works of wanderlust

Tag: weekend warrior

  • weekend wrap, thirteen

    Oh, lucky. 

    Here we are on another Monday morning perched in front of a keyboard as summer wanes. The Kid was lamenting that her first post-grade-school summer flew by in a blur of summer job and a smattering of friend gatherings which seemed as tho it cheated her a little. Get used to it, I told her. That’s life. What’s two months anyhow? A couple of bill cycles and another season blows by.

    It wasn’t all a loss, though.

    I picked her up from said summer job on Friday afternoon and plunked her at one of those friend gatherings. Her high school pals have been successively hitting the eighteen-year old birthday milestone these past few months and I think she’s next.  We never really found out what goes on at these parties, but it all seems pretty tame. We idled on the couch post-dinner and a friend drove her home. Ah, Fridays as our responsibilities of parenting a kid dwindled into the final countdown towards her impending legal adulthood.

    Saturday, feeling a bit lazy and knowing that the local marathon weekend was going to disrupt Sunday running plans, I dragged my sorry butt to Park Run. You know Park Run, right? The Saturday morning 5k “not a race” but really a race free event in the river valley. It happens all over the world and in like a dozen locations in Canada. I have now done it eight times.

    The Kid and I took the dog for a loooong walk on Saturday afternoon, stopping briefly at the pop-up off-leash park one neighbourhood over. The dog could not have cared less about the off-leash, but a random chunk of field surrounded by a tall orange construction fence and which probably reeks of other dog’s markings was probably epic confusing.

    Later, it being our wedding anniversary and all, Karin and I went for a fancy dinner at a new Japanese-inspired fusion cuisine place, and then went home and watched another in our getting-ready-for-Japan Miyazaki movie marathon: Princess Mononoke. I’ve seen it a dozen times and it still rocks hard.

    Sunday I should have gone to cheer on the marathoners, but I slept in. That’s not a trivial statement: I never sleep in. Like, once a year, maybe. And yesterday was the day. I dunno why I was so tired.

    I spent a couple hours working on the computer. Literally. Lester had loaned me a graphics card which I had anticipated may work to get my VR setup working on my old desktop. He recently replaced that card and it was just sitting in the box. I spent too much time and the best I got to was it loading half way through Windows boot up and freezing the computer. Maybe after I finish this contract I’m working on I’ll risk blowing up the whole computer, but I had a minor panic and restored the old hardware. Computer 1: Brad 0.

    We set out early-afternoon for the Fringe Festival. We have a smattering of tix for the week, and two sets were for Sunday. We took in “Plays by Bots” (which we’ve seen annually for 3 years now) which is improv based on poorly written AI scripts, and then “Colins Back” which was a big, fun improv show with a local troupe hosting famed improvist Colin Mochrie for an hour of silly fun.

    Not a bad way to cap off the evening, which was otherwise mostly capped off by a quiet dinner back home and watching Japanese travel videos on Youtube until bedtime. 

  • weekend wrap, twelve

    I missed a weekend update last week, but mostly because it would have been more of a six day vacation update that spanned a weekend, and that whole trip was a bit of a blur of driving and eating and kayaking and by the time I sat down at a keyboard again it was nearly a new weekend and seemed like it was all a bit of a fading memory anyways. 

    This past weekend was another long one, but officially so with a statutory holiday dropped on the Monday. 

    That means it looked something like:

    Friday, after the Kid got home from work and we didn’t feel like cooking in the heatwave we drove out to one of the bedroom communities to redeem a coupon for a free piece of cake. Well, we ended up having dinner of course, and a dash of nostalgia at one of the two remaining locations for this nineties restaurant that used to be everywhere when I was a teenager. It was solid.

    Saturday we made our way to the Heritage Festival for our exploration day. I hadn’t done much work there this year because they were a bit more organized and setup turned into a quick one-night affair that I missed rather than the usual four day drawn out event and race to the finish line.  We ate and strolled and got way too hot in the summer sun.

    We all went our separate ways for a few hours, but the Kid and I reconnected at the house for a light dinner and then went to watch the new Fantastic Four movie at the theatre, burning off the rest of the day in air conditioned comfort.

    Sunday, Karin and I got ready pretty early and made our way back to the festival to work at least one formal shift.  I cooked crepes for a few hours and she ended up at the cash service counter.

    But our plan was short lived and we had made dinner plans with C&A (for various reasons, not the least of which was to celebrate the one year-ish anniversary of our mountain hike vacation) who dropped by for a home cooked meal, birthday week cake for A and then a couple of games well into the evening.

    I joined some last minute plans for a holiday breakfast run with the crew (at least the few who are still around in earlyAugust) and we ran five klicks and then went for bacon and eggs.

    While I was running I got a text that they could use my help at the festival whenever I could get there, so Karin dropped me off shortly after noon and I spent the next ten hours on site, mostly cooking but then helping tear down and pack up as we closed up shop around six and ended the festival weekend for another season. I got home pretty late and pretty much fell asleep as I was clambering towards bed.

    A whole week of fun crammed into a three day weekend.

