works of wanderlust

head over feets, eleven

The shoulder season has arrived in earnest. I don’t know if it will stick or if we’ll get a reprieve of warmish weather for the end of the month. Part of me would like it to be around 10C for my race at the end of October, but that might be wishful thinking. Whatever mother nature decides, she has shed her autumn coat and the leaves are now mostly rotting on the ground for the season. The autumn colours are gone once again.

The last couple weeks I continued my training, in earnest…

There was a stat holiday in the middle of the week on the last day of September and so we went for a long walk in the dog park on a Tuesday afternoon. I don’t usually make note of my walks here, else they might fill up every other entry being so numerous, but it is notable because the holiday seemed to have thrown off the rhythm of the week and delayed a couple other fitness activities.

Thursday I finally made my way back to a pool. As expected the temporary closure of the local pool has turned a quick swim outing into a cross-city adventure requiring planning and navigating rush hour traffic. My goal is to get into the water at least once per week, and when my local pool opens again in December I’ll try and work that back up to a triple. I logged 800 m and they started closing the lanes so I called it.

Met the guys—RM and LG—for an autumn run through Mill Creek later that same evening. The weather is still holding. Sometimes the fall rolls through and gone in an afternoon, but we’re coming up on a week. I won’t complain and I’ll get out as often as I can in this vibe. We did a fast 6k and felt it.

Another long walk filled my Friday. I hopped the bus to the Uni and started off on foot with naught but a sketchbook in hand. Over the course of about four hours of strolling through campus, the river valley, the legislature grounds and downtown I drew four pictures and logged about fifteen klicks on foot.

Sunday we met for two different runs. We were due to log fifteen klicks on our training plan, but also, we had signed up for a 5k “fun run” called Run for the Cure, a breast cancer awareness and fundraising event. So we met about an hour and a half early and logged a meandering ten klicks through the adjacent neighbourhood. Then we shed some people (who were not doing the fun run) and gained others (who were) and stood around in the cold for about 45 minutes until we set off for a jam-packed five klick not-a-race race. We celebrated with pho nearby.

And then I got sick. I spent three solid days prone on the couch and then was a little cautious about getting back into my groove.

But with the race just two weeks out, I braved the sub-zero temps on Sunday morning (and dealt with the pain of not running for a whole week) and checked the sixteen klick long distance off my training list. It wasn’t fast, but it was filled with autumn colours.

Tuesday I trekked back across the city for a swim. I can justify the drive because the pool is right beside the vet’s office and I needed to pick up a prescription refill (for the dog, of course) and gas is mysteriously about fifteen cents cheaper over there, which pays for my drive if I fill up over there. There’s a whole story about a thanksgiving altercation involving the dog wherein I wrenched MY shoulder. I swam just 500m because I was sore. But I swam.

October 15, 2025
urban sketch, three
In the meanwhile, my personal month-of-sketches art experiment continues unabated and, as of nine days in, triumphant.

To be clear, not even most of the pics are gems. I have been partaking in the act of suburban sketching, which doubly adds to my challenge of (a) seeking out something to sketch and a place to sketch it and (b) making said scene of suburban mediocrity seem interesting enough to sketch in the first place.

To make matters more challenging, I’ve been mildly sick for the last couple days, which means going to sit in the park on a chilly October afternoon is not high on my list of priorities, even if doing a sketch kinda is. There was one particular sketch I did from the comfort of my living room window, looking out into the back garden with a mug of hot tea at the ready.

All that aside, what my goal for the last nine days has been is embracing the clutter and chaos of a scene. Urban sketching (and thus I will postulate, suburban sketching) is very much about a Venn-like diagram of purpose and positioning (artistically speaking) in a way that overlaps with snapshot vacation photography. That is to say, if I were to walk out into a busy city street, stroll into a lovely urban park, or sit on a bench beside a cute little corner shop, I may be so inclined to snap a photo, right? But with a sketchbook in hand, and a pen at the ready, I should be able to stay a little longer and draw the view instead.

thinking like a photographer

i used to snap hundreds or thousands of photos each week, and owning, learning, and perfecting my use of camera equipment was a defining hobby of my life. small-p politics of being the camera guy aside, thinking like a photographer is a sixth sense for me and as such has been both a benefit and a curse. it is a curse because sketching is not photography: there is something about consuming a scene with one’s eyes, mashing it around inside one’s brain, and then turning the thoughts about the scene into monochromatic lines on a piece of paper with one’s hands, all of it taking place over minutes or hours of time. this is nothing like the instantaneous click of a shutter that turns photons into matrix of data that represents a near-perfect replication of the light that passed through the lens of the camera in that moment. thinking this way, though, has been a benefit because for years I have already been thinking about composition, light & shadows, shape, form, and style—all of which translate into a meaningful way that my aforementioned brain mashes around what it sees before it turns it into a sketch.

