With the site redesign mostly complete, I think I need a new logo, something that isn’t just literally the name of the site. Yes, I know it’s clean and efficient, but it’s also sterile and blah.
I still want something sleek and uncluttered. I will ponder.
When I tinkered around in Canva, I ended up with this:
It both does and doesn’t speak to me. It’s also full of hidden meaning that no one else would ever figure out.
But the actual logo will probably not feature a jar of pickles.
Whoops, I swear I didn’t mean to go another two weeks between runs again. But I also didn’t expect to develop FOK1Fear Of Knees. I am now paranoid about my knees giving up, giving in and giving out. It has made me afraid to run at all.
But today, with the weather being nice again (finally), I decided to get out there and…do half of a 5K. If it went well, I’d do the second half on Friday, then resume full 5K runs on Monday.
I think it went well.
My pace was off, which is no surprise. I have done so little running in the last few months that I have lost my form, stamina and sense of direction. Fortunately, there are signs to help with the latter.
My route began at the Jiffy John for reasons best left unstated, then I followed the Spruce and Conifer Loops, turned back after rejoining the main trail and ended my run right near the bridge at Silver Creek–just about exactly what I was hoping for. This had the secret bonus of little overlap on the trail, despite how short the run was (see map below, which makes it look like half the area is dead because they obviously stitched together satellite data from different seasons).
I ran in my Speedgoats, which are probably nearing time for replacement. Last Friday I snapped one of the laces, so took laces from my old Brooks Revels and used them. They were fine, even if they aren’t colour-coordinated with the shoes. I didn’t have anyone scream at me, “You fashion monster!”
Speaking of colour-coordination, I saw a guy running on the river trail. He was passing by me from the other direction and his t-shirt was utterly soaked in sweat. Kids, don’t let runners wear cotton when jogging!
The weather was nice, around 14C, with a mix of sun and some high cloud. I only encountered a few people and my BPM of 153 was fine, though my average pace of 5:50/km was a bit slow. That should improve as long as the knees allow it.
We’ll see how the back-half of the 5K goes on Friday.
Stats:
Run 865
Average pace: 5:50/km
Training status: Recovery
Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW, short loop)
Start: 11:33 a.m.
Distance: 2.51 km
Time: 14:38
Weather: Sun and high cloud
Temp: 14°C
Humidity: 65%
Wind: light
BPM: 153
Weight: 168.5
Total distance to date: 6197.5 km
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation)
Shoes: HOKA Speedgoat 5 (337.5/634/971.5 km)
Here are some, because it’s important for people on blogs to have opinions on trending topics or something.
Here is a kitten:
And so it begins. As I type this on Sunday morning, the heavy rain…
…has begun.
I may go out and take photos later, because that would be a silly thing to do.
In the meantime, I had a bunch of dreams last night and remember bits from at least four of them:
From Environment Canada:
A year ago, I was noting the FIRE DANGER signs had just gone up. That won’t be happening for a while this time around1My totally scientific prediction is by the end of June, if the weather trends dry after the current soaking. The 10-day forecast does show sunny and warm temperatures returning on June 5, though, which means some will be complaining that it’s too hot by June 8.
But hey, no forest fires. Just the possibility of flash floods, which is totally something you expect with summer 19 days away. Weather2Probably climate change, actually, amirite?
Right now, in my neighbourhood and as close as literally next door in some cases, we have:
And yes, isn’t it nice that New Westminster (and Coquitlam) are “cities on the grow”, but you know, it’s kind of wearing me down. We’ve had this construction going on in some form for the last 10 years. It feels like it never ends. It would be nice for it to end. I want to walk the neighbourhood and just see people and buildings and trees, not cranes and open pits and excavators and the constant din of hundreds of construction workers operating machinery, hammering and making a lot of racket, which is part of their job.
It would be nice. Maybe it’ll happen eventually, for a moment in time, before the next project commences.
Original post here: Something that really was better in the olden times
I made a note to revisit my February 13, 2024 post about nostalgia and how some things were better in the long ago days of the 1970s, in which I reflected on how life moved slower back in the olden times. I made the note in case I had any new insights to add later. Thinking about it some more, there is one thing I allude to it when I mention a smartphone without reception as a way of escaping the always-connected feeling of life today. And that is the phone, and how we communicated with it (or didn’t) back then.
