WriteQuest 2011!

2010 was a moribund year for me as far as writing went. I flamed out halfway through National Novel Writing Month, the writing group fell apart and my output slowed and then pretty much stopped for most of the year.

I’ve vowed to make 2011 the start of my writing renewal and part of that has been taking the writing group and exercises and moving them off a couple of scattered subforums and onto their own website, thenwrite.com. I’m hoping it will keep me and the other participants inspired and excited about putting words to page (and screen).

If not, I vow to become a pole dancer.

Return to the Valley of the Jogger

Four months later and I have finally completed another jog. Woo!

My plan was to complete 5K.

Conditions were favorable for the time of year, with the temperature ranging 3-4ºC, only a slight breeze at the start and partly cloudy skies, with the sun actually poking out a few times. I walked a circuit at China Creek Park first to check out the path and while there were no puddles the trail was rather mushy in spots, about what I expected given the recent rain.

I dressed in shorts since my manly tree trunk* legs don’t feel the cold much, wore a t-shirt with my jogging jacket and eschewed gloves, remembering all the times I’ve overdressed on previous runs. After the first km my hands still felt like blocks of ice so I was wondering if I’d made the right call but they warmed up a short time later and were fine the rest of the way.

By the second km I was beginning to feel some cramping in my chest and my legs suddenly gained roughly 300 pounds each. At this point the only other jogger out sailed past me. He was something like four feet taller than me so I figured he was fast due to his huge, hill giant-like stride. It couldn’t be because I had lost every trace of my conditioning!

As it turned out, I only lost most of my conditioning. My first km came in at a perfectly respectable 5:07/km but the rest of the run fell off the cliff, with my time plunging to 5:26 by the second km and continuing lemming-like for the next two km before leveling off as I finally hit my stride in the last stretch. By that point I was fully warmed up, the cramping had diminished and the legs, though still heavy, didn’t feel quite as burdensome.

Afterward, I felt fine and recovered quickly. My knee did not bother me at all and my legs are otherwise fine. I think my left shoe is a bit wonky up front so I will probably look for a new pair soon. I’ve put in probably over 700 km on these ones, so they’ve served me well.

Chart:

km Jan 18
1 km 5:07
2 km 5:26
3 km 5:36
4 km 5:42
5 km 5:44

* haha, no

Kneedful things

A good pun is hard to resist. A bad pun, moreso.

My left knee has checked out A-OK and the doctor says I am good to resume jogging, which I plan on doing this Monday. When he seemed a bit evasive on the cause of the soreness in my knee I asked, “Is it one of those ‘getting older’ things?” He immediately started in with, “Well, I wouldn’t want to put a name on it…” which seemed like a polite way of saying, “Yes”. But he was polite, so no dirty look for him!

Here’s hoping my Nike+ sensor still has some juice in it. Here’s also hoping I don’t collapse face-first into the mud after 200 meters.

Bike at 12 o’ clock! (hiking Burnaby Mountain)

Today Jeff and I hiked up Burnaby Mountain for an hour, completing our trek in about an hour instead of the expected two. It was the first time I’d be on a mixed use trail, in this case one for both cyclists (specifically of the genus mountain bike extremus) and hikers. Within moments of ascending we had our first cyclist wheeling down toward us. Since they have momentum and it’s difficult, if not dangerous, for them to try to stop, we obligingly hopped out of the way each time.  I was a bit uncomfortable with this at first but everyone was so dang polite it didn’t bother me after awhile.

Then we didn’t seem any more riders.

The climb was milder than the one we did last week at Buntzen Lake but we gained a few hundred meters of elevation, at least, and some of the parts we climbed are apparently considered advanced, according to maps (see below).

No pictures since there was only one small lookout along the way, but I may take some if we return.

The route we took is seen below. We began on the road, walked east and headed up Nicoles Trail, over to Gear Jammer, down to Function Junction and finally down the aptly-named Lower Snake Trail (switchbacks ahoy!) before coming back to our starting point on Pipeline Trail. Not a bad little workout and the weather was very cooperative — clear and a few degrees above freezing.

Trail map:

And the relevant part of the legend:

Needing knees

I have not jogged since September 20th.

This is not by design.

As it happened, back in September my left leg was ailing again and so I opted to give it time to recover before resuming my runs, as I had previously. This particular time it seemed the left ankle was feeling especially tender. I am more convinced now that the way I was running — on an oval course, always counter-clockwise — may have contributed to my left leg bearing more than its fair share and thus making it more susceptible to injury. My plan was to resume running and to either find a new course to run or to simply alternate between running clockwise and counter-clockwise on the path around China Creek Park.

