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This run was “calibrated” in that a couple of weeks ago I set the trip odometer on the car and found that from my place to the QEW overpass over Erin Mills Parkway is about 5km. Since traffic was light on this Labour Day Monday I ran the route—normally it would be too noisy. Even with a walk in the middle while I drank some water and stopping for a couple of lights I managed to achieve a better time by about 3 minutes than my usual “hill, dale and trail” route. So, now I’m satisfied that the more interesting route I run is probably over 10km.

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The paths along the Credit River are mostly dry except for the half-dozen usual low-lying wet areas. I couldn’t use my “Ironman” watch. I think the battery is dying as the display is screwy. So I used the small radio with lap timer I used to use before I got my MP3 player / FM tuner device. I’m not sure how the 1:21:34 time compares as I’m still in the process of “developing” this route for my “long” run. It was warm enough for shorts, too.

The route: my house, path between Folkway and Erin Mills Pkwy, Ploughshare Ct, Erin Mills Pkwy, Credit Valley Road, E on Eglinton Ave W to just past Credit River Bridge, down to path, S along path and then up to Covington Terrace, Credit Pointe Dr, Wellsborough Pl, rejoin path that goes along N side of 403 and back down to Credit River, S along path under Burnhamthorpe Bridge to foot bridge over Credit R. in Erindale Park, path over hill just S of U of T at Erindale, past Sprinkbank Arts Centre, N. along Mississauga Rd to Collegeway, cross street and join Sawmill Valley Trail, N to bridge under Burnhamthorpe then along trail that parallels Burnhamthorpe almost to Erin Mills Pkwy, turn N to Burbank Dr, Walnut Grove to Sawmill Valley Dr, Stonemason Crescent, the home again. Estimated distance is between 10 to 12 km. I really need to get a simple odometer for my bike one day.

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In tagging along with my wife’s low carb. diet I’ve lost a couple of kilos. Now my BMI is 23.4 kg. One calculator told me something kind of scary: I’m in the 19th percentile for my weight based on my height, age and gender. This means, of course, that 81% of men (U.S., North America?) weigh more than I do.

I dialed in the new weight on the treadmill. It says I expend about 6 calories less over the half hour now that I have shed that 2 kg.

I figure I now weigh about what I was when I was 17 — Before I was of legal drinking age and before I drank beer.

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My wife is making “Indian” flutes with the Grade 5’s. So far I’ve cut the ½ in PVC pipe to lengths and loaned my two electric drills to make the holes. Soon I’ll have to fabricate little ½ in x 1¼ in pieces to direct the air from one hole to another to give it that “flutey” sound. These parts will require me to use a router table to cut ¼ in grooves in PVC doorstop moulding. As I was at Rona to get the moulding, I looked at the tables and only found generic or mucho-expensive models. As I have had a Craftman router for several years I decided to look for one at Sears just down the road. I ended up buying the medium expensive model shown in the image. You gotta love those marketing images: they show a router table in a workshop with a few shavings but no router. I spent a relaxing half-hour or so assembling the table.

In the not so exciting department I had to replace some of the caulking around the main bathroom’s tub. We are thinking it is time to renovate because of the ugly tub and the bathroom’s rather bland decor. We aren’t sure whether it will be a shower cubicle or a complete bathtub enclosure this time around. I grew up in a house with only a bathtub so I’ve taken showers exclusively ever since I left home. I’m really not into tiling and I think it is difficult to achieve leak-proof results without a lot of skills, time and care. It will be time to look at bathroom furnishings in the next few weeks and start planning.

I’m tired: I increased the distance of my run by several kilometers. Unfortunately snow at about the freezing point starts to lose its hard-pack qualities. The valley trails are starting to become slushy in places. That last third was starting to feel like a real grind.

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The drive to choir from Mississauga to the Beaches in the morning was snowy but didn’t get really bad until we exited off the east end of the Gardiner: some kind of lake (Ontario) effect I guess. The return drive home at about 1pm was uneventful though the Gardiner and QEW were only “track bare.” Many heeded the “heavy snowfall” warning and stayed home. We stayed in this evening rather than driving to Scarborough to attend a 50^th birthday party for a friend whom we haven’t seen for several years.

