works of wanderlust

Month: August 2025

  • head over feets, six

    Unfortunately, my inclination to stay active is frustrated routinely by the effects of mental clutter that has me fomo’ing a blur of professional and personal obligations. That’s to say, I’d go out for a run were I not feeling like I was waiting for the phone to ring or an email to arrive or nudging myself to go out and make some art, darnitall. The net result is that if I don’t schedule a workout into my plan well in advance, the old gears grind to a halt and somehow I linger in the wings failing to do much of anything productive at all. 

    A subjective standstill.

    Somehow, despite these odds, I have been fitness’ing by…

    I showed up for Wednesday run club on the heels of a day-long storm that was just clearing as I set out to drive over to the store. Only two of us showed up, likely because of the rain, and we logged a humid and mostly-cool six klicks through the suburban asphalts. Puddles abounded. 

    I forgot to wear my watch when I went to the pool before lunch on Thursday. This may seem like a trivial thing, but it did incur me the duty of keeping mental track of my laps, and counting accurately while submerged is a trick like patting one’s head whilst rubbing one’s belly. It is an act of coordination. Nevertheless, accurate or not, I came up with a satisfactory number and the simultaneous conclusion that swimming at ten in the morning is not the best time for lane busyness. 

    I was undecided on a Thursday run so I declined to initiate a plan, but others intervened and we ended up meeting down south. Our planned six klick tour of the neighbourhood missed a critical turn so we followed the trail to the next available exit and wound and wend a route we have misguided ourselves to previously. It added an additional two klicks to the distance, which doesn’t sound like much but two unplanned klicks along a deceptively long suburban road takes literally forever to finish.

    I have been to the local Park Run a half dozen times give or take over the last couple years. My beef with the fun run is that it “is not a race” but there is a course, start, finish, timer and people sure act like they are racing. Oh, sure—the race is only ever with yourself, but the vibe makes me amp up my game for better or worse, and yet there I was Saturday at the start line again.

    As the maintenance shut down for the nearby pool looms just over a week away, I am making sure to continue to try to build a habit before that habit shifts to another facility further away. Tuesday by seven thirty in the morning I was swimming laps and pushing myself to go a bit further. All bets remain on the early swims as the best time, at least in the summer. We’ll see how it shapes up when school is back in and all the students are stuck in class.

  • weekend wrap, thirteen

    Oh, lucky. 

    Here we are on another Monday morning perched in front of a keyboard as summer wanes. The Kid was lamenting that her first post-grade-school summer flew by in a blur of summer job and a smattering of friend gatherings which seemed as tho it cheated her a little. Get used to it, I told her. That’s life. What’s two months anyhow? A couple of bill cycles and another season blows by.

    It wasn’t all a loss, though.

    I picked her up from said summer job on Friday afternoon and plunked her at one of those friend gatherings. Her high school pals have been successively hitting the eighteen-year old birthday milestone these past few months and I think she’s next.  We never really found out what goes on at these parties, but it all seems pretty tame. We idled on the couch post-dinner and a friend drove her home. Ah, Fridays as our responsibilities of parenting a kid dwindled into the final countdown towards her impending legal adulthood.

    Saturday, feeling a bit lazy and knowing that the local marathon weekend was going to disrupt Sunday running plans, I dragged my sorry butt to Park Run. You know Park Run, right? The Saturday morning 5k “not a race” but really a race free event in the river valley. It happens all over the world and in like a dozen locations in Canada. I have now done it eight times.

    The Kid and I took the dog for a loooong walk on Saturday afternoon, stopping briefly at the pop-up off-leash park one neighbourhood over. The dog could not have cared less about the off-leash, but a random chunk of field surrounded by a tall orange construction fence and which probably reeks of other dog’s markings was probably epic confusing.

    Later, it being our wedding anniversary and all, Karin and I went for a fancy dinner at a new Japanese-inspired fusion cuisine place, and then went home and watched another in our getting-ready-for-Japan Miyazaki movie marathon: Princess Mononoke. I’ve seen it a dozen times and it still rocks hard.

    Sunday I should have gone to cheer on the marathoners, but I slept in. That’s not a trivial statement: I never sleep in. Like, once a year, maybe. And yesterday was the day. I dunno why I was so tired.

    I spent a couple hours working on the computer. Literally. Lester had loaned me a graphics card which I had anticipated may work to get my VR setup working on my old desktop. He recently replaced that card and it was just sitting in the box. I spent too much time and the best I got to was it loading half way through Windows boot up and freezing the computer. Maybe after I finish this contract I’m working on I’ll risk blowing up the whole computer, but I had a minor panic and restored the old hardware. Computer 1: Brad 0.

