Taken after my run on my iPhone 12, which I’m getting closer to going from joking about replacing to actually replacing.
And it won’t be with another iPhone.
But now, the pics!
A few shots around Burnaby Lake, April 30, 2025
Month: April 2025
Run 919: More buffalo, less gazelle
The weather was pleasant today, so I headed out for a nice trail run. I briefly contemplated doing the “easy” route of running the river trail, but ended up going to the lake, running the 5K, then walking the rest of the way around and back. I am at 26,188 steps as I type this.
My calves will voice their concerns later.
I filled my water bottle and almost took it, but humidity was still around 68%, which is a fair bit higher than the last run, so I risked going no-water and it was fine.
I started right at the 0K marker and when I hit 1K, I was a bit surprised that my pace was a rather languid 5:59/km. On the other hand, I can’t say I felt like I was pushing at all, so this wasn’t alarming or anything.
At the end of the second km, my pace was now 6:07/km. This was alarming, so I picked up the pace a little, but was still focusing more on being like a buffalo: slower, steady, and less like a gazelle: faster, nimble. My pace improved to 6:04, but I knew it was unlikely I’d come in under the six-minute mark.
I finished with a pace of 6:01/km. and you know what? It’s fine. I felt good, I wasn’t gasping for breath, my BPM was 152. I’ll get faster again as I get in better shape (and losing a few pounds might help, too).
I also discovered, when looking over my stats on the Garmin Connect site, that the voice that announces my pace every km does not round up or down, but the site does. Here is a chart where:
- Pace = Pace as reported on Garmin Connect
- Pace During Run = Pace as reported during the actual run
- Exact Pace = Pace without any rounding of numbers
| Lap | Pace | Pace During Run | Exact Pace |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 6:00 | 5:59 | 6:00 |
| 2 | 6:08 | 6:07 | 6:07.7 |
| 3 | 6:04 | 6:04 | 6.04 |
| 4 | 6:04 | 6:03 | 6:03.9 |
| 5 | 5:53 | 5:53 | 5:53.4 |
The differences are slight, but can have a psychological effect. For example, while the Garmin Connect site reports the same pace for laps 3 and 4, the watch reported lap 4 as slightly faster, which proved encouraging and inspired me to push a bit more for a faster finish.
It was again strangely busy on the trail for a weekday morning. I either need to start earlier, or maybe people are just getting out a lot whenever it isn’t raining. A lot of dogs at the lake were off-leash, which is unusual and bad, though the dogs were at least well-behaved.
Oh, and post-run, I spotted multiple murders (or whatever you call them) of goslings. The poopmonsters have been busy! Good for them, I say. You can’t spend all your time honking, hissing and going berserk.
Stats:
Run 919
Average pace: 6:01/km
Training status: Productive
Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW)
Start: 11:01 a.m.
Distance: 5.03 km
Time: 30:18
Weather: Mostly sunny
Temp: 13-14°C
Humidity: 68-66%
Wind: light to moderate
BPM: 152
Weight: 173.2
Total distance to date: 6,430 km
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation)
Shoes: ASICS Trabuco Terra 2 (25/28/53)
Music: Blondie, Eat to the Beat
April 2025 weight loss report: Up 4.6 pounds
Let me explain.
It’s all muscle!
No?
OK, maybe it was something more like this:
April, particularly the first two-thirds of the month, was very stressful. I started out with modest weight loss that would have continued through the month if my eating habits had remained unchanged. They obviously did not, as I ate food to cope with stress. I ate all the food.
By the end of the month, things had settled down, but my weight didn’t, it was still tracking a couple of pounds up. In the final week, I decided I had to change my eating habits and do so in a drastic way.
That starts tomorrow, on May 1st.
But rather than ease my way into this new snack-free regime by cutting back, I did the opposite. I ate snacks. I ate a lot of snacks. I wanted to make myself sick of snacks.
Example: Yesterday I ate three candy bars (and more). The calorie total was more than double my entire breakfast.
I gained another half-pound overnight, to finish the month up a whopping 4.6 pounds. I broke the 173 pound mark for the first time this year. (Almost) all the stats are going in the wrong direction (see below for more, including the exception). I’ll likely be up again tomorrow.
But tomorrow, May 1st, is when the new plan begins. No snacks, unless it’s fruit or veggies. Calorie-rich dinners like pizza will be exceptions. Salads? More.
But we’ll see. In the meantime: FatVille, Population: Me. But hopefully the road leads to SlimVille or at least NormalWeightVille.
One plus side: Probably thanks to the running, I added 0.5 kg of muscle (about 1.1 pounds) this month, so woo on that. My total body fat only increased 0.2% as well. Maybe I’m just big-boned1lolz.
