Tag: Canada Day

2019 week twenty six

Book Read
None

Kilometres Ran
week twenty six – 44.6

2019 to date: 1,245 KM

Even with a long weekend in hand I come ill prepared to write something here. I’ve been thinking a lot about reading and writing about it and sometimes I think that maybe it would be interesting to write about some of the interesting stuff that I read each week that is not in a book, and maybe not be so fixated on reading a book a week so that I will have a book to write about every week. I actually do have a book that I just finished that I have a few things that I want to write about just not today. But maybe I’m just lazy.

With my laziness in mind and today being Canada Day I decided to House to Grouse which I totally thought was a thing except I didn’t see a single person I follow on Strava do it today so I began thinking that maybe I thought it up and somehow managed to forget that I thought it up. Then I went to a Canada Day BBQ this afternoon and someone there had also done House to Grouse today (and I “did it wrong” apparently) and I mean I really should have known because “House to Grouse” is kind of a bit too clever for me to have thought up even accidentally. All that to say that this morning I woke up and biked (aka “did it wrong”) up to Grouse Mountain and then did the Grouse Grind and then biked back home. And it was fun. I mean, there was a section climbing up Nancy Greene Way when I thought, “this was a stupid idea.” But I was wrong because right now it feels sort of gratifying to have done it.

I’ve written I don’t know how many times on here about my terrible luck with race photos and wouldn’t you know it lightning struck again when I got my Marathon Photos from last Sunday’s Scotiabank Half Marathon. I flipped through the deck and as usual most are terrible and the others are just meh. Then I got an email from the race organizers Canada Running Series saying one of my photos was free! I figure that I would see what I could do with the least terrible one. However, I don’t get to choose my least terrible photo. Instead, Marathon Photos chose the free one for me. Have a look at the selection below and see if you can guess which one is my free photo.

As you can tell from the watermarks, I didn’t even bother downloading the free photo. Then I was on social media somewhere and found Dave Mallari who is a local photographer and he’d set himself up at around the 20KM point on the course and posted an album to his website. I had a look for anyone who I might know, not expecting to find me because I’ve already beaten the dead horse named Todd’s Photo Luck (it’s a weird name) and then I found this photo and I like it a lot and it’s so much better than any one from Marathon Photos so I gave Mallari my money instead.


week twenty six

Books Read:
40. Oryx and Crake — Margaret Atwood

Kilometres Ran:
this week — 33.52
to date — 917.23

For the life of this journal I’ve posted books that I’ve read and I’ve linked them to where you can buy them and I always try to link back to the publisher especially since a lot of what I read comes from small presses and they deserve the tiny, utterly insignificant amount of traffic that I might in some parallel universe provide. And sometimes I read a book that really doesn’t need any help. Like this one. So I’ve decided that when I post such a title, from now on I’ll like to a good indie/used bookstore and you’ll have to click the link to see which one. But don’t worry, there’s no chance that we’re going to crash any websites with this little endeavor. And I’ll always set to open in a new tab, because websites that don’t do that are jerks. Yeah especially you, Wikipedia. I said last week that I was looking forward to reading Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue but instead I read Oryx and Crake and saved The Queue for next. I really liked this book and I’m interested in continuing the series. I thought Jimmy/Snowman was likeable. I did not like how things unfolded with Jimmy and Oryx and Crake at the end of the book; it felt rushed or something, and unfulfilling. Like when I finally finished the main storyline in Fallout 4 today and sort of went, huh, put down the controller and started reading The Queue.
week twenty six
I spent the long weekend visiting family in Victoria, which meant another 10 kilometre jaunt by Beacon Hill Park and out along The Breakwater around the lighthouse at the end and then back to Clover Point. And on Canada Day no less. I expected a nightmarish crowd of people, but the weather wasn’t all that great, so the strollers were rather thin. I never noticed before that the beach below the Terry Fox Mile Zero monument is named for Steve Fonyo. It doesn’t ever show up on Google Maps. I just noticed a little sign as I ran down Waterfront Trail. I don’t know why that’s significant. It probably isn’t.