Practice

Wednesday night football is back! We apparently have enough players to field a team for the summer season, so it'll soon be time to play wacky races again to get to games on Wednedays after work (should I actually ever manage to secure employment again, that is). 

Because we've got several new players, the usual weekend football practice is upon us this afternoon, so it's time to steel myself for having multiple footballs whacked at me for two hours. New gloves were needed anyway, so I went out to the local football shop yesterday afternoon to find a reasonably priced pair for the outdoor season. A rude shock was in store. Pretty much every pair was $100+. (Cue HOW MUCH? joke) Are they made of gold nowadays or something? I found a pair that were a bit on the big side, but tolerably priced (tolerable in the sense that I made it disappear onto the credit card) . This pair has finger spines in, which is a first for me; it means bending the fingers backwards is very difficult, but maybe they'll reduce the number of finger injuries I seem to get these days...

The Running Man - Day 34

Almost a week late with this post. Last Sunday saw me hit the last target in my 8 week walk-to-run program, in which I ran for a continuous 30 minutes. I'm slightly disappointed with the distance and pace, but my legs were a bit dead after having to flee a much-too-close-for-comfort thunderstorm in terror last Saturday afternoon. That was really quite scary to be in, and it's comical to see on the pace chart just how much I speeded up in that last mile and a half. It came to pass that the legs were obviously a worn out and a bit stiff on the Sunday and so I ran marginally slower.

I've followed it up with a couple of runs on Tuesday and Thursday, but now we're into the proper summer weather, it's a bit hot during the day for running quickly. Still, it's been nice to complete the program, and I've decided I'll enter a local 10K race in September so I get a couple of weeks of just steady running before I have to start another 8 week program.

Flood

If you've been watching the news, up to 100,000 people who live in low-lying rivers in these parts have been evacuated due to flooding. Fortunately, Beige Towers is well uphill out of the river valley, and everyone I know is out of harms' way. 

Essentially, on top of an already very wet June, a month's worth of rainfall fell on the mountains in a day on Wednesday. Add that to the run off from previous rain, and the melting snow from the mountains meant that water had nowhere to go but into the Bow River, which has inundated pretty much every town on the river between here and the mountains. There is some doubt whether the rivers here have peaked yet, as the rain continues to fall to the west. As of right now, the Bow is roughly 2.5 m higher than it would normally be, and the Elbow is about five times its normal depth as the water overflows the dam at Glenmore Reservoir. I'll update the post with pictures as I find them.

Aerial gallery taken today from the Calgary Herald

Gallery from the National Post

Shaving and Saving.

Let's not beat around the bush: the cost of disposable razor cartridges is outrageous, compared to their actual cost (yes, even more than the cost of cheese over here). At one point, they were the most shoplifted item in the UK because of their retail price, which is why they're now locked up in special vending cases on both sides of the Atlantic. When you're an unemployment statistic, dangling in the wind while you hear back from a second interview at a company, you have to make the unemployment benefits go as far as they can. So I'm obviously not going to pay $30 for a set of 8 cartridges (which last a little more than a week each) when it'd cost more than my grocery bill some weeks. Two options presented themselves: electronic, or an old-fashioned razor. I had an electronic briefly when I was in school and didn't find it comfortable, so it was time to go old school instead; I ordered a double-edged safety razor on amazon last week.

Digression: I wish amazon.ca would give shoppers the option of choosing which courier they'd like, rather than it being a complete lottery. Internet shopping in this country is an aggravating business compared to back home. In particular, amazon.ca is a backward country cousin to its American and British relatives, in terms of service and range of goods available. I know part of that is the distances involved, but a merchant needs to supply the customer in the fashion most convenient to the customer, not the vendor. The razor arrived via UPS, who, as per usual, couldn't get in to the building, meaning I had to take a three hour round trip on public transport today up to UPS at the airport. Look at the box it came in, drowning in the amazon packing. What a waste of packing, stuffing, petrol in the delivery truck, and time (both mine and the UPS driver's). The small green box would have fit in my mail box through Canada Post several times over. Do better, amazon.ca

While the razor was on its way from Vancouver, I had a jaunt out on Sunday to buy the rest of the paraphernalia, having culled information from the internet about creams/soaps, and the best brands. Except for a shaving bowl, so I have to make do with an, er, IKEA shaving bowl. And when the razor arrived, it had the added bonus that it came from Sheffield. So in the pursuit of thousands of "Yorkshire points" in refusing to be fleeced by Gilette, I get to buy something from Yorkshire anyway. 

The razor is actually much shorter than your garden variety plastic disposable, but very much sharper blades and much heavier. The idea is that the weight of the head is sufficient to cut the beard, and your hand just has to guide. I only cut myself once on the first attempt, right on the jawline where I half expected to cut myself. The face is very smooth, but the neck is less good; the disadvantage a safety razor has is that the head isn't jointed, such that you have to contort your hand/wrist to maintain the right angle between skin and blade, and that's harder on your neck. The technique will come with time. The best bit about these sorts of razors: the cost of the blades; 100 of the blades this razor came with retail on ebay or amazon for about $15 (so 15 cents each instead of about $4 each for a cartridge). Score me about 50,000 Yorkshire points for not having to deal with Gilette possibly ever again. Crooks.

The Running Man - Day 30

I'm now into the last week of the running program. Last week and this both have five scheduled sessions in seven days. It got hard towards the end last week, and the legs are beginning to complain about it, but I finally ended up running under 9:00 per mile in all five days. 

