Saturday September 30, 2006 6:25 am Lethbridge Sunrise 7:29 Sunset 19:13 Hours of daylight: 11:44

A. Morning Musings

6:25 am It is +13 C at the moment. The forecast is for a high of + 26 C. The wind came up late yesterday afternoon and it is still blowing. Many of the yellow leaves have left the trees.

My weight is down 1 to 189. This is the third time I have made this level. The previous two times I quickly bounced back up to 190. I am determined to hold the line this time.

The vanity cabinet remains my first priority. The winds today preclude any serious bird watching. That leaves Model Trains and Literature as my other activities for the day. I should get back to History as well. I am still struggling with a good representation for the French Revolution, based on the book "Citizens". I recently bought a biography of Marie Antoinette that I will want to read as well. I am going to search the Web for a bit and see what approaches various history web sites use for this period of French history.

B. Plan

Immediate
Health	Walk & exercise	1 hr
Chores	Build new bathroom vanity cabinet	5 hr
Model Trains	Lay ground cover over layout tables	1 hr
	Determine track layout for main classification yard	1 hr
Puzzles	The Orange Puzzle Cube: puzzle #9
Technology	add keywords to iPhoto records	1 hr
Birds	Add September birds to North American data base	1 hr
History	Continue reading "Citizens"	1 hr
Literature	Continue reading "The Custodian of Paradise" by Wayne Johnston	1 hr
Later
Chores	Investigate water softeners for home
Technology	Read manual for cell phone
	Make notes for chap. 4 of "Switching to the Mac"
	Begin reading "iPhoto"
	digital photography - learn about using the various manual settings
Literature	Read "The Art of Living" by Epictetus
	Read "The Song of Roland"
Mathematics	Larson "Calculus"
	Read "The Computational Beauty of Nature" Chap 3
	Gardner "The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles"
History	Watson "Ideas"
Model Trains	Build oil refinery diorama: add ground cover
	Assemble second oil platform kit

C. Actual/Notes

7:50 am We web search for sites about the French Revolution uncovered this gem: http://www.historyguide.org/index.html . Fascinating. The site has many interesting features. The two that were most striking for me were the overall modular structure and the personal perspective (including his autobiography). I would like to begin a similar one for mathematics. I agree with Steven Kreis's decision to aim for senior high school and undergraduate students.

Here is a preliminary mind map of what I have in mind:

I now want to create a new web site that contains a separate page for each subtopic. At this stage I simply want to create the structure with no concern for formatting or appearance. Done.

6:20 PM Building the bathroom vanity is turning into a bit of an adventure. If I ever contract to do this again for someone else I will be sure to charge an hourly rate. The difficulties all stem from taking an existing cabinet made out of 1/2" particle board and converting it to 3/4" plywood. There are additional constraints such as the external width must remain the same and all of the existing doors and drawers must still fit. Basically I think I have everything solved now. The essential idea is that the interior width is now 1/2" less than before. This means that each door must be trimmed by 1/4". I will do this tomorrow. Everything else is fine and ready for final assembly. Tomorrow it will be finished, except for paint. Have I said this before?

Once I have this project completed, I hope to split my time between the model trains and mathematics.

D. Reflection