I went for a walk today. It was weird.
Reasons why it was weird:
- There was a guy dragging a big screen TV by a rope as he walked down the sidewalk. It was a big TV—like a 62” one or something—and it was like he was out taking it for a walk. I asked him if he needed help, thinking he was dragging it to the curb to throw it away or something, but he was like, “nope, I’m good!” and kept walking it.
- I saw four—yes, four—different couples walking around where the woman was holding a bag of groceries and the man was holding a watermelon. This wouldn’t have been as weird if the four sightings had been in a relatively concentrated area, but they were all over the place.
- This kid (he was like 12 or something? I have no idea) rode his bike up to me while I was going up 14th street and started talking about the Illuminati.
Strange walk. Strange walk.
Calgary Adventures
So guess who walked 20.5 miles today?
WE DID!
We went down to the southern end of the C-Train because we wanted to see just how far south we could walk in one stretch. Turns out it’s pretty far. This is (approximately) our route. That Dairy Queen was our destination.
YAY! I’ll be doing my “one year in Calgary” walking stats in about a month, so stay tuned!
Also, this. You can buy individual colors/flavors of candy. Do you know how dangerous that is?
ALL APPLE JOLLY RANCHERS ALL THE TIME
I DON’T HAVE A TITLE ALSKFAJLFKASDJG5SGA
I love living in Calgary, yo.
I mean, I loved Vancouver, but that was different. I loved the city. It was my escape from everything else (mostly school and the fact that I had zero friends and the fact that I was so, so sad there). Here, I not only love the city but I love school and I (sort of) have friends and I have Nate and I have happiness!
It’s big enough population-wise that there’s the feeling of anonymity, but it’s big enough area-wise that there are good chunks of the city that don’t feel “big city” at all, which is nice for walking.
I also feel a weird connection with Calgary. It’s probably because the 1988 Olympics were held here just a few days after I was born. Which is a weird reason to feel connected to a city, but what are you gonna do.
Finally, everything that’s happened up here so far has made this the most accurate fortune cookie fortune I’ve ever received:
Well…
Things to do in Calgary:
- See the Calgary Tower
- Watch a Flames game
- Go to Cross Iron Mills Mall
- Seek shelter from tornadoes
Yeah.
Apparently parts of the city were under tornado warnings this afternoon. Check out some of these pictures.
Menacing, huh? Aaaaaaaaaaaand then it was gone.
Oh, Canada.
(Sources for pics: 1, 2, 3, and 4)
Road Trip – Day 19: Crowsnest Pass to Calgary
YAY WE’RE BACK!
Not that it wasn’t an enjoyable trip—it definitely was—but we’re both glad to not be driving anymore and to be back in Calgary. Calgary’s a really nice city, yo. I think we both appreciate it even more after having gone through some large US cities (*cough*San Francisco*cough*).
I’ll post pictures on Facebook at some point…there will probably be a few more there that I didn’t post on here, just ‘cause.
WOO!
WOO!
You know that “possibly good news” I mentioned a little more than a week ago? Well, now it’s official, so I can blog about it. Nate bought a condo that’s ridiculously close to both his place of employment and campus, and we’ll be moving there at the end of June.
How cool is that? Even cooler is the fact that it’s not a basement and has actual windows and a balcony and no one above us. I’m super excited.
i’m in ur country, walkin ur cities
HEEEEEEEEEEEEEY, guess who hit 1,000 miles on her pair of shoes?
*points at self*
Nate and I went on a very nice 11-mile walk this afternoon (which included getting poutine and candy), which put me above 1,000 miles on my shoes. Check them out!
So that’s 1,000 miles since I moved to Calgary, which was September 1st of last year (though I guess I didn’t wear those shoes until the 8th, but whatevs). I’m going to try to get to 1,500 miles on them before I break down and get a new pair (mainly because I want to wait until the Kinvara 6’s come out), but no promises. The heels, as you can see, are really starting to wear through.
Here are some stats:
Miles: 1,029.41
Time: 265 hours, 44 minutes, 43 seconds (that’s like 11 days)
Steps: 2,173,614
Woo!
ALSO: we watched Guardians of the Galaxy last night, so now I’m all caught up for Age of Ultron in May. I’d have to say my three favorite movies were, in order, The Avengers, Thor, and Iron Man 3. Thor: The Dark World had the best soundtrack, though.
