I cannot express to y’all…
…how much I LOVE HIM
There was one bag of the Cheeky Cheddar Munchies at Fresh Co so I bought it in order to have a physical version of this cheesy bro in my office for all eternity. Here is the front of said bag:
Edit: THERE IS A WEBSITE
Edit 2: THERE IS A .GIF
The others are cute, but Cheese Man is untouchable.
(Also, I did July’s 50k today because I figure the rest of the month is just going to get hotter.)
(Super exciting.)
I AM LOSING MY MIND
LOOK AT THIS LITTLE CHEESE MAN
This is the CUTEST THING I HAVE EVER SEEN OH MY GOD
I
AM
C R Y I N G
The other flavors have different iterations of the little dudes on them, but he is by far the best one.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
The Bow: List Edition
Super boring to everyone who’s not up here, but:
ITEM ONE: they’ve finally fixed the path that got washed away in The Great 2024 Calgary Water Main Break last June.
The geese are mad because that was a prime “eat ALL the grass” spot.
ITEM TWO: we just got hella rain (Friday and Saturday were the rainiest days Calgary’s seen since the 2013 flood) and the Bow is really muddy and fast right now. Ignore my terrible camera skills.
END!
I Love Calgary
It’s super pretty. Proof:
I took like seven of these pictures and this is the one that had the fewest bird bombs in it. But alas, it is still a non-zero number of bird bombs.
GET OUT.
Relentlessly Mammalian
(Blame my husband for the title.)
TWO THINGS TODAY:
One: we’re in a little mini heatwave up here and it was supposed to get up to like 86 or something today. So I decided to do my first night run of the year last night. I think the last time I did a night run was around Halloween last year, so it’s been a while. I like not having to put on sunscreen and being able to run down the middle of the road without much threat of cars, but I’m also more limited route-wise (I am NOT doing the creepy Bowness Park nonsense this year, sorryz) and I do just like being out during the day. Also, the nights are relatively warm if it’s hot enough for me to be night running.
Two: My mom, Nate, and I watched Captain America: Brave New World last night. It’s pretty sad that everyone seems conditioned to hate everything Marvel has put out since Endgame; I thought this one was pretty solid. It definitely had one of the best post-Endgame action sequences with the battle over Celestial Island:
Really good choreography in my opinion. Love the shots at 1:26, 2:11, 2:46, and 3:31.
DONE!
Bottom Eyelashes
The one single facial feature of mine that I don’t ABSOLUTELY DESPISE?
My eyelashes.
Well, sorta.
They’re naturally very dark and long. The ones on my left eye piss me off because there are like three lashes that grow in a different way than the rest, but in general, they’re like the one part of my body that doesn’t disgust me constantly.
Anyway, when I wear mascara, I typically just put it on my upper lashes. Why? Because my lower lashes are basically the same length as my upper lashes and so when I put mascara on both the lower and upper lashes it looks like I shoved a handful of spider legs into my eye. Observe:
That just looks weird to me.
(Sorry, I have nothing else to blog about today, haha.)
Nostalgic Item!
Heyooooooooo so this is totally random, but here is a little music box that I’ve had since I was a kid:
It’s pretty old and beat up now and half the sticker on the back is torn off, but I was able to Google it and found out that it’s an Otagiri music box from the 1970s. While it looks like there are quite a few near-new versions of this out there that you can buy from eBay, Etsy, etc., I wanted to put a recording of mine up here just in case it ever breaks. Plus, it’s super cute. And don’t we always want a super cute topic for a blog post?
Anyway.
You can hear how old it is, hahaha.
I need to know…
…the story behind these little decals that are plastered all over the sidewalks in Inglewood.
They’ve been there for a while now – since about the time they closed the section of the river path that runs through the start of Inglewood, forcing walkers/runners/cyclists to go through Inglewood proper to get back to the rest of the river path – but I’m still curious about the cause.
Was there one hooligan runner that was like shoving past walkers on the sidewalk?
Was there a particularly aggressive running group that didn’t want to share the sidewalk?
Was there a particularly angry walker and/or resident who didn’t like runners going through the neighborhood and made a big enough stink to make them stick these decals everywhere?
I’ve run through Inglewood quite a few times since they closed the path, but I don’t think I ever did anything to warrant this. So hopefully it wasn’t me, haha.
