Saturday Treat

Introduction

This journal entry was written by me, Brandon Nolet, in the context that I just had a very exhausting but extremely rewarding Saturday afternoon.

Preamble

I rarely ever go out on the weekends, at least voluntarily. If I do go out, it’s because there’s some sort of family function, or someone else has decided to drag me along with them. I often prefer to go home after my volunteering and work on personal projects.

However, I’ve started to realize that there’s very little actual time that I spend on the personal projects and more time spent just putzing around. That’s not good. So instead of doing that, I decided to catch up with a friend and bring my partner along. His wife was along for the ride, so my partner had some good conversation and company as well.

We all went for coffee and treats.

New Friendship

I was initially a little worried that my partner would be too shy to be able to get deep into conversation with my buddy’s wife. Those fears were dashed within the first ten minutes of hanging out. To my delight, they were being an absolute social butterfly!

All told we all spent about 4 hours together and it seems like most of that time was spent having conversation. From my partner and my buddy’s wife there was a lot of laughter, animation, and hand gestures. It was a pleasure to see my partner so involved in the conversation.

Release of Stress

Not only do I think this was a good way to spend a Saturday afternoon, I think this was an amazing relief of stress. Both my partner and I have been so entrenched in our personal lives and so involved with each other, we’d built up a lot of tension.

By involving ourselves with other people’s lives, and by letting out all the horror stories and whatnot, we were able to get a lot off of our minds. It helped put those things to rest. I know that while I feel exhausted, I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. I feel like I got more out of the whole exchange than I put in.

There’s probably something related in psychology that I could put here, but I’m too tired to include that about now. Though I won’t rule out writing about that in the future.

New Ideas, New Advice

Because these are people that I don’t see very often, I find that there was a lot of catching up to do, but I also had a lot to bring to the table…so to speak.

So I was able to talk about a lot of the things that have been transpiring over the past few months in my life. Between a brother who’s not treating his family right, and potentially changing jobs, I had a lot on my mind. I brought a lot of this up and through conversation was able to work through the troubling points in these topics and more.

I was also able to get some new ideas relating to some of my personal projects. First of that was to actually follow a javascript course to be able to understand a lot of the finer workings of the language. This was especially true of the later versions of javascript, like ES6 and…7? Shows how ignorant I am.

There was a lot more that was talked about, but I’m sure ya’ll don’t really care about the finer details. The most useful of the advice was probably to contribute to an RRSP to help contribute to my first home(condo). This would take place by taking advantage of the Home Buyers’ Plan, which I’ve just read has had an increase into the withdrawal limit.

I’ll talk more about the condo/RRSP/HBP stuff tomorrow as I also want to do more research into my plans.

Future Plans for Friends

As you can see, this was basically a double date. I think this is something that adult couples do? It must be a lot easier for couples to get along with each other because you’re sort of in the same “status” socially. I think the idea of it all is quite cute.

We plan to do a little potluck some time in the future and hang out more often. I know my partner enjoyed the conversation and I anticipate a lot of excitement for the next chill session.

Conclusion

I failed to mention that this couple is 20 years or so older than us, but I think that might be to both of our benefits. The only thing I can speak to is that my partner and I can certainly learn from them. I’m sure that my buddy and his wife enjoy the company as well, and get the benefit of knowing they’re helping a young couple flourish?

If anyone has any thoughts on that, let me know. I’d be curious to know what the perspective from the other side is.