works of wanderlust

Tag: weekend warrior

  • weekend wrap, eighteen

    We lucked out and got a couple nice autumn weeks to walk through the trails and sneak in some colourful runs, but it seems as if October has other ideas for us. The weather turned cold over the weekend, dropping into the freezing temps for Sunday morning.

    This weekend we:

    Went out for dinner on Friday night. No one wanted to cook and everyone was on board with sushi, so as the sun set we went off to local japanese place and ate our fill. Along with other things, the Kid is now perfectly fine with raw fish sushi. If that sounds strange, just consider that she has been inching towards it with sushi rolls that are more in the imitation crab, avacado, or tempura shrimp realm and is only now embracing salmon and tuna rolls. In other words, we can order a little bit more ambitiously and she’ll just eat whatever. Another unseen benefit of her aging out of childhood.

    She did, however, invite company over to watch a movie so Karin and I were relegated to the main floor of the house. We played some board games. I won. Enough said.

    Saturday morning the ladies were going in six directions with appointments and other stuff. I played some video games for most of the morning, but joined them just before lunch to brave the hoards that had descended upon Costco. My reward was a hot dog. 

    The dog joined me for a bit of a lazy walk. I’ve been working on my daily sketching challenge so I went to the park to draw something. She sat content by my side for nearly an hour as I worked on the shading of a copse of trees.

    That evening we had invited to the fiftieth birthday party of my former boss. We’ve kept in touch, and she pinged me earlier in the week to see if we were free. The place was packed and it was a bit of a rager for a fiftieth. Matched her style, though, and I had a good chat with some former colleagues who had made the shortlist. A limoncello shot was later regretted. 

    Sunday was a crazy run day. I met a few of the crew in a weird neighbourhood in Mill Woods for our ten klick pre-run. We ran a bunch of trails with which I was formerly unfamiliar, all of which ended us at the Towne Centre parking lot. Then we stood around in a crowd of about six thousand people waiting to run the Run for the Cure 5k breast cancer run. SL is a manager for CIBC bank, the title sponsor, so she rallied us onto her team and we wore colours and rounded our our ten klick pre-run with a crowded five klick fun run to make our training distance fit. Then we went for pho. 

    I was hosed for the rest of the day. The combination of running fifteen klicks, partying the night prior, and standing around in shorts in the sub-zero temps spent what was left of my energy and I chilled on the couch until dinner, then chilled on a different couch until I went to bed. I did fit in there somewhere reading all the social media posts about the teachers strike, but once again having a semi-adult daughter pays off.

  • 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, sixteen

    September is in full swing and half over as I write these words. It’s always so quaint to not only be surprised by the passage of time, but then to write about it as if anyone reading those words isn’t even further into the future and looking back wishing it were only the middle of September 2025 and not whenever they are.

    The weekend passed in a bit of blur so this may be a short recap.

    Friday, we chilled after a long week back to the normalcy of routine. The school year season, as much as it is now defined by semesters of university I suppose, began anew, and we all had classes and clubs and lessons that kicked into gear again last week, so an evening on the couch was not a terrible idea. 

    I have been refining my code for my *other* site, a “gram-ish” blog over at 8r4d.com/p which is what I built initially to post less on social media, but is all one big hand-coded bespoke CMS project. I mention it, because starting on Friday night I sat there with a computer open squashing a few more bugs and fine-tuning the code a little more. It’s been in the works for three years but is all one fairly mature product these days.

    Saturday I got up and ran Park Run. Sub-thirty for a five klick run, so my running streak (hitting fifteen days on Saturday) was paying off. 

    And then I was struck with the negatives of contracting work, because lacking a better plan I spent a few hours on the contract puzzle I had been left with on Friday afternoon post-sending a status update to my client.

    Our evening wrapped up at the Jube. Karin and I had tickets to a comedy show called The Stand Up for Canada tour, hosted by none other than Rick Mercer. It was two hours of patriotic date night laughs.

    Sunday was spent mostly in Red Deer. We got up, packed up, and drove south. The mother-in-law has been deeply entrenched on the organizing committee of the local Terry Fox run, and so we go down and help and/or run. This year I mostly just did the running part, making it day sixteen of my running streak. (And I think it may be the one to cap it off with so I can focus on properly training and not draining.)

    After a lunch in Red Deer we drove home, did the weekend grocery shopping and spent the rest of the evening chilling on the couch again. There’s only so much energy to go round these days, huh?

  • weekend wrap, fifteen

    Writing a weekend wrap on a Monday morning is very much a shakeout ritual. You see me posting some low-stakes content here summing up my random acts of nothing much on the opening day of a new week and wonder what’s the point, but getting back into the business of productive writing after a few days of schedule flux is not just as easy as it seems. Jotting a few sentences as a mental catchup, is as much a writers warmup as I’m ever going to do.

