Six months ago today was the happiest day of my eventful life. How time flies. The road at our feet still stretches to infinity, winding and in turn obscured by shadows or glowing in the warm afternoon sun, but it will never again be lonely. Gotcha indeed.

« It was a lovely day of breaking the rules, of throwing preconceived ideas into the wind, of going back to the source, of shaving the unnecessary, of looking deep inside instead of out, of holding a single hand rather than many, of spending time with angels, of walking barefoot when shoes are in order, of wearing jeans because they feel good, of eating with bare fingers, of doing exactly what we wanted, of staring into the sunset while dreaming of sunrise, of not caring too much about what they think, of taking a last step down and a first up, of burning bridges and opening new doors, of taking chances and daring to jump with no ground in sight, of seeing an everlasting fog finally lifted, of understanding it all, of figuring out how simple life’s complexity is, of saying yes after so many no’s, of definitely accepting the truth as only currency, of taking a deep breath and arriving home, at last. »

I’m obviously not the only one obsessed with fish and islands. These were graciously offered by Craig Gronlund. They are a few years old and were shot in the Cayman Islands, back in the Paradise Divers days. Some things - and places - will hopefully never change.

Thanks Craig!

These were taken far away, deep down, long ago and out of sight. But they still make me laugh, when needed.

219 years ago, heads were about to roll in France. They had before and would roll again. Often. Such is the hideous face of our history.

On the 14th of July, 1789, the prison and armory of Paris, la Bastille, under assault by a mob composed of citizens of Paris and eventually joined by some mutinous National Guards, finally fell. Monarchy was about to collapse. It was the beginning of the French Revolution. 

A little over a month later, a document would be ratified that was called Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du citoyen (Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen). Strangely enough, or maybe not, the US Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. These were troubled, freedom-seeking times. Bloody times.

Fighting for those rights, against them or not caring at all is just a matter of perspective. As the First Republic was being born, France went through a Reign of Terror (la Terreur) and guillotines snapped happily at a multitude of heads. Parisians were busy killing each other for quite a while; with or sans-culottes, nobody was safe, nor spared.

Eventually, the Republic would again fail as Napoleon Bonaparte proclaimed himself Emperor, no less. Then monarchy did a come back, saluted and plummeted again. Then a Second Empire was built. Yawn. It gets so boring...

But tonight we celebrate the 14th of July and there will be fireworks everywhere. That’s nice. Before the fireworks, however, a huge military parade will catalyze and paralyze Paris. That’s stupid. Let’s, as I have said it in the National anthem of the lobotomized, put war to rest and stop bragging about the size of our... canons.

A bloody hymn will be played across the land, over and over again, as people stand up and veteran eyes shine and politician minds compute and mouths gap, as wide open as the brains that run them, fragile, empty.

From the heart of Paris to the suburbs of Marseilles, from the grey skies of Normandy to the sunny beaches of Côte d’Azur, from little alpine villages to rural Ardèche, everyone French, on this famous day, feels something. Feels different. If only we could get everybody to feel the same. And if only that meant looking forward rather than back. Then we would truly have a national holiday worth celebrating.

The bloodshed and barbarism that have lead us where we stand is nothing to be proud of. It might have been unavoidable but that was then, this is now. Can we, s’il vous plaît, once and for all, put it all behind us and allow ourselves to grow out of the blood bath, rather than look at the stains with the loving eye of a mother blinded by her instincts?

Le jour de gloire est arrivé, mon oeil. Et vive la France.

They think out of the box. They have guts, grace and trust their lines. Where we see a wall they have a playground. A window becomes a challenge, the sidewalk a parterre. They are the Aeriosa Dance Society. For some reason, as I watched them perform on the walls of the Vancouver Public Library last night, I kept thinking about Tolkien and the Elves.

Maybe it was the light. Maybe it was the slightly surreal evolution of the human spiders, bouncing off their own tilted horizon line and reaching downwards for the sky. Maybe it was just because I’ve again started reading the trilogy, for the Xth time, always the first. The critical part is forgetting about the bloody movies. But once I manage that, I plunge into the most detailed, carefully crafted fictional world ever invented with such delight that everything in my daily life becomes tinted by it. The Middle Earth erupts into my mind with such amazing power that I lose track of where the fiction stops and reality begins.

So they danced and they flew and they jumped and glided and hung, seemingly effortlessly, obviously happy, and high on the crowd’s mesmerized silence, which meant but an inner roar. Kudos.

After careful analysis of my many cramps, side aches, crashes, morale low’s, mood swings, mediocre results, motivation deprivation and various other technical factors, I’ve concluded that:

• I run more often in my head than out there;
• I run faster if I have something in the oven;
• I run much better to music and even better to certain specific beats.

