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First GraviTrax marble runs

We started building GraviTrax marble runs with my daughter about six months ago and immediately thought that it would be fun to shoot videos of our creations. Today, we finally put together a clip of our first takes. Looking back at it after several months, it was nice to find some value in it beyond simply being a memory of spending time with my daughter. One thing about activities like GraviTrax, Lego and other construction sets is that the experience of playing with them is fleeting. You put a relatively large amount of time and effort into building a project, but after you take it down, it kind of ceases to exist. In theory, Lego models could be preserved if one has unlimited storage space, but with GraviTrax the pieces are supposed to be reused, so the old projects are definitely not permanent. In that sense, having a video of previous attempts turned out to be quite useful as a reference for the layout, height of the elevation platforms, etc., as we found today when breaking out our new expansion set (a video of that is coming up, hopefully sooner than in six months). In the mean time, here is a look at our first marble run projects.

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Paddle boarding at Cadborough Bay

This weekend, my daughter and I took our paddle boards to the ocean for the first time this year. The water was surprisingly warm (no, we didn’t fall down), and the trip itself, as short as it was, didn’t disappoint in terms of the sights one can only see from the water: sunken boats, uninhabited islands… The former was only a stone’s throw from the shore and the latter was only thirty meters or so across, but we‘ll take them. My wife and Bruno, our puppy, were keeping an eye on us from the beach, although Bruno made an honest attempt to join us in the water.

We shot some footage with two GoPro cameras, one on each paddle board. If nothing else, it gave us some good material for a movie-making project the following day, which fits nicely in the current theme of remote education (read: finding a way of entertaining a child at home and justifying it from an educational standpoint by hoping that she might learn something in the process). Seriously though, we all felt that shooting and putting together the video somehow enhanced the whole paddle boarding experience.

Check out the result:

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Crepes and egg boxing

Our eight-years-old daughter achieved a culinary milestone of sorts a couple of days ago. She prepared batter for crepes all by herself. She started from searching for a recipe on her iPad, then proceeded to get the measuring cups and ingredients out and mix everything up practically before any of the adults were out of bed. The adults were very much motivated to get up when she announced that the next step would be to fire up the stove and start baking.

In the process or breaking eggs by hitting them against each other, she discovered an egg boxing champion in our carton of eggs. Strictly speaking, she didn’t confirm that it was an undisputed champion (which was a good thing, because the remaining eggs were needed for other dishes). But the champion did not crack after being hit against the table surface, the spoon, the pot, the iPad (I didn’t ask if she had tried it, and she didn’t tell) and the chef’s forehead. After that, it was retired back to the carton with honours. I guess, the other eggs did not dare to dispute the championship.

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On social distancing and remote learning

One unexpected and positive side effect of our university’s transitioning from face-to-face to remote instruction in the face of the rapidly spreading COVID-19 is the fact that I’ve been spending more time with my eight-years-old daughter over the past week. Sure, changing the pace and the mode of delivering two courses on a short notice has generated quite a bit of extra work, but that has been partially offset, at least in my case, by being able to do this work on a more flexible schedule, i.e. without having to be present at a certain place at a particular time. And even as I’ve been working from home, every time I see my daughter, I cannot help but notice how glad I am to see her. This is not because of the heightened sense of fragility of human life in the face of a pandemic or something like that. It’s just as she is growing so fast that in a few short years she’ll most probably be physically away (that is, unless all universities will be doing remote teaching on a permanent basis by then). For now, though, we are enjoying each other’s company daily, even if it is, ironically, a condition forced by circumstances.

Our puppy, Bruno, is also getting more of our attention, because we simply cannot ignore the beautiful weather and not to take him on longer walks (leaving socializing for later, of course).

Oh, and another unexpected outcome of being cooked up at home is that I am rediscovering the Gundam anime for myself (we’ve been watching the Mobile Suit series with my daughter). Incidentally, I learned that the anime series inspired some academics in Japan to form the virtual Gundam Academy, focussing on futuristic urban planning and technical advances in the real world. How’s that for remote education?!

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Pragmatism

My eight-eight-years old daughter is eager to help me with processing photos from sports photoshoots. She has been looking over my shoulder for a while now and tried using Lightroom herself, to the point where she is fairly proficient at cropping (e.g., she the understands the rule of thirds and has a natural eye for using leading lines in composition) and basic exposure adjustments (e.g., she understands the concepts of black point and highlight clipping). It is apparently a great fun for her, and she treats it like some sort of computer game. This morning, she pulled the laptop away from me and started cropping a selection of photos from the last night’s basketball game.

“You can check them later,” she said to prevent my interfering.

She was clearly enjoying the process, commenting on the photos, the facial expressions of the players and how much fun it was to edit the images.

“I want photography to be my hobby too!” she exclaimed.

Naturally, I was quite happy that my daughter found whatever I do meaningful enough to make it her own. So I encouraged her: “By all means! Why not?!” Or something along these lines.

She kept going through the images, cropping each one and checking exposure. Gradually, she began to realize that the work was pretty tedious and repetitive, and that the image set was rather large.

“Are they actually paying you for this?” she asked after a while.

Enthusiasm curbed with pragmatism – she might be on her way to becoming a pro.

