works of wanderlust

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
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.

October 15, 2025
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

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 419,675 words in 553 posts.

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