Taxi drivers have a fairly bad reputation as drivers.
This post is going to add to that reputation.
This taxi is parked at the Esso station at the corner of Burrard and Davie, across the street from where I was waiting to catch the bus. A few minutes prior to taking this picture, I watched as the taxi driver attempted to defy physics by having his cab occupy the same space as an articulated bus (he was trying to cut ahead of the bus to get into the gas station). This led to the honking of horns and crunching of bumpers as the two vehicles verified the laws of physics still do in fact apply.
Seeing drivers do foolish things is pretty typical. You know the old joke that yellow means drive faster? Now it seems yellow is the new green and red is the new yellow. The mentality appears to be ‘if you don’t actually cause an accident, it’s okay!’
I’ve noticed more cyclists on the sidewalks lately. Given the typical Vancouver driver, I can’t entirely blame them for avoiding the roads. It’s unfortunate that many cyclists also kind of suck. Oh well. At least pedestrians can’t run each other over. Yet.
The new adult store down the way apparently no longer needs a ‘chemist’ as the CHEMIST NEEDED sign is now sitting upside down at the bottom of the window it’s in. Or maybe that’s part of the testing the potential chemist needs to go through, to be able to read upside down text.
On one of the store’s side windows, a new sign has appeared (click to see the full-size version):
Now, I have no problem with some people being size-enabled. As Morrissey once wrote, some girls are bigger than others, some girls’ mothers are bigger than other girls’ mothers but here the shop owner is not only offering large lingerie but extra large. It reminds me of that story about It’s a Small World at Disneyland being closed for months so they could make the canals deeper. This was needed because the weight of passengers over the years had increased enough that the boats would occasionally scrape bottom and get stuck. One can only imagine the madness that would ensue as the boatload of people was forced to endure that song for an extended period of time while waiting for help to arrive. (If you follow the link, you can see Disney denied the changes were made due to passengers getting bigger, to which I offer ‘fat chance’.)
The other sign in the window shows how out of touch I am with the latest in adult toys and things of that nature. The Stallion spray is labeled a ‘male genital desensitizer’. I am unsure why a guy would want to desensitize that particular area of his anatomy. ‘I can’t stand the pleasure anymore! Make it stop!’ As always, I fallback on my standard:
In a taste of things to come, today’s run was in light rain, with the temperature a cool-for-the-season 12ºC. Despite the inclement weather and it being a stat holiday a fair number of people were at the park, either jogging or walking their accursed dogs.
My body definitely seems to prefer cooler days when it comes to running. I had another good start (4:56) but slumped surprisingly in the 2nd km (5:03 — still a decent time). I had an excellent and very consistent second half, however, and finished with my second best time ever — 5:21, only one second off my fastest run back on February 26th.
Unlike many recent runs, there were no cramps or other bits of discomfort to slow me down. My left leg seems to be holding up fine. I think I got a bit of a mental boost from the other runners, as they were all jogging at a much more casual pace than me. I lapped several of them and you can’t help but feel a little fast when you do that, even if they’re not exactly tearing up the place themselves.
Chart (red denotes running in especially warm conditions, green denotes cramps during run):
Recently I decided to create a new episode of Angry Carrot, the mad vegetable who wants to take over the world for some reason. I posted a couple of teaser panels to the Martian Cartel forum and reproduce them here.
Last September I began using the Nike+ and my iPod nano to track my runs. Since then it’s recorded 634 km. Not bad. It would be more if I hadn’t sat out nine weeks with injuries to both of my legs (at different times). Still, it’s a decent amount of running considering the last I did was back in high school 28 years ago.
Today I opted for a morning run as a change of pace. Under a sunny sky with little wind I started out with the temperature at 12ºC. It climbed to 16ºC by the time I finished, though I don’t think it played a big factor in my effort.
I had a very good start — the first two km both came in under five minutes but the second half was marred by some cramps and gas (sorry to those running behind me! :P) bringing my overall time down lower than I would have liked. Still, I finished with a pace of 5:27/km and an overall time of 54:38, which is an improvement from the last run. My left leg is still feeling a bit tender but holding up okay for now.
I was a bit surprised both before and after my last run and I want to note both surprises here for future reference. I will be making reference to the past three runs, with the most recent being #3, etc. After #1, I felt fine. A few days later my left leg felt a bit sore. Now, if I hurt myself when running it never surfaces later — I feel it during the run and very much so immediately after. That this didn’t happen made me wonder if there was another cause. I realized I had developed a bad habit of using the sub-woofer under my computer desk as a makeshift foot stool. The problem is it is quite small and my legs were very stretched out. I probably hyper-extended the left leg a bit in the process. I’ve seen conditioned myself to not use the sub-woofer for anything but playing bass! Run #2 came a week later, as I wanted to give the left leg a bit of a rest. The surprise here came the next day when my thighs were actually sore (in that “hey, these muscles haven’t been used in awhile” kind of way). That seemed odd, but it’s a good reason to get off my butt and get back to running more often.
Chart (red denotes running in especially warm conditions, green denotes cramps during run):
A late afternoon run today as temperatures are cooler now. Under hazy cloud, intermittent sun and 17ºC, I ran with the wind, against the wind and at one point mildly cursing the wind.
That one point was when the wind actually blew my cap right off my head. I snatched it out of the air with ninja-like reflexes and put it back on without breaking my stride. That was probably the highlight of my run. The other was the opening km, one of my fastest yet at 4:54/km — and that was without really trying at it. Such things encourage me.
It had been a week since my last run because my left shin had been feeling a bit tender and I wanted to give it a little time. While I could feel it today it didn’t hurt, had no impact on my time and felt fine afterward. A much larger impact was mid-run when I first got a cramp in my lower abdomen and then some minutes later another in my chest. These always have the same effect — they restrict how much air you can inhale and that inevitably slows me down. The averages during this part of the run, with 4 seconds between km, demonstrates the effect vividly.
My iPod cable proved to be vexing. I could not get it to stay tucked in my left pocket like normal and eventually just gave up, letting it swing all over, pretending it wasn’t really distracting me. I think I’ll finally use a velcro strip to cinch it up to the right length for the next run.
Chart (red denotes running in especially warm conditions, green denotes cramps during run):
On Saturday night around 8:30 or so the power went out. A check of the neighborhood showed the lights were on two blocks east, on the other side of Knight, but were out as far west as I could see. I later learned that the outage extended to Cambie Street. The power doesn’t go out often here so it’s always a novel experience. It took a couple of hours to be restored and in the meantime I skulked the darkened streets with a flashlight, talked to a couple of young women at Kingsway and Inverness who had never experienced a blackout (but were soothing their nerves with some glasses of red wine), then sat in the candlelight on the deck with the others until the lights came back on. It was slightly annoying to be so close to the next grid that stood unaffected. Oddly, all of the traffic lights on Knight appear to be on the unaffected grid save for the ones at the major intersection of Knight and Kingsway. Much horn-honking ensued there as people tried to figure out how to navigate without having red lights to peel through.
Two days later, shortly after 10 a.m. the power went out again. Annoying, but it was restored in about an hour this time. The power then went out a third time just past 6 p.m. It was restored within 15 or 20 minutes but still, whoever is responsible, stop pulling the plug already! The CBC News website reports that there was actually a fourth outage in a nearby area and the others are blamed on ‘problems’ at an electrical substation. Odder still is usually you think of these things happening in the summer when the grid gets overloaded due to air conditioners and so on but the weather the past few days has been seasonal, not really hot at all.
Am I the only one who starts thinking of end-of-the-world scenarios when the power goes out? There’s something primal about being a big city plunged into utter darkness that gets the mind going. When the aliens arrive, they’ll EMP-and-awe us, no doubt. One minute you’ll be watching Leno, next minute you’ll be slaves of Xantor and the Zerbinians.
The forecast for today was calling for partly cloudy with a high around 20, so I figured I would run in the late afternoon instead of my usual early evening time. As it turned out, the clouds were all around the edges of the city with blue sky directly overhead. The sun blazed down on me the entire run. It was 21ºC in the shade when I headed out so probably a degree or two warmer in the sun and there was a fair breeze blowing.
My CTN (Cap Tug Number) was two.
On the bright (ho ho) side, my start was thew fastest in months, with the first km coming in just under the 5-minute mark at 4:59. The second km was also brisk. In fact, the fast start meant that I was pretty much on pace with my previous run up to the halfway mark, but by then the relentless sun, shining on me like a spotlight, began to take its toll and my pace flagged noticeably. By the last few km I was feeling baked (and not in the noted BC way) — my whole body had this weird and unpleasant swimmy feeling, my mouth was completely dry, including the tongue. Using a dry tongue to lick dry lips provides about as much relief as you’d expect. As a result, I staggered to the end 10 seconds off my previous pace.
I’ll be sticking to early evenings on sunny days from here on out.
The park was fairly quiet for a Sunday afternoon, though more people began filtering in toward the latter part of my run. One person had a black wiener dog and it made me think, that’s got to be the worst kind of dog to be when it’s hot. You’re covered in black fur, so you get maximum sun absorption and your body is so low to the ground you get bonus heat emanation from that when it’s hot out. A black wiener dog walking over a midday parking lot must feel like the proverbial hot dog. Fortunately this and the few other dogs present did not knock me down. I’m not paranoid about this happening again but I do maintain an extra level of vigilance now that it has happened.
I saw someone use the port-o-potty early in the run and on the next lap I could smell it — and for every lap thereafter. The good news is what I was smelling were the chemicals and not what the chemicals were for. I suppose y design, they don’t actually smell that bad. Still, port-o-potty odor is not on my list of neat things to smell when jogging.
Chart (red denotes running in especially warm conditions, green denotes cramps during run):
