General

Fall on me

It’s the first day of fall and everything is falling into place (see what I did there?)

Anyway, the trees are already donning their orange, red and yellow coats, the nights are now cool enough to make the air conditioner optional and the opportunity to wear shorts outside when not going out for a run are dwindling.

It’s also raining again semi-regularly.

So it’s very fall-like and now it’s official. And I’m okay with that. Early fall is something like my fourth favorite part of a season, when everything is balanced on the edge between the last days of summer and the first days of autumn, but we are still a ways from the trees being bleakly devoid of leaves, the sky perpetually gray, and the threat of snow becoming all too possible. For the moment it can still be sunny and pleasant, everything is green and splendid and I’m not both leaving for and coming back from work in the dark (it’s now dark, but the sun is still up for over an hour yet when I get home).

If I was a poet I’d write something eloquent about fall, but I ain’t, so you get a haiku:

Fall is in the air
Sun, rain, wind and shorter days
Just say no to snow

Birthday: Bread, but no cupcakes

As always, I am most grateful; on my birthday for having made it largely intact to another birthday.

It was even nice enough for me to go out in a t-shirt and shorts, possibly the last time I will do that this year without questioning my sanity or prepping for a polar bear swim in January (the forecast promises mostly sunny and 23ºC a week from now, but the weather in the second half of September can change in a whimsical and abrupt manner).

I thought it might be cute to buy a cupcake and put a single candle on it (mostly to take a picture of it), but Save-On Foods sadly was only selling a half-dozen of aggressively overdecorated cupcakes. I might have settled for a chocolate muffin instead, but they had none of those, either. I came home instead and, as the kids say, had a sad. I also made bread, which was yummy.

Part of me still wants to go out and find something, but I think the “it’s your birthday, just laze around and very slowly burn calories” part will probably win.

So here’s an image I found on the internet instead. I searched for “sad birthday cupcake.”

And here’s the image in its original context on flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/chlorophonia/6259698224

Weird rain

Weird in that today is the first time in a long while that we have had fairly steady rain during the day.

School kids were probably fuming. This is the first weekend since classes started.

Other signs of impending fall:

  • The swimming pool at Hume Park is closed for the season, and has been drained. The slide is still in place, so if someone really wanted to, they could climb up it and slide down into a nearly four foot deep concrete hole. Probably not recommended.
  • Likewise, the bubble over the tennis courts at the Burnaby Tennis Club (which I can see on my runs at Burnaby Lake) has been put back in place. It looks like a big oval marshmallow. Mmm. marshmallows. People would have been able to play tennis today because it’s up, so good timing there.
  • The sunset tonight was at 7:37 p.m. The post-dinner walks are going to be spooky pretty soon.
  • It never got past 20ºC today. In fact I don’t think it got past 16. Brr, relatively speaking.

I’m not complaining about the change in weather, mind you, as we need the rain and despite a slow start in July, the summer has been pretty dry overall. Still, I always lament this season’s passing. The world just feels so alive and vibrant in the summer.

I will now count the days until next summer. Actually, thanks to a Google search, I now know it’s 265 days. I’m undecided on whether this precise level of knowledge is a good or bad thing.

Request for Summer 2018 in Haiku form

I know this is almost like asking for winter to start in October, so I want to make it very clear I AM NOT ASKING FOR WINTER TO START IN OCTOBER.

That said, my Haiku:

Summer you burned me
And half the province as well
It’s fine to stop now

By coincidence the forecast is calling for showers tomorrow.

The one rule about typing club…

…would probably be “don’t make typos.”

On a whim I plugged in my old Filco 87-key keyboard with brown switches to see how they felt after not using the keyboard for awhile and it’s actually better than I remember. The keys are tactile without the same CLACK as blues, but still satisfying to a certain degree, and less noisy.

With the Filco still plugged in and in the mood for some typing, I did a search for “learn to type” and landed at typingclub.com. It was eager to invite me to take the first lesson, which consisted of typing F and J a lot (the home keys, as the billions of people who can touch type already know). I dutifully went through Lesson 1 and got the following results:

I’m not sure what real accuracy is, other than the apparent opposite of fake accuracy. But look, I passed all the requirements and was invited to move on. This scares me, because Mavis Beacon started out very encouraging, too, before basically saying I was slow and a bit dumb, but I’ll let you skip ahead so you don’t cry and make a scene, okay?

26 wpm compares to my usual three-fingers-look-at-the-keyboard-a-lot method’s average of 45 wpm or so. The gap between the two is sadly not that great to close, testimony to how slow I currently type.

I may try Lesson 2 or another program, or just recall Mavis’s cruel smile and switch to voice dictation. We’ll see.

A certain irony

A recent email from Zinio–a digital magazine store–arrived and the enticement in the subject line rather suggests the person dispatching their mass emails might want to subscribe to Grammar Weekly*.

* It’s entirely possible there really is a Grammar Weekly magazine. I didn’t check, though.

