General

Murmur and The Dark Side of the Moon

The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and Murmur (1983) are two albums I own and enjoy, but neither of which I listened to when they were new. As they turn 40 (!) and 50 (!!) years old, I thought I’d reflect a bit on each.

When The Dark Side of the Moon came out in 1973, I was only nine years old and didn’t listen to any specific music or bands yet. I was gravitating toward The Beatles and The Beach Boys, though (in 1973 The Beatles had only been split up for three years). I came across this album years later, getting it first on CD in the mid-80s. The transfer was so bad (or good, depending on your perspective) that you could hear the analog hiss during quieter parts of the album.

Of the two, DSOTM is more famous, of course, but I feel it’s more dated or, to be more generous, of its time. In particular, the instrumental “Any Colour You Like” sounds very early 70s to my ears. That said, the rest of the album is sleeker and more timeless, and while it isn’t a concept album in the purist sense, all the songs connect together through themes and sound collages in a way that makes it feel like a single piece, a real album album (kids, ask your parents what an “album” is!)

DSOTM is also the sound of a band coming into its own with confidence and newfound maturity. It was Pink Floyd’s eighth album and was one of the last where all the band members fully participated.

Murmur, by contrast, was R.E.M.’s debut. Listening to it now, 40 years later, it still has a weird kind of freshness to it. I mean, it doesn’t sound anything like what you hear in contemporary pop music (which I can’t address without jumping straight into “old man yells at cloud” territory), but if you sought other albums with a similar sound recorded today, Murmur would effortlessly fit in with them, because Stipe’s vocals (not as murky as legend would have it) and the band’s early experimentation in style, going from jangly pop to simple acoustic numbers, remains vibrant and clear. It’s a fun album, an early adventure, and a great example of a group that fired on all cylinders right from the start.

Although I could have picked up Murmur when it was new (I was 19), like many others, I didn’t discover it until after getting brought in to R.E.M.’s music by a later album, in this case Document (1987) and specifically, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)”. In retrospect, I wish R.E.M. had done more zany songs or lighter songs. Some of the best on Murmur are these, like the appropriately propellant “Catapult”. Ah, well.

Canada D’eh 2023

I have no idea why I’ve never used this terrible title for Canada Day before, but I’ve fixed that now!

It is a day of birding and, hopefully, relaxation and recovery.

Here’s a bonus bird shot from this week that I hadn’t posted to get things started:

I should be so chill in the sun

An Elder Scrolls dream and ship espionage with a horse

Some dreams I had last night, or what I remember of them:

The first seemed to be taking place in some kind of high fantasy world reminiscent of The Elder Scrolls games. I’m not sure if I was actually human, but recall moving between different groups as I traversed the countryside, some of them being undead or skeletons. None if it was threatening or scary. This segued to me being in some kind of building–possibly a hotel, so this might have been a transition point to another dream. It felt 19th century, at least in decor. There were two women in old-timey dresses and one was frantic because someone or something was on the loose and likely coming for them, someone who seemed like a UBG–an Ultimate Bad Guy. I got the sense they’d be in big trouble if he found them. They ran into a room and hid in a large walk-in closet. Apparently in this dream I was a complete idiot, because I was in the hallway when the UBG appeared and very obviously went into the hotel room with the two women. Further, as he came in behind me, I very obviously went into the walk-in closet, and only shut the door on my half, leaving the women fully exposed. Maybe I was the UBG’s assistant.

The last thing I remember was thinking I should do something, so I tensed up like I was going to punch someone. Then the dream ended.

The next one started on a ship, which was being controlled by bad guys. I was being forced up top on deck to look for something or to do a thing. I remember climbing ladders and at one point someone fired a gun to remind me not to try anything funny, like trying to escape. There was also a horse involved, somehow. After some tense spy movie-like action, the scene transitioned to land and to what seemed to be the entrance to the old Moose Lodge in Duncan (it is no longer Moose-affiliated, as I found out recently via the interweb) where many people were milling about. I had either escaped or been released and had important information for my dad, who was apparently there (he died in 1991), but due to murky conditions, I had a hard time finding him, so I was calling out for him. The horse was there, off to the side, and appeared to have a large chunk missing from its middle in a way that is too weird to properly describe. The horse, unsurprisingly, seemed unwell, and sat down. Somehow what I did was tied to the horse and saving it, probably, but again I woke up before any closure.

Then my Garmin sleep report said I didn’t get enough deep sleep. REM sleep was good, though. I’ve been having piles of dreams lately, and have no idea why. I like remembering them, though!

