works of wanderlust

weekender, three

The weather has warmed in the last week, but mostly that just means we can’t go outside because the freeze and thaw cycle is leaving the sidewalks a horrific mess of glazed ice.

We settled in on Friday evening and watched the (delayed) stream of the Olympics opening ceremony from Milan, etc. We visited Milan in 2023 as part of our meandering European summer vacation, and Milan was one of the very small handful of places I was not revisiting from my previous travels over there.

We ordered a couple of sets of AirPods from our Airmiles points. (Apparently they are changing the system so we decided we may as well cash out as much as we could and reset before the changes screwed us over or something worse.) So I spent most of the weekend trying out the crazy technology. I’ve been enjoying the noise cancellation feature and made more use of it over the weekend than I thought I would. (In fact, as I write this in a noisy cafe it is absolute distraction-reducing bliss!)

Saturday I got back into the running game. I have been couched for three weeks with a minor back injury, a strain from slipping on the aforementioned icy sidewalks, and I’ve been parked on rest duty barely able to move. I haven’t been running. I haven’t been swimming. I haven’t been to orchestra because I couldn’t lift my arms high enough to hold my violin. It’s sucked. But mid-last week it all just sort of cleared up overnight, so I was off to the races once again, literally, heading off to partake in a Park Run.

It was my worst time ever logged in my dozen or so runs of that course, but between the terrible conditions and the alternative of being stuck back on the couch, I wasn’t complaining too much. Not too much.

The Kid was cast in a one act play at the university, so she has been busy, busy, busy rehearsing for the last two months for that. It all culminated at this weekend when the New Works Festival took to the stage. We actually went to opening night on Thursday, but she had shows on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon too, so her weekend was pretty much completely consumed by that.

I didn’t go to the Saturday evening show, tho, and I stayed at home catching up on my television backlog before the subscriptions expire and then sitting in the basement making some music.

I was back out on the somehow icier trails on Sunday morning, joining the crew for our #SundayRunday neighbourhood lap. Coffee ensued. Of course. And that pretty much ate up most of my morning before needing to rush back to get cleaned up for my afternoon.

With the Kid’s show successfully wrapped and her riding on a cloud of post-production bliss, we made a fancy-ish dinner and had a celebratory slice of cake (she even put a #3 candle on in because she had finished three shows!)

Her and I watched a weird indie movie and then spent another hour discussing what it meant and then looking up videos to try and have someone else explain it all to us.

I had planned to do some writing but instead sat with my laptop in bed migrating some databases to deal with an upgrade notice. Ah, the joys of running a website. Sunday evening doing technical maintenance is a helluva way to end the weekend, huh?

February 9, 2026
cough-ee, two

I’m still coffee-less.

I won’t further bore you with the medical details, but for reasons of pressing health management I have not been drinking coffee for over a month. I haven’t been avoiding caffeine, per se, but given that coffee was my major source of the stimulant I have simultaneously come close to clearing that out of my diet, too.

In other word, January was a helluva month, and February is off to about the same vibe as January.

As has been my routine for the last twenty-five odd years or so I have started my day with a cup of joe. My tastes for what goes in that coffee has shifted and changed over the years, but the coffee ritual itself has long been a consistent track on the daily playlist.

When I left my last full time gig, now two and a half years ago, my morning coffee ritual became a little bit more important. I would daily start my productivity with a mug of coffee and and open keyboard, and two or three times a week I would hit up one of the four or five local cafes and settle in on some borrowed wifi and a cup of freshly brewed dark roast.

I went into the Starbucks yesterday and walked to the counter. The woman recognized me and by name offered, “Hey Brad, it’s a tall dark roast, right?”

“Uh—actually—” I replied. It was awkward for a moment but I recovered. “I’ll have a mint tea this morning.”

“Oh, of course—no problem. I’ll grab that for you right here.” I could tell I had thrown off her entire day, too—or maybe she is dealing with my coffee-less life way better than I and I am almost certainly exaggerating the effect it was having on her. Yeah, the second one.

Going coffee-less is having the desired physiological results, in case you are wondering. The health concerns that were suspected of exacerbating my symptoms have all but vanished in the last forty or so days since I have transcended my addiction to the java. Net positive, right?

What I never really considered, tho, was the very real impact on the psychological side of removing an anchoring routine from my life.

I woke up this morning, for example, and I was rifling through our tea collection. A couple years ago I bought a little wooden tea stand, the kind you might find in a trendy cafe, to neatly organize our tea offerings on the countertop. It started off as a delightful highlight of random houseguests who could peruse the selection. We keep in stocked from a mess of boxes stored in the cupboard below, tho, and I as I wasn’t seeing what I was looking for in the stand I went spelunking in the archives. Therein I found my hastily stashed coffee supplies—pour over cups, leftover filters, my Aeropress, bags of rapidly aging beans—stuffed in behind the tea boxes.

My morning tea tasted of a kind of regretful loss, of imperfect replacements.

Given the positive results of going coffee-less on my health I am struggling to see a reality where I would even jump back into a daily coffee ritual lifestyle again. The tradeoff is imbalanced. The cost is too much for the benefit.

But it doesn’t mean I’m not going to mourn the loss.

February 5, 2026
spinning and looping

I think I may have alluded to it in a previous post, long ago and last year, but I have been casually dabbling in audio and digital music.

