works of wanderlust

fifty walks, walk two

Winter returned temporarily, and not that it should have stopped me from going out for a long stroll, but I’ll honest: I imagined this thing, at least the first few iterations, as some kind of romantic spring stroll as I shred the bonds of winter and embraced the last summer of my forties.

Then it got miserable for about ten days again, and well…

The Route

I’ve calculated (in the vaguest sense of that word) that I can probably log about ten of my fifty walks from my house inasmuch as I intend to follow my own loose rules. The Kid pointed out that I have a few more options if I don’t limit myself to loops and instead do some point to point walks and carry a bus pass to get back home from the other end. Walking from home was not always the point, though, and the very nature of adventure implies something further afield.

Yet, I walked out my front door once again and started for the wilderness of the Transportation Utility Corridor (TUC) just beyond the suburban fences that guard this weird strip of highway adjacent, oil pipeline obscuring, transmission cable traced route towards the general direction of the river.

I had a sense of something unknown at the far end of that path.

And indeed, when I’d crossed the river and climbed part way back up the neighbourhood on the far side of the valley, I veered sharply into some single track trail and carefully maneuvered around the remaining patches of ice and wet muddy slicks as I wend my way to the far end of the asphalt trail I’d just escaped.

Mission accomplished, I did an about face at the top of the hill, the same place where we’ve been meeting to run our hill training runs recently (though on a different hill another klick further down the path) and descended a fairly familiar running route back towards my own corner of the suburbs.. and home.

The Effort

I alluded to the remaining patches of snow on the trail and by far this was what marked the worst legs of the trek. The snow was not longer, strictly speaking, snow and had turned to a crusty layer of slick pack ice that had been worn smooth by previous adventurers. Many of these were, of course, on little bits of decline in the trail where I found myself clinging to the branches of nearby trees as I tried not to topple myself.

I also cannot neglect to mention the hilliness of my chosen route. For a huge part of the walk I was going up and down hills, be those familiar asphalt paths that we often run or struggling through the woods on sketchy trails in (what turned out to be a stupid choice of footwear) an old pair of sneakers-turned-everyday shoes.

I brought along my proper camera this time and (despite temptation to pull out the phone camera once or twice) I stuck to my choice of lens and nabbed a small selection of interesting shots. I haven’t mentioned this previously, but I have been limiting myself this year to a single SLR lens for reasons of Pointless Creative Struggle(TM). My choice was a 40mm pancake prime lens that I have been enjoying. It was the only lens I took to Japan last year, for example, and I got a lot of great shots there while simultaneously saving my back from carrying too much equipment.

At the end of the walk my watch was just a hair over 10km in 2 hours and 23 minutes. 10.15km in fact. Making my grand fifty walks walking distance total now 21.15km in 4 hours and 52 minutes. I’m gonna need to build a chart or something.

The Highlight

Of course when you go on these walk you really expect to find the normal strangeness: interesting views, odd people, and weird constructions in the woods. I always seem to, at least.

This time the oddness came in a vehicular form—or lack thereof. Car parts were scattered along the diverted path I travelled. I came first upon the axel of a car, and then a radiator. A couple hundred steps further the panels of an old car were being used as a kind of makeshift fence along the side of the path. Certainly the snow was hiding more. And at the very top of the trail, perhaps no more than a hundred meters from the road, an entire engine block rusted and settled was set like an eclectic old stone marking the way home.

Someone—or someones—had taken the effort to carry bits of an old car into the woods and scatter it along the trail in some meaningful way.

All I was carrying was a camera, and that was enough for me.

April 11, 2026
fifty walks, walk one

I’m no April fool, but spring has been playing tricks on all of us this year. It seems to tease a warm up but then chill out the next day and offer up a little bit more snow.

Case in point. Yesterday I did my first of the fifty walks series, and I didn’t even need my wool cap. This morning, less than a day later I am sitting in a Starbucks to write the recap of that walk and looking out the window at the swirling mini blizzard we mustered up to celebrate.

