works of wanderlust

Month: October 2025

  • panoramic, three: oculus graffiti

    There is this strange place literally walking distance from my house. 

    The graffiti tunnel, more formally known as The Oculus.

    I say “walking distance” though it did take me over an hour to walk there and an hour to walk home—plus I spent time there taking photos, sketching, making a video and then stopping for lunch on my way home. Three and a half hours later I got home from a little suburban adventuring.

    About twenty years ago now they built a stretch of the city-circling ring road that swung round the southwest corner of the city. At about seven o’clock on the circle the road passes over a little feeder creek. Readers of this blog will be slightly familiar with that creek because we run through many of the trails that weave over and around and past that creek—but north of where the Oculus sits.

    Rather than just build another bridge, some industrious city planner seems to have decided that this would be the future site of some connecting trail linking the neighbourhoods on either side of the freeway, so they build a hulking concrete culvert with a beautiful paved footbridge traversing through the middle and atop the creek… and never connected it to anything. Never. Even twenty years later it’s this seemingly abandoned piece of pedestrian pathway that requires a map and some hiking boots to locate. 

    To be fair, they are doing some roadwork about 500m south of this point now and it is a strong possibility that the lack of connection will be formally remedied in the next couple years—or never—but if it’s going to happen it’s going to happen soon. Or, yeah, maybe never.

    Still. In those twenty years much has transpired under the freeway and much paint has been spent on decorating every reachable surface with graffiti. It is a sight. I mean, if they ever connect it, I’m sure they will repaint it as a stark and boring Industrial City White—but for now, it is a destination for adventure and a sight worthy of some stellar photographic efforts.

  • urban sketch, four

    I’m nearly three-quarters of the way through my October sketching challenge as I write this and I have yet to miss a day.

    Two things have emerged from that effort:

    First, I think my drawing has legitimately improved. Doing anything daily is inevitably going to contribute to the effort of general practice and growth, but there is always the risk of hitting a plateau and not realizing any noticeable gains. Self-perception is hard. Self-evaluation is even more difficult. But drawing every day feels a bit like running every day: you build on the gains from the day before and the vibe is never really given to a recovery phase where things stagnate or decay back to the starting state. Whatever that metaphor means for the effort of learning an artistic skill, it feels like it is meaningful here as a comparison.

    Second, me concern for lacking meaningful subject matter in the aesthetic wasteland that is the suburban clutter that is the place I live has ebbed into a kind of seeking the beauty of nature fighting against the cookie-cutter-ness of this world. Sure, the houses and windows and rooflines all start to look the same, but the trees are poking out around them in different ways and framing scenes with a kind of pleasing quality that I am getting better each day at noticing. I think that is important. I mean, I wrote earlier about my struggles with getting out of the photographer’s mindset and of moving away from thinking of my sketches as photos with an ink pen instead of pixels. I think I am starting to feel that vibe a little more strongly as I plonk myself down in unlikely places and frame a scene with sharp inked lines to give a sense of something beyond what is just there.

    My plan with this effort was to re-prime my sketching senses before we head off on a vacation where I think the world will be significantly more sketch-able than suburban prairie Canada. Japan is graced with interesting architecture and a kind of shinto-driven aesthetic that emboldens spaces with a kind of symmetry and beauty that one could spend a lifetime studying to attempt to understand. I have a couple weeks to sketch it, so I wanted to go in hot and ready as I have ever been to draw it—and draw from it.

  • japanese, part three

    I am approaching fifty, but attending an introductory language class kinda makes me feel like I’m in kindergarten again. We count in unison, ask each other our names and ages, play games identifying colours, and get stickers for good work. 

    I also have the least interesting origin story of the bunch, I’ve concluded. Everyone else seems to have a much better reason to be learning a challenging new language than my “I just decided to learn something new” one day reply. 

    One guy has family in Japan and he’s trying to learn how to talk to his grandmother. He already seems to know quite a lot and jumps to answer almost every question before my brain can even start to do the back and forth translation and get words to my mouth.

    Another guy is trying to immigrate there and wants some basic proficiency under his belt before he leaves. He spent the break yesterday getting help from the teaching assistant proofreading an email he needed to send about his immigration process or something—I only half listened from across the room.

    I was chatting with another dude after class and he had apparently grown up in Japan because his parents were working there when he was very young, and was fluent in Japanese at one point. There were recordings of himself speaking as a kid and he decided he wanted to be able to understand what his younger self was saying so… language classes.

    And me. Just interested. Lifelong learner, I reply. I dabble—I am just in a phase. Will I still be poking at this in a year? It would seem a bit of a waste, otherwise, right?

    In a month or so we’ll be in Japan. Immersed. 

    I’ve got a few basic phrases locked into my brain, but the daily drilling of new ones goes in fits and starts and I’m not as consistent as I need to be with the effort. Also, my brain is not as young and spongelike as it used to be. In one ear and out the other, is how the phrase goes.  I can say it twenty times in class and seem to have it just right, but then—out of context, perhaps—I can’t seem to latch back onto it again.

    Learning languages is not for everyone. It seems like some people just get it—or at least they are faking it way better than I am. I persevere, but am humbled by the effort.

  • weekend wrap, nineteen

    The more exciting of recent weekend was the Thanksgiving long weekend, last weekend, but of course by the time I remembered that I should sit down and recap it—or should I say, by the time I had the time to recap it, it was already getting on late Wednesday and I couldn’t bring myself to reflecting on a weekend that was already a few days passed. 

