metawidget | Entries tagged with travel: western adventure

Back from Banff, and the collective agreement passed the member vote on Monday — life is pretty good right now!

Banff was a really fun adventure — time with Heather, Andrea, Morgen and Oscar; seeing some glaciers; hiking every day; no major logistical bumps! Oscar had lots of questions and observations about air travel and (surprisingly to me) declared his favourite adventures to be the hot springs. I think he liked the ritual — hot, cold, ramps, taps… and maybe the fact that the Nordik here is 16+ so he got to do an older teenager thing. The hot springs we visited were very different from the Nordik, though: run by Parks Canada, only slightly more expensive than bus fare, and lots of families and middle-class-looking people, and also several languages being spoken around us. Both at Radium Springs and at Banff. Might be a Western thing and it was refreshing.

I'm back at work for another couple of days and then back into the woods to revel with the ecumenical pagans… I've been roped into helping out with a ritual, and we're starting to plan a small communal camp kitchen. I'm looking forward to more down time before a busy fall of continuing to learn my new business line and continuing union stuff. I was thinking of trying to organize a little workshop for organizer types to drink mead, swap tips and share stories, good and bad… but maybe next year, or maybe just informally in the time I might have been ill-advisedly participating in foam sword duels… and if I just relax and ritualize, that will be fine too.

Current Mood: happy
Current Location: STO #33
Crossposts: https://metawidget.livejournal.com/223550.html

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Today is the day Oscar and I head out for Banff! I feel a little under-packed but I think it's that we're not camping… we'll be staying and going on adventures around the area with Heather, Andrea and Morgen for nearly a week. It's my first time in Banff and first vacation with H&A, and Oscar's first time out of the time zone or travelling by plane.

I've been busy lately: we negotiated a tentative agreement for research employees in the core federal public service and now members are voting. I did my but for the ratification campaign with a seminar and talking it up around the office. Odds are very good we'll have a better-than-inflation pay bump, some new rights, and a contract until 2022!

Adapting to the new position is feeling a little long… I'm still trying to hold the fort a little on some of my old duties as my replacement there is due to arrive around Christmas. The ways of doing things in the new division are pretty different, too… I know feeling competent takes a while but it's hard. I'm good at many things, but by unit's business is taking a lot of learning and I find myself trying to pepper my weeks with some of the things I am good at — holding the fort on my old work, Positive Space, union stuff… Anyhow, I have some downtime now and will come back to some routine tasks of my new unit that I'll be able to help take care of. I'm hoping a little basic stuff will help me get my feet under me. The learning will continue!

Current Location: Couch at home
Crossposts: https://metawidget.livejournal.com/223375.html

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It's a nice day today, we've got plans to hit the annual opening party for our neighborhood garden box project. Vivien has somehow managed to lose her bike helmet, which is a big hit to our family mobility. I've been wandering around looking for it to no avail.

I got that promotion… true to form this was the time I had figured it wasn't going to happen and that I should just plan for another couple of years in my old post. The new team (I'm leading a team of six) seems like a nice one and I've got a good 2IC who knows the work very well. I've got a lot of the subject-independent skills and I probably know more of the statistical nuts and bolts than I feel like I do now. I'm going to a new office on a floor with the open "2.0" plan; so far I think it'll work out okay.

I went on TV on TV and talked about polyamory and how I do it… you can only pack so much into 22 minutes or whatever, and I was on (in the second half) with a counsellor who had her views and a program to promote, but I think I did okay for my first time on live TV.

Next week is going to involve a lot of bargaining… once an election writ is dropped we have to wait until the next Parliament is good and settled before negotiating again… probably 2020. But we'll be working hard (and staying late) to get it done.

We're starting to plan the summer a bit — Elizabeth is making musical plans, we've signed the older kids up for a week of climbing camp, we'll probably festival with the pagans a couple of times… and in what I hope is the start of a series of adventures with individual kids, I'm going with Oscar to visit Heather, Andrea and Morgen in Banff for a week in July: his first passenger air experience and sight of what Albertans call real mountains :) I'm pretty excited and hour it will be wonderful bonding and relaxing time.

Current Mood: cheerful
Crossposts: https://metawidget.livejournal.com/223208.html

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stalkingsilence provided me with seven questions:

