Suspiciously Good Summer Weather: Calgary Edition
I’m hesitant to blog about this because I don’t want to jinx it, but we’ve had the best summer weather this year. Especially this July. It’s usually obnoxiously hot/smoky/both during this month, but we’ve had tons of rain, lots of cloudy days, and, overall, very cool weather.
Heck, Tuesday was Calgary’s coldest July 22nd since records began in 1884. And July 21st? Same thing.
That’s wild.
The rain can be obnoxious (notice I’m posting book reviews in July; that does not happen unless I’m stuck on the treadmill), but this is so much better than the heat.
I’m trying to take advantage of the cool morning running weather, too.
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!
Today’s Blog Post Brought to You By: Doomscrolling!
That’s like all I did today, haha.
Anyway.
Informative, but depressing.
I can see people being critical of the lack of numbers/values/scale, but like they say in the video, they’re trying to make it something that anyone can understand from a purely visual standpoint. It’s something to get a conversation started, and even if that starting point is, “well, how legitimate is this? There isn’t even a scale or any indication of how different the light red is from the darker red,” then that’s still getting people talking. “Sparking conversation” as they say in the vid.
(Also, they do offer a scaled version of each display; click the “bars with scale” display option for a given location).
Here’s Calgary:
This is actually one of the least extreme ones. Look at Tucson:
Yikes.
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.
Hey, I live there!
I’m actually surprised it’s gone to the Conservatives since its creation, actually, mainly because it contains the U of C. But I guess we’re in ‘Berta, so everything tends to swing Conservative here.
I’M SO EXCITED TO VOTE NNNNNNNNGH
It’s GUTTER CARNAGE
(Get it? Instead of utter carnage it’s gutter okay I’ll stop.)
So one of the gutters on our condo building is a problem child and consistently looks like this once it gets cold and then warms up so that things start to melt:
What a monstrosity.
Anyway, I got home tonight and found this:
Mega Icicle had crashed to the ground, taking the whole gutter with it.
There were actually huge chunks of ice like halfway across the parking lot. Someone had already taken the broken piece of gutter and put it in the snow next to the dumpster, haha.
Calgary: if the cold doesn’t kill you, the ice sure will!
Oh God, Here We Go
Edit from later in the day:
OH GOD, HERE WE GO
I guess it will be treadmill time for a while. It’s cold and they’re not going to get all this cleared super fast.
Water, Water…Everywhere!
Calgary’s water…HAS RETURNED!
I guess it’s better that all of this nonsense happened in the summer rather than in -40 degree snowy hell.
I mean, I guess it could happen in -40 degree snowy hell, but maybe these repairs will hold.
FOR NOW.
Edit: we actually did a decent job of conserving during this time. It’d be nice if we could conserve like that all the time, though…
So Very, Very Brr
So one of the recommendations for water conservation during our water main shutdown is to limit showers to five minutes. This isn’t that hard to do; I can run the water to rinse, turn it off to soap/shampoo, then turn it on to rinse again. The problem is that I have so completely destroyed my body’s ability to regulate its temperature that as soon as the water is off after rinsing the first time, I am
SO
RIDICULOUSLY
COLD
Like, it’s still pretty warm here, both during the day and overnight, and I usually am quite warm when I get done running. But I cannot handle that little change in temperature that comes from having wet skin in the shower. I literally start shivering like I’m out in the middle of one of our -30 snaps.
I’m pretty sure if I had to do this in the winter I’d die.
Can’t wait until the water’s back.
Congratulate Me!
I’ve lived in a single place (well, city-wise) for TEN YEARS!
Yes, ten years ago I moved to Calgary. I really love this city and would happily stay here the rest of my life.
My ten-year anniversary for living in the same HOUSE is coming up next June, so that will be even more monumental.
Ha, remember when I moved five times within one year? Hahahahaha never again Jesus Christ
Water Main Shutdown COMMENCE
Here we go again!
It sounds like this repair (these repairs?) are going to take a while; we’ll see if the city complies or if people will start rebelling, haha.
The city did do a pretty bad job of getting the word out about this second shutdown, though. You’d think with something as critical as not running out of potable water would warrant, I don’t know, at least like a pamphlet in the mail. Or they could do like they did with the original water main break and send out an emergency alert. Just so that people know what’s going on.
Bah. Who knows. We’ll see.
Thun-Dah
We had a mega storm yesterday and the freaking airport flooded but I can’t take it seriously because TRÈS GROSSE GRÊLE sounds like a badass French metal band.
Hahahaha what the hell is going on
Montgomery just can’t catch a break, can it?
(Source is the article linked above)
The hilarious (?) thing is that this is just one block parallel to the major water main break that just got resolved a few weeks ago. Totally different and totally unrelated, apparently, but still.
I know exactly where this is, too. I’ve been running right through that area because my usual running route was closed because of the bigger water main break.
Fun fun.
Back
It already feels like I was never even in Moscow.
Now I have to wait a whole year to go back.
BLEH.
The Great 2024 Calgary Water Main Break Saga: An Update
So the water’s still off, but it sounds like they’re at the stage where they’ve repaired everything they can see and are going to start flushing the pipes and then test the water quality. If the water quality is good, they can start running the water properly. So we’ll see how that goes!
Here are some fun pictures from around the Parkdale and Montgomery neighborhoods:
Keep conserving, Calgary!
And go spend some money at the businesses in Bowness; they’re losing a lot of business due to the road closures.
A big section of the bike/walking paths are blocked off due to the flushing/testing.
Signs on the fence around the flushing/testing.
A shot through the fence of the part of the pathway that got washed away by the initial break.
Party time!
Fifth Place!
Not bad, Calgary. Not bad.
