Month: July 2023

Run 787: Why does my body weigh 80 tons?

View of Brunette River, pre-run

My plan today was to go slow ‘n steady. I did this!

It was weird, because even though it was slightly cooler and humidity was slightly higher, it felt a lot warmer, even with the occasional breeze kicking in. I chalk this up to the difference between the more open river trail vs. the much more sheltered and narrower lake trail. In short, I spent more time under direct sun.

I felt like I was plodding the entire way, as if I was running on Jupiter. At around the 3.5 km mark, I thought the right knee was going to act up, but it never really did. It feels fine now, post-run, but I’ll update this post if it feels sore or stiff later in the day.

On the one hand, even though I ran a full 5K, I improved on all my stats from the previous run–better pace, lower BPM. On the other hand, I felt like a lumbering sea lion. All that time off really adds up.

As far as DMS1Dry Mouth Syndrome goes, I experienced what I’d call minor DMS. I took my water bottle with me, but ended up not clipping it to the belt, because the belt has lost enough elasticity that the bottle sags and pulls it down. I kept it in my left pocket, and it wasn’t obtrusive for running, even when full. I did take one sip mid-run, but was fine otherwise, so the apparent bad zone for DMS starts when the humidity drops somewhere below 50%.

Overall, it was nice to complete a full 5 km run with my knee and body intact. I think I made the right call sticking to the river trail today. I’ll mull over the options for Friday, when the weather may be a bit cooler.

Brunette River, post-run

Stats:

Run 787
Average pace: 6:15/km
Location: Brunette River Trail
Start: 10:53 a.m.
Distance: 5.04 km
Time: 31:27
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 25-26ºC
Humidity: 54-52%
Wind: light to moderate
BPM: 156
Weight: 166.4
Total distance to date: 5815 km
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation)
Shoes: Saucony Peregrine 12 (485 km)

Engagement is down. Solution: FREE BEER!

By which I mean this image:

Bonus points if you recognize what cartoon this is from

Very slightly more seriously, Jetpack offered me these stats for the past month:

320 visitors
375 views

Sure, it may not seem like a lot, but it’s 100% organic! Just like the ingredients in the imaginary beer I’m offering.

Jetpack shows I’ve barely hit double digits this week, though:

That’s actually better than what the site has done historically, where it’s usually been in the single digits. The only thing I can think is a couple of LLMs are now scraping the site and hoping I don’t sue them like Twitter did.

If none of this makes sense in the future, welcome to the world of 2023.

Walk 100: Off and walking

View just west of Cariboo Dam, mid-walk

After a slothful day yesterday, I got off my butt and went for a walk today.

I did the same route as last time, but only paused briefly at the lake, so kept it to a single walk for epic stats. Or something.

I was a little faster and BPM was a little lower, but it was also a little cooler, too.

No complications ensued, and I risked not wearing sunscreen due to the copious canopy along the route. I believe I escaped burning.

Stats:

Walk 100
Average pace: 9:26/km
Location: Brunette River trail/Burnaby Lake
Distance: 8.45 km
Time: 1:19:40
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 25 °C
Humidity: 47%
Wind: light
BPM: 116
Weight: 166.3 pounds
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255
Total distance to date: 746.38 km

Another black and white entry: Scary shell

Found near Maplewood Flats, during extreme low tide.

Added to my black and white gallery:

Haiku to an empty mind

I’m having a challenging time coming up with blog topics today. I looked over my blog topic list and was left completely uninspired. So a haiku:

Haiku to an empty mind

I try to think thoughts
But my brain says uh uh, no
OK I'll just sleep

Birding, July 16, 2023: In the inlet

Where: Maplewood Flats (North Vancouver) and Tlahutum1Formerly known as Colony Farm Regional Park (Coquitlam)
Weather: Sunny with late cloud, 25-28C

The Outing

We ventured out on a special Sunday edition of Birding With the Boys™ and our first stop was Maplewood Flats, which we had not visited in the summer before.

As it turns out, most of the birds in the summer hide in all the lush vegetation and trees. Near the entrance, a sign indicated several dozen species spotted and while we caught a glimpse here and there, and we heard but didn’t see a few more, the birds were overall a bit scarce.

Until we moved out onto the beach, where a super low tide allowed us to venture a bit further out than we’d normally get. There were crows and seagulls in abundance, along with a bunch of purple martins, who were nesting in bird boxes that are normally surrounded by the water of Burrard Inlet.

