Party all the time! It’s a blog.
Items x 3
Item the First: Goals
Percent of 2012 that is already over: 4.09% (15/366 days)
Percent of my 2,500 mile goal completed: 5.7% (142.62/2,500 miles)
Not too bad. Going to be more difficult once I start work (and school at some point), though.
Item the Second: Frivolity
This is something I surprisingly haven’t come across before today. “Each of the 53 cards represents a day in the year; therefore for every birthday there is a card that holds a profile for you. This is called a Birth Card, and the profile of this card represents your personality and characteristics.”
So in the spirit of “Claudia’s blog loves to explore frivolity on the internet,” here is my card reading + extra info!
I am a Ten of Spades.
The Workaholic Card. Ten of Spades people can be very materialistic and workaholic types and when they are, their home life always suffers, and they suffer with it…There are many spiritual influences present in their life path that can make these people the masters of their destiny and lead them to great heights in helping others. However, there is also the pull towards material accomplishment that can blind them to their possibilities and limit their growth potential. As Spades they have the opportunity to transcend the material through spiritual awareness…these people are capable of great, unattached spiritual love and can have everything they want if they look to their higher sides for direction and guidance. Having both Karma Cards that reside in the Neptune line of the Life Spread can create a tendency towards addictive behavior. Combine that with their drive and the tendency to do everything ‘all the way’ and you find a personality that often goes to extremes, in both good things and bad. They learn through experience and experience life in its fullest. The ups and downs can be dramatic in some cases. The Ten of Spades will meet with endings in this life designed to teach them the value of letting go of personal attachments to ideas and lifestyles. Meeting this challenge, they can live to experience the heights of spiritual awareness and understanding which is a part of their destiny.
Some of the Ten of Spades Issues Concerning Relationships
Highly ambitious and creative, they can become indecisive in the love arena which can lead to problems. They are often unsure of what they truly want in love matters, or they continually attract romantic partners that cannot make the commitment. In either case the outcome is the same – changes and fluctuations in the romantic life…they are very giving and loving and only need to find a way to balance out their desire for a family life with their naturally intense, ambitious nature.
Info about the Spades suit: Spades are the suit of wisdom and wisdom can only be obtained through experience. Though a Clubs may have wealth of knowledge, their knowledge is, by definition, inferior to wisdom. And all Spades people know this. These are the workers of the deck. All the workaholic cards are Spades and any Spades person can be accused of it at one time or the other…Spades are more interested in doing their jobs well than talking about them or becoming too emotionally involved with others. Spades can be stubborn and don’t like it when others try to control them.
Info about Tens: You are a person of personal accomplishment and like to be applauded by many for your work. You tend to overdo things. You are ambitious and can be very successful.
Item the Third: Humor
“Extendended” indeed.
I’ll be your eigenvector if you’ll be my eigenvalue
MUSIC STATS!
Graph of genres
Mean song length: 4:00
No five-stars this month.
WALKING STATS!
Total number of walks: 85
Total mileage: 673.1
Total steps taken: 1,348,433
Total calories burned: 37,535
Correlations!
month miles calories steps month 1.00000000 -0.02778855 -0.07326894 0.03896221 miles -0.02778855 1.00000000 0.98203163 0.99229965 calories -0.07326894 0.98203163 1.00000000 0.95563610 steps 0.03896221 0.99229965 0.95563610 1.00000000
Graph!
Tune in tomorrow for mega music review!
Are Humorous Baristas called Brew-Ha-Has?
Since February 26th of this year, I’ve walked* the equivalent distance of the span of Romania.
One of my 101 in 1001 goals I added a month or so ago was to have walked the equivalent distance length of Idaho over the course of the year (that’s 479 miles, approximately). But then, when I was researching the lengths of states and various other things, I found out that the distance across Romania is pretty similar (approximately 460 miles). Since saying that you walked the span of a country sounds a lot cooler than walking the length of a state, I changed my goal. It’s a little shorter in reality, sure, but I figure I’ll hit 479 miles soon enough, anyway. I took a 9-mile walk this afternoon that brought my total to 464.89 miles.
Woo!
And you know I can’t do anything like this without bringing you all some STATS!
- Total distance in Vancouver: 234.5 miles
- Total distance everywhere else combined: 230.39
- Longest walk: 22.64 miles (47,132 steps)
Boxplot!
Correlations!
distance calories steps speed distance 1.0000000 0.9760977 0.9904710 -0.2836056 calories 0.9760977 1.0000000 0.9422555 -0.1071855 steps 0.9904710 0.9422555 1.0000000 -0.3922823 speed -0.2836056 -0.1071855 -0.3922823 1.0000000
WOO!
*Walking distance includes only “intentional” walking times—times I walked to walk (including all Canadian Mall destinations)—and more specifically, the times I actually had my iPod Touch with me and utilized the iTreadmill app and excludes distance accrued while walking to/from campus, going to the grocery store, prancing around the house, etc.
WOOSH
So it occurred to me as I was wandering around downtown Vancouver this afternoon that I’ve walked to all the major malls in the city, but I never gave you guys a ranking.
Like you care, but you know I dig the rankings.