Last year Calgary was ranked 7th, and this is the 11th year that it’s been in the top 10. Apparently cities are assessed across five categories: stability, healthcare, education, culture and environment, and infrastructure. Calgary did well in education, healthcare (really??), and stability.
Woo!
Well, hell.
So apparently the water main break is bad enough that they’re expecting it to take anywhere between three and five weeks to completely repair.
I don’t know if the city can maintain this level of water usage restriction for that long.
I guess we’ll have to see, though, huh?
Ugh.
Stitch the Temps
I mentioned this to my mom the other day and realized I hadn’t posted the full set on here, so here it is!
Reddit user Adolwyn has been cross-stitching the monthly average temperatures for Calgary since 2018. It’s interesting to see how big of a swing there is from those hellish February temps to the hellish August temps.
They use a cross-stitch template that they found, but I agree with their assessment that one more lower temperature range would be very appropriate for Calgary, as we get a lot more < -18 temps than > 35 temps.
Supah cool!
Ugh. PEOPLE.
Regarding the water main break: the number of comments I’ve seen from people who are like “THIS IS ALL A GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY, I’M GOING TO TAKE A FIVE HOUR SHOWER AND WATER MY LAWN FOR A DAY AND A HALF JUST OUT OF SPITE” is absolutely disgusting.
Like, even if this whole thing was a government conspiracy, that doesn’t change the fact that the city will run out of potable water if we don’t conserve it for the next week or so. And how angry will you “government conspiracy” idiots be when you turn on the tap and nothing comes out? Believe whatever dumbass theory you want, but don’t allow your belief to make this worse for the rest of us.
I don’t know if it’s my imagination or not, but it seems like people’s ability to have empathy and compassion for others (or even just making a small sacrifice to help out others) has greatly decreased as of late. It’s pretty distressing. Anyone else notice that?
Edit: somewhat related. Where is the responsibility? Where is the common sense? Y’all go to a concert where everyone is screaming their lungs out for three hours and then go all “surprised Pikachu face” when you get COVID? UGH.
Edit 2: people laughed at my “water hoarding” in my office, but WHO’S LAUGHING NOW????
OH SHIT
So as I was browsing the Calgary subreddit last night, there was a post about how the neighborhoods of Bowness, Montgomery, and Parkdale (Parkdale being the neighborhood at the bottom of our big hill) had either no water or very little water pressure in their taps. Turns out a water main broke on 16th Ave. and crews were having a hell of a time shutting the water off before finally getting the gushing to stop. After reading this post, I checked our water pressure and it seemed fine, but I decided to fill up the five or so water bottles I had lying around the house just in case.
Fast forward to this morning. I’d forgotten about the broken water main until mile 2 of my run, at which time I got an emergency alert message on my phone saying that the water main break was a critical one, Bowness was under boil water advisories, and that everyone was being advised to conserve water.
I didn’t know quite how bad things were by this point, but in another five minutes or so I hit the part of the river path that goes behind all the athletic fields in Montgomery. The path, the parking lot next to the path, and the road going through the athletic fields were all taped off.
So I had to switch my route around and run up Home St. to see if I could get around the blocked area. Turns out they had a whole section of 16th Ave. blocked off – where the water main break happened, of course – and were already trying to fix things. I was able to run my regular route through Bowness and read more about the main break once I got home.
Turns out it’s pretty serious.
Hopefully they can get it fixed within a week.
Edit: HAHA NOPE (see June 14th’s blog post)
Running Swag
I got my Calgary Marathon stuff a while ago, but I waited until my mom was here to open the package. Behold!
Shirt image:
Medal:
It’s too bad they’re not going to be doing the ultra distance anymore after this year. The marathon’s going to be the longest.
MY MOM IS HERE!!!!
Here in Calgary, that is. It’s time for her annual month-long stay in the city so she can hang out with us (and give us an excuse to go walking in places we don’t usually go).
WOO!
Coming to Canada? WANT TASTIES??
Four of them are in Calgary. I don’t know where Eight, D.O.P., and Major Tom are, but the River Café is on Prince’s Island Park. I use their year-round public bathroom sometimes, haha.
As for the Vancouver ones, I feel like I’ve heard of Published on Main (and probably walked by it if it’s actually on Main St.), but I’ve never heard of the other ones.
It’s too bad I’m so picky about food, otherwise I’d probably enjoy exploring those four Calgary restaurants.
Ugh.
The smoke is back.
Already.
It’s FREAKING MAY.
It also always seems to happen on the hottest day of the week/month/whatev, so we can’t even open the windows.
I hate summer already.
Huh…
I just finished another pair of shoes (500+ miles), which meant that in addition to starting the new pair, I saved and exported the old pair’s mileage from my iPod so that I could start the count anew with the fresh pair.
As mentioned somewhere previously on this blog, I’m not actively going for a new mileage record this year (which has been incredibly demotivating), mainly because I’m pretty sure my entire family would want to throw me in the river if I were to obsess over mileage even an iota more than I did last year.
So when I checked my mileage progress for this year so far as I entered the new miles in my little spreadsheet, imagine my surprise when I found this:
- Cumulative miles from January 1 to May 2 in 2023 (my record year so far): 2040.27
- Cumulative miles from January 1 to May 2 in 2024: 2125.24
UM.
But then I realized that 1) I had not yet bumped up my daily mileage to 18 miles in 2023 by this point in the year, and 2) I had not yet run a marathon distance in 2023 by this point in the year, whereas I’ve done multiple marathons, multiple 50 Ks, and a 60 K so far this year.
Still, though, I was not expecting the mileage to be that close and for 2024 to be (even a little bit) higher.
I’m going to have to try really hard not to use this as a sign from the universe to go for a new mileage record.
Really, really, really hard.
Also, I’ve taken over 101 million (recorded) steps since I moved to Calgary, which is pretty sweet.
Eigenblogger 