Berry Foraging, My Pemmican Project, and Ugly Fish

I have no shame in saying that the constant daily influx of being mindful of the presence of lockdowns, the masking up, the event postponements, the extra measures for social distancing, the death tolls on the news, concern for family and friends, the ineptitude of some leaders and governments, and some of the willful ignorance of the public in general, to deal with this matter responsibly and seriously, are all making it harder for me to avoid a depressed state. Today is Day 2 of a 4-Day weekend for me. There’s offerings and opportunities for overtime abound coming to me, but I am not tempted at all to take any right now. I poked into work to take OT during my last 4-day weekend, and it did me no good at all in retrospect. A four day weekend happening every six weeks is the only positive trade-off I have after my schedule had been jumbled around as it has since the Covid-19 measures took effect. It’s (allegedly) summer, and I should be using these days off wisely.

However, yesterday was a day that I felt I didn’t play out so well in being wise, at least in the beginning of it. I had absolutely no energy or motivation to do anything constructive for much of it, but I did force myself to move. I thought of going fishing, but the prospect of facing a stampede of ticks charging at me through the rushes and grass along the river shore near my favoured spots wasn’t anything I wanted to contend with right then. Mid-July is the beginning of canning season for me typically. I did brew up some Watermelon Rind Pickles, but there was no heart in that task: it felt more like a job of being stringent to stop household wastage rather than an act of pride of creating a homemade culinary pleasure. Something reduced to a menial cleaning duty, like mopping a floor, or scouring a toilet.

Mid-July here is also Saskatoon berry season, and, even though again my energies and instincts didn’t feel right, I forced myself to try a bit foraging around some spots where I correctly guessed that there would be an abundance of bushes - to at least feel a little more useful and productive. However, it wasn’t very fruitful - literally. I also correctly guessed that they would have also had been picked over already by other foragers, since shutdowns have made it more likely that some of those without work were more resourceful in using the extra time to snoop around for free seasonal food. Surprisingly, I managed not to invoke furious swarms of mosquitoes as I rustled through the bushes, being so close to the river, but an hour or so in the oppressive humidity was enough, and I tapped out. The few odd good berries that were left were sparse, some were already becoming desiccated, and amidst puny immature ones that only birds would take interest in. I combed the area, working along for at least a kilometre southward, to only get a yield of about 400 grams of berries of mediocre quality.

I tried not to allow all this effort to become another senseless waste of time. These saskatoons were not of any size or quality to be usable for dessert fare like pies; too miniscule of quantity to use for jam. I found the thought of working an hour to make what would amount to a couple of fruit smoothies ridiculous.

The thought of another possible use for them struck me as ridiculous: making pemmican. The ridiculous part being that I lived all my life here in this province, and I have never once sampled any sort of pemmican. It’s now considered to be an archaic foodstuff, heading down the road of dietary obsolescence, like many other food traditions that have become obscured and extinguished since the advent of modern refrigeration, and food preservation science. I can forgive myself, and I won’t be too self-critical about that kind of ignorance on my part. Very few people here, in fact, even amongst those who are of native ancestry or Métis, from which it originated, have ever sampled pemmican in this modern age. When I shared this idea with my girlfriend, she looked at me with the expression like she saw the needle on my weird-o-meter flip over into the red zone, that mirrored a conclusion that the Covid situation is turning her poor boyfriend into some sort of crazy, paranoid, doomsday prepper*. That seems to be the only isolated subculture remaining that is taking a serious interest in making pemmican; if not eating it, then storing it in some bunker somewhere, where it awaits them for Armageddon. That is really kind of a shame, because it’s something that would be an honestly true local Canadian/Saskatchewan food: a meat preservation technique that has been used to sustain the indigenous people here for centuries, if not millennia, but not readily adopted for our modern culture here in Western Canada. I’d like to see it be given some more due respect as a food with some historical significance and cultural identity for this province. I’m not saying that it has to be made popular again, but the technique for making it should be at least given some honour, and be preserved for posterity, like the rest of those so-called pioneer recipes that were collected for the sake of the history of the communities of our province. 

So, out of my own scientific and anthropological curiosity, I decided to commit to this project. It comes as a disappointment to my girlfriend, who I’m sure would have rather preferred that I try make her some scones with those few saskatoons I found.

Making pemmican merges techniques of preservation that intersect the making of sausage and jerky. It’s simply made of lean, dried meat; mixed with mashed, dried berries, maybe with salt if it was available; blended and coated with melted tallow. After that, it is then pressed, formed, wrapped, and when packed in an air-tight container, it’s one of these foods that can last nearly forever (if kept dry) without further need of resources to preserve it (hence why preppers really dig this stuff). It is a food that’s energy-dense (without any carbs/added sugar) and protein-rich, and also readily portable and easy to cache without refrigeration, or other sophisticated method of storage. That was the appeal of it to the indigenous peoples, and later to the traders, trappers, and frontiersmen in the early days of settling in this territory. It’s as perfect a food that can be made for the practical purpose of enduring the rigours of outdoor living and/or a hunter-gatherer nomadic lifestyle: be it grunting along portaging canoes, chasing down your next meal in the bush or on the plain, or just for plainly and simply surviving in an uninsulated, flimsy walled, collapsible, portable shelter during the worst of weather inclemency. As a diet food, you can’t get more Paleo than something that was actually crafted since the Stone Age.

I have actually tried to make pemmican once before in my lifetime. It was back when I was in the sixth grade in school. Making “pemmican” was part of our social studies class project when we were learning a bit of the aboriginal culture and history of our province. We used hamburger and saskatoon berries mashed together the “traditional way”, by using rocks, but the drying process failed completely. I remember afterward, as a result, we had containers full of horrible, maggot-festered, slimy, rotting mush; with a gag reflex-triggering stench. It was definitely a moment where that could have dissuaded me forever from ever being curious about it again.

Traditional forms of pemmican aren’t just restricted to bison and other wild meat - but can also made of something that required more of an acquired taste. I was made aware more recently of a sort of fish pemmican made by the northern Dene people of this province. The substance in question, if I remember right, is something called “losh”. When first told about this, I was uncertain if it referred to the fish used, or the recipe for its preparation. The Dene method of making this stuff involves taking the big, fatty liver from fish we call a mariah (pronounced the same as the first name of the singer Mariah Carrey). It’s also known by the other names, varying regionally, of burbot, or ling)**. I’ve always known it being called by the first name I mentioned. For those unfamiliar with it, it’s a freshwater relative to cod, with a fat, flat, frog-like looking head with a lower barbel on it, and an eel-like tail. As far as native species of fish in this province go, this one isn’t likely ever going win any beauty contests. It’s an icky dull brownish colour, and it’s about as ugly looking as a pail full of smashed assholes. Anyway, this creature’s liver is mixed and mashed together with dried cranberries, and perhaps some parts of its pulverized flesh. The rest of the process and details of preparing it is of no interest or consequence to me because I’m quite sure that I would never fucking ever eat such a thing anyway. I won’t knock its possible nutritional benefits though. It’s probably a very potent and practical nutritional powerhouse, loaded with all the same vitamins that cod-liver oil supplements have. Sensible to eat in a Northern area where plant-based vitamins are lacking most of the year. The point is that its preparation/composition has the common elements as that of pemmican: basically some sort of mix of flesh, dried berries, and animal fat. Apart from that, I imagine and assume that the traditional way of adding some seasoning and flavouring to food in the pre-colonial times for the aboriginal people was pretty much limited to just using salt or wood smoke.

