💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 9-03.gmi captured on 2024-09-29 at 00:39:05. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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This summer I did a lot of driving. I was supposed to head out and visit my family, but my grandmother has had some serious health issues, and until my parents were able to arrange for a more permanent caregiver, they were basically on-call helping her with, well, everything. _It might not be the best time to visit_, my dad told me in June. So I didn't, and the summer slowly passed.
Slowly passed until the last few weeks, when I went down to the States a couple of times. Eight hours there, eight hours back, times two. We broke it up a bit (stopping in the same small city each time to get gas and/or stay the night before heading east), but it was a lot of driving in a fairly short span. I thought we'd all listen to more music. We listened to very little. We spent a lot of time talking.
But yesterday I lined up with all the other Canadians making the trip back on Labour Day, and while we tried to be clever and use a smaller and more out of the way border crossing (a single lane on both the US and Canadian side), it seemed that a lot of people had that idea, too. We were in line for almost half an hour. The online trackers suggested it might've even been faster to take the most common border crossing.
And now we're back. I spent the morning getting caught up at work, then let the dogs out and went into the vegetable garden to see what was ready for picking: a few dozen cherry tomatoes; one large, orange tomato; and eighteen big cucumbers. I texted my partner a picture. _Uhhhhh, I hope you like cucumber._ I peeled and had one with my lunch. I'll be doing this a lot in the coming weeks. There were a few more that were almost ready to pick, maybe a bit small. I'm sure they'll be ready in a day or two.
Now September stretches out in front of me, and I see things getting closer and closer. My music lessons start this week or next. I have a couple of races in a few weeks. I ran in the fitness centre at the hotel, did 5.5 mi in an hour without stopping on the first day, 3 mi in half an hour on the second. Pushing myself. Remembering when this all felt so much easier. Coincidentally, I was younger. Is it age, or dedication? Ask me in three weeks.