From least favorite to favorite, I bring you Canadian Malls: Vancouver Style!
14. Brentwood Town Centre
Most pointless mall ever. Seriously. It’s like taking the Palouse Mall and removing all the interesting stores, leaving you with Zales, Hallmark, the information center, and that area that turns into the Hickory Farms store during Christmas.
13. Central City
This one’s in Surrey. Do you value your life? Don’t go to
Surrey. The fact that this has a freaking college attached to it perplexes me enough so that this isn’t in last place.
12. Lynn Valley Centre
I don’t really know how this qualifies as a mall, but it is in North Vancouver, which explains the creepy aura about it. Totally not worth the trip up there, unless you’ve got a car. Even then, though, it’s iffy.
11. Lansdowne Centre
There really wasn’t much to this mall, and it’s all the way in Richmond. But it did have a clean Zeller’s, which is like witnessing a miracle, and the Bed Bath and Beyond clone store I walked through seemed pretty freaking awesome.
10. Granville Island
If you can get past the throngs of people that are there pretty much 24/7, the Island is pretty funky. I dig the massive fresh market, but the throngs get to me pretty quickly.
9. Kingsgate Mall
Ah, good old Kingsgate Mall. My grocery depot. Another really small mall, but it’s in a good location, has a grocery store, and has alcohol. What more is necessary when it’s on the bus route home?
8. Capilano Mall
Another pretty “meh” mall apart from the giant Walmart with the McDonald’s as its heart. It’s also all the way in North Vancouver, so it’s really not worth the walk and/or bus ride unless you are morally against the mall on Grandview Highway.
7. Pacific Centre
Apple store + H&M makes for a good mall in general, but there really isn’t anything else in the Pacific Centre worth noting. It’s location is nice, though, and is surrounded by more entertaining things in downtown Vancouver.
6. Oakridge Centre
Poor little Oakridge Centre, being only a mile away…totaly gets overlooked as a place I’ve walked to, haha. It’s a decent mall. Apple store, Safeway, and cinemas for those who enjoy such frivolity. Its proximity to the SkyTrain is both good (“hey! I can get on the SkyTrain right from the mall!”) and bad (“all the SkyTrain traffic has taken over the seats on the bus! How do I get home?!”).
5. Richmond Centre
Apple Store! Late hours! Quiznos! You’re livin’ wild if you go to the Richmond Centre. I still don’t see the logic of having a mall within
literally 300 steps of another mall. At least it’s close to the Skytrain so you can hightail it out of the party zone when all the other malls have closed and you’re still shopping at 6 PM.
4. Real Canadian Superstore
Ah, the love child of Walmart and Costco. I really dig this place, and am glad London seems to think its smaller city needs double the number of RCSSs that Vancouver has. This place gets super extra bonus points because everything’s so cheap. Example: box of awesome granola bars = $4.99 at Safeway. Same box of awesome granola bars = $2.15 at Real Canadian. Yayzorz.
3. Coquitlam Centre
Despite this being 4 billion miles away, it’s huge and has a lot of awesome stores. Assuming you survive the parking lot, this is a super enjoyable mall.
2. Metropolis at Metrotown
This mall? It has a Real Canadian Superstore INSIDE OF IT. It also has a soft pretzel shop, which made my mom super happy when she came up and we hung out at Metropolis. It’s another massive mall, but it’s a lot closer and easily accessible via SkyTrain.
1. Park Royal Centre
GIANT MALL. I really like Park Royal. It’s got an H&M, and HMV (which is like a Hastings), and a Whole Foods. It’s also about 12 miles away and you have to walk through Stanley Park to get there, so it’s a good destination for walking on Saturdays. Completely unrelated side note: Vancouver
has the biggest slugs I’ve ever seen.
Also this: here is a map of my knowledge of Vancouver before I started walking (aka, back when I was on Dunbar):
And here is now:
Snazzy, eh?
And today I walked 19 miles.
I still don’t know if I like my header
Hey people. No Canadian Mall installment today, mainly because I’ve run out of interesting malls. There may be more installments later, there may not be. But in the meantime, RECTANGLE WALK!
“A” (and “G”) = my house. This route is exactly 20 miles, but by the time I got to mile 16 it was late (started late because I got distracted by music) so I just took the bus the rest of the way, haha.
Anyway, the main reason for this was to get a reasonable estimate of how long the 40K walk would take. 16 miles = 25.7 kilometers, so it’s totally doable before it gets dark, assuming I start early enough. Maybe next weekend.
OH YEAH, and it’s April 30th, so…
Graph of genres:
Mean song length: 3:48
No five-stars again. This year has a lot of really good songs, but none quite good enough for five stars.
Tune in tomorrow for anniversary excitement!
I AM THE PHEROMONE LADY
Hmm.
So as I was trucking my way down to Granville Island this afternoon (it was going to be my Canadian Mall installment today, but that didn’t happen for several reasons, one of which being the water ferries suck), this guy comes running up behind me, stops me, and basically says that he saw me by the Cambie bridge and “thought I looked fascinating.” Then he gave me his number.
Cool, right? Yeah, except there was no way he was younger than 50.
