works of wanderlust

  • fifty walks, walk four

    fifty walks, walk four

    I’m going to (mostly) skip over the part where the straight face I mentioned in my last walking post re:spring fell and we had another few days of chilling winter weather.

    Instead, I just jump right into the idle decision that the day had improved enough that I’d just keep walking when I set out on a cool Monday morning in late April. My first three walks had been long loops that had led right back to my front door, but for walk four I had wanted to try out a new plan: a straight shot walk from A to B.

    And what better place to act as my test-case B than West Edmonton Mall where I could find fun, food, and an easy bus ride back home?

    The Route

    We live in the South. The Mall, as the name implies, is in West Edmonton.

    There is a river in between us.

    I set out to find one of the few crossings that was not completely out of my way here, which took me down into the dog park and towards the pedestrian footbridge. I still think of it as the new bridge. It opened about ten years ago which is hardly new, but also means it was built after I moved to the neighbourhood and found myself frequenting the park… so, new-er. 

    A good half of the walk was through the wilderness of winding trails that took me from the nearby park access trails, down across the bridge, across a long stretch of trail across an open field and towards the 200-step step climb that is the Wolf Willow Stairs.

    From there I meandered through the neighbourhood, crossed another pedestrian-only bridge to hike over the Whitemud freeway, dodged through the last stretch of urban chaos and found myself crossing through a construction zone and into the parking lot of what was once the biggest shopping mall in the universe.

    I stopped my watch at almost exactly 11 km and 2 hours and 27 minutes. This means across four walks I have logged 43.65 km total and nearly ten hours of walking.

    The Effort

    I mentioned the stairs.

    I mentioned the newly minted fifth or six iteration of spring… I’ve honestly lost count.

    There was still patches of snow on the path in many places, and climbing in and out of the river valley in such conditions was never going to be a traditional walk in the park. It’s a long haul made perceptually longer by the fringes of intolerable conditions. Other than that, I really don’t have much to complain about. No bugs. No wind. And the sun just warm enough to fight off the chill without forcing me to strip down to stay cool.

    Navigating the construction going on up around the Mall—which has been happening for like three or four years at this point—as they bring an elevated LRT track through an established neighbourhood, past the hospital (where I was born) and alongside the busiest parking lot in Western Canada… that was less of a pain that I would have anticipated.

    And then I hopped into the Mall, had an expensive lunch, and found my way over to the bus loop to catch a ride back to the vicinity of my starting spot—and my couch.

    The Highlight

    The stairs are the obvious highlight: I hate climbing them, but the view is amazing, looking down the length of the twist and turn in the river, spanning back over the scenery I’d just traversed.

    On the other hand, and I don’t know if it counts properly because I’d already stopped my watch, but a dude was arrested on the bus. Two bus cops pulled him off and cuffed him and made a bit of a scene. They were telling him it was fare evasion, but I’ve never seen them full-on arrest someone for what is usually a minor ticket: there is probably a bigger story there. Maybe less of a highlight than a low point: ah, West Edmonton Mall, you never disappoint.

  • media: love, robots & cowboys

    media: love, robots & cowboys

    In between writing code and going for walks I have found a moment here and there to hunker down and keep checking off items from my epic science fiction streaming list.

    In the last couple months there has been something of a theme as I spent a month or so in the far future and the world of Asimov’s crumbling galactic empire before clambering back to the nearer future threats of rogue AI entertainment bots.

