Good: The weather is nice, so the tots won’t get drenched getting their treats
Bad: The inevitable bursts of illegal fireworks that will probably get half the dogs in the area barking for an hour
Neutral: 50% off Halloween candy tomorrow, of which I will buy none
I normally don’t call back to old posts, especially ones from 14 years ago, but I added a decent-sized update to My new career(s), so I thought I’d point it out.
Also, here is a cat working hard on a computer:
I had several vivid dreams last night, and made a token effort to remember at least one of them. And did!
It was about movie intermissions, but not the old-timey kind where the movie literally stopped playing because they only had one projector and had to physically change reels. No, in my dream–and if I remember correctly, the movie being featured was Aliens (1986)–the movie would literally keep playing, but it would be the intermission, the idea being that people still needed a break during a long movie (and let’s face it, all of James Cameron’s movies are long1mostly), but rather than force people to try to pick the best time to run off and pee (though there is, in fact, now an app for that), the movie would deliberately add in a lull midway through.
What I recall from the dream is that the intermission scenes were a combination of backstory or minor character development, stuff that wasn’t critical to the plot, so if you missed it, it was more like missing the bonus material on a DVD rather than some vital part of the story. In the dream, people seemed to like it. In reality, it would just make movies in theatres even longer than they are now, so maybe not such a good idea.
Etc.: The last movie I saw in a theatre was Onward, in early March 2020. I can’t say I miss the experience, with or without intermissions. I do remember my bladder almost exploding during the interminable credits for Avengers: Endgame (runtime 181 minutes) as I waited for the “secret” scene at the end. My bladder won, and I missed it. I think I looked it up later, but can’t even remember what it was now.
It was warmer today, so there was that!
It was also wet. My plan to escape the rain worked perfectly on Tuesday. Today, it worked in reverse, which is to say it not only rained the entire run, it rained more than any run I can remember in the past few years. It went like this:
Light rain > Steady rain > Torrential downpour > Steady rain
The torrential downpour part happened around the fourth km. I passed another runner, who was dressed kind of like how a ninja might, if a ninja was into jogging: black shorts, black cap, black running jacket. He looked very wet. He nodded as we passed each other, probably thinking the same thing as me: What was I thinking running in this weather?
On the other hand, once you get that wet, you just kind of go with it. There were many puddles, so much puddle dodging was to be had, but sometimes I just went through when it was easier than dipsy-doodling around. By the end I was so soaked my shorts were clinging to my legs, and I was wringing water out of the sleeves of my shirt.c I looked like I had stepped out of a swimming pool.
As for the run, it went fine. My knees felt a little stiff on the walk back from the lake, but only a little, and during the run, while I noticed ye olde left hip chime in at the 3K mark again, it was pretty quiet overall. I was a little slower, but not much, and my BPM was down, so it balances out. I may run again on Saturday, which so far looks dry. Dry will be nice.
Stats:
Run 820 Average pace: 5:48/km Training status: Maintaining Location: Burnaby Lake (CW) Start: 9:48 a.m. Distance: 5:03 km Time: 29:09 Weather: Rain, heavy at times Temp: 14ºC Humidity: 93% Wind: light BPM: 154 Weight: 169.2 Total distance to date: 5980 km Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation) Shoes: HOKA Speedgoat 5 (115/222/337 km)
Remember back in the old days when the worst part about a telephone was the rotary dial? I do, because I’m old as dirt. But to compensate, you only had to dial the last five digits of a number, instead of all seven.
Today, you have to punch in 10 digits to call the person next door, but you actually don’t do this at all, because they’re in your contacts list and you just tap a few buttons. If you had to actually enter their phone number, you would have no idea what it was. You might not even understand numbers themselves.
So in a way, phones are better now, because dialing is more convenient than ever. BOOP BOOP and done.
BUT…spam. I also remember never getting spam calls. Now I get them all the time. This is not an improvement. But because phones now accept text messages, I can also get my spam in text form, too. And do. Constantly!
Also, remember before we had voicemail trees? Where you could talk to an actual person because an actual person would pick up the phone when you called? It seems quaint now.
I had to call a bank, not for myself, but regarding someone else. I got into a voicemail tree. I spent some time with this pseudo-person-sounding thing. It was confused and befuddled by my inquiries. I tried rephrasing. I thought of using some snooty British accent. Finally, I pushed the 0 (zero) key, hoping it would still work as a “Please for the love of all things holy, let me talk to an actual carbon-based unit” button. And it did! The “digital assistant” put me through to an actual person at some central office, probably a couple of thousand miles from the local branch I wanted to book an appointment at (she confirmed her centrality, but did not reveal where she was located, nor did I inquire). She could not book the appointment for reasons, so I ended up speaking to three different people and being subjected to terrible hold music that played on a short loop and sounded like it was recorded from the FM radio in a ’73 Gremlin. In the end, I finally had an appointment. Hopefully. They could not give me a local number in case I had to cancel or was running late or anything. Apparently they only communicate through telepathy or email with local branches.
Back in 1975, I would have called the local branch directly, spoken to someone who would have picked up after the first ring, then had the appointment booked in a few minutes. Except I was 10 years old in 1975 and didn’t even have an account back then. But I could have theoretically done this.