We also saw some large ex-crabs and then about a million tiny living ones. They are pretty cute when they’re that small, but we grew concerned we might be inadvertently mashing entire families under our feet, so we tread carefully and tried to avoid the watery parts of the flats where they tended to cluster.

There was seagull drama over the possession of molluscs.

After baking under the glare of the sun on the flats, we moved onto Tlahutum Regional Park, where we…continued to bake under the glare of the sun, as shade there is hard to come by. We saw a group of immature starlings, some fleeting flickers and cowbirds and even a few ducks in the pond, but overall, the quantity of birds was on the low side. Probably avoiding the heat, unlike us.

The community gardens featured a lot of immature white-crowned sparrows, looking young and scruffy, one here-and-gone Anna’s hummingbird that I managed to get a shot of, plus glimpses of others.

Overall, it wasn’t a great outing in terms of birbs, but it was still nice to be out and to see Maplewood Flats in its full summer dress.

The Shots

Soon™

The Birds (and other critters)

Sparrows and sparrow-adjacent:

  • Anna’s hummingbird
  • Blackbird
  • Brown-headed cowbird
  • Common yellowthroat
  • Northern flicker
  • Purple martin
  • Song sparrow
  • Spotted towhee
  • Tree swallow
  • White-crowned sparrow

Waterfowl:

  • Mallard

Common:

  • Crow
  • Seagull

Raptors:

  • None!

Non-birds:

  • Tiny crabs
  • A few garter snakes that slithered off before we could get shots
  • One scruffy-looking squirrel that also did not stay and make cute poses for us

Serif vs. Sans serif: Fight!

UPDATE: I have turned radical and am now using the serif typeface Bitter for headings. Anarchy!

I’ve been thinking about my blog redesign, as I do periodically, and have read several articles arguing in favour of using serif fonts for body text on websites. The old belief was that text on screen evolved to be mainly sans serif because low resolution screens made serifs harder to read, as they couldn’t be rendered well. Now with fancy™ screen technology and higher resolutions, that’s not a problem, so it’s time to return to serifs for body text, following the lead of virtually all novels and most books in general.

And yet I cannot find a serif I like. They all look too thin or too fat, or too fancy. Part of it is laziness, because the theme I use, the excellent GeneratePress, offers a list of dozens of Google fonts, but it isn’t trivially easy to deviate from the list. And I am lazy, so trivially easy is important. But I will keep poking at it.

For now, I am using Heebo for body text again, because it’s a clean-looking sans serif font, plus the name is adorable.

Also, I’ve tried going through some “best fonts” lists and as you might imagine, a lot of them are SEO-driven junk. But there’s a few out there! I will expand on this post later.

(And yes, I know the difference between a typeface and font, but that battle is long since lost for the pedants.)

My apologies to the internet

Earlier this year, I gave myself permission to post whatever I wanted to this blog–no more filters, no more forbidden topics. If I wanted to say it, I’d say it.

I’ve noticed lately that a lot of what I’ve been writing seems kind of cranky, and I don’t want to come across as a cranky person. I have had a terrible flu bug recently, and am still getting past the last bits of it and this has certainly soured my overall mood, but I just seem to be taking on lots of negative stuff–mostly on the web–then spewing bile here because of it. Some of the targets are pretty easy, admittedly. And I really believe grocery stores are gouging customers and that makes me angry, because food isn’t optional, and it rankles me that these people will get away with it because our federal government is ultimately too spineless to do anything about it.

But see, there I go again! Cranky! Angry!

I will still feel the way I feel, but there’s no need to project it to the Large Language Models scraping this site to help some future 14-yewar-old write their book report.

This is my way of saying I am going to try to focus on more creative, whimsical and/or entertaining stuff to post. And kittens, of course.

But first, a nice shot I took today of Burnaby Lake (it’s there under all the lily pads):

Walk 98 and 99: Warming up

Brunette River, mid-walk

It was warm and getting warmer. As part of my recovery, I am trying to get out and exercise more, even if it’s just walking with no running (especially the day after my first run in 18 days). The knees held up fine, but my upper legs are feeling the after effects of that run.

It was also quite warm and dry. Thankfully, there’s plenty of canopy right now on the river trail. There were other people out early afternoon on the trail, but more at the lake and roughly a billion at Hume Park.

I kept up a decent pace but again chose to split the walk into two halves, stopping at the lake to grab a few photos and to drink copiously at the water fountain near the dam.