Nothing wrong with older guys, of course. It’s just that I know from my, um…experience, I tend to attract the creepy older guys.
Stalker Dave.
Creepy Andy.
That weird married guy that decided to follow me everywhere for a bit.
The half blind guy who…yeah, he’s, um…yeah.
Interesting times. Should I give him a call?
OH, and so after missing all three buses required to get home (and having to subsequently wait 30 minutes for each of the next buses), I finally got on the 41 and spent the whole ride home with a guy’s crotch in my face. Quite literally. I had a seat but the bus was super crowded and the guy who was standing in the aisle next to me just happened to be the perfect height for crotch-to-face action.
He was kinda pudgy, though, so I didn’t mind too much.
And the fact that I just rationalized the crotch-attack of a perfect stranger as something I “didn’t mind too much” is proof of how ridiculously lonely I am up here.
I haven’t had physical contact since December, and even that was very brief.
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFF I need love.
Is a theorem about pickles called a dill lemma?
Tell me, CNN, what about this story makes it business-related news (at least the booze one was semi-business-relevant)? Are circus careers making a comeback? Should we invest in human cannons? Is Apple releasing the iCannon this summer? TELL US WHY THIS IS CATEGORIZED THERE FFFFFFFFFFFFFF
Can you tell I’m feeling better? I guess I don’t get physically sick, I just mentally screw myself over every few days.
ANYWAY ONTO BUSINESS.
I’m slowly revamping my whole blog design, seeing as how my 5 year anniversary is coming up in a little over a month. My additional pages (those ones up in the tabs there) could use a bit of work, my layout might need a work-over, and I’m not sure if I like my header again, haha.
Also, once I run out of malls, this west- to-east walking tour of Vancouver (and Burnaby and Coquitlam) is happening. 40 kilometers, baby!
Rome was actually built in a day and a half.
When I’m not carrying anything and feel like I could run five miles, I get to the bus stop just as the bus is pulling in.
When I have 50 pounds combined of backpack and groceries and it’s windy and cold, I miss the bus by about 30 seconds.
SUCH IS LIFE.
Anyway.
One gripe I’ve had with my iPod Touch is the fact that, unlike the Nano, it doesn’t have a pedometer. I love Nano’s pedometer ‘cause I’m that type of obsessive person who likes to track progress and estimate changes in my daily patterns and just generally be a number watching weirdo.
But today I found probably the coolest “you’re obsessive so you’ll love this” app: iTreadmill. I will utilize this tomorrow on my walk to whatever the hell mall I decide to go to, but I calibrated it this afternoon and can already tell it’s awesome.
It tracks:
- Steps
- Steps per minute
- Time
- Average pace
- Average speed
- Calories
- Distance
It keeps track of your history and gives you graphs! You can create a playlist to listen to as you go (I just put my whole “Favorites” playlist to play), you can enter your weight to get an accurate calories estimate, and you can set step, calories, distance, or time goals and set alarms to sound for certain milestones to your goals if you like that kind of stuff (I do). It also pauses automatically after 5 seconds of inactivity so waiting at stoplights and such won’t lessen your average speed.
HOW COOL IS THAT?
Download it, dudes.
Also, they should just make this a static claim on CTV weather for Vancouver:
Earlier today when they still had Saturday’s prediction up they actually had words (“light rain,” “rain,” “more rain” (seriously), “rain and snow”), but I guess they ran out of synonyms.
SUCH IS LIFE.
NaNoWriMo: T-minus 30 days
WOO!
The only good thing about October is that there are only 31 (30 now) days left until NaNo starts. Seriously. Every October for like the past three years has blown heavy metal chunks for me. Screw you, October.
I don’t have a definite plot in place. Actually, I do. I have like five definite plots in place. I just have to choose which one to implement. I’m leaning strongly towards the road trip/religious undertones one, but I might genre ditch and go for a more sci-fi story, just to annoy myself and try to work within a genre of which I’m not a big fan.
Who knows? I didn’t know where I was going with things last year, but I finally got an idea on paper that I’d had in my head for awhile.
Anyway.
Today was probably the last sunny day of the year up here, so I took the opportunity to test out the accuracy of the pedometer feature on the new Nano by comparing it to a regular old pedometer.
Not too big of a discrepancy, considering I spent like an hour of those three hours wandering around in Safeway. I think the Nano is more sensitive to “wandering” steps (as opposed to the more deliberate “get out of my way, I’m faster than you” steps) than the pedometer, hence the difference. I’d also trust the Nano’s calorie counter thingy more, since you can actually set your weight, something you can’t do on the pedometer.
And yes, it took me three hours to go ~11,000 steps. Like I said, Safeway, plus the whole “maybe I’ll stop and wait for the bus, ‘cause I have no damn idea where I am” ordeal when I couldn’t find the store I was looking for.
OH YEAH, and this:
I found this movie via Netflix and was going to watch it in its entirety tonight, but this song from the opening sequence totally ruined that, ‘cause I had to go find it, download it, and listen to it on repeat for about three hours. Apparently the movie is like Inception, but better.
Today’s song: Mediational Field by Susumu Hirasawa
Eigenblogger 