With the temperature about -18°C, windchill approaching -30 and lots of blowing snow I decided to stay in and use the treadmill. For some reason the pulse monitor jumped around between 68 and 120 bpm—perhaps because my skin and the household humidity is so dry due to the cold. I experimented and approximated the “pulse” controlled workout with the “interval” workout I used to do. I programmed my fastest walking speed (about 6.8 kmh) and a 10% slope. Judging by the calorie readout of 371 and how I was sweating I think this program equalled the pulse-controlled, 35 year-old program I had been doing.

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Shorts

With temperatures in the low teens (°C) today I ran home from the train station wearing shorts—a first for a January 13^th for me. Unfortunately, like yesterday, it was pouring rain though, unlike yesterday, it wasn’t a thunderstorm. Of course, being winter, tonight’s temperatures will go below freezing and snow is expected.

Anti-Spyware

I tried Microsoft’s beta anti-Spyware software at work and at home yesterday. It seems to be pretty simple-minded about filenames and directories. It found a file, cat.exe, in the system32 directory and called it the Dutch Porn Dialer. Actually it’s a Windows port of the Unix cat command. It also called two expat.dll files spyware. These are an XML parsing library.

I think the software needs more work.

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Because it was a holiday and lighter traffic I chose to run along Eglinton, a 6 lane road with wide grassy boulevards to pick up the trail beside the Credit River where I expected to run alongside the river until Burnhamthorpe. To my surprise there is a steep ascent (30 m?) to the top of the valley in the middle of this route where you run along some side streets and then descend to the valley again underneath the Highway 403 bridge. Then, of course, there’s my usual steep ascent up to Burnhamthorpe. Though the route is somewhat shorter than my usual two valleys run it has twice as many arduous ascents regardless of whether you run it clockwise or anti-clockwise.

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Now that I have devoted several weekends to working on the front and side walkways the job is essentially complete, save for a few minor finishing details. So, I ran my regular route (12km?) in about 1:04^* this afternoon, a decent time considering my lack of “practice.” Though it was only about 9°C, I wore shorts. And, just before leaving, I decided to wear my running shell. This turned to be “a good thing” as there were several brief showers during the hour or so. The fall foliage was beautiful especially some brilliant red maples at the corner of Collegeway and Mississauga Road.

An hour’s run over familiar routes allows one time for thinking and meditation. I thought today that my suggested Chrismas list should be runners' apparel or gift certificates from the Running Room or Coast Mountain Sports.

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On these hot afternoon runs I have been carrying a water bottle and wash cloth to wipe the sweat off my brow. Today’s experiment was to use Gatorade™ rather than just water. I really can’t say whether I was able to keep up the pace because of it or not. I find it too sweet. I am speculating whether I should be trying de-alcoholized beer as my fluid du jour. Though, by the end of the run, whatever I use has warmed up to air temperature. Real beer wouldn’t be good as alcohol is a diuretic and it makes you sweat even more.

This morning I sketched my concrete paver (interlocking brick) front and side walkway on 11×17 graph paper. I still haven’t found a good (read free or minimal cost) CAD program for Windows 2000/XP. The Google calculator was a great help in calculating areas and volumes. My 100' measuring tape has handy 6 ft 8 in type markings so I used those on my sketch. Google helped me calculate the paved areas (e.g. 20 feet 10 inches times 4 feet. The answer came up in square meters but the paver company quotes square feet per pallet. So Google helps me there too: 10 square meters in square feet. I could also calculate how much dirt I will have to remove and how much gravel and sand I’ll need.

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Finally, after 3½ months, our driveway has asphalt. We hired another company as the first company, the one that removed the old asphalt and put down a layer of crushed rock, wasn’t returning our phone calls. They did have $500 from us, though, so I figure we have kept up our end of the contract.

I signed the contract with Burl-Oak Paving on Tuesday and 9 guys (“all from the same village in Newfoundland”) came out to do the work today (Saturday). It took them about 2 hours with about ½ hour spent waiting for the asphalt truck. Now, in 4 or 5 days, I’ll be able to drive straight into the garage with no “bumps in the road.”

My next youngest brother, living in Victoria, had his birthday today. I woke him up at 09:00 his time to wish him a “Happy.” Apparently they stayed up Friday night to finish watching a movie they’d rented. I wasn’t too sympathetic as I had been up since 07:00 this morning not knowing when exactly the paving guys would be coming.

