Yes, I was actually kind of good this month, food-wise! I was also very active, running and walking all hither and yon.
I may have sweated off some weight due to the humidity, too. In any event, I am down 1.8 pounds for the month, and the same amount for the year, too, which looks worse that way, but I’m down, so it’s a win as per me.
Onward from here!
Stats:
January 1, 2025: 166.8 pounds
Current: 165.0 pounds Year to date: Down 1.8 pounds
August 1: 166.8 pounds August 31: 165.0 pounds (down 1.8 pounds)
Body fat: August 1: 25.1% August 31: 24.8% (down 0.3%)
Skeletal muscle mass: August 1: 29.7 kg August 31: 29.5 kg (down 0.2 kg)
Or what happens when you get more carbon into the atmosphere than the Earth can handle, as outlined in this Guardian article, in which it describes periods of volcano activity so intense they wipe out most life on the planet and turned it into a noxious, lifeless hell for pretty much everything. Fun stuff!
I like the following quote. Lips = Large Igneous Provinces, which is a cute, understated way of describing periods of extreme volcanic activity that move massive amounts of lava below and then onto the Earth’s surface:
Lips are the Earth’s way of rudely reminding us that our thin rocky surface, and the gossamer glaze of green goo that coats it, sits atop a roiling, utterly indifferent planetary drama.
Anyway, just something different from the stories about Trump’s health (tip to readers in the future: It ain’t lookin’ good!)
I started the day by oversleeping a little–not much, really. But the rest of my usual morning routine seemed to play in slow motion, so by the time I headed out for my run, I was two hours behind where I’d normally be. It was still morning, but getting late–and hot.
Well, not so much hot as muggy. Or rather, both. Huggy.
On paper conditions look similar to Wednesday–temperature a degree or two higher, humidity about the same. But it felt a lot muggier and the air quality was clearly (!) worse today, with visible haze.
Additionally, my Baker’s cyst® behind my right knee had made its presence known again after my last run, so I was a bit concerned how this run would play out, even under ideal weather conditions..
It turned out…okay! The right shin was mostly fine and the knee didn’t seem to be an issue. Pot-run, it felt a little creaky to start but by the time I got home, it again felt okay. I am tentatively not worried.
But I was very thirsty.
One benefit of starting the run around 11 a.m. is the Cottonwood Trail was mostly in shade. And that was the one and only benefit.
The run was unusual in one other way: interruptions. The first was by choice: I stopped at the fountain by the Nature House to have a drink, then used the loo for good measure. This gave me Bonus Rest #1.
Bonus Rest #2 came shortly into the fifth km when I paused the run to take a phone call. This took a few minutes and again gave me a small chance to rest.
I don’t think either break really made much difference to my pace, but you can see the little blips in my BPM, and overall BPM was a pretty low 147. My pace was a bit slower at 5:55/km, but this was mostly due to a stellar finish of 5:34/km, because the first two km were actually over six minutes each. Yikes.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to running in, like, normal weather again. Soon. Maybe.
Haze visible in the distance, Still Creek in the foreground, post-run.
Stats:
Run 959 Average pace: 5:55/km Training status: Productive Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW) Start: 11:02 a.m. Distance: 5.03 km Time: 29:43 Weather: Sunny Temp: 23-24°C Humidity: 75-71% Wind: light BPM: 147 Weight: 164.4 Total distance to date: 6,625 km Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation) Shoes: ASICS Trabuco Terra 2 (220/489/709)
Today, the college is among many post-secondary schools being hit by declining enrolment, particularly from international students. Budget cuts and layoffs are happening and as you might imagine, it’s not great for morale.
I’m more glad now than ever that I left it all behind. I wish everyone there that I know and like the best, though!
I leave you with this photo of a snazzy new label maker we got shortly before I left.
View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run: Hazy, with humidity in the hizzy (as the kids say).
I contemplated various scenarios today, all of which involved avoiding bears. In the end, I decided to just stick to a regular counter-clockwise run around the lake, as a 5K run in this direction affords better lines-of-sight for bear sightings. I also paused my music when running through sections that were twistier, to better listen for a large shambling creature, be it a black bear, Bigfoot or just some really big hairy man.
Fortunatley, I only saw the signs.
The real danger turned out to be the humidity. It was a bit warmer at 22C, and the lake always feels more humid than the river trail, so I sweated like it was my life’s purpose. The combo of temperature and humidity also brought my pace way down to 5:54/km. OTOH, my BPM was only 148, because that’s the best I could muster in the conditions.
