Platform Corruption

To be blunt, I am effing fed up with this censorious Blogger / Blogspot platform after spending maybe 2½ hours working on yesterday's post, only to have the outrageous bastards pull the post offline within a half hour of it being published.

Naturally nothing specific was pointed to as being against their "community guidelines" ─ some prick just arbitrarily decides that he or she finds something offensive to him or her, and that is all that is required. No proof presented.

From this day forth, I am only going to make 'bare bones' posts, spotlighting aught of personal importance.

I wrote in that post that my brother had shown up just ahead of 7 p.m., which rather flummoxed my plans for the early evening. Fortunately for me, however, he must have passed out within a couple or so minutes of sitting down at the T.V. he had turned on, for I had gone downstairs to reluctantly join him and found him unconscious, the remote in his hand, and the Telus Optik TV Channel Guide on display.

He could not remain conscious long enough to select something.

Consequently I never got involved with him. Nevertheless, since I was not planning on getting up overnight until 4 a.m. instead of 1:45 a.m. for a five-mile walk, this posed a small problem in that I was going to have to spend far longer in bed than I am usually able.

But I managed.

I rose at 4 a.m. because I wanted to try something different ─ a weekday morning visit to the Save-On-Foods outlet about a mile from here. The plan was to leave home shortly before 6 a.m. and put in a four-mile walk, and then stop at the store before making the final mile-long walk home with my purchases.

I will not again be doing this.

At least I performed six sets of pull-ups and chin-ups in the backyard shed before leaving, managing the typical repetitions of late ─ i.e., four in the first set, and two in each of the remaining five sets.

And I succeeded in leaving home at 5:45 a.m. ─ so often I leave later than intended.

Then things began to go amiss.

Initially the morning was lightly trafficked and thus relatively peaceful. However, I needed to withdraw cash from my financial institution's ATM ─ there are two ATMs at the building.

Well, neither was functioning. Either the debit card insert for each had been jammed by a vandal, or else the inserts had been locked to prevent use.

Since I belong to a credit union, I did not want to visit a bank ATM and have to pay a user fee, so I was obliged to walk approximately half a mile through downtown Whalley to another credit union, when instead I had intended to follow 100th Avenue to its intersection with 148th Street (Google Map) and leisurely follow trails until eventually coming out near Green Timbers Way (Google Map) and then working my way back to Save-On-Foods near Fraser Highway & King George Boulevard.

Oh, I did eventually work my way to the Green Timbers Urban Forest Park and got in some trail walking, but there was nothing pleasant about the walk to get to the forest from downtown Whalley.

Then when I got to Green Timbers Way, the flood of motor vehicles and even other pedestrians who work in the government complex along that short road was appalling. And from that point, I had no further peace the entirety of what remained of my walk.

Never again will I choose to walk so late into a weekday morning ─ there is, after all, a solid reason why I choose to rise at 1:45 a.m. and then attempt to be away on my walks by 2:15 a.m. It is the only time when I can expect the least amount of vehicular and pedestrian traffic.

This post is getting longer than desired, so all else I will say is that I sunned in the backyard this afternoon, topping 70 minutes.

I will also mention that at 7:02 a.m. this morning, my wife sent me a Facebook Messenger text to report that she will finally be returning home on the 21st of this month. She left Canada on an early evening flight to go overseas either January 23 or 24, so she will have been gone darned near six months.