works of wanderlust

Tag: weekend warrior

  • weekend wrap eight

    The last three days have been punctuated by epic thundershowers meaning not only does the lawn now desperately need to be mowed thanks to the rain, but also that it was a good weekend for a time-consuming indoor actitivity.

    This weekend was filled with:

    Games. Anita scored a pair of tickets to the annual Game Con convention over at the expo center, three-day VIP passes, and she apparently had no interest in attending. One ticket to her husband, obviously, but I took the second and spent a huge chunk of the weekend, including Friday, there.

    Friday I got to the con just before lunch, did some of miniatures painting, wandered around, watched a couple demos, and then met up with Chris on his break, who was volunteering there all weekend, and we played some board games in the middle hall.

    I skedattled out of there around five, and chilled with the dog through another thunderstorm as the evening pressed on.

    Saturday I got up and got back to the con to meet Aaron. We did some wandering and product sampling, checked out a lot of the vendor booths and then watched some of the mainstage shows while we ate mediocre poutine. He took off around 2 and I stuck around a little longer to paint another free Warhammer miniature.

    Back home later that afternoon we made dinner and I retreated to the basement to read.

    Sunday morning was a beautiful sunny day and so we logged a nice ten klick run in the river valley.

    Sunday was also a dual event in our house, Karin’s birthday and also Father’s day, so the poor kid was juggling gifts and cards and being in a good mood.

    I had bought Karin a 2 player “duel” variatiaion of another board game we like. Finding good two player games is our new challenge as the parents of a kid just about to launch into university, and we played a couple rounds trying to figure out the rules… then the strategy.

    We walked the dog over to the cafe for something else to do later that afternoon, and then as the evening pressed on we went for a slow but tasty dinner at the nearby sushi place to celebrate the double celebration day.

    And then, just because it had been a busy couple of days, I hunkered down for the rest of the drizzly night to finish off another book in my queue so that I could move onto other things… not that it’s a race or anything.

  • 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.

  • weekend wrap six

    Summer marches ever closer, even though the temperatures would argue  that it arrived a couple weeks ago. I worked with a guy once who would argue obessively that we did seasons wrong, and that the solstices and equinoxes —equinois? — equinoctes?, whatever, should in fact mark the mid-points of each season and that the transition was much fuzzier than a June such and such a day is now summer. To his point, this would mean that summer would have started on or about May 6 and run through mid-August when autumn begins. And I mean, he’s not completely wrong… but it’s not a fight I’m picking up here. The point being is that it did strictly become June this past weekend and is definitely feels very summery.

    In that summer vibe, this past weekend we:

    Went to bed early on Friday. Maybe I’m in my autumn years, but I knew I was up for a long and busy couple of days and the heat of the past week had tired me out.

    Had a medical appointment on Saturday morning. That’s not really something to hold up and brag about I suppose, but I’ve got some little minor nagging cough that I’ve been dealing with for over a year now and the medical system is a series of appointments and tests and more appointments and trying not to gaslight myself into thinking it’s all in my head—which it isn’t. Alas, so much for keeping this lighthearted, huh?

    Drove to Red Deer to drop off the dog because apparently she is not considered part of the family enough to attend the family reunion. Or maybe it was a facility rule, I dunno.

    Attended the family reunion marking the century status of my paternal paternals immigration to Canada.  Yeah, my great grandparents bumbled their way across the Altantic a hundred years ago this month or something and now a whole bunch of their descendants think they own the damn place. Not so much me, I’d argue. But that’s a post for another day. Instead I’ll just say I spent the afternoon bitching and gossiping in the sunshine with my cousins. Yikes. 

    Drove back to the city in the biggest damn not-quite-summer windstorm I’d ever seen, clouds of impenetrable dust blowing off the fields with people going half speed down the highway with their blinkers on at points.

    Ran a lovely 10k morning run with the crew.

    Filled a small concert venue with fellow orchestra-mates and a sold out house for our year end concert. Apparently there is potluck party tonight, but then our season is over until the fall and I have some violin maintenance to attend to.

    Read. Read. Read. And finished another book. Review… eventually. 

    And of course, listened to the wind which never really seemed to stop blowing all weekend.

  • 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.

  • weekend wrap four

    Used to be that May Long Weekend was a rite of spring to which we all looked forward. Maybe people still do. Entrenched as I am, it was just another weekend, albeit one where the family hung around the house for an extra day. In fact, the Kid has a five day weekend and as far as I know is still at home asleep as I write this.

    But long weekend or not we continue with the inventory of accomplishments to mark the passage of time.

    This past weekend we…

    Spent Friday evening playing host to the penultimate performance of the Kid’s high school musical debut as Rosie in Mamma Mia! A dozen friends and family made the trek to the high school theatre for the show, and what is better for the ego than the soothing tunes of ABBA while watching one’s nearly adult daughter play a randy middle aged washed up rock star?

    I must have eaten something funny Friday night tho, because Saturday morning was a wash of me recovering from a terrible night.

    We did manage to play host to my sister, niece and nephew who came up for the Saturday matinee and then joined us for burgers and milkshakes at the Varsity.

    I went to be early.

    Sunday was a great morning for a run and I wrote a whole post about my longest run of the calendar year.

    And then with the great weather temporarily bringing out the sun, I set up the solar-powered bluetooth speaker, blasted some tunes and planted my garden. Everything is seeded and watered and irrigated in a kind of haphazard organizational scheme of square-foot gardening meets my knees are not up for this anymore.

    We dug into the latest Star Wars series Andor over a glass of wine later that evening.

    And the next morning the kid came with me for coffee, yeah coffee, and we sat in Starbucks for an hour me writing and she doing her physics homework.

    I started a secret series behind the scenes of this blog. I’m going to try doing more month-long self-improvement experiments. You can read more about the first of those in a month when I post the results.

    I spent a chilly afternoon adding a bunch of security fixes to this blog because I noticed that along with the increase in readship traffic there has been a parallel increase in bot hackers trying to barge through my password. Suck it hackers. Go use your powers to hurt some greedy billionaire corpo, not some asshole in a starbucks trying to hold his sanity together.

    Of course, what with it being a long weekend, Monday was the regular orchestra rehearsal night, not cancelled despite the holiday because we have a concert in less than two weeks.

    And then I went to bed a little early. It was a long weekend, after all.