As for my body, the right shin continues to improve and provided nothing else falls apart, bursts or explodes, I may begin thinking about ramping back up to a 10K run again.
But we’ll see.
For now, I’ll just keep my eye open for bears, hope nothing breaks, and wait for the cooler temperatures of the fall to arrive.
View looking northeat across the lake, post-run.
Stats:
Run 958 Average pace: 5:54/km Training status: Productive Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW) Start: 10:18 a.m. Distance: 5.03 km Time: 29:41 Weather: Sun with high cloud Temp: 22°C Humidity: 76-73% Wind: light to nil BPM: 148 Weight: 164.8 Total distance to date: 6,620 km Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation) Shoes: ASICS Trabuco Terra 2 (215/476/691)
404 Media has a piece on AI slop videos that are all over Instagram and TikTok that not only evoke nostalgia for the 1980s, which has been a thing for a while, but goes further, with generated characters with feathered hair creepily inviting you to come back to 1985 and join them.
Tip: You can’t actually do that. You are stuck with 2025.
I especially like this paragraph from author Matthew Gault:
These videos are awful AI-generated slop, yes, but it’s more than that. Reactionary nostalgia, a desire to return to a fake past or a time when you were young and things were better, is part of why the world is so fucked right now. It is, literally, the basis of MAGA. Worse, these videos about the “past” tell us a lot about our present and future: one where AI encourages our worst impulses and allows users to escape from reality into a slopified world that narrowly targets whatever reality we’d like to burrow into without dealing with the problems of the present.
It’s like the Matrix, except stupid, horrible and about as cool as roadkill.
Brunette River, pre-run: The promise of heat that is hot, to paraphrase America.
Not literally beating bears, of course.
I had a few goals today:
Avoid bears
Beat the heat
I achieved both of these things by:
Running on the river trail instead of at the lake
Starting my run just before 9 a.m., almost two hours earlier than on Friday
Now, I have seen a bear on the river trail, but the trail is wide and open, with excellent sight lines, all of which is the opposite of the loop around the lake, so if you see a bear, it will likely be way up ahead and not when you suddenly confront it coming around a tight, narrow corner. As it turned out, I saw no bears, only one dog (on leash, yay) and a few cyclists, so it was pretty quiet overall.
It was 21C, which is pretty warm for 9 a.m. but not bad overall. Humidity was a sticky 78% and didn’t drop much, so sweating was copious and constant.
That said, the right shin, still a bit tender, is definitely starting to feel better, so I believe it’s officially on the mend. Because I always find a way to complicate things, last night I managed to pull at least one ab muscle, so I got to run with a mild ache on my right side. I don’t think it had much effect, other than just annoying me.
The switch to the river trail seemed to give me a little more pep, as I came in with a fairly zippy pace of 5:39/km, my first under 5:40 in a good while. Something that helped: Most of the trail was in the shade, with only one small section getting direct sunlight. Nice.
In all, a fine start to the week.
Brunette River, post-run: Still with the early morning vibe.
Stats:
Run 957 Average pace: 5:39/km Training status: Productive Location: Brunette River Trail Start: 8:57 a.m. Distance: 5.03 km Time: 28:29 Weather: Sunny Temp: 21°C Humidity: 78-76% Wind: light BPM: 151 Weight: 165.7 Total distance to date: 6,615 km Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation) Shoes: ASICS Trabuco Terra 2 (210/463/673)
UPDATE, one day later: Now up to 32 pending updates!
What’s funny is when 27 apps on my iPhone 12 needed to be updated, I did update 7 of them and just days later the number of updates is already past that initial 27, to 30. This is just silly.
Phone updates are silly.
I want to see how long I can go before something stops working.
Scheduled to start taking patients in 2026, the new acute care tower they’ve been building next door since 2021 is pretty much complete, at least from the outside. Jim Pattison, a famous-in-BC entrepreneur, donated something like $30 million to the hospital, which is a lot of money even in Canadian dollars. As a result, he gets his name prominently displayed on each long side of the tower, where it reads:
Jim Pattison Acute Care Tower
Except for some reason, the east side of the tower reads:
Jim Patti
And this amuses me because I’m just that kind of guy. I assume the rest of the letters will go up at some point, but in the meantime, I draw comfort from having Jim Patti looking down on my home from nine storeys up.
Video game arcades emerged in the mid-1970s and flourished through the 1980s. During this same period, I was 10–25 years old, so pretty much the prime age to indulge in arcade gaming as a pastime. A friend and I would sometimes even get in his van and drive from Duncan to Victoria, a roughly 50-minute trek, to check out the latest games at the snazzy arcades in the capitol. This was around 1984, just when the first (and as it turned out, some of the only) laser disc games emerged.