    This weekend…

    It started off with that empty nest vibe when The Kid took off to an overnighter party outside of town. There’s a whole story to why her and another girl went an hour out of the city to hang out with some rural peers in a small town east of here, but the short of it is that it left Karin and I to fend for ourselves. Our option was to go out for pizza and then crash on the couch to watch some teevee.

    I got up at a respectable time and launched myself over to Park Run. It was my eleventh partaking of the river valley five klick weekly race. That sounds good, but those eleven runs have taken place over three-plus years. I logged a twenty-eight minutes and change time, tho not my best was still better than I was expecting. I’ve always floated around that thirty minute mark as an objective standard, so breaking through that is a net positive day out.

    I burned off the bulk of the day doing some coding and sketching and playing some video games. The temperatures have dropped and I was still trying to warm up from running Park Run in two degrees and shorts.

    We made pizza for dinner. Yeah, two nights in a row with the pizza, but my homemade pizza is just a completely different category than the stuff we get at the local family pizzeria.

    We curled up on the couch again and watched a movie that evening. I’ve had this obscure science fiction film on my watchlist for the better part of fifteen years, but I’ve been struggling to find a copy even to buy. But then the other week it showed up on one of the services we pay for, so I flagged it and didn’t ask—just put it on and watched all of its weirdness. 

    Sunday morning I led the group on a ten klick taper run. Our race is next weekend, so after peaking at sixteen klicks (the race is a ten miler) last weekend, we eased off the gas and fed a bit of recovery into our training plan.

    My afternoon was a bunch of chores. We had to run over to Home Depot for some bits and bops, and then a bunch of new sheet music came in over the email for our rehearsal tonight so I got busy uploading that and then fixing a tiny bug I noticed in the code I had recently posted for managing all that sheet music and so the I blinked and it was late afternoon and time for making my sketch of the day.

    I ran into one of our long lost runners in the park. LS hasn’t been seen since May—at least not by any of the crew—and then there he was. So we stood there and chatted a bit and it turns out he’s been really sick and trying to sort through that. But he seems as much on the mend as is possible and I told him he really should stop by for coffee and assure people that he didn’t die and we’d all missed his funeral or something.

    Dinner and more video games capped off the evening, and I was reminded that the long weekend would have been much more exciting to write about, huh?

  • i, capitalist, part one

    I have all these little things floating around in my life that are probably worthy of entire articles. Heck, if I wrote some of this stuff down and started a blog about each of them I would probably get wicked traffic… you know, because the whole money, investing, business and buying shit is the type of stuff that ninety-nine percent of other guys besides me salivate over day after day. 

    It’s not that I don’t do any of it, it’s just that I’m not intellectually interested in it… the same way that I don’t really care about professional sports. The teams are companies. The games are repetitive. And unless you’re gambling on it or cheering for the playoffs it’s all one big circle… of whatever.

    That said, I do a lot of capitalism things and this is site is kinda like my journal and half the point of it is to drain the thinks out of my brain onto the page, so… yet another new series: i, capitalist, wherein I yammer about my business and my investing and my other stuff.

    Like, I’ve been getting all consumer capitalist drooling over a new computer. I’m writing this on a six year old iPad. It works. But kinda just barely. I’ve been working on a contract for my business and the business is definitely going to be investing in a new computer so that I can do business work on something besides my gaming desktop computer in the dark basement or an aging iPad. And crazily enough Apple is apparently announcing the next version of their MacBook Pro series. I’ve been doing a lot of coding and sound design and a bit of video work, not to mention writing millions of words (on a freaking iPad) and while it all kind of works with the equipment I have, those new M5 terabyte multicore drool-inducing laptops are haunting my dreams. I don’t yearn for much, but a slick new laptop is hard to resist… especially if it’s a business expense, huh?

    And speaking of business I’ve been trying to figure out what it all means to be the sole director of an incorporated business. About six months ago while I was job hunting I had a few opportunities to apply for some sweet government work. Long story short, I didn’t get it because they closed all the competitions because of a labour dispute or something, but in order to apply I had to do so as a corporation. It’s not exactly an epic origin story for the side of a beer can to write “8r4d Consulting Ltd was built on the owner’s dream of meeting the minimum requirements to apply for a part time government system analyst contract …and the rest is history!” But here I am. And I need to responsibly track all the money and the bits so that I can file taxes and be a good corporate owner guy. It’s a time. 

    And speaking of money and bits, I got suckered by an advert, I admit it, and I downloaded one of those day trading apps to my phone and plunked a bit of mad money into the stock market. As of this morning I’m up… but only by about eight cents at the moment. It was as high as 35 cents when I started writing this, but such is the rollercoaster of the financial markets. (It’s particularly fitting that as I was writing this at a Starbucks, my actual investment guy who works at the bank across the parking lot strolled by with his coffee. We’ve got cash in a managed fund portfolio through him that all kinda makes my little trading app look like I’m playing a video game. But heck, I’m almost fifty and I know virtually nothing about the stock market. I figured I should learn a little bit.) My thought was not to try and partake in some get rich quick fantasy, but rather to spend a little bit of cash to see how the system works. It’s unlikely I’ll lose my shirt gambling a few hundred bucks on some tech and energy shares, but I’m playing with the assumption of a sunk position anyhow… and the rule of not chasing bad investments with more. I am more of a gamer than a money guy, after all.