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Snowmakers

In the holiday busyness, we forgot that we had a gingerbread house kit that was purchased long time ago and was sitting at the bottom shelf of a cupboard. So this weekend, my daughter decided to decorate it anyway. It turns out, her timing was perfect – as soon as the house was done, snow came to Victoria for the first time this season. If Bruno, our puppy, could talk, he would say, “You should have built that gingerbread house long time ago, so I could enjoy the snow sooner!”

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Polite pedestrians

When my parents first visited Victoria, they were pleasantly surprised and even mildly inconvenienced by the fact that the local drivers were too polite. When my parents would be walking around town, the cars would often stop to allow them to cross the road (which they felt obliged to do, even though they were not planning to).

A couple of days ago I was riding my motorbike for the first time in 2020, taking advantage of a dry, sunny day. And I realized that the local pedestrians reciprocate the politeness – several of them stopped at the crosswalks and waved me though, presumably to save me stopping and changing gears.

It’s a small thing, but that’s why I like Victoria. “It is so civilized,” as one colleague said when we moved to live here. Besides, being able to ride a motorbike in January end even enjoy the sunshine is a real treat. Check it out:

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Best part of travel

“What is your favourite part of travel?” asked my eight-years-old daughter, who was eager to start packing for our skiing trip over the Christmas holiday.

I wasn’t sure I understood what she meant. Obviously, I like the skiing part, but I had a sense that it wasn’t what she was aiming at.

“My number-one favourite thing is packing,” she explained. “Second is arriving to the hotel room, and driving there is the third-favourite part
I am pretty sure “third-favourite” really meant “the part that could be skipped without missing much”.

I thought about my own order of preferences. I agree with her that anticipation is a large part of the overall experience. Planning of a trip is at least half of the fun, or at least it could be so. Unfortunately, for me there is often not enough time to enjoy the planning phase, to slow down and do it methodically. Packing is a perfect example. More often than not I scramble to do it at the last moment, and so it becomes a chore. Indeed, whatever is worth doing is worth doing slowly.

I find it amusing how much my daughter enjoys the novelty of the new environment. That’s her number two on the list of favourite aspects of travel. Playing in the hotel’s pool and being able to build a “royal bed” by collecting all the pillows she could find erased even the momentary sadness of saying goodbye to Bruno, our puppy, who is staying with his breeder during our trip.

For me, it’s the people we come across one way or another during the travel that ultimately make the experience what it is. Debbie, Bruno’s breeder, for example, had her hands full with a litter of puppies, yet she accepted him without hesitation at our first request. I really hope that Bruno’s first Christmas will be more enjoyable in the company of his original family than sitting in a crate while we go skiing. I somehow suspect he would not have shared my daughter’s enthusiasm about our hotel room.

On the way to skiing, I ran into my kendo sensei in a cafeteria. Two minutes of face-to-face chat to catch up about the kids and the parents, sharing our pride in their achievements and concerns about their health felt like being reassured that someone still shares your values and cares about your going-ons beyond a Facebook “like”. Watching us talk, my daughter suddenly became sad that I put kendo on hold in the past year in order to pursue other things together with her. And I became a bit sad that she is becoming a bit more grown-up every day, right before my eyes.

Then, there was a family from Brazil, whom we met at the pool. They live in Victoria as part of their sabbatical. Their experience of this part of the world was so positive that it reminded me how much of it I’ve come to take for granted. The hedonic treadmill is a tough thing indeed.

And the family time in the company of my daughter, wife and parents – being able to experience it in the context of travel, even if it’s short three hours away from home, is definitely a treat.

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Mt. Doug

A Saturday afternoon walk turned out into the first legitimate hike for both my daughter and our Lagotto Romagnolo puppy Bruno. We just started climbing past our usual turnaround point on the trail and soon found that it was easier to continue scrambling up against the little water currents running towards us on the rocks than to turn back and follow their flow. Soon the sweeping views of Victoria started opening up and my daughter, who minutes ago was vocally regretting her decision to go on this hike, was delighted at having made it to the top. While we were crab-walking along a slippery rock on our way down, Bruno was zooming up and down the muddy slope as some kind of mountain goat. “He is in heaven!” said my daughter, and he certainly looked like he was beside himself with excitement. It took three water changes when we gave Bruno a bath at home to wash off all the mud. And this is saying something, because he usually goes to a great length to avoid stepping into puddles or even on wet grass. (Some water dog he is!)

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New gear

There is no way around it – shooting with a brand-new camera is one, if not the, most exciting aspects of photography. Admittedly, I like new technology in a stereotypically geeky way, so my view is probably biased. Still, these are exciting times for photographers, with the technology advancing at an amazing pace.

During the past couple of weeks, I’ve been taking my new Sony α7R IV for some sports and concert performance shoots. The amazing 61 Mpix of resolution and the super-nimble autofocus (I mostly shot with a Sony FE 70-200mm f/2.8 GM OSS lens) makes shooting incredibly exciting. Last time I had the same feeling was when I laid my hands on a then-new Canon 1Dx. Immediately, I knew that it was a revolutionary piece of equipment that was going to change the way I approach taking photos.

I am glad that I’ve had an opportunity to take my photography hobby to a professional level. Not the smallest part of it is that it allows me to play with the latest and greatest gear. Ironically, the state-of-the-art gear is needed to stay competitive as a pro. So it is not clear at all what is the means and what is the end.