Spring actually seems to have arrived this past weekend. I’m going to regret writing that in a week when we get another late-season blizzard that clogs up traffic for a couple days, but between going for a walk in a t-shirt and running in shorts and considering moving the tomato plants outside for a few hours each day going forward, it’s definitely getting closer to spring.

Friday evening we went to the mall. We never go to the mall on a Friday night, and I don’t remember the last time we visited West Edmonton Mall and stayed past closing. But the kid works there now and we offered to come give her a ride home so she didn’t need to take the sketchy bus at half past nine in the evening. So, the mall it was, and by the time we got home that was that for our evening.

I woke up early on Saturday (I mean who sleeps in anymore? well, besides mostly everyone) and had this very clear vision for a wordpress plugin. What a nerd, you are saying, and you would be right to say so. But I spent about three hours bringing that vision to life via a mix of vibe coding and bug squashing and crazy testing. Now I have a automated posting buffer built into this very blog for pinging off a variety of scheduled and random messages to Bluesky and Mastodon social media networks. It works pretty slick, but also kinda reminds me why I don’t bother much with social media to begin with. Sigh.

Karin and I took the middle part of the day to do chores. We sold a bunch of our old LEGO to a local second hand LEGO store (there is really a whole store for that nearby) and then took most of that money to go buy house paint. It’s all part of the same project as the Kid plans to move into the basement, possibly as soon as this week. It’s been cleaning and sorting and selling and cleaning and shuffling and soon painting. Then it will be a lot of moving.  All of it to give the Kid, now adult, some of her own space with a couple sets of stairs between her and her parents.

We stopped on the way home and bought a whole tray of chicken wings, which I fried up in the deep fryer along with a batch of homemade fries. It was not a healthy dinner, but it was pretty tasty. C&A came by to play games and drink beer, but mostly to join us to go watch EF doing a figure skating competition at the rec centre nearby. We were out being social until well past our bedtime and then walked home in the still-warmish spring air.

Sunday I did my run, of course. I personally logged twelve klicks as I continue to build to my half marathon in August. I say personally because were at the scattered training phase where one group of ten people running together somehow logs about five different distances as people add on, drop back, start early, bail out, or whatever. Either way, we all met for coffee after. Well, I drank tea, but we’ll pretend.

The afternoon was a bit of a drag as we dove into our taxes. I doubt any ‘mercuns are reading this, but our taxes aren’t due for a few days yet so we’re not quite late—though with my tangled mess of incomes, having gone back to school briefly for upgrading last year and the kid now a real ‘dult with a real income and going to school and cashing out some registered educational savings… well, it wasn’t quite a standard fill in the blanks year for us.

The gals ran off to do their pilates class mid way through and I took a break from the numbers, to play some music, but the evening chilled out a little as we had dinner and settled into just hanging out. Heck, if every weekend were this busy I’d need a vacation from my vacation.