By the time I felt I’d rested enough to resume jogging I began a new job and suddenly my schedule was a lot tougher to work runs around. Couple that with waning daylight hours and I let it slide longer than I would have liked.

Then something weird happened. My left knee started to hurt. More precisely, I would sometimes notice it feeling sore, though it never hurt to actually walk on it. It was most obvious when I would kneel to tie my shoelaces. What makes this weird is that I never experienced any problems with my knees when running. At first I thought I did something to hurt it and just couldn’t remember exactly what I’d done but the soreness is ever-present. I feel it every time I kneel down, though it never gets worse (or better). I plan on having the knee checked out at the clinic soon but mildly fear this may be a chronic injury that will require therapy — or worse!

If the doctor tells me it’s one of those ‘men of your age’ things, I promise to give him a dirty look.

I will update on the potential kneetastrophe soon.

Star Trekpalooza (with bonus Forbidden Planet)

Over the weekend I had a rare chance to watch several back to back Star Trek: Next Gen movies as part of some Space network marathon and it has made me revise my opinions of several.

I saw the last segment of Insurrection and all of Generations, First Contact and Nemesis. Here are my new and improved opinions:

First Contact: This is still easily the best of the Next Gen movies. Yes, the concept of a Borg Queen is inconsistent, Crusher gets pushed into the background in favor of Alfre Woodard’s character and it combines two of the most tired tropes in Star Trek — saving Earth and time travel. But thanks to a lithe script, some excellent set pieces and tight performances by the cast, it all holds together and becomes more than the sum of its proverbial parts.

Insurrection: I only caught the last few scenes and it reminded me of what a dull and plodding movie it is. They somehow managed to make the action sequences limp and lifeless despite having the cool new Enterprise tooling around. Going from First Contact to this was a huge letdown. Even as a TV episode, Insurrection wouldn’t rank among the better ones, with its ‘simple folk on Amish planet’ plotline and not giving a damn if they blew the whole thing up.

Generations still comes off as a disjointed narrative, with too many different threads, many of them feeling only loosely connected to each other. The whole ‘Picard’s family dies in a fire’ (a fire? Really? In a time where they brag about no disease or poverty they somehow still manage to have fires that still burn down houses and kill people? Okay!) was utterly unnecessary and forced Patrick Stewart to spend a large amount of the film moping around. But the writers apparently couldn’t come up with anything better for Picard in the Nexus than ‘a family of mawkish, Stepford-style children dressed as if they were from the late 19th century so the tragedy of his real family was deemed necessary. When Picard looks out a window of his imaginary Nexus home and says, “This can’t be real” it’s a bit of a “Well, duh” moment. Which also demonstrates how hanging the whole movie on the Nexus was dumb to begin with. The plotholes in this movie are at least Galaxy class in size. Here’s just one, though: If Picard was able to leave the Nexus at any point in time, why did he not leave when Soren could be safely apprehended aboard a ship instead of mere minutes before he blows up an entire star? Because that wouldn’t have given us a scene of Kirk falling down and dying. Yes, Kirk’s death comes at the, er, hands of a rogue walkway that collapses. How noble!

Nemesis: I have always thought of this as being the worst of the Next Gen movies because of the poor matte effects, the overall cheap look of the film, the silly dune buggy sequence and the unnecessary and unconvincing sacrifice of Data as an attempt to wring a few tears from long-time fans (not to mention the cop-out of having B4 suddenly become more Data-like at the end). However, while all of these flaws are still present, none of them bothered me the same way they did back when I saw this in the theater when it came out in 2002. The story stays focused on the silly main plot (a lot of nonsense about a less-than-believable evil clone of Picard wanting to, uh, destroy the Earth or something for reasons that are never entirely clear, but which I can best surmise as “So I will be famous!”) and the pace keeps moving forward. In the end I have to say I found Nemesis more interesting than Insurrection, if not actually better, so I think I’ll now put it slightly above Insurrection in my list of Next Gen movies. My new ranking is thus:

1.First Contact
2. Generations
3. Nemesis
4. Insurrection

The gap between #1 and #2 is pretty big. The gap between #2 and #3 is smaller, while the space (ho ho) between #3 and #4 is rather small.

It’s too bad that the Next Gen cast didn’t get a decent batch of movies for their theatrical run. When most of your efforts rank about as highly as Star Trek V, it ain’t good.