Hence my recent problem: for most of those years, I have been running to the same repertoire of less than 10 songs, half of which I actually use most of the time. Sure, they are pretty darn goods song and the repetition probably achieves some kind of hypnotic effect but still, I think a change is in order because as it is, simply hearing one of those tracks in a non-running environment gets my heart pumping, my forehead sweaty, my feet longing for running shoes and adrenaline shooting through me like if an invisible finish line had just materialized.

For the longest time, I had been putting off adding songs to my playlist based on the simple fact that finding tracks with an appropriate tempo within my 1500 song library was a daunting task of trial and error. The thing is, I use some tracks for warm ups and others for the 2 most common speeds I run at (slow and super-slow), and they each fit within their own rather narrow tempo range - 82 BPM for the slowest, 83 to 85 for the mid-speed ones and 86 to 88 for the fastest, as it turns out. It’s amazing how a change of 6 beats per minute can mean the difference between life and death!

Well, yesterday I found a nifty piece of software called beaTunes, which analyzes your MP3 tracks’ BPM (Beats Per Minute) and saves the resulting value in the file’s appropriate field via iTunes. I left beaTunes run overnight so I don’t know for sure, but the whole (one time) process probably took a couple of hours.

Result? I can suddenly browse through my music library, click on a column header and sort all songs by tempo! Nirvana! Not the band, the state! I now have an amazing variety of new songs to chose from and can tailor my running playlists to my needs based on the speed or rhythm I want to be running at on specific routes.

Now of course Microsoft is always behind and the Media Player which I use to upload music to my MP3 device doesn’t support the BPM field. Duh. Why would Microsoft natively support anything useful or cool? Mais qu’à cela ne tienne, iTunes does, so I made my playlist in there and then used the open source iTunes Export to turn it into a WMP-compatible list, and I was done.

The MP3 player is loaded (I refuse to run with the iPod - too bulky, too precious) and eager to get a field test. So am I. The new Asics rock. My runs are mapped over at MapMyRun. For only cramps, now, I will fight those in the hand holding the player.

[Note: this post was originally written about BMP’s but to accommodate the rigid perfectionist mind of some readers, later adjusted to BPM’s.]

This will be a surprise slide show, unless you are already familiar with 66 Square Feet. My post is merely meant as an echo, because I like to pile up beauty in here until it finally tints my soul. Let’s just say that these amazing close-ups were taken by a magnificent photographer, with a superb little camera and a killer instinct. What else? Oh yeah, on a gorgeous terrace and in the probable company of a very, very noble black cat. The link is below. Treat yourself.

 I link therefore I am

Today a glance at the Weather Network left me in shock. Such a perfect forecast is a rare sight. I feel bad for reporting our luck while over on the Eastern Seaboard everyone is overcooking, but the flip side is that Vancouver will get a million days of rain in a just few months.

In the meantime, next week-end should be perfect for a Grouse - Lynn Creek or Lynn - Deep Cove trail run, and even better for watching some aerial dancing. And maybe I’ll finally pay the beluguita a long-overdue visit. I also have to find those well hidden starfish around the Seawall. That’ll take a low tide.

« And, baby, in high tide or low tide,
I’ll be by your side,
I’ll be by your side. »

Bob Marley - High Tide or Low Tide

Bon, ‘faut pas craquer, je m’applique. Having not yet achieved the results I was hoping for, which would be nothing short of « divine perfection », I am still regularly experimenting with le flan. Here’s the updated recipe. See also Flan pâtissier - 1er essai for the initial results and full length cooking drama.

The dough hasn’t changed much, but the quantities are now reflecting an overwhelming North American tendency to use the dreaded « cup » as a measuring unit, a nightmarish fact that has kept me on my toes doing intense maths. Here’s the formula for the dough:

• 1.4 cups flour (fun to play with)
• 125 g butter (my favourite)
• a pinch of salt (also called a sprinkle or a dusting of. By me.)
• a pinch of sugar (also called a tease or a sneeze of. By me too.)
• an egg yoke (not to be confused with my flight sim yoke)
• a bit of water (1024 bits of water being equal to a kibibit)
• 120 cl of hope (I’ve increased the dosage, success having been elusive)

« The making of » the dough is available at a reasonable cost, but you can also find it for free in the above mentionned post. I’m getting better at it. It no longer sticks desperately to the counter in a heroic effort to avoid the oven - and I have also perfected my technique when the times comes to lift it up, rolled flat, into the cooking pan. Now, this is very scientific, so pay attention... Since I don’t have a flat and thin mobile surface I could roll the dough on and then lift the whole apparatus and reverse into the pan, I use two clean sheets of paper taped to the counter. When the dough is flat and stretched, I undo the tape, put the pan on top and spin everything upside down. I cracked myself up so hard doing this that I almost dropped the whole thing!