About a year ago now, feeling a little flush from working some part time hours at a local retail gig, I put a couple hundred bucks into a little digital synth setup. Clearance sales were my friend and I was able to get a helluva deal on an Arturia Microfreak synth. If you have never heard of that particular toy be kind and don’t consider yourself too uninformed. It is a very niche product, a kind of mid-range digital synthesizer that is neither really a keyboard nor a pure synth box, obscure and rather a weird sort of mash up of electronics and transistor punk meets musical instrument. There is really nothing else that looks like it, and I got one for about half of the MSRP at a blowout sale.

I love that damn thing. I think the last time I fell so in love with a piece of electronics was when I got my first dSLR camera. The potential of a tool for creative exploration uncouples itself from the constraints of the dreams of others when you have enough knobs and dials to turn that the variety becomes nearly infinite.

I have been roughly learning to play the piano since. Sure, I already know how to read music and am coming up on the ten year anniversary of taking up the violin as a middle-aged student struggling through beginner music lessons and up into member of an orchestra, but those are musical skills… where often, the synth feels a lot more like creative play.

I feel like it’s music meets a lego set.

But another bit of recent financial flush with some side work has opened up an opportunity to add to my musical set up. Not exactly striking gold, but a spare couple hundred bucks from a gig over the month of December allowed me to buy a couple bolt-on musical tools.

First, I bought myself an effects pedal. Technically it’s a guitar pedal, but audio-in is audio-in and if my audio-in happens to come from a digital synth then that’s not a fault so much as a creative choice and a musical opportunity. I had been doing very little structured musical exploration with that to date, but I had plugged in and passed through it’s distortion and reverb engines almost everything that makes a sound in our house, including voice and playing my aforementioned violin into a microphone.

But then second and just lately I bought a looper pedal. Again, it is a guitar pedal, meant to be operated with a foot and an amp on a stage for groovy live performance, but again audio-in is… yes, audio-in, and those are not limitations so much as creative choices that I get to bend and musical opportunities I get to explore. I plugged it into my synth and have been loving the result. Loopers allow you one to record a bit of sound and then layer more and more sound over it on a loop, adding a bass line then a chorus, then rhythm and vibe and twinkles and song, building into something more than one can describe.

I made this last night on the looper, layering about six different tracks in real time with a shimmer effect run through the effects pedal, all of it synth and sound and a mix of wet and dry mashed into a weird chaotic burst of noise and groove:

I have been dabbling with all of it for the last week or so, recording tracks and loops and sometimes just sitting in the basement for an hour making dreamy soundscapes with it all. My piano skills are not great, but they have vastly improved (practice with anything will have that effect, I hear) and I have even started some light composition. None of it is great. Some of it is channeling my inner-Ross. A lot of it is chaos of noise and lacks any resemblance to what you probably consider music, but there are pieces starting to emerge from the effort of learning the tools that is more than any of those things.

And see, the thing about all this stuff is that these quasi-gadgets are all more than simple devices. They are musical instruments. Its not like buying a new computer or a game console. It’s not like nabbing some hot new phone. It’s not like upgrading your speaker system. Yes they are all electronics and batteries and wires, but they are tools of audio creativity and would probably vastly prefer to be on a stage in front of an audience than in my basement. They are meant to perform, in the literal sense of that word.

I may be a long way off from live performance, but at the end of the audio-in chain is the last part: a recording system, one button to press to capture anything in the last step before the sound erupts from my headphones or speakers.

That’s audio-out, and it’s the most exciting part of all.

January 30, 2026
weekender, two

The verdict was that “it’s probably better than sitting around watching tv all night” so we took a chance and drove to the far side of the city and beyond and found ourselves in one of the little bedroom communities on the outskirts of town, driving through a dark gravel road and ending up at a tiny little community hall in the middle of the middle of the middle of nowhere.

Turns out, CC had uncovered news of a local “trivia night” being held out there and wanted some chumps for a team. So, Karin and I made the trip.

Of course it was all fun and friendly enough, but the whole night I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was crashing something, like I had showed up at a party uninvited or strolled into a wedding mistaking it for the hotel restaurant.

We got second place in the trivia contest tho.

The kid and I went to the gym on Saturday and otherwise it was a pretty much lazy day. The dog had endured some dental surgery earlier in the week and she was still in a phase of sleeping off the meds.

I spent a couple hours in the basement playing around with some new audio equipment that had arrived on Friday, too. I may write more about that later, but I am rigging out a bit more for a audio project I am working on and the pieces for that are coming together—and they are fun to play with beyond the project, too.

That night, Karin and I were back at the Jube for the second week in a row. This time we had tickets for a travelling Broadway production of Moulin Rouge. It was solid.

Sunday morning the ice was calling, so we put on our running spikes and went out for an eight klick run. Even with cleats on the trails were borderline dangerous, and one of our number took a minor tumble. No injuries to report, but it was not a productive training run so much as a nice-to-be-outside adventure. That said, I really need to start doing some productive training runs soon.

More fussing with my audio toys that afternoon after I figured out I could hook my violin into the mix, so I recorded some silly riffs and had some fun making as much noise as music.

Then the Kid and I got hurtled into grocery duty… which led to dinner duty… which led to burning off the rest of the evening just idling around the house. Some weekends just start hot and end with you nearly dozing off on the couch, I guess.

January 19, 2026
weekender, one

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.

January 12, 2026

about

Welcome. I’m one of those weirdos who still writes a personal blog. In fact, I’ve been writing meandering drivel online for decades, and here you’ll find all my recent posts on writing, technology, art, food, adventure, running, travel, and overthinking just about anything and everything …since early 2021.

I write regularly from here in the Canadian Prairies about just about anything that interest me. Enjoy!

There are currently 448,385 words in 588 posts.

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