59: October Update

I can’t believe it’s almost Hallowe’en.

The past month has included a number of ‘normal’ activities, though I wouldn’t say it feels like things are back to normal, in general.

On the abnormal (but good!) side, we’ve ticked off a few longstanding items on our house deficiency list. We put in the headers above the kitchen cabinets, and the trim around the bathroom linen cabinet.

I found two things surprising about getting these items done: First, they each took less than a day to complete. We’d been stalling forever on doing them because they seemed like huge hurdles to get past, but they really weren’t that bad. Second, while it was satisfying to get them done and checked off the list, they actually don’t make a huge difference. I am hoping it will be another story when all the pieces are done. Fingers crossed, anyway.

We had our weekend getaway to Victoria a few weeks back. Luckily this was before it started raining every weekend; we had beautiful sunshine for the whole trip. We ate in restaurants, visited with friends, family and former neighbours, explored the city, did a ghost tour and saw baby goats. Overall it was a very good weekend. The busiest we’ve had in almost 2 years, and all fun stuff.

While we ate a lot of good food and saw interesting things, I would say the best part was just having the chance to catch up with people we haven’t seen in a long time.

Here are the two pictures I took over the entire weekend:

On Thanksgiving weekend, we had dinner at my mom’s. This was the first family dinner we’ve had with my mom and my sister and her family, indoors, since the pandemic started. My mom used to regularly host large family dinners with one whole side of the family in attendance, but we realized that the last one had come and gone without our knowing it was the last one. By the time large gatherings are back, my mom will most likely be in her new, much smaller house.

That night after dinner we made the trip out to Abbotsford to attend Suburban Swing. It was our first indoor dancing experience since March of 2020. We opted to wear our masks the whole time, even though it was a vaccinated only event, and I can’t speak for Michel, but I didn’t find that it cramped my style at all.

The event felt quite safe and while there weren’t as many people there as there would have been previously, it was enough people to keep it interesting and fun. It was great to be on a nice smooth, wood floor again and dance with some of my favourites. We would definitely go back, but being on a Sunday night and so far away, we only consider it when we have Monday off, so it might be a while.

As much as I’ve been trying not to let myself get excited about our potential trip to Ireland next spring, we ended up booking flights. Aeroplan had an end of September deadline for bookings that included one free cancellation or change, so we thought we might as well jump on it while there’s no risk involved.

Our years of saving points are paying off with this trip – our total cost is $150 for the flights and we’re coming home direct, in fancy pods. I’m not a big fan of flying but that makes it a lot more palatable.

And then, once the flights were booked it got pretty difficult not to start looking into what we wanted to do while we were there… so now I have a couple of hotels booked too and some ideas for our itinerary. All have full cancellation options though, so again, no risk – except that of being disappointed.

Now here we are almost at the end of October. Where has 2021 gone?

Since my last post, I’ve made quite good progress on the sweater I’m knitting. I would guess it’s about 75% complete now.

I’m still working through The Artist’s Way. I have been pretty half-hearted in my effort to do the exercises, and I’ve started slacking off on my Morning Pages as well. I am still planning to complete the book, even if I am just reading each week’s chapter. I am enjoying the reading part and even some of the writing exercises, but I’m not very motivated to put in a lot of time and effort right now.

And lastly, because it was so strange, I will tell you about the dream I had last night: We had a bear in the house. It was a bit of a problem because we didn’t know how to get it out, but the bigger problem was that there were two gorillas outside the front window and they were making the bear very agitated. At one point it took a run at the glass, which cracked but didn’t break. I was having a hard time finding the non-emergency police number (in the light of day I feel like this maybe would have qualified for a 911 call, but apparently it didn’t seem so in the dream) or the Animal Services number on my phone.

I don’t remember being particularly scared, just concerned about the potential conflict if the bear and gorillas managed to get to each other. Someone please interpret this for me.