Stats:
January 1, 2025: 166.8 pounds
Current: 173.2 pounds
Year to date: Up 6.4 pounds
April 1: 168.6 pounds
April 30: 173.2 pounds (up 4.6 pounds)
Body fat:
April 1: 26.5%
April 30: 26.7% (up 0.2%)
Skeletal muscle mass:
April 1: 29.9 kg
April 30: 30.4 kg (up 0.5 kg)
BMI:
April 1: 24.1
April 30: 24.8 (up 0.7)
Historical: January 1, 2022: 182.8 pounds
Brunette River, April 29, 2025
It’s been a bit since I posted some shots of the river. Here’s two.
Written? Kitten! is still around
And is proof that not everything in the whole has gone sour and awful.
Get your kittens here: https://writtenkitten.co/
Treadmill run: Sweaty and a little cheat-y
But not really cheat-y, more like semi-interval-y.
I stopped once a few km in to retie my laces, as they felt like they were loosening. I also slowed the pace down a few times for about 20 seconds or so, then went back to the regular pace. Running on the treadmill is a much more sweaty and tiring experience than trail running, even if the pace on the readout claims I’m going slower than I would be outside.
But it was cooler and showering and I just didn’t feel like running in the rain today, so I chose to go through what was almost certainly a worse overall experience to avoid getting a bit damp (I am still sweating profusely as I type this).
Still, I had an overall pace of 5:47/km on the Garmin with a BPM of 148, which seems a bit strange, since I had the treadmill set to a pace of 7:03/km–yet the pace and time to complete 5K totally checks out.
I’ll take it, though. Now to continue my post-workout sweat.
Stats:
Speed: 8.5 (6.5-9.0)
Incline: 1 (1)
Pace: 5:47 (8:36/km)
Time: 29:05 (26:05)
Distance: 5.03 km (3.03 km)
Calories burned: 342 (273)
BPM: 148 (130)
Training status: Maintaining
Music: Prism, Armageddon
Parenthetical numbers are from the previous treadmill run.
Birding, April 26, 2025: Sit, sing, poop
Where: Reifel Bird Sanctuary (Delta), Boundary Bay (Delta), Burnaby Lake (Burnaby)
Weather: Sunny, windy 12-18°C
Reifel Bird Sanctuary
Reifel was mild, breezy and packed full of people. I think I saw more people than birds.
The geese were quiet until they weren’t. Once one starts honking, the GHM1Goose Hive Mind takes over and they all honk.
We saw a few pintails, so they haven’t all left yet, but chances are decent these may be the last we see until they return next migration. Goodbye, pointy-tailed butts!
We saw a few Sandhill cranes, two of them on their little “making babbies” island, until one departed for the shore where it hung out with the aforementioned geese. Among other winter refugees, we also saw a few scaups, though their numbers have dwindled, too.
Making up for it were swallows and plenty of them, including some that may have been barn swallows but might have been something else, but were probably barn swallows.
There were definitely others that were barn swallows.
And even though one of the bird signs at the sanctuary identifies them as a local (or at least regularly visiting) species, we saw cinnamon teals for the first time: a male and female pair in a pond near the viewing tower. The male is a very bright orange, with piercing red eyes. They each have big bills reminiscent of shovellers, but smaller. The male especially was in very serious dabbling mode, constantly dunking his head.
We also saw an adorable pair of Least sandpipers at one of the inner ponds, the first time I think we’ve seen them at Reifel.
We heard and saw marsh wrens again, underscoring that the best time to see a marsh wren is when he’s horny. Come summer, they’ll be nearly-impossible to spot again.
In all, a pretty good outing, though again, the number of people milling about was noticeable. Also, I felt inadequate with all the people carrying lenses half as long as I am.
Boundary Bay
The main quest here was to find a common yellowthroat, with a side of Savannah sparrow. Mission accomplished on both, though most of the time they were far off and the shots were not great.
We did get a pair of nice matching burns on our necks, though, as I brought sunblock, then thought it was a good idea to just leave it in the car. I am very smart.
While we slowly burned, we observed a few other birds, mostly swallows, what seemed like an endless supply of herons flying overhead, bald eagles circling about or sitting on far-off logs, and a robin or two, which would usually move just as I was lining up a shot. I took photos of the golf course, instead, as I was fairly confident it would not suddenly fly off on me.
There was also construction equipment out and aboot as they are expanding the width and possibly the height of the dyke in one section for reasons. As it was the weekend, the equipment was idle. I took pictures. Again, the equipment was close and very still.
