Run 1,027: More or less normal, with sun

View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run: Calm, mild and sunny.

Temperatures were a bit warmer today, but still seasonal and I posted a slightly better run vs. Wednesday, basically flipping my pace on the first and second km, but hewing closely otherwise. I didn’t experience any issues and didn’t try pushing hard or anything. BPM was up slightly to 152, but more effort, so it’s fine. The peak was 158, so it stayed within a pretty narrow range throughout, even when I was running harder.

I ran clockwise, starting at the mysteriously re-locked water fountain by the dam. I stopped to check the water fountain at the Nature House post-run and it was working, so they seem to have singled out the one at the dam for some reason. The flow of water at the Nature House fountain was a bit low, as if it was set for the world’s least thirsty person. It was still nice.

Just before I started my run, a young guy dressed all in black ran by. This meant when I started he was within sight of me, not far ahead. No biggie, I assumed that the benefit of youth would see him dash off and out of sight soon enough. But this did not happen.

Instead, it seemed his pace was very close to mine. I faced a dilemma: On the one hand, I don’t like having a “pace car” person running in front of me, and on the other, I didn’t particularly feel like turning on the jets to get past him. The solution, as it tutned out, was to do nothing. I was actually running slightly faster than him, so it took minimal effort to pass him, which I did.

The weather, being pleasant and mostly sunny, brought out a fair number of people–many of them fellow joggers–but I only once had someone almost walk into my path when her partner moved to let me by–and she then tried to take over his spot because maybe she was secretly coveting it?

The stretch of trail between the rowing pavilion parking lot and sports fields is getting increasingly flooded and in several spots has water more or less permanently pouring across it. I am hoping it gets resurfaced soon.™.

In all, a good finish to the week. It feels nice to be back to my normal self, running-wise, after last week’s weirdness.

Looking south across the lake from Phillips Point, post-run.

Stats:

Run 1,027
Average pace: 5:43/km
Training status: Maintaining
Location: Burnaby Lake (CW)
Start: 10:46 a.m.
Distance: 5.03 km
Time: 28:43
Weather: Mostly sunny
Temp: 10-11°C
Humidity: 60%
Wind: light to moderate
BPM: 152
Weight: 168.1 pounds
Total distance to date: 6,960 km
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 265, Samsung Galaxy S26, AirPods (3rd generation)
Shoes: Saucony Peregrine 15 (230/385/615)

Music: Synchronicity, The Police (I didn't even skip "Mother")

Run 1,026: New phone, faster legs

View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run: Sunny, with the trees in bloom.

I missed Monday’s run due to phone-related shenanigans (I got a new phone on Monday but the shenanigans were not related to the new phone itself). This meant I had four days off between runs so if nothing else, I’d be well-rested.

I headed to the lake and adopted a slower starting pace to see how I felt. I felt OK, so I increased my pace and went on to keep increasing it, for a rare graph where every km was faster than the one before, with the last one coming in at a spiffy 5:30/km. My overall pace was 5:45/km, much better than last week and while my BPM was up a bit at 150, that’s still perfectly cromulent and expected with the extra exertion and having taken some extra time off.

So it seems whatever hit me last week has moved on, at least for now. Yay. I didn’t experience any issues, the run just felt like a normal run. One young guy (seriously, there are people running on the trail that are probably 40 years younger than me now) passed me wearing a t-shirt that said “10K run division” on the back, so I didn’t feel too bad about him getting ahead. I assumed he’d just keep expanding his lead and disappear ahead of me, but either he slowed down or I sped up as we reached a kind of equillibrium and he stayed ahead but within sight for the rest of the run (he kept going after I hit 5K).

The trail had a decent number of people out and the weather was significantly cooler than Friday’s 17C. 9C was fine for the run and the sun was out much of the time, which felt nice. I’m not sure how much the more seasonal temperature helped today, except that I’m sure it did.