ALSO ALSO: rainbow sprinkle pretzels. Is there a better candy to represent me? I think not.
Walkin’ on the Sun
Holy buttgoblins, I’ve been missing Vancouver today. I was actually going to blog about how much I missed the city (and walking around in it), but as I started doing so, I remembered something else that was related but more interesting than my usual Van blathering.
“What is it?” You ask, grateful that you don’t have to scroll past another “Claudia blah-blahs about Vancouver” post.
It’s Walk Score!
From their “About” page: “Walk Score’s mission is to promote walkable neighborhoods. Walkable neighborhoods are one of the simplest and best solutions for the environment, our health, and our economy.”
Basically, a city (or a specific house in a city, either way) is assigned a score depending on how “walkable” that particular city/house is. If a house is closer to major things like downtowns, restaurants, grocery stores, parks, etc., it will have a higher score. If it’s far away from such things. Or, in the case of a city, if there aren’t a lot of sidewalks or pedestrian-friendly routes, the city’s overall score decreases.
So let’s check it out!
Yeah, that looks about right. The blue dot is where I lived, by the way.
And this:
That looks about right, too. Calgary is fantastic at the inconsistent sidewalk thing. And the taxi drivers that want to mow down pedestrians. DON’T GET ME STARTED ON THE TAXI DRIVERS.
What about Moscow?
That’s…surprising, actually. I don’t know if it’s because there just aren’t that many grocery stores in the city or (because stores/restaurants/etc. seem to be pretty clustered in specific spots)? Moscow seems waaaaay more walkable than Calgary. But that might just be because I’ve walked it so many freaking times that a 3-mile walk to Walmart doesn’t seem bad at all.
Hahahaha, yeah. Yeah.
Eigenblogger Presents: Random Nonsense
Alternate title: Claudia Has a Test Tomorrow and is Too Nervous to Study Anymore So You Get This.
- Hahaha. Oh, North Hill Centre.
- I have rediscovered the following two music videos and love them once again.
(strobe light warning around 2:26 in that last one)
- Nate, here’s that CMYK puzzle I was telling you about.
- If you say “Londonderry Air” just right, it sounds like you’re saying “London Derriere.”
- One of my favorite SMBC cartoons. I don’t know why it’s so hilarious to me, but it is.
- How could I have forgotten to embed Achievement Hunter’s “Hot Hoof” video on here? It’s one of my favorite Minecraft-related videos.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand I’m done.
Canadian Mall – Installment 21: Westbrook Mall
Hey look, it’s one of those Canadian Mall posts. I haven’t done one of those in quite some time, have I? Anyway. Today Nate and I walked down to Westbrook Mall, a mall down kind of in the southwest part of the city.
Mileage from home to mall (one way; from Nate’s house, not mine):
Pros:
- A nice little quiet mall. It wasn’t very crowded at all.
- There’s a Walmart, apparently. I either didn’t see it or just wasn’t paying attention.
Cons:
- Like most malls, the parking lot is a death trap for pedestrians.
- There were no super special standout stores. It’s a small mall.
- The walk was good, though!
END!
Winter Walk!
So I just found this last night.
“Winter Walk Day 2015: Join schools, community groups, workplaces and individuals to walk for at least 15 minutes on February 4th. Register and then record your minutes after your walk.”
Of course today was the one day I didn’t feel like walking to/from school, but I did it anyway!
Mileage: 6.47
Steps: 13,670
Speed: 4.05 MPH
WOO!
Weather, u ok?
We’re having a freaking heat wave up here, y’all. It got up to about 57 degrees (Fahrenheit, of course!) during the middle of the day.
In January. In Calgary.
We went walking around downtown in short sleeves. It was pretty freaking great!
(Short blog.)
*noises of relief*
Hokay. Back in Canada. Everything went smoothly and the remainder of the weekend was grand.
Totally unrelated: I’ve been super motivated to work on Arborhood now that I’ve actually gone back and done a quick re-read of things. I don’t write things in chronological order, especially with NaNoWriMo—whatever I feel like writing on a particular day, I write just below what I’d written the day before—so my first task is to actually organize everything into a somewhat chronological flow. Then I can start writing/rewriting.
But I do like the story. I like my tree characters. I like that it’s vastly better than my two previous NaNos, The President’s Barber and Whistler’s Father. Those were god awful.
Anyway. SCHOOL TOMORROW! *cue flailing*
Edit: And this. This is great.