In that case, the context of the scene is just as important as the focal point. And mostly here in reality the context of any scene is a little bit cluttered and little bit chaotic.

Drawing a building will include the vegetation growing around it, the shadows, the posters hanging in the windows, the parking meter out front, the cars parked in the stall astride the building itself, people, birds, trash cans, street grates, and all the lovely details that make the scene feel real. The camera wouldn’t ignore any of that to make the object one is photographing stand out, would it? Neither should the urban sketcher, I assume.

With this in mind, I have been practicing absorbing the life that comes from that chaos and clutter: it all makes the scene seem more real, I think, and even just playing with the notion of adding as much of that clutter as I can while still retaining the fidelity of the art I am trying to put onto the page…well, it’s a balancing act. But it is resulting in interesting sketches that have made this little challenge satisfying enough to continue.
October 10, 2025
state of the blog, one: un-curated

When I relaunched this site back in April I suggested that I would try not to write too many navel gazing posts about the blog itself. I mean, to be fair, I like reading about how the sausage is made—as it were. I wish a lot more people who maintained personal websites and writing projects were actually interested in the creative process as much as they are interested in click-through optimization and search engine manipulation and all the other topics that seem as much about duping users into reading your drivel as is was about actually creating extensive collections of online expression.

I probably don’t need to mention that writing this as I am in October 2025 the world is in a period of retracting rights of personal expression.

I have been consciously moving further and further away from the corporate social networks and continuing to build a slow-but-steady presence here online. To my earlier point, this site was never about click-throughs or search engines or tricking you, the reader, into reading anything you don’t want to read. This is just the manifestation of opinion from one guy here on the Canadian prairies and the things I write about span a hundred different topics—you’re going to find something interesting and you’re probably going to be bored by just as much.

When I relaunched this site, scraping it together from the remains of about four other niche blogs I was maintaining, while I was trying to find my footing and my rhythm I did stray into writing far too often about the blog itself. So, I declared that I would only drop one of those navel gazing “meta” posts no more than once per week. I’ve held pretty solid to that, and the number has been more like once per month.

But here’s the sausage-making part: a lot goes on behind the scenes to write the words and collect the photos and too, keep the lights on here. No one would or could afford to have me sit here and recreate this kind of thing for them. It is a kind of work of personal madness that it even exists. My blogs have always been a kind of personal passion project.

All of that is to say that I do appreciate readers. I do appreciate clicks and when you find this on search. I have some light stats running and so I have a rough idea that people are visiting and they are reading certain topics. I know that, for example, if I shared more cast iron recipes I could flood this site with traffic. If I posted more hiking tips for the rocky mountains, I would probably build a dedicated user-base. Or, if I complained more about oddball observational neighbourhood gripes the search engine would light me up like a firework. I’m not a performing monkey, tho—so you get whatever I feel like writing about and you can feel free to dig through the archives and look for anything that is more interesting.

Social media really has trained us to expect an internet built for an audience of one. That’s the simultaneous beauty and danger of the algorithm. When it’s acting nice we call it curation. When it’s isolating us to niche information we call it siloing our perspective.

This blog is my perspective, but there is no algorithm. I have written about that before—somewhere here—and all to the point that like in yee good ole days, when papers and the evening news showed us everything they could jam into their publication-slash-broadcast allotments, we didn’t live in these curated silos of expectations. We just read everything, whether it was something that made us clap like a trained seal or not.

I’m no news outlet, but as I keep writing on this blog and filling it with stuff that interests me (knowing only a fraction of it will interest you) I do so understanding that I have far more in common with traditional media publications than I do with corporate social media feeds. There are (as of right now) about four average-length books worth of writing on this site and not a word of it is curated (or siloed) to you. And I think that’s a good thing.

