It is Thanksgiving here in Canada this weekend. I really don’t think much about this holiday: Irene asked if we were making a special meal, and we agreed to order pizza later and save the big dinner thing for Christmas.
But I do often think about being grateful for what I have. I haven’t made a commitment yet to practicing daily gratitude or anything quite so progressive, but I do feel that making an effort to account for the benefits I receive in life is worth while. In that vein, here are a few things I’m grateful for at this point in 2024.
Emily of Monsterlady’s Diary posted recently about what she might do if she had a million dollars to give away and it focused on making sure her family and herself could own their own homes. I have thought about this very issue quite a bit as I’ve aged, and pondered it some more this morning sitting on my deck with Finn and my coffee.
I think that one of the things that would bring me comfort as I ‘age out’ of society would be knowing that the generations following mine could have a fair chance to own a home. I think that is a bit of stretch given current conditions. But there are some things I’ll be watching for before my ashes are put in a jar somewhere.
Ah, the signs of fall in the Kootenays. Some of the trees have started to change their colours a bit early. The nights have a distinct chill to them: not quite frosty yet, but there is definitely a sense of that coming. The robins seem to have gotten quieter, and some tiny birds are performing strange flocking dances that don’t appear earlier in the year.
The strongest indicators of fall for me, though, come down to three annual chores that I’ve grown accustomed to.
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 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.
Blaugust 2024 was my very first blogging event of any kind. As August comes to an end so too does the Blaugust festival, and the topic of this final week is ‘Lessons Learned’. I obviously learned a lot since I’m a complete neophyte to such events.
I suppose that the most obvious thing I learned from Blaugust was that participating in such an event can be fun! But what else did I learn in the process? A bit of introspection is in order…