  • weekend wrap, eleven

    Last week was a busy week. Some work-related, professional stuff occupied my days (oddly enough) and my the time Friday rolled around my head was crammed full of half-baked frustrations with the state that summer has on the speed of business. It was always my least favourite time of year to try and get things done, and this year has been no exception.

    Alas, nothing some sporadic video gaming interspersed with various parenting emergencies couldn’t distract from.

    The blur of a mid-summer weekend included:

    Friday evening was a bit of an adventure trying to sort out a lost airpod for the Kid which meant driving across town to locate it.

    I watched a movie to relax. I settled into the couch and something inclined me to put on Cast Away, you know, the old Tom Hanks on a deserted island movie, and oddly enough it boosted my spirits a little bit after a weird week.

    Saturday morning was a little lazy, but the Kid needed to catch up on paperwork (yeah, figure that one out!) and so wanted to trip over to Starbucks and do her work over a coffee. This is my life now. I joined her and did some writing while she did her stuff.

    The weather was spotty, raining mostly, so the gals decided to do a morning costco run. Saturday at costco is always a bit sketchy, and with it being summer and raining it hit the mark. We tried to find something we could all agree on to cook for dinner but failed miserably. 

    I spent a good chunk of the afternoon prone on the couch, jumping between reading and playing some cozy video games, so reporting on that is a bit of mixed bag of “yeah, I needed to chill for a couple hours” and “lazy dude sits on couch.”

    Then the adventure began.  Well, not really. The kid got roped into a summer dance performance (even tho we thought she was all done with the studio) for a local highland games. The weather was garbage and the car needed gas, so we took my truck and I drove. I sat in the parking lot reading my book until she wandered back after the show an hour and a half later and oof… dead battery in the truck.  We got a boost from one of the other adults, but in the process I noticed my last-legs battery was corroded to the point of imminent failure

    Sunday morning I met the crew for a run and coffee, as usual, and as reported on in a previous post. 

    Then I went home, got showered and changed, and headed over to the store to buy a new battery for the truck. Changing it out—time spent mostly cleaning the corrosion off the leads—took about an hour and then I went for a little drive to make sure there was a solid charge in the new battery.

    I decided it was time to put my feet up and put the hammock out in the backyard, then waded out in grass up past my ankles, and nestled into my hammock… for about seven seconds. I figured I should probably cut the grass before I relaxed completely, and promptly checked off both those items from my afternoon list.

    The making of dinner followed, and after settling in to finish off another book while I waited for the food to digest (and the community free time at the pool to end at seven) I started reading a new novel.

    I capped off the weekend with a long lane swim at the pool shortly after seven, and the kid tagged along to go to the gym. I zonked me out and I was in bed at a reasonable hour like any middle aged guy who had a busy weekend should be.

  • 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.

  • weekend wrap, nine

    Somehow I missed a couple weeks in a row of weekend wraps, which is particularly flustering because one of those weekends was a long weekend, and the Canada Day long weekend to boot. I blame the distraction on that my weekend actually ended on Wednesday, so my headspace was a little out of sync with reality.

    Excuses, excuses.

    So, all that is to say that while I didn’t give updates on the various outings and barbecues and chores that were accomplished, I’m sure you’ll get the sense that a couple busy weeks transpired and what we were left with was our first full weekend in July …and it was kinda mellow.

    This weekend we…

    Reunioned. The Kid has been housesitting and so it was a big deal that we picked her up after work on Friday and went out for vermicelli bowls for dinner. A week out of the house and it already kinda feels like she moved out, even though by this time next week she’ll be back to being underfoot and in my kitchen making a mess again.

    I was tired, and the air had just enough of a hint of firesmoke that I shut myself up in the house and spent my Friday evening reading. Very exciting, huh?

    Saturday was by far more eventful. We were out of the house by eigh-thirty in the morning and scooted down to the Italian market to pick up our lunch in the form of a big ole spicy italian sandwich.

    Then we drove east. I will now, likely to the objection of the dozens of people who live there but who will never read this, decribe the vague are east of the city as the middle of the middle of nowhere. Yes, there are a scattering of smallish towns and barely cities and other rural things to see dotted across the prairies, but essentially there is very little between here and Saskatoon six hours drive down the arrow-straight highway.  We went two hours east, and then north for a bit, and found ourselves in the middle of the middle of the middle of nowhere where on the one hundred and fifteen year old remains of the family farm we had a little family reunion. The dog was not amused.

    We were back on the road home and back into cell service range again by about seven that evening and home by nine, after which there was not much to do besides chill for a bit and then go to bed.

    I woke to rain. Pouring rain. And a determination of a sort to get in a run come hell or high water, the latter seeming a real possibility. I showed up for run club and ended up plodding out a not quite seven klick run drenched and solo.

    I stayed to for coffee and to warm up after.

    Karin and I did the grocery shopping and then I parked myself in the basement as the rain continued to watch some Netflicks before working myself up to start prepping dinner.

    In the meantime, Karin went to pick up the Kid because they had show tix for downtown on Sunday evening and the Kid had not brought any going out clothes to her housesitting gig. The pair of them ate then disappeared for the evening and I had the house to myself to practice my Japanese and my music, in roughly that order. The dog continued to be unamused.