***

I also managed to catch most of Forbidden Planet on AMC, which I’ve somehow never see before. It’s a bit of a jolt to see a young Leslie Nielson playing it straight as the commander of a military force that travels on a spaceship that looks strangely like a UFO. Overall I enjoyed it and it reminded me of how the pacing and plot sensibilities of movies have changed so much in the last 50 years. Forbidden Planet has its action but most of the film is simply talking or even one character demonstrating things to another. The enemy for the most part is literally unseen and the ending is not based on action but a psychological twist. There is allegedly a remake in the works (IMDB lists it as a 2013 project) and I can imagine the bigger, louder lasers already, the relatively simple ending being drawn out into a huge firefight and several unnecessary subplots tacked on. We need more science fiction movies that are about ideas and not just action. I expect the worst.

Finally, I caught the first 20 minutes or so of Fantastic Voyage. They emphasized several times that the shrinking process could only last 60 minutes maximum and then went through multiple phases post-shrinking of the sub and crew before finally injecting them into the guy’s body. I was expecting the project lead to send them a wireless message (yes, despite having all of this very fancy tech, they could only communicate through Morse code) telling them that they only had five minutes to complete the actual operation. Still, I love the tone of the movie, which can be described as serious-but-fun.

Take a hike! (to Buntzen Lake)

Today Jeff and I went for a hike in the Buntzen Lake area. I am a hiking newbie still but Jeff kindly furnished me with a walking stick for additional stability, balance and to fend off marauding bears.

Rather than hike around the lake itself, which has an elevation gain of a little over 100m, Jeff plotted a course up the Halvor Lunden trail which would take us up to the top of Eagle Ridge and a total elevation climb of about 1020m. We made pretty good time heading up but somewhere past 600m up the trail became snow-covered. Normally this would not be an issue but the cover was fairly thin and had frozen, making it pretty much ice. Just past Polytrichum Lookout at 680m or so, the trail becomes very steep and narrow and the ice was a little unforgiving without having claws of steel attached to your boots. After continuing up a ways we elected to turn around and head back down.

Although it didn’t seem like we had climbed very far up Treacherous Icy Slope, making our way back down took longer than expected, with each step falling into the ‘be very careful so you do not go head-first the rest of the way down’ category.

We arrived safely back in the park and ate lunch in the sun at Buntzen Lake proper. For five minutes. Not that we finished lunch in five minutes, that’s how long the sun shone on our table before it moved on. Pesky winter sun. Everyone in the area seemed to have a camera. I did, too, and took some pics, which can be found in the Buntzen Lake gallery.

Here is one of them, a close-up shot of The Pulpit, the rocky outcropping at the top that we did not quite reach.

[singlepic id=125 w=640 h=480 float=none]

It was an enjoyable outing despite not ultimately reaching our goal. There were no falls, bears and the weather was about perfect for this time of year — sunny and a touch above freezing with no wind.

Running update: no running

The problem was different this time.

After finishing the run on September 20th my left leg felt sore but I incorrectly surmised it was my shin again. However, while it was a little tender, that was not the issue. Rather, it’s the ankle, which is new. I can still feel it some 12 days later, so I’m not going to be running again for at least a few more weeks. I’ve read that there is a small chance that regular running on a track or oval can lead to each leg getting a slightly different workout and can increase the risk of injury. I wonder if that’s what has happened here. When I do resume running, I am going to try switching direction every other time, so I run counter-clockwise one day then clockwise the next. I may also plan out my first runs away from the park.

Next week, with the ankle feeling better, I’m going to resume my free weights workout in the interim, so all of my other muscles can be sore and share in the fun, too.

Here be puddles and sore legs (run)

An early afternoon run today with the temperature rising from 15C-17C, breezy and about an equal mix of sun and cloud. It had showered hard in the morning so this was the first run in a long time where I had to navigate around puddles.

It was not a very good run, alas, plagued by a number of issues:

  • rust from five days off
  • when the sun came out it felt very humid and muggy
  • my left leg was clearly bothering me partway through
  • a persistent cramp in my stomach in the second half of the run

That said, I finished at a pace midway between my two previous runs, clocking in at 5:27/km with a total time of 55:03. I ran a little farther than intended because the glare on my iPod was so bright at the end I could not read the display. It also seemed that clicking the menu button did not, in fact, present me with a menu the first few times I tried it. I suspect Apple wants me to upgrade to the shiny new nano that just came out. Total distance ended up being 10.08 km.