There are also signs stating that runners are encouraged to use the southside sidewalk, so…something must have happened.
I’m just curious.
Back to Calgary
I’M BACK IN CALGARY
I DON’T WANT TO BE HERE RIGHT NOW
I WANT ANOTHER WEEK+ IN MOSCOW
LALALALALALA THROW ME IN THE BOW
An Experiment (or, “What I Think About During a 26-Mile Run”)
So for anyone who is unaware, there is a bike/pedestrian path between Moscow and Pullman called the Bill Chipman Palouse Trail. Completed in 1998, it is an approximately seven mile long trail that starts near the intersection of Bishop Boulevard and Main Street in Pullman and ends at the intersection of the Pullman-Moscow Highway and Perimeter Drive in Moscow. A decade or so (?) ago, a little scale model of the solar system was set up on the Moscow side, where the sun was placed at the terminal end of the trail and each planet was placed an appropriate distance from this little model sun, ending with Pluto and the other dwarf planets near Warbonnet Drive.
This gives you a good idea of the distance between all the planets, but as I was running this morning, I wondered what this model would look like if it extended the entire length of the trail. That is, if the sun was placed where it currently is (at the Moscow end), but Pluto and the other dwarf planets were placed at the Pullman end, how would the spread of the planets look over these seven miles?
So I made a map! This is what that model would look like with the sun at the “mile 0” marker and Pluto/dwarfs at the “mile 7″ marker. Distances:
- Mercury: 0.069 miles from the sun
- Venus: 0.128 miles from the sun
- Earth: 0.177 miles from the sun
- Mars: 0.269 miles from the sun
- Jupiter: 0.922 miles from the sun
- Saturn: 1.698 miles from the sun
- Uranus: 3.403 miles from the sun
- Neptune: 5.334 miles from the sun
- Pluto/dwarfs: 7 miles* from the sun
And a picture, because that makes it so much easier to see.
I think that gives an even better representation of the vast distances between those outer planets. Also, it’s kind of cool that the Washington-Idaho border sits where the Asteroid Belt would be.
WOO!
*This is super approximate; there are obviously several inaccuracies when doing this in Google Maps in terms of getting the exact distances along that trail, AND I don’t remember if the “Pluto” marker is based on Pluto’s average distance from the sun, the average distance of the mentioned dwarf planets, or on something else.
Oh, Moscow.
It’s good to see that Moscow is still weird.
For the most part.
It’s not as weird as it used to be, but it’s still got its weird moments.
Anyway.
Every time I come back here, it always blows my mind how close everything is. I can walk basically anywhere in town within a maximum of, like, 45 minutes. I could hit all three major grocery stores (Rosauers, Safeway, Winco) quite easily on one trip. I can’t say the same thing about the three closest grocery stores to us in Calgary (Safeway, Save-On, FreshCo…I think).
Also, I love how I can just doodily-doo across four lanes of traffic without even a threat of getting mowed over because there’s nobody on the road. Again, can’t do that in Calgary. You can barely do that on a one-way back street in Calgary.
I haven’t walked through campus yet, but I’m sure I will before I head back up north.
CH-CH-CH-CHANGES
(I think I’ve used this title before.)
(Anyway.)
I’ve walked around Moscow a few times now and have run to and from Pullman a few times now as well, so here are some observations about stuff that’s changed since the last time I’ve been here:
- The Gambino’s billboard that you could see as you drive into Moscow from Pullman is now a billboard for JackJack’s Diner. I’m pretty sure that Gambino’s billboard has been there since I was born, so that’s pretty sad.
- That new Home Depot seems really out of place. Is that just me? Why is it there?
- HOW THE HELL DID SHARI’S CLOSE IT’S A 24-HOUR RESTAURANT IN A COLLEGE TOWN
- The Palouse Mall is now called…The Palouse Place? So it says on the doors, at least. Odd news.
- That big farm house with the white fence right along the Chipman Trail between mile markers 2 and 1 on the way to Pullman? The family that has lived there forever must have moved, because their little “population” sign is gone and the “GO COUGS” lights are gone as well.
- Edit: Yeah, they must be gone. That little dome thing no longer says “Siggie Dome” on it.