Today’s run was a scorcher: it was so humid that my “sta-dri” shirt was soaked by the end of the hour. My time was a couple of minutes slower, too — probably because I had to wipe the sweat off my brow periodically and drink some water.

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I finally got around to putting 3 coats of water-based urethane on the baseboards and quarter rounds I’ve cut for the ensuite bathroom. I still haven’t decided whether I’ll glue the moulding to wall with “liquid nail” glue or use nails. I guess it depends whether I can hold the moulding in place while the glue cures with clamps or heavy cans.

I bettered my counter-clockwise running time by a few minutes around my usual circuit. I have to run up all the steeper hill parts in the last third of my run when I go this way around. Running the route clockwise changes those steep hills into descents. The elevation change going up in the last clockwise third is more continuous and gradual.

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I bettered my usual run of between 11 and 12 km (note to self: get that bicycle odometer soon) by about 2 min — perhaps because the air was breezy and about 22°C.

Today’s supper guests were my youngest brother and sister-in-law and their two children, Sarah and Alexander. Sarah the two+(?) year-old was scared of the dog because of a previous encounter with a Jack Russell terrier but Alexander, almost one, ignored her. Their family got a car just recently so it was nice to have them visit us for a change.

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I have put on maybe two kilos over the past couple of weeks — probably due to too much beer and food at my sister-in-law’s family party a couple of weekends ago. I didn’t realize how finely balanced my current eating habits and exercise were until I over-indulged. That excess doesn’t come off easy. And to think I have another family party coming up this weekend and at least two more in August.

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Today was neighbourhood-junk-exchange a.k.a street sale day. I was looking for yard tools for my son’s soon-to-be-purchased house. Though I didn’t find anything for him, a neighbour down the street was selling his 5hp chipper/shredder because he was tired of storing it. I just had to try it out this afternoon: after I turned my compost piles, I had a pile of sticks and brush to chop. The machine is noisy but it works great. It even chops up pine cones into little bits if I feed a few at a time into the branch port rather than using the brush hopper. I had planned on buying an electric shredder but this is more powerful and I paid half the price for this apparently not used very much model.

Now I guess I’ll just throw out my electric vacuum-mulcher with the chipped plastic impeller blades. I had dissassebled it but found the impeller and motor shaft were one unit. I hadn’t gotten around to taking apart the motor. Even on the Internet I couldn’t locate parts for the unit. Besides it is those pine cones or the “cores” left by the red squirrels that break the impeller blades when I suck up a pile of leaves with those hidden inside.

Today’s weather was great for a 12 km run. The park and ravine paths are dry for the most part and the air was cool. Instead of wearing a hat, I now put sunscreen all over my head and wear a sleeveless top to avoid a “farmer’s tan.”

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It poured rain this morning. So hard did it pour it leaked under the siding and trickled in the top of one window via the siding. At least I noticed the water and mopped it up. I’ll definitely have to start calling roofers for estimates tomorrow.

My afternoon run of about 11km was rather slower by because of the wet trails and the puddle jumping. Running on the grass is slower, too. My knees and feet prefer running on grass.

I decided not to enter the Mississauga (Half-)Marathon. There’s too much to be done on the weekends: choir takes up half of Saturday already until the end of May. I figure that by the time I get driven there, register, run, get picked up at the other end, etc. that will be more than another half day gone. This will be another thing to put on the list of things I would like to do once I (semi-)retire in a few years hence.

Saturday I was busy restoring hubbo.com so I just ran on the treadmill. Since I had found the heart monitor I tried the “aerobic” “heart-rate controlled” 30 minute work out. The top speed was only 6.8 km/h; however the machine set the slope at 10% for most of it. I seemed to have sweat as much and burned as many calories according to the machine than the time I ran an average of 10 km/h over 30 minutes at a 2% slope.

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I found out that Mississauga (or at least some sponsors) is hosting its first annual marathon on May 16, 2004. I run for the fun(!) of it mostly; however, since this is a local event I am considering the half-marathon. At 21.1k this is about double my longer distance runs on the weekend. Perhaps I’ll try increasing this distance over the next couple of weeks and then make a definite decision.