Ok, dough in the buttered pan, pre-cooking is the same as before, I use my thickest spoons as weights to prevent the dough from rising like a balloon!

On to the flan itself. After experimenting with brown sugar, icing sugar and maple syrup, I am back to the basics: plain, normal white sugar. I’ve switched from corn starch to custard powder just because I was out of the former. It’s basically the same stuff, with a bit of salt, flavor and color added. So the flan formula looks like this:

• 1 liter whole milk (I never saw parts only of milk in a store, they must throw them away.)
• 0.8 cups sugar (notice, once again, the scientific precision; it’s not 3/4 cup, it’s 0.8. There.)
• 0.8 cups cornstarch (in this case Bird’s Custer Powder)
• 2 eggs + 2 yokes (the most fun part of the entire recipe being when I get to crack the shells...)
• 2 to 3 tsp pure vanilla extract

Pre-heat the oven to 1.21 jigowatts, or just 375°F. I used to get mixed results when mixing all this, at times ending up with a rather chunky cream but I’ve got it down to a drill. Bring the milk (minus one glass which is used to mix the cornstarch and eggs) and the sugar plus one tsp of vanilla to a boil. While this is happening, mix in a bowl the glass of milk, 2 more tsp of vanilla, the cornstarch and the eggs. I’d love to experiment with electricity but all I’ve got is a hand whip, so I go crazy for a few minutes until I feel like a few more visits to the gym are needed and the mix is unctuous.

When the milk is boily, I pour it into the bowl (and not the other way around) slowly, while whipping lightly to mix it well. Then the whole flan mix goes back into the pot and, over medium fire, is stirred into a thick cream. At times the bottom tends to send chunks up and I then use the whip to beat the crap out of those chunks, with the pan lifted momentarily off the stove. Eventually, the mix is so thick it uncovers the sides of the pot when stirred. That’s my signal. The original recipe said « let it boil for a few seconds », so I do, having no idea of what that does, but it’s fun because I can see the bubbles approaching the surface way before they burst. The things I’ll do to amuse myself.

The flan is poured into the pre-cooked crust and evened out, and stuck in the oven at 375°F. At precisely 35 minutes, I take it out and carefully brush a thin coat of apricot jam onto the surface, and put it back in. 5 minutes later, I switch the oven to broil for another 3 minutes. (This time, distracted by my post, I went to 6 minutes, and those 3 extra minutes made a huge difference; I wanted to avoid the brown patches that look like a skin desease.)

I let the flan cool off for a while, then put it in the fridge to get it to become a little firmer. Voila.

[2:00 pm prelude. Don’t look at the pictures yet.]

It’s hot. I don’t do the beach thing too often but after writing my epiphany of bitching and highlighting the fact I live on the water, I figured I might as well take myself seriously and cross the street over to summerland. Don’t they say that life is a beach and then you dive? Of course, today being the first of July, I’m not alone here. However so far the crowds haven’t given me the creeps. The day is warm and slightly hazy, Vancouver true to herself, contrasty and ambivalent. While frying on the hot sand, I’m looking to the north at the patches of snow remaining on mountains around Grouse. A grey heron flies by, seaplanes are lining up for their final approach over Stanley Park, a large yellow chopper is circling around a giant Super Post-Panamax gantry crane carefully hoisted on a freighter, probably awaiting extreme low tide to go under Lion’s Gate Bridge to the Port of Vancouver. Sea kayaks are sliding along on the calm sea. I won’t last long. This just isn’t me; but I’d like for my skin to remember years spent in the tropical sun, so that it won’t lose its tolerance and sense of humour. If the temperature can drop a little, I’ll go running and then later venture back out to shoot the Canada Day fireworks. Sand. It sneaks everywhere. The last time I was lying on a beach, Marie was to my right and adorable penguins were walking by. The water was clearer but not much warmer. It was another hemisphere, another continent. The same story, unfolding slowly.

...

[Hours later, on the Seawall by the 9 O’clock Gun. 10:15 pm.]

The crowd is sneaking into every little corner of my personal space, just like sand did so earlier. Human rivers have poured out of the downtown core like hot lava out of its crater, unstoppable, destructive. We’re talking about very well behaved lava, here, this being Vancouver. But the fact remains that I am no vulcanologist and would be much happier under my canopy or alone with Marie at the top of a high mountain. The fireworks soon begin. They are disappointing compared to the Celebration of Light. I do my thing and then follow the flow back to town, itching everywhere. What do we have to be so proud or happy about, celebrating Canada Day while Canadian soldiers are killing and dying overseas in a war that isn’t ours and in which we shouldn’t be involved?