works of wanderlust

Tag: summer

  • merrily along, two

    The internets are full of crazy these days—and if it isn’t flat out nuts, it has probably been generated by an AI chatbot—so here is a few more good news, good vibe, life isn’t all wrinkly grapes reports from my week.

    My positives this past week were…

    The weather cooperated enough that I was able to mash up a few great summertime activities, turning on some tunes on the deck with the pergola shade up and writing out in the backyard instead of a cafe. The dog sat in the grass looking super contented and I got some vibes out my back door.

    It’s berry season, and my garden is full of fruit-bearing bushes and trees. Need I write more? Saskatoons, raspberries, haskaps, and soon—very soon—a tree bursting with juicy plums are just a picking away.

    I mentioned that the Kid got a summer job, but then a couple weeks later got her first paycheque and if there was ever an example of unfiltered joy through a text message, she sent me a dozen of them that morning. And then I think she stopped and bought herself a treat to celebrate.

    I’ve mentioned in other posts that I bought myself a gym membership to the local recreation centre. Some might not look at this as anything but a kind of fitness burden that they have taken on, but having access to some drop in classes and, yeah, the swimming pool is a definite mood boosting positive addition to my days.

    I have been mucking around with electronic music on my various devices, and have reached what I’m calling the curration stage—that’s the point where I am feeling done with just mucking around and am organizing things for a more learning-centric approach to the tools. It’s hard to explain without diving trench-deep into the details, but basically I’ve been weeding and pruning my toys so that I have a cleaner slate to do more experimentation-type stuff with sounds. 

    We have been more conscious about buying “Canadian” stuff lately, reorienting our spending, and have been finding lots of treasures in the form of better coffees, better beers, better fruit, and even better vibes.

    We were able to make a full salad last night for dinner from just stuff that came out of the garden in our backyard. Lettuce, beets, berries! Yum.

    We went for lunch in the Highlands neighbourhood this past weekend and I ate one of the best burgers I’ve had in a year atop the rooftop patio of a little place over there. Add to that a tasty sour beer and garlic fries and it was a divine meal worth reporting here again.

  • merrily along, one

    I routinely find that I have a hundred little often-good things that I want to post about but (a) I don’t want to post a whole article about and yet (b) I don’t want to lose them in this rambling, barely-read record of our little life here which can so easily drift into complaining or rambling.

    With world events swirling in such frustrating ways it really is easy to get lost in the negativity and yet a piece of me is realizing with crystal clarity that the hopelessness being drilled into us day after day by the media, by the fascists, and by the universe itself is a feature (for them) not an accidental byproduct.  

    “How dare we celebrate the positives while they’re busy burning down the world?” I have been told in maybe not so literal a phrase… but the meaning has always been the same: despair you fool, and now pay us our due.

    So. I want to start a new ‘series’ on this site where I just reflect on some good things that have been going on in our lives.

    Like.

    The Kid got a summer job. I won’t tell you where or necessarily what she is doing, but she is currently getting paid a decent union wage to spend her summer outside with kids and helping the community. The only days I won’t be jealous is when the mosquitos finally come out.

    One of my longer-serving running friends is getting married today. It’s one of those tiny, family only weddings, but we took him for drinks last week and sometime today, atop a streetcar crossing the river he’ll get hitched to his long-time girlfriend, soon-to-be wife. 

    I’ve been reading more. You may have noticed from the review-count on this site, but I’ve read more in the last three months than I have in the last three years, it seems, and losing my patience with the written word while I was trying to write more was a point of distress for me lately. Digging into words as a consumer is a huge positive shift for me.

    Oh, and I finally fixed our television box last night. Two hours it took to figure out that the problem we’ve been having for months and months, the set top box resetting and inexplicable technical fails was in fact a borked power brick. The don’t tell you this but they basically put little computers inside those little power blocks now and become another point of failure. The Wife gets to watch her shows in peace now.

    The dates are secret for obvious reasons, but we booked our trip to Japan later this year. That’s about all I have to share on that for now, except to say that we have flights and hotels scheduled to spend over two weeks in Asia later this year with plans to go to Tokyo Disney, the Ghibli park, and eat a lot of tasty Japanese food. Sorry, we’ll do Korea next time.