Fifty is a lot of walks. I’m gonna need to try to do roughly two long walks per week if I’m going to hit that goal. It’s also going to be interesting to try and write something interesting about each of them.

The Route

To start, I suppose I should just say that I made it simple for my first: I walked out the front door and took the still new-ish long path up along the mini-freeway that passes by our neighbourhood. That path is about four and a half klicks long from our intersection (it goes south for about two).

From there, and reaching a kind of inability to go any further north for the moment, I tucked into the nearby neighbourhood and crosscut it towards where I knew the creek trails joined up.

We run in the creeks all the time, but it’s been a very long time since I’ve just gone and walked that path. Years, really. Most of the ice was still packed onto the trails down there, but it wasn’t so bad that it was impassible or anything. It was slow going, but for that I blame my photography urges.

I climbed back out of the creek valley at the end of that trail and followed the asphalt back towards home.

Eleven klicks. Exactly. I started and stopped my watch at the foot of my driveway and it read 11.01km.

The Effort

As I noted I spent a lot of time distracted taking pictures. Shockingly, you may be surprised that I even tried doing some “strolling selfies” propping my camera up against a tree or a light standard and using the remote shutter features of my AirPods to try and nab an interesting solo shot. I think I might still need to work on that.

The walk took nearly three hours all in. That’s a lot of solo time in the city. I was doing the (obviously simple) math of that while I was wandering along and taking breaks from the audiobook I was listening to: fifty walks at three hours a piece is a hundred and fifty hours of walking and at least five hundred klicks. I’m gonna need to figure out some better shoes, too.

Of course, finding fifty walks in this city that are unique and interesting and places “I don’t usually go” is going to be probably my biggest challenge. I can walk laps around neighbourhoods but (a) I need to get to a starting place and (b) what’s so interesting about laps around yet another suburban wasteland? I suspect a good portion of my walks will be out my front door and exploring some of the single track or side trails that I don’t visit while running (and definitely can’t get to in a car) and there’s nothing wrong with that. Rules are not so strict as to have me plotting against my own self-interest and success after all.

I also need to figure out how I can bring along a better camera or a audio capture device, both better than just my phone. Travelling light is great, but a dozen times along the way yesterday I thought to myself it would have been great to have my SLR or my Zoom recorder.

The Highlight

Part way into the creek trail I went off route, and wandered down a side path along the thawing creek. There is still a pretty solid build up of winter ice, but the water is flowing through the gaps, gurgling and rushing atop and through the melting spaces. I took some photos and stood there listening to the creek for about five minutes. Birds sounded all around and the city disappeared from my awareness. It was a moment.

If I can find something like that on the next forty nine walks I think I’ll easily be able to call it a success.

April 2, 2026
weekender, six

I somehow managed to fit in watching three movies this weekend and it started with a random pick off Netflix called Code 3, a Rainn Wilson tragi-comedy about ambulance drivers in Los Angeles. Also, it turned out to be a biting indictment of American-style health care, and a bit of an unexpected tear-jerker in the end.

Saturday morning got myself out of the house pretty early because the orchestra was doing our first spring concert. Don’t worry, you didn’t miss it. It was not a public concert. As part of our mandate as an organization we do a few concerts every year in seniors residences for the folks who live there. We packed a small hall in the facility and played an hours-worth of repertoire with only a couple small snafus—not that anyone would notice besides us—and put a lot of smiles on faces, which is a pretty slick way to start a Saturday… despite the long icy drive into downtown.

My migration away from caffeine tends to hit me pretty hard on quiet days like this when I’m not actively working on anything important. I made the mistake of putting on The Princess Bride (the second movie of the weekend, by the way) and I am one hundred percent certain I napped through half of it—but not a specific half, just fifteen minute chunks in fits and spurts. The dog didn’t move, either, cuddled up as she was next to me on the sofa.