    streaming: westworld, seasons 1 & 2

    Reboots are a funny thing. After watching them for a while I always get the urge to go back and find the source material that inspired the reboot.  In the case of Westworld the television science fiction epic that spanned four seasons, it is based on a 1973 movie of the same name written by none other than Michael Crichton, you know, of Jurassic Park fame.  No surprise, because it’s damn near the same premise: man creates beast, man creates theme park based on beast, man is destroyed by his creation. In the case of Westworld, though, the beast in question is quasi-sentient AI robot cowboys in an old west theme park where rich folks cosplay their old west fantasies… until the robots fight back. We watched (most of) this show back when it was still quite new, and I had the seasons sitting in my library taunting me for two reasons: one, I kinda always wanted to do a rewatch, and two, we gave up after season three and I never saw the end (even though reports are that it never quite clambered back up to the quality of the first season… does it ever tho?). Such are the draws of tepid spring days, and I found myself recently binging through the first couple seasons, no small feat given that multiple episodes are movie-length and clocking each season well over ten hours of intense blood, gore and horny robot dramatics wrapped around some intense philosophical exploration on the meaning of consciousness theory of mind mind games. I really need to watch that ’73 flick to see how much of this overlaps. My experience on a second run through though was not quite how I remembered enjoying the show back in the late twenty-teens. This kind of storytelling often relies on mystery reveals to drag the plot forward. This great, don’t get me wrong, when the audience is seeing something intense and weird for the first time. It can pull reluctant watchers through thick plots and convoluted treatises on the nature of reality while they try to figure out who’s who and what’s what. On the second watch tho, the big spoilers have already been drained of all their impact and the only thing I could rely on (personally, say) is that my memory from watching these nearly ten years ago was a little washed over and unreliable. I always knew something was fishy, or that such and such a character didn’t make the casting call for season three, but getting there was only half as fun as the first time besides. If you haven’t ever watched Westworld it is worth the trip. To ask if it holds up in 2026 when we are now ten years closer to sentient robots and some of these weird questions are less hypothetical as we chatbot our vibes with our phones each night, well, that’s just a silly question.

    streaming: foundation, season 3

    I met R. Daneel Olivaw when I was in grade eight and my best friend at the time bought me a paperback copy of Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel as a birthday gift. It was my introduction to hard science fiction that wasn’t Star Trek, and my first glimpse at the fantastic future worlds created by Asimov filled with galactic imperialism, sentient robots and mind-bending philosophies. The bridge into his Foundation series was not a far leap. Nor is the comparison to Star Trek, especially since this modern adaptation for Apple TV was apparently produced and (often) directed by Roxann Dawson, better know to many as half-Klingon engineer B’Elanna Torres on Star Trek: Voyager, another favourite of mine. And she done good, too. Foundation was long considered unfilmable. I suspect this partly due to the fantastic special effects, but anyone who has read Foundation will immediately know the real reason: the books break all the rules of fiction writing (yet somehow work) because they are literally just long conversations between people, usually sitting in offices, discussing strategic politics in the same way two opponents might have discussed a chess match hours later over a cup of coffee. Film that! Yawn. Luckily they took a different approach. I mention Daneel because (spoiler alert) the character finally emerges as part of the lore of the world recreated in this series (as happened in the books, too) in late season three with the same sort of adapted-for-the-screen sensibility that has followed this entire adaptation. Most of the complaints I had read were about this type of fuzzy interpretation of the source material, but those critiques were usually leaving out the part that Foundation was a serialized series of novellas written by a white immigrant in the 1950s who was telling a different kind of story and needed to get his work published in a deeply racially divided America. (Oh, how times have changed, huh? /s) Gender swapping certain characters, adding a realistic portrayal of a far future society far less concerned about skin pigmentation than ours, and focusing on the bigger themes of the story were only slightly jarring, and only because I had read (and listened to) this book so many times I needed to flux my perception into a new alignment, and yet not a bad one. It was a wonderful take on the story and brought the world to life in a way that I think even Asimov would have marvelled at. It’s just too bad it’s locked up on Apple’s streaming platform and I cancelled my subscription else I’d probably start over and watch it all again.

  • fifty walks, walk three

    fifty walks, walk three

    One of these days I’ll be able to tell you it is actually spring and keep a straight face.

    Once again my rhythm of walks was temporarily interrupted by a resurgence of winter. I don’t want to suggest I’m incapable of winter walking, but two things happen when we get a fresh batch of spring snow following a nearly complete thaw. First, every sidewalk and trail is a fresh slog for a day or two, and that’s not even considering that a spring blizzard is often just that… a blizzard, cold blasting, wind blowing, bout of bad weather. Second, for a day or two after the blizzard every path is a giant puddle, every trail is mud, and every route is an obstacle course. 

    If we do end up pushing this fifty walk challenge into November I will be walking through settled snow and shovelled trails as people come off a fresh summer and autumn refresher.

    Either way, I walked my third adventure stroll of this thing I’m doing which is trying to log fifty long walks around my world before my fiftieth birthday in November.

    The Route

    I didn’t know exactly where I was going when I left, but I started walking east. We are in this kind of corner of the city where there is the river to the west and the freeway to the south and kind of the rest of the city to the east and north.  There is city south and west of us, too, but it involves traversing the aforementioned river and freeway.

    So I walked east, which is really nothing new. I walk east all the time… but I usually turn back shortly after going east and don’t really go all that far. 