My current phone is pretty good at checking the weather, though, and it lets me take photos of me shaking my fist at the sky, futilely. So in some ways telephones are not bad.
I normally run on Mondays, but this Monday has been Heavy Rain Day. I don’t really like running in the rain, but if it starts raining while I’m running, I shrug and continue. If there’s a light rain or drizzle before the run, I shrug and continue.
But if there’s heavy rain falling and I know that as soon as I step outside I will get drenched, I find motivation harder to come by. But tomorrow morning looks good, so I count skipping the run today as a handy day of extra rest.
I did have to go to the store, though, so I tried to time my trip between deluges and was…partly successful. I also wore long pants for the first time since April, covering up my sexy tanned legs. Worse, it wasn’t even cold out (17C — above normal). I later regretted the pants. But I waited until I got home to take them off. I’m not some perv.
I’m not superstitious–at least about numbers or dates–and it’s pretty weird when you think about how people can be spooked by a certain date falling on a particular day.
But people are pretty weird as a rule.
More importantly, Friday the 13th gives me the perfect excuse to post an image of a scary black cat!
Well, scary-ish. Okay1I still can’t decide whether to type OK or okay. Maybe I should do a poll on the internet., not really scary at all, but actually cute.
Yes, I’m actually calling them by their preferred name, even though everyone else calls them Hall & Oates. For the title of this post, anyway.
And yes, they have released 18 albums since 1972 (gadzooks, that’s 51 years ago as I write this), so ranking four is only covering a tiny portion of their discography.
BUT.
These are the four albums that established them as the most successful pop duo ever. They’re also the only four I ever bought as a teen/pseudo adult in my early 20s1Technically I bought five, because I also got their hits collection, Rock ‘n Soul, Part 1. There was never a Part 2..
Ranked:
It’s that time of year when people are doing things because, for some reason, organizations have chosen to stuff these events into the last few months of the year.
Should I participate these things? Let’s have a look-see:
Halloween
I don’t really do Halloween, other than maybe enjoying some of the decorations people put up in their yards around the neighbourhood. That’s enough for me. That, and watching the Peanuts Halloween special. Also, Halloween is technically just one day, even if candy shows up on store shelves three months before October 31st, so it’s pretty easy to just say I’m not taking part. Maybe some alternate universe version of me dresses up as a vampire and goes out to costume parties to all hours of the night. I’m happy for that version of me, with his suave goatee and all, but it’s just not this universe’s version of me.
Inktober
I used Inktober a few years back to help rekindle my interest in drawing. It worked! I have not drawn much over the summer, for various reasons and thought about doing Inktober again (using my own rules, of course, because I’m a rebel). But today is October 10 and that means 10 of 31 prompts have already come and gone. Yes, I could just wave them off and start with #11 tomorrow, but it would bug me that I was missing a bunch, and I’d try to catch up, and maybe it wouldn’t go well? I don’t know. I think I’ll mull this for one more night before deciding.
National Novel Writing Month
This is coming up in November, as it always does.
I was thinking about whom the ideal participant in NaNoWriMo is and this is what I came up with:
I used to be #1, could make an argument for being an unpublished version of #21Techincally I got published in a Moose Lodge newsletter when I was 12 years old, and mostly feel like I was secretly #3 all along. I’m not sure if I want to invest the time writing to end up with something that isn’t very good. Writing under the pressure of NaNoWriMo certainly gets you lots of words, but I feel trying to complete a novel in that 30 days leads to a lot of shortcuts, sloppy writing and what you’re really doing is trading the satisfaction of completing a specific goal–a 50,000 word novel in 30 days–for the long slog of fixing that same novel and turning it into something readable, effort that may have been better spent just working on a novel without the pressure cooker 30-day deadline.
I mean, if you feel you need the deadline just to get something happening (#1 or #2), I think it’s valid, but you need to be prepared for a lot more work afterwards to turn that dashed-off novel into something good. Because why would you write a novel, otherwise?
Based on the above, I think the odds of me taking part in National Novel Writing Month 2023 are pretty darned slim.
In conclusion
I’ll probably just stick to my own list of tasks, which is chock-full of stuff that I shouldn’t let myself be distracted from, anyway.
Yes, when all else fails, it’s time for cats. Fortunately, the internet is filled with them.
The pleasant fall weather is looking to pause for a few days beginning tomorrow. Pausing is still better than six months of The Rains, though.
After years of having Amazon Prime, I finally cancelled it today. The process was not terribly difficult, but I did have to wade through several “Please don’t go, look at all the stuff you get!” pages to get to the point where I could actually cancel. I’m afraid their plaintive pitch persuaded me not! I did elect to let my current membership expire on renewal, rather than get prorated the few bucks back by cancelling right this moment in a fit of pique.
Here’s why I’m cancelling, in case other Canadians are considering (American Prime is a bit different, so I wouldn’t really compare the two):
And that’s it! I look forward to buying local more often! Sort of.
When you are self-motivated and can do so on your own terms, that is.
Which I am totally doing.
And it’s fun!