- I haven’t actually been in the mall yet because it always makes me sad (it’s not what it used to be), but my mom told me that Rite Aid is basically just selling stuff until it’s gone and then they’re going to close. Rite Aid was always a fun store to go to for me when I used to go to the mall with my dad. I bought my first eyeshadows there. They had the one type of journal that I always used for school. They had Ring Pops. Life is sadness.
- Prices at Walmart don’t seem to have gone up to the same degree as the prices at Winco.
Thanks, Mongolian BBQ!
This is actually hilarious.
“Everything’s going to work out!”
…
“Except those lucky numbers. You ain’t gettin’ those.”
Today involved:
Twenty miles of running.
Five pitas.
Two hours of sleep.
One can of Monster.
And a partridge in a pear tree.
(I am a responsible adult, I swear.)
(I made sure to drink the Monster while I had the pitas.)
Two Wiki Words
Hey y’all.
Two quick Wikipedia articles today because I happened across both of them in search of…something very different, haha.
FIRST UP: Cyanometer
It’s an “instrument for measuring “blueness” and was initially developed to measure the color intensity of blue in the sky.
Why does it exist?
Because humans are weird little creatures who like to quantify everything.
Because one of its creators, Horace-Benedict de Saussure, believed that the color of the sky was dependent on the amount of particles suspended in the atmosphere, and differing shades of blue corresponded to different approximate amounts of particles.
SECOND: Contronym
A contronym is a word that has two opposite meanings, such as clip (which can mean “attach” or “cut off”), cleave (“to cling” or “to split apart”), or buckle (“to fasten” or “to break”). There are, of course, a fair number of English contronyms, but they show up in other languages, too.
END!
I honestly have no idea what the hell this is
So I’m finally trying to work through all those home videos we transferred from the old camcorder tapes a few years ago, right? Currently I’m just going through and making a list of all the things on each tape. Most tapes are the old spring and Christmas plays from St. Mary’s, videos of us opening presents on Christmas Eve and Christmas, and a good number of videos of me doing my dumb “I’m Stephen Spielberg, look at my amazing movies” stuff from elementary school and junior high.
But at the end of one of the tapes was this audio:
That is obviously me singing, but I don’t have any recollection of singing this (or writing it). I don’t know if I was trying to parody something or if I was just making a dumb “rap” and thought it sounded cool; in a lot of my other videos, if I’m making fake commercials or something like that, I’m parodying something that was on TV at the time (like the “I’m Bob from The Money Tree” or Hot Pockets commercials that were parodied in my “Fifth Grade Movie” thing).
For “context,” the other two things that were on this tape (which was labeled “Christmas Play” – super descriptive) were the St. Mary’s Christmas play/concert from 1999 and the first version of our video report on “Stepping on the Cracks” from fifth grade. So if I recorded this song around the same time as these other parts, I would have been…11 years old?
Sounds about right.
But who actually knows.
I sure screeched a lot, though.
BLEH.
Today was the last day of my French class.
It was also our draft day for fantasy baseball, but I could only stay for half an hour because I had to go teach at 3:30, meaning I wasn’t able to handpick my whole team and had to let the auto-draft take over after I was able to get…five?…six? guys I wanted.
So I’m lacking enthusiasm, because who are these random-ass guys and why are they on my team?
Bleh.
Death of the Mall
It’s both interesting and sad that malls are not what they used to be (physically, culturally, or socially).
Those of you around my age (or millennials in general): do you remember the role that the mall played in your childhood/teenagerhood? I was never an “OMG I gotta go to the mall!!!11!!1!!1” type of girl, but it still played an important role in my existence throughout my early life.
I would always spend the weekends at my dad’s place. Our routine – from as far back as I can remember – was always to go to the mall on Saturday mornings. He’d give me $20 and set me free for an hour to wander around the mall and buy whatever I wanted. Books/CDs from Hastings; makeup, notebooks, and pens from Rite Aid; art stuff from Michaels; books from Waldenbooks; earrings from Claire’s; weird miscellaneous nonsense from The Card Farm (I have no idea if anyone remembers that store, but I loved it) – these were frequent purchases, and I enjoyed the “independence” of getting to wander around the mall on my own for an hour.
My dad bought me Beanie Babies from Hallmark (back when they were a thing).
