A reloaded post is a quick-clipped summary of a bunch of small things from the past few days. I want to write them down, but I am either lacking in (a) details or (b) time. That?s just how it goes sometimes. Enjoy.

Vacation-Staycation

I’ve been slacking. I mean, we had such grand plans. We set aside a week in late-July for some family togetherness (for better or for worse) months previous. The idea was a mid-summer break, a bit of travel, and some well-needed down-time. Or…

A few weeks ago a piece of equipment exploded in a building wholely-connected to my wife’s employer. I have more details of course, but I’m not a news website and I’m not interested in getting anyone in trouble by saying more than I should. My part of this comes in (only) because the consquence of this explosion was an information technology nightmare for my wife’s company and subsequently a top-tier, all-hands-on-deck, disaster-recovery situation for Karin. On the eve of our vacation she’d been working every day for about ten days, probably no less than sixteen or eighteen hours per day. And it wasn’t even certain she was going to get to keep her vacation. Effectively, I was a single parent for a long stretch and that stretch was inching very close to the fringes of our long-since-planned time off.

Then again, I was already off on MY vacation. Claire — checked out of her daycare for the span — and I did some daddy-daughter stuff. And — much longer story made short — four days into my ten days off, Karin was very gleefully released from her indentured servitude, albeit on a cellular leash, and we had a small handful of days to hurriedly drive down check out (first) Drumheller and the dinosaur museum and (second) the amusement park Calaway Park near Calgary. We also did some stuff back at home, including hosting a couple meals and a Sunday afternoon matinee of “Mary Poppins” (the musical.) I mean, it wasn’t a bust… it just was.

Bring on the Sore Throat, Round 2

Of course, it wouldn’t be a 2012 vacation (or even a staycation) for our family if all of us were healthy. Right on cue, just as Karin got official notice that she could log off her laptop for a few days and we were out celebrating with a delicious sushi-based dinner, I felt the first tingles of a scratch in my throat.

You know the kind. Things feel a bit dry, so you drink some water… then some hot tea… and then finally, reluctantly, pop a losenge hoping to ward off the evil cold. By Tuesday mid-afternoon I was in full-blown sick mode, wishing I could just curl up in bed instead of be loading up the car for the promised family road-trip. But no. And here I was downing tea by the half-litre and taking my meds hoping to tame the beast now living contentedly in my sinuses, all the while happily jumping from city-to-city in an effort to entertain my family. It calmed on Thursday, re-emerged with a vengence on Friday, and then has been slowly scaling back to where it is now as a persistent cough.

I had great plans to run in distant prairie lands: I hunkered down and drank tea instead. I had set aside time and technology to write numerous blog posts from darkened hotel rooms: rather, I went to bed early.

It’s now Tuesday and — still not quite back to my old self — I went for a test run last night. A quick four clicks that didn’t kill me indicates I might be back on track for training for that race that is a little more than two weeks distant. Alas, we will see.

Technophile Fun Week

Of course it didn’t help either than leading into our staycation week two interesting technological events occured (to me.)

First, Steam — you know, the epic online game retailer — hosted it’s annual summer game sale. I couldn’t help but be tempted by the numerous daily deals on awesome game titles, and bought my fair share of licences and probably maxed out my monthly internet bandwidth downloading most of them.

Second, and more interestingly, my phone finally pissed me off enough that I very nearly threw it out the window. A little more than two years ago I had signed up for a mobile phone plan, picked out a very cool little Android device known in Canada as the “milestone” (and in the US as the “Droid”) and went along my merry way. This was all well and good. The phone was fast and slick. It ran a version of the operating system for which it had been designed… and then innovation happened. Mobile phones got even better, and faster, and more packed with memory. Mine updated itself automatically to a new flavour of the operating system, started syncing with the new versions of the fancy baked-in software, and my little 2010 phone suddenly struggled to keep up with the 2012 software for which it (honestly) had no hope of ingesting. It was inevitable, of course, but I think it was as much the victim of a mobile phone paradigm shift as it was in the crosshairs of standard technological obsolesence. My middle-class whinging began afresh: my text messages would arrive days after they were sent, the phone would take a minute to boot and another two to dial. It would reboot spontaneously, crash repeately, and was simply an disfunctional brick in my pocket.

I wandered over to the phone store that first Saturday to inquire, and came home with a refreshed contract and a brand-shiny-new phone, the infamously huge “phablet” also known as a Samsung Galaxy Tab. It came along on our vacation and provided far too much geek-joy and distraction to go unnoted here. Hopefully it lasts a little longer than two years. And yes, so far and ten days on, I really like it. It almost makes up for a broken vacation and a sinus infection… almost.

And about those missing “lists”… I’ll get to them someday soon, too.