works of wanderlust

weekend wrap, twenty

I guess this was the final weekend in October, huh? I started this month with a personal art challenge, drawing every day, and so far I’ve kept up my end of the deal. But somehow whenever I immerse myself it the act of doing something daily over the span of a month it seems to speed up time and I blink and… well, it was the final weekend of October.

Friday evening was a tiny little self-contained adventure.

I had to go pick up my race package from the store up near Whyte Avenue. The wife had a little AGM meeting to attend with a big purpose right near there. Her meeting was for a board she sits on and it was the meeting when they were electing a new president to replace her—happily so—since the kid is no longer doing that particular extra curricular thing and she doesn’t need to run the organization and fundraise for other kids, huh?

I dropped her off and drove up to the Running Room and grabbed my race shirt and bib. Ran into Kim, because she was working, and PS, because he was also picking up his package at the exact same time.

I got it into my mind to go back to the store where I bought my little sketchbook, the one I’ve been doing all my drawing in for the challenge this month. It turns out that they are only sold at like three places in the city, and one of those places was on Whyte Avenue. But Whyte Avenue, the city’s gentrified Uni-adjacent trendy shopping strip is a terrible place to try and go casually on a Friday evening. I could not find parking—at least not some free parking (and I was feeling a bit too cheap to pay) so I ended up driving laps around the neighbourhoods for a while until I got frustrated and just decided to try to drive back to the studio to pick up the wife… which is when I got trapped in a construction zone hell and it took me twenty minutes and a few middle fingers to navigate.

I picked her up and we decided since it was almost 8pm to finally grab a dinner. There is a little sushi and rice bowl place on the way home so we swung in there and ordered, and as she hands us our food in to-go bowls (confusingly) she told us that they were closing at 8 and we could only stay if we ate fast. Ugh. So we ate our sad little bowls at home twenty minutes later and settled in to watch some television.

I got paid for a couple of my contracts last week, so on Saturday morning I made my way to the store to (finally!) replace my laptop. I’ve been working on a mix of (a) the shared family computer, (b) a ten year old gaming desktop in my cold, cold basement, (c) a fourteen year old recycled MacBook Pro hacked to run Linux and (d) a six year old iPad that is starting to show its age. Since setting up the corporation I’ve always known that the best tax approach is to use the money and invest back into the company rather than pull it out as salary and pay a bunch of taxes on it. So, new laptop for the business was bought… and then most of the afternoon setting it up and getting all the softwares installed on it.

We had a lite dinner and settled in for some more television on Saturday evening.

Sunday I woke up to rain. Rain is not inherently bad, but Sunday morning was also race morning and I looked out the back door as even the dog refused to step out and tried not to think that I needed to be at a start line in a couple hours to run sixteen klicks.

I met the gang for a carpool over to the race and we were plenty early to spend time wandering around and overthinking the weather. Of course, soon enough the race was run and it being the first real race I’ve done in over a year (Park Runs apparently don’t count, but they’re also only 5k) I was spent.

We piled in and went for a late lunch at some enormous asian buffet place on the north side that I’d never even heard of, and I stuffed myself to borderline feeling ill.

I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening recovering from the race (and lunch) and went to bed at a far too reasonable time for a guy with nothing much to do on Monday morning except write.

October 27, 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.

October 23, 2025
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.

October 23, 2025
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.

October 23, 2025
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?

October 20, 2025

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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.

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