I have no idea what the odds are but we’ve had not one but two vehicles written off after being hit while parked on the street in front of our house.
The most recent was in February of 2016…
I got rear ended again last week while stopped at a crosswalk but luckily, this time the car was still in driveable condition and SGI is going to repair the damage ($2100 for the relatively minor replacement of a bumper and a bend reinforcement bar!)
*Very* glad I’m not in the market for a new car for the third time in the last few years!
…it’s crazy that people in library school are still reading my blog for fun and profit.
(The question below was posted on a FB page for FIMS students/alum, another alum tagged me but before I could even dig around too much to look for the post this person wanted, another student chimed in with a link to the post they were looking for instead of the slogan one.
I posted a comment about how weird and amazing it was that people were still reading my blog and then a few others also added comments to say how they’d read my blog while they were in library school at various points over the past decade. Surreal.)
…that we played from morning to night (okay, Shea’s not as big of a music fan as I am and occasionally asked for some peace and quiet to read her book!)
Above is a graph of how many individual songs I played each month and below is a list of my most played songs courtesy of last.fm which tracks listening from my devices (but not music in the van driving out to our site, CDs or radio obviously.)
(Unfortunately, last.fm doesn’t appear to allow users to set specific time ranges so 180 days is too long and 90 days is too short to cover the entire summer. But 90 days is most of it so I’m using that.)
I never would’ve guessed that the novelty hit of a couple YouTubers would be my most played song of the summer but if the trade-off is that Pace is getting into popular music, that’s cool by me.
It’s well documented on this blog that Blake Berglund’s “Coyote” was my unofficial album of the summer so it makes sense that playing the entire thing on repeat, er, repeatedly, means he takes 5/10 of the spots on my Top Ten list (not sure how that happens with an 11 track album but I suspect it’s the first five songs on the album that ranked highest as I might not have always listened to it all the way through every time I started it.)
Panda is another song that Pace introduced me to this summer.
G n’ R surged late because I played them non-stop before and after their concert in late August (I’m actually surprised only two songs made my Top Ten given how much I played them at the end of summer – Paradise City could’ve easily been there too!)
I honestly have no idea how Luke Bryan got on there – there are probably a couple dozen equally formulaic new country songs I listened to quite a bit this summer that could’ve made the list. I suspect that song ended up being left on repeat at some point to end up that high on the list (and I’m not just making excuses because I’m embarrassed about liking Luke Bryan – if I sincerely played his song that much, I’d freely admit it!) 🙂
Anyhow, on our final night together, after a day of fun in the sun, drinks, food and much more, one of our new friends put the following song on.
This is a guy who I stayed up to 3am with one night (I think a campground late night record for our group when we had more than a few!) building a massive fire, drinking a massive quantity of booze and with him requesting song after song – mostly metal and 70’s hard rock – while I played DJ.
So hearing him play a slow country ballad (that I’d never heard before either) was a bit of a surprise.
But in that setting, as we all felt summer slipping away from us, the song’s nostalgic tone was a perfect note to end our summer on and this immediately became one of my new favourite songs.
If we’d had a rainy summer, if we had neighbours who played loud rap until all hours of the morning (nothing against rap – just not my idea of campground music), if we hadn’t been able to get out to our site as much as we did, if I’d cut off my foot chopping wood after a few beers…the reasons our decision to try a seasonal camp site could’ve been a disaster are long and varied. 🙂
But, as I’ve said to a few people as summer’s been coming to a close, things could not have lined up better to create a perfect summer.
Here’s why…
We knew seasonal camp sites had many advantages and I listed 10 of them at the very start of summer. But it all starts from the fact that we managed to get drawn for a seasonal site in the first place. We put our name in at a number of provincial and regional parks last winter knowing that there are always more applications than spots so nothing was guaranteed. But we ended up getting drawn in the park lottery for one of our highest ranked camp sites at the provincial park that’s closest to Regina and on the edge of the Qu’Appelle Valley, quite close to where I grew up and not far from where we have our farm to this day.
The site we ended up in (Valley View #68) was close to the playground and Service Centre (but not too close), on the end of a row so we only had seasonal neighbours on one side of us and the site behind and across from us were for nightly campers so we had a rotation of different neighbours pretty much every weekend. Plus we only saw one other nearby seasonal camper three times the entire summer so that made our location even more private feeling.
We introduced ourselves to the people in the seasonal site beside us on May long weekend as they were moving in (we’d moved in the weekend before when you were allowed to move your RV in but not yet stay overnight) and it turned out that not only did our seasonal neighbours at the campground live within six blocks of us in the city but they had two girls including one who was the same age as Sasha. Sasha and Brynn become instant best friends (the picture above is from the day they met!) and we even accelerated our plans to move Sasha from another location of our daycare provider so she could be at the same one as her new friend who was at the daycare’s other location!
As the summer went on, we also got to know many of the other seasonal campers including another nearby couple who also had two young girls and all four of whom became part of our “summer family” as well.