Stats:

Walk 98 and 99
Average pace: 9:30 and 9:32/km
Location: Brunette River trail/Burnaby Lake
Distance: 4.03 and 4.03 km
Time: 38:17 and 38:25
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 27-28 °C
Humidity: 38%
Wind: light
BPM: 115 and 119
Weight: 165.2 pounds
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255
Total distance to date: 737.93 km

The perfect(ly ironic) comment for an article on spam

At the time I read Elizabeth Lopatto’s Summer of spam piece on The Verge, there were 37 comments. After a bunch of people commiserating with their tales of spam, or offering suggestions on how to fight it, I came to what was then the last comment:

Yes, spam. I’m curious what the spammer had to edit. Maybe they got the link (which I have redacted) wrong? It’s also cute that they have deliberately altered “job” in the hope of bypassing automatic spam filtering. (I am the one who reported the message as part of my internet civic duty.)

As for the article, go read it and likewise commiserate. I’ve noticed an uptick this week in both spam phone calls and spam in my Outlook account (which still gets mercifully little junk). Fighting spam is not an easy j0b!

Related: Alex Leonard has an article on LLMs and how they are generating spam, using vast amounts of energy and generally making the web a terrible place. Worth reading: On the weird plague of LLM (aka AI)

Run 786: 18 days later and the knee survives

View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run

First, the knees: My last run was 18 days ago, on June 26, and I stopped after 2 km because the right knee was aching.

Today, I set a goal of 3 km because a) it would be an appropriately modest target after a long layoff and b) it plays into my OCD, allowing me to get the total distance run to a nice round figure.

The good news is my right knee came through intact! Allowing for various creaks and things from the nearly three weeks I hadn’t run, the right knee actually didn’t ache at all. This was probably aided by a few things:

  • The time off since the last run
  • Starting on the north side of the dam, which reduced any uphill/downhill running
  • Since it was quite warm and dry, and I was out of form, I was pretty dang slow

Speaking of warm and dry, it was pretty warm and the humidity was low enough that my mouth was kind of dry. My current post-illness phlegmy state meant I had difficulty swallowing a few times, which is not a nice feeling to ever have, but especially when running, and you’re trying to keep all the parts going. Had I known beforehand, I would have taken my li’l water bottle.

I am relieved that the knee is not worse for wear, but am cautious all the same. I will try running again on Monday and see how it goes. I could really feel those 18 days off, though. I had no problem not overdoing it because my body was wholly incapable of it. Still, it was nice to get back out, and I got to take some photos of the lake as a bonus.

Here’s a shot from Phillips Point:

View from Phillips Point, post-run

Stats:

Run 786
Average pace: 6:18/km
Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW)
Start: 12:55 p.m.
Distance: 3.02 km
Time: 19:03
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 26-27ºC
Humidity: 46%
Wind: light
BPM: 159
Weight: 164.8
Total distance to date: 5810 km
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation)
Shoes: Saucony Peregrine 12 (480 km)

If sleep is for the weak, I am very strong

UPDATE, July 15, 2023: My score finally improved! See below.

Because my sleep has sucked the past week. But I think I know why.

This horribad flu I’ve had has mostly receded now–mostly (today is Day 16). What remains is fluid in the chest. I am still a little phlegmy. But the way it mainly manifests now is the fluid makes certain sleep positions uncomfortable, which makes my sleep poorer.

My Garmin Forerunner 255 seems to translate this as “stress” so it keeps telling me to not stress out before bed, even if I’ve done nothing more than had a hot bath and spent an hour watching kittens.

For fun, here’s how my sleep score has tracked the past week. Note that in Garmin’s rating system, they found only about 5% achieved an Excellent rating.

I can’t precisely say why my score has continued to get worse, though the Monday to Wednesday range is relatively close. Thursday was even worse still because my side of the bed got accidentally adjusted into an upright position around 4 a.m. and brought me fully awake.

Garmin sleep rankings:

90-100: Excellent
80-89: Good
60-79: Fair
0-59: Poor

My sleep scores, starting July 8th:

Saturday: 79
Sunday: 76
Monday: 69
Tuesday: 66
Wednesday: 60
Thursday: 44
(NEW) Friday: 82

Why did Friday see a dramatic reversal? I suspect two things:

  • Late night foot massage with a massage thingie
  • I ran yesterday so was physically tired, not just mentally