Getting back on track. I decided to start this project today. There was no set method amid any of the recipes and techniques I reviewed online, so I’m jury-rigging my own from the bits and pieces found that accord to the materials I have in my kitchen.

Meat, salt, and saskatoons

I originally thought I was going to make my first pemmican trial as authentic as possible and use bison meat. However, even a modest quantity of bison meat costs a mint, and it would be a shame to have a possible failure result with such a great expense. So, I opted for the leanest beef I could find: some trimmed eye of round, using about two kilograms worth, accounting for the fact that the weight will shrink to about half or more once I dry it. The melted tallow component is actually beef suet. If you are already feeling repulsed, and going “Ewww!”, and are of British ancestry, I remind you that there is such a thing as suet pudding in the English gastronomical circle. The butcher I visited told me that there is little difference between the two, and process of rendering it would probably be easier. I got myself a kilogram of that to render down (using my slow-cooker). That, plus my 400 grams of berries, mashed and muddled with about 2 tablespoons of salt were my total ingredients. I sliced the beef pieces to about a 5 millimetre thickness. I coated them with the mashed and salted saskatoon berries. I placed some on an even single layer on a mesh drying rack in the oven at 225 degrees F (107 degrees C) for several hours. The rest of the slices that would not fit on that rack were put in my food dehydrator. 

I dried the pieces until they were about half their original volume, and quite rigid and no longer sticking to the rack surface. Using my hand meat grinder, I then ground down that stuff and got a yield of about 750 grams of berry/meat component. I rendered off enough suet for about an equal weight of it to make a 1:1 mixture. I blended it together while the liquified suet was still warm. I got a consistency in the mixture that looked like a thick lumpy pudding. I lined rectangular containers with wax paper, poured it in these molds, and allowed the mix to set and cool. I used a paper towel to blot off some excess grease from the surface of my cooling pemmican bricks.

Suet added to the mix.
The bowl on the right is the
remaining cracklings from the
rendered suet. They won't be
wasted. I'll add them as filler for
my next sausage-making project.

Rectangular containers lined with
wax paper to form my "bricks".
It makes this operation look
somewhat illicit!

The finished product all set and wrapped up.
One innovation I used for forming (not exactly
traditional) was a homemade wooden press used
for making sushi.

If you are as crazy or adventurous to copy what I’ve been doing, know this. Beef fat hardens quickly and is more waxy than it is oily/greasy. Never dispose of hot beef fat down your sink! Unless you want a visit from your plumber. I haven’t done this myself, but I felt compelled to warn people who might be silly enough to try to do that. Wipe and scrape off as much of the splatters and excess residues from your surfaces, bowls, and utensils and dispose in the garbage before you wash them.

My Verdict: The process was a lot more labour intensive than just making straight up jerky or even making sausage. I found it to be a bit messier than those processes. The texture after it finished setting was kind of waxy, as could be expected. I have not actually tasted it yet; I’m waiting for a bit of biochemical magic to happen first. I stored most of the bars in my freezer except for one. That one is the smallest of them which I kept out in room temperature that will be used as sort of a sacrificial scientific assay, to see and monitor if, or when, any decomposition does occur. If so, how long will it take place? I’m also curious, given that there are sugars in the berries trapped in an anaerobic environment, if any sort of secondary fermentation process will happen, as like when dextrose is added to salamis that are hung to air dry and be preserved that way by sort of being pickled in the residual alcohol internally, which also gives them a signature flavour.

If I dare myself to make this stuff again, I think my next berry ingredient will be some further reduction of a blueberry jam that I made that did not set and was thence rebranded “blueberry syrup” to recover from my failure. I also have dried juniper berries which could be interesting. I saw a version with honey added, another forever food, which may help with its conservation.

I’m now curious as to how to use it culinarily, apart from just whittling away at a bar of it and eating it off the knife while camping in the bush somewhere, or while ice fishing, or keeping a bar of it packed in a winter roadside emergency kit in your car’s trunk. I imagine it could be used the same way as being set on a charcuterie platter, or the same way Ukrainians (from the old country) traditionally eat salo (smoked/salted raw pork lard), i.e. with bread, pickles, and vodka. Who knows? Avenues of further innovations could start from here.

*- Not so, I just need to pull myself out of my blue funk with something novel to do.

**-Taxonomical Name: Lota lota. That seems fitting for a fish that’s a whole lota ugly. Whatever you chose to call it, it is one of the more disgusting living things you could ever pull out of a lake in Saskatchewan aside from leeches. My problem with this fish isn’t really with some prejudice against its appearance, but rather after having caught a few these from several winters of ice fishing, I’ve too often seen many come up through the ice riddled with little gray-white parasitic worms that are clinging to their bodies. A consequence of its habit of occasionally burrowing in the silt and muck of a lake or river bottom. It certainly thus doesn’t make the thought of willingly eating one of these things any more appealing, although some who are bold enough to eat these things swear and claim that there is a bit of a lobster-like flavour to them.

Winter-ruption

Some people have the habit of immersing themselves into their Sunday morning with their coffee, and leisurely reading the weekend paper. I’m noticing that since the year began that I seem to be immersing myself into my Sunday morning with my coffee in hand, and pretending as if I were writing for a newspaper.

There were unwelcome strange things going on throughout the week since last entry, mostly confined to my personal life for me to deal with beginning the moments I came home after work on more than one occasion, but thankfully these tricky things didn’t mushroom into anything more wild or intensely serious. They included: my building almost catching on fire, another threat of infestation, and my poor little pooch getting injured. Of all those, my dog’s health was/is my greatest concern. She is healing: slower than I want, of course, but at least she’s not deteriorating for the worse. I’m happy that the week ended better with new interesting experiences, and overall soothing transitions. It has been a good weekend to shake off some of the mid-winter blues, which included crawling out of my hermit hovel for a change, and being a little more social. I got myself a ticket for sporting event, which I deemed to be a kosher purchase despite some new project ambitions, which I’ll cover more about sometime in my next entry.

I checked out my first lacrosse game on Friday evening. The Sasktel Centre arena was packed. The Saskatchewan Rush played the Buffalo Bandits. Unfortunately, the Bandits earned their team name too well, first stealing away what was an initially impressive and massive lead by the Rush, coming hard and overtaking them to come to a tie, and then stealing the game away in overtime, 16-15. An epic comeback for them (uncelebrated here, of course), and an embarrassing downturn for us. It was only the Rush’s first loss of the season though - small potatoes. It was still worth the effort to go, and I’d check out at least one more game for the season. Again, I write this next part for the benefit of my non-Canadian audience. The game originated in this nation (actually long before we became a nation) centuries ago by the Iroquois tribal first nations out east. Anthropologically speaking, it was evidence that the development of such a game was an indication of less reliance on nomadic hunting and gathering, and the preference to adopt permanent settlement and the deployment of agriculture. Leisure time appears more with the fixation of working around seasons in one place, and acting out non-lethal ways to practice martial tactics through team sports also evolves*. However, despite it being our official national sport, it fell into obscurity in our cultural scene for a long while. It lost out somehow to hockey and to curling, in terms of popularity as a spectator team sport in these modern times, or at least there has never been a Lacrosse Night in Canada televised on CBC during our nation's formative sports media years. The more novel and esoteric team sport of broomball** (another rink sport invented here, because we have way too much fucking winter to deal with) even became a more popular community sport around here during my early years than Canada’s official national sport, lacrosse. Lacrosse still has been around, but it just hasn’t really been popular as a big-time league field sport until it had been recently re-hyped somehow, and has been making a grand resurgence, thankfully avoiding a sort of extinction from our identity.

