I don’t know about these knees.
My knees are olden
Eldritch things of days gone by
What was I saying?
No, that really doesn’t capture it. Let me try again.
These are not bees knees
They are sensitive like me
Creak like an old ship
Better. Not perfect, but good enough.
I was originally planning on updating my PC this spring but thanks to crypto currency miners driving the price of video cards into orbit I’ve decided to hold off and peruse my massive backlog of games for titles that will still run on my current rig, which is about four years old.
Instead I started playing Diablo 3 again. Like World of Warcraft, it acts as comfort food because it’s pretty mindless. You click, things die. You click more, more things die. You get loot. Your character gets increasingly ridiculous looking. It’s fun. Since I last placed (coincidentally four years ago) they’ve added seasons, which locks your character into a “start over” mode that gives you a few trinkets and baubles for completing various goals. I’ve completed one of nine goals. I probably won’t finish them all and I will be sad, but only a little, because there’s good clickin’ fun in the meantime.
I’m almost worried that Diablo 3 is now distracting me from my writing the same way WoW was. Don’t ask about my writing…
I can’t remember the last time I had a corn dog. It was probably at a fair when I was in my teens, so about three hundred years ago. But when I think about them, they just seem weird. You take a wiener and coat it in a thick layer of fried cornmeal. It’s just an odd thing to decide to turn into a dish. I can’t even remember if I liked them. I kind of want to try one again but there’s no easy way other than buying an entire box of them in the grocer freezer. Then I’d have to figure out what to do with the rest of them. Donate them to orphans? Turn them into fertilizer? Science experiments?
But maybe this is a case where it’s better to let sleeping (corn) dogs lie.
Also, I categorized this post under Health, though I’m not entirely sure it qualifies.
Run 574
Average pace: 5:49/km
Location: Burnaby Lake (CW)
Start: 1:47 pm
Distance: 5:03 km
Time: 29:20
Weather: Clear, some cloud
Temp: 12-14ºC
Humidity: 40%
Wind: light to moderate
BPM: 163
Weight: 167.1 pounds
Total distance to date: 4455 km
Devices: Apple Watch, iPhone 8
Today’s run can be divided into Good and Bad.
Good:
Bad:
Signs of spring were all around, too:
The skunk cabbage is also on the verge of blossoming, too. This is the time of year when it looks pretty and isn’t stinky.
Four (!) trees have been cut down since my last run at the lake, including several that had been leaning rather precariously. A fifth that had a large branch angled over the path, requiring you to either duck under or go around has also been amputated. This past winter has probably seen more trees come down (via storm or chainsaw) than in the seven years I’ve been running here.
Overall, I am left a bit nonplussed by the run. I was hoping to get a pace in the 5:30s range, but at least the knees were fine. Well, I shouldn’t say fine. I’ve come to realize that for awhile now (several years, at least) my knees have been very tender whenever I have to use them, like when I kneel on the floor to tie a shoe or scrub something off the kitchen tile. They feel weirdly sensitive. I can replicate this by going into a crouch. I have no idea if running caused this, or if it’s hereditary (my dad had bad knees) but I’ll keep running for as long as I’m able to or possibly get bionic knees.
One other positive was the BPM holding at 163. It’s been remarkably stable, which seems like a good thing. As I get in better shape it should go down. I just need to do more stuff to actually get in better shape. 😛
I am way behind on my post quota this month. Yes, I have a quota, one I just made up now and have to enforce for arbitrary reasons.
Here is a cat being put to sleep (very briefly).
There’s a big office building that sits midway between the condo and nearby grocery store and when it opened, we got a bonus walk that acts as a shortcut to the store, saving us having to walk up and around the block. It’s a pleasant little walk, with a nice view of the river (until they finish building the new condo towers, at least), and there’s a little grass area with picnic tables and a garden. The area is a bit truncated due to encroaching construction, but what’s there is green and lovely.
And now the garden there has this sign:
This is not the kind of sign put up proactively, so it means it went up after needles were found in the area. If you stand at this sign and look to your left, you are looking directly at a daycare facility, with a playground beside it. It’s about ten steps away.