    We set out early-afternoon for the Fringe Festival. We have a smattering of tix for the week, and two sets were for Sunday. We took in “Plays by Bots” (which we’ve seen annually for 3 years now) which is improv based on poorly written AI scripts, and then “Colins Back” which was a big, fun improv show with a local troupe hosting famed improvist Colin Mochrie for an hour of silly fun.

    Not a bad way to cap off the evening, which was otherwise mostly capped off by a quiet dinner back home and watching Japanese travel videos on Youtube until bedtime. 

  • book reviews: from the end of the world

    I realize it has been over a month since I posted a review, but it has not been for lack of reading. Oddly enough my biggest struggle has been focussing on one book for long enough to cross the last page finish line.

    When I first bought my new ebook reader I had downloaded a trio of books from the library and so I had no issues grinding through the limited selection. But over the last month or two a number of holds have reached the top of my library queue, I discovered an ebook repository for free classics, and my occasional browsing of the deals section on the kobo website has resulted in me accumulating titles faster than I can read them. Here I am with a different big stack of books, it seems.

    In other words, I’ve been dabbling and I now have something like a dozen books on the go.

    So while lately I have been reading a lot of things, I actually finished reading…

    Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

    There was a time not so long ago when it seemed like a sure bet that biotechnology was merely lagging behind advancements in digital computer tech and that eventually and inevitably it would catch up. That one day humanity would program critters and people and viruses in the same way that we now write apps and databases and AIs was taken as a given. Still quasi-working in a healthcare-adjacent role and daily-ish using my university degree in genetics when this book came out, I seem to remember reading it the first time and feeling as if I was just looking down a futurists timeline of potential society-killing options. Farfetched, maybe, but manipulation of genomes and biohacking as a corpo-dark-era tactic at the hands of lunatic geniuses was not off the table. I think twenty years of uninspired progress towards much of anything in this realm has not taken off the table the doom of society via bioterror, but it has thrown a bit of cold water on the idea that a lone genius prodding DNA in his private lab will unravel the fabric of life and twist it to his own evil designs. Atwood, as usual, paints a stark vision in this the first of the MaddAddam trilogy which I decided to re-read before I plunged into books two and three soon. In a world of AI erosions of our own real society from the bottom up, breaking the world through exponentially accelerating evasion of laws and decency and good taste, it was an interesting voyage back into the simpler times of dystopian fictions that just wanted to kill us outright rather than simply making us obsolete and angry. 

    Stupid TV, Be More Funny by Alan Siegel

    I will admit: my guilty pleasure these last few years has been rewatching old episodes of The Simpsons along with a fan-tastic weekly show called the Talking Simpsons podcast. The now thirty-six year old cartoon show has been a running theme in my life these past decades, and revisiting the classic eps has been a breath of nostalgia for me in these weird times. And as pedantic as it can sometimes get, diving down the rabbit hole of production minutia and listening to random commentary about the history of television from decades past definitely beats the modern news. The author of this book was a guest on the aforementioned podcast, hawking his book obviously as he chatted along with the retro-nostalgia conversation, and I just happened to be pondering books for my reading list. Of course, with so much scope to cover even a book a hundred times as long could likely still not do the subject matter justice and Siegel chooses to focus on a collection of early production obstacles and paint a story of the little-show-that-could breaking through the norms of a media landscape that was stagnating with wholesome sitcom predictability. As a devotee of the television nostalgia podcast genre I can’t say there were more than a few nuggets of knowledge that I had not stumbled across before, but the book does frame them up and contextualize the story against the backdrop of cultural and political shifts going on at the time. It would definitely make a great entry point into a vast field of knowledge, and a worthwhile read even for us crusty old nerds who are already neck deep in the lore of an aging media form.

    Endymion by Dan Simmons

    It would be fair for anyone to assume that the third book of a four book saga could be the weakest of the bunch, but somehow that is not the case with this one, the third volume of Simmons Hyperion Cantos. We pick up into the story over two hundred years after the end of the last book which left in a bit of a hanging what-happens-next scenario us as the civilization humanity had built across the stars on the shaky foundations of their AI creations was entering a collapse and fizzling into a new dark age. And once again the style does an about face and we are granted a new (doomed) narrator and new narrative style. Two hundred years is a lot of catching up to do for any story, particularly when the seeds were planted for a daunting religious oligarchy to grab power in the void of the civil collapse, and our narrator strings us through a story of a lone child, the descendent of two of the characters we met in the previous two books, who is facing down insurmountable odds to, we presume, take on the empire. The story is a river tale. That’s trope, I think. The main cast finds itself moving down a river on a raft towards a vague destination and the challenges they face are those of not just the humans chasing them but the natural obstacles they encounter along the way. I can’t think of more than a couple of stories that use this structure, but it definitely feels like a trope… and that’s okay because the science fiction setting and the juxtaposition of natural obstacles and the seeming unlimited power of a fully armed and super-powered military apparatus chasing our protagonists while they float down an interstellar river on a flimsy wooden raft is a kind of magic that keeps one turning pages. 