Piper Spit
Sufficiently burned, we ended as we do most times at Piper Spit. No pintails or coots here, and the scaup population was quite low. There were plenty of geese, a few gulls and the usual gangs of wood ducks and mallards. We saw one green-winged teal. Maybe there were more?
There were a lot of people here, too, including a very bossy little kid shouting orders to his family like, “Get your camera!” One kid decided to kind of play with his giant hat instead of wear it and dropped it off the pier. His father helped him get it out. He’s lucky there weren’t more gulls around. They’d totally go for a hat.
As it happened, this is where I learned the limits of the battery in Nic’s old Sony camera. After 691 shots, I got the “Battery exhausted” message and had to resort to taking scenery shots with my 107-year-old iPhone. Admittedly, we were close to wrapping up, so I didn’t miss out on much, really.
Overall, a nice day, with maybe bigger crowds than would be ideal, but with unexpected delights along the way, like the cinnamon teals and sandpipers.
The Shots
Theoretically possible
The Birds (and other critters)
Sparrows and sparrow-adjacent:
- American robin
- Anna’s hummingbird
- Barn swallow
- Black-capped chickadee
- Brown-headed cowbird
- Cinnamon teal
- Common yellowthroat
- European starling
- Golden-crowned sparrow
- Marsh wren
- Northern flicker
- Red-winged blackbird
- Savannah sparrow
- Song sparrow
- Tree swallow
- ??? swallow
- White-crowned sparrow
Waterfowl and shorebirds:
- American wigeon
- Bufflehead
- Canada goose
- Gadwall
- Great blue heron
- Green-winged teal
- Hooded merganser
- Lesser sandpiper
- Mallard
- Northern pintail
- Northern shoveller
- Sandhill crane
- Scaup
- Wood duck
Common:
- American crow
- Assorted gulls
- Rock pigeon
Raptors:
- Bald eagle
Non-birds:
- A few black squirrels
- Various bugs and bees
- A persistent helicopter
The bold new food plan (I’m not calling it a diet)
It’s totally a diet.
But what I am planing on doing is what I did way back in June 2008 when I stepped on my scale and, over its piercing screams of horror, saw that I weighed 187.5 pounds (it could only show half pound increments, which seems like an odd limitation for something that only does one thing).
Today I weighed in at 171.9 pounds (thanks, modern-day precision!), which even a non-math expert like me can see is only about 16ish pounds short of my roly-poly former self.
(At this point I was going to share a screenshot taken on my iPhone 5 in 2012 showing my weight in MyFitnessPal as being something like 143 pounds, except I cannot find the shot now. So just imagine it here.)
The point here is my approach to getting to my desired goal of 150 pounds is not working.
It didn’t work in the early 2000s, either. In order to actually lose weight back in 2008, I had to redo my entire food plan and stick to it. I did and lost over 40 pounds. I don’t need to lose 40 pounds this time, so I already have a head start!
Here is my plan, which I will start on May 1, 2025:
- No snacks, except for fruit or veggies. And no cheating by counting something like “strawberry shortcake” as fruit.
- I will wean myself off non-sugar soda over the space of a month or so. This is to avoid nasty caffeine headaches from withdrawal, which has happened before.
- Switch to drinking water.
- Keep breakfast and lunch as is.
- Be more mindful of calorie-rich dinners.
- Continue to exercise regularly.
We’ll see how it goes.
State of Linux (for me): April 2025 edition
Linux Mint is getting closer to being a replacement OS for me over Windows 11 and macOS whatever (the yearly updates are kind of meaningless now, it’s just a yearly dribble of new features no different from what MS does with Windows 11, just with a cute name like Sequoia attached).
But it’s still not there quite yet, which I’ll elaborate on below.
First, I’ll say this: Linux Mint (the distro I have been running for some months now as a third OS) is pleasant to use. It stays out of the way, it doesn’t constantly ask me to grant permission to everything (Macs are trending toward becoming the UAC nightmare that was the initial release of Windows Vista, sinking the user experience in favour of “security”). There are frequent updates, but they are handled with a few clicks whenever you decide to apply them. Most don’t require a system restart.
It has built in software bits like applets, extensions and desklets hat are easy to add (or remove) that help customize the experience in small, but nice ways. The look and feel of the entire OS is highly customizable. It loads fast, everything feels snappy.
At this point, the only things holding it back for me are the same as before:
- Photo editing
- Gaming
- Journaling
Photo editing has improved and I’m experimenting with a few new programs there, such as Prima.
Gaming is also getting better, though having an Nvidia card complicates things a bit. Native gaming, when available, works great, and emulated gaming is also pretty good now. It’s not quite there, but it’s close.