Thanks for reading.

October 7, 2025
panoramic, two: art expedition

I went for a long walk on Friday.

I could sense that autumn-proper was ending. I mean, partially this had to do with a coherent ability to look at a calendar and see that as we enter October things tend to sine-wave pretty erratically between bitter cold and the autumn warmth reprise. But in there, all the leaves drop and all that’s left is bare, twiggy trees.

So I took in the last great day of autumn and went walking near downtown—and I brought both (a) my sketching supplies and (b) my phone with the intention of snapping some photos, both for reference and enjoyment.

What I got were a few gorgeous panoramas.

And since I’m in the panorama vibe lately, having uploaded my plugin for review to the WordPress directory, I’m still feeling pretty fly over having given myself some elbow-grease access to sharing these sorts of pics.

My first view was from Kinsmen park below the high level bridge. I missed the glory shot of the streetcar traversing, but I did sit down here for a while sketching.

There is little park up at the north end of the high level bridge that is probably on the short list of the most scenic spots of the city. The two bridges with the river valley below and the Uni on the opposite bank. I stood up here for half an hour taking various shots. These were two of my favs.

Finally, and as admittedly as much as I could use some practice on panoramas involving symmetrical scenes, I spent a while on the legislature grounds trying to snap some architecture pics that did the place justice. Oddly enough, the best pic in that place was in pen and ink. Sometime I surprise myself.

October 6, 2025
weekend wrap, eighteen

We lucked out and got a couple nice autumn weeks to walk through the trails and sneak in some colourful runs, but it seems as if October has other ideas for us. The weather turned cold over the weekend, dropping into the freezing temps for Sunday morning.

This weekend we:

Went out for dinner on Friday night. No one wanted to cook and everyone was on board with sushi, so as the sun set we went off to local japanese place and ate our fill. Along with other things, the Kid is now perfectly fine with raw fish sushi. If that sounds strange, just consider that she has been inching towards it with sushi rolls that are more in the imitation crab, avacado, or tempura shrimp realm and is only now embracing salmon and tuna rolls. In other words, we can order a little bit more ambitiously and she’ll just eat whatever. Another unseen benefit of her aging out of childhood.

She did, however, invite company over to watch a movie so Karin and I were relegated to the main floor of the house. We played some board games. I won. Enough said.

Saturday morning the ladies were going in six directions with appointments and other stuff. I played some video games for most of the morning, but joined them just before lunch to brave the hoards that had descended upon Costco. My reward was a hot dog.

The dog joined me for a bit of a lazy walk. I’ve been working on my daily sketching challenge so I went to the park to draw something. She sat content by my side for nearly an hour as I worked on the shading of a copse of trees.

That evening we had invited to the fiftieth birthday party of my former boss. We’ve kept in touch, and she pinged me earlier in the week to see if we were free. The place was packed and it was a bit of a rager for a fiftieth. Matched her style, though, and I had a good chat with some former colleagues who had made the shortlist. A limoncello shot was later regretted.

Sunday was a crazy run day. I met a few of the crew in a weird neighbourhood in Mill Woods for our ten klick pre-run. We ran a bunch of trails with which I was formerly unfamiliar, all of which ended us at the Towne Centre parking lot. Then we stood around in a crowd of about six thousand people waiting to run the Run for the Cure 5k breast cancer run. SL is a manager for CIBC bank, the title sponsor, so she rallied us onto her team and we wore colours and rounded our our ten klick pre-run with a crowded five klick fun run to make our training distance fit. Then we went for pho.

I was hosed for the rest of the day. The combination of running fifteen klicks, partying the night prior, and standing around in shorts in the sub-zero temps spent what was left of my energy and I chilled on the couch until dinner, then chilled on a different couch until I went to bed. I did fit in there somewhere reading all the social media posts about the teachers strike, but once again having a semi-adult daughter pays off.

October 6, 2025

blog.8r4d.com

Ah. Some blog, huh?

I’ve been writing meandering drivel for decades, but here you’ll find all my posts on writing, technology, art, food, adventure, running, parenting, and overthinking just about anything and everything since early 2021.

In fact, I write regularly from here in the Canadian Prairies about just about anything that interest me.

Enjoy!

Blogging 400,992 words in 530 posts.

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