It’s been hot here the last few days! I haven’t really noticed because I’ve been working and my home has a little thing called AC. With heat has come massive swarms of bird-sized mosquitoes, so it really hasn’t been outdoor weather!

Today is the start of a four-day weekend for me. I’m burning out from a really long and unending transcription marathon, so it’s nice to have some time to just breathe. Of course, I utterly failed at sleeping in this morning, but I did take it slow. I waited for the post to come, then went to town to run some errands.

By the time I’d hit the post office, the bank, and the thrift store, it was only 11:10 and much too early for lunch, so I decided to go walk around the Shurniak Gallery. This gallery is a real gem for Assiniboia, featuring lots of beautiful art in different mediums. There’s mostly paintings, but also some sculptures and other things. I’ve been to the gallery once, in October of 2013 for a music concert, and I didn’t have time to view everything.

The artwork on display would belong in any world-class museum. My favourite medium is oil, so I spent a lot of time admiring the colours and brushwork on a variety of paintings. You really have to go through the entire building because there’s artwork tucked into every corner.

The gallery now has a cafe serving soups, sandwiches, and coffee beverages at a reasonable price and is really a lovely place to wile away an hour. Admission is free and donations are welcome.

After visiting the gallery, I decided to check out the lunchtime buffet at the New Moon Cafe. I usually do the buffet at Andy’s, but a neighbour told me that New Moon has ‘more stuff.’ It did and it was tasty and the same price as Andy’s, but the ‘more stuff’ isn’t things that I enjoy, like breaded and fried mystery meat in a very sweet sauce (typical Canadian-Chinese offerings passed off as ginger beef or lemon chicken or sweet and sour pork). So I’ll probably to stick to Andy’s, which has really good pizza! But I’m glad I tried it out and I did enjoy my lunch very much, especially the chicken wings and broccoli!

After lunch, it was time to get groceries. The grocery store parking lot is absolutely chaos as the store renovations progress and I had to drive around the block to find a parking spot! It’s no wonder they are so adamant that baggers take out orders as I don’t think everyone would be bothered to walk their carts back several blocks!

They had some good deals today on everything on my list, so it was a fruitful expedition. Shopping in that store is such a chore because there’s no room and people for some reason don’t get that and just leave their carts in the middle of narrow aisles. I really hope that the expanded store will give us a little more room to move around. I really do appreciate the increased amount of selection in the store, though, especially when it comes to ‘ethnic’ foods and am optimistic that when I come home next May, I won’t feel a strong urge to go do a big Moose Jaw shop like I did this year.

Next thing on my list for today, make sure that I’m ready to move to my new computer, which should be here Monday but I suspect could surprise me tonight… I don’t think I’ve ever moved to a new machine running a newer OS before, so I’m not convinced that a ‘restore from last Time Machine backup’ will work.

It’ll be cooler over the next few days, so I’ll be able to start running some tests to determine where I’ll be installing the new booster antennas. There was a very justifiable delay in getting the booster out (which the Facebook followers know all about), so probably won’t get it till about this time next week. I can’t wait to write a report on that and give the awesome store and tech I dealt with some much deserved praise!