I don’t know, or couldn’t guess, as to how or why lacrosse became so diminished in popularity, and a lesser meme of the field/arena/rink team sports played in this nation to begin with. Perhaps it lacked the display of brute strength of football, or the more extreme speed and sometimes pugilistic action that ice hockey has, or perhaps it wasn’t as cerebral, or loaded with enough focused and refined, single-pointed calculated target finesse that curling has in satisfying the other end of the spectrum of stimulation through spectatorship. Sadly, I believe that it wasn’t more strongly popularized throughout our history really because white guys originally from Britain or France didn’t come up with the idea first. It looks like something that Dr. Seuss may have invented. It sometimes gets tricky to follow the plays, as the ball isn’t out as much in the open as a hockey puck is, hidden in racket netting as players are trying to deek each other out, so it can be definitely harder to track. Maybe that's why it got harder to promote and sell through radio and then television, when these media forms were in their infancy: the technical issue of reporting and recording where this elusive ball was throughout a game. The extra dimensional axis along the field of play makes it as interesting, if not more so, than ice hockey. More hand-eye coordination is involved with it perhaps than hockey in that respect. Even if I were younger, I know that I’d have a real challenge playing it. I wish success not only for our team, but also to the league as a whole.

Another newly hyped outdoor game/sport for this winter-ruption season in the city that I’m checking out this weekend is Crokicurl. You can’t get much more Canadian in a game than this: taking a table game that originated in this country, something I’ve played a few times in some dingy, up-in-the-sticks barrooms (Crokinole); a game, as with darts, where one’s prowess is tested and tempered by making it even more challenging yet for one’s fine motor skills with heavy alcohol consumption, and then making an augmented version of it to play on a post-studded ice surface using curling stones for counters. What a concept! No doubt, some form of inebriation or intoxication had to be in progress as the heads came together to create this fusion of these two games. It’s so simple, and perfect! I also can’t really believe that we’ve been so stupid as to not come up with this idea a lot sooner for around these parts. Oh well, better late than never for this heroic flash of innovation. Sponsorship for this bar game come outdoor spectacle, especially from the local brewers and distilleries, i.e., those who could have some sway in allowing drinking in public, could really help it to take off in popularity during this most wretched of the yearly seasons. Hey, and why not just loosen up a bit more about drinking outside in public in the middle of bloody winter as well for special events like this? Especially considering that things are getting lax enough around here where weed is going to become legal by next summer. Hell, I bet the newly forming cannabis corporations here may also want a piece of this sponsorship action. It might be even more entertaining watching these “athletes” trying to play this while they are completely high***. It could potentially be the new stoner outdoor winter sport (not unlike snowboarding, which already holds such a distinction), that can get more involvement and appeal from the lesser-than athletic types. It will be interesting to see how this thing evolves as another one of our national wintertime leisure activities.

It's all hype folks: a sport doesn't become a sport nowadays without it. Pulling a new one out of obscurity and making it fly off the ground with popularity seems now to be impossible to do without commercial sponsorship. 

*- Non-lethal is not always the case. The Aztecs had fully adopted agriculture and civilization too, and consequently developed their own basketball-like team sport called ullamaliztli, a game that died out right along with them. Maybe it’s popularity didn’t take off so well because the losers of the game were offered as human sacrifices to their pantheon of gods. Hard to the develop teams if they are constantly being physically eliminated by getting their hearts torn out. Let's just say that their PR folks kind of didn't give this a serious think through for promotional purposes.

**- Broomball: an ice rink sport believed to have been invented right here in Saskatchewan (first official recording of it being played is in the community of Perdue). Played sort of like hockey, except with using an implement resembling a broom to whack a ball around (hence the name, like, duh!). Comparing it to hockey is like comparing (American/Canadian) football to rugby. There’s no special padding like hockey, and specially soled shoes are worn instead of skates. You need some sure footing as you run along the ice, but you may get the advantage of some added extra traction by occasionally trotting over someone's missing teeth. It can be even more pugilistic than hockey, as I’ve seen in some goonfest matches of it in the past. Maybe it's because there’s less a lot padding to punch around, and there is a decided advantage in being able to base and balance a striking posture more easily to scrap, drift, and coldcock a guy on ice while wearing shoes rather than skates. It's what makes one who is being a broomball goon even distinctively more of a lowdown dirty psycho bastard than as such in hockey in comparison. It would be great, if not miraculous, if this actually got recognized as a sport fit for the Winter Olympics, other than seen as the lowbrow hybrid spawn of hockey/rugby that it could be. 

***- I’m sure at this point of reading this composition of crazy ramblings, that some may think that I do marijuana myself. I honestly do not. My limited alcohol consumption (because of medical reasons) is enough of a vice as it is; I don’t need anything else beyond that. Personally, my life wouldn’t change when cannabis becomes legal here, except probably dealing with issues as a steward about the grey areas when it comes to interfering with work performance in others on the job. I would treat it as a medicine (one that I probably can’t take anyway due to contraindications with my other treatments), and nothing more than that. I am, however, pro-legalization; more so for the reasons that I believe a strengthened hemp-production economy and industry makes for an inroad toward more sustainable ways of environmental and ecological preservation, and will ultimately lead to less taxed and stressed healthcare, law-enforcement, and corrections systems.

La Loche

I tried to have a good as a weekend as I could, given the horrible events in this province that happened recently. It’s not an incident I want to make a special effort to remember; yet it is one that simply can’t be ignored . . .

This province is a place that’s normally so obscure to most of the rest this globe: except to those who were part of the diaspora of leaving here for grander opportunities, or who still have family settled and rooted here. Lately, there has been a terrible light that has been shone upon us. For those of us who live in this province, which few people on this globe can pronounce, or would care to otherwise bother to find on a map, it’s a spotlight shining most unfavourably, on a remote place with little of anything redeeming to offset its reputation of being a rough spot to live in this province. We are (were) an ordinarily peaceful region in comparison to the rest of the world. Now however, we are no longer exempt from the list of places where violent shooting rampages can possibly occur. Now, a signal of further collapse towards the dark side of humanity in the northern communities and the first nations’ reserve lands is beckoning. This recent result: four dead, several others seriously injured. It’s a harsh glimpse into a community where society is already close-knit yet fragile, where families are already shattered with higher than average rates of poverty, unemployment, addictions, and suicides. Its isolation and lack of basic amenities and services don’t help either, nor does the clash of cultures, or having a provincial government who is largely dismissive of having mental healthcare, or even healthcare in general, accessible to its citizens; doing what it is doing to dissolve more of what little there is available already. It occurred at a time of year when the trough of wintertime depression is the deepest for most. There simply was less chance and resources for adequate intervention and prevention for things like what happened in La Loche recently. Most people are shocked, saddened, and angered about what happened there. As for me, after considering all the factors at play, it was no longer a question of if things like this could happen there, but a question of when and how severely the outcome would be.

