Dispatches from a happy Hullian

It's the Sunday after the Wednesday Elizabeth and Vivien took off for Europe. My general strategy is to keep myself and the kids here busy. We rode the Cycle for CHEO (15 km edition, to keep it manageable for Ada on a one-speed kid BMX bike) and it went pretty well — Oscar zipped off ahead despite my admonition to stick together but we didn't have too much trouble finding them. We took some time to hang out with Simon (who had done the 35 km on their own), chowed down on the included BBQ and wandered the activities — Ada sat in the driver's seat of the OC Transpo EV bus while Oscar assembled a cardboard O-Train and double-decker bus in one of the passenger seats (and took some prompting to dislodge).

We've been eating things that Elizabeth and/or Vivien don't (sushi! pancakes! meat sausages!) and on the PD day Oscar went off to the library after the bunch of us had sushi with Andrea. Yesterday Ada and I met up with Andrea and Morgen for a visit to the Ottawa Art Gallery at the speed of four-year-old attention span (we can get away with that because admission is free!) followed by Byward Market ice cream and a community barbecue at the Children's Garden.

One unsettling thing that happened on Thursday night was that someone was skulking around the yard and went into our garage, smoked in there, moved things around and, as far as I can tell, didn’t take anything — might have borrowed Elizabeth's bike helmet for a bit, and I thought they stole the digging fork but then it turned up inside the garage (it had been leaning against the fence). I think I saw the guy putting back the bike helmet. Odd — at first I thought Elizabeth had left her bike and helmet somewhere and the guy (not a familiar one, but I'm not at every open mic…) was bringing them back? They also moved the chicken feeding station out of their coop and unplugged the light in there. It wasn't hard to put things back and the garage smoke smell has dissipated but it was pretty unsettling.

This coming week I deliver the presentation on our unit's specialty to the recruits at work — I've delivered it last decade but it's been a while so I've spruced it up and am looking forward to it. I think, with me responsible for the kids in the evening, I might book a morning off for a second 32ish km run before tapering to Race Weekend.

1) What are you doing this spring that you weren't doing 1 year ago?

Making a habit of running or cycling daily.

2) What pandemic precautions are you still taking?

Giving people space, masking up indoors, seeing less of people than I'd like and giving strangers more personal space including stepping off the sidewalk as we pass each other. Also, got vaccinated!

3) What's a safety rule that's very important to you?

Don't surprise drivers.

4) What plants are blooming where you live?

A lot of the spring flowers have come and gone... strawberry flowers are still open, bleeding hearts too, and honeysuckle has some flowers holding on and lots of golden fallen petals under the bushes.

5) What was your most memorable summer job?

Probably working on web development in the mid-to-late 90s as part of a bold little enrichment program which connected talented rural kids with community groups that wanted websites. I discovered ramen, both ends of a job interview, Photoshop and Illustrator, hand-coding HTML, and doing tech projects in teams. I liked how us kids taught each other a lot of what we needed to do and I liked biking to work and having my own money.

Questions: thefridayfive

It's been a bit of a challenging winter and spring here, as everywhere. We're all still healthy here, employed, eating eggs from the backyard hens, so not as challenging as it could be, but still.

One of my union colleagues died last weekend. Mehran was quick to welcome me aboard when I got elected to the national Research Group executive, and quick to be friendly and to do what needed doing in general. He was also curious and open and talked happily of his love of food, dance and life in between matters of helping members and being good unionists. I'll miss him; there'll be a very empty virtual chair next weekend at the Group meeting.

Work is a bit of a slog... getting traction and coordinating people is hard and tiring sometimes, and there's a lot of staff movement and random requests going around. I might be able to make some good changes in an upcoming Lean process review, which would help me feel like I'm leaving things in good shape when I find an opportunity somewhere that fits me better. The return to virtual school for the kids, extended one week at a time since Easter, has thrown my routine and energy out of wack, even though Elizabeth has been taking the brunt of the daytime parenting. I have a fair amount of extracurricular stuff going on — Positive Space is getting more active again, union work continues with consultation and a stewarding case that might have legs. Those extras are work but they help make work more meaningful. In good pandemic news, our age slices are up for registering for a first shot next week... I'm hoping for Johnson and Johnson just so I'll be done (and apparently there are 300k doses of J&J coming into Canada now, but there are some possible bumps), but any shot in my arm is a good shot.

I've been mixing running and biking for my mental health/exercise time. I'm still shooting to run and now also bike every public street with asphalt and a name — I'm over half done on the bike and nearly two-thirds on feet. I've been varying it partly because if I run long distances too many days in a row my muscles have some concerns. But overall I'm getting pretty good at this, and seeing everywhere in the Hull sector at least twice, sometimes in different seasons, has been pretty cool. I know where our favourite tofu burgers come from because I've run past the factory in an industrial park. I can see new streets and developments go up, moving the goalposts for this whole silly game.

I'm missing seeing my Vanier loves in person — we've got our stopgaps — virtual D&D, grove rituals (happy Beltaine!), video storytime (Heather has finished the first book of Lord of the Rings with the kids) and various one-on-one chats. I used to do walk-and-talk after the kids were in bed by phone, but the 8 PM curfew has made that harder. Once the restrictions are loosened maybe walking and talking in person will be a thing again.