And the new phone–a Samsung Galaxy S26–worked without issue playing music from my AirPods and relaying the laps from my Garmin Forerunner watch. My current gear is a Frankenstein mix-n-match that works surprisingly well together. This pleases me.

Oh, and the water fountain was back in service, hooray! Long enough for me to get one drink from it, then it was locked down again. I am not kidding. By the time I went down to the 0K marker to start my run and ran back past the fountasin, a park worker was there locking it down again, for reasons unknown. They’ll probably open it up again in July.

Before: I got a drink from the fountain. Yummy cool water!
After (literally a few minutes later): Locked down again.

Still, In all, it was nice to get back out and return to my normal running ways.

Looking toward the rowing pavilion, post-run.

Stats:

Run 1,026
Average pace: 5:45/km
Training status: Maintaining
Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW)
Start: 11:32 a.m.
Distance: 5.03 km
Time: 28:52
Weather: Partly sunny
Temp: 9°C
Humidity: 54%
Wind: light to moderate
BPM: 150
Weight: 167.9 pounds
Total distance to date: 6,955 km
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 265, Samsung Galaxy S26, AirPods (3rd generation)
Shoes: Saucony Peregrine 15 (225/374/598)

Music: Ta-Dah!, Scissor Sisters

Birding, April 11, 2026: Two-thirds birding, one-third sleeping

Where: Reifel Bird Sanctuary (Delta), Tlahutum Regional Park (Coquitlam), Burnaby Lake (Burnaby)
Weather: Cloudy, 13°C

I was feeling weird and tired in the morning, so I missed the entire Reifel section of birding today.

Reifel Bird Sanctuary

Nic saw a bunch of Snow Geese, some White-fronted Geese hanging with them, and the Killdeer still protecting their parking lot nest. The babbies are expected to hatch soon.

I have no photos from Reifel, so you’ll have to use your imagination.

Tlahutum Regional Park

Coquitlam River, cropped to 16:9.

We both went to Tlahutum and spoiler: no Mountain Bluebirds, but we did see a somewhat elusive Cinnamon Teal for the first time this season at the big pond, where all the cool birds were hanging out, ranging from Buffleheads to Gadwalls and shovelers.

We opted to skip the community garden, though we could see the flooded bits are starting to dry out. Soon™.

The bulk of the trails proved fairly quiet, with only a few Golden-crowned Sparrows and some crows, but not a lot else. Maybe birds like the sun, because it remained overcast the entire afternoon (though it did not shower, as the forecast had threatened).

The other highlight came when we took a path different from the usual on the way back to the car and came across, of all things, a Bewick’s Wren having a grand old time taking a dirt bath right in the middle of the trail. We took photos until it was done and flew off. It was very into the dirt bath.

In all, though, a quiet outing here today.

Piper Spit, Burnaby Lake Regional Park

Burnaby Lake was windswpt and cool today.

By the time we got to Piper Spit, the wind had picked up and it felt a bit cool, a big shift from the last few days of summer-like weather.

While the lake level was lower, meaning more of the land mass is now above water, it was still too deep around the spit for shorebirds. Most of the usual gang were otherwise represented, including a single Glaucous-winged Gull, perhaps selected to check the status of the golf balls the gulls have collected there.

The coots seemed to be split into two groups: the clean-billed and the dirty-billed. The dirty-billed had black…stuff…along their “lips”. I have no idea what it signifies. Maybe we have two rival coot gangs and the coot war is coming.

A lot of the birds we saw today were looking scruffy, due to moulting, and among them were some Green-winged Teals who looked a bit like unfinished paintings, with their heads flecked with green instead of lovingly smothered in it.

The drama here was kept to a minimum, though the geese were still being geese. You can’t fight your nature.

I have still not gotten a decent photo of a cowbird yet.

And we saw a pigeon couple kissing and kissing and kissing some more. Another male, meanwhile, was trying and failing to impress the ladies again.