  • pool blues

    Fate has kicked me in the gut once again.

    At the risk of evoking a critical level of pity and having that backfire at me in the second paragraph of this essay, I’m going to mention a sad little easily-solved problem that unfortunately knocked me low again this week: they are closing the pool where I’ve been swimming for “three months of critical maintenance.”

    “They aren’t doing it to you personally!” My wife rolled her eyes at me when I showed her the notice.

    “Maybe not, but the universe seems to have it in for me lately.” I replied.

    I’ve been a swimmer for years, but after a year-long hiatus I broke down and spent money on an annual pass to the local pool with the intention of getting back into my routine. I just bought the pass three weeks ago. According to the email, in a mere week’s time the pool will be closing for three whole months. The next nearest pool is a twenty minute drive from my house, and the activation energy that gets me from prone on the couch to jumping into a swim lane with my goggles strapped over my face does not seem strong enough to include a commute. One more barrier, my brain is telling me. One more kick in the gut by my friend fate. 

    Sigh. 

    I’m whining. I know that. But damned if the universe doesn’t seem like it’s decided to pick on me personally as of late. Objectively speaking millions of people might have it orders of magnitude worse, but personal struggle is both subjective and relative isn’t it?

    I was told that when I set out to make a life change, to upend everything I had built over the years in my career—in search of something more interesting, more satisfying, more purposeful—that by the end of it I would have experienced a range of emotions from high to low, buffeted by self-doubt, refined in crystal clarity, and everything in between all at once. I shrugged off the notion, not because I didn’t believe the prediction but because I figured I could roll with it, whatever came my way, all of it. 

    A voyage across an ocean without a map is an apt metaphor. Each day at sea is a little different—maybe closer to shore, maybe not. A storm may roil one day or the sun may beat down on another. Little things make all the difference in the world, and having my swimming pool closed for a few months felt like a man adrift at sea who had just watched his favourite hat fly into the yonder on a gust of wind. No the wind didn’t do it to him personally, but it is tough not to feel that way—for a little bit. 

  • head over feets, five

    Early August has been a mixed bag for me. I’d like to blame the weather—hot as it has been—but there are other factors and life is just futzing along being adversarial to my side-goals.

    Either way, I managed to get out and do a bit of activity, like:

    I had this idea that now that I’ve been swimming a few times I would see how the different times of day compare for lane availability. In that spirit I found myself checking into the wristband station around 1pm and was standing on the pool’s edge by about quarter after perplexed by the number of swimmers mid-day on a weekday. It’s summer, I suppose. I squeezed myself into the crowd and logged about five hundred meters as much for the refreshing cool of the pool in the summer heat as for the exercise.

    I joined run club the next day and despite the borderline too-hot heat (it was 29C in the shade!) we set out on a six klick loop. I am not a fan of hot weather running, but I managed to finish off the distance if a little slowly. Kim, on the other hand, had a bit of a reaction to the conditions exacerbated by the temperature and had to call an ambulance.

    The next night we tried another run of similar distance down along the river, but the weather had cooled considerably and it had started to rain so barely twenty-four hours later a five klick run was logged even though our shoes were waterlogged.

    I don’t usually count my walks, nor even really log them these days, but Friday I set out for a stroll and (having walked that route before so I know the distances) put six klicks on my treads in the light drizzle.

    The local marathon is next weekend so a few people are tapering. I’m not sure many in our group are seriously running tho. We’ve got a couple going out for fun and a couple more pacers—which is serious but usually one paces at a comfortable time because you are out there helping other people run it. All that is to say we did a simple 8k run on Sunday because it’s that time of year and no one was up for anything crazy long.

    My swimming honeymoon is over and what with our little vacation out to BC I lost my momentum. I have been trying to get back into a routine and also trying other time slots. Monday even was not it. I logged 750m in lane swimming around 830pm and the lane pool was packed. I think I’d better stick to mornings.