What is your current favourite song?: I think "Shake it Out", by Florence + The Machine. It's ludicrously catchy, anyway.
What is your ultiamate comfort food?: Galumptious Mac and Cheese, or maybe a bit too much Bridge Mixture. But there is lots of good comfort food out there, so it is hard to choose.
What book are you currently reading? Or what book would you like to read but haven't yet?: I just finished The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood. It was a fun read; I think the characters were more relatable and had more interesting problems than in Oryx and Crake, but Atwood was still having the same sort of parody-dystopia-building fun.
What's your favourite part of being a dad?: Being a toddler amusement park is pretty fun, and so is realizing that my learning curve is starting to catch up with his (for now).
Favourite Canadian museum that you've visited?: I have a soft spot of the National Gallery. When I didn't live here, I would take a couple of hours to visit it almost every time I came up. I should go back more often now that I live here. It's too bad it isn't free like it used to be — it's a bit of a disincentive, particularly if I may be with an awake toddler with a short attention span, to pay by the visit. Maybe they could charge by the hour!
Describe the best holiday you ever had.: I think our cross-country train trip (wow, I didn't really blog that — here are some pictures, behind Facebook security in Elizabeth's account) may have been a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
What does a typical day off for you look like?: Breakfast could be the usual toast or baked goods, coffee and juice, or Elizabeth might make biscuits or pancakes. I'll manage to get some unstructured time to myself for reading or Internetting while Elizabeth and Oscar take a nap. I'll take Oscar with me on some errands to give Elizabeth a break to practice music. We may go as a family off to some happening out of the house, and we'll almost certainly get some Oscar playtime. I'll catch up on laundry, cat boxes and other chores, and Elizabeth will probably clean a bit and get the dishes under control. It's usually a pretty low-key sort of day off, but it's a nice change of pace.

If you want some questions to get your writing juices flowing, let me know in the comments!

Current Mood: sleep-deprived
Current Location: J8Y 3E7
Crossposts: http://metawidget.livejournal.com/181232.html

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I'm writing on the night of St. Patrick's Day, on the train in the dark. We're sleeping in seats for this leg of the trip, right behind a family with a young child who's uninterested in sleeping just now.

The vibes in sleeper class and coach are quite different; our travelling mates in sleeper seemed like fellow summer campers — lots of interaction, kicking around the club car and talking, and stuff in common — VIA employees on retirement or vacation and teachers were way overrepresented back there, and our companions were on average gayer and greyer than the general population. Up here in the front, people seem to tend to have their own built-in groups: families and travelling companions, including the group of barely-eighteen Swiss kids who, on boarding in Edmonton, proceeded to jam barely-eighteen porn magazines in the window shades somehow, which the staff and older passengers studiously looked away from until one of the crew encouraged the youths to take their porn down from public display.

Sleeper class food is excellent and plentiful. I think K. at work warned me that we might put on weight on a trip like this one, and she may be right.

The views out the windows have been very pretty — most of the time the weather out here has been clear and bright (and not too bitterly cold when we've gotten out of the train to stretch our legs). Most of our time in Saskatchewan's famed flatness was in the dark, but we did see those rocking oil pumps in fields in Alberta, and a lot of countryside that looks kind of like Ormstown, with a different mix of trees — or not. Today, however, was my first time ever in the presence of mountains with pointy tops capped in snow, as opposed to the rounded, smaller mountains we have back home.

Tomorrow (most likely today by the time I touch the Internet and post this), we're going to spend our first significant amount of time on solid ground in Vancouver, but then get back on a wobbly surface for the ferry trip to Victoria and

aeon_of_maat.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: Somewhere in the Rockies between Pyramid Falls and Kamloops.

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I'm writing from Toronto, waiting for Elizabeth to catch up with me in the lounge they let us sleeper-class passengers use. I hope her audition for the Folk Festival went well... because now it's basically vacation time!

...aside from the little bit of contract programming for an old client of mine that I picked up and procrastinated on a bit. But I think the really important parts are done, and the files are sent off. I hope any little fixes will feel like recreational programming.

I can't quite believe we're actually doing this Crazy Cross-Country Rail Trip — it came up fast, but it should be fun. We'll have somewhat intermittent Internet once we get beyond Windsor later tonight, but I'll try to record the bits of our journey in blog posts and pictures, and fire them off when we have a signal. We leave Toronto at 10, so we'll grab some good food (I hope) near Union Station.

Good blog post on protectionist sentiment, the economy, gambling ads and appearing concerned:

http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/ephemera/too-many-symbols.php

Also, I'm a bit disappointed in our Liberal senators, who earlier this week seemed ready to strip un-stimulus stuff (bashing public service unions, removing women's right to go to court for pay equity) out of the budget and pass the actual spending stuff, only to be pressured, it seems, by the MPs to hold their noses and pass the whole omnibus shebang. It's back to the last Parliament, where the Cons are evil and the Libs have no backbone — same strategy, too: the Cons do something all-or-nothing with a few reasonable elements (stimulus package, not having another election), the Libs object briefly, the Cons accuse them of obstructing the few nice things in their package, conveniently ignoring the ideological payload, and the Libs fall over themselves trying not to look obstructionist, whether it's sitting out votes or pushing senators to skip the due dilligence. I think it actually kind of tied in with Matthew Skala's article above, it's all about perception and symbols and not much about what a measure actually does.

Current Mood: bouncy
Current Location: Union Station, Toronto
Current Music: Collective Soul. "Goodnight, Good Guy" from Hints Allegations And Things Left Unsaid.

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Dispatches from a happy Hullian

sometimes known as Woodgiepapa

Entries tagged with travel: western adventure

Summer migrations

Adventures and learning

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May 2024

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