Walk the Walk: Canadian Style
Heeeeeeeey, so I don’t know why I waited like a week for this, but what the hell, have some walking statistics for my time in Calgary so far!
Total distance: 680.00 miles [Not sure how I managed to hit that exactly. It wasn’t planned.]
Total number of walks: 93
Average distance per walk: 7.31 miles
Did I meet my average of 50 miles per week? No. I blame finals. But that’s okay, considering that last year it took me eight months to go 1,000 miles and this year it took me only about 3.5 months to walk nearly 700 miles. I bumped up the pace quite a bit, I’d say.
Want some line graphs? You know you do.
October was a good month.
Stay tuned for a later blog post in which I set my yearly mileage goal for 2015!
Towering
Yay, today was fun! Nate and I went to the Calgary Tower and then to an indoor botanical garden/mall that was tucked away within the depths of downtown. It was super cool. Have some grainy iPod Calgary Tower pics, because I suck at remembering to bring my actual camera and also suck at taking good pictures in general.
Nate’s feet, my feet, and the ground far below us:
So much flatter than Moscow, haha:
And bigger:
It never even occurred to me to take a picture of us (not just our feet) in the Tower as well, but I’m the worst photographer ever, so what’re ya gonna do.
In This Blog: Claudia Does a Dumb and Walks a Mile in -31 Degree Weather
I know that doesn’t sound like a very long distance, but OHMYGOD.
REALLY
FREAKING
COLD
It was really only like -8 or something (hahaha, “only” -8), but we were getting like 15 mph wind gusts—so with wind chill it was -31—and I had to walk directly into them to get home from the bus. It also didn’t help that there was snow blowing EVERYWHERE so it only took about 30 seconds for my glasses to get coated in flurry debris. Plus, it had snowed so much that it was hard to tell where the road was versus where the sidewalk was, so I was kind of stumbling around anyway, never mind that my eyelashes were freezing together and I couldn’t feel my toes after the first block.
Seriously, I have a new respect for cold now. I would not want to go back out in that.
(Except I kinda do.)
(It was exciting.)
In related news, this is going to be the first week I won’t make my mileage goal, mainly because the weather is not walker-friendly tonight and because it probably won’t be walker-friendly tomorrow. I’ll make up the lost miles after finals.
Another rant, haha
Sorry, I’m in rant-mode this week.
Alright, so one of the malls I walk to all the time is North Hill Centre. The reason I frequent this mall so much is because it’s in between UC and my apartment, meaning I can walk there from school, get grocery nonsense at Safeway, and walk home fairly easily.
To get to the mall form across the street, you have to go over this above-highway walkway thingy. Here’s Google Maps to help you visualize this:
(Do you like my super professional-looking labeling?)
Let’s zoom in on the mall parking lot, shall we?
Oh, what’s this yellow painted walkway? A corridor for pedestrians to get through the parking lot, perhaps?
Why yes it is! Look, the Google Maps shot even has pedestrians utilizing it!
So how come every time I go to that damn mall there’s at least one car parked in that yellow walkway?
Seriously. Do they really think that’s a special little parking spot for them? Do they not realize it’s a WALKWAY for LEGS??
It wouldn’t bother me so much if it wasn’t so hard to cross right there (okay, maybe it still would), but the way the other parking spots are arranged makes it hard for the cars to see you and you to see the cars. Heck, even when the walkway’s clear you basically have to step out into the lot to see if there are any cars coming. So why not add the obstacle of one or two drivers thinking that they’re super special and allowed to park in the shiny yellow spots?
*frustrated pedestrian mumbling*
Pedestrian Rant
There are two types of drivers here:
- Those who are super, super courteous to pedestrians and will stop like half a block away to let you cross the street and/or who will smile and wave at you when you take 3 minutes to cross because you’re trucking through two feet of slush.
- Those who will mow you down because they’re on their phone/are far too important to wait at most 15 seconds for you to cross the street/both of the above/taxi drivers.
Seriously, the taxi drivers like swerve to mow down pedestrians here. “Y U NO PAY ME FARE TO GET WHERE UR GOING HOW ABOUT I TAKE OUT YOUR LEGS THEN YOU’LL HAVE TO USE MY SERVICES HAHAHAHAHA”
(Or so they appear to be thinking.)
I don’t think I ever had a close call with a car in Vancouver; here I’ve had at least three. Not cool, Calgarians, not cool!
