General

While I’m wishing for ponies

I have a bike and enjoy riding it. I don’t ride it much because I live in a vast urban area that requires me to ride the bike (I have no vehicle to load it into/onto) along busy streets not designed for bikes before I can get to the nicer areas with bike lanes, dedicated bike paths and further out, trails and other places where riding a bike is actually calming and relaxing.

I wish there was some master plan for the Lower Mainland (Metro Vancouver) to add proper, separated bike lanes on basically every major route. Instead, we get weird piecemeal projects like New Westminster’s upgrading of Columbia Street (two blocks adjacent to the Royal Columbian Hospital, which is why it’s happening) and Sherbrooke Street (same reason). It’s nice and so far it looks great (work is expected to be complete in February 2025), but it’s just a few blocks, like a tease of what could be before you’re just dumped back onto the regular street with nothing but a white line separating you and your bike from every vehicle.

But without some central plan that de-prioritizes cars and prioritizes bikes, this is probably the best we’re going to get.

Maybe we should learn French and move to Paris, where they seem to have figured this out.

What does this mean?

Also, I am really leaning into “posting whatever pops into my head (or social media feed)” lately. I’ll have more substantive posts, too. I’m pretty sure, anyway.

I present cat on shark:

I would give credit, but none was attached. I like the ambiguity of “Is the cat attacking the shark or is it just using the shark as a couch?”

September shleptember

September was not a great month.

It started with something like three new temperature records being set as we got multiple days of 30C+ weather, but not long after that the reverse happened, with periods of rain and cooler-than-average weather. That trend has continued right to the end of the month, where today the high is supposed to be 16C, two degrees below the usual 18C. And yes, I can feel the difference!

My birthday was a bit of a dud, but it got better a few days later, weirdly.

Strata stuff is basically all bad and weighs me down. I wish people could just be better, but that world is clearly a fantasy. Maybe we’ll evolve to be more enlightened in a few million years. Haha, sure.

On more positive notes, I am doing more stuff and being more productive, both creatively and otherwise. I have resumed regular runs and my legs have not betrayed me–yet!

Also, as per the previous blog entry, I am down very slightly in weight, which is better than being up.

In all, a hearty meh, with a side of “could be worse!”

Time sequences

Every time sequence that consists of incremental numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.):

12:34
1:23
2:34
3:45
4:56
2:10
3:21
4:32
5:43
6:54

Why do I find this bit of trivia interesting? I don’t even like math, which means I should also slightly dislike numbers on principle.

But I made a vow to post anything that pops into my head1Don’t worry, there are some limits., so here we are.

Transit etiquette

As per Translink:

Please give up your seat to people with very large belly warts.

“Hello, please have this seat so you may apply vast quantities of Compound W.”

Also applies to people:

  • Who have swallowed bowling balls
  • Are incubating a large spheroid alien
  • Have ingested an extremely large capsule
  • Might be pregnant?

(See the real tips here. The illustration is from the Translink newsletter.)