Amorphous Blobs of Time

One thing you have to figure out in retirement is how much structured time you need. How full do you want your calendar to be at the beginning of the week? My summer schedule includes tutoring twice a week and dragon boating three times a week. On top of that I’ll usually have a few social activities (book club, lunch with a friend, etc.), and maybe an appointment. Weekends are kept free for Ray and I to make plans, so they still feel like “weekends”.

Ray’s summer weeks include sailing, a therapy dog visit, and sometimes golf. He needs fewer scheduled activities because he’s very good at imposing his own structure on his days. I am not.

Having about ten hours of structured time during the week works well for me. I can easily fill the in-between time with reading, writing, coffee time with Ray, laundry, spontaneous social activities, etc. That’s about the right balance for me to not feel too busy, or like too much of a slug.

This past week, my tutoring sessions were still on hold, dragon boating sessions were cancelled due to wind and/or smoke, and my plans to meet a friend in Kingston for a day were cancelled after a tree fell on her car during a storm. On top of that, the wildfire smoke meant we were pretty much stuck indoors for a couple of days, and I really noticed the difference. That hour or two a day gives my days a shape. Without it, my week became an amorphous blog of empty time…like that week between Christmas and New Year’s when you can’t remember what day it is. There’s a finer line than I thought between me and a slug.

We’d been hearing about an ice cream place in Frankford that we had to try. A couple of weeks ago, driving home from the cottage, we saw a huge line-up outside a barn that had been converted to an ice cream stand. We realized it was the place we’d heard about, so after the smoke cleared, we drove out there with friends to check it out.

What’s Your Scoop in Frankford carries the same brand (Kawartha Dairy) and flavours of ice cream that our local ice cream shop does. The main difference – and presumably the reason for their popularity – is the serving size. We each ordered a single-scoop (small) cone. As you can see, the ‘single scoop’ is about six scoops. The brilliance of this place’s success is in understanding that people will drive a half hour out of town to eat a pint of ice cream if that choice is taken out of their control. I ordered a small and that’s what I got! Crazy, eh? Well, can’t let it go to waste! It would have been much easier for us to walk to our local shop and order a large ice cream cone, but then we’d have had to deal with the guilt of making poor choices. Ugh, I should have just ordered a small. As it was, we all thoroughly enjoyed our ice cream cones, relatively free of guilt.

I didn’t sign up for competitive dragon boating this year. I’ve done it the past two summers and wanted to leave more of my weekends free this year. I still dragon boat, just not with the race team. Having said that, they needed a few extra paddlers for last weekend’s festival in Trenton, so I signed up to join them.

The day before the festival, I was regretting that decision. The forecast said 100% chance of rain and a threat of thunderstorms throughout the day. I fully expected it to be another of my cancelled activities for the week, but we ended up getting very lucky. Not much rain, and no storms.

Brighton has taken the gold at this festival for many years in a row, but the competition was stiff this year. In two of the three heats we had the fastest time of all 14 teams. That qualified us for the A Division finals, where we lost to a team from a cross-fit gym. We nicknamed them The Vikings. The fact that we were even close to beating them when they had a lot more testosterone, and fewer years on earth, says a lot about the calibre of Brighton’s coaching and training program.

One of the interesting things about birding is that you see birds that have been there all along, but you weren’t paying attention. Ray’s spotted a few unique ones recently.

Piping plovers are endangered, with only a handful of known nests in Ontario each year. Those nests are monitored and protected by conservationists. Because plovers nest on sand, they’re very vulnerable to flooding, storms, and predators. Presqu’ile Park had one of the few successful nests this summer. Normally you can’t see the chicks because the area around their nest is cordoned off, and volunteers monitor the area. Ray was out for a cycle and stopped to sit by the water, then spotted three chicks strutting along the beach. The bands on their legs told him they were the plovers, who’d recently fledged the nest. The parents were nowhere to be seen. He got a few shots from a distance and then let them be.

A few more shots from his birding tours: