works of wanderlust

Month: July 2025

  • head over feets, one

    I used to write a whole blog about running and fitness. And then? Well. It was one of the only things that was lost that I truly cared about in the hack that took down my little private server—back a couple years ago. Ten years of rambling journals about races and training and side-fitness projects. It was not something that anyone but I read, but I did go back and peruse it on occasion.

    I miss that, and it’s hard to just start over from scratch with something that big.

    But…

    Starting in July I’ve decided to get back into the fitness groove. I haven’t fallen completely off the truck, but I haven’t ben focused. And that is in itself a multidimesional effort of motivation, accountability and grit. To that end, I am going to do what I always do when I start getting serious about my personal fitness, and write about it. But no stand-alone website for now: the format that is really working for me these days is the quippy list of short-form reflections, tucked away in the files of this blog.

    That said, so far this month I have:

    Logged a Canada Day run with the crew.  We used to more frequently do this thing where on any stat holiday (usually Mondays) we would meet at the local breakfast joint, trot out a five klick run, and then go for a long breakfast. July first is not only a stat holiday but kind of a second mid-year new years resolution day, so a good day to start off on the right foot, even if it ended with a side of bacon.

    A few days later I logged a solo seven klick run in the rain. For a dozen reasons no one else showed for runday sunday, and those that did ran inside (for injuries reasons) or on their own outside (for pace reasons) so I went off by myself into the drizzly neighbourhood and got a short lap done.. and done.  It was nothing particularly special, but it would have been just as easy to go for coffee and skip the run when no one is there to breath down your neck about it. Grit.

    Yesterday I cracked and bought a pass to the rec centre. Back when I worked for the municipal government, the half-price annual pass was a deal and then some. Now, still paying a slightly discounted rate (‘cause Karin gets a deal through work after all) was a slightly tougher pill to swallow. But excuses be damned and effective last evening I have a year of access to the pool and the gym.  I celebrated with a sixteen klick ride on the stationary bike.

    This morning I was feeling ambitious, new pass in hand, but cautious. I haven’t swam laps in over two years. Seriously, I looked it up. March 2023 was my last time in a pool. I used to be damn near religious about it and even did a triathlon a few years ago.  So I suited up at quarter after seven with the ranks of all the senior swimmers and did a ten lap re-introduction to a sport I once moderately rocked. First time back in two years I didn’t want to push it. Ten laps was enough to feel it, but not enough to burn me out for another two years. I’ll be back soon enough for a little longer next time.

    In the meantime, I went right back to one of my old fitness hacks: the trusty spreadsheet. Strava and those other apps are all great for social cred and light accountability in the fitness jam, but nothing beats a good old fashioned fitness ledger to see the numbers laid out on a grid.  That, and I’m still in a bit of a value mindset having just dropped a lot of money on an annual pass and I want to see if it is worth it—though I suppose “worth it” is a subjective thing and getting out and moving is a tough thing to quantify. For the next year I’ll play fitness accountant in my spreadsheet, tho, and see how it all adds up.

    Now? Off to buy some batteries for the scale. Eep!

  • weekend wrap, nine

    Somehow I missed a couple weeks in a row of weekend wraps, which is particularly flustering because one of those weekends was a long weekend, and the Canada Day long weekend to boot. I blame the distraction on that my weekend actually ended on Wednesday, so my headspace was a little out of sync with reality.

    Excuses, excuses.

    So, all that is to say that while I didn’t give updates on the various outings and barbecues and chores that were accomplished, I’m sure you’ll get the sense that a couple busy weeks transpired and what we were left with was our first full weekend in July …and it was kinda mellow.

    This weekend we…

    Reunioned. The Kid has been housesitting and so it was a big deal that we picked her up after work on Friday and went out for vermicelli bowls for dinner. A week out of the house and it already kinda feels like she moved out, even though by this time next week she’ll be back to being underfoot and in my kitchen making a mess again.

    I was tired, and the air had just enough of a hint of firesmoke that I shut myself up in the house and spent my Friday evening reading. Very exciting, huh?

    Saturday was by far more eventful. We were out of the house by eigh-thirty in the morning and scooted down to the Italian market to pick up our lunch in the form of a big ole spicy italian sandwich.

    Then we drove east. I will now, likely to the objection of the dozens of people who live there but who will never read this, decribe the vague are east of the city as the middle of the middle of nowhere. Yes, there are a scattering of smallish towns and barely cities and other rural things to see dotted across the prairies, but essentially there is very little between here and Saskatoon six hours drive down the arrow-straight highway.  We went two hours east, and then north for a bit, and found ourselves in the middle of the middle of the middle of nowhere where on the one hundred and fifteen year old remains of the family farm we had a little family reunion. The dog was not amused.

    We were back on the road home and back into cell service range again by about seven that evening and home by nine, after which there was not much to do besides chill for a bit and then go to bed.

    I woke to rain. Pouring rain. And a determination of a sort to get in a run come hell or high water, the latter seeming a real possibility. I showed up for run club and ended up plodding out a not quite seven klick run drenched and solo.

    I stayed to for coffee and to warm up after.

    Karin and I did the grocery shopping and then I parked myself in the basement as the rain continued to watch some Netflicks before working myself up to start prepping dinner.

    In the meantime, Karin went to pick up the Kid because they had show tix for downtown on Sunday evening and the Kid had not brought any going out clothes to her housesitting gig. The pair of them ate then disappeared for the evening and I had the house to myself to practice my Japanese and my music, in roughly that order. The dog continued to be unamused.

  • merrily along, one

    I routinely find that I have a hundred little often-good things that I want to post about but (a) I don’t want to post a whole article about and yet (b) I don’t want to lose them in this rambling, barely-read record of our little life here which can so easily drift into complaining or rambling.

    With world events swirling in such frustrating ways it really is easy to get lost in the negativity and yet a piece of me is realizing with crystal clarity that the hopelessness being drilled into us day after day by the media, by the fascists, and by the universe itself is a feature (for them) not an accidental byproduct.  

    “How dare we celebrate the positives while they’re busy burning down the world?” I have been told in maybe not so literal a phrase… but the meaning has always been the same: despair you fool, and now pay us our due.

    So. I want to start a new ‘series’ on this site where I just reflect on some good things that have been going on in our lives.

    Like.

    The Kid got a summer job. I won’t tell you where or necessarily what she is doing, but she is currently getting paid a decent union wage to spend her summer outside with kids and helping the community. The only days I won’t be jealous is when the mosquitos finally come out.

    One of my longer-serving running friends is getting married today. It’s one of those tiny, family only weddings, but we took him for drinks last week and sometime today, atop a streetcar crossing the river he’ll get hitched to his long-time girlfriend, soon-to-be wife. 

    I’ve been reading more. You may have noticed from the review-count on this site, but I’ve read more in the last three months than I have in the last three years, it seems, and losing my patience with the written word while I was trying to write more was a point of distress for me lately. Digging into words as a consumer is a huge positive shift for me.

    Oh, and I finally fixed our television box last night. Two hours it took to figure out that the problem we’ve been having for months and months, the set top box resetting and inexplicable technical fails was in fact a borked power brick. The don’t tell you this but they basically put little computers inside those little power blocks now and become another point of failure. The Wife gets to watch her shows in peace now.

    The dates are secret for obvious reasons, but we booked our trip to Japan later this year. That’s about all I have to share on that for now, except to say that we have flights and hotels scheduled to spend over two weeks in Asia later this year with plans to go to Tokyo Disney, the Ghibli park, and eat a lot of tasty Japanese food. Sorry, we’ll do Korea next time.

    Lately, I’ve been making music. I mean, playing a lot and learning a lot and loving sound for the raw enjoyment of it in my own ears with no expectation of sharing it beyond headphones or my living room walls. The act of learning and honing enough skill on the piano has allowed me to flex musically beyond tinking keys and the exploration of synth sounds is a deep art form.

    Of course, finally, I can’t neglect to tell you that I get free bread all summer. Well, kinda. I stumbled on a (potentially in error) crazy deal at the grocery store where I traded in some of my loyalty points for three bags of bread flour. I think there was likely a zero missing on the redemption value, but everyone gets a break once in a while and me, I have nearly twenty kilos of bread flour thanks to my acute mathing skills in the grocery aisle. 

    See? Good stuff all around.

  • media reviews: a lack of independence

    All work and no play make Brad a dull guy.

    I’ve been working on real projects, too, but I still find a lot of time to dabble in entertaining myself with no hidden agenda. This past month I’ve been stoking the seeds of rebellion and growing virtual canola, but not necessarily in that order.

    I’ve been enjoying…

    gaming: farming simulator 2025

    There are really only two types of games that exist. I mean, when you sit down and think about it—and believe me, I’ve done my share since trying to build a video game from scratch this year—but those two types of games fall basically into one of two core game mechanics: create chaos or create order. The create chaos games are simple: blow stuff up, fight, battle, knock down a wall of bricks with a little ball and on and on. The creating order games are pretty obvious, too: craft stuff, build structures, sort objects, organize those objects into neat rows. We could probably argue about the nuance of all things and that sometimes creating chaos is leading to order or vice versa, but hey, I’m trying to keep this simple. And all that said, what I can’t exactly tell you is when the first “farming” game came out because farming games (unlike this game I have been playing) are not necessarily about literally running farm.  Farming games are generally about creating order: taking a wild space and converting it into a resource-generating source.  Farming games can, yes, and often do replicate vegetable farming from reality, but too sometimes you are farming gold, or in-game energy, or dinosaur eggs, player experience points or maybe just maguffin-like doo-dahs that progress the game play, and many farming-type games use the abtraction of farming as a mechanic to create a need in the game to progress gameplay by forcing a labour-like management system of creating order out of the seeming nothingness of the game world. But Farming Simulator is literally what it says. It’s buying tractors, harvesting crops, and managing animals, all in a massive virtual space that looks like a slice of some agricultural landscape pulled from a film trope. And I’d be damned if I denied that driving a virtual tractor around gravel roads to pick up a load of wheat isn’t the coziest way to lose oneself in a few hours of meaningless order-creating video gaming. The 2025 version is probably my fourth or fifth official stab (not counting the mobile versions on my phone) at digging into this game, and really only the second one that stuck. The game is of such complexity that it is easy to get lost and eventually bored in the first layer—driving a tractor until you run out of things to tractor on—and just miss all the nuance offered at deeper levels. A thousand other reviews have already talked about the graphics and the mod base and the mechanics of the engine, so I will simply say that what is often overlooked—and probably what drives some suburban computer nerd to play games like this—is a kind of latent urgency in the genes of humanity that impels us to grow things, harvest food, and tame the land: it is like a survival instinct, almost, fulfilled by the simulator pretending to do work that is the foundation of human societies. Plus, who doesn’t like to drive a green tractor through the countryside?

    streaming: andor, season two

    There has been a meme floating around online that Andor has ruined Star Wars because it was just that good. And, frankly…I almost agree. The jibe goes something like this: watch Andor, then go back and watch the very first Star Wars film again, A New Hope. At the end when Luke Skywalker and Han Solo are getting kudos before the end credits roll, put yourself in the shoes of just one of those guys standing in the crowd some of whom were (now, according to canon) probably friends and at least coworkers with the characters of the new mini series. They had fought together, suffered together, built a rebellion through personal sacrifice for years…  and then one day some farm kid and a space trucker show up, luck out in a single battle and they get a parade, medals and literally all the glory. Oh, Luke, wipe that shit eating grin off your face. Don’t you understand the game you just stumbled into? Didn’t you watch Andor on Disney+ for fs sake? All joking aside, what makes this show so good and what I think a lot of people who like this series so much (but maybe aren’t fully able to articulate about it) see in it’s story is simple: real stakes. The whole point of the story arc that leads from the first scenes of Andor to the end of the Rogue One movie is that literally none of these people make it. The whole story is based on what is almost a throwaway line from that famous opening crawl of the original movie, that some rebel spies stole the plans for the death star, the plans that become the key the story in that same first film.  Some clever person said, hey, let’s tell that story because those guys did the real hero work and probably lost their lives to do it: stakes. Andor ignores the mysticism of the force and assumes that the regular suite of bad guys are busy somewhere else doing their bad guy shit and that the real fight is happening out of sight, in dark corners and that people who have been drawn into it because they are people who make good choices while still doing things objectively less good, are giving up everything to help everyone else for change they will never live to see: stakes. There can’t be a season three because what happens next is all the movies you love already and all these characters did that for the galaxy and the plot: stakes. Weight, purpose, and stakes. I haven’t had much good to say about Star Wars for a while, but if you are any kind of fan at all you need to watch Andor. 

  • book reviews: from a heat wave

    There is never a bad excuse to read, but hunkered in the cool basement to avoid the hot weather nursing a cold Coke and speed running some fanciful fiction is better than many. 

    I won’t tell you that there is either rhyme or reason to my recent picks besides that I’m on a bit of a first in, first out ebooks from the digital discount bin on the Kobo site or whatever pops up on my library holds list first. For example, I assume the original Jurassic Park book was on sale for a buck ninety nine a couple weeks ago because there is a new (eighth!?) movie in the franchise due in theatres imminently. The same reason that I bought a new Jurassic World game on Steam for less than a cup of coffee this past weekend. I’m just riding the shockwave of the cultural vibe, it seems. And I’m okay with that, too.

    These last couple weeks I’ve read:

    Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

    I’d be lying if I said my first read of this book—way back in the early nineties—did not influence my choice of post-secondary education. I remember that our high school librarian who knew that our little group of nerd kids were ravenous readers showed up at the side of the table where we were playing cards one lunch and held out a copy of the book with its stark white and black dinosaur bones cover to the group and asked who wanted to be the first to read it. I accepted. The novel and subsequent movie sparked a kind of renaissance in the popularization of genetic engineering akin to a 90s version of the AI goldrush of 2025: everyone wanted a piece and every piece of media—magazines, television, and more—were telling kids that biology was the career of the future. A year or so later, having devoured the novel and the concept, I was enrolled in a science degree program and the rest is a sad trombone of personal history. I can’t recall having read the book since high school, but Jurassic Park is one of those things like Star Wars—there’s been so many sequels and video games and theme park rides transect my life that, first, it was hard to recall if the novel had been one of those and, second, the source material was almost underwhelming with respect to both the official and head canon that has emerged and swirled through the decades in between. The novel is a romp. And by far lighter and less dense than I remembered, like a Grisham novel with science-ish concepts. And that’s fine. Though reflecting on the direction this book sent my life spinning felt a bit like I’d been chased along the way by a Tyrannosaurus Rex to only find out later it was little more than film prop.

    Vacationland by John Hodgman

    Over a decade ago we went on a vacation cruise in the Caribbean. The Kid was young. We were young, too, but kind of in that middle demographic of not young enough to be cool but not old enough to be completely out of touch. I had been listening to a podcast by John Hodgman (about a week before we left for Florida departure) in which he was talking about suspiciously similar cruise he was about to embark as well. Sherlock I am not, but I nonetheless figured out that the cruise itinerary on which we were coincidentally booked was simultaneously hosting the JoCo Cruise, a fan convention at sea for which at least half or more of the passengers were attending. We were not attending. We were like vacationers who show up for a quiet vacation in middle of comiccon. We spent our weekend spotting C-list celebrities from our deck chairs and watching convention-goers enjoying a completely different week than the few hundred rest of us were having on a much more typical vacation. Yet, (tho I knew he was aboard) I had not spotted Mr. Hodgman. Was he actually on this boat? Was he hiding from Wil Wheaton? Had he tumbled overboard, martini in hand, and been lost at sea? The second-last night of the cruise the convention was hosting a big party on the Lido deck but, as they were setting up, us normies were still allowed up there and so the fam and I went for a soak in the hot tub before we got evicted to the buffet. It was then, sitting there in a whirlpool in my swim trunks, drinking a cocktail when I happened to look up. There standing on the deck at parade rest in bare feet and a tuxedo was the guy himself. Just standing there. Sound-checking or vibing or just being him weird self. Core memory. My Kid, aged six, did not care at all. But if you enjoy rambling anecdotal vacation stories like this, stories that touch on odd confluences of priviledge and ecclectic knowledge, Mr. Hodgman’s book may be right up your alley.

    I’m Starting to Worry About this Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin

    My familiarity with the writings of Mr Pargin extends back to a fondness for the various essays and comedic observations he infrequently published pre-pandemic, and that twist through my complex relationship with the publication Cracked.  When a new article or guest podcast appearance bylined with his name on it I could always tell I would need to pay slighty more rigorous attention to the plot and his wry, pulse-on-the-zeitgeist observations which so parelleled a lot of familiar vibes I couldn’t always articulate on my own. There is, of course, always a danger in looking to a single source of understanding of anything, particularly in this vastly connected reality we share, but I will admit I felt a kind of abstract, quasi-celebrity kinship to this guy with whom I shared a kind of parallel upbringing and creative motiviation. That said, his resulted in a more successful (rightfully earned) outcome, and all of this background is relevant to the tone and substance of this latest of his novels, a standalone adventure-ish story that could easily be subtitled ”Or, why people on the internet are all nuts, you shouldn’t trust a word you read, and first thing’s first: take a deep breath and calm the fuck down!” Pargin has an acute sense of the moment in which we all live, and I suspect this is largely because he has spent enough mental processing cycles pondering the outrage engines and content factories to be a successful participant in the same if for no other or better reason than to promote his writing. That can’t help but leave a few scars on the soul of any author that surface in clever or disturbing ways through a thrillride of a novel that was hard to put down once I started reading.