The Island

This weekend was chock-full of pseudo-adventure. I landed in Victoria on Friday and immediately went and played two hours of pickleball with my mom and her merry band of Pickleball Marauders. I think I was the youngest player there by a fair margin, and they ran me ragged. I closed all three rings on my Apple Watch before getting back to my parents' place.

It's a good pain.

Saturday was action-packed, thanks to the venerable Rick Cochrane, Realtor At Large™, with house viewings from Sidney to Brentwood Bay. We're looking at moving to the island at some point, and I've decided the best way to facilitate this is to get in the way of the Universe and see what happens. There are some stunning homes out here — stunning good and stunning bad — and I've enjoyed every moment of trying to shortlist places that could be "the place."

Today, Sunday, was a book-tour day for Jenn's new book, A Visit From Krampus. My job as publisher was to shop it around to various bookstores, get them interested in it, and hopefully get them to order it. I'm learning a lot. The first thing is that there isn't a whole lot of money left over if you do this via consignment, but the point of this exercise is to get the book to the people. The feedback was more than I could have hoped for.

Every single place I visited today loved it. Loved the idea. Loved the words. Loved the art. Loved the feel of it. And they all believe it will have a home on their shelves.

I'm off to another bookstore tomorrow morning, perhaps more houses to see, some work-work, then back on a plane to Calgary. Also, for those not in the know, the island is like a mini Jurassic Park, but instead of amazing and majestic dinosaurs, it is inhabited by about four quadrillion tiny lizards.

Carpe all the diems.