I woke up and took her for a walk because the day had warmed up considerably. It’s pretty much spring now, but that only means that the cold has restricted itself to the shoulders of the day—not a problem unless you a morning or evening person.

We had a quiet evening and the Kid wanted us to watch a comedy special that she was enjoying. I think she does that sometimes, just to watch us watch something that she likes so that she can gauge how aligned we are with her frame of reference. That’s just speculation tho—and overthinking it. It was pretty funny.

Sunday morning I met the usual crew and we started the uphill push into more serious training. Winter tends to be a maintenance phase for us with anyone rarely doing serious racing between November and April. Spring means better trail conditions, of course, but also the clock suddenly ticking on everyone’s summer and fall race schedule. I haven’t signed up for anything yet—tho I really should—but I do my best to keep up with everyone who has something in their docket. In other words, we did my literal longest run of 2026 on Sunday morning which wasn’t particularly long in the grand scheme of things, but was long enough be considered a change from the so-called long runs we’ve been doing since about October. No problem. And of course, a coffee (tea for me) meetup followed as usual.

Our third movie of the weekend was the one everyone is talking about this month. We got tix to Project Hail Mary which came out on Friday and engaged with the zeitgeist of the film-going universe for the afternoon. I had read the book for the second time almost a year back, one of the first I tackled on my new (at the time) e-reader. It’s a great story, and they did an excellent job of turning it into a classic film that I’m sure I will probably buy on video and watch a dozen more times.

Going to the movies in the afternoon, tho, means that your evening feels a bit anti-climactic and so we had dinner and chilled on the sofa with the poor neglected dog (who did not get to come to the movie) and wondered what strange adventures awaited us in the week ahead.

March 23, 2026
japanese, part five

I’m Duolingo’d out.

I have long had an affection for the idea of this app. I was one of their early users, I cranked through the French lessons for well over a year-long streak back when I was commuting to work downtown on the train and would sit in a little bench seat and churn through verb conjugations and vocabulary lessons.

And then I stopped using it for a while. I burnt out a bit, and… well… that was that. Reflecting on why I stopped back then the reasons were pretty similar to how I’ve been feeling this past month or two.

See, last March, almost exactly a year ago I was enrolled in a University program for professional upgrading and I was able to get the student discount for a subscription to Duolingo again. I had been dabbling on my own in learning the Japanese character sets, and we were planning an autumn trip so I figured it would be fun to maybe learn a few words. Duolingo to the rescue, right?

I churned away, cranked through levels, and the app kept telling me, I was making great progress, scoring 100% lessons, and boom: I am a Japanese ace, or something.

This morning I hit my 365 day streak. One year of daily Japanese lessons, some days more robust than others of course, but a solid effort on the app nonetheless.

Am I fluent?

Well, um… that’s the thing.

Duolingo gets a lot of hate online, and the last thing I want to do is pile on. It’s been a good toy. It’s a fun distraction. It definitely motivates. And… well, again. A year is no measure of fluency, but I really have very little confidence in my ability to do much with Japanese beyond the little bit that I learned taking actual in person lessons last fall from a native Japanese speaker. I don’t give the app much credit for progress. It was there, always nagging, but something about it wasn’t sticking.

So, I’m taking a break from it… again.

Learning a new language is complex, and I think if I were to sit in a room with one of the big brains working behind the scenes at Duolingo I would probably hear about a vision that combined complex conversational AI with an easy to use app and motivational pushes to help people learn. And I suppose if I was willing to dump heaps of money into that version and spend a solid thirty minutes a day conversing with a bot and, oh, overlook the shady staffing practices that people talk about online with respect to Duolingo’s corporate owners, yeah, maybe I would work closer to fluency.

But the core product, the affordable and reasonable product that I am willing to pay for, is very much a half baked game and I no longer think it is doing anything for me in terms of moving closer to fluency with any reasonable speed. And upgrading—considering the aforementioned shady business stuff and also that I’ve just spent a year mostly spinning my metaphorical tires in the duolingo mud means I’m pretty burned out on pushing forward with this approach to learning Japanese.

