works of wanderlust

Tag: weekend warrior

  • 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, nineteen

    The more exciting of recent weekend was the Thanksgiving long weekend, last weekend, but of course by the time I remembered that I should sit down and recap it—or should I say, by the time I had the time to recap it, it was already getting on late Wednesday and I couldn’t bring myself to reflecting on a weekend that was already a few days passed. 

    This weekend…

    It started off with that empty nest vibe when The Kid took off to an overnighter party outside of town. There’s a whole story to why her and another girl went an hour out of the city to hang out with some rural peers in a small town east of here, but the short of it is that it left Karin and I to fend for ourselves. Our option was to go out for pizza and then crash on the couch to watch some teevee.

    I got up at a respectable time and launched myself over to Park Run. It was my eleventh partaking of the river valley five klick weekly race. That sounds good, but those eleven runs have taken place over three-plus years. I logged a twenty-eight minutes and change time, tho not my best was still better than I was expecting. I’ve always floated around that thirty minute mark as an objective standard, so breaking through that is a net positive day out.

    I burned off the bulk of the day doing some coding and sketching and playing some video games. The temperatures have dropped and I was still trying to warm up from running Park Run in two degrees and shorts.

    We made pizza for dinner. Yeah, two nights in a row with the pizza, but my homemade pizza is just a completely different category than the stuff we get at the local family pizzeria.

    We curled up on the couch again and watched a movie that evening. I’ve had this obscure science fiction film on my watchlist for the better part of fifteen years, but I’ve been struggling to find a copy even to buy. But then the other week it showed up on one of the services we pay for, so I flagged it and didn’t ask—just put it on and watched all of its weirdness. 

    Sunday morning I led the group on a ten klick taper run. Our race is next weekend, so after peaking at sixteen klicks (the race is a ten miler) last weekend, we eased off the gas and fed a bit of recovery into our training plan.

    My afternoon was a bunch of chores. We had to run over to Home Depot for some bits and bops, and then a bunch of new sheet music came in over the email for our rehearsal tonight so I got busy uploading that and then fixing a tiny bug I noticed in the code I had recently posted for managing all that sheet music and so the I blinked and it was late afternoon and time for making my sketch of the day.

    I ran into one of our long lost runners in the park. LS hasn’t been seen since May—at least not by any of the crew—and then there he was. So we stood there and chatted a bit and it turns out he’s been really sick and trying to sort through that. But he seems as much on the mend as is possible and I told him he really should stop by for coffee and assure people that he didn’t die and we’d all missed his funeral or something.

    Dinner and more video games capped off the evening, and I was reminded that the long weekend would have been much more exciting to write about, huh?

  • 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?