Whether this all stemmed from long term recurring generational community strife and social problems, or simply is a punctuation of this script as a volatile short term mental derangement of one individual is debatable. There are not enough things yet released in the news suggesting how this storm of rampant untamed violence ultimately erupted. All we know for now is that it was a male young offender who did this, meaning under the Young Offenders Act of Canadian law, his name won’t be released to the public. The exact factors, precursors, and triggers of the events in this town will remain in question, as will the more detailed psychiatric profile of the perpetrator. There was some suggestion of bullying going on. As much as I can empathize with that young man given his age for struggling to deal with such an issue, I certainly don’t condone his chosen course of action to deal with it.

Mass shootings were once thought be limited mostly to the domain of that crazy nation downstairs*, with their psychotic fascination and promotion of gun culture, the ridiculous interpretations of their constitution’s second amendment, and the more relaxed regulations for firearm ownership and types of weapons one can own. Now, this insidious trend is appearing in other normally peaceful and civilized nations and societies, albeit (thankfully) in a less frequent degree. Norway, Sweden, Finland have suffered such tragedies in the past decade. Paris France, of course, is still a salient memory. Australia had the Port Arthur incident in the 90’s. Quebec (like École Polytechnique) and Alberta (Taber) are the other provinces in this nation to have had gunmen charging into schools and opening fire.

I can only imagine the sorrow and mood in such a community that has been unwillingly thrust by these circumstances into the view and focus of the whole nation, and to the rest of the world with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s announcement of the tragedy in such an international forum like Davos, Switzerland. It’s moment of infamy that won’t ever be erased from the hearts and memories of those who were families and neighbours to the slain and wounded victims. Two teachers were lost, in a place with already precious few positive engaging role models who could have benefited that community. I hope the survivors get the support they need somehow; no simple bandage of financial support is going to make this nightmare go away for them, or reform an already shattered community.

*- To date, the first 25 days of this year of 2016, at this moment, the United States alone has had 786 recorded deaths by guns. That already amounts to more than half of all the gun deaths that occur in Canada for an entire year (an average of roughly 1300 for the past 25 years, according to Statistics Canada). Statistically, you are more likely to be shot to death in the United States than you are to die in a car accident in Canada.

The Marathon Itch

Since the end of April, I’ve been trying to exercise again, but I’ve been hit with more stumbling blocks. I’m at least cycling again to a normal speed and pace, but my endurance is still lacking. I’m guessing that my lungs give out at around 75% of what their normal past efficiency was. Damned pulmonary scar tissues are still being a nuisance to me. Cycling has been the only hardcore physical cardio activity I’ve been able to tolerate throughout the month, as there is less shock from it. Back pain due to a pinched nerve for the past few weeks has limited me to just that. Of course, this impedance restricted my ability to run. However, I’m finally feeling like I’ve recovered from that. All this while, it has been aching me to see so many people out there running, yet I couldn’t be among them.

I went to the Saskatchewan Marathon Expo yesterday. I wasn’t registered, but I was collecting a race package for someone who was. When I arrived at the Expo and reached the bike valet station, I was given a ticket with the big bold number of 007. It was a reminder that I had the smarts, discipline, and resilience before to adopt the “Bond” attitude before, and I’m sure I could put myself back in that place again. As I was cycling back home the downtown, I was lost in thought about what it will take to put me back into the shape my former self was in, and what kind of time and energy I could devote to it. I now have a goal, but I needed real science and numbers and figures to help guide me. So, like James Bond, I decided to scope out some of the course of the Saskatchewan Marathon, and covertly follow and use some real people as targets to assess some realistic metrics and information to fashion some running hacks.
I could hear the ruckus and commotion of the setting up of the Marathon all the way from the Exhibition grounds where the race starts this morning. The dog and I walked towards the starting gate, and I used the GPS on my phone and the stopwatch to get some data. Here is what I tracked down and found:

·         The stretch along St. Henry Avenue between the corners of Ruth and Hilliard is 0.211 km: that’s exactly 1/100^th of the distance of a half marathon (1/200^th of a full one). That’s convenient and useful for making a quick mental tachymeter calculation when I’m running through that section of street.

·         I found a target guy amongst the runners who was about my height, age, weight and build. I timed him and followed him between those two points. (1’ 52.62”, or 112.62 seconds)

·         Voila, I have what I need to determine realistic average target pace, at least initially.

·         Now, calculate that time and distance to a time/km figure for my slowest LDR pace (8’ 53.4”/km), and then go for a run try to hold that pace, and see how far I can get before pulmonary fatigue kicks in to get a baseline. I use that to work on extending my distance beyond that, progressively working up to the 21.1 km mark, and try and not to get too hung up on going faster.

I went for a trial run later after breakfast, which took me through some of the Marathon course. It was great to use the open road for a course way, and even though I wasn’t part of the race, the cheering bystanders were very motivating.

Mindful Consumption: Patronage and Support to Our Public Liquor Stores

Another conference was attended, giving me a lot more to dwell on with the current political climate in this province and reviewing the insidious changes to the Saskatchewan Employment Act, and how it ultimately affects us as not just unionized employees, but all of us as workers in general. I thought I'd better start taking a firmer stand on things; to be a more conscientious opponent against all the bad things that this government is doing to strip away our crown corporations and the privatizing of other public institutions. We ended the first evening of it having a bit of a social mixer and being well entertained with a hypnotist act. On the closing of day two, a note of gratitude came to our entire group from the young lad who was our bartender the night before. He said that ever since he worked at the hotel where our conference was, we were the people who he had so far made the most tips from; this is news coming from a guy who on numerous times served that same room full of businessmen and corporate big shots who probably drank more and had a lot more money than us to spread around for gratuities, but their habit of greed prevented them from doing so. That fact gave me lots of faith that we as unionized employees are really innately out there looking out for our fellow labourers, affiliated or not. The subjects of liquor, corporate business greed and hypnosis set my mind to write about this so called trial of privatized liquor stores in the province, and the propaganda that the Wall government is trying to use to sell us on this nonsense. Given what I said in my second sentence, one thing of meaningful action I vow to do, and we all should do as well, is this:

Stop buying from the new privatized liquor stores in this province. Why?

They take profits and revenue away from being used for public services and works in the province. With that money in pure profit diverted instead to private corporations, the government then becomes further relegated to reclaim those losses through more taxation elsewhere, or else slashing funding to other aid programs and public services and amenities. The yield from the profits going to the government coffers from just Saskatoon alone is huge: one million a month from just one of the larger ones alone, according to one of the brothers from SGEU. I dread to think about how much of a loss that would be if all of a sudden every liquor store in this province became privatized.

