Catrien's thoughts: August 2011

I came across Weight Mirror, a site where you can upload a photo of yourself and it will "photoshop" your photo to give you an idea of what you could look like at different weights. It's free and you don't have to register. (No, I'm not affiliated with the site.) Pretty cool tool that might help those of us working on attaining a healthy weight.

Irene turned out to be less dangerous than expected and I can at least report that my uncle's fine. He was most amazed by the sight of young trees "spinning" counterclockwise, in the same direction as the wind. My thoughts are with those who lost loved ones, and with those contending with the aftermath in other ways.

My uncle lives in North Carolina, so I'm waiting to hear how it will turn out with hurricane Irene. He doesn't live too close to the coast, so probably it will end up being a lot of wind and rain and hopefully not much else for him.
My thoughts are with everybody who has to evacuate. I was very happy to read some reports that pets will be allowed in (some?) shelters. Please everybody, take care of your pets. I know that organizations will be helping people and pets in areas that will be hit hard.

After two weeks of, well, sketchy weather and a strange (for us) house, we're back home. It was a good vacation. I read six books, made applesauce, practiced a foreign language, didn't sleep too well, and enjoyed the sound of wasps in a wall full of something like Virginia creeper, as well as a lot of sparrows, a couple of bats, about a hundred cows, and a weasel. Proof of the last two (see if you can find the weasel!):

The wireless modem verdict: not much of one, since I didn't try out my own sim card and unlocked modem, probably partially because I was afraid of the roaming charges. In any case I didn't trust my language skills enough to buy one where we were. The one we rented worked fine. The only problem was that we were in a valley out in the country where there weren't many GSM cell sites. We checked our text messages and mail by putting our cell phones and the modem on the fence twice a day. Worked fine, though the connection was still slow. :-) We drove out of the valley to a more populated place to use Skype to call my Mom. Here's our Communications Center:

Once back home, I read Bruce Feiler's article "Our Plugged-In Summer" on nytimes.com. As always, vacation makes me think about my "digitality" and what's good/what's not so good about it. I agree with the basic idea of his use of the Internet on vacation: checking out useful information on attraction, looking things up with the kids, etc. We did something similar, although probably less often than Feiler and his family did. And yet...I find it hard to describe, but when the Internet is an option, as useful as it is, it means a small part of our attention is not where we are. We're partly "out there" and not "here". My experience is that this detracts from a vacation (and from "regular life," if we're not careful), even though I am a huge fan of getting information when I need it. There are lots of pros and cons to this question, so let me know what you think!
The big computer is back after being repaired for the "flashing folder of death" problem. Apple replaced the hard disk, and to my delight they were able to copy the data onto it, so I didn't even have to use the Time Capsule. Fantabulous.