Complaint free(ish)

I was on Day 7 of my renewed Complaint Free 21-day challenge when I opened my mouth this morning to a co-worker and…complained about the weather, of all things. And not even the current weather, the weather last week. Old weather.

This is sort of the equivalent of telling yourself over and over not to do something and then doing it, anyway. As soon as the complaint left my lips I knew what I’d done and the bracelet was snapped onto the left wrist.

Tomorrow I begin Day 1 again, a little wiser and hopefully a little more content about the weather. 😛

(It was sunny and pleasant today, adding a pinch of irony to the whole thing.)

Rain today

It rained today, the first rain we’ve had this month during daylight hours (we had one other brief shower overnight). It took 25 days to arrive, which is impressive, but in a somewhat depressing way, less impressive than it once was because dry summers are no longer uncommon.

The rain is good because it helps reduce the likelihood of the tinder-dry forests instantly going up in flames, it helps to douse the smoke drifting down from all the current forest fires already raging due to the tinder-dry aforementioned, and it may slightly revive the very very brown grass seen everywhere.

As I am the lucky recipient of a return of the cold I had a few weeks ago, I probably wouldn’t have run, anyway, but even that turned out to be okay–I enjoyed the indulgence of a true day off, where I shrugged off not completing my activity rings, enjoyed some comfort food, and bought a couple of Frisbees. Er, flying discs.

The weather appear much the same tomorrow, but if I’m up to it, I may try a short, soggy run. And like it!

The cat sat

Today it is cloudy, cooler and there’s a chance of showers.

This is actually good, because it’s finally, if temporarily, cleared the infernal smoke haze from the area.

In celebration I present a cat reclining in a pose not unlike mine two nights ago when I canceled my usual Tuesday evening run due to the smoke and 32ºC temperature.

Complaint free, now with official wrist band

Today I’m starting the 21 day complaint free challenge again.

And this time I’ve upgraded from a rubber band to the official™ Complaint Free World bracelet, as seen on my freakishly thin wrist here (click if you really want to see the pores of my skin):

I ordered the child size and the bracelet is still huge. I have the world’s smallest wrists (not a complaint).

I’m starting again because while I can’t point to a specific time or incident, I know I have sinned complained since achieving the original 21 day goal and figured it was better to just wipe the slate clean (which you’re expected to do if you complain, anyway) and use the official bracelet as further motivation. It’s easier to just acknowledge that at some point I let loose the complaints and declare myself complain-free again (hopefully).

For Day 1 I was fine. The bracelet is much more noticeable than the rubber band, so it is perhaps a more forceful reminder to keep my trap shut when the urge to complain arises.

We’ll see how Day 2 goes, especially if I run tomorrow in this heat-blasted, smoke-choked weather we’re currently experiencing.

Beavers dam it

I went for a walk tonight along the Brunette River trail to help work off the 15,000 calories of pizza I had ingested earlier and spied for the first time the fur-bearing stick re-arrangers that have been at work at the small artificial pond created back in 2012 as part of a habitat restoration project. Previously the drainage pipe fed into a small pond that continued into another pipe under the trail and into the river. For the restoration, a new stream was created off the pond to the east that travels about half a km or so down before joining into another. At the same time a large concrete barrier was put in place to create a larger, permanent pond. When it rains this pond naturally spills over and the excess goes into the pipe that leads under the trail. In the winter this spillover becomes a reasonably impressive little waterfall.

Recently I’ve noticed twigs and small branches adorning the top of the concrete barrier. They would usually go away, but inevitably reappear a few days later. They were there tonight and for the first time I saw the culprits lazing about in the pond: three beavers.

There may be more than three, but that’s how many were showing themselves. None were active in the construction as I walked by, but their work is evident in the shot below. You can see that even though we are in the midst of a dry spell, there is still a trickle of water flowing over the concrete and the beavers will have none of it (apologies for the naff picture quality. I was afraid the beavers might dive if I got too close, so I wasn’t too fussy on getting the best angle).

Here’s a cropped version that more closely shows the dam builders, contemplating more dam building. The third one is near the water’s edge toward the back.

I wonder if these beavers are related to the ones that managed to derail a 152 car train.

The internet of despair

In case you had trouble finding depressing things on the internet, Bijan Stephen has an article on The Verge that handily links to several sites that trade specifically in the despair and hopelessness online: The feeling of online is ennui

It highlights how you can feel so alone and cold when in the midst of a billion babbling virtual voices. In the era of an American president seemingly spending more time making typos and complaints on Twitter than actually doing his job (perhaps a good thing), it’s not surprising that stories (and sites) like these would pop up.

Screenshots of despair is my favorite, partly because it’s a blog and not a Twitter account, but also because the humor mostly derives from being out of context, which makes it seem a little less hopeless and awful (though the blog author asserts “I am trying to break your heart.”)

One example:

It only gets better from there.