works of wanderlust

Race, Off

Sunday runday, and it was about just a month ago I was lamenting the upcoming lack of race season.

My running partners were all busily signing up for virtual races that seemed to me as little more than paying for a t-shirt and a medal. Meanwhile we would all tell ourselves that the difference between running around the neighbourhood this weekend as opposed to last weekend was that this weekend was a virtual race. Wink wink. And about ninety-dollars in race fees.

I would run. But this year would be a season of no races.

Tho.

Until Friday night there was an exception to all my lamenting.

The long-shot was a local late-May ultramarathon of various distances that we’d all signed up for in the first days of twenty-twenty. Over a year ago. Trained and ready when COVID sprung. In April of last year, we each recieved an email that the race had been deferred for a year in hopes that the pandemic (which surely wouldn’t last more than a couple months, right?) would be a distant memory. We would all race again next year.

This year.

So it went that on the last weekend of May 2021, four weeks out from writing this, I was due to tackle the Blackfoot Ultra for another go. Twenty-five kilometers of the “baby ultra” distance through the rolling trails of a nearby natural preserve area.

Friday evening the fateful email came again.

Due to COVID the race organizers, unsurprisingly, were unable to obtain a permit from the local health authority to host a couple hundred racers and support crew for a daylong event. Every registration has been deferred yet again to twenty-twenty-two.

The single, solitary race for which I have been registered now for nearly a year and a half is now officially thirteen months away.

Race, off.

I could grumble here. I could write that all those hills we’ve been running were all for naught. That my push to recover from some joint inflamation over the last couple months so that I could keep up my distances was a waste. Or that somehow my motivation was only sparked by the prospect of that looming twenty-five klick weekend less than a month away.

I could.

I won’t.

We’ve all made so many sacrifices this past fourteen months that I can’t account for this as more than another disappointing blip.

It’s another opportunity to reshape my training plan. A chance to think about what I want to get out of a summer without any races at all. None. What that means to my week-to-week training and how I can use that freedom to explore the city’s trails again this summer.

Perhaps a running streak?

Or some adventure running, looking for trails I’ve never met before.

Maybe just enjoying the time with my cohort without any pressure for pace or distance.

The last of my races may be off, but I’m thinking of it as an opportunity.

May 2, 2021
Backyard Ribs: Part One, The Rub

It’s the first Saturday in May and I woke up to a clear blue sky and a weather forecast that was begging for a day outdoors.

It’s always a gamble, of course, to plan twelve hours ahead of your cooking time for a backyard grill, particularly something as elaborate as a fire smoking some pork ribs. The rain could appear over the horizon and soak the suburbs. The weather could turn cold on a dime still this early in the season. Or the wind could push through and make building a fire a hurculean feat.

I took the gamble, though.

I had my reasons for stopping by a new local grocery store last night and a big one point five kilogram pack of ribs caught my eye. “I’m making ribs on the fire tomorrow.” I told my wife as stocked up the fridge with my purchases upon returning home.

“Oooh. Yum!” She replied.

“I’m also making it up as I go along.” I told her.

That got a less enthusiastic response.

I’ve never grilled ribs over an open fire, so tonight is going to be an adventure. It’s a new-to-me process, but makes use of lots of practiced skills that add up to what I hope will be a success. So, I’ll start with what I know, a basic dry rub and about eight hours in the fridge to let it season up a bit.

Dry Rub Recipe

60ml brown sugar 15ml salt 15ml ground black pepper 15ml paprika 30ml garlic powder 30ml onion powder 10ml ground celery seed 10ml ground mustard 10ml cumin

I spread this evenly on the washed and dried ribs. There was enough in this batch for about 2kg of meat, so I had a little bit left over when everything had been generously coated and wrapped.

Dry rubs have a couple of positive features I’m looking for in their use: Flavour. Tenderizing. Simplicty. And more, I’m sure.

I don’t have much room in the fridge for a big old marinade right now, either, and we’ve been trying to cut back on single-use plastic like large zip bags (he writes as he posts a photo of cling wrap on his countertop.)

But for more important results, back to things like flavour and texture. If you look at the recipe, for example, this particular rub has a solid tablespoon of salt. Eight hours resting in that much salt has an effect on the meat that is essentially a preliminary cure. It’s not going to make this into a true cure of the meat, but it will start to draw some of the moisture from the tissue and will have a tenderizing effect on the final texture.

My basic rub recipe also has a lot of sugar. Partly, it’s there to even out the spices. Literally. The sugar is a good way to bulk up the rub and make sure it spreads evenly across the meat and doesn’t concentrate too much of the spice unevenly as my untrained hands dash it across the raw flesh. Also, while I’ll add a sauce when I put these over the fire, that sugar in the rub will be the start of the carmelization during the first exposure to heat that will crank up the sticky sweet flavour many people associate with ribs.