By having a lot of kids her age nearby, Shea and I (and Pace as well) didn’t have to entertain her much at all this summer as Sasha freely ranged between a bunch of different camp sites and whichever adult was nearby would keep half an eye on the kids. (We realised how important this was on the one weekend when neither of our seasonal friends were there with their kids and Sasha suddenly became *much* more needy of our attention!)
It definitely was a warm summer for (Saskatchewan),” Wenckstern said. Temperatures rose above 30 C on 12 days, and there were plenty of days with temperatures in the high 20s as well, she added – Regina Leader Post (September 15, 2017)
It was an incredibly hot, dry summer which gave us all the advantages that brings – beyond simply enjoying sunny weather most days, we had very few bugs through the entire summer, no mud being tracked into our camper or reason to stay inside watching movies (or even to skip going to the campground completely if it was really wet) plus perfect conditions for afternoon beer drinking most days! 😉 (On a related note, I made a conscious decision to *not* be so conscious of my eating and drinking and to just enjoy the summer. That meant that I regularly joked that my summer diet was “chips and beer”, I think that our summer booze bill might legitimately rival the fee we paid for the site itself, my dad thinks I need to go to rehab, and I know that I’m about 10lbs heavier than when when we went to Mexico last February! (Guess we’ll have to start planning another winter getaway to give me incentive to lose the weight once again!) Oh, and we didn’t get the bad side of the hot weather, at least right until the end. Unlike some campgrounds (including Buffalo Pound which is one we could’ve ended up at), Echo didn’t have a fire ban until the very last weekend of the summer whereas some of those other campgrounds that weren’t far away from us, had fire bans all summer. 🙁
We had numerous visitors over the summer – both my parents and Shea’s parents camped with us multiple times as well as various other friends and relatives popping by for afternoon or evening visits throughout the summer. We also knew a few others who were staying at the campground, both overnight and seasonal, including co-workers, people we know from our volunteer activities and various other connections. In terms of visitors, we even got really brave and allowed Pace to invite not just one but two friends for one entire weekend! (Luckily, that was also a weekend Shea’s parents came to camp with us so we had an extra set of eyes to watch the boys *and* Grandpa Dennis’ truck to pick them up when they decided to ride their bikes *down* a steep hill into the valley!)
Unlike other years where our camping consisted of booking a week or two of holidays that we look forward to, enjoy when they happen and then they’re over, this year, we took holidays throughout the summer – no extended periods longer than a week but, working with our existing schedules and stat holidays, we took enough days off that almost every weekend turned into a three, four, or even five day weekend which made it feel like our entire summer was a holiday in a way.
Every weekend had something new or different as a focus or activity – one weekend, we might try the skate park in Fort Qu’Appelle. Or walk down to watch the Sask Express touring production for “Canada 150”. Or have a potluck with our neighbours. Or go swimming at the beach. Or kayaking. Or go on a nature hike. Or set-up a paddling pool that was big enough for adults to use. Or do a Sunday drive around the lake. Or have a picnic lunch in the tenting campground when it wasn’t busy during a weekday. Or take in an arts festival. Or bring a sno-cone machine to make iced treats for the kids (and margaritas for the adults!) Or attend the Regina Symphony Orchestra’s “Symphony Under The Sky” event (pictured) at the Motherwell Homestead National Historic Site. There were times we just hung out at our campsite too! 😉
At my work, a perfect storm of staff leaving for other internal and external jobs, an extended medical leave for one employee and various other similar issues meant that we were as short this summer as I can remember any branch being in my near-decade at RPL. But weirdly, the extra stress and work that this caused when I was at work made the time spent away from work even more enjoyable. There was no better feeling than driving through the gates of the park and feeling all my worries about work and any other stuff going on at home fall away!
On our last full day together yesterday, the campers we’d become closest to got together to listen to the Rider game, drink copious amounts of booze and have a potluck meal, play catch with a football in the nearly deserted campground (most people left after September long including many seasonal campers even though we can technically stay until the end of September), have water balloon fights with the kids, listen to music (including one of our many unofficial summer theme songs). The night ended with a group singalong as all kids and adults spontaneously joined hands to dance in a circle and there were hugs, kisses and possibly a few tears as well.
It’s been an amazing summer for so many reasons. Now, I can only hope that we find a similar magic next year!
1. Ice Maker – Early in the year, I did the math and figured it would be cheaper to buy bags of ice as needed than to buy an ice making machine. We ended up spending about 40-50 nights at the lake (depending how you count – some of these “nights” were actually day trips) and we usually bought a bag of ice per day on average – sometimes more, sometimes less, usually for around $2.50/bag. So that means we spent $100-$125 on ice over the course of the summer. That’s slightly cheaper than a new ice maker which goes for around $150 + tax. But if we’d bought one, we would have it for its entire lifespan going forward – at Christmas and for other events (Birthdays! Grey Cup parties!) in our house. And of course we’d also have it if we end up with a seasonal site again in future.
2. (Better) Deck Box – I bought a cheap deck box at Canadian Tire fairly early in the season. It worked fine for the most part but I sort of wish I had a sturdier one that had a bit more storage space.