I biked to work yesterday and brought the kids to swimming on the big bike today… it's cold but the streets are clear enough. Part of the street-clearing by the city involved dumping huge chunks of ice on our front lawn and smashing a garden box. It was on the easement and hidden under a snowbank but it seemed gratuitous. Oscar was pretty full of rage last night when he found out.

I'm trying to streamline and delegate stuff at work… delegation is its own sort of work but I think I'm getting some of it done. Union concerns are ramping up with a perfect storm of performance talk season, new initiatives from management and bargaining.

Honestly I'm feeling a little overwhelmed today: beer bottling kind of took over the kitchen last night and a whole bunch of furniture is shuffled around for a house concert today. Our kitchen tap is acting a little flaky and there is a buck of work and life stress swirling around me. I hope things settle down soon. Maybe biking season will be good for my state of mind.

The allergist's waiting room may be good for my writing, now that I've finished the Persepolis graphic novels (in the original French — my European-style swearing will be greatly improved) — thanks, spacefem for the impetus! Persepolis got more personal and relatable as I got further along; the voice was funny and poignant and the drawing was always expressive. It is well worth the read.

I'm out on the bicycle for the season, although it looks like I may have a few days of bussing while the coming snow storm hits and melts. It feels good and makes picking up things and getting Viv to her dance class a lot easier, but I will have to be careful of my knees.

Elizabeth and the kids have a bunch of vegetable and flower seeds started in the back — marigolds, broccoli, tomatoes… I am looking forward to really getting the garden going. That and the new, more local, CSA we're signed up for should have us eating well this summer.

Easter was lovely this year — the egg hunt went on into Monday, the feasting was tasty, and soccer in the back field with kids and super-cousins was a blast. I'll leave talk of the bonfire to a picture post. It'll have to wait a couple of days at least, though.

Today, I took the kids into the Glebe and back (14 km round trip) in the new bike trailer:



Neither of them really likes getting a helmet put on, Oscar's seatmate manners are still a work in progress (trailering, with faster-moving scenery, they're a little better than strollering) and Oscar was loudly and urgently wondering for a while where Mama was on the way home (she was riding behind us). Despite all that, they were both asleep when we pulled into home. It was Elizabeth's first bike ride out of the season — she went out ahead in the morning to record some additional vocals for her album, and I came later with the kids to add my screaming to one track, get Vivien a snack (soda crackers were only so satisfying during recording), say hi to Sarah at Nicastro's and have tasty sandwiches for lunch at the Wild Oat before heading home together. It was my and Oscar's first ride out post-tune-up (yay, chain grease) and Vivien's first bike trailer ride ever! I was quite happy with how the new trailer handled with two kids and gear in it.

Sunday, I got in my token February bike ride, to get groceries. It was just around freezing and quite refreshing.

I also realized I haven't posted Oscar-with-teeth photos yet.

( Here's one. )

1. What did you do in 2010 that you'd never done before?
Fathered a child (well, I guess some salient bits were done in 2009), grew peas, built a hardwood floor, drafted a will, published a statistics paper, took a train in business class, drove a pickup truck.
( thirty-seven more )

I'm writing from the couch with Pixel the Relatively New Cat lying on my legs. She's kind of the Ernie to Noisette's Bert: sociable, talkative, stripey and drives Noisette a little crazy. They're getting along a bit better than they did at first, though.

I'm in my second week of a two-week vacation: Elizabeth's music school shuts down for two weeks in the summer, and my projects are all long-term enough that two weeks in the summer without me won't kill them, so we co-ordinated. Happily, Kaleioscope Gathering was also on, and so we hopped on our (fully-loaded with panniers and a trailer full of gear) bikes and went out to Planatagenet or thereabouts to camp under soft pines, participate in a communal camp kitchen, learn about partner yoga, thai massage, herbs, relationships, vocal techniques and esoteric stuff, hang out with fun pagans and pagan-friendly people, acquire a thumb piano, and attract most of the security on duty to our campsite — with rumours of chocolate fondue. Like teinm_laida was reporting, people there for the most part have their guard down and are their genuine, enjoyably weird selves.

The garden is doing really, really well. The exciting bits lately are red Russian kale coming up where the spinach was, and a zucchini patch that wants to take over the world. Also of note are the beginnings of a blackberry patch behind the compost!

I commented with "words" over at stateofwonder's journal, and she gave me five words to riff on:

( biking • Quebec • Scrabble • Mathematics/Statistics • home cooking )

Well, it seems that this time last year is still on the first page of my Livejournal — I guess I'm a little uncommunicative on here. I hope a few more meaty updates will be in the near future, as well as the traditional good/blah table for all your point-form needs…

Elizabeth and I read really differently. Whether it's a book or a magazine, I tend to read stuff straight through; I at least have to take a crack at a chapter or article and give up on it before moving on to the next one. She moves around the volume and picks out what appeals to her. With good books, we both read the same amount of stuff.

( good/blah )