but what the hell, here’s a weekend wrap up.

The weekend didn’t go as I expected, and things I though would be short and sweet ended up lengthy and expensive, and some stuff didn’t get done at all. However, I mostly can’t complain.

Among other things, I ended up lining up a great deal on a necessary home improvement project that I hope I’ll be happy with, even if the lining up thereof took up my entire Saturday morning. I expect I’ll have more to say on this at a later date.

A trip to check out a local bike shop I heard about ended up with me coming home with a new bike. Yeah, I already have a serviceable (or at least serviceable after several tune-ups) bike, but it really wasn’t meeting my needs anymore after several hundred trail miles; this hobby took in a way a lot of others haven’t, which meant that it was time to replace the battle-scarred “best bike you can buy at Wal-Mart” with something of higher quality that’ll serve me for many years to come*.

I ended up with a Giant Revel 1 mountain bike, which is all kinds of nice, and several steps in quality above my old one. It also, probably most importantly, is actually the right size for someone of my height, which makes a tremendous difference in ride comfort and control. I put almost twenty road miles on it this weekend to get a feel for it, though I’m really very anxious to get it a little dirty out on the trail in a couple of days.

A nice highlight for Sunday was the Richmond Family Peace Festival, full of the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of numerous cultural and spiritual traditions present in the area. It was a neat experience, and a source of excellent carribean food.

In amongst all this, I also got at least some of the usual housework, bill paying, and shopping done, and watched a handful of movies, mostly music documentaries, including It Might Get Loud, covering a multi-generational guitar summit between Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White; Anvil: The Story of Anvil, chronicling the efforts of the influential but not particularly successful Canadian metal band to remain relevant and release their thirteenth record, and I Think We’re Alone Now, which documents the stories of two stalkers obsessed with 80s pop star Tiffany, that starts of a little disturbing and then gets even more so.

I have no clever way to close this out, so I’m just going to let it fizzle out, kind of like Friday night.

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* – The old bike won’t necessarily fall by the wayside; my eldest child has already claimed it to replace her bike, which, while purchased at Walmart, was far from the best example of their product line. I’m going to go ahead and recommend you don’t buy a budget bike at the big box stores.