The employees of the private stores are paid less than the unionized workers at the public liquor stores for the same labour, and I will not support an entity that is doing its part to drive a bigger wedge between the rich and the poor, and taking away from its workers the chance of having a fair living wage, despite the fact that I'd be paying about the same price (or perhaps even more in cases) for the same product at private store. If you do manage to find a cheaper price for the same product at the private store, the average overall difference is probably amounts to within the range of a dollar. However, the difference between the hourly wage non-unionized and the unionized employee is usually greater than a dollar. Why can't they then just be paid the same higher wage if the workload and product prices have little to no significant difference? There are discounts in the public liquor stores too, but just because they aren't advertised more publically in a flyer, as with the case of the private store, we are given the illusion and misconception that there aren't any discounts at all in the public liquor store. I find it to be a strange irony that the private stores can advertise alcohol "publically" while the public stores do not.

You may, for whatever reason, truly hate your current government; and may think that by not buying from the public liquor store it will be your way of "sticking it to the man!" , but think of this repercussion. The reality is that when you take that booze money from the government and instead give it as a profit to a singular (family-owned as is the case with Sobeys here) multi-billion dollar corporation, that buys and lobbies governments on their agendas without our say so, you have basically started a trend of selling off whatever personal political power that you have left as a citizen and a consumer, to a corporation who will give you sweet-bugger-all as a result of their profits, unless you are a share-holder and relying on the crap shoot that is the stock market for a dividend return from them. When all is said and done, the ultimate thing that all governments respect is a means of filling their coffers. The more means of power that a mass of citizens has to pay its government directly, the greater the chance that same government might actually listen to and think more about those masses of people rather than listening the whims of a corporation that has become too large with money: to the point where their money is greater than that of what the rest of the masses have combined.

If there is little to no difference in savings in cost for product, what about the factors of transportation: vehicle usage, fuel, and time? On a personal level, the public liquor store I use is close enough to cycle or walk to; it's convenient, more economical, and more environmentally responsible. The cost of fuel I'd be using to drive to either private liquor store from my place on either end of this town would burn up whatever savings (if any) I would have gained from the booze I bought there. In a practical sense, it's totally pointless for me to buy from the private stores here. As it is now, in Saskatoon, the two private stores are logistically located in some very out of the way spots for the majority of the population of the city, while the public stores are distributed more closely amid the majority of the residential neighbourhoods. You certainly wouldn't be buying the privately sold liquor for the fuel economy (or to save time) in Saskatoon unless you maybe lived in the far West End or in Stonebridge. I don't even have to draw out the Hamiltonian circuits or Eularian graphs to prove it. As someone who grew up rurally, it drives me crazy when people don't more accurately account and factor in for the actual fuel and time costs in the overall "savings" when getting their purchases.

I'm a frugal person, but not to the point where my saving of a few nickels and dimes supports depriving another local worker a chance for a few more dollars and protected rights and benefits if s/he were union affiliated, and only serves to take away revenues that help my community and province, and gives more power and leverage for corporations to exploit people and crawl into the hip pocket of government leaders. Buying from the public liquor stores is a direct investment into the province of Saskatchewan. Buying public ultimately serves the greater good.

Learning What Lagom Is

I've been enjoying what might be the last weekend of the year that is fair-weathered enough to partake in enjoying my Sunday morning coffee outside on my deck. I write with mixed emotions. I'm reflecting on an onslaught of information which has been knocking around in my skull since I acquired it from my last conference I attended. I'm saddened that organized labour is coming under such attack from all sides by corporation controlled conservative politicians. How has it come to be that the labour movement has been made to look like such an evil thing, when all the policies that unions are trying to fight for are in the interest of fairness, equality, and access to a better standard of living? I'm at least grateful that the recent transit union lockout in this city was deemed illegal, and that these workers can proceed with their jobs. The impact of it has been making life difficult for many of my co-workers.

I don't usually like to climb on top of soapboxes and start tossing around my opinions on political things. However, I'm stuck with dwelling on the subjects of politics and healthcare, and how both our provincial and federal governments seem to be doing all they can to ruin the whole system, and I feel I have some need to process it all through some writing. It really sickens me to know that here in Saskatchewan, the birthplace of Universal Healthcare in this country, which has been noted through the polling of our population as one of our nation's greatest achievements, is now being threatened in various ways by the current provincial and federal governments in the very province from which it was born. Compounded with this is our governments' blatant attacks on the unionized workforces of this province and country. Here are some facts with regard to this province and nation as to the progression of their attempts to erode the healthcare and unionized labour. I could go on and on about the insidious activity of the Harper government: about how he slashed funding and staffing from Statistics Canada and put a gag order on the scientists of Environment Canada in regards to the reality of Global Warning, but I'd like to just remain focused on these things first*:

• Premier Brad Wall spent a ridiculous amount of our tax payers' money to pay a single American consultant to determine how to run the healthcare system instead of consulting directly and working collaboratively for needs assessment with those who actually operate and work in the hospitals and community clinics in this province. Why are we getting administration advice from someone in a nation that: doesn't have the same proportionality of organized labour in the healthcare system as ours does, has the most expensive healthcare costs in the world, no model of Universal healthcare to operate with, and a closer to failing grade in terms of a rating for health care services in a comparison on the international level? Compounded with the expiration of the healthcare expense sharing plan to the provinces set up by the Liberal government 10 years ago, and the Harper government's refusal to renew it, this provincial system will be deprived of several million dollars for our healthcare budget as of this year.
• What reason(s) do businesses and supposedly democratic governments have to really fear and condemn organized labour? Why don't we throw in another nation into the mix for comparison and contrast, someplace where the labour movement is highly present in a democratic country, and then see what kind of hardships are happening there with this extra presence of Unionized labour? So, I did just that. I found out that the nation with the highest percentage of unionized employees is Sweden: one of the countries on this earth that I really like besides my own. I'm using the percentage figure of unionized labour I was given at the conference (67.7%), but I have found other stats with the union membership there as high as 80%. Regardless, in either case,  either figure still makes Sweden the most highly unionized country in the world. I did a three way comparison with Sweden, Canada, and the place where Brad Wall foolishly spent our tax dollars for consultants: the good ol' USA.
  
   

Stat Category	Sweden	Canada	USA
Percentage of Workers affiliated with a Union (2011 -2012)	67.7% (highest in the world)	31.5% (Saskatchewan is province with the highest %age at 35.4%)	11.3%
Health care spending %age of GDP 2011	9.36%	11.81%	17.85% (incidentally, the highest medical expenses of all nations)
World Health Organization rating of Each nation's health system	23rd	30th (but declining)	37th (and declining even faster)
Universal Health Care system	Yes (even plans for coverage for illegal immigrants)	Yes (but being threatened) I learned that Canadians that were even born here and leave the country for a long time are subjected to denial of services	No
Human Development Index Score (Ranking) of 2006	0.949 (4th)	0.949 (4th) tied with Sweden	0.944 (10th)
Nation's rating in highest average longevity	8th	11th	34th
Percent population living below the poverty line	3.7%	9.4%	15%
Average Disposable Income after taxes (in USD, 2014)	$3,181.11	$2,773.50	$3,258.85
Corruption Perception Index (the higher the score the cleaner the government) Maximum good score is 100	89	81	73
Crime: Prison Population Rate (prisoners per 100,000 people)	57 (159th in the world)	118 (129th in the world)	707 (2nd in the world, also ranked number 1 nation for having the largest population of incarcerated people)
Paid Maternity Leave	420 days, 80% of wages paid	52 weeks (365 days), 55% of wages paid	No national program, but some benefits varying state to state. In 1993, a national provision of 12 weeks unpaid leave enacted
Free University	Yes	No	No

 
What can we learn from this?

