Jennie and Stuart on the Road: Aug 21 to 24

We drove home on Wednesday morning. Our daughter Annie had driven in from her new place in London and was waiting at home when we got there. We spent the afternoon together and then I drove her downtown to her old place so she she could get back to packing.

We asked if we could help but she wanted to take her time and go through everything slowly to see if, this time, she could sort though everything and only take the stuff she actually uses, instead of just dumping everything in the truck and saying that she will do it at the new place. It is also terrible trying to find a place to park down there if we did go to help.

That night we went up to see Jennie’s mom who stays with Jennie’s brother. As she is 96 years old she does have her health problems but still seems to be motoring along.

Thursday was yard work day. When we got home the front of the house didn’t look too bad. We have someone mowing the lawn and he had trimmed back the weeds enough that they didn’t show up too much. It still took 2 full yard waste bags to get the front cleaned up.

The backyard, again this year as in the past, was another matter. I don’t get the back lawn mowed because it is such a small part of the yard. Last year some plant had taken over the interlocking stone patio. That happened again but to a lesser extent. This year the thistles took over everything else. This was the view as I walked around the side of the house into the back.

There is a small patch of lawn and some shrubs in there some where.

Eight yard bags later we are making some progress.

The plant from last year had moved up to our tiered garden. Before.

After.

The depressing view from our solarium.

I figure we have to get rid of at least 5 more bags of weeds before we are done.

Friday we had lunch with Jennie’s mom, her brother and his wife, and Jennie’s niece and her family, at a Chinese buffet restaurant. Her niece has two really cute, talkative kids. I got some great pictures but I am not sure whether I should post them here.

On that subject I never know how to handle posting about our interactions with other people. Pictures of Jennie and I and where we have been are one things but I don’t know what other people think of my talking about and posting pictures of our activities together. I just usually try and not mention any names.

Today was another hot day so we went on a bike ride down the Don Valley to Cherry Beach and the Leslie Street Spit.

When we got to Cherry Beach there was a stand up surfboarding event going on. Jennie talked to someone and it seemed that the event was to benefit the Autism Society but it was hard to tell from any of the signs.

It was kind of early when we got there so it was a bit empty.

As we have a lot of stuff on the bike, we didn’t want to just lock it up so we took turns looking around.

There were some races going on.

At this booth parents could take their kids out on a board.

We saw one mom take her quite withdrawn son out for a long time on a board.

Her other two kids took turns paddling each other around.

CBC and CTV were there doing interviews.

There were lots of sailboats out in the harbour, although they weren’t moving very fast as there was so little wind.

On weird thing was that every few minutes we would see people walking up the beach carrying a short piece of a wooden post. Our only guess was that it was some sort of endurance race.

Of course there were some food booths so we had some pulled pork for lunch.

Onwards at the spit, we had never seen it so busy. There were literally no parking spot available in the area. This had always been our go to spot to park when we drive down here. We think the reason it was so busy was that the city had a bunch of booths up and was leading some guided walks out onto the spit.