He is Risen, He is Risen indeed.
This weekend was a rare and very welcome three day weekend. Thursday night a bunch of us from work went out to The Reef and had some fantastic food. It was a fairly early night since most of us were feeling pretty much completely knackered.
Good Friday was absolutely glorious in sunshine and warmth. It wasn’t the kind of day that leads one to contemplation of the reason for the holiday. I didn’t venture out until 11 because church wasn’t until noon and I needed to return books to the library en route. I get cold easily and am easily deceived by beautiful sunshiny days: it looks nice and warm out, therefore it must be, therefore I tend to overdress when I go outside. I was removing layers all the way to church. What struck me was the number of people out walking and the number of stores that were open, even in the morning; practically all of downtown was open and there were nearly as many people out as there are on a Sunday afternoon in the summer. Thus, I was struck with a conundrum: do I do all of my running around today when I actually have time or do I try and squeeze it in tomorrow before I start cooking a turkey (more on that later) and reserve the day for what it deserves. I left church around 1:45 and ended up scumming to the shopping (or part of it) because at that point I was feeling pretty much like crap (you know that nice achy feeling you get when you are coming down with something, plus the stuffy nose) and most of the places were on my way home. I figured that if I still felt that way on Saturday, there was no way I was leaving the house to walk downtown and some things I needed to get. So we did a few random errands and found about 50% of the things I was looking for, not a great success rate. I managed to get startled out of my wits by Jose, the mate on my boat, as I was walking down Fort. At this point, I need to back up and say that the day before I was annoyed by several bikers and runners on the Galloping Goose who persisted in passing within about 6 inches of my left elbow when the whole 4 metre pathway was wide open. So when, as I am walking down Fort St, I sensed a body within tat 6 inch space for an extended period of time, I was starting to get annoyed. Then said body slapped me across the back… Jose is very lucky I looked over at him before reacting! Yes, it was startling. Friday night, Karen and I went up to the Cathedral to hear the Cathedral Choir and Orchestra perform Mozart’s Requiem. After it was over, we wandered around downtown and saw these guys out again (first time I’ve seen them this year) with their usual massive crowd. We listened for awhile before wandering some more before heading home.
Saturday I woke up at the ridiculous hour of 4am and couldn’t sleep. So I read the Economist, like any normal person does at 4am. That lead to two hours of working on my country research for Offshore, which lead to me falling asleep until 9am. So I did get some sleep out of all of that. At 10:30 I called Sarnia to say hi to the gathered family for Granny’s memorial service. Somehow everyone thought everyone else had told Jen I was on the phone, so I never did talk to my sister… Karen came over just before noon and we went shopping for our bird, stuffed our bird, and stuck it in the oven. We ended up with seven of us last night for Easter dinner – crew members who didn’t have anywhere else to be basically. There are enough leftovers to last us for a week, however none of us will be around for a week because we are all on the boat… hopefully some of it freezes and then I won’t have to buy groceries for the next few weekends. It is always fun to enjoy fellowship with them outside of the boat.