The cooking of these gorgeous hunks of meat will happen later today, and I’ll photograph and post the results in the upcoming part two.

For now, cross your fingers for that weather holding out!

May 1, 2021
Our Well-Loved Cookbooks: Five Roses

There was a point in time about fifteen years ago when I would have told you that the best way to make pancakes was to follow the directions on the box.

And see, everyone who dabbles in more advanced cooking techniques than as-per-manufacturers-instructions likely has a story of that one recipe that upon discovering it made you think… yeah, I can probably make this.

For me that recipe was the pancake recipe in Five Roses: A Guide to Good Cooking.

I have no idea where this book came from.

For the longest time it was one of a half dozen eclectic recipe books on our shelf that had appeared in our lives sometime during that phase of moving out, getting married, and building a home. It may have been a gift or shown up in a care package from a relative or … I honestly don’t know.

Perhaps you’re wondering if maybe we had received it as a promotional deal from the manufacturers of Five Roses flour products? Alas no, I don’t recall ever having used Five Roses flour, know where I would buy Five Roses flour, nor even if Five Roses flour is still in production. (Well, it is …I just Googled it.) I’m sure it’s a fine baking ingredient, but our store shelves are ubiquitously stocked with Robin Hood flour. Even so, I don’t have a Robin Hood Guide to Good Cooking, just this one.

And though the photo doesn’t necessarily make it clear, that recipe book is now dog-eared and full of notes and adjustments and splotches of splattered recipe results.

Every weekend on Saturday morning I make pancakes for my family. Every weekend I craft a bowl of batter from flour, sugar, baking powder, eggs, vanilla, oil, and milk. Every weekend I pull a crusty recipe from the hard-coded memories stored in the deepest part of my brain and turn it into breakfast.

That recipe originated in this book, a now well-loved cookbook in our home.

April 30, 2021
Kinda Secret Projects

I haven’t been entirely forthcoming with my friends and family.

In fact, there are very few people who I know in real life who also know that I write in this blog.

Maybe… say… five people.

I have no real good reason for not self-promoting other than that I wasn’t ready yet. Creativity and personal expression, particularly as you get older, is this balancing act between newfound not giving any effs, and realizing that your interests are straying further and further from popular culture and mass market interests. There is also the whole risk equation tied back to personal and professional reputation, but that’s a blog post for another day.

Also, simply, I wanted to get my legs stable under me before I went telling everyone that “hey, look over here… I’ve been writing a blog you should all check out!”

I’ve done that more than once in my life. Posting to the internet for twenty years often means you’ve racked up many projects and over-tapped the good will of friends and family.

I’m not the only one who does this … is doing this kinda-secret-project thing right now … or so I found out.

One of my colleagues, a guy who reports to the same boss as I do, revealed to the team yesterday that his New Year’s resolution made and kept was to start a podcast.

He has posted nearly twenty episodes of a self-produced audio program… in secret… since the start of the year. The link went low-grade viral around the office chatter and I think he multiplied his subscriber rate by insert-coworker-count-here… speaking of, ahem, professional reputation.

I was momentarily tempted to stick my hand up and say “hey, wanna read my blog anyone?” but the moment passed and he was in his moment, and maybe mine will come, too.

Or whatever.

I’m kinda enjoying my kinda secret project for now.

April 29, 2021
Sylvan

This language of mine is so filled with clever words meant to precisely describe many things. Other words have meanings that are soft, fluid and flexible that they are used to describe concepts so vast as to make the boundaries of those definitions fuzzy and flexible.

To me, sylvan feels like on of those words.

SILL - vann

Living in or simply relating to the woods.

To me, growing up this word had a fuzzy meaning that was almost opposite of it’s actual definition.

Sylvan meant a trip to the beach.

Not a great beach.

Yet a twenty minute drive from my house was a large prairie pond called Sylvan Lake. On a summer Saturday we’d drive out, swim in the shallow, muddy water, wander the path along the town, and eat candy or ice cream.

Or later, “Want to go to Sylvan this weekend?” As a teenager with driving license this was a epic getaway far away and out of town.

The shores of Sylvan Lake, the lake, is not devoid of trees by any means and I imagine now, knowing the definition of its alias, that once long ago it was revealed by explorers and granted a name because it was a huge lake in the middle of a woods. Today it is but a dent in the vast agricultural Canadian prairies, an impression in the otherwise rolling flat lands that happens to contain water, support a small town, and attract city folks for their weekend getaways.

I’ve since travelled to many beaches touching many lakes, rivers, oceans, and warm blue seas. It still echoes back to my youth when I hear this word, yes.

But my association with this word has mostly reverted to moments more like the photo in this post: the quiet of the woods, the majesty of a living forest, and the peace that comes from walking among the trees.

April 28, 2021

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 425,845 words in 562 posts.

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