Part-time prevaricator
I think it was worth it, even if a thunderstorm woke me up early this morning.
I shot at Spruces for about an hour and a half, and met a couple who had stopped in on their way from Brandon to Dauphin. (Hi, Doms & Debs, if you’re reading this!)
Here are a couple timelapses, one of the Milky Way floating above Clear Lake and another of the stars wheeling across the sky.
The aurora data were good last night, but I’d had a long day so I didn’t go out in the countryside last night. I did set up a camera in the spare room, in case it got bright enough to be seen over the city lights. At worst, I thought, I’d get a few hours’ worth of star trails.
Oh, and the star trails turned out OK, too.
I set up the camera around midnight; the battery finally died around 4:35am. The trails above are made from about 2,200 frames, each 5 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 800.
I set up my camera in the upstairs bedroom, pointed northeast, for about an hour.
Technical details: 335 light frames, 4 dark frames, each 10 seconds, f/1.8, ISO 100.
I went camping with some friends I’ve known for well over 30 years. As is my nature, I took my cameras and tripods, so in between the fishing, the drinks, the meals, the hikes, and the naps, I took a few photos.
Continue reading “Camping, August 2024”
I moved in to the cabin Friday evening—laptop, sleeping bag, cameras, bike, and food—and got settled in. I read for a bit[1]Current read: Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde, which is pretty trippy so far. and checked the forecast. The evenings this week look pretty cloudy, so I’m not sure how much astrophotography I’ll get to do. Last night was clear, though, so I decided to head on out about 10pm.
I got set up at the Wasagaming dock just before 11 and snapped about 30 minutes’ of star trails. I discovered later that the camera wasn’t quite as level as I’d hoped, so I ended up cropping out the thin line of the lake, but the tree on the left made a nice foreground. (See the photo above.)
After that I headed to Spruces, and set up one camera for another round of star trails…
…while the other one was designated for Milky Way photos.
It was a good start to the week, I think.
What I’d like to do with my week:
Hold my calls, I’ll be at the cabin.
Last night was clear, so I went out to see if I could catch any of the Perseids. I saw a half-dozen, but I only caught one bright one on camera.
That’s OK, though; there was plenty for me to take photos of.
I was out in the dark for a couple hours, and it was worth it.
On Wednesday last week, I got a message from my friend Ray:
Hey, want to come camping with Craig and I?
I almost said No. I swore off tenting after a disastrous thunderstorm spent in a cheap tent. But Ray’s a seasoned camper, and it’s been a long, long time since the three of us got together. (We’ve been friend since our university days, and while I’ve seen them each individually in the last year or so, it’s been over a decade since all of us were in the same place.)
So on Friday I packed up some gear and hit the road for Duck Mountain Provincial Park. We ended up sitting around the campfire, drinking and shooting the breeze, till well past one in the morning.
Saturday morning Ray treated us to what he termed a “simple” breakfast of delicious bannock, spicy Italian sausage, and bacon fried over the fire…
…and then we spent a couple hours paddling around on West Blue Lake, Ray and I in a canoe, Craig in a kayak. After that we had some “basic” lunch[1]Ray’s idea of “basic” camping food included pad Thai, risotto and chicken, and chana masala; his protest was that “it’s all freeze-dried” but that didn’t make it any less delicious., then Craig and I crashed for an hour or two while Ray read in the gazebo. Once the sleepers had awoken, we went to the campground’s store to pick up more firewood, then shot more breeze. We listened to the Riders lose on Craig’s truck radio, had some “simple” supper and more drinks. Bedtime came a little earlier than Friday.
Sunday we got up, breakfasted, struck camp, and parted ways. Craig’s on the hook to come up with a plan for a camping adventure next year; perhaps we’ll end up doing some back-country paddling. I guess we’ll see.
My grandparents used to farm up by Fork River, which is about an hour’s drive from the park. My mom went up to the farm a year or two ago, and said it had fallen into disrepair. I wanted to see for myself how it looked, so I headed on over.
On the way I passed a number of interesting abandoned buildings, and snapped photos of a couple of them[2]Later this summer, when I’m on my retreat, I really want to try star trails at one of them, but it’s a long drive. We’ll see..
Then I got to the farm.
I didn’t drive in, but left my car at the end of the driveway and walked in. I snapped photos for a panoramic view of the yard first.
The driveway is overgrown with grass, and the yard was full of grass and weeds, waist-high at least. The outbuildings were in bad shape; a couple have collapsed, and the garage’s roof has come down inside.
But the barn’s still somehow standing—given how many swayback or collapsed barns I’ve seen in this province, I’m impressed at how well it’s holding up. I waded into the waist-high grass, damp still with either dew or a recent rain, and took some photos.
The willows behind the house are twice as tall as the house now. In places in the yard, the grass was flattened, which suggested to me that animals have been bedding down there. The prairie life seems to be taking the land back, which, on the whole, I’m OK with.
I almost chickened out. Part of me was afraid of what I might find up there at the farm. I spent a significant chunk of my childhood there, and I didn’t want decay and collapse to ruin the old memories. But I’m glad I went.
After about half an hour at the farm, I walked back to my car and headed home. What a weekend. Thanks, Ray, for the invitation.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | Ray’s idea of “basic” camping food included pad Thai, risotto and chicken, and chana masala; his protest was that “it’s all freeze-dried” but that didn’t make it any less delicious. |
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| ↑2 | Later this summer, when I’m on my retreat, I really want to try star trails at one of them, but it’s a long drive. We’ll see. |
My friend Tim was camping at Wasagaming, as is his wont on the September long weekend. I went to visit on Friday evening.
We headed up to Spruces to check out the sunset…
…and the moon.
Later, the galaxy appeared as the moon set.
And I decided to try to catch Jupiter with my 55–250mm lens, which is usually too shaky at 250mm. It seems to have worked. (If I’m reading this right, the moons are, L‑R, Callisto, Europa, and Io.)
After I dropped Tim off at his campsite, I saw that the aurora were making an appearance. I stopped in a few places (the beach in Wasagaming[1]Man, I really don’t like the orange lights at the beach, the dock on the golf course road, and on the roadside on #10 highway).
Footnotes
| ↑1 | Man, I really don’t like the orange lights at the beach |
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How’d I do against my goals?
All in all, this was a good retreat. As always, I wish it had been longer, but you know what they say: so it goes.
I got up earlier than I would have liked. The cabin got chilly overnight—the outside temperature dropped to somewhere around 8°C last night—and so I opened up the curtains anywhere the sun would shine in. Then I made coffee and had a banana, and sat down to process last night’s photos and charge up the camera batteries.
I wrote about 1,000 words in the morning and then read some more of my nice light beach read, Catch-22. (I’ve always mentally paired Catch-22 with Slaughterhouse-Five, since both are anti-war satires and both have titles of the form word dash number. There’s another way they’re linked, I’ve decided, because both of them unstick the reader in time. In Slaughterhouse-Five it’s explicit; one of the first lines is “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time”. In Catch-22, it’s implicit; Yossarian’s story bounces around in the timeline, with flashbacks, reminiscences, and foreshadowing leaving the reader unsure just when in the story we might be. Are they flying 30 missions or 55? Has Snowden perished yet or is he still alive?)
I biked down across the dam to the coffee shop to post yesterday’s update (which I’m sure you’ve read) and mutter to myself about the 503 Service Unavailable error my site is still intermittently throwing. (I’ve got an open tech support ticket reaching back to, I dunno, July or so; apparently it’s a hard problem to solve[1]As the old joke goes, there are only two hard problems in computer science: naming variables, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors..)
Back at the cabin, I had a brief chat with my friend Ed, who was trimming the grass at his daughter’s cabin across the street. He invited me up the hill for a visit later.
I took the kayak out—finally, a day warm enough to go out on the water!—and paddled about 3½ km, up the lake and back again. If this isn’t nice, what is?
I had some supper—it’s becoming apparent I BBQed enough smokies on Monday for lunch that I’ll be eating smokies till the day after doomsday—and then sat down to write my evening’s 1,000 words, which ended up being a weird little acrostic snippet that’ll need a lot of editing. But as Sir Terry Pratchett said, The first draft is just you telling yourself the story. It’s not gonna make sense, yet, to most anyone else. That lesson is both necessary and a hard one to learn; I think I re-learn it every time I sit down to write.
After writing I went up to Karen and Ed’s cabin, high atop the hill, and we sat on their deck and chatted for about two hours. They say hi, everyone.
The skies were clear when I got back to my borrowed cabin, and I was sore tempted to load up my camera gear and go snap some more photos in the dark. But I was also still tired from the night before, so I compromised: I set up the camera on the deck and collected an hour’s worth of star trails right here. Even in a light-polluted spot like this—there’s a bright white lamp that shines down on the deck that’s easily as bright as the full moon—you can see the stars. You can tell—the photo’s up above.
She made her circuit again, in reverse this time: the small-windowed original building, with its museum pieces, the green chair from The Rt. Hon. Alan T. Kimpole, without whom perhaps there would be no library here, the dusty artifacts with their small, neatly-typed placards; then the First Annex, stodgy with dark wood (again, here, she found it difficult to not imagine the place smelling of brandy and the combined smoke of generations’ worth of cigars); the West Wing with its offices; the North Stacks with its prime ministers flanking the very dated portrait of the Queen; and finally the O’Neir room, surprising her not at all with its insistence on being last.
The last shall be first. Who said that? She should know. It used to be one of Nathan’s favourite quotes.
She hesitated before opening the door, her hand trembling a little. Please God, she thought, don’t let it be the funeral home. Because she’d come to suspect why there was a photo of their wedding next to the rosewood urn, and she didn’t like the implications.
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There was a lake in the room now.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | As the old joke goes, there are only two hard problems in computer science: naming variables, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors. |
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