In 1975, we had a phone in the house. It was mounted to the wall in the downstairs hallway and had a long coiled cord that allowed it to reach partway into the adjacent kitchen, if it was a long call, and you wanted to sit down. 1975 predates any other phone technology–you dialed numbers using an actual rotary dial (at the time you could leave off the first two digits, so you only had to dial the last five, saving some wear on your fingers. Compare to today where there are so many numbers they had to add two new area codes to BC and you now have to dial not just the seven digits number, but also the area code and 1 at the start). Voicemail did not exist in the consumer space and even answering machines weren’t adopted back then, though they did exist in nascent form. This meant that you had one way to contact a person in real time: Call them on your medieval rotary phone and hope they were home. If they weren’t, you just had to try again later, or maybe hope to run into them at the local grocer or something. As a kid, I never called much, I just walked to someone’s house or one of the usual haunts, or we’d pre-plan at school (face to face during recess, lunch or an especially boring class).
Being unable to instantly and always communicate and especially knowing someone who had a lot of 9’s in their phone number (this was a thing) resulted in a certain kind of isolation, but it was never perceived as such. You just had your own little part of the world, your friends and neighbours had theirs, and you made specific, conscious choices to have them intersect. And if you couldn’t reach someone on the phone, you’d just do something else, like read a book, or go bowling.
I’m not advocating going back to rotary phones to recapture some lost magic, they were pretty awful (push button phones were genuinely exciting when introduced), but having that level of removal from everyone else, where we existed as communities, but smaller, more intimate ones, is something I look back on fondly, not with any sense of “we had to walk uphill both ways in the snow” old-man-yelling-at-clouds bitterness, just in appreciation of the quiet it brought. I think of kids growing up today with smartphones practically embedded into their hands, and it does not appeal to 10-year-old me at all. And I was a tech nerd! Maybe that part is a little old-man-yells-at-clouds.
Something to ponder for a future post.
I know, complaining about the weather (over which I have no control, at least to my knowledge) is dumb and pointless, but when I looked at the 10-day forecast this morning and saw eight days of everything from “light rain showers” to “heavy rain”, with a mere two days of “mostly sunny” in the middle (which will probably change to “light rain” in the next day or so), I felt I had to…post this.
On the plus side, this will prevent local forest fires, which we don’t really get, because the lower mainland (Metro Vancouver to outsiders) is not exactly covered in forest to begin with. It also means fewer incidents of skin cancer, since no one is going to be working on a tan, except possibly those two “mostly sunny” days (which are a lie, anyway).
On the other plus side (I’m trying to stay positive here), maybe instead of a scorching dry hot summer, it will merely be pleasant and mild and people will wake up every morning and feel refreshed and filled with joy, and return to a nice cool bedroom in the evening feeling the same.
Or you know, we could get maybe another sunny day sometime so I remember what they feel like. I’m just saying. (It’s raining steadily as I type this.)
Obligatory GIF:
I have cleaned out my inbox. I felt it was important to record this.
That is all.
Here is a cat with mail.
These:
The BLASTED part is in reference to what it will do to your tongue if you eat more than one of them. Maybe if you eat only one of them. I was checking email this morning and wondering why my tongue felt weird, and then I remembered having a few of these last night–last night–and the damage lingers on the next day, the top of my tongue does indeed feel BLASTED.
Recommended, maybe as a science experiment, but not as food.
It happened on May 18, 1980. I was 15 years old and remember being up that Sunday morning and hearing the screen door at the front of the house rattling, which struck me as odd, as there was no wind. A few minutes later, the Seattle station KOMO-TV (Channel 4) broke into whatever show was airing with a Special Report (kids, ask your parents what Special Reports were), confirming the volcano had erupted. Later that summer, we travelled through parts of eastern Washington, and I was able to scoop up a jar of roadside ash and a piece of pumice that had been ejected. I thought they were extremely neat at the time.
Sadly, I don’t know where either went. I know the rock at least made it with me to Vancouver, but that was in 1986–only six years after the eruption. I suspect it just got lost in one of my many moves (it strikes me that my parents only moved twice after hitting their 20s, compared to the million or so times I did).
I always thought volcanoes were cool when I was a kid (along with the other usual suspects, like sharks, dinosaurs and roller coasters), but this local-ish eruption (about 300 miles away) really brought home to me how destructive they were. The images of the devastation are ones I still vividly remember, and I read everything I could find in magazines and newspapers (kids, ask your…well, you know).
I came across this stunning pair of photographs on Mastodon, one taken just before it erupted, one shortly after, from the same vantage point. The post-eruption shot really does look like a moonscape.
Before:
After:
I kind of hope not. I’ve seen a few lately and I’m getting strong 70s vibes. This is not something I have been craving, I should note.
Also, I asked Adobe Firefly to give me “A man with a large moustache standing on a sunny sidewalk, holding a cat in his arms, laughing; horizontal orientation” and this is what it produced:
Pros:
Cons: