The Arrival

The week started early and the week started hard. Not what you’d expect to hear from a guy on vacation eh? Well, as stated previous, my parents are coming to visit. I foolishly left all the cleaning of the house until the last minute so I had to clean at a break neck pace. My goals were to get after the floors, the dusting, the bathrooms, and wash all the bedding. I can say that I arrived on the target with time to spare. They also landed on schedule. I made a Dutchie style itinerary for the few days that they are visiting so that I can keep them busy and entertained while they enjoy some time away from the usual. It’s a bit different nowadays as my mother has fully retired and her biggest obligation is coordinating what cool thing her and her friends are going to get up. Bicycling, pickle ball, kayaking, hiking, walking the boardwalk, etc. She’s got fun mornings, the rest of the day she goes home and looks after the property. The Big T runs on his own schedule. Going to bed at 10 or 11 and up ahead of 5am most days, he goes pretty hard in between. So I had to try and find a bit of a balance between those two lifestyles without smashing my own health and well-being. The only reason they arrived on time is because I requested they make a stop at the LCBO on their way to grab me some Pink Whitney. The particular store I requested they try had an ample supply but was closed, apparently adjusting hours for COVID-19. This eased their arrival time, otherwise they’d have been much earlier. The delay allowed me to have a meager and fast lunch then some time to try and nap for twenty or thirty minutes. That effort was unsuccessful. When they arrived, they arrived bearing gifts. This was in response to me buying a boat of course.

We had the plan to keep to so pleasantries were kept to a minimum. We loaded up and brought all the now necessary accessories, including masks, sanitizer, wipes, etc. First stop was the Home Depot to get some items to enable us to do a bit of work around the house. We needed to caulk, lock and pipe. I’ll try to keep up with the little jobs we did, mostly so you are thinking about things of this nature that you should be doing or checking. The lock was for the shed, I am going to be storing some items in there and figured I should lock it up to keep the honest thieves out. The caulk is for the dryer vent replacement project. I’ve talked about it a month ago but the little fins have disapearred from my dry exhaust vent and that leaves it vulnerable to pests such as birds and mice. I also have a critter cage to put over it to further keep them out. The pipe is for a project to be highlighted later. While we were out, we zipped into the Walmart to get some specific groceries for that evening’s meal. We also got my groceries since I neglected to cover that over the weekend. The meal required that I spark up my BBQ for the first time in many, many moons. I’m not sure I used more than twice in the last two years. I cooked some average porkchops out there with some nice corn on the cob (ear of corn) and mother made a Greek salad. It was a pretty tasty meal. More food than I’d make for myself but that is the fun of cooking for a crowd. After supper, instead of dessert, we worked on the dryer vent then started the unnamed pipe project. Once we were finished that we settled in for a nice family movie night and watched the Gentlemen on the big screen in the basement.