Yesterday was a ridiculously sunny, warm day for November - which made it relatively easy to to go for my scheduled run. It was so warm, in fact, that I shed the long-sleeved shirt I'd been wearing when I reached town, and ran the rest in just singlet. (Thank goodness, I was wearing my belly-covering Chicago marathon singlet, and not my usual running bra.)
When I arrived home, Husband was preparing to tackle the next chore on our list - garden cleanup - but I quickly put the kibosh on that, suggesting we go for a bike-ride instead. Being the good sport he is, he immediately agreed and got busy loading our bikes on the car so we could drive the 20kms to Lunenburg and bike the trails there.
Of course, we could have ridden the trails in and around Bridgewater instead but we were ready for a change of scenery and keen to explore the "rails to trails" system in Lunenburg. Also, we knew Lunenburg had more pub and cafe options if we wanted to stop for refreshments at some point. In the end, we only rode for an hour or so before making our way to the deck of the Knot - a favourite pub we hadn't visited since the pandemic began. It felt great to sit in the warm sunshine, sipping a tasty beer and snacking on sweet potato fries and wings - almost "normal".
Some might argue working in the garden would have been a better use of our afternoon but, given how glorious the day was, it seems to me to that taking time for a little fun was the very best thing we could do with it.
Working with the weather is important when you live in a climate like ours. When folks around here complain about the weather, you'll often hear someone reply "well, just give it a minute and it'll change". It's not at all unusual for us to have three seasons in a day. Given that, it's important to take advantage of the good and not-so-good weather when it happens.
The first few years we owned our current house, we mostly just stayed in it on weekends. I was still working in Halifax then, and we had a small place in Dartmouth, where we spent Mondays to Fridays. The day we moved in, we stacked a half dozen boxes filled with miscellaneous belongings in a corner of the dining room and I promised Husband we'd unpack them the first rainy weekend. As the months passed without a rainy weekend, the stacked boxes became a bit of a joke but I refused to give up glorious summer days at the beach to sort through them, so we just covered them with a tablecloth and ignored them until the weather finally cooperated. As I remember it, we finally unpacked them shortly before Christmas.
When I was running regularly, I worked with the weather in the same way whenever possible - modifying my training schedule to run when it was mild and dry. Of course, I wasn't always able to avoid running in rain, snow and/or ice, but I realized early on that running in better weather made it more likely I'd stick with whatever program I was following. I'm trying to do the same now to make my Return to Running a little less painful.
The same applies to the rest of my life. Rainy days are ideal for tackling indoor projects so why not use them for that, saving the better weather for outdoor chores and the very best days for impromptu adventures? I find I can accomplish just as much with much less effort that way and, now that I'm retired there's no reason not to do things in whatever order makes the most sense.
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