The midway point of the run was ‘highlighted’ by a muscle car revving its engine as it went down nearby Glen, causing a car alarm (apparently on the ‘go off if songbirds are present’ setting) to start wailing and it was that car alarm. You know the one, the worst car alarm ever, the one that has four different alarms, each one annoying in its own way. Fortunately the owner turned it off in short order. Or maybe it was an act of God. Either way I was glad.

There was not much else noteworthy on the run. I found a burst of speed for the 7-8 km stretch but the cramps and general soreness prevented me from maintaining that to the finish. I iced the left calf for about 50 minutes afterward and will see how it feels in a few days. The way things have been going I suspect I will be taking another forced break from running. I may look into some kind of cheap physiotherapy, if such a thing exists.

Chart (red denotes running in especially warm conditions, green denotes cramps during run):

km Sept 20 Sept 15 Sept 13 Sept 6 Sept 2
1 km 5:02 5:05 5:00 4:56 4:54
2 km 5:07 5:08 5:05 5:03 4:58
3 km 5:11 5:12 5:09 5:07 5:03
4 km 5:15 5:15 5:14 5:11 5:08
5 km 5:18 5:17 5:18 5:14 5:13
6 km 5:21 5:18 5:21 5:16 5:16
7 km 5:23 5:19 5:24 5:18 5:19
8 km 5:24 5:21 5:26 5:20 5:23
9 km 5:26 5:23 5:28 5:21 5:26
10 km 5:27 5:23 5:29 5:21 5:27

The Simple life of Ferris Wheele, Part 3

Opportunities (Let’s Make Not So Much Money)

One of the random things that pops up in The Sims 3 are Opportunities. These can come from work, an acquaintance or based on your reputation/skills. They give various rewards when completed, sometimes including good old-fashioned moola. As Ferris has continued to cook, his skill has improved to the point where he actually successfully prepared waffles that were not burned black. Hooray!

Waffles, not scorched!

This, in part, led to him getting asked to make a group dinner for some neighbor and deliver it. I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I think I lacked a proper group recipe or ingredients or something. All I know is Ferris never runs out of cereal or waffles but neither is apparently acceptable for a group of party guests at the neighbor’s. Oh well.

Eating and dousing flames

Continuing on the food theme, Ferris’s eventual success with waffles may have made him overconfident, for his next meal ended up with the stove on fire. As you might imagine, this is not a good thing, as expressed by Ferris’s reaction below.

A little too well-done.

Fortunately, Ferris keeps his cell phone in his boxer shorts and called the fire department immediately. He then ate ice cream on the couch for dinner instead.

After the fire, ice cream.

Read more

The tire(d) run

Today was the first time in awhile that I attempted a run with only a day off in-between.

Fortunately, it was a success!

The temperature was 19ºC but dropped a degree or two over the course — not that I noticed, because despite the sky being overcast, it still felt a bit warm. It began spitting partway through but didn’t turn to light rain until the run was over and I was heading back. The spitting did clear out most of the park by about the 6 km point, though.

The only discomfort I felt was some light cramps on my right side but they didn’t affect my pace.

After another slowish start (5:05) I again finished with a strong back half, though I could clearly feel the effect of only having a day off. The second half of the run left me feeling pretty tired, even as I worked to maintain my pace, but my consistency from 5 km to 10 km was probably the best ever — I only dropped my average pace by 7 seconds in that span (compared to 12 in the first half). I finished with an overall time of 54:03 — a full minute faster than Monday and an average of 5:23, my third best pace to date.

The titular tire (say that three times fast):

The top of the photo is the gravel of the kids play area, the bottom is the path I run on. I continue to be baffled at how things like this end up where they do. What is the story behind someone rolling a tire, complete with rim, into a public park? People are weird.

Chart (red denotes running in especially warm conditions, green denotes cramps during run):

km Sept 15 Sept 13 Sept 6 Sept 2
1 km 5:05 5:00 4:56 4:54
2 km 5:08 5:05 5:03 4:58
3 km 5:12 5:09 5:07 5:03
4 km 5:15 5:14 5:11 5:08
5 km 5:17 5:18 5:14 5:13
6 km 5:18 5:21 5:16 5:16
7 km 5:19 5:24 5:18 5:19
8 km 5:21 5:26 5:20 5:23
9 km 5:23 5:28 5:21 5:26
10 km 5:23 5:29 5:21 5:27