Walk 98 and 99: Testing the knee

Brunette River, as seen from Lower Hume Park, partway through the first walk

I decided to go for a walk today to see how my right knee would fare.

Good news: It was fine, no issues even as I walked at a very brisk pace at times. This is not to say the knee is better, as it is clearly not, but it does hold some promise for doing a run tomorrow, maybe. Possibly.

I actually split the run in two. When I got to Burnaby Lake, I puttered around for a few minutes, getting a drink at the fountain, and taking some photos. I then headed back on Walk #2. They were very similar.

Unlike yesterday, it was pleasantly warm and sunny. It was nice, and no dogs misbehaved, despite several being off-leash.

Stats:

Walk 98/99
Average pace: 9:12/km and 9:11/km
Location: Brunette River trail/Burnaby Lake
Distance: 4.47 and 4.29 km
Time: 41:05 and 39:21
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 25 °C
Humidity: 58%
Wind: light
BPM: 118 and 119
Weight: 165.6 pounds
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255
Total distance to date: 738.63 km

I met the possible end of the world (in my head)

Another dream I had last night:

This dream came before almost meeting Indiana Jones and was more ominous.

In it, something had happened that was probably bad, as there was thick black smoke belching out of downtown Vancouver–enough to suggest a large section of the downtown core was affected. And the smoke stretched in tendrils across the sky, to where you could see other places that had been struck by…something. As I looked around, I could see multiple of these pillars of black smoke everywhere, all of them connected in a way that seemed unnatural.

It was never revealed, but in the dream I felt some kind of meteor was likely, because I was totally a pseudo-scientist. I also recall most people never found out what happened, because whatever it was knocked out all communications at the same time, so maybe hostile aliens. I was helping someone who looked just like the archaeologist on Curse of Oak Island sort through a box of tiny snails that were apparently being distributed as food. I was helping because of my scientist stature, I think. I didn’t actually do anything else in the dream that I can recall, just snail duty. And the archaeologist may have actually been one of the coop students I worked with at the college, because he looked a lot like Laird Niven now that I think about it.

I almost met Indiana Jones (in my head)

A dream last night:

I was in some desert plaza with a few other people, apparently waiting for Indiana Jones to show up. I was playing as some 20-something (I remember this–I was clearly playing a role, I was not meeting Indy as myself) and apparently got on the wrong side of the villain, who was in attendance. He came over to intimidate me and I made some move on his ample villainous neck, claiming that I thought he was going to fall over my chair and was saving him. Then I got up to pee, which I announced to everyone for some reason. I was called back before I left because Indy was arriving. Then I woke up. I’m pretty sure it was the 1930s Indy, and not the 100-year-old one. I was also the 20-something version of me, not the 100-year-old one.

I’m pretty sure I had the dream because I’d read an article about the game Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis earlier in the evening.

And now I’ll never know why we were meeting Indy. :sadtrombone:

A wedding in Chase, Day 3 of 3: Post-wedding

On the third and final day, we had an open agenda and only a few things to do:

  • Check out of the hotel before noon
  • Get home before dark (neither of us has great night vision for driving)

First, we tidied up our hotel room and checked out. One thing I forgot to mention in the previous posts is that while the shower was very strong and the water was nice ‘n hot, the drain could not come close to keeping up with the water flow, so showers were more like combo shower/baths because you’d be standing in ankle-deep water by the end. Not optimal, but better than not enough water pressure, I suppose.

We once again dined at McD’s and I had another Sausage and Egg McMuffin. I don’t know what they put in those things, other than the parts in the name, but I have a disturbingly powerful hankering for them.

After breakfast, we decided to return to disc golf–but first we would get some bug spray to fend off the mosquitoes. This led to another debacle using the in-car navigation and just weird bad luck (the Pharmasave we first went to was closed on Sundays. Sorry, people who need prescriptions, you’ll just have to deal!) but I eventually got a can of Deep Woods Off! at a Save-On Foods. Speaking of weird, the guy ahead of me was buying two nags of Tim Hortons coffee (this is such a Canadian entry) and asked if I was just buying the one item. I said yes, and he let me go ahead of him. This was nice, but I mean, unless he was expecting some horrible complication with the coffee, I wouldn’t have had long to wait. Maybe people in Kamloops are just that nice.

With the bug spray secured, we returned to the course, sprayed ourselves liberally (spoiler: It worked!) and set out to play 9 of the 18 holes, cleverly using the app to make sure we played in the right direction and everything. At several points, multiple marmots would gather on the fairway ahead of us, apparently knowing we couldn’t throw far enough to imperil them. And they were right.