• A country that makes it easier to people to access education seems to have less of a need to incarcerate them.
• More investment in starting a child off in life with receiving the proper care might have a lot to do with keeping this person out of jail as an adult
• A greater unionized population seems to have less, or tolerates less, corruption of its own government
• If you have a system that implements a fairer living wage in that country, you'll have less people under the poverty line
• Healthcare spending seems to be occurring a lot more efficiently the more the country is unionized, at least in this comparison
• Even though Sweden still ranks 23^rd on the WHO healthcare ranking, the average life expectancy there is dramatically higher than that of the USA which has no true Universal Healthcare system
• The USA may have the highest take home pay out of the three after taxes, but an accident without the proper insurance through one's HMO down there, or some denial of coverage through some bureaucratic loophole which private insurers often pull will dwindle that pay down really quickly.

So, the nation with the largest number of union affiliated employees has come around to developing a society with: less crime and therefore less tax money used to feed and shelter prisoners, free university to keep fewer people enslaved to paying off student debt, a better rated healthcare system; yet with less GDP used for healthcare spending, less social poverty, and more relief to parents for rearing children. Not included on my table is the fact that Sweden has universal daycare. So why then is Brad Wall consulting with a nation whose healthcare system is rated more poorly than that of Canada, where the average life expectancy is already lower than that of Canada, an inefficient one where your access to healthcare solely depends on your own ability to pay/insure yourself for it, a greater division between its rich and poor, has a more dystopian society that has brought them to having the degree of crime, and their policies to deal with it which results in exponential spending on militarized police forces and wars on drugs, and having one fifth of the entire world's prison population incarcerated in their country alone? Isn't that an indication that their society is breaking down? Is it not then a ridiculous notion to be consulting with them for some means of improving our healthcare system? The only reason Brad Wall went this course was to try to learn how skirt around the organized labour in our hospitals and clinics for the sake of making cutbacks, not giving a hoot in hell about patient and client care, or the needs of the people who tend to them.
    
To be fair, Sweden also has this thing going on in its society that can't be conveniently pasted onto a table or chart. They have this unique word in their language called "lagom"; it means not too much and not too little, but just enough. Exercising moderation is held as a high social standard of appropriateness there. It is a cultural concept they have that is applied to a wide range of things, from their diet, to their resource consumption. I also imagine that it can also be applied to things like a common sense of fairness, environmental issues, social justice, and weighing of consequences on a person at a social level. It probably has a lot to do with making people there not so motivated by greed, and more geared toward fairness and equality. It's one of the few places left in the world where the middle class isn't facing extinction as quickly, and a bigger divide isn't being widened so dramatically between the rich and the poor. Over-the-top displaying of affluence and material wealth is generally regarded in their culture as absurd, obnoxious, ridiculous, and even obscene.**I find this attitude deeply engrained in myself already, and am appreciative of it. It makes me want to visit Sweden all the more to give it more exploration. If given an opportunity to be sponsored to be part of making a social documentary in this country for Canadian television or for my own union, I'd jump all over the chance to do it. The social fitting of lagom somehow probably correlates into how and why there is such a notably high preponderance of unionized labour in Sweden, but because this is a correlation it doesn't indicate cause and effect or determine how which begat what, the unions or the social attitude of lagom itself. Whatever the case, the two ideas seem to work interdependently and function well enough together for the Swedes. Union or not, healthcare or not, we would all do better by learning this same ethic from them.

Sweden also has a higher number of their female population representing their constituents through their government offices than either Canada or the USA. Perhaps that's another reason why there is a greater social mindfulness to allow for a long maternity leave for proper childhood development. With less of an old boys club to deal with, and less influence of some other patriarchal or some other old school theocratic oligarchy ruling them, this has a chance to happen. I wonder what the reaction of the Swedes would be to the senate scandals that happened here since the Harper government took power.
 
*- Statistics Canada used to be the envy of the world with having a publically accessible information for civic leaders and developers, public institution planners, scientists, activists, and businesses to use alike, but through the reign of the Harper government, 20% of its staff were let go, $30 million of its operational funding was slashed, and now measures of privatization and deregulation no longer assure unbiased data processing. Along with the short-listed census, this makes this a war on science, and cripples the Canadian public to having the freedom to access information.
 
**- This social attitude even prevails with the richer capitalists from there like of Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA. Despite being one of the richest people on the planet, he still flies economy class, drives a mid-90s model Volvo, recycles tea bags and encourages his employees to write on both sides of the paper.

Hibernation Musings

I was happy and grateful that this Friday was an actual Friday for me: no work this weekend. I'm too stiff and sore, and I just want to be still and heal. I had no initial plan for this weekend except for destination hibernation, since this Saturday morning's temperature has plummeted down to -44 with the wind chill accounted for; it's senseless to wander too far from home. But sleep continues to elude me. Ella has crawled under my covers, curling up beside me and exploiting me for the extra heat in the bed, happily snoring like a buzz saw. I wish I were so comfortable; I just lie here envying her peace of mind to do that. My own mind has been stricken and mass attacked with too many other problems and concerns to think about, as I'm stuck here in bed, now two hours before sunrise. There seems to be no convenient, easy, or safe way to vent the stuff, and I have been letting these negative things fester in me and consume me. Thus comes this exercise of trying rid these demons through writing. As cold as the bloody weather has been as of late, I at least know how to use self-discipline/persuasion, common sense, and logic to adapt to it. It's a whole other matter and issue when dealing with the cold-heartedness of other people.

The last paragraph seemed to serve me well enough to let me throw enough mental baggage on a shelf to allow me to catch another hour of sleep. It's now close to sun up. We only stuck our heads outside long enough for a brief relief constitutional for Ella's sake. To force myself to sit still and convalesce, I continue writing. Part of my soreness comes from something that I've been doing to lead people who have been watching me to question my sanity. I'm getting more mindful to stay in shape. I've been willingly choosing to walk to and from work on these colder days. Why do I do it? Apart from economy, for the following reasons:

• My own body is a far more reliable machine in this kind of frigid cold than any other kind of vehicle I've ever owned
• A longer bout of low impact exercise (walking) on a frigid cold day yields the same result (or greater) rather than running the same distance on a hot day; minus the sweat, and minus the risk of breaking bones if you attempt to run on ice.
• BAT (brown adipose tissue) is activated in cold weather, which in turn activates your metabolism to burn more regular adipose tissue, that your body uses as energy to heat it.
• Somehow my immune system improves; I get sick less. I'm giving my body a break from inhaling virus-laden indoor air, which I'd be sucking air if I was using a public fitness facility. The winter when I never got sick was the one when I walked outside most frequently. 

