"What we do belongs to what we are; and what we are is what becomes of us"
"What you possess in the world will be found at the day of your death to belong to someone else. But what you are will be yours forever".
"When once you have tasted flight you will always walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward: for there you have been and there you will always be".
--(all by) Henry Van Dyke
Today I work half a day and then head to the airport for an afternoon flight. We're heading back to the little lake cabins in Manitoba for a longish weekend. We'll fly up to Winnipeg, and then drive an hour and a half to the east, into the Whiteshell Provincial Park. I'm looking forward to the trip. Work is very busy right now, so I'll lug along my computer and perhaps spend a bit of time at night or at dawn working on projects. Overall,though, it should be a very nice break.
I love Canada. It's a place I always enjoy visiting. I've only been a handful of times, and only to a handful of places, but I've had a great time each time. This time we don't get the exchange rate benefit we usually get, as I believe the Canadian dollar is running at 95 cents or so of ours, rather than the 70 cent "everything is like on sale" rates of years past. Yet the lodging and such are surprisingly reasonable.
I enjoyed looking up the "visit winnipeg" type tourist site, to see if anything special was in the region. The frog jumping festival out a ways looks too far to drive, but certainly an amusing small town thing. I like Winnipeg because it seems similar to any of a number of midwestern cities that exist, centers of their own little universes, without a great deal of needless folderol or pretension.
Unlike the usual August, the weather in the far-off north is actually no cooler than our very unseasonal August here. Yesterday we had yet another rainstorm. I drove home on a side street, creeping bumper to bumper with dozens of others who, like me, thought it might be less trafficked to hit the side street rather than the expressway.
I was playing yesterday at lunch with one of the on-line virtual photo editors. It was fun, though I would have to spend more time to fully understand how to get the best results. Eventually, I believe that most things we now pay material sums to use in terms of software will be offered on an advertising-based model through the world wide web.
In this vein, I'd like to give a shout-out to the website Splicemusic, whose new redesign means that one can not only remix sound samples on the site (which provides some tens of thousands with which to work), but also compose new music on either of two synthesizers. This kind of rig-up would have cost a decent sum in a software package not even ten years ago, but now it is free to use on-line. As further generations of the site generate even more synthesizers and compostional options, the site will be very cool.
Today is my father's birthday. I'm glad--and hopeful for many happy returns. I hope the gift I got him arrives on time. He's 74 this year, which used to seem a pretty material age to me, but now, as people live longer, does not seem quite so old.
I was daydreaming yesterday about how last month is the 23rd year since I got out of law school. Just two more years will make 25. 25 sounds like a good, round number of years to practice law, if I am so fortunate to be able to do so.