3. Tarp Clips – When we happened to visit him during his stay at Echo, Shea’s co-worker, who happens to also have an rPod, had tarp clips to pin down his rDome external tent. He said they work really well, especially on windy days. (The irony – the same weekend he camped at Echo, I woke up at 5am to try to hold our rDome in place with logs, plastic tubs full of clothes and anything else I could find since the wind was blowing so wildly.)
4. Rocket Copters – We only discovered these cool toys during one of our last weekends at our camp site when we saw kids slingshotting them into the sky over the playground (from our site, we thought they were some weird new firework at first until I investigated a bit more. The kids who had them very generously allowed Pace and even Sasha to have a try.)
5. Fort Qu’Appelle Co-op Membership – it’s tough to say if buying a membership ($10) would’ve paid off with whatever cash back we got for our spending this summer. But every time we popped into the local co-op grocery store for another $50-$100 in groceries for the weekend, I kept thinking “I should’ve gotten a membership at the start of the season!”
I’m a garage sale addict at the best of times – who can resist finding something that someone else paid $20 or $100 for and being able to buy it for pennies on the dollar? Plus part of the addiction is how random it is – like the slot machine in a casino, you never know what you might find when you pull up at a house with some balloons on a tree out front!
This year was extra fun for hitting garage sales because we had a seasonal camp site that we needed a few things for and buying at garage sales freed up our money to be wasted on other things. 😉
Here are some of my best purchases… 1. DVD Movies (most for $1-$2) – I started hitting garage sales in early May and one of the main things on my list was to flesh out our DVD collection since we don’t own a lot of movies ourselves anymore but I knew it would be good to have a few movies in the camper for those rainy days or some kids’ movies if we had “Tailgate Theatre” using our rear garage’s TV capability (as we did a couple times this summer.)
2. Double Folding Chair ($25) – I actually found this item at a garage sale a few years ago and it was a good deal – sturdy, a woven basket underneath plus various pouches in the front made it more than the sum of a couple single $9.99 folding chair specials from Canadian Tire (which is what I usually use) I didn’t use it much when we first got it but once we got to our seasonal site, it was my favourite chair – at least until my parents gave us a gift of two anti-gravity chairs mid-way through the season!
3. Xmas Lights – I already had some extra outdoor Christmas lights that I was planning to take to decorate our site but at a random garage sale on the way out of town one day early in the season, I stumbled upon a person with a 5 gallon pail of a number of strings of Xmas lights for $5. How could anyone turn down a deal like that? I bought them, *most* of them even worked, and they became extra lights for our site on top of the ones I already had. Heck, the person even threw in the 5G pail and that’s going to cost you a few bucks for a new one normally too!
4. CD Player – even though our camper has a radio and outdoor speakers plus I can also stream most radio stations using my phone and a Bluetooth speaker (mainly 620 CKRM for Rider games), I still wanted a regular CD player that I could move around the site, carry to other places (eg. beach) as required and so on. I was on my way back from an ice run at a nearby convenience store when I saw the sign for a garage sale on the Pasqua First Nation. So with a bag of ice melting in my vehicle, I went to check it out and of course they had a CD player for a whopping $2. Sure, one of the buttons didn’t work and it was pretty grungy. But once I confirmed it could pick up 620, it was sold!
I happened to get to introduce myself to Blake who was at the “Symphony Under the Sky” concert at the end of the summer and told him this story. He joked that he thinks Value Village is the main distributor of his album and I realised it’s probably not good form to tell an independent artist that you bought their album secondhand. Luckily, he has a new release that just came out on September 1 and I bought that the old-fashioned way – er, pre-ordering the digital download on iTunes – even though it’s also available for streaming as part of your $9.99/month fee. Finding this CD was a double bonus as it gave me something I could play on my new $2 CD player as well! 😉
One of the most poignant episodes of The Simpsons is “Season of 4 ft 2” which tells the story of the Simpsons family taking a summer vacation to the lake.
Lisa, who’s usually an outcast nerd, ends up befriending a group of cool kids while Bart, who normally has a large circle of friends, is left on the outside.
Bart tries to ruin Lisa’s popularity by showing her new friends her yearbook which nobody in their school had signed at the end of the school year.
Lisa thinks her new friends have turned on her when she catches them vandalizing her parent’s car. But it turns out they’re decorating it as a farewell after a summer of fun.
The episode ends with a montage of shots from the Simpsons’ summer adventure set to the song, “All Summer Long” by the Beach Boys.
I’ve been thinking about that episode a lot lately because of how perfectly it captures the magic of a family having an amazing summer together (even if the kids occasionally get on each other’s nerves!) In fact, if I get around to making a montage of our summer photos, I suspect I’ll use this Beach Boys song as the background music!
Unfortunately, YouTube doesn’t have the actual Simpsons montage (stupid copyright) but I found this clip which has been modified to get around YouTube’s filters which at least will give an overview of the episode’s events if you haven’t seen it.