I might as well admit another weird truth about me as I sit here writing on the subject of the frigid days of winter around here. As much as I've done my fair share of grumbling about the arrival of winter year after year; no matter how cold it becomes, I really don't find myself fantasizing about taking a tropical holiday anywhere. Seriously. If anything, I'd find that after dropping in for a brief two week sojourn at some beach resort like in Mexico or Cuba, only to be whooshed back and plunged into these friggin' freezing environs to endure the remaining couple of months of cold again, it would only serve to make me even more miserable about the season. It doesn't add up to a reasonable sum total for the expense of pursuing pleasure and warmth in my books. I'll be patient and wait for summer to come.* Perhaps I just think of it bitterly now because I have no one to really share such a holiday with. If I ever went anywhere for a winter holiday, it damn well better be for the entire duration of the season (which currently isn't really practical or sustainable for me).

At this time of the year, if I do dream about far away places, I tend to think more about the other peoples and cultures that live around this same latitude, and I wonder what they do differently than us to adapt, endure, and even somehow befriend this season. I think of people like the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Finns, and the Russians: people who actually might have a sense of what it's like to live in a climate like this. They seem to deal with winter more positively than us in comparison. It's almost becoming second nature now for this time of the year to copy some of their habits. For instance, I recently learned some cuisine techniques from a Swedish chef (I said a Swedish chef, not the Swedish Chef)**. I'd be using the sauna downstairs today if I could (like the Finns would) if a Christmas party wasn't being set up in the neighbouring rec room right now. This is my second winter of Nordic skiing, inspired by the Norwegians. I'm getting more open-minded to allow myself to listen and relax to more classical music, like perhaps some Russian would, on cold days like this. My living space tends to shrink and get cozier and condensed with more cerebral activity; I retreat to my four square meter kingdom. This is what I do more now in solitude to gain comfort, rather than hanging around and listening to the negative bitching and complaining other people do about weather that none of us have the power to control.

The social media network throughout this nation has made winter time seem even stranger, as we get less ignorant of our own regions, and peek more into those around other parts of the country. There are a lot of clashing perspectives in a nation as large as ours is of what a relatively cold day is***. My co-worker and I were laughing at her friends in Vancouver who were on Facebook describing the temperature lingering around zero degrees there recently as being something like "soul-crushing". What a bunch of goddamned pussies! People would be dancing out in the street here if the temperature even managed to climb up to minus five during this time of year. Sadly though, as more immigrants come here from warmer climates, and more urbanization happens, it appears that we as Canadians are becoming soft in attitude about adapting to winter. I miss the more rural attitude from my own upbringing that people had during wintertime. You just dealt with having to tramp out there each day to protect your livelihood no matter how cold it got; there was more resilience and a lot less drama about it, and yet we somehow lived through it all. Hell, we used to play outside as kids when it was 30 below, but now it's made to look like some sort of crime for allowing children to do that. With people becoming more urbanized and listening in to the status of the climate on a broader national level, which really hasn't changed much in intensity over the years season after season, the reports seem to be so much more dramatic and apocalyptic now. Now, it's some newscaster reporting on the weather network, who probably has never been out of Toronto their whole life, who's always looking freaked out when they start reporting on the weather conditions in the north, or here in the prairie provinces; making what has always normally happened each year look somehow dangerously unnatural and extreme.

Well, my soup is almost done, and it's time for lunch. Maybe, just for a hoot, I'll tune into a Vancouver stations and feeds to see what kind of havoc the dreadful "zero degree weather" has wrought over there.
 

*- Having lived in the tropics for half a year once, and comparing that to a nicer summer season here in Canada: Canadian summer has more tolerable heat extremes, longer daylight hours, potable tap water, more reliable infrastructure, sanitation, and civic services, less crime and poverty, much fewer people in street traffic leaning on car horns, and no disgusting lizards and cockroaches invading your dwelling, which perhaps have earlier on in the day, frolicked around in humid fermenting piles of garbage containing an abundance of discarded human-excrement-caked toilet tissue.

**- Those watching me operate in a kitchen might easily assume that my cooking inspiration and mentor is the Mr. Börk Börk Börk Swedish chef from The Muppet Show, but the actual person I'm referring to in this case is Magnus Nillson, who authored the book Fäviken. It is about his restaurant lodge somewhere in the Jämtland county in Sweden, which is currently considered one of the top 50 best restaurants in the world. What is incredible about his place is how relatively remote and isolated that this restaurant seems to be, leaning close to the Arctic Circle, and most of the dishes prepared there are made from what is farmed, hunted, and foraged within the immediate vicinity of the establishment. The book is an amazing compendium about self-sufficiency, and how to cook gourmet dishes with even the most rustic natural in-season regional ingredients. If it is an ambition of someone to have a 100 mile diet, eat with environmental consciousness, or eat as much locally produced food as possible, this book is a treasure-trove of ideas for proving that elegant abundance can be found anywhere.

*** - Addendum: My idea of when it gets extremely cold, or my where my personal limit begins when cold weather makes me want give up and scream "Uncle!" and I'm no longer willing to go outdoors, is when the temperature is at -40 or lower. It's a temperature reading that equally spells "BRRRR" on both the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales; it becomes troublesome to run anything mechanical outside, and that makes even those tougher folks living north of the 60th parallel start to wish for something warmer.

My View on Roadtripping

I attended a family wedding this past weekend. It was a good trip for the most part. Though I was under-prepared for the cooler than seasonal night up there, I managed. It was good to see many of my relatives again; I just wish I was better adapted for this sort of social environment. I don't have a physical problem with my hearing; but I don't know if it is because I'm just getting older, or because I'm too accustomed to a more introverted lifestyle: I find myself having a brain that's more diminished in capability in filtering out multiple conversations; so being in a crowded, noisy community hall is sensory overload for me.

I was also invited to another family member's wedding in Banff in late August of this year. Sadly and regretfully, I won't be able to attend that one. I do like Banff; I've been there three times already, but the last time was there was around 20 years ago. Thinking back for each of those times, it was a miracle that I've made it in and out of there with the less than road-worthy vehicles I had to use at those times. This subject, plus reviewing my last entry, prompted me to think about making road trips within this country, as some more holiday time is coming my way. As like with many Canadians, I am one who has been blissfully ignorant about just how huge our country is in comparison to others, and just how skewed our notions are about what 'big' and 'small', or 'near' and 'far', are in terms of distance and scale in relation to those preconceptions from those of other nations; and what we consider is 'normal' for our needs/challenges to travel around, even just within our respective home provinces.* I was doing this after reviewing the time, distance I covered, and the amount of fuel I used, just to go the destination of this last wedding, which was within the province. I was further sobered up to this fact upon realizing through another conversation that the province of Saskatchewan alone is about 15 times the size of Denmark. I'm imagining that the whole scene of the sparseness of our population, distances between towns, and the expense of some rail and air fares for even trips within this country that are greater than some international flights, must appear so grossly inefficient to someone from someplace within, let's say, western Europe when it comes to the subject of travel.

