I returned home yesterday after being away for a week. Home these days is a lovely, peaceful place, and I am very lucky to live here. Now that I am retired, I can sit out on my porch and allow myself all the time I want to ponder life’s oddities.
One of these ponders: if I like my home so much, why did I go away on a motorcycle road trip for a week? Or any trip, for that matter?
I’ve arrived on my motorcycle in Edmonton, and have navigated thanks to my GPS from the West end of the city to my hotel in the city’s South East area.
I lived in Edmonton for the first 35 years of my life, but this is the first time that I’ve returned that I could barely recognize … well, anything.
I’m on a motorcycle trip that I will detail later on my Geek on a Harley blog. I’m heading to Edmonton and the highway through Jasper has re-opened recently. I found out last night before starting on today’s ride that limited services have become available in the townsite, so I decided to stop for fuel there.
I spent much of my working life with a perpetual ‘to do’ list. Things were added, things were removed, but the list persisted. This was a supplement to an even bigger ‘to do’ list in the form of a project plan, but the concept was always the same. No matter how carefully I planned, new tasks always found their way onto these lists making any concept of ‘done’ rather elusive.
I’m retired now, and yet the To Do list lives on. I’ve had a household list of some kind for a decade or so, but now in my ‘golden years’ (where’s the gold?) I find the list is filling and emptying far more frequently. Yet some tasks are evergreen and never seem to make their way off the list…
We had some visitors for the past several days. Irene’s cousin Anne and Anne’s husband Lester spent a couple of days with us as they travelled east through the province on their way to Alberta.
We had a really nice visit. I’m not exactly a social animal, but once I get going I probably can talk the ears off of a brass monkey. We had some good chats about a number of things we can’t really control: economics, politics, artificial intelligence, social media, and health. Good meals were prepared and eaten and a few drinks were consumed. And we had some lovely evenings sitting on the porch chatting as the light of the day dissipated.
I’ve made a couple of small changes to my site’s branding. These aren’t big things: I have larger changes planned in the next few months. But they address a couple of things that were bothering me, and hopefully won’t make much of a difference to the folks who visit.
I have updated the title of my site and the ‘favicon’ it uses.
I went into some detail early in 2024 regarding Irene’s cancer diagnosis and how the treatment had progressed to that point. Back then we were still figuring out our ‘new normal’, and although the outcomes were positive it was still a very uncomfortable situation.
Not much has changed medically since January but I thought it was appropriate to give an update on how our life with cancer is progressing.
Achievements are not something I pursue in computer games, and I’ve carried that attitude to Blaugust as well. But it is perhaps a bit fun to at least spend a moment to consider them, so here goes.