fancy coffee cost literally three times as much as mine. Yikes.

    The in-laws showed up unexpectedly with the intention of taking The Kid for a pre-birthday lunch, so we tagged along for that. It was more a brunch, by her request, which only means I trained her well enough these las eighteen years to respect the most important meals of the day.

    We scooted over to West Edmonton Mall for a few hours on Saturday afternoon. We’re not casual shoppers, to be honest, so it was more a mission trip to find The Kid her birthday gift. I wandered and took photos and met the gals back at the bubble tea store.

    Following a dinner of sushi from the mall, we trekked downtown to start the theatre season. We are seasons tickets holders for the Citadel and our first play of 25/26 was an adaptation of Life of Pi, which was phenomenal. 

    Sunday I led the crew on a twelve klick run. I am officially in training for my race in a little over a month, which means inching my distance back up to a ten miler equivalent. It’s completely do-able, it’s just been a few months since I’ve run more than ten klicks. Autumn was definitely showing its colours.

    The Kid had a friend over to watch a movie for her class, so I went for a stroll and bought the ingredients for my gag gift for her eighteenth. Where we live, eighteen is the age of majority which means she can technically buy booze and cannabis and vote and gamble, all legally. I bought her some scratch tickets and a bottle of the most barely-a-wine wine I could find and a goofy card. Oh, dad.

    I made dinner and we cleaned up and settled into a chill evening. Our last evening as parents of a “kid” was spent doing the most parent of things: sitting on the couch, watching tv, helping her with her homework, and going to be at a reasonable hour. 

  • 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.