    Lately, I’ve been making music. I mean, playing a lot and learning a lot and loving sound for the raw enjoyment of it in my own ears with no expectation of sharing it beyond headphones or my living room walls. The act of learning and honing enough skill on the piano has allowed me to flex musically beyond tinking keys and the exploration of synth sounds is a deep art form.

    Of course, finally, I can’t neglect to tell you that I get free bread all summer. Well, kinda. I stumbled on a (potentially in error) crazy deal at the grocery store where I traded in some of my loyalty points for three bags of bread flour. I think there was likely a zero missing on the redemption value, but everyone gets a break once in a while and me, I have nearly twenty kilos of bread flour thanks to my acute mathing skills in the grocery aisle. 

    See? Good stuff all around.

  • seeking adventure

    Imagine you are flying.

    Down a trail.

    Over the crest of a low hill.

    Around a hairpin curve in the path blinded by a dense forest of trees.

    I think a lot of people hear the term ‘running’ and can’t fathom that it means anything more than grueling hours spent on a treadmill. I think most people wallow in the sport as little more than a fitness activity, a workout, or a span of time spent sweating for the sake of the sweat and the calories. 

    I have been a runner, properly so, for nearly eighteen years.

    I rarely run for the sweat.

    I do, on occasion, yes.

    But by far what I run for is the adventure.

    I am flying.

    Flying down a trail, over a hill, and around a hairpin curve brushing past the foliage reaching out across the narrow path.

    It did not start out this way.

    For the first couple of years, yeah years, I was stuck in a beginners rut. We do beginner runners such a disservice giving them rules to build into and goals to which they then aspire. How many beginner runners start to either “get in shape” or “participate in some race” thinking that fitness and competition are the best parts of the sport? How many don’t get in shape or don’t “win” the race and stumble back to the couch?

    During the pandemic years I started hosting what I called Adventure Runs. I would post a meeting location. I would roughly plan a route (usually never having run at that location myself). Set a time, arrive, and just run.

    We were not there for fitness or time or training or any of that. It was perfect timing for such things because most races had been cancelled or limited, people were bored and lonely, and the world was damn near empty of pedestrians.

    We flew down new trails, clambered over low hills, and traced unexplored hairpin curves in dense forests that had grown there for decades but which rarely saw more than a few humans on any given day.

    Adventure.

    Adventure is ill-defined. I can set you specific goals for fitness. I can tell you what numbers makes for a good pace. I can adjudicate your finish time in a race. I can see the appeal of quantitative measures against which we can guage our so-called enjoyment of this activity. But adventure? Adventure is raw quality. Adventure is about the feel of it, how your heart sings in the moment and how you end some span of time spent away from everything else, flying, climbing, swerving through the woods feeling unlike anything else.

    I’ve been thinking about adventure again. I have been trying to bottle that effort into a coherent plan for the upcoming summer months. I have been getting myself ready to fly again.

  • Snakes, Ditches, Mud, and Ticks

    Each summer for the last few I’ve hosted a small adventure club for a group of my running friends. We call them Adventure Runs, though running occasionally turns out to be only a minor component of the adventure.

    So…. once again it is summer, and once again yesterday morning I posted our secret meetup location in our chat server, anticipated all day long, then finally after work ended for the day drove to the secluded parking spot and waited to see who else showed up.

    Adventure Journal

    It had rained all afternoon.

    Not just rained. It had poured, complete with thunder and lightning, clacks of huge rain droplets batting against the windows and sending coworkers on our video meetings running off camera to close windows and comfort pets.

    At 5pm we were texting back and forth about whether to delay our running plans.

    But by 6pm the sunshine was back and I was lacing up my trail shoes and trying to remember exactly how to navigate the city streets to where I’d agreed to meet up for a local adventure.

    The thing about trying to find interesting and unique places to run in the suburbs of a big city is that we really have just two choices for trails that are not of the well-maintained asphalt or crushed shale-surfaced accessible recreational locales: we either need to drop into the river valley or we need to find a bit of wilderness trapped between the cultivated corridors of roads, housing and shopping malls.