    Instead I just followed the path.  And then the sidewalk. And then I found myself traipsing over the freeway on the only bridge for a stretch of ten kilometres with a pedestrian sidewalk, wherein I found myself outside the suburbs and in the outer suburbs and very nearly in an exurb, which was just fine by me because there was a place to grab some lunch. I was a little more than an hour into the walk at this point.

     After lunch I ran out of sidewalk. 

    Well, strictly speaking I did some math and realized I was turning this unplanned stroll into a fifteen klick route unless I made some adjustments. I hiked across a school playground shortcutting the route a bit, pushing into the neighbourhood and finding the quasi-secret entrance to a very special place: a freeway crossing access.

    The Effort

    As I write this there are two giant heaps of graded fill straddling the freeway where (presumably this summer or sometime soonish) the planned pedestrian bridge will cross the freeway connecting our neighbourhood-ish with the commercial shopping area south of the busy road.  See, the planning department dropped the ball for pedestrians in the southwest corner of the city.

    Between the highway and the river, a space marked by say the six o’clock and eight o’clock positions on the city-as-a-clock-face and a stretch of about ten klicks there are exactly two official ways for pedestrians to cross the freeway, and one of those is pretty much at six o’clock.

    The other one took me four kilometres of walking to get to from my front door.

    There are two unofficial crossings, too: one is the graffiti tunnel (aka the oculus) which involves following an unmarked gravel path, walking down an abandoned stretch of road, climbing down a steep dirt hill, and finding what amounts to a giant culvert that was constructed nearly twenty years ago with some vague intention to hook it up to the city trails (which never happened) but which now dumps one out into a grassy field alongside a busy road, where one can walk up the shoulder for about five hundred meters to find the dead-ending trail which drops one onto the south side of the freeway.

    The second is the one I took, and it involves going to the far back corner of a neighbourhood, ignoring a number of warning signs, clambering down a rough path, walking through some muddy single track trail and climbing back up a steep gravel hill to where the trail system-proper connects to the pedestrian bridge suspended under the eastbound lane of the freeway. From there one is in the river valley trail system on the interior of the ring-road freeway and (at least in my case) a short walk from my house.

    That aforementioned pair of dirt heaps is an active construction project to build a third official crossing. I’m confident I’ll get to try it before I turn sixty.

    The Highlight

    I want to tell you that I did some serious exploring on this walk but I only really had a short stretch of new ground covered. These are not trails I travel often, and honestly I’ve never before walked this route. Run it, yeah. But walked? No.

    And it was just on the fringes of being walkable, too. 

    No spring maintenance has been done yet and the paths under the bridge as I was nearing the end of my route were spongy and wet.

    I did get a hint that the beavers had been out recently with lots of freshly gnawed trees to be seen along that stretch of trail, and it was great to see plenty of others out on the trails on bikes, running and enjoying the warm weather.

    I had to pull my jacket off half way through so that I was not drenched in sweat from the heat.

    In the end this walk comfortably hit my target distance, clocking in at 11.5km in 2 hours and 28 minutes. This brings my grand walking total for my first three walks up to 7 hours and 20 minutes for 32.65 km. If only I could monetize that my feet would earn me some serious cash, huh?

  • twenty-five

    twenty-five

    I’m gonna go on about this all day and probably longer, but today—as I write these words and post them on April 20, 2026—is my blogiversary. 

    On April 20, 2021, I was sitting in a hot little studio apartment in mainland Vancouver having just moved out there for work and I decided to write an email back to some of the folks back in Alberta—family and school friends, you know how it goes—and at some point (as I am wont to do,) I went down the metaphorical rabbit hole and well… I started a blog instead.

    There was no software to do that, of course, at least not that I had figured out yet, and so I hand-coded the whole damn thing, and wrote raw HTML for a few months worth of posts that followed.

    That started twenty-five years ago today.

    Today, where now I sit with a half dozen WordPress installations, a personal plugin repo, and a career built on making websites, that all looks quaint. Crazy. But it kickstarted a lifestyle. There’s no other good word for it.

    Oh sure. Those old, old, old posts and the first sixteen years of my blog are all archived offline. Alas, most of it was pretty stupid (not that what I post here is all that much better, even if it is often more tastefully considered) but I did write and write and write millions of words over that span and share them with an audience that was as enthusiastic for fresh blog … in kinda the same way that most of the world is currently grooving on doomscrolling their social feeds in 2026. Blogging was a thing back then. It was the way. It was the beating heart of the internet.