I'm coming around to really disliking long road trips for the sake vacationing now, especially given that the price of fuel is constantly rising. If I have to do more than six or seven hours of driving just to arrive at one destination then I'd rather just fly. It's the fact that you start off (from here) with having to go a ridiculously long way just to get out of territory and scenery that you are already familiar with. The only advantage of it is that you can drive through it relatively quickly, but it still makes for a long drive. I would dread having to live any further south of here. I'm at an age and a place where I pretty much got the general concept of what prairie looks like, and driving through it more doesn't make it look any more exciting or appealing. To put it in perspective for the benefit of my international readers: from my city, you have to drive through what amounts to half the length of England just to escape prairieland, before you just start touching the closest fringe of what is the decent natural parkland and woodland north of here. It may have been OK to do back in the days of my youth, but for me now, it just sums up to more wasted time on the road. I would probably have a different attitude altogether if I were touring another continent with a sparse population on the road, like Australia, because that would be a totally different place I've never seen before. Then again, I would tire quickly of it if it were desert land I was traversing.

I've come to realize that each day I'm allotted less and less time on this Earth, so when I am lucky enough to get time off, I want to get wherever I want to go as soon as I can, and spend less of that time staring down a highway lane and driving. I have only three days to use of my five days off**, and a drive within my six hour radius/comfort zone doesn't really bring me close to anyplace I really want to explore in depth. A sore knee, neck, and back is making tenting and sleeping on the ground up in the bush country not too appealing, as I am trying to recover again for marathon training. Like with the last stint of time off, I might have to be content with creating an adventure at home.

*- And vice versa . . . I heard more than one story of various people in this province who've had guests arriving (I've heard from Holland, Switzerland, Greece, Australia, Hong Kong, and even the United States) who landed in Toronto or Vancouver, and were expecting their friends or relatives to meet them there in something like a couple hours to greet them. Rule # 1 of travel: LEARN SOME FUCKIN' GEOGRAPHY!

**-Two claimed by other appointments.

The 14th of 14 days

I just arrived home from work tonight, sitting outside on my deck and watching the supermoon in all its fullness, at least for a little while before it becomes enshrouded with the approaching inky black clouds. I'm thankful for the bit of a break from the cloudiness and rain that stuck itself here for the past few days. The thought of heading out for a nightcap somewhere came, but it quickly passed. The truth is that I'm frustrated and tired; so far away from being my ideal self to even think of wandering into some pub, or attempting to be social. I'm all "peopled out"; yet I need some safe way to vent. So, I chose this route.

Between my regular job and union business, I've had a fourteen day workweek. Today was the last day of it all, and the two days off coming up will be less than ideal weather-wise. I always used to look forward to this day: the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. But now, I'm less than enthused. I'm so bankrupt energy-wise. I only feel darkening days coming ahead, both figuratively and literally. Nothing but cloudy skies and rain is in the forecast, and a possible oncoming surge of swelling river due to the havoc happening in Alberta right now. There have been power outages, and probably more to come with the predicted thunderstorms. I doubt if it will be enjoyable, or long enough to refresh me, knowing that this coming Monday I'll just be stepping into a scene of negotiations that's going to make me want to go ballistic and tear my own hair out.

One thing that has been draining me is brooding with a lot of anger. As good as it was to attend my local's convention this past Wednesday and Thursday, gaining such an overload of information and sobering picture of the facts in the report card of what these graft-fed provincial and federal governments are doing to our Crown businesses, public sectors, healthcare sectors, and the stupid amendments of our labour laws, that impact not just unionized labour, but all workers in this province, has left me completely disillusioned with right wing politics. I've given up hope in thinking that anything political will ever serve as salvation a long time ago. We live under a regime that wants to control us by enslaving us with debt, poverty, and corporate influence, and they threaten us more with messing with the terms of hours worked effecting overtime pay, and stripping us of our right to take strike action.

I hope there is someone around next time to slap some sense into me before I allow myself to take on another string days like this again. I'll close this now before I get even more enraged as I start elaborating on the topic. The best thing I can do for myself for the next couple days is to do anything else than be a miserable bastard. I just don't know what or where in my private home life that I should pick up on out of the numerous things around here that seem to have been neglected in the past two weeks.

Saskatchewan Marathon: 10 K Race Results

I initially registered for the Half Marathon, but then decided to downgrade to the 10 km race given the bits of adversity I had to contend with in the past couple months.

 

SRRA Pasta Supper

The Day Before:  Attended the Marathon Expo at Prairieland Park. Ran some drills and a light 30 minute run with MJ. Napped. Went to the SRRA Pasta Supper at 5:00 and listened to talks from two Canadian Olympic Marathon runners. Soaked in Epson salts, and watched TV for the remainder of the evening. Ate more carbs in the form of bread and popcorn. Went to bed at 11:00. Very fitful sleep. Maybe the material from the documentary I was watching was giving me nightmares.

Wake up/Breakfast on Day of Race: Alarm set at 6:30 but was awake by 6:00. Breakfast was a banana, and orange chopped up in Greek yogurt with a scoop of Kaizen Protein powder, and one cup of decaf coffee. About 480 calories.

Ten kilometer race start time: 8:00 AM, arrived 20 minutes early. Thankful that I was walking distance to the event. Traffic access and parking was hell for those who drove there.

Weather Conditions: I thought they were perfect: only 11 degrees Celsius, cloudy and cool, no wind. There was a sprinkle of rain the previous evening that tamed down some of the dust. The humidity was ideal for my best conditions for breathing well.

Start Position: I chose the 1 hour  to 1:15 goal part of the pack.

Most Challenging Part(s) of the Race: The nagging fact in my head that I'm eight to twelve pounds over my ideal body weight. The only thing notable that was a challenge was dehydration after 7.5 km, but I did OK with managing it.

Things I’m most pleased about with my performance: I initially gave myself a goal pace of 7' 00" to 7' 30" /km to work around; I exceeded that. I didn't stop, nor did I walk at anytime throughout the course. This race was the best running performance I had since the year began. Neither the injured foot, nor twisted ribs, nor erratic heart rate, nor respiratory bugs, nor the recent food poisoning, managed to conquer me. My resilience prevailed, and after this, I feel even more driven to take on my full regimen of training for the Half Marathon of the River Run in July.

Final Results:

• Time:  1:07:55, last year I was  55:49
• Rank: 753rd (out of 1306 racers).
• Average Pace: 6'48"/km (honestly, better than I expected after doing so little training).
• Average Heart Rate: 168 BPM
• Place in Sex Division: 269th (out of 393 men racing).
• Place in Age Division:  54th (out of the 71 male runners in this race who were between 40-49 years old)

Post Race: Soaked in the tub, started blogging a bit of this, and pursued my rewards.

What I’ve Learned: The great exercise in patience in trying to heal.  Even the best have upsets when trying to reach goals, as in the case of last night's Olympian speakers.

My reward(s): Planning on checking out a Sunday matinee (Star Trek: Into Darkness) with a leisurely walk to the downtown ( to keep from stiffening up), dining on some spicy protein, grabbing a beer at Hudson's. Given that extra distance in walking to there and back in addition to what I ran, I can say that I did actually then do a half-marathon distance today.

Thankful for: A relatively flatter course compared to last year; exceeding my expectations, the ideal weather, the close starting point,