Biking & reminiscing

I'm back on the bike! After a couple weeks of walking everywhere, the snow finally melted enough to make it possible to road bike again. Don't get me wrong, I love plugging into my headphones and walking to my destinations - and walking is great for the central nervous system - but being able to get to where I want to go 4x faster and without having to pay for gas, parking, or transit feels great. Well, until you get a flat... which I did on my way back home from work a couple nights ago. That sucked. And I know you're not supposed to ride on a flat tire, but I was too tired to care, so I noisily made my way home, walking up the large hill on my path and then slowly pedalling down the street, trying to avoid every little pothole.

So, until I fix the flat (which is fairly easy to do, I've done it enough times now), I'm gonna be riding on an ancient bike that's heavier, slower, can barely change gears (until I fix that, too), but that almost never gets flats. Ol' reliable. I still lock 'er up, but it's such a janky bike, and as such I don't live with the fear of having it stolen because it looks so crappy. It's unfortunate that bike thievery is so common in the city. I've had my wheels stolen before - thankfully never a whole bike -, and it's just so frustrating.

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I'm in a reminiscing mood, positive reminiscing I guess. Mostly thoughts about times when I was more social, more integrated within a community, where I hung out with close friends & acquaintances alike, and where the drudgery of working to make a living wasn't an omnipresent worry in my head. I often find myself thinking "well, the pandemic wiped off my social life" nowadays, which is kind of true, but also kind of an excuse. So, while I specifically, currently don't have plans to integrate myself into a community, it's on my mind. I mean, being steadily employed brings a sort of community feeling, but it's not exactly fun.

In related news, I've been talking to K on the phone on a monthly basis, which is awesome. Sharing tales of our daily lives, it's a positive experience for me.

'till next time.

Clean eating

Feeling a bit anxious. It's my own doing: I'm not eating as clean as I was, say, a month ago. Too much sugar. All I had to do was not start eating it! But now I'm addicted again, especially when cravings hit later in the evening. And the chips, oh, the salty potato chips. I need to cut back on those, too. And I will, because insidious weight gain is not something that does my body good as I grow older.

Okay, so that's some self-reflection for encouragement.

I have the tools to limit this sugar creep. I still enjoy cooking. So if I cook things that are good enough, I can just eat that instead of chowing down on chips.

For example. I make a spicy parsnip hummus, and I love eating carrots with it. Trying to replace chips with carrots might not be the easiest, but if I get used to it and I stop buying the damn chips, I have a chance. The work that I put into making my own snacks makes it so I save money, and I'll feel better if I eat it compared to a processed food coming out of a factory somewhere unknown.

Another thing I really want to do is to keep more pictures of what I make so I can upload them. I'm saving up for a better camera (or an upgrade to my phone), and then I can post them on here. Then, when I want, I can look back on delicious foods I've prepared and counter the junk food addiction.

Still working. I was a little bit worried because of changes to my schedule, but it should be okay. I don't love my work, but I definitely don't hate it. I don't dread it. So it's all right.

... & the March weather

A couple blog posts ago, I wrote about the February weather, and how there wasn't much going on, snow or otherwise. Well, things have changed! Since then, there's been snow, and it has stuck around. Yesterday, I was walking home at the end of the day, and snow fell and never stopped falling. And whilst I was trudging through the sidewalks, lightning lit up the sky and a few moments later, thunder. It was pretty crazy, and the streets were mostly deserted so it felt like I was alone in the remote wilderness because all the cars, and concrete, and pretty much any human-made thing was completely covered by whiteness.

This morning, the snow has stuck around. I can confidently say there was snow this winter, 2022-2023.

Exciting gaming news

As stated in my bio, I'm a pretty big gaming fan. These days, I split my gaming time between remote cloud (PC) gaming, and my Nintendo Switch. For cloud gaming, I connect to a data centre that runs the game I want to play and I stream the game to a derelict Mac that can't run anything modern BUT has a 27" screen. I use a cheap gaming mouse, and a standard keyboard, and I'm good to go. It's great because I have a decent gaming collection thanks to the free Epic games giveaways, and access to my Steam account with all the games I've bought since the mid 2000s.

That's a lot of games, plus the free-to-play options that are on GeForce Now (which is the client I use for cloud gaming). 

Well, there's going to be a bunch more games, now that Microsoft and Nvidia have signed an agreement just yesterday bringing all the Microsoft game studio games to the platform. It's not all publishers that allow their games to be cloud-based, but Microsoft is now one of them and so I'll be able to play AAA games like Skyrim and even Call of Duty (and that's because Microsoft bought recently bought Activision-Blizzard).

Users of GeForce Now, such as myself, speculate that having a behemoth like Microsoft partner with Nvidia means other publishers will now want their games to be on GeForce Now. You still need to buy the game to play it through cloud servers, so it would make sense for other publishers to want to cash in on gamers like me who don't plan to run modern games on expensive modern machines.

So yeah, I'm pretty excited that I'll have access to more games I enjoy! I just need to be careful with finding the right balance so that I don't spend my leisure hours only playing video games. 

I -am- looking forward to playing badminton this weekend!

The February weather

 I'mma write about the weather. Yeah, the weather. The way I see it, it's better than not writing at all.

So it's February. The winter thus far has been pretty dull. There's been snow, but not much of it overall. It tends to melt, so I think there's been a maximum of two weeks in a row where there was snow on the ground before it all melts due to strange weather phenomenons like near 10° Celsius earlier this month. It's not like I live in an area where we get chinooks (super warm winds that blow into Alberta from the Rockies); no, this is plain ol' southern Ontario weather with a touch of ever-increasing climate change.

The problem with having some snow, and then most of it melting off soon after, is that it leaves ice patches everywhere when it stays cold after, which is dangerous for biking. If there's lots of snow, it's also kind of dangerous because the snow compacts from all the traffic over time and basically turns into ice, too. But when the snow all melts, and it stays warm, if I bundle up, the wind doesn't bother me even if it can feel pretty chilly sometime.

Still, I'd say the winter is coming to an end soon. I'm looking forward to more outdoor activities, and the ease of moving around.

Toxic beat

 

 

Here's the Song of the Day. I was walking home from work when this shuffled on. I can't really speak to the lyrics, but the beat is hella catchy, as with all Parov Stelar releases.