There are other ways. I have books. I have flashcards. I have access to media and the internet to scrape together something that can’t do any worse than what I’m doing now.

Sayonara, Duo.

March 17, 2026
weekender, five

I am certainly not entirely keeping pace with my weekender updates, but to be fair a lot of recent weekends have been us just hiding from the cold weather and watching movies or playing video games for long stretches. We’ve also spent a lot of time in the basement sorting and cleaning because the Kid has signalled an interest in moving into the downstairs bedroom but that requires a lot of reorganization, painting, and a list of other interconnected and downstream effects related to clearing out that room so she can move in. In other words, if you haven’t heard from us it’s probably because we are in the basement clearing it up.

But we did get out on a date night on Friday night. I had bought tix for Karin for Christmas to the symphony—experiences not more stuff, right?—and the show was a trio of former Broadway divas on tour and singing musical hits in accompaniment with our local orchestra. It was solid.

Saturday was busy, but not for me.

The ladies had their morning fitness routines and I chilled with the dog.

And then it was prep for the annual dance studio gala event. This is our first year technically not being dance parents, though, even though Karin still takes some adult fitness classes there. Problem is that she was president of the parents society last year, so that means she is still loosely tied in the handover of the complex jobs of both transition and making sure all the know-how of running this big event get passed along to the next generation. She was over at the hall all afternoon helping with setup, and then they both ditched me to attend the show and dinner, the Kid going along to watch some of her friends dance.

I stayed at home and ordered a pizza (for Pi Day!) and cracked a beer for myself as I hunkered down with the dog and pushed through a couple episodes of the show I’ve been watching (Fallout). And then I retreated into the basement to noodle on my music stuff until well past eleven when the gals stumbled home.

I have this old amplifier stereo system with some reasonably good shelf speakers that have been sitting in my office gathering dust. All of it is well over twenty-five years old, though it still works. I (a) have been thinking that it was broken because the volume dial on the amp is finicky and (b) its very much got some old connections that don’t sync up with anything modern like HDMI or bluetooth or USB. But then I got to thinking: my music stuff doesn’t have modern connections either: it leans into standard audio jacks and the like. I dug through my box of old cables (you know, the kind every self respecting guy has in a closet) and managed to string an audio connection over to where my synth and pedals are setup, found the remote control at the back of the shelf and dusted off the equipment. It was damn near magical, filling the whole room and half the house with rumbling bass and wah-wahs of electric synth.

The next morning I met a few of the crew for our Sunday run. Various excuses—a fun run race, mostly—meant our little group was just three strong, but we logged ten klicks and even made it down into the snowy trails for a part of it.

Later that afternoon I was back down in the basement with my audio stuff out again, and had not only played for a solid hour or so with the synth but then realized that I also had the connections to hook up my iPhone to the audio cables. I put on some Pink Floyd and turned down the lights and just chilled. It was a vibe.

Of course, the Kid turned on the Oscars after dinner. I can’t say I ever care much to watch, usually because—as with this year—I haven’t seen many or any of the films yet. But we watched the whole damn thing, me mostly explaining the little nuggets that I understood about the voting process and the seat fillers and also trying to look up everything on our phones when we were like who-is-that and what-was-she-in-again?

If the weather reports are to be believed, the temperatures are about to do a one-eighty sometime today and perhaps even usher in a spring thaw. So, maybe next weekend—fingers crossed—I’ll get outside a bit more.

March 16, 2026

about

Welcome. I’m one of those weirdos who still writes a personal blog. In fact, I’ve been writing meandering drivel online for decades, and here you’ll find all my recent posts on writing, technology, art, food, adventure, running, travel, and overthinking just about anything and everything …since early 2021.

I write regularly from here in the Canadian Prairies about just about anything that interest me. Enjoy!

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