Tuesday, April 26, 2011 Lethbridge

6:20 am

The temperature is +3 C, with a high predicted of +15 C.

From the Environment Canada website:

Today Sunny with cloudy periods. Wind southwest 30 km/h. High 15. UV index 6 or high. Tonight Cloudy periods. Wind southwest 30 km/h becoming light this evening. Wind becoming west 20 overnight. Low plus 3. Normals Max: 15°C Min: 1°C

7:00 am Technology

I have an email reply to my request for technical assistance to resolve an error message with my windows xp startup using a software program called Parallels. I do not have time to go through these steps at the moment to see if I can get it working. We are in the process of packing up and getting an early start on our drive to Edmonton.

3:00 PM

We are now in Edmonton and have checked into the motel. We made a brief stop in Claresholm for a bacon-and-egger and coffee at an A&W franchise, and another in Red Deer at a Second Cup franchise where we had a cup of coffee and a pastry. There was still ice on most of the lakes north of Red Deer. We did see a couple of hawks from the car but were not able to identify them as we hurried along.

I did turn on the iPad when I was in the passenger seat and noted how it worked. The GPS was fine and the Geocaching.com app (which is the same as the one on the iPhone) worked fine. I was able to note the location of various caches as we drove down the highway but we were eager to get to Edmonton and visit the Art Gallery so we did not make any effort to actually find any of the caches.

5:00 PM

The key item for today was to visit the Art Gallery of Alberta and view the Emily Carr exhibit. It was impressive. Carr is recognized as one of Canada's most important artists. This was a particularly good exhibit as it displayed all of her famous paintings, including one called "Big Raven" that was on a postage stamp a few years ago.

There were also exhibits by Lawren Harris (one of "The Group of Seven") and Walter J. Phillips.

9:00 PM Literature

I have just finished reading more from "Autobiography of Mark Twain". Here is a quote that caught my eye:

"Finally, in Florence in 1904, I hit upon the right way to do an Autobiography: start it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you at the moment; drop it the moment its interest begins to pale, and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime.

Also, make the narrative a combined Diary and Autobiography. In this way you have the vivid things of the present to make a contrast with memories of like things in the past, and these contrasts have a charm which is all their own. No talent is required to make a combined Diary and Autobiography interesting." [p. 220]

I am not so sure I agree with the last sentence, but it does give me license to play.

I am going to try adding little episodes of the day that I feel like including in these daily web pages. Up until now I have deliberately avoided adding anything that did not pertain to various pre-set categories of Learning (with the possible exception of Morning Musings). These episodes will not be tagged like the Learning categories but will simply appear in a temporal order as they occur during the creation of the daily web pages.

11:30 PM

April and May are the Stanley Cup playoffs. This is the trophy for the NHL season where the top 16 teams play a series of best-of-seven games until only one team is left. We are presently near the end of the first round. There are only 2 Canadian-based teams in this year's playoff - Montreal and Vancouver. Tonight both teams were facing elimination.

Montreal won their game against Boston by a score of 2-1 and that series is now tied 3 games a piece with the 7th game tomorrow night. The other series was already tied at 3 games each and this game was the deciding game. Vancouver has just finished playing Chicago and with only 2 minutes left in the game Chicago scored to tie the game 1-1 and send the game into overtime. Vancouver then scored in the OT to win the game and the series. They will now move on into the second round and will play Nashville in the next series.

When Vancouver scored the winning goal you could hear the shouting in the room next door. It is difficult to convey the interest that these playoffs hold - at least as long as the team you are cheering for is still in the mix.

There will be more updates in the days ahead (I have also added a few entries for today).