Saturday July 08, 2006 7:00 am Lethbridge Alberta

A. Morning Musings

7:00 am The sky is clear and bright blue this morning. The temperature is +14 C with a forecast high of +29 C.

Saturday is a good day for reviewing the current week's entries. Viewing last Sunday's entries motivated me to make a cup of coffee before going further. Mmm. Keeping the Immediate entries in the table outlining my plans (below) to only 2 Learning activities has been a good idea. The chores are now beginning to ease up and the number of new ones is starting to peter out. Although yesterday I did fix some weatherstripping on the front door that was causing the door to squeek when it was closed. Phyllis finished painting a rear door. Both activities had been waiting for a couple of years to be attended to. I'm not sure what to think about this: the plus of getting the tasks done or the minus of realizing that they should have been done a long time ago. Definitely, the plus.

My immediate Learning activities have focused on two items: technology (learning about the MacBook) and literature (reading novels). The technology is another embarrasment. I don't have a problem with the Mac as it has been over a decade since I last used one, but I am still a novice with the cell phone (not only do I only know the very basic commands of answering a call and sending a call but I rarely remember to take it with me) as well as with the iPod (I now have some playlists on it and know how to select them and listen to them but I am still not sure about many of the other features). These are useful life skills and I need to get on top of them.

Technology has had a few pluses this week though. I have learned how to partition and use an external hard drive and am fairly comfortable with using Parallels to switch between Mac OS X and Windows xp. I now have Skype and Fetch installed on the MacBook.

My back is continuing to bother me (it is not that bad, but I am aware of it when I move too quickly) and I have scaled back my plans for my model train. I want to take the wiring of the layout more slowly and make it more tentative as I proceed until I am very sure that it is what I want. I need to visit the store in Calgary to buy an NRMA gauge for measuring various tolerances for the track and the trucks on the cars and to see what the people there say about using terminal strips for the wiring. I am now thinking that I want to have a separate control panel for each switching yard and to run all this without recourse to DCC. I need to decide which turnouts will be operated from the panel and which will be manual throws. The control panel should show this. I now need to do some reading about wiring control panels. Ideally I would like a light to indicate the current status of the turnouts that are operated electronically and an icon to indicate the location of the manual throws.

The house is a lot cleaner as our ex-neighbour has taken his stove and fridge out of the garage and a swing out of our back yard, and we have taken 2 old computers and a large CRT monitor to the uni and another load of stuff to the Salvos.

I have identified one new "chore": the making of about 4 more book boxes. This will likely take a couple of weeks, but I am looking forward to using the radial saw for a project again.

Saturday should also be the day when I back up all of my MacBook files (both OS X and Windows xp). Done. That took less than a minute. Having all of my files in one folder within OS X made this a trivial drag-and-drop. I have no new files on Windows.

I have updated my amportal web page to include a few more news links and few less university links.

9:05 am Time to go for brunch in a local restaurant.

B. Plan

Immediate
Health	Walk & exercise	1 hr
Technology	Make notes for chap. 2 of "Switching to the Mac"	2 hr
Literature	Continue reading "A Map of Glass" by Jane Urquhart	3 hr
Later
Chores	Take cement blocks to landfill	2 hr
	Reply to long overdue email(s)	1 hr
	Take 5th wheel in for maintenance	2 hr
	Investigate water softeners for home	2 hr
	Parge area around rear step to garage	1 hr
	Build 4 more book boxes
Technology	Read manual for cell phone	1 hr
	Transfer music to iPod	1 hr
	digital photography
	try using extender lens and monopod	2 hr
Mathematics	Larson "Calculus"
	Read "The Computational Beauty of Nature" Chap 2	1 hr
	Gardner "The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles"
History	Continue reading "Citizens"
	Watson "Ideas"
Model Trains	Add blue backdrop to layout	2 hr
	Review layout for under the table turnouts
	Wire lower mainline track for a power block
	Fasten lower mainline track to layout
	Draw schematic diagram of track layout	2 hr

C. Actual/Notes

5:00 PM It has been a long time since I sat down with a novel and spent a solid three hours reading it through to the end. What a glorious way to spend a day! The book, Jane Urquhart's latest, "A Map of Glass" has left me vibrating, literally, with a myriad of emotions. She has woven an incredible tapestry of a sense of place in our modern world bringing in the importance of history, both personal and societal as well as the psychology of normalcy and what a thin fabric that is. The fact that the setting is where we spent 15 wonderful years (Kingston, Ontario and nearby counties) helped me appreciate the descriptions of the land and the old buildings and abandoned farms. Now to savor the feeling...

D. Reflection