and things went downhill from there

atara and I have split up; she's flying home today, and I'm heading off to Vancouver for the next three days. I am torn between looking forward to spending a few days in Vancouver, and regretting that I did not just call this the end of my vacation and fly home with her.

Christmas with my family went well. We had 22 people in the house for Christmas dinner, and we managed to get through it all without fighting once. I guess the only lowlight of the trip was that Mom invited our pariah cousin over for dinner.; His mother (my aunt, obviously) recently died, and he was alone and mourning. I am glad that she invited him, and he was very grateful for it, but at the same time we were all reminded of why we have generally avoided contact with him for years.

This was the first time that many of the extended family have ever met this cousin, and I wondered how they would react to it. The moment he was out the door at the end of the evening, all the family knives came out. I feel bad for my cousin because I can't imagine how it must feel going through life knowing you leave a bad impression everywhere you go.

This is my last evening of vacation before I return to work in the morning, and I am feeling a little melancholy about it. I had a lot of plans for things and places I was hoping to do and go while I was off work, but most of them did not come to fruition for a variety of reasons. This was not a bad week of vacation, just not what I had envisioned. I have another long weekend coming up later in September, so I will see if I can make that one count.

Since we did not get out of town much this summer, we decided to fit a Fargo trip into the last week of August. Part of that trip involved a side venture into Minnesota to take in the potato festival in Barnseville. It was as small-town and kitschy as one might expect from such a thing. We did not stick around for the potato wrestling later in the day, but we managed to bag a couple of teeshirts.

I call this Our Lady of Perpetual Levitation -- truly a miracle in tarnished copper and stone.


Ponies of Constant Sorrow


My biggest disappointment of my vacation was that I did not get around to writing the story I've had percolating in the back of my mind for months. I've actually gone as far as to sketch out the entire plot from start to finish, which is a rarity for me. Normally I am too tired and mentally burnt-out from work to put much effort into writing these days, so I was hoping to put some time into that this past week. If nothing else, I am coming off the vacation time feeling mentally renewed, so I may be able to get in some writing before my job sucks the life and hope out of me again.

I have not taken a lot of photographs lately, but what I have been doing is finally processing some of the ones that have been in my queue for months. I am starting with the shots from our drive out to the coast in the summer, which I will follow up by working through the rest of our shots from the cruise - well, both cruises as I never finished processing all the shots from the first one. Finally I will move on to MFF, where I have a couple dozen pictures that I think are probably worth fixing and posting.

While I was fixing up a few pictures today, atara wandered up and watched me work for a few minutes before she made an observation about our difference in philosophy when it comes to photography. She said that she takes pictures with the purpose of documenting the moment, and capturing digital memories. On the other hand, she thinks that I am more concerned with capturing the art of the moment, where the composition is more important than the content.

I guess I can see her point. I like to think that I am creating a digital documentary of sorts as well, but I confess that I have always had a soft spot for pictures that raise more questions than they answer.

I call this one, "I am ready for my close-up now." This is a picture that I would normally have left to sit on my HD because it is a bit blurry, and not quite composed the way I wanted because I shot it in a rush. On the other hand, I love what is happening in the shot, so I did my best to salvage it.


I dashed off ahead of the pack in order to capture this shot of the trail up ahead. Originally, I wanted it to show how wet and muddy and miserable the hike was, but when I processed it, the trail actually looks friendly and inviting. It looks inviting to me, anyway.


I am a real sucker for black and white photos. I have always had an interest in learning to take good black and white, and to that end I bought a roll of film back in the day with the intention of taking pictures around town. It was one of those films that Fuji put out that took black and white, but was designed to be processed in a colour lab. I loaded up the roll by accident when I was on vacation down in Alabama and then went through some very colourful gardens down there, taking great pains to ensure that I carefully composed the colour arrangement in every shot I took.

Then I got the roll back from the lab, and I was both disappointed and intrigued. I was irked because I had been so careful about my colour arrangements, but I was actually very pleased at how the black and white shots turned out. Many of them were very striking, where I think the colour version of the same shot would have been forgettable. In the case of this shot, I just like the way the contrasts work in black and white.


The last time I was out to visit these ice fields, Dad was still alive. We did not get out to the ice fields this time, but we hiked up to their base. It was not a long hike, but it was a taxing one because of the altitude.


I scampered down a hill to get to a good location for these shots. I thought the others knew where I had gone, so I took my time setting up for a few pictures, and even used my neutral density filter to get a couple of shots like this one.

Apparently, they did not know where I had gone, and they assumed that I had wandered out into the woods and gotten lost. Oops.


This was very good, but I could not get my head past the idea that I was basically eating a deconstructed sandwich. When we were at MFF a couple of years back, we went down to the hotel restaurant for dinner. I was tired of road food, and all I wanted was a salad. I ordered the chef's special salad, and when it arrived, it had been similarly deconstructed. It came on a long plate, with a wedge of lettuce at one end, and the rest of the ingredients strung along the plate. It was pretty good, but it was not what I'd had in mind.


I love the look and feel of determination in this picture. This was actually near the start of the climb, so I can't promise that they looked quite as determined by the time we all got to the top.


Even though we were there in the shoulder season, the lake was not quite as empty as it looks in this shot. A lone family just happened to row into the frame as I was setting up to get the shot, and I decided the shot would look better with them in it than without.

My boss finally got back to me and told me that after Today, I will be off until the new year. I don't know if the project knows yet, since they seem to be working under the assumption that I will be fixing defects and scheduling a couple of things in the week after Christmas.

I will actually be away from my job for even longer though, because on January 5th, I have to report to the car shops to learn how to be a car inspector. I will get to learn how to replace brake shoes, knuckles, air hoses and the like. Since this will all go down in January/February, I guess I will have to learn how to work with frozen finger stumps.

Some honest, physical work might do me some good. In any event, some time out of this stressful, toxic IT shop will definitely do me some good.

We made Calgary tonight as planned, arriving about the time I had expected. Tomorrow is the long day.

Calgary may not be exactly as pictured here.

Today is our last day of what I would consider vacation before we hit the road for two long, ugly days of driving. All I ask for is no major accidents along the way (we got delayed twice by ugly fatalities on our last drive home from the coast), and good weather. Rain makes the drive eversomuch longer.

We advised Fernando this morning that we would not be around for the 0800 breakfast seating tomorrow because we had to hit the road early. He appreciated the notice, since it would have just been wasted food if we had not shown up - and given the fancy service, it would have been a fair bit of wasted effort. He stopped by our room shortly after breakfast and said that he would prepare a bagged meal for us to take on the road and leave it in the fridge for us in the morning. These are the little touches we love about this place, and one of the reasons we love staying here when we are out in Victoria.

I spoke with our cat sitter briefly this morning via our IM client at work, and he told me that the cats are all doing well. We were a little worried about Jaws, but he said she is always the first one to show up for meals, and then she does a tour of all the dishes, eating her fill while the other cats try to decide if it is safe to come out and eat or not, then demanding attention when she is done.

At work, I forgot to run a report for our Accounting office before I left, and great drama unfolded as soon as I hit the road with lots of passive-aggressive messages flying about. I tried running them while I was in Calgary, and they failed miserably. I passed the task off to a co-worker, and he ran into the same problem. He has been working with the database architects to try and get the problem resolved, and this morning he finally got the reports to run. Now I need to perform all of the secondary tasks involved in converting the reports into a usable spreadsheet for our needy accountants. Oy.

Fortunately I managed to remote into my desktop in Winnipeg this morning. I have been trying all week, but the connection was failing. Another 30 minutes should have me off the hotseat for another couple of months before I have to run these awful reports again.

After several false starts I finally managed to remote into my work desktop and almost wished that I had not. Things virtually fell apart the moment I walked out the door on vacation, and checking in brought back all the stress and annoyance I had been feeling before I managed to escape on vacation.

Then I remotely rebooted both of my desktops and things got better. It is always a nail-biting experience to remotely reboot a machine like that, but when they came back up, they were behaving in a much more civilized manner. As I read through the wall of hopelessness and despair in my in-box, it occurred to me that I picked a good couple of weeks to be away, and suddenly I felt much less stressed and more relaxed again.

We are going to hook up with my mom today and do some stuff around town. She wants to take in a public market where they have an olive oil and vinegar tasting shop, then atara insists on taking in the Provincial Museum where they recently opened a Viking display. She's into Vikings. Actually, Vikings are kinda cool so I'm interested to see it as well.

I lugged my cameras around with me all day yesterday and managed to only take a single picture at the ferry terminal before the battery in the small camera died. I will lug them around today and see if i can manage two pictures perhaps.

Our first visit to Lake Louise was cold, rainy and grey. At atara's suggestion we went back up there today when the weather was nicer. We decided that the lake itself would probably be a disaster of tourists, so we took in other attractions instead. We grabbed lunch in the village, then rode the gondola up to the top of the ski hill.

Later, we drove up to Lake Moraine to see what it had to offer. In a word, scenery. We took a few shots of the lake, then noticed that a lot of people seemed to be collecting at the top of a large stone pile beside the lake. On further investigation, we learned that there was a path leading up the back to scenic overlooks at the top.

atara, her uncle and I took the path to the top while her folks waited at the bottom. It was a bit of a hike for people who were already tuckered out from three very active days of exploring and hiking, and at about the 4/5 mark atara protested and sat down in the stairs, announcing that it would be a good time to get a picture of her if I felt so inclined.


The view from the top was nothing short of spectacular. I will posting more pictures once I get home and have access to a computer with more horsepower, but here is a sample of the view from the top.


We saw a bit more wildlife on our way back to the cabin at the end of the day. There was a moose by the side of the road leading out of Lake Louise, and later we saw (or atara saw, since I was driving) a family of grizzly bears (mother and two cubs) by the side of highway 1.

As usual, I have left a lot of our vacation preparations until the last moment. My excuse is that I work better under pressure. Does that make sense to you? I hope so, because that's my excuse whether it is justified or not.

A couple of things that I can scratch off my list today are:

1) Get the lug nuts on the Volkswagen re-torqued. I called the nearest tire shop (not the place where we got them changed, but the one on the chain that is closer to our house) and the owner cheerily told me to bring it in whenever I liked. It took the mechanic who they sent out all of five minutes to torque them, but he grumped about it with every click of the torque wrench. I admit that the lug caps on the car made it an added pain, and that lugs seldom fall off, but it was his own company that had instructed me to come back for the service.

I ignored the advice when I had the snow tires put on my old Probe a few years back, and when we drove down to Ohio I discovered that a few of the lug nuts were just a couple turns away from falling right off by the time we got there (stupid alloy rims). So I understand you may think this is a pointless ritual, re-torqueing dude, but my first hand experience has taught me otherwise.

2) Clear the bathtub drain. This was made more complicated by the fact that atara hid the plumbing kit we bought a couple of weeks back, so I had to resort to using a plunger. The plumbing in this house is old, and the bathtub drain invariably slows to a crawl ever few months, so plunging it has become a routine bit of drudgery. As I was taking a mid-morning nap today (part of my day when I working the 5AM shift), I suddenly had an idea that might make it easier. Part of the problem with plunging the tub is that I don't have enough hands - at least, not when I try to use a plunger.

The problem is that when I plunge the drain, the water just comes blasting up through the overflow drain under the tap. My usual method of attack is to cover the overflow (usually with a wash cloth wrapped in a plastic bag) using one hand while I operate the plunger with the other two hands. That's the main reason why I dispensed with plunger and started buying those expensive compressed-air drain clearing kits.

The idea that came to me stemmed from the fact that the overflow drain has a little decorative metal cover over it, with a little projecting nob that has a hole where a plug on a chain would normally hang. I pondered on whether that could be removed, and if it could, then it occurred to me that I might be able to put a layer of plastic wrap over the opening and screw the cover back into place, effectively freeing up my third hand. It did, I could, and it worked. Our tub drains properly again. Well, still slow, but its usual slow rather than it's "standing in water while you shower" slow.

3) Clean the tub, sink and toilet. I am still working on that one. I cleaned the tub, but as I was turning my attention to the sink, Jaws kicked me out of the bathroom because she wanted to use her litterbox.

We're into September and July has finally caught up with us. We are entertaining atara's parents over the long weekend, and as part of that we took a trip up to Gimli today. It's a pretty little Icelandic town on the shores of Lake Winnipeg.

I would write more about it but it is hot in our house, and they others are making plans to head out again very shortly.

Some people will actually go to some lengths to add lens flare to their pictures, but if you get the light just right the sun will take care of it for you. I didn't dare look through the viewfinder when setting up this picture (something about staring at the sun through a zoom lens makes me a bit squeamish), so the final results came as a surprise. I like how it turned out.

( Another picture behind a cut. )