Where: Sapperton Landing (New Westminster) Weather: Cloudy, 12°C
With the possibility of showers, we opted to forgo the usual birding, but I decided to pop down to Sapperton Landing, which is not far from my place.
Sapperton Landing
The sky over the Fraser River looked foreboding, but it remained dry for my visit.
It was quite blustery, but there didn’t seem to be any imminent threat of showers, so I strolled to the end of the trail (about 1 km) and back, using my kit lens to take scenery shots on the way in, and switching to my telephoto lens to take (any) bird shots on the way out.
As it happened, a single Great Blue Heron and Ring-billed Seagull cooperated, with a few others flying about or over the river. There were boats and weird logs, too.
The Shots
All photos shot with a Canon EOS R7 with 18–150 mm kit lens and 100–400 mm telephoto. Some landscape shots captured with a Samsung Galaxy S26.
The gallery only features two birds. Well, technically more if you look for them.
Also, the last two photos are heavily postprocessed.
A tugboat tugging away, with the Port Mann Bridge in the background.
A small ferry waiting to be scrapped on the Fraser River.
An old BC Ferry waiting to be scrapped. The name is mostly worn off, so you can only read Queen of...
An excavator doing its thing on an immense pile of sand or gravel, with a barge also loaded with gravel in front of it.
The middle section of the old Pattullo Bridge, sitting on barges near to its replacement bridge.
A fish mosaic along the trail.
A fish mosaic along the trail.
The sun shining on trees along the shore of the Fraser River.
A red and black rescue boat with rescue people on it. One of them is shooting a photo.
Ledcor boat plying the Fraser River.
A Ring-billed Gull hanging on the dock at Sapperton Landing.
Great Blue Heron avoiding the wind on the Brunette River.
Hook and ball hanging above the river. This is heavily edited, including a FAKE SKY. Just because it was fun. The sky is real, just not the actual sky from the shot.
I got a late start, so with the weather forecast showing a higher chance of showers in the early afternoon, I opted for the river trail instead of the lake, but to get a few more steps in, I walked to the end of the trail and started there instead.
The run was both better than Wednesday’s–my pace improved by seven seconds–and stinky. The stinky was due to the copious numbers of dead salmon lining the riverbanks. It seems most of them have done their spawning and moved on to the dying. The river was high a few days ago and is low now, so a lot of the ex-salmon are stuck on higher ground until the river level rises again.
In hindsight, I should have gone to the lake and risked a shower.
As for the run, another slow start, with the overall pace saved by a solid finish. The area around my surgery (chest) felt tight for the first few minutes, but eventually felt better. I felt a bit overdressed (I wore two layers, even though it was quite mild again at 14°C), but I’m still not sure what is keeping my pace down. The stiff left knee? Diet? Karma? A little of everything?
Here’s the pace breakdown:
6:03
5:59
5:59
5:57
5:39
Average was 5:56/km, with a BPM of 147, both better than Wednesday, as I’d expect on the river trail.
A year ago that 5:39/km would have been closer to my average pace. I know my performance is going to decline every year as I get older, unless I train hard enough to compensate (which is very unlikely), but I still feel there’s more here. Maybe it’s just lingering effects from the surgery. Maybe they accidentally removed some of my running genes.
Still, it was a better effort and I stayed mostly dry, so I’m good with that. Also, the few dogs I encountered were all on-leash and well-behaved.
The river running low, post-run. If you zoom in, you can see some ex-salmon.
Stats:
Run 1,085 Average pace: 5:56/km Training status: Productive (!) Performance Condition: 0 Location: Brunette River Trail Start: 12:52 pm. Distance: 5.03 km Time: 29:48 Weather: Cloudy, some light sprinkles late Temp: 14°C Humidity: 69–70% Wind: low BPM: 147 Weight: 172.4 pounds Total distance to date: 7,225 km Devices: Garmin Forerunner 265, Samsung Galaxy S26, AirPods (3rd generation) Shoes: Scarpa Golden Gate ATR 2 (205/418/623)
The widget pop-up menu on the New Tab page. It is quite round.
Eventually it will look like this:
And when it does, someone will like it! Maybe the circle could be 3D embossed and we’d be back to those clip art CDs we’d buy for designing websites back in 1998.
For a time I was running three OSes, each on its own physical drive:
Windows 11
Linux Mint
CachyOS
Technically, four, but my Mac Studio (circa 2022) mostly sits powered off these days.
