Jasna and I just got back today from a spur-​​of-​​the-​​moment camp­ing trip. We’d been want­ing to have a couple days just for the two of us for a while now, and our sched­ules aligned, so why not? We thought camp­ing would be more fun and relax­ing than any­thing else, and I’ve wanted to see the towns along the Grand River forever, so we com­bined the two and went to Rock Point Pro­vin­cial Park: it’s vir­tu­ally right where the Grand River emp­ties into Lake Erie and neces­sit­ates driv­ing along the Grand River, a fairly nice drive.

I’ve got a grand total of 3 pic­tures from the trip and I’m happy with that. It wasn’t the sort of trip to you take to take pic­tures of. Appar­ently the park is known for its fossils, but we didn’t go hunt­ing for those, either. We went down to the beach a few times — twice for moon­light swims — and spent most of the rest of our time in our camp­site sit­ting around and talk­ing and enjoy­ing one another. We got a nice camp­site with fairly good pri­vacy and shade, and none of the camp­sites dir­ectly around us were taken. It was pretty much the per­fect couple of days, only because we were together.

Jasna bought me an e-​​reader! She actu­ally bought it before we’d planned on going on the trip, but I guess this seemed a good time to give it to me, and give me an easier time read­ing. It’s a Kobo, which I adore. I’m actu­ally a bit of a freak in that I’m some­what anti-​​paper: I often prefer read­ing on screen to read­ing on paper; maybe it’s a side-​​effect of grow­ing up with a com­puter. The Kobo has a really beau­ti­ful dis­play and is easier for me to read than any­thing I’ve ever read from, CRT, LCD or paper. The dis­play can’t refresh very often — maybe once a second or some­thing like that — and it’s super low-​​powered which makes it unsuit­able for any­thing but read­ing, which suits me fine. I have only two com­plaints: firstly, that the font size is typ­ic­ally too big, but that’s a cri­ti­cism of the books that are format­ted for it, not the device itself; and secondly, that it’s really dif­fi­cult to skip for­ward or back­ward a lot of pages at a time. With paper it’s easy to do a bin­ary search for the page you want, but the Kobo seems determ­ined to make you do a lin­ear search.

I did bring my laptop, but only so I could do just enough work to make my guilt levels fall to the point where I could genu­inely relax. It turns out that’s about half an hour, ha! I’m still more or less pleased with how the thesis is progressing.

Jasna and I just got back today from a spur-of-the-moment camping trip. We'd been wanting to have a couple days just for the two of us for a while now, and our schedules aligned, so why not? We thought camping would be more fun and relaxing than anything else, and I've wanted to see ...