(Except for those of you drivers who are very pedestrian-aware. You guys rock.)
THE END!
500 Miles!
Hey foolios!
After my walk today, I’ve officially walked 500 (well, 501) miles around Calgary!
STATS TIME!
- Number of walks: 65
- Average distance per walk: 7.71 miles
- Shortest walk; longest walk: 1.39 miles; 17.03 miles
- Average per week: 50.1 miles
Boxplot time! Here are miles by the days of the week (the red line is the average 7.71 miles).
WOO!
Also, have some perspective:
Here is a map showing the distance between a random location on the east side of Moscow and Walmart, which is on the extreme west side of Moscow. Most would agree that this distance, 3 miles, is pretty much “across town.”
Here’s the same distance in Calgary.
Just to give you an idea of how dramatically different the areas of the two cities are (that’s not even all of Calgary north-south-wise; it wouldn’t all fit at that zoom).
Canadian Mall – Installment 20: Chinook Centre
It’s Canadian Mall tiiiiime! LET’S DO THIS.
Mileage from home to mall (one way):
Pros:
- While it’s a moderately long walk here, it’s not a bad walk. No weird “hey, we’re going to not put a sidewalk here just to screw with you” blocks
- Buckets o’ stores. Seriously. It’s a huge mall.
- The layout’s not terrible.
Cons:
- People EVERYWHERE.
- There were so many people that I actually had no desire to go into any of the stores; I just went in, did my mandatory walk-through, and went back out.
- While the layout’s not terrible, I still got lost in it ‘cause I’m me.
- Some lady almost mowed me over in the crosswalk outside. Like seriously, did she really need to gun it out of the parking lot that quickly? I had the right-of-way (the “walk” sign was clearly still white and not flashing red) but she certainly didn’t give a crap. Good thing I was paying attention.
Canadian Mall – Installment 19: Sunridge Mall (The Actual Mall This Time)
Hola!
So I went east again today for my walk and this time actually went INSIDE Sunridge Mall instead of walking around the outside of it and visiting the neighboring business. So here we go!
Mileage from home to mall (one way):
Pros:
- It’s a pretty big mall but wasn’t too crowded.
- Lots of different clothing stores (including H&M!).
- There was a massage place (can’t remember the name) that offered “water massages.” These apparently entail getting naked and sitting in a tanning booth-type thing in order to get pummeled by water jets. Sounds interesting.
- Lots of different shoe stores, too. I’m not much of a shoe person, but I might end up going here to get boots at some point. THE SNOW IS COMING.
- Got kids (or like toys)? Giant Toys ‘R’ Us.
Cons:
- It is REALLY not easy to get here via walking, at least from my location in the city. It’s not a direct shot and you have to go through a bunch of industrial stuff to get there.
- All the women’s bathrooms, except for one, were out of order.
- There was a surplus of very young children there. I don’t know if they all mass-escaped from the Toys ‘R’ Us or what, but OH MY GOD. If your child can’t walk on his or her own yet, it’s probably not a good idea to let them loose in a mall.
Done!
A List of Things I’m Good At:
- Nothing.
In other news: Mammatus clouds!
\
We be gettin’ the Chinook winds, which explains why it’s so freakishly warm today.
Singe-Worthy
Okay, I’m sure you’re all probably sick of hearing about my Canadian adventures by now, but I have to blog about this ‘cause it’s pretty great.
So awhile back (2012), a statue called the Wishing Well was installed in front of the Genesis Centre here in Calgary. The statue is a giant reflective bugger that looks like this (pic source):
Not too bad, eh?
Well, apparently the $559,000 (!!) statue had to be removed recently, as its reflective powers of doom burned a hole in a dude’s jacket. The incident actually happened last year, prompting city officials to put a blue fence around the statue (which had actually been built for people to interact with it by going inside it and making noises). Since the jacket incident, officials (and the artist) have tried to prevent another singe by angling the sculpture, hammering it, and dulling the interior. But since nothing has worked, they finally decided to remove it entirely.
Okay. Now fast-forward to this weekend. On Saturday morning there was a huge underground electrical fire downtown which knocked out power to about 17 blocks of condos, apartments, and businesses in the nearby area (not where I live). I went to read Mayor Nenshi’s tweets about the fire and its possible cause and saw this tweet from someone else:
Hahahaha. Best comment ever.
Eigenblogger 