💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2023 › 12-03.gmi captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:40:06. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Not in the right-wing, end-of-the-world, guns-and-ammo-and-a-thousand-cans-of-soup sense. We've spent the weekend making a big list of things to do before we take off for somewhere warmer, and it's been a long time since our last real vacation, so this feels both strange and familiar.
Went to the bank yesterday, purchased a bunch of currency in case there are credit card issues (this happened to us in Switzerland, a decade and a half ago); notified the bank of start and end dates, picked up lots of sunscreen for my lily-white skin, made lists of instructions for the pet sitter.
We got a lot done yesterday. Once I was done running around, I stopped by A&W, picked up a teen burger and onion rings (for her), a mozza burger and onion rings (for me), root beer for both of us. We don't get fast food often, A&W maybe once a year? After we ate, I poured myself a beer, and we settled in to watch A Child's Christmas in Wales on YouTube (one of my favourites), and a couple of episodes of Bakeoff that we'd missed. Need to call the alarm company, send them details. Need to figure out roaming, too. I didn't actually get a smartphone until 2017, and my last international trip was in the winter of 2016, to Chicago. $16/day, apparently. That feels extortionate, but also extremely in line with how the major Canadian carriers work.
All the work that needs to be done before I largely swim and sit in the sun. My partner says I'm bad at being idle. I don't plan on being idle. Besides the usual warm-weather activities, I plan to take a small notebook, write a bit every day. I did this when we went to Ireland ages ago, but I've never been able to find that notebook in my piles of papers. I'll take better care this time. My winter poems often have a certain tension, a certain vibe, born out of the context of what my winters are usually like. Time to invert that.