    All that is to say, this weekend was busy enough.

    Shaping the whole thing was the fact that the Kid was housesitting, so after a quick family dinner on Friday we drove her over and dropped her off for her housesitting gig. Tres exciting, non? 

    The rest of the evening we plonked on the couch and caught up on some trash television we’ve been enjoying. Not much to speak of, nor anything worth writing about, but it was a bit of weekend fare to ease out of a long-ish week.

    Saturday, I went to the doctor. Nothing urgent, of course. I’ve had a nagging cough for about a year and I’m seeing a specialist about it and the appointments are every three months on a Saturday. I get to sit in a glass box and blow into a plastic tube and then they adjust the cocktail of respiratory medications I’ve been taking and voila.

    I celebrated learning that I probably don’t have asthma by going and running my five klick lap around the neighbourhood. I’ve been working on a running streak and Saturday was day eight, the loop around day, particularly since day one was last Saturday when I did a Park Run. 

    Before it got too hot we took the dog to the off leash park and walked a lap. The highlight of that trip was randomly finding a fossil in the river. 

    And then while Karin went to The Mall, I stayed home and fuddled with some technology projects; I got a new memory card for my GoPro (delivered) which seems to have fixed the file corruption errors I’ve been getting and then I started poking at adding a new feature to my “unsocial media applet” software. I’ve been pondering some quality of life improvements for our upcoming trip to Japan, specifically simplifying the time stamping feature I had in a waaaay early version that let me tell the post I was in, say, New York and it would flag the time stamp to indicate that. I was able to pull in a location from the IP address of the internet connection and do some fancy pants stuff to automate that plus start building a kind of bespoke geographic database to simplify other aspects. Plus, I cleaned up some bugs. All in all, a few hours of coding work, but it’ll save me as much over the next year of posting.

    Another evening of chilling in front of terrible television with a beer and the day was done.

    Sunday, I met the crew for a nine klick run which was also the ninth day of my streak.

    And then I left coffee a bit early so that we could go to the thank you barbecue for the Heritage Festival French pavilion volunteers.    

    We ran another little errand to visit the Kid and drop off something she forgot, and then it was back home for more Sunday errands: a dog walk, cleaning up the kitchen, some more coding, groceries, and cooking dinner.

    I went for another walk to test my fixed code out in the “field” by which I mean, literally in the field but also on a connection that was not our house wifi, and that was about that for another late summer weekend.

  • weekend wrap, fourteen

    It’s September, and the last few days of August were a long weekend that was busy and activity-filled and definitely not wasted for the last day of summer holidays.

    Friday evening I got my board shorts on and sat in front of the computer for a a solid two hours attending the kick off board meeting for the start of the new orchestra season.  We start rehearsing again in less than a week, but being on the board (kinda—I’m more of a committee head) means sacrificing an occasional evening to make things work behind the scenes. Just too bad it was a Friday of a long weekend this year.

    With the heat wave, I hadn’t been out running all week, so I decided last minute to go check out Park Run. It just about killed me, but I pulled out a sub-30 five klick run.

    Otherwise it was a pretty quiet Saturday, up until Karin and I went out for dinner—and then stopped by the pop-up Night Market in the nearby Rec Centre parking lot. It’s a new event some group is trying to get going, and it seemed like a lot of fun and busy too.

    I went back later with my camera, walking over after the sun set, so I could play around with some low light night photography in a crowd.

    Sunday morning it was another normal day for a group run, which was a good thing that (a) we started early because the heat came on later and (b) ran at all, because the smoke came on later, too.

    Karin and I got rolling shortly after and got the kayak out on the river for a two hour paddle down the North Saskatchewan with the dog as our only passenger.

    But all that action darn near wore me out so we crashed on the couch that evening.

    Monday was a stat holiday, and as such we had planned a breakfast run meetup. The plan, as per usual, was to park near A&W, run five klicks and then go for breakfast. Sadly, the smoke had rolled in and the air quality was at a 10 plus. The verdict and consensus was to skip the run and just go for breakfast. Smart.

    I don’t really know where the rest of the day went. The kid has been filming her friends doing silly things in the backyard for a “Taskmaster” party she is planning, so we mostly just kept quiet and out of her way until dinner.

    I figured I should get some physical activity in, tho, so the Kid and I went to the Rec Center and I ran laps while she did some strength training.

    But that was that, and we came home so she could finish prepping for her first day of University (today) and I could settle back in for the end of summer… well, summer holidays.