A Saturday with Other People

Morning routine. Journaled Friday. Drove to Albany with Sydne and her Subaru. Pho at Ba's. Stopped at Annette's. Fire cider at Sydne's. Booked a Puerto Vallarta stay for friends. December trip shifts to Cancún. Six personal records at the gym. Voice walk to Suds. Dinner at El Palenque.

A day of family errands, travel planning, and an evening with friends

Events and activities that occurred on Saturday, November 7, 2026

The center of the day was Albany. Sydne needed her Subaru dropped at the dealer, and we had agreed days earlier to turn the errand into real time together. The service department quoted her about two hundred dollars plus labor for a software update tied to a manufacturing defect, which struck us both as an odd way to pay for the manufacturer's mistake. She declined for now and plans to take it up with someone who has the authority to say yes. Lunch followed at Ba's, a Vietnamese place in downtown Albany, where a bowl of pho made the morning feel less like logistics and more like an outing.

Before heading back, we stopped at my youngest sister Annette's place in North Albany to collect a weighted blanket, and I came away with a tall, reedy plant that may well be artificial. Real or not, it has a future as a studio prop. The last stop was Sydne's house, where she poured me a taste of fire cider, which is less a drink than a dare.

The afternoon turned to travel. I used timeshare points to book a stay at Villa del Palmar in Puerto Vallarta for my friends Brian and Paula at the end of the month, and then turned to my own December plans. I had hoped to be in Puerto Vallarta for the Virgen de Guadalupe processions, but the dates refuse to cooperate, so the trip is drifting toward Cancún instead. The outline is taking shape around the small Mayan sites of El Rey and El Meco, the ferry to Isla Mujeres, and Tulum at opening time before the crowds arrive. The guiding intention is opportunistic travel photography: go somewhere unfamiliar with a camera and let the place decide what the pictures are.

The gym delivered the day's quiet surprise. A lower-body session at Planet Fitness set new highs on six machines, and five of them held the heavier weight through all three sets. Progress in the weight room rarely announces itself, so a day when it does is worth writing down.

I walked to Suds in the early evening talking with Claude the whole way, sketching the Cancún itinerary and testing whether a request spoken on the sidewalk could reach the agent system running at home and come back with an answer. One version made the round trip in about two minutes; the others stalled on a configuration I had forgotten to finish, which gave Sunday its first task. Somewhere along the route the conversation also produced two stories, The Lighthouse Keeper's Camera and The Bridge Builder's Last Bridge, both now saved with the others.

At Suds, Michael and then Mary joined me for a few beers, and the three of us carried the conversation over to dinner at El Palenque, where a spicy mango margarita closed out the night.

Looking back, the day was spent almost entirely with other people: a daughter's car, a sister's blanket, friends' vacation plans, friends at the bar. The planning and the workout fit into the spaces between, and that felt like the right proportion for a Saturday.