works of wanderlust

Tag: autumn

  • 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.

  • panoramic, one: autumn-ish

    If you’ve been reading along, you may already know that about a year ago I went backpacking in the mountains and returned with a whole bunch of great photos. A few of those photos were panoramic pictures.

    This is not a post about those particular photos, but rather the inspiration and adventures into code brought about by those photos. It was an adventure in thinking about image formats, and trying to figure out a way to display them nicely on a website, so when I go out on lovely autumn weekend and take photos like these… I can post them like this…

    Now, don’t even get me started on the image and video orientation debate. Horizontal versus vertical video! The shift from snapshot to square to tall images on instacrap. It’s all bewildering and when they start making wide screen folding phones we’re all going to follow the little red ball to whatever the latest trend is anyhow. 

    I like my 4×6 photo format for the most part. It’s a generational bias, I know, but still—it’s what I like. 

    All that said, the progress of technology over the last twenty-five years to simplifying panoramic, ultra-wide, auto-stiched photography has arugualby turned it into my second-favourite format. (Which probably means Apple will turn it off soon, dammit, I shouldn’t have said anything!) Back when I got my first camera I literally used software like photoshop or single-purpose software to individually stitch carefully captured photos together to make home-brew panos, and they were at best mediocre.

    Now, there is just a mode on my phone. On your phone too, probably.

    Except, back to that format war thing. People like pics that fit on their screens in the orientation that is most comfortable to hold. In other words, pano pics don’t fit nicely at all on our screens. 

    All this is leading up to the fact that when I added a pano feature into my 8r4d-stagram app, it changed my incentive by one hundred percent to take more pano photos. Which of course means…

    I’ve been taking a lot of pano photos lately. And like you’ve seen scattered into this post, I am interested in sharing some of those here on this blog. 

    Where this all led me was to sit down and write a plugin in WordPress to do something that should have been very simple, but look as did, was not something I could figure that anyone else had made: I built the start of a simple plugin to add panoramic photos to my WordPress blog, and display them in a way that lets you think of them like regular photos, but with a little secret hidden off to the side if you are inclined to scroll and nudge with your mouse or finger.

    I released it this morning on Github.

  • autumn running

    I don’t abide much my astrological mumbo jumbo but Sagittarius that I am has seemed to inclined me to a love of autumn—the cool weather, the orange-tingted palette, the crunch of leaves on the trail beneath my feet.

    We stumbed into a trail run this past weekend. It wasn’t an intense mountain ultra by any means, but in attempting to keep out of the cool October winds early on Sunday morning we ducked into the shelter of the trees and woodier areas adjacent to our more regular running routes and spared little reluctance to dive headlong into hitherto unexplored diversions from the same. 

    That is to say, we knew there was some single track through the little suburban creek that cleaves between our little suburban corner of the city and the greater metropolis but they tended to be trails we ignored in favour of either more serious training or longer, more serious running adventures.

    But it was Thanksgiving morning, there was a fresh box of it-was-someones-birthday pastries waiting back at the coffee shop where we run, and we were looking at something short and simple and let’s just get it done today and go have a coffee, okay?

    The leaves crunching, the colours on the ground and in the trees, and the whole autumn vibe if I’m being honest—it all inspired me to pull out my phone and record some improptu footage of the run. I held the camera ahead of me as I dashed through the trees and dodged obstacles. 

    If autumn seems like a long season, here on the Canadian prairies we are often lucky to get more than a week.

    By next weekend the air will have chilled a bit more, the leaves will be detritus on the ground surrounded by a million bare branches. There could even be snow—it’s a coin flip. 

    So instead we enjoy the trails in the moment, for a moment, and dig our winter gear from storage for another cold season as our autumn running seasons blinks past in a blur of orange and red and brown.

  • All Hallows’ Eve

    Happy Halloween!

    With near certainty, within a week or so I’ll be shovelling the sidewalk clear of fresh snow and contemplating pulling my cross country skis from storage.

    But … as of right now it is still October, the air is crisp but not quite freezing, and as the sun starts to set over to the west I’m busy putting out the last few decorations and readying a big bowl of candy for the inevitable arrival of wee trick-or-treaters.

    We spent the better part of the weekend cleaning up the backyard, raking the fallen leaves from the grass, and stacking the outdoor furniture in the shed.

    This year I again set up a cozy set of wooden benches around my backyard firepit and kept the campfire supplies handy near the front of the storage area so I can attempt some winter cookouts outdoors. Last year the snow fell and I piled up small heaps and built burms into a campfire cove in the middle of the yard where we cozily cuddled around our old fire bowl. This year I hope to improve on the design and add the cooking capacity by making use of my new-this-season fire pit. What would be more fun that toasting a big pot of chili over the fire come December, warming up that big cast iron Dutch oven for a steamy winter wonderland feast right in our backyard?

    Still, we have a few days of pre-snow to enjoy the dwindling remains of the late-summer and autumn.

    In the neighbourhood one subdivision over they are likely to send off the month with a celebration of Halloween fireworks. I’ll hand out some candy from our front door, click off the lights as the evening grows later, and wander across the street to check them out.

    Boom! Crack! Pop!

    And … boo!

    Then. It’s basically winter. Alright, that is a little scary.