Addiction sucks, for sure, but maybe if you’re going to shoot up, don’t toss your needles out where they can prick and infect innocent little kids (or anyone else)?
The Fitbit One is a step tracker that, unlike most, does not strap onto your wrist. It comes with a clip but I always kept it in the watch pocket of my jeans where it tracked faithfully.
I am using the past tense because my Fitbit One is now dead, murdered by washing. To be more precise, when I did my last load of laundry this past Friday I forgot to take the Fitbit out of that watch pocket and realized this with five minutes left in the wash cycle. It came out dead and remains dead. It is tracking in technology Heaven now.
I’ve actually done this once before and the Fitbit One not only survived, it gave me a bonus 1400 steps from tumbling around inside the washer for 45 minutes. The difference this time is the button on it had collapsed into the unit and while it still worked fine after the button collapse, tracking just as it always has, I suspect that this created a gap for water to get in and zap everything to heck and back.
I looked into replacing my deceased device, but apparently Fitbit quietly stopped making the One awhile back. Local stores don’t stock it. The closest replacement is the Fitbit Zip, which only tracks steps and is shaped a bit like a watch, sans strap. But I have my Apple watch now for tracking and it’s on my wrist where it more easily guilts me into meeting my goals (see here for more), so I think I’ll just stick to the one device.
I feel a bit silly killing the Fitbit One like this, but I appreciate the slight de-cluttering of the technology in my life.
Run 573
Average pace: 5:27/km
Location: Brunette River trail
Start: 5:25 pm
Distance: 5:05 km
Time: 27:34
Weather: Cloudy
Temp: 6ºC
Humidity: 75%
Wind: light
BPM: 162
Weight: 166.8 pounds
Total distance to date: 4450 km
Devices: Apple Watch, iPhone 8
I had another weird glitch with the music before starting my run. I told Siri, though my watch, “Hey Siri, shuffle R.E.M.” It processed the command and then…no music. I look and instead of R.E.M. it’s showing…Supertramp? I bring out the phone and there’s a pop-up that says something like “Ruh roh, where’s the internet??”, which was odd because I had a couple bars on my cell signal. I make sure the AirPods are connected and they are, so that’s good. The music app doesn’t show the Supertramp song, although the watch does. Instead it just says “Music”. No song title, nothing else. When I press play it actually plays. But it’s Supertramp.
So I just issue the command through the phone again and then…it works. No other issues after that.
Technology is weird. I wonder if the iPhone is hinky. Or maybe it’s cosmic rays.
It was also chilly out, so maybe it was that. The chill was making the phone cold and afraid to work properly.
It rained hard in the morning and I was not enthused about running, so I waited and all of a sudden it was 4:45 p.m. and I’m thinking I should go or I’m just going to slump on the couch, getting up only to use the bathroom and to fill my face with food (not from the bathroom). I wore my long-sleeve shirt, which was a wise move, but shorts were fine. It wasn’t windy, so that helped to keep it from feeling as unseasonably cool as it was.
I ran the river trail, again by first walking to the far end, then starting from the end. The left knee was fine, the right knee was a bit sore but not too bad and for the second half of the run it settled down much more than in the last run. But I did notice that at times it seemed to jiggle a bit–the actual kneecap. I’m thinking more than a compression sleeve is worth getting.
I tried not to push on the run, but did at one point when I was catching up on another jogger. She was on the left so I moved to the right. She had a giant phone strapped to her left arm. I don’t think I could ever do that, it just looks so awkward. Plus I’d feel like I was constantly tipping very slightly to the left. As I caught up to pass she suddenly looked over her shoulder, as if she intended to move over to the right. This created an awkward moment because I was in the space she wanted to move into. I turned on the afterburners and increased my pace for a few hundred meters. My lungs felt the fire. I mostly eased up after that and was pleasantly surprised by the final result, a 5:27/km pace, with the BPM at 162, no different than my much slower previous runs. Yay.
Here’s how the last three have gone:
5:57 > 5:38 > 5:27
So it’s a good trend. I should note that the river trail is not really a trail at all, but a very compacted gravel road. As such it’s a lot wider and smoother than the trail at Burnaby Lake, so I always tend to be faster on it. Still, an improvement is an improvement and I’ll take it.
