Saturday, June 18, 2011 Lethbridge
4:50 am
The temperature is +9 C, with a high predicted of +18 C.
From the Environment Canada website:
Today Increasing cloudiness. A few showers beginning near noon. Risk of a thunderstorm this afternoon. Wind becoming northwest 20 km/h gusting to 40 this morning then light this afternoon. High 18. UV index 4 or moderate. Tonight Showers. Risk of a thunderstorm this evening. Low 10. Normals Max: 23°C Min: 9°C.
5:00 am Morning Musings
I have a freshly brewed Tim Horton's coffee beside me and feel like sitting back and taking stock of a few matters.
One is cooking. This is an activity that I am spending more time on than in the past. It is actually a new type of hobby. So far I have occasionally inserted a photo of a meal, or even a loaf of bread, but I have not given it the status it deserves. The solution is obvious: add another activity to my already too-long list of activities that fill my days.
Another is geocaching. The wet weather in southern Alberta has put a damper on this. The coulees are very slippery and muddy and many of the country roads are in a similar condition. But this is a good opportunity to familiarize myself with a software package on my PC called "EasyGPS" that was recommended to me by TeamDJM. It is also a good time to remove a number of obsolete caches from my Garmin nuvi. My global total is 982 found caches. Only 18 more to reach the 1000 club. The recent CARL3 event in Lethbridge added over 50 new caches in the immediate area so that will make the goal easily attainable. But it also raised the question of whether I want to make number 1000 special in some way.
A third "matter" is health/fitness. I have been slack with this recently. I need to return to my regular walks in the coulee. Fortunately the route I normally use is not muddy so there is no excuse for not making this a Daily Dale activity. I should also rein in my eating a bit. I do like good food, but I am not burning the calories off as quickly as I am putting them on.
A week ago I clarified 4 main goals that set out my priorities:
- Art/sketching/photography
- Math/symmetry/linear algebra
- Go
- Model Trains.
The Model Trains activity has been maintained, but the other three have not been attended to since I made the list. One item that I forgot to add is Literature. I like to set aside time on most days for some form of recreational reading. I am now reading Surface Detail , a sci-fi novel that is fascinating.
Mmm. I need a refill. Of coffee. Okay, where was I?
Ah yes: Art/sketching/photography, math/symmetry/linear algebra, Go.
Let's take them one at a time.
Art/sketching/photography. Reading "Picturing the Land" has renewed my interest in art, particularly Candian art. Good. But the small book "Notebooks from Brome-Missisquoi" has stimulated me to try to learn to sketch with a pencil. Simple scenes, trees, buildings. This doesn't seem too much to ask. But it will take some practice. I also need to spend more time reading and using my camera to explicitly take well-composed photographs.
Math/symmetry/linear algebra. This is a good early morning activity. I enjoy the feeling of understanding a particular relationship. The recent book I bought in Montreal, "The Symmetries of Things" is a different approach than the one I have been using with Linear Algebra (i.e. following a textbook and set of lecture videos of an MIT course). And I would like to add Group Theory to this list. All three topics are inter-related, and very interesting. This is a simple (!) matter of setting time aside and getting on with it.
Go. This is pure fun. Go is a game of strategy. It is a challenge to improve. I need to balance playing games against the iPad2 with reading about strategy. I have a good book for this. Once again, this is a matter of "just do it". It also provides a nice break from other activities.
One hour, two cups of coffee. A perfect beginning to the day.
6:00 am Cooking
While in Kingston recently I bought a book of recipes that focused on quinoa. Yesterday I tried the first one in the book, Apple Strudel Breakfast Cereal. I was not sure what to expect, but it was delicious. Apparently it can keep in the fridge for almost a week.
I now have 2 packages of quinoa: the regular white variety and a red variety. I mixed the two in a ratio of 2:1 when I made the apple strudel breakfast cereal in order to give it a more colorful look. This worked well.
I am planning to make the next recipe, Blueberry Flax Hot Cereal, later this morning.
6:40 am Photography
I am enlarging this category to include my preliminary efforts to add sketching to my repetoire of efforts to capture some of my views while walking about.
Here are scans of the cover of the delightful book I bought last week while in the Eastern Townships of Quebec.
This book is a perfect model of something I would like to mimic. Now to find my pencils.
11:00 am Geocaching
My Garmin nuvi was acting up this morning. I spent about half an hour deleting about 80 geocache sites from the unit and then I added 4 from West Lethbridge.
When I turned the unit on while in coulee I was startled to see that all the caches I had deleted were back, and the 4 I added were missing. Fortunately I also had my iPhone so I used that to get near the cache sites and then used the more precise feature on the Garmin to give me the coordinates of where I was. The combination worked well and I was soon in the vicinity of the first cache.
I was only the second person to register a find for this cache even though it has been available for over a week. The cache itself was very special - the first I have seen that used this particular approach. The second search was relatively straight forward and I made the find on my return journey up the coulee.
As the cache names indicate, both caches were part of the CARL3 event that was held while we were in Quebec. The walk into the coulee served 2 purposes: exercise and geocaching. It really felt good to be in the coulee again.
The countdown continues: my life-total is now 984, only 16 more finds to reach 1000.