I got my first Tamagotchi at JCPenny.
I bought a copy of The Sims at Toys ‘R’ Us.
I bought my prom dress at Macy’s.
My high school friends and I would wander around the mall when we all wanted to gather.
Hell, when Rob and I were dating in college, we spent a lot of our time at the mall (there were…other reasons for this, but we’re not getting into that right now!).
Malls just don’t seem to be as integrated in kids’/teens’ lives anymore, which is super sad. I guess that goes along with the idea of the “death of third places” thing, which is the decline in public gathering places outside of home or work, but still.
It’s a bit depressing is all.
One of My Favorite Things…
…is curling up under my warm heavy blanket and watching about 15 minutes’ worth of TikTok vids before going to sleep.
And I know, I know…screentime before bed. I know. But let me be honest: there is nothing in this world that will affect my ability to fall asleep. I fall asleep in at most five minutes as soon as I lay down.
Hell, you could make me run a marathon before bed and I’d still fall asleep within five minutes.
(I know this because I’ve done it before, haha.)
OUTSIIIIIIIIIDE
So our temperature swung up to 45 degrees today (!!!) and I finally, FINALLY got to run outside.
I haven’t gotten to run or walk outside (apart from going to campus and/or the grocery store) THIS ENTIRE MONTH.
IT’S THE TWENTIETH.
I was losing my freaking mind on that treadmill, man.
It’s been a while, but…
We’re back to sawing off delinquent toenails!
Or parts of them, at least.
This just kinda snapped off the end of my middle toe
PUT IT IN THE TOENAIL BAG!
Oh Dear
Well this is an…interesting way to display this data.
I have mixed feelings about the use of Chernoff faces (or any derivatives) to visually display multivariate data. Unless done correctly, I think that this type of visualization can be difficult to interpret. I also think it lacks one of the main purposes of a visual – a quick and relatively easy way to understand the data – because it involves a lot of parsing of the individual pieces (eyebrows, eyes, nose, mouth, face shape, etc.) which is a pretty big ask if someone’s just quickly glancing at the faces.
But anyway, I do like the idea of trying to make “Chernoff emojis” for each state based on the variables in question. Using the color of the faces as a representation of one of the variables rather than face shape/size makes them all look a bit more uniform and makes comparing the other features a bit easier.
Also:
Yeah, that’s my expression whenever I think of West Virginia, too.
Hey, American Friends?
Y’all okay down there? It sounds scary.
Saucony, I am BEGGING you…
Please return to the Kinvara 13 style. I have exclusively worn Kinvaras since 2012 and I have never had a single problem with any of their iteration until I hit the Kinvara 14s. Once I started wearing them, I had tons of foot pain and lower leg pain – things that I’ve never had. It was to the point where it was incredibly difficult to walk* and I actually reverted back to my previous Kinvara 11 pair (see this blog for the out-of-order shenanigans of my past few shoes).
Then today I thought: why go back to the 11s? I have a whole pile of Kinvara 13s that have about 500 miles on them each; surely a few days of walking/running in those won’t be too bad.
So I wore an old 13 pair today while running and guess what? The foot pain disappeared.
Entirely.
It’s like there was never any pain to begin with, which is pretty shocking given how bad the pain had actually gotten.
So yeah. Please please please please PLEASE go back to the 13 style. Your most loyal Kinvara customer will thank you.
*I did anyway, though. And ran. So I’m sure that didn’t help.
I’d like to issue a formal apology to the Kinvara 11s
Ugh.
SO.
I’m having a really rough time with the Kinvara 14s – rough enough that I actually reverted back to wearing my old worn-out Kinvara 11s (the ones I just finished with prior to this pair of 14s). While they’re not nearly as comfortable as the Kinvara 13s, they’re better than the 14s because it doesn’t feel like my ankle is getting actively eaten by a chainsaw when I wear them.
An angry bear, maybe, but not a chainsaw.
ANYWAY.
I was looking at the Running Room website last night to see if they had the Kinvara 15s yet and they had ONE PAIR LEFT of the Kinvara 13s in my size. I have never gotten my credit card out so fast, haha.
So at least I’ll have one more pair of 13s before having to go back to an inferior iteration again.
I have not been having a good time with shoes lately.
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