Diarium (the unfortunately named journal app I use) I am running in a Windows 10 VM. The VM is a tiny bit laggy, but since I only use the app briefly in the morning and evening, it’s not a big deal. A native solution would be preferable, but seems unlikely, unless I switch to a different piece of software.
Still, I feel Linux Mint is closer than it’s ever been in terms of replacing the other OSes. If and when I get a new PC, I will likely turn this one into a dedicated Linux box and see how it goes on a rig that is 100% penguin-based.
Run 918: Gummed up
Today’s run was a little weird and unpleasant.
First, despite it being a weekday morning, the trail was unusually busy. And several people appeared on bikes! I managed, “Bikes aren’t allowed” as they pedalled past me. At least they weren’t riding like maniacs.
Conditions should have been optimal, but the combo of wind and humidity was apparently enough to result in some nasty DMS1Dry Mouth Syndrome and it got so bad at one point that I paused the run briefly to try to generate any kind of moisture in my mouth at all, because I could not swallow. The pause was about equivalent to the time it would take to tie up a loose shoelace, so I don’t think it gave me much of an edge in terms of pace.
Speaking of pace, this run–probably because of the dry mouth and constant sun–felt a lot harder than Monday’s. I crept past the six-minute mark on the second km and hit it exactly on the third, but thanks to a decent start and recovery at the end, finished with an overall pace of 5:58/km, with a BPM once again of 152.
I toyed with going on a straight 5K, then walking out from the lake, but I’m glad I didn’t, because my watch was already yelling at me for overreaching at the end of the run.
I think I may have to dig out my li’l water bottle and take it on my next run. There is something horrible about trying to swallow during a run and your mouth is so dry you literally can’t. Bleah.
Still, that’s another 5K done, and I didn’t have any other issues, so here’s to Friday’s run being better-hydrated and smoother. I’ll also try to aim for an earlier start.
Stats:
Run 918
Average pace: 5:58/km
Training status: Overreaching
Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW, short loop)
Start: 11:16 a.m.
Distance: 5.02 km
Time: 29:57
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 14-15°C
Humidity: 56-53%
Wind: light to moderate
BPM: 152
Weight: 170.9
Total distance to date: 6,425 km
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation)
Shoes: ASICS Trabuco Terra 2 (20/15/35)
Music: R.E.M., Reckoning
Run 917: The Easter Monday 5K
With bonus people, because the Easter weekend is the only one of the year with not one, but two stat holidays.
This time several family groups with wee children did kind of get in the way, but just a little. Dogs were well-behaved, but as often on the river trail, some were off-leash. Boo to the dog owners.
As for the run, I started out a bit slower in order to pace myself (I am still rusty as all get-out) and was mildly concerned when the second km edged just over the six-minute mark, but I picked up the pace to finish and ended with the same average as my 3K run a few days ago: 5:55/km. BPM was up slightly to 152, which is fine as I actually pushed a bit in the second half.
I didn’t experience any issues otherwise.
The weather was mostly sunny and around 10C, which felt a bit cool with the wind before the run, but was fine during.
Overall, it was skookum to get another actual 5K run done. Onward and upward, I say! Or at least onward. Upward would be a bit weird for running.
Run 917
Average pace: 5:55/km
Training status: Productive
Location: Brunette River Trail
Start: 11:04 a.m.
Distance: 5.02 km
Time: 29:45
Weather: Mostly sunny
Temp: 10-11°C
Humidity: 68-66%
Wind: light
BPM: 152
Weight: 170.6
Total distance to date: 6,420 km
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation)
Shoes: ASICS Trabuco Terra 2 (15/7/22)
Music: Blondie, Parallel Lines
Why is UI design so terrible now?
In version 7.51 of Signal (desktop version) they changed how you access stickers. Before, you clicked on a sticker icon in the text box and chose a sticker. One click, simple.
Now you click the emoji icon, which makes no sense because stickers are not emojis, they’re stickers, then you have to click over to the Stickers tab and choose a sticker.
In simpler terms, what took one click now takes two. This is a regression, no matter how you look at it.
Here’s how the Signal team looks at it on their Github page: “Now you can experience the pinnacle of human technological advancement in Signal Desktop with a brand-new selection interface that makes it easy to quickly find an emoji, sticker, or animated GIF that’s perfect for the moment.”
They could have left the sticker button in the text box and still implemented this change. They could have made the sticker button customizable for “quick access” to stickers, emoji or gifs, but no, instead they just made adding a sticker two steps instead of one.
They have also taught me to never update Signal again. Good job, you clowns.