Up until yesterday all three were working fine. Windows 11 and CachyOS still are. I was noodling around in Mint and it needed updates, as OSes do, so I installed them and it suggested I reboot, so I rebooted. It came back with errors, crashes, and weirdness. I tried some fixes, including boot repair, but could not get the system running stable. I’d also not created any backups prior to the screwy update. Whoops! I thought about my options and decided I’d give Mint a break for a bit (a major update is due next month, I’ll probably give it another go then) and so today I installed Ubuntu over top of it.
Yep, plain old Ubuntu, with its Snaps and GNOME and all that.
My experience so far:
Snaps have been glitchy. In one app, the mouse pointer was tiny. In a weather app (Mousam) it would not let me add a location, rendering the app useless.
I installed Bazaar, the Flatpak store, and enabled full Flatpak support. The Flatpak version of Mousam worked perfectly. The mouse pointer was likewise correctly rendered in a Flatpak version of the program in question. UPDATE: This turned out to be an issue with the Snap version of the app and is not the fault of the Snap system. Also, the Flatpak version does not render the hourly forecast properly, either, though it works fine in CachyOS. So Snap is off the hook for this.
So, Snaps…not so impressive, but easy to work around for third party stuff.
Next, GNOME, the desktop environment (DE) Ubuntu comes with my default.
GNOME feels very smooth. Windows open and close and resize without any hesitation. I generally like the look, too. The corners are maybe a tad too rounded, but pretty nice overall.
But if you like options, GNOME stinks. Its main competitor is KDE Plasma (which I use on CachyOS) and it offers far more customization. Some of this verges on overkill or esoteric, but a lot is just sensible stuff you expect and ends up being hidden away in GNOME.
Example: The default mouse pointer in GNOME is quite small on a 4K 32″ screen. I went into mouse and display/appearance options to bump up the pointer size. But the option isn’t in those places. It’s under Accessibility:
It’s not what you think!
But not under Pointing and Clicking! It’s under Seeing. See? But at least the option is there. For a lot of stuff, no options exist, which means you have to resort to extensions and other add-ons to do any real customization. I like customization. GNOME does not.
On the other hand, the general approach of GNOME on the desktop is one I got used to pretty quickly, and again, it feels very smooth. Click an icon to bring up a list of all apps, click another to show all open programs. Everything feels very snappy (er) and close at hand, so it feels faster, somehow, compared to Plasma, even though it really isn’t.
I’ll keep exploring Ubuntu and GNOME for the time being, but suspect I’ll keep spending most of my time in CachyOS and Windows 11.
View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run: Not seen–the incredibly balmy 17°C weather.
It was kind of a strange run.
I missed Monday’s run because I had errands that ate up a large chunk of the day, so I’d gone three days between runs. The weather today looked cloudy, but unusually balmy and indeed, it was 17°C for the run, about six degrees warmer than normal. I wore my hoodie to the lake, but had it wrapped around my waist for the run and the walk home. It was so mild that even the breeze after the run felt refreshing, not cold.
It was also Remembrance Day, and as there was no immediate threat of rain, the trail was fairly packed, this time with a weirdly large number of joggers, though none of the regulars (I got out late), along with others walking dogs and one very naughty cyclist who was riding way too fast. May both her tires get punctured by coyotes.
I started out slow and ended with an overall pace of 6:03/km, down a fair bit from my last run. Thinking about it, I cite these as possible reasons:
The high temperature threw me off and slowed me down
I was stretching my legs in bed just before getting up this morning and pulled the right calf hard. It was still tender when I did my pre-run stretching, so it may have been a factor.
Just plain lazy (I don’t think this applies, because my BPM was 149)
In any case, it wasn’t a bad run, just slower than normal and definitely sweatier than I’d expect for the second week of November. I saw a lot of people dressed for normal November 11 weather, but not many dressed for what the weather actually was.
The lake, post-run.
Stats:
Run 1,084 Average pace: 6:03/km Training status: Maintaining Performance Condition: -1 Location: Burnaby Lake (CW) Start: 12:52 pm. Distance: 5.03 km Time: 30:26 Weather: Cloudy Temp: 17°C Humidity: 68–67% Wind: low BPM: 149 Weight: 172.7 pounds Total distance to date: 7,220 km Devices: Garmin Forerunner 265, Samsung Galaxy S26, AirPods (3rd generation) Shoes: Scarpa Golden Gate ATR 2 (200/413/613)
Still reading. I have read through the first house party scene. I recall a writing tip saying to never have house party scenes in your story. I actually have two and the first one is especially long.
But having reread it now, I still like it, though it could stand some trimming.
