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our day off

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2017.03.15

Beware the ides of March, your day shall be a bust if depending on the weather forecast – or so we learned this year. I've taken a couple of days off during the kids' March break to spend some time with the kids and to alleviate same from my wife. We decided to go to an indoor playground because the weather forecast called for 16°C with the wind-chill. But on the way there we decided that it looked like it was warming up substantially, and despite some wind decided to change course and head to a distant spot in the sticks where maple trees are producing sap and humans are producing syrup. We'd been, once, but that was before The Girl's birth (to the best of our recollection).

We'd checked out their site before leaving, and everything seemed to be on despite the iffy weather. So it seemed like it'd be worth the chance. It wasn't. Five hundred meters before we arrived, a text arrived from my mother, who we'd asked for a reminder of the location. She was letting us know that "The Kortright Center" had put a note on their website indicating that the day's activities were shut down due to the winds and the danger of dropped branches from the towering trees (some kind of hardwood, the species escapes me).

We popped into the place and I bought the kids some maple candies to silence them. We then turned back toward the city and decided to a) pick up a couple of things for the aquarium and then b) go to one of those places where parents dump their kids for birthdays and that sort of thing, a trampoline-based affair where the kids could burn off some energy for 30 minutes.

Incredibly, the aquarium store didn't have one of the two things I needed, a simple replacement sponge for a filter. And the trampoline place was so busy that when we arrived at 2 they told us we'd not get in before 5.

Salvaging something from the day, we got the car cleaned and cut our losses.

At least I have fish food.

rand()m quote

It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

—Wendell Berry