I started…poorly (7 shots on one hole) and this let Jeff cruise to a win of 41 to 44. We were 13 and 16 shots over par, so not quite tournament-ready (Kamloops is the “tournament capital of Canada” as noted on multiple signs all over the place). Jeff also won the bonus award of “most discs in the water” at three discs! His were very clean by the end of our round. I put a few in the weeds and one over a fence but managed to stay out of the water. With just a few hundred hours of practise, I could probably get pretty good at this!

Jeff got par once! I almost got par…five times!

I only took a few quick shots on my phone this time, Here’s one looking over the South Thompson River.

After wrapping up the disc golf, we began the trip back. It started to rain shortly after we started up the Coquihalla, but fortunately the rain didn’t persist, and it was partly sunny the rest of the way. The rest of the trip broke down1This phrase becomes relevant, as you’ll soon find out like so:

  • A brief stop at a Dairy Queen in Merritt, for ice cream cones. This is another example of fast food that was strangely yummy. I haven’t had a DQ cone in probably ten years or so.
  • Another stop to let Jeff rest at the Coquihalla Summit (elevation around 4000 feet or 1200 meters). Jeff reminded me again how nice it would be if I had my driver’s license again. The pressure is on! I made a vague promise of sorts.
  • A stop in Hope just past 4 p.m. to have an early dinner at Home (but not home). Jeff had schnitzel, I opted for the turkey dinner. I ate almost everything before remembering to get a photo of my food. Sorry, Instagram, you’re out of luck this time!
  • Traffic moved better than expected once we got out of the mountains, but slowed then stopped outside Langley. It turned out two pickups got into a pretty good fender bender (more like a “whole front end bender” for the one that hit the back of the other), but we got past the accident just after RCMP arrived and before the fire truck, so the delay was minimal.
  • Jeff quizzed me extensively about getting cats nearly the entire drive from Hope to home
  • We arrived home at 7 p.m. with plenty of daylight left. I unpacked. Jeff immediately went to the deck. 😛

And that was it!

Although the trip started not-great, and the various map tools all let us down, often in spectacular fashion, it was nice to get out of New West for a few days and there’s something about the look of the area around Kamloops I find strangely compelling. Maybe it’s just that it’s so visually distinct from the coast, where I’ve lived all my life. I’ll have some shots in the gallery soon™.

A wedding in Chase, Day 2 of 3

We began Day 2 in Kamloops and with time to relax and take in some local scenery before journeying to the wedding.

We had breakfast at McDonald’s because I really wanted a Sausage and Egg McMuffin. And I liked it!

After, we decided to visit the disc golf course at McArthur Park. The park is billed as the second largest in BC and indeed, it is big. I think it has something like 40 soccer fields.

We discovered the course is part of UDisc and had an app. There truly is an app for everything. We downloaded the app, created accounts, selected the course, created a scorecard and were off!

As it turned out, we should have checked the course map, because we started off literally in the wrong direction, the ultimate golfer faux pas. A nice guy helped us out, but by this point time was already starting to run a bit short. I suggested we move the golfing to the next day, when we would have nothing else to do (except drive back home at some point before dark). I then shot a few pics with my camera. There was a marmot. So cute! I took a bunch of photos of it. Then we found that the marmots are everywhere. Then we also discovered the mosquitoes–or rather, they discovered us. I further suggested we get out instead of being eaten alive. We did so.

The first marmot. The first of about a million, as it turned out.

We planned on leaving around 1 p.m. for the 3 p.m. wedding ceremony, but ended up heading out around half an hour later. At first, things were fine. The weather was partly cloudy, and the drive to Chase is along a flat stretch of highway that parallels the South Thompson River. As we approached Chase, I entered the address into the in-car navigator. We end up on a gravel road, but it seems to be going the right way. We continue on and it tells us we’ve arrived a short time later. But we’re at some random farm. As it turns out, it mysteriously stopped us far too soon. We (or rather I, because I totally should have realized what was happening) made the first wrong move: We switched to Google Maps. It sent us back and way off course. Time was starting to run short. I keyed the route into Apple Maps. It wanted to send us around the far side of Little Shuswap Lake–a route that would take us many km out of our way. We finally figured out we had been going the right way initially and returned to the gravel road.

Jeff drove at what one might call a brisk pace. Perhaps just a little above the posted 40 KPH speed limit. Perhaps. We also saw a scruffy young bear, which was sort of cute. Mom was probably just out of view, waiting to rip out the throat of anyone getting close to her kid.

