works of wanderlust

  • synthnaholic

    synthnaholic

    I have been playing so much music lately. 

    It was almost two weeks ago when my new MIDI-controller arrived. I had ordered it over the long weekend and thinking it would be shipped later that week, trekked across country on a slow freight truck, sorted and maybe delivered within two weeks—well, I lowered my expectations. 

    It got packed up from a store that had stock on the north side of town, put on a FedEx van the next day and was at my house less than 48 hours later. It was crated in an old Fender guitar box and the lady driving the courier van announced “your new guitar is here!” when I opened the door and seemed ready to come inside, help me set it up and jam. I can’t tell if she was disappointed when I told her it was a keyboard.

    I wasn’t.

    I had bought a very small and basic MIDI controller a few months back, but it was the literal lowest end model by the same company. It was the vanilla 25 key model with nothing but a USB port and a couple simple UI buttons. It scratched the itch for a while, but only really proved to me that I wanted something a little more robust.

    I bought instead 61 key fuller featured model with enough adjacent functionality to keep me busy trying to learn both the tool and the technique—you know, how to actually play the piano—for a few years.

    So yeah… between that and the violin music which I need to be practicing for, um, that upcoming concert next month, my days have been very musical.

    A MIDI controller is basically just a piano that doesn’t make any of its own sounds. Its guts are limited to sending signals—MIDI, or Musical Instrument Digital Interface signals—down a cable to a computer or synth. I have been dabbling in both, and the controller itself came with a list of software encompassing about twenty-five hundred instruments. Each of those twenty-five hundred instruments has enough creative potential to keep me curious and exploring for hours, days, weeks, or even months so I’ve got a lot of ground to cover.

    And I have been learning the piano, too. Being able to read music, again, helps. I have a couple decades of poking mindlessly at the ivories to back it up, but I’ve focused on working through a technique book and methodically trying to learn hand positions, chords, and articulation. Maybe a fools errand at (nearly) fifty, but I’m having fun.

    Of course, I can also plug the controller into the synth. The more advanced model of controller that I bought pairs right up and lets me go much, much deeper on that instrument now that I have a proper keyboard UI for it. Where the software instruments are largely sampled software sounds, the synth is actually generative tones that are created by manipulating raw sound waves through cycling envelopes and filters, wiggling them around with FM passes and modulating it all across a dynamic and configurable matrix of dynamic adjustments. The synth is like hunting for audio in an infinite sea of changing variables, and making music from the result.

    All that is to say, I have been playing a lot of sounds in my office, and it is beginning to feel more and more like music.  And I’m having a helluva good time, too.

  • weekender, seven

    weekender, seven

    I think spring might actually be here.

    I was pretty tired Friday evening because I had gone on my long adventure walk that morning (and into the afternoon) and was feeling the weight of it in my legs for most of the rest of the day. 

    We celebrated the Kid’s first paycheque at her new job by going out for burgers: nothing too fancy, just the local Five Guys, but it hit the spot and saved me from standing in the kitchen cooking all evening.

    Saturday I made it to the pool and swam some laps. I don’t usually go on the weekends because its often insanely busy. I made an exception and knuckled through the insanity because the Kid needed a ride to the rec centre anyways and my other option was sitting around with the dog.

    I hadn’t mentioned it here, but I bought a bigger midi controller last week. I had got a little trial one to see if I liked it. That was a couple months ago, and it was small—only 25 keys—and as it turns out not really good for learning to play the piano. I enjoyed it and had some fun with it and I’ll still pull it out and use it for stuff (it was less than a hundred bucks anyhow) but it wasn’t scratching the keyboard synth itch.  So I bought a 61-key version and set it up on my desk wired into my stereo system and computer and pretty much any time I don’t account for here—hours and hours it turns out—was probably me playing chords and jamming through my sheet music collection.

    I made a shrimp pasta dish for dinner on Saturday and we chilled for most of the evening.

    Sunday I woke up and met the crew to run. One of the women who ran with us often for years, EG, had taken some time off for injury and then had a baby, and she showed up with the kid and a running stroller. We had about ten people out to start and ran a respectable eleven klicks. I took my turn pushing the stroller. 

    I made the mistake of putting on a mismatched pair of shoes. I can’t recall myself ever doing that before, but it happened because I was in a rush to meet everyone and they were both black… just very different vintages. Not recommended.

    I ran over to the grocery store to buy the ingredients for a peanut butter pie and then came home to make that. It was our contribution to dinner.

    Our plans to do some house clean up chores were interrupted when our neighbour invited us over for tea and cake, and we caught up with her. It’s funny how you can live next door to someone for years and then go months without much more than waving as you pass in your vehicles. 

    We went from one social event to the next, heading over to C&As for the aforementioned dinner, pie in hand, and hung out there chatting. We were planning our summer camping and hiking trips and made some progress with that—though we think we may be sitting out most of the overnight parts and just doing the hiking this year. Darn those creaky knees.

    And to wrap up the weekend, the Kid, who is now done classes and should be studying for finals, took a break and was out on Whyte until 2am… so you can probably imagine just how well her poor dad was sleeping last night, right?

  • fifty walks, walk two

    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.

  • fifty walks, walk one

    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.

  • weekender, six

    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.

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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