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Today’s treadmill stats: #3 / 360 ↑ / 112 ↑ / 2.0% / 5.02 ↑ (10.04 km/h) / 12.1 ↑ / 78 / 49.

Though today’s outside weather was fine for running I had washed my running stuff this morning. I set the max. speed to 12.1 km/h (7.5 mph) which was pretty fast though I found if I lengthened my stride I could (just) keep up. Truth be told, I pressed pause a couple of times. While looking for something else I found the heart rate monitor for the treadmill (after I was done natch) so I’ll try a heart rate controlled routine next time.

Last night’s spreadsheet discovery was how to show formulas in MS Excel. This simple VBA function does the trick:

Function GetFormula(Cell)
   GetFormula = Cell.Formula
End Function

Some of my expense calculations for the tax return combined some values (I use named ranges) and I wanted to show the formulas I used beside the calculated values.

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I pulled out the topographic map I bought and checked some distances. Near as I can figure my regular route wasn’t quite 10km as the crow flies. I remedied that today and added some extra distance. It took me an hour to run the route which isn’t all that great for a 10K run; however, my excuse is spring. I would guess that at least 60% of the route is on grass or park paths which are quite squishy and puddly at the moment. There is the as the crow flies aspect, too: the map shows my route varies over a vertical distance of 62m or 203ft 5in. Most of this is spread out over the route except for a couple spots getting in and out of the Credit River valley.

As I am home alone I have had a chance to log some 324 receipts to account for my wife’s music teaching business. This means that I’m almost finishing the completion of our 2003 tax returns. Yee haw! Let the weather get warm and the following weekends' weather be excellent!

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She passed me just as I had started my run from the GO station to chez moi. I was jogging slowly as I had been on the verge of headache most of the day. However, I couldn’t let her “get away” with it so I picked up the pace and trailed her by about 10 m. for about the next 1.5 km until she turned the corner. She was probably surprised that this old guy with knapsack could keep up. A couple of times I was catching up then she sped up again, never quite “getting away.” All that pounding and exercise did bring on the headache but a couple of Moitrin got rid of it at supper time. Geez am I tired though.

To that guy in the SUV whose back window I slapped: “Is it too much to ask a driver to stop before the pedestrian crossing when the light is red in your direction before you make a right turn? Oh, and could you look both ways, too.”

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I was thinking of a new blog but then I thought a new category would work for me just as well.

After a return trip to Windsor last evening and this morning. Then sitting at the keyboard for this afternoon there’s been a whole of sedentary “activity” going on. Rather than run in the rain and dullness I hopped on the ol' treadmill, à la greque as no-one else was home. Though, I don’t think the ancient greeks wore shoes and socks.

Today’s stats: #3 / 324 ↓ / 101 ↓ / 2.0% ↓ / 4.78 ↑ / 11.3 ↑ / 78 ↓ / 49. Average speed: 9.6 km/h.

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That TV cable is no longer lying across the second floor hallway. Today I fished it down the cold air return to the basement and thence to the video amplifier near the service entrance panel.

Today’s find at Rona was a spring loaded access cover usually used for access to valves or wiring. I sawed an 8 in. square hole in the wall in order to be able to drill holes through two studs and pass the cable through from the hall cold air return to the room with the TV. Then I just snapped the cover on. The hole patching can wait until I redecorate that room. For the time being, the access cover is hidden by some storage drawers.

The longest part of the job was in trying to fish the cable from the unfinished middle room of the basement over the finished hallway to the service entrance panel. After a couple of frustrating tries in the afternoon, I broke off and ran on the treadmill. Then it was time to make supper. After that fine repast I made one more attempt — this time successful. I guess being exercised and well fed had something to do with it. Or maybe it was the stronger flashlight I used in this attempt.

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My younger son is now a published author. His opinion piece appeared in the University of Windsor student-run paper The Lance.

Today’s stats: #3 / 344 ↑ / 107 ↑ / 3.0% ↑ / 4.43 / 10.5 / 80 / 49 ↑.

Good thing I used the treadmill this morning as I almost fell flat on my back while walking to the corner to get the newspaper later on. Yesterday’s partial thaw and freezing rain have made the sidewalks and paths “somewhat” icy.