Where: Burnaby Lake (Burnaby), Tlahutum Regional Park (Coquitlam) Weather: Cloudy with late clearing, 13°C
There was a lot of cloud, even more wind and fewer birds on this abbreviated day of birding.
Piper Spit, Burnaby Lake
Seagulls gathered at Piper Spit.
We started at Piper Spit, where we saw surprisingly few birds. Blackbirds were absent and most ducks that were not mallards were in low supply. This was offset somewhat by getting some (distant and partly obscured) shots of some Wilson’s Snipes hiding along the tall grass off to the north and west of the pier. We found them thanks to another birder with a VVBL1Very Very Big Lens.
We watched a seagull work over an ex-salmon in the shallows.
The Dowitchers had moved elsewhere, probably due to the water level being a bit higher, or maybe because of the wind, as it was very windy.
There was a single duck, but a healthy population of coots milling about the other groups of waterfowl, as they do.
In all, it was a wee bit underwhelming, but the conditions were not ideal for birds to be out in the open, and the appearance of the snipes was a nice bonus.
After this we went to the western edge of the lake to get scenery shots of Still Creek. We did not see any birds here, other than maybe a few crows flying overhead.
Tlahutum Regional Park
The big pond at Tlahutum.
Our second and final stop was Tlahutum, where the clear highlight were several Pied-billed Grebes plying the waterways and not just the Big Pond™. And while they are divers, the ones we observed didn’t dive, they just…sank. Nic and I both got shots of this in action, where the midsections has submerged and the tail and head haven’t and it looks like a magician’s trick. Grebes are weird.
We also saw some Northern Shovellers in the creeks, which is a bit unusual (they usually stick to the Big Pond) and a few Common Mergansers plying the ruddy-looking river. The light changed over the time we were here, so we were able to take before/after shots from various viewpoints.
The community garden is starting to develop its pond-like puddles, which attracted a murder or two of crows to either drink, bathe or both. There were a lot of crows around, gathering before their nightly trek to Burnaby, where all the cool crows go.
There were also multiple Northern Flickers, but other sparrow or sparrow-adjacent birds were only seen fleetingly. As mentioned previously, it was windy and maybe when you weigh next to nothing you avoid going out in the open where strong winds can bat you around like a shuttlecock.
Overall, not a bad outing, given how bad the weather could have been. We’ll see what the Super El Nino has for us in the weeks ahead.
The Shots
All photos shot with a Canon EOS R7 with 18–150 mm kit lens and 100–400 mm telephoto. Some landscape shots captured with a Samsung Galaxy S26.
As noted at the start of this, there will be days when I do nothing.
Today is one of those days. I went out birding and my entire evening (it is 10:21 p.m. as I type this) was filled with strata-related nonsense, so no time to do anything but ponder.
View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run: Mild, calm, with the threat of showers.
Which is to say it was pretty mild for today’s run, to the point where I paused after 3K to remove my Echo hoodie.
I missed Wednesday’s run due to a pressure headache and weird neck pain, then missed Friday’s run because I was waiting for the rain to at least not be pouring and lost daylight in the meantime.
But with birding postponed a day and no rain (for the moment) I set off today in late morning, with the run starting shortly past noon.
The clouds meant the trail was not crowded, though, perhaps being a weekend, there was a naughty cyclist. At least he wasn’t riding fast.
I surprised myself with a better-than-expected first km, then dipped a bit for the second and third before improving and having a stronger finish. Overall, it was fine–four seconds faster than Monday, with a BPM only slightly higher at 148. My left knee felt hinky intermittently, but never for long and never enough to slow me down. It feels fine now.
The one sad note was this:
You shall not drink!
They usually shut down the fountains around the first week of November, so not unexpected. I look forward to sipping again in March, maybe.
It did actually sprinkle for about 10 minutes, but waited until after I finished the run, which was nice of the clouds.
Overall, a decent wrap-up to the week.
The lake, post-run, a few minutes before light showers passed through.
Stats:
Run 1,083 Average pace: 5:54/km Training status: Maintaining Performance Condition: +1 Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW) Start: 12:03 pm. Distance: 5.03 km Time: 29:39 Weather: Cloudy Temp: 12–13°C Humidity: 79–78% Wind: low BPM: 148 Weight: 172.7 pounds Total distance to date: 7,215 km Devices: Garmin Forerunner 265, Samsung Galaxy S26, AirPods (3rd generation) Shoes: Scarpa Golden Gate ATR 2 (195/400/595)