    Yeah, now blogs are a bit old school, but back when I started this unpaid gig I was twenty-four going on twenty-five, and and that was twenty-five years ago which (math nerds, go!) makes me forty-nine going on fifty today. Shifting over to a tiktok account or trying groove with you all on the socials was never going to be my speed. So, a few years back I doubled-down on the blog and now I write and write and write more words here and there and other places to keep up the digital patter of a well-blogged life. 

    Why?

    I have figured out exactly two reasons why this has stuck with me.

    One, I like to write and so writing something immediate and personal has always been a great way to hone those skills. It’s a warm up for more serious writing. It’s a habit. It’s a personal public diary of sorts. It’s practice. It feels like I have accomplished something.

    Two, it makes me actually do stuff. People tell me I am weirdly active and exploratory of a countless list of activities, hobbies, and projects. They are not wrong. But it’s not some attention disorder or curiosity overload, so much as the doing of those things and the writing about those things have been so deeply entangled it is almost a kind of chicken and egg problem at this point. Rather, I would actually argue that a lot of my curiosity manifests from a drive to have interesting things to write about. I’m not so much writing about the things I’m doing …as I am writing and looking for things to write about. I’m busy doing stuff mostly because I maintain this public accountability log that drives me to dabble and play and make and to become and stay interesting enough to write about.

    But whatever the reason, it’s been twenty five years. A lot has changed. A lot has not. And figuring out the whys and wherefores will be something I do until I post my last post. (This is not that post.) Stay tuned. The next twenty-five is sure to be really interesting… or something.

  • weekender, eight

    weekender, eight

    Spring actually seems to have arrived this past weekend. I’m going to regret writing that in a week when we get another late-season blizzard that clogs up traffic for a couple days, but between going for a walk in a t-shirt and running in shorts and considering moving the tomato plants outside for a few hours each day going forward, it’s definitely getting closer to spring.

    Friday evening we went to the mall. We never go to the mall on a Friday night, and I don’t remember the last time we visited West Edmonton Mall and stayed past closing. But the kid works there now and we offered to come give her a ride home so she didn’t need to take the sketchy bus at half past nine in the evening. So, the mall it was, and by the time we got home that was that for our evening.

    I woke up early on Saturday (I mean who sleeps in anymore? well, besides mostly everyone) and had this very clear vision for a wordpress plugin. What a nerd, you are saying, and you would be right to say so. But I spent about three hours bringing that vision to life via a mix of vibe coding and bug squashing and crazy testing. Now I have a automated posting buffer built into this very blog for pinging off a variety of scheduled and random messages to Bluesky and Mastodon social media networks. It works pretty slick, but also kinda reminds me why I don’t bother much with social media to begin with. Sigh.

    Karin and I took the middle part of the day to do chores. We sold a bunch of our old LEGO to a local second hand LEGO store (there is really a whole store for that nearby) and then took most of that money to go buy house paint. It’s all part of the same project as the Kid plans to move into the basement, possibly as soon as this week. It’s been cleaning and sorting and selling and cleaning and shuffling and soon painting. Then it will be a lot of moving.  All of it to give the Kid, now adult, some of her own space with a couple sets of stairs between her and her parents.

    We stopped on the way home and bought a whole tray of chicken wings, which I fried up in the deep fryer along with a batch of homemade fries. It was not a healthy dinner, but it was pretty tasty. C&A came by to play games and drink beer, but mostly to join us to go watch EF doing a figure skating competition at the rec centre nearby. We were out being social until well past our bedtime and then walked home in the still-warmish spring air.

    Sunday I did my run, of course. I personally logged twelve klicks as I continue to build to my half marathon in August. I say personally because were at the scattered training phase where one group of ten people running together somehow logs about five different distances as people add on, drop back, start early, bail out, or whatever. Either way, we all met for coffee after. Well, I drank tea, but we’ll pretend.

    The afternoon was a bit of a drag as we dove into our taxes. I doubt any ‘mercuns are reading this, but our taxes aren’t due for a few days yet so we’re not quite late—though with my tangled mess of incomes, having gone back to school briefly for upgrading last year and the kid now a real ‘dult with a real income and going to school and cashing out some registered educational savings… well, it wasn’t quite a standard fill in the blanks year for us.

    The gals ran off to do their pilates class mid way through and I took a break from the numbers, to play some music, but the evening chilled out a little as we had dinner and settled into just hanging out. Heck, if every weekend were this busy I’d need a vacation from my vacation.

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!

There are currently 470,195 words in 608 posts.

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