I was never great at arcade games, but also not horribly inept, so I usually felt I got my money’s worth when I exchanged a $10 bill for a roll of 40 quarters. Unless I played anything from Williams (Robotron 2084, Defender, Stargate, Sinistar), because their games were technically brilliant, a blast to play and required a level of hand/eye coordination I never had, even as a nimble youth.
But there was one game that I actually mastered and could play from beginning to end (because it actually had an end) on a single quarter. That game was one of the aforementioned laser disc titles, Space Ace.
I was never that good at its predecessor, Dragon’s Lair, but loved the film-quality animation and being able to “control” the same. I put control in scare quotes because both games were ultimately just variations of Simon–hit the button or push the joystick when a colour flashes onscreen, and the animation continues uninterrupted. Guess wrong or take too long to react (measured in fractions of a second in some cases) and you got to watch Dirk the Daring (in Dragon’s Lair) or Dexter (in Space Ace) die in some horrible way, you’d lose a life, and the game would play through the sequence again, giving you another chance.
Space Ace was a bit more generous in the clues guiding you through the game, and this was apparently enough to get me to keep trying, to where I could get through the entire thing for only 25 cents.
Last night, YouTube served up a video of a complete playthrough of the game. The video is about nine minutes long and is linked below. Watching it, I am kind of amazed I managed to get through the entire game on a quarter, even with 20-year-old reflexes, because there were so many times decisions had to be made so quickly, I couldn’t even suss out which was the right one before two more had already popped up and flown by.
Clearly, I was a maniac in 1984.
I continued to hang out and play in arcades until the early 90s, or until I was around 30 years old. By then home video game consoles were getting good enough to make them credible alternatives to the arcades and today arcades are just a niche for either nostalgia buffs looking to play the cocktail table version of Ms Pac-Man (which was the best way to play), or for indulging in novelty games with weird controls that are two bucks a pop or something.
But I’ll always remember those early years and my only single quarter game, even as it seems totally bananas today that I could pull off those moves back then.
It almost feels like you can see the curve of the Earth.
It was warm today and maybe that made a lot of birds shy about coming out, because sparrows and sparrow-adjacent birds were in relatively short supply. We did see some chickadees, a few blackbirds and a lone cowbird, though.
Mostly it was mallards (being jerks by hogging seed) and wood ducks, with the males still looking snazzy with their proto-mullets, along with the re-emergence of geese in most parts. The air was full of honks.
We even saw some swallows still hanging out in the main pond, though I wasn’t able to tell what kind they were, as they were in full flitting mode.
Others must have known this is the birding lull, because we were able to drive straight into the sanctuary and the number of people around was definitely down for a sunny, pleasant summer Saturday.
Still, it was fine. Can one have too many glamour shots of mallards?
Centennial Beach
Mt. Baker looms over Boundary Bay and the tidal flats.
We had some better luck at Centennial Beach, with multiple types of shorebirds prowling the streams left in the wake of the extremely low tide, including yellowlegs, killdeer, semipalmated sandpipers and a lifer–a long-billed curlew. At least I think it’s a lifer, I don’t remember seeing one before and it has an extremely distinctive (and gigantic) bill that curves down. A couple of them were strolling about farther out. We ventured onto the tidal flats for a bit, but were wary of spooking them.
There were also a ton of grasshoppers basically everywhere. I was tempted to title this post “Day of the Locusts.” I got some decent shots.
The other surprise was three snow geese in amongst a bunch of Canada geese. I did not have snow geese in August on my bingo card.
The raptor trail was raptor-deficient, however.
In all, the shorebirds made the trip worthwhile.
The Shots
Shot with a Canon EOS R7 with 18-150 mm kit lens and 100-400 mm telephoto.
A few shots:
Blackbird up close and personal at Reifel.Snow goose in August.
The Birds (and other critters)
Sparrows and sparrow-adjacent:
Anna’s hummingbird
Black-capped chickadee
Brown-headed cowbird
Cliff swallow
European starlings
House sparrow
Red-winged blackbird
Waterfowl and shorebirds:
American coot (still not yet)
Canada goose
Killdeer
Great blue heron
Greater yellowlegs
Long-billed curlew (lifer)
Long-billed dowitcher
Mallard
Northern pintail
Northern shoveller
Semipalmated sandpiper (lifer, at least per Merlin)