    A dozen years ago a major infrastructure project resulted in the city building a ring road encircling a major part of the established city-proper. The road itself is almost eighty kilometers long with access points into and out of town every three to five klicks, and while in most places it snakes by the clusters of houses with naught but a bit of grassy ditch to separate the two, there are huge swaths of road anchored inside what’s called a transportation utility corridor (TUC) where clearance has been maintained to build roads, power transmission lines, and oil pipelines.

    I was also acutely aware of a spot not too far (but not easily accessible) where a particularly interesting swath of TUC had been combined with some natural preserve, an old, blocked off access road, and an interesting destination at the end of the connected trail.

    Into the Woods

    On any given summer day, the trail that led from the quasi-parking lot to the east access of the locally famous “graffiti tunnel” would have been a moderately challenging bit of dirt-based single track weaving through and around eclectic landscapes crushed between a busy highway to the south and a winding high-watered creek to the north.

    An hour after our quadrant of the city had been doused in an afternoon summer storm, those same trails were glistening and muddy, the tall grasses were hung heavy with rainwater, and the protruding heaps of clay silts that marked the marshy landscape near to the creek were more slippery than had we been running on our familiar winter ice slicks.

    As we descended into this twisting, wet, and perilous collection of intersecting trails, each of the seven of us often veering off course to find a bit of path we were individually more comfortable with, a mix of caution and excitement bubbled through the group.

    At one point I stopped abruptly with two of my companions close on my heels, slamming on my brakes in the wet mud and barely avoiding stepping on a medium-sized garter snake soaking up the sun on the middle of the path. I shooed it away and “stood guard” as one of my ophidiophobic running mates inched by and squealed in fear.

    Familiar Destinations

    More tall grass (hiding nasty ticks!)

    A scramble hand-over-hand up a small, nearly impassible hill.

    A leap of faith over an ant hill the size of a small car.

    And wet feet all around, even though we never did get very close to the creek at all.

    While the west side of the graffiti tunnel is accessible from a gentle gravel path connected to some of our local neighbourhood running routes, the east side (separated by a muddy creek) is only found on foot by following the two-and-a-half klick route through the trees and grass and wilderness-laden ditch through which we had just run.

    We ogled the years of overlapping graffiti that covered the old pedestrian underpass (yet to be connected to the trail system-proper even eighteen years after it’s installation), took a bunch of photos and selfies, and then contemplated our alternate routes back to the cars… ultimately deciding to face the known perils of retracing our steps back rather than trying to find a simpler (but far longer) route home.

    It is almost a rite of passage for a guy who plans crazy running routes to listen to the grumbles and complaints, cursing and swearing of those silly enough to follow him into the wilderness.

    And it is certainly rewarding to lead all of those people full circle to their cars and to realize that every single one of them just experienced something they’ll remember for long after we’ve all gone home and washed the mud from our ankles.

  • Last Day of Summer

    And just like that the leaves turned yellow, the air felt crisper, and another summer drifted into memory.

    In three short months we managed to squeeze in quite a lot of action, particularlly considering that the world was still fairly locked down with this pandemic.

    We visited the mountains for two weeks across two separate trips, completed a modest list of hikes, kayaked on a couple mountain lakes, photographed glaciers, and enjoyed the wilderness.

    We cooked outdoors on our new backyard fire pit, roasting a crazy variety of meats, a garden’s worth of vegetables, and too many marshmallows to count.

    We hosted friends in our backyard, spending lovely afternoons or evenings with (on different occasions) family for elaborate meals, co-workers for beers, friends for campfires, and my running crew for a brithday party.

    We met our neighbours in the park, new friendly relationships spurred on by the magnetic conversation starting magic of a cute puppy who makes pals with anyone and drags me into it at the other end of a leash.

    We ran as I hosted at least a dozen weeks of adventure runs around and just outside the city, encouraging a dozen (give or take) of my running crew to join me in exploring new trails and unfamiliar routes, often with an ice cream or beer at the end of it.

    We enjoyed our own backyard.

    We toured our own city.

    We lived in our space, not always by choice, but making the best of the situation.

    The summer of 2021 ends in a couple short hours and it may not have been perfect, but it certainly was not wasted.