We ended with a stop at the butterfly garden, which is still absent of butterflies, but did have a Goldenrod Crab Spider tucked inside a tulip, its front legs spread out, ready to give a deadly hug to any early pollinators. The one we saw was an almost translucent white, though they can change colour to match their surroundings. How sneaky!

The weather was better than forecast, but it was still very gray. I guess it makes the motre colourful birds pop, so there is that. In all, a nice bit of afternoon birding.

The Shots

Shot with a Canon EOS R7 with 18-150 mm kit lens and 100-400 mm telephoto.

A few shots, gallery pending:

When you got an itch, you gotta scratch.
The first Cinnamon Teal we’ve seen this year.
A Golden-crowned Sparrow looking contemplative.
This Bewick’s Wren was enjoying a nice dirth bath.
A Goldenrod Crab Spider waiting to give a pollinator a fatal hug.

The Birds (and other critters)

Sparrows and sparrow-adjacent:

  • American Robin
  • Anna’s Hummingbird
  • Barn Swallow
  • Black-capped Chickadee
  • Brown-headed Cowbird
  • Common Yellowthroat
  • Dark-eyed Junco
  • Golden-crowned Sparrow
  • House Sparrow
  • Northern Rough-winged Swallow
  • Red-winged Blackbird
  • Song Sparrow
  • Spotted Towhee
  • Tree Swallow
  • Violet-green Swallow
  • Yellow-rumped Warbler

Waterfowl and shorebirds:

  • American Coot
  • American Wigeon
  • Bewick’s Wren
  • Bufflehead
  • Canada Goose
  • Cinnamon Teal
  • Gadwall
  • Great Blue Heron
  • Green-winged Teal
  • Killdeer
  • Marsh wren
  • Lesser Scaup
  • Mallard
  • Northern Pintail
  • Northern Shoveler
  • Ring-necked Duck
  • Snow Goose
  • White-fronted Goose
  • Wood Duck

Common:

  • American Crow
  • Rock Pigeon
  • Glaucous-winged Gull

Raptors:

  • Bald Eagle
  • Northern Harrier

Non-birds:

  • Goldenrod Crab Spider

I tried to “fix” my iPhone, I have a few regrets

As I’ve mentioned before, I have an iPhone 12 I bought in January 2021, making it now a little over five years old. This is the longest I’ve ever had a phone that didn’t plug into a wall outlet.

But late last year it started exhibiting an annoying issue (that also had an unintended perk as a side effect): It stopped passing through phone calls.

I can make calls the same as always, but when someone calls me, they get sent directly to voicemail. Often, I don’t even get a notification that a call has happened. If my phone does ring, the caller gets sent to VM while I stare at a not-actually-happening call where the time on the call never advances past 0:00.

The perk is it saves me from ever having to take a call, which is nice in a 1990s-no-cellphone kind of way.

But it is not helpful when someone, like a doctor, needs to call me.

I tried various ways of fixing the issue, but always felt it was likely bad hardware. I’d resisted two final fixes:

  • Updating to iOS 26
  • Doing a full erase and reset of the phone

I’d already ruled out the second option, because I’d just rather get a new phone at that point, and I’d resisted the first option because I deeply dislike the look of “Liquid Glass” and the bugs and weird, unwelcome changes made in iOS 26.

But then I thought, it’s up to 26.4.1 now, and I knew all the steps to take to tamp down the (IMO) ugly look of the new UI design, so I went ahead and updated.

It made no difference. The phone is still broken.

But so I’m not just griping, as fun as it is, here are the steps I took to minimize the look of Liquid Glass, with most of these settings found, logically, in the Settings app:

  • Under Display, I changed Liquid Glass from Clear to Tinted
  • Under Accessibility:
    • Display and Tex Size: Turn on Reduce Transparency
    • Motion: Turn on Reduce Motion (this one is essential to cutting down the insane bounciness they added to everything)
  • Lock Screen > Customize: Set the clock from Glass to Solid

This mostly reduces the home screen and other app pages to looking like before, except with the weird glassy outlines on icons, which look terrible and you can do nothing about. This also doesn’t affect the awful choices Apple made in its native apps, like Apple Music, an app that was already pretty clunky and now is somehow even worse. But it’s mostly tolerable after making these adjustments.