Today was hard work, because I went out immediately after a thunderstorm and it was warm, sunny and humid; not a winning running combination. But today, I made it through the three mile mark before I had to stop for my 1 minute's walk (27 mins run, 1 min walk, 2 mins run). Saturday will see the full 30 minutes running, but it's nice to see my 3 mile times last week were reasonably consistent, even with a walking period in there: 27:03, 26:42, 26:53, 26:41 and 27:08. Today I took 26:55, but was going slowly in the third mile to conserve energy for the week ahead.

Double Trouble

A couple of months ago, HSBC Canada upgraded their website so it looked just like the one back in the UK. I facetiously remarked on twitter "I bet they introduce secure keys next". I wasn't a fan of my UK account having one since the first one became intermittently faulty almost instantly and it's a bit of a pain to have to get another one ordered from 4400 miles away. At least over here, we didn't have one.

And then when I was at the bank last Monday seeing the lovely Silvia to invest my savings that I transferred over here ten days ago, she mentioned (when she wasn't being interrupted by instant messenger messages from her boyfriend) that I'd need one, and that as of the 17th of the month I'd have to use one. Lo and behold, the 17th is here, and it needed activating. So now I have two of them. At least if the one on the left fails, I only have to go into town to get another.

The Running Man - Day 24

After a frankly terrible effort yesterday, something of a return to form today. I suppose, in hindsight,  that going out running in 25 degrees and a strong wind wasn't a good idea. Add that to the fact that I'd spent the afternoon wearing dress shoes after having been at a job interview; the robot leg really doesn't, for whatever reason, like wearing dress shoes. At all. Maybe it's due to lack of cushioning or something. 

 

I put the feeble performance down to dead legs from the long walk I had on Tuesday, and pondered whether to have today off and shift each remaining day in last two weeks of the plan back a day. And then this morning, I decided "no pain, no gain" or somesuch and decided to go out anyway. The graph on the right shows that I did 200m further than yesterday, in cooler temperatures and lower winds. Maybe yesterday's poor showing was the weather. Today was 19 minutes running, a minute walking, 10 minutes running. And for the first time I went coasting through the two mile running uninterrupted barrier without any difficulty. Consistent pace most of the way through, slightly faster when pushing at the end, no real grumbling from the legs. The final two weeks involve back-to-back-to-back efforts Monday to Wednesday, as well as Friday and Saturday. Two weeks from now I should have run 30 minutes without stopping.

Exchange

I finally severed all financial ties with the UK over the last two nights. The exchange rate between the dollar and pound - which has been in the toilet for approaching five years now - has never given much impetus for making the final transfer. But in the last couple of weeks, the rate has risen back to the level that I'd deem acceptable for a transfer. The rate hasn't been this high since Christmas, and before that sometime in 2010. It's all going to be squirreled away on Monday when I have another appointment at the bank to invest it in various vehicles, where it can hopefully work to offset the loss in the 2008 exchange rate and the ridiculous number of charges involved in transferring it over here. It's sod's law that the exchange rate is still going up right now as I write, though.

My UK account now has ten pounds in it, which is probably the least there's ever been in it since it was opened at some point in the 1990s. I pretty much don't exist over there now; not tax resident, no assets, no NI contributions, credit rating most likely disappeared, not on the electoral register.

The Walking Man

Today was supposedly an off day in the running plan. It says I have to do 30 minutes' easy walking, but I rarely do. Since it was actually a nice sunny day today, and not pouring with rain as it has done for much of the last three weeks, it was time to go for a walk. I plumped for the walk up to Nose Hill. At such time as I run for half an hour, this is going to be my once a week hill run; though not into the park itself, just back down the hill parallel to John Laurie Boulevard, in the loop you can see on the right. The park entrance is on the loop.

It's a mile uphill, a mile downhill, bookended by two miles of largely flat ground at either end. Back when I was learning to walk again after anklegeddon, this route was a regular. But I never went right to the top on the path, seeing as I didn't want to hospitalise myself again. Today was as good a day as any to break that duck, since I wasn't doing anything - again - due to the continuing situation of being studiously ignored by most chemical companies in town for 95% of the lab-related jobs that I apply for.

I didn't realise quite how long the walk is from the base to the viewpoint where you can see most of the city; it must have been well over a mile and took a good 25-30 minutes to get there, the last bit wandering through the scrub rather than on a path. I only realised half way through that bit that the university trap coyotes in animal traps up here so there was the possibilty of stepping in one. I found the path again lest I end up in hospital yet again. The pleasing thing is that it at least seems the running has done me some good; a near 7 mile round trip according to my phone at a reasonable pace. 

The view isn't done much justice at all with rubbish phone camera. Look how insignificant the downtown area looks at this distance, with flat ground for hundreds of miles in all directions to the south, north and east. It's a bit of a shame it was a bit cloudy and hazy; you can't really see the mountains behind the crafty shot of Beige Towers on the bottom right.

The Running Man - Day 20

So in the running adventure, we've now reached the point of only one minute walking. I thought when I planned this route out that it'd be plenty long enough, but it doesn't look like it. I'm going to have to extend it further somehow. It's nice to be able to get to Market Mall in ten minutes, but shopping whilst sweaty and panting might put off other shoppers.

Saturday's effort was the fifth run in six days; thanks to my timer applications failing on Monday, I had to repeat the course on Tuesday to make up for it. My leg was duly stiff this morning. Only three weeks to go now, and then I have to introduce my legs to running up hills. They don't like even the small hill as you leave Brentwood CTrain station to run past the Smart building, so goodness knows what they'll be like having to run a mile uphill to Nose Hill. It'll be good for the speed in the, er, long run.