New year and new “weekend” report title. The Weekend Wrap is becoming the Weekender for 2026, so stay tuned for rambling reports on how we spent ours.

The Kid went out on Friday, so Karin and I dug a gift card out of the archives and hit the local pub for drinks and dinner. The place was packed, but there must have been a game on or something because there were a lot of “game day” specials, and between the card and the sales we barely spent twenty bucks out of pocket.

Not complaining.

Saturday was brunch.

Ms. SL hosted a little get together at her house and we all brought brunchy potluck items. There were waffles and eggs and bacon and little quiches and a whole bunch of fruit and even mimosas. Then, giant kids as we apparently are, we went out behind their house with our sleds and made fools of ourselves on the hill.

For a bunch of people in their late forties and early fifties we’re probably just lucky no one broke a bone or something.

That evening we got dressed up a bit and went out to the Jube, the big local theatre that was putting on a show of The Lord of the Rings in Concert, which was basically them playing the first movie of the trilogy in its entirety on a big screen while the orchestra and a hundred-person choir did the score live.

Our friend Ada was part of the choir (which is ninety-percent of the reason we went) but it was a pretty cool experience either way.

It turned into a late night tho because we hung around waiting to talk to her after they got off stage—but we did miss the worst of the traffic.

Sunday I got up and went out on my first outdoor run of the year.

Yeah, January eleven and I haven’t been outside to run this year until just now. The streets have either been too icy or the weather has been too brutally cold, and actually that has been the case since just before Christmas. The Sunday paths were pretty choppy, oatmeal as we call it, but it was refreshing to be back outdoors after a couple long weeks of indoor pain.

After lunch, Karin got it in her head that we should watch the next movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy that afternoon so she put on the extended edition of The Two Towers, the second in the series. I had forgotten it was literally four hours long, so by the time we finished our afternoon was completely gone and we had to make some dinner.

A bit of reading, a bit of writing, a bit of sketching, and that rounded out the first post-holiday weekend of the year. Not much to say when you can’t go too far outside, I guess.