We arrived literally a few minutes before 3 p.m.–technically not late!

As it turned out, the ceremony was late in starting, so it all turned out fine in the end.

Taylor and Derek got married in a barn. Or a very barn-like building. It was rustic.

The marriage barn

After the ceremony, we had plenty of time to hang out and schmooze with people we didn’t know. I took a few more pics of horses, giant bugs and things, which I will link to in a gallery that will be magically edited into this post later.

While waiting for the reception and dinner, guests could choose from some snacks outside the hall, as shown below.

  • On the left: Meat, cheese and brownies
  • On the right: Veggies
Meat on left, veggies on right. I think I know which side won.

The dinner was nice, though there didn’t seem to be any butter for the dinner buns. Maybe they were trying to be healthy after plying us with prepared meats and brownies beforehand.

In all, it all went as one would hope a wedding and reception would–short, but ice ceremony, speeches at the reception that ranged from thoughtful to funny, and were also short (you may be detecting a theme here), and good simple food without anything totally weird that would make people go back outside to see if any salami was left over (there wasn’t).

After the dinner and dessert (more brownies! Plus cheesecake), we headed back to our hotel before it got dark and wound down the evening, tucking in around 11 p.m. We both slept very well that night, probably because we were worn out from driving up and down that gravel road about a hundred times. I still see it in my dreams.

Loakin Bear Hall. No actual bears attended the reception.

A wedding in Chase, Day 1 of 3

Programming note: I normally post vacation or travel entries on the day in question, but opted to just take notes and write them after the fact instead this time, so some details may be missing or totally made up for dramatic effect.

The last time Jeff and I went to Kamloops (in 2015), it was for his niece’s convocation (high school graduation). Despite it being June, it rained while we were there, and yet I still got a sunburn.

I did not get a sunburn this time.

This time we were heading there (actually further east to Chase) for her wedding at some quaint little ranch that is billed as a “wedding venue”.

A friend of Jeff’s provided us a gratis rental car, which was very nice. It was a BMW X2 and, as you might expect from a Beemer, was quite nice. The seats did not numb my butt, even on the long journey up the Coquihalla Highway.

We started out a bit later than intended, but would still arrive with plenty of daylight left.

Shortly after leaving, the grey sky turned even more sullen and showers started. We opted to stop for a late lunch in Chilliwack, where there is still a giant flag along Vedder Road. I had chicken strips at a Wendy’s and they were fine. We headed on past Chilliwack and began the ascent into the mountains. The rain picked up until it was coming down in sheets. This made for low visibility and a not-really-pleasant drive. It stressed me out.

Once we reached the Coquihalla Summit, the weather abruptly changed. This actually makes sense, because on our side it’s temperate rain forest, and on the other (Kamloops) side, it’s as close as you get to desert in BC. The mountains go from being covered in Evergreen to being covered in scrub and dotted with a few trees. There’s something about this forest minimalism I find aesthetically pleasing.

We got in and after a few minutes of the check-in clerk puzzling over our MoreRewards™ hotel voucher (we cashed in some points to get two nights free at the Best Western Premier, one of about 500 hotels on a stretch along Hugh Allen Drive. There is another hotel being constructed there even as I type this), we were given our key cards and went up to our room. Really, for the price (especially the free price), it was pretty decent.

But just like the hotel room I stayed at in Nashville 10 years ago, the office chair was broken, so in order to sit at the desk and not feel like a five-year-old trying to reach my laptop, I had to use one of the many pillows from one of the two beds to sit on. At least it was cushy.

By this time, I was feeling out of sorts from a combination of:

  • Stress
  • Right knee being a bother from the previous day’s run
  • Left hand being weirdly achy as well (I think I slept on it funny or something–it’s fine now)

I curled up on the bed and dozed, until Jeff got hungry. We remained indecisive as to what or where to eat as our options began closing for the evening. We finally settled on getting something from a Triple O’s down the road. I had some garlic Parmesan fries. They were actually not bad. We crashed early. Or rather, I continued to crash.

It was a somewhat ignoble start to the trip. And I haven’t even talked about how the various maps apps (Apple Maps, Google Maps, the in-car navigation system) would give us sometimes confusing or nonsensical results. Both Apple and Google REALLY want you to do U-turns everywhere. U-turns are mostly illegal in Canada.

I only took a single shot on Day 1. Behold our hotel room, my sexy legs and a Swiss Chalet ad on the TV: