Someone in an online discussion (Padraig) wrote the words that follow, and which I thought were well chosen enough to copy here. (I'd credit him with more specificity had he provided any).
When I die, I will be gone. period.
People will remember me for a time, then they will die. Before long, no one will remember me. Any mark I ever left on the world will have turned to dust and blown away.
Then, someday, our sun will swell into a red giant, consuming the inner planets, including earth, laying waste to any trace of life in the solar system. And then, unless we've found a way off the planet, any memory of the human race will have been annihilated.
Even if we have mastered interstellar travel and spread to other planets, entropy will have its way with the universe and nothing will remain but pervasive infrared radiation. Unless the universe itself has a memory, there will be no one and nothing to remember that life ever breathed anywhere.
And you know what? I still prefer that to believing a lie.
A well worded phrasing that resonates well with my perspective. His post was prefaced with one other sentence, saying, "My thoughts on death are incredibly bleak."
Here I disagree, in that I didn't find his view bleak at all. On the contrary, it captured well our existence as collections of molecules and electro-chemistry in the natural ebb and flow of matter and energy.
The universe is a beautiful manifestation of probability and pattern, complexity and depth. That within all that stuff, we can craft meaningful lives rather than just exist and procreate. That we can love and be loved, and create beauty from randomness gives us a reason to savour every moment between the before-we-were and the after-we-are-no-more.
I've recently connected up with Tumblr to see how they do things over there. I've got a bit of a footprint in the 'Blogger' world already, but I was curious to see if they do something a little different. My conclusion is that Tumblr is basically like Blogger with more style, and leaning more towards images, although it looks like some of their text capability is fairly stylish as well.
I posted a series of eleven pics to Twitter the other day and thought I'd put those up as a test. Blogger doesn't seem to offer me any means to do a tiled array of the small thumbnails that I pulled back down from TwitPic. I could put together a simple HTML table to pull it off, but I thought I'd see what Tumblr could do with it.
The result is good. Here's the final photo, plus the nice array that I just screen-shot captured from the Tumblr presentation:
The Tumblr interface stops you at 10 pictures, but it gives you several different layout options for tiled arrays.
So kudos to Tumbr. Not sure how much I'll add there, but if the experience continues to be painless and stylish, it could attract some additional attention from yours truly.
I've been lax at keeping up with accumulating photos. So I'm taking some time to sort pictures at the tail-end of this 2012 Christmas/2013 New Year holiday period. This could take a while, and no doubt my urge to share pics will be triggered by particularly interesting shots. These may evoke no particular excitement among my Twitter followers, so I thought maybe I can refresh this otherwise stale blog area with some pics. Be prepared for a total lack of theme or reason in their order and presentation.
This is a modern shoe-box experience, I suppose. Once we would clean up a room, find a shoe-box full of photos and with the intent to sort them we would spend a few hours reliving the memories. Now it's a folder on my desktop with a bunch of pics that didn't get sorted as I removed them from various picture-taking devices. Putting them into my 'digital photos' directory with meaningful categories allows me to revisit them as I do the sorting.
Prepare yourself - these will be quite random. :) Click pics for bigger versions.
The Photos
A. Bread! I like to bake bread as you may be aware if you follow me on Twitter. Batch to batch, I'm usually making either small loaves that I can get through in a couple of days lunches, or medium sized loaves that will get us through a stew dinner, and a couple of breakfasts. This shot at the right has my mouth watering.
Peanut butter on fresh bread - Yum.
There are a whole lot of bread pictures in these folders I'm sorting, so I'll spare the Internet the wasted bits and bytes. Oh, except here's a shot of some rye loaves. too.
B. Bugs! Sharing this video via YouTube, as taken from my back yard. During the spring I recorded the process of sweeping out my water-feature stream-bed, and it is very much filled with bugs. Seeing them all squirm around as I remove the organic junk is quite compelling.
Due to their habit of blending in, it might be tough to see in the embedded player above. You can click on this link to see it full-sized on the YouTube site - a creepy-crawly video record of my menagerie saved for posterity.
C. In Montreal in the summer, a trip to a popular breakfast spot on the Plateau. Four of us with lots to eat. Mine, are the eggs Benedict at the bottom.
That visit also featured a fun, though swelteringly hot, picnic in a park around Jean Talon area, and some fun 'Gypsy Jazz' at a club near Saint Denis. Le jazz manouche!
D. Ginger beer trials. Making my own ginger beer for a while, I decided to compare it against some of the commercial ones. A good learning experience. There were bits in the others that I could attempt to imitate, yet elements of mine that were better. A good exercise.
E. Hiking with a picnic along the way is fun, and one of our
favourite spots not too far from the city is captured in this shot. I
use this one not due to its great composition or scenery but in way of
contrast. The left shot is from June 2011. As luck would have it I've
neglected tidying up my photos long enough that a walk to the same area
the following summer caught the contrast. The drought of spring 2012
decimated the scrubby oaks that populate the top of this part of the
Eardley escarpment. Sad to see, as in the second picture they
show pretty much a total loss of foliage. Whether they died as a
whole tree we won't know until the spring of 2013 I guess.
2012 View - Oaks Suffered from Drought
2011 View - Happy Trees
(Blogger has a bit of trouble managing picture placement, so I hope the pics are rendered okay in your browser. I seem to have got them reasonably well placed in Firefox for now)
F. Dinner for 55cents? Go to 219 Sparks Street with this coupon for the Plaza Hotel. Of course, the hotel may have been gone for 70years or so. This is from some random newspaper bits in our attic. Fun stuff to find. Click the pic for a bigger one you can read.
G. Pizza Anyone? Making a lot of thin-crust, fresh local ingredients-based pizza lately. Once the dough is made and ready it's quick and tasty. The other handy bit of info is that if you make a scratch dough, you can form it up into individual pizza sized balls, then wrap tightly in plastic and freeze them. When you anticipate a pizza event, pull em out to warm up and form into pies. Soaking the tightly-wrapped ball in cold water is a good way to thaw them as well.
H. Waffling can be a good thing. In early summer when the berries are in season, making some waffles is a good plan. So we did. The results are very photogenic with the great contrast between red and light-golden waffle.
I. A cup of tea. I've been known to spend a bit of time at one Bridgehead coffee shop or another (it's a local Ottawa, Canada coffee/tea place). This pic seems to capture my experience there pretty well. Tea, paraphernalia, and Internet access. Good way to spend an hour if you can get a good seat and cross your fingers that your corner doesn't turn into a daycare spontaneously. Avoiding prime mom times is the best advice.
J. A glass of wine or two makes life a tiny bit nicer. I'll take a pic of a wine bottle here and there, mostly for record keeping purposes. This is a good case in point. The 2010 Meiomi Pinot Noir blew me away all through the summer of 2012. For me it's just what you want in a Pinot - the fruit is crisp and rich, with raspberry/cherry notes, the tannins are balanced and soft without missing the bus. So, I was glad to have recorded the bottle. However, this picture worked out so well with the background and lighting and the super-cold glass of water that I had to share it here too.
I haven't found the 2011 yet but I've heard good rumours, though I wonder if they'll have pushed it a bit further away from classic Pinot territory if they've heard all the exclamation about big fruit and soft tannins. Okay, I'm getting distracted just thinking about it.