The next step is a new Android phone, and soon.

Run 1,025: The same, but better

View from Cariboo Dam: Sunny and once again weirdly warm.

The stats and conditions for today’s run were remarkably similar to Monday’s (I did not run Wednesday because my Garmin watch recommended a rest day), but the title of the post still makes sense, because while Monday felt like a horrible slog, today’s near-identical pace was a more deliberate choice and my performance was pretty steady throughout, with a slightly faster start and finish.

I’m still not entirely sure what is dragging my performance down this week. It may be a combination of things:

  • Spring allergies
  • Maybe a virus of some kind?
  • Probably not Spring Fever
  • Definitely not Boogie Fever
  • The much higher-than-normal temperatures could be a factor

Speaking of, it was 17C for the run. The normal daily high this time of year is 12C, to give you an idea of how much warmer it was. Humidity was 50% and while I didn’t experience DMS1Dry Mouth Syndrome I could sense it beckoning. I did a short loop today and didn’t experience any issues, nothing at all like Monday. I was slower, but didn’t struggle, because the slowness was more a choice.

I saw one guy jogging with a jacket. I almost started sweating spontaneously just looking at it. Seriously, you do not need a jacket when it is sunny and 17C, unless you have, I dunno, translucent skin or something. Maybe he did.

In all, not a stellar week for running (other than the great early summer-like weather), but I got through it.

Sun shining on forested area just past the end of the run.

Stats:

Run 1,025
Average pace: 5:54/km
Training status: Maintaining
Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW, short loop)
Start: 11:32 a.m.
Distance: 5.03 km
Time: 29:39
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 17°C
Humidity: 50%
Wind: light
BPM: 147
Weight: 167.1 pounds
Total distance to date: 6,950 km
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 265, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation)
Shoes: Saucony Peregrine 15 (220/360/580)

Music: Flood, They Might Be Giants

Paper notebooks, still neat in the 2020s

In my travails of trying to get a dual boot system going on my new PC with Windows 11/Some Linux Distro, one of the things I need to prepare for is the possibility that a particular Linux distro will overwrite the Windows MBR (Master Boot Record), which can prevent Windows from loading.

I have a few command line instructions available on my older PC to fix this if it happens, but to get to the commands I need to switch input on my monitor, swap keyboard cables (no KVM) and it’s a general nuisance.

The easier solution was to write the commands down in a paper notebook, all old-timey style, and keep it nearby on the desk, ready to be consulted. Fortunately, my handwriting (or printing, rather) is still quite tidy and readable. All good and I have followed the instructions several times (cursed Linux distros).

And now that I’ve done this, I realize I have the notebook itch again. It’s that feeling I get when I walk down the stationery aisle of a store or walk into an actual dedicated stationery store, like The Letterbox back in my hometown of Duncan (interestingly, The Letterbox is, not surprisingly, long gone, but just a few stores over from where it used to be is an office supply store, so its spirit lives on nearby). Stationery, but also pens, paper, typewriter ribbons (kids, ask your parents), notepads, fountain pens (kids, ask your parents–again!– also, fountain pens and lefties don’t go together well, but I didn’t care) all of this stuff has delighted me since I started writing back as a wee one and still does today, even as nearly all of my writing is done via keyboard.

But now that the notebook itch is back, I’m on the hunt for a new notebook to keep on my desk. The one I have (for free, from the UBC Sauder School of Business) is nice, but it doesn’t lay flat, and it looks like Muji has some that do. I am on the hunt. I’m going analog, baby.

(For some things. I’m not ready to abandon all of civilization quite yet.)