I will once again promise myself to run during the week now that there is daylight to do so. We’ll see how it goes.
Strange Weather by Joe Hill
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’d easily give Strange Weather four stars, but one of the stories just didn’t work for me. Having said that, this is still an easy recommendation for both fans of Hill and horror in general.
The first story, “Snapshot” has a nice Twilight Zone vibe going on. Set in 1988, it tells of a surly, strange man with a not-quite Polaroid camera that does more than just take your picture, it takes you, a piece at a time. The man encounters an awkward, clumsy, but bright teenage boy and…things happen. It’s better to just read and enjoy the story.
The second story, “Loaded” is about a murderous psychopath who acquires a lot of guns and goes on a shooting rampage and kills a lot of people. And that’s it. In the Afterword Hill describes it as “my attempt to make sense out of our national hard-on for The Gun” and while the story certainly has plenty of guns and gun-related violence, it didn’t work for me, even as I imagine Hill leaning back in his chair, pointing a finger gun at the monitor after writing the last sentence of the story and saying, “Nailed it!” If “Loaded” were a movie, it would be an unrewarding slog, a series of killings that say little more than “a psychopath with guns is probably not a good thing.” I also felt the characters didn’t always act believably. The reporter makes a long string of stupid decisions for no apparent reason, while I think the psychopath would likely have killed himself after one particular event in the story.
The forest fire that serves as a backdrop is maybe meant to be a metaphor, but it could have been cut from the story and not affected it at all.I did think it was clever setting the story in Florida, though, allowing the character of Kellaway (the killer) to represent everyone’s crime headline favorite, Florida Man.
The third story, “Aloft” is a fantasy involving a petrified skydiver who, on his first jump, lands on a cloud that turns out to be more than just a cloud. It’s funny and weird and the background story that intersperses his travails on the cloud is touching and engaging. The whole story just hangs together tightly.
The final story, “Rain” is a bleak, nasty tale that asks the question, “What if it rained super-sharp shards of crystal?” If you guessed “a lot of people would die”, you’re right! Things tie together a little too conveniently at times and the whole “Comet Cult” group that serve as neighbors to the main character, seem more in service to the plot than being necessary to the story. Still, Hill skillfully paints a truly frightening picture of a world where the weather can suddenly kill. A certain president with a fondness for tweeting insults adds further to the story’s sense of despair.
Overall, Strange Weather is a terrific collection, even if “Loaded” was a misfire (sorry) for me.
Today, the last day of winter, was a weird one for local geese.
I saw a pair of geese–often referred to by their affectionate nickname, poopmonsters–in the pond outside the Langara library this morning. This is perfectly normal, except the pond is empty and I got the impression, somehow, that the geese were expecting and perhaps demanding water. Soon, geese, soon. They have to wait until overnight temperatures stay above freezing for a week or something.
Later I went for my usual walk around the golf course at lunch and saw another pair of geese (or maybe the same pair, which would be even better) out on the links. They weren’t golfing, or at least not yet. They were just milling about, pecking at the ground for food, and probably pooping. I heard the splendorous honking of another pair of geese and looked to the sky. Lo, there they were, and they came down to join their feathered friends. Except they were not friends. One of the geese, upon landing, immediately chased another. A goose fracas quickly ensured, with much honking, wing-flapping and snapping of beaks. It was either an alpha male thing (do geese have alpha males) or one of the geese was just plain loco. I’m still not sure which. If I’d had more time I would have shot some video, because it was a dazzling display of waterfowl foolery.
And this ends winter and the season of crazy geese.
I’ve decided it makes the most sense to take my 2009 NaNoWriMo novel The Ferry, and attempt to self-publish it this year. I’ve chosen it because it’s actually a complete novel, so it only needs another draft or two to be ready, vs. actually finishing one of my other novels. It’s not my best work, but it’s words on a (virtual) page and has action, romance and horrible monsters from some other dimension. And that’s not a sly reference to some political angle.
Steps in my plan:
We’ll see how it goes, but if I don’t do something this year, I’ve decided I’m going to give up and spend all of my free time playing Diablo 3. ALL MY FREE TIME.
