Back from our most recent camping stretch but bittersweet as my inlaws decided to pull the pin after twenty years of seasonal camping.
(This has been coming for awhile but still tough that the moment finally arrived.)
So much of our week away was watching as they listed (and sold) their camper, packed up everything in it, started clearing out their site, etc.
I made a video of some of the many highlights over the past twenty years…
No, Shea didn’t finally get tired of being married to me and drown me.
We’ve been camping for much of July (in a campground that has really crappy LTE service that, on balance, I find to be a good thing – though Sasha managing to sneak the password for the $80/month wifi the neighbours pay for shows she doesn’t quite see being disconnected the same way her dad does!)
I’ve also been busy with accompanying my parents to a few different specialist appointments, a big landscaping project at our house and more going on in our lives keeping us busy (I think I’ve observed before that there’s irony that the busier I am in my life, the less time I have to document my thoughts about my life on this blog!) 🙂
So anyhow, just wanted to let the seventeen people who regularly read this blog know that posts will likely continue to be few and far between, perhaps until the end of summer (unless my inlaws do suceed in offing me with their constant offers of fish frys and poutine nights!) 😉
“Sea Urgency” instead of “Sea Urchin” is a malapropism that Sasha coined in Mexico but it applies for this picture taken during a snorkeling excursion in Hawaii in January 2012 long before she was born…
This piece of advice ties directly to last week’s about how the absolute most vital piece of advice I’ve received in my 15+ years as a librarian is to do what you can to solve the problem of the person standing in front of you.
In library school, I think I saw a stat that something like 90% of people think of “books” when they hear the word “library”. But as a great manager pointed out to me long ago, that’s a complete red herring.
Books are what people think we’re about but the reality is “helping” people is what we’re really about in libraries. Sure, sometimes that means helping them find the book they want but it might also mean helping them find a job. Or to become a Canadian citizen. Or to find treatment for their addictions. Or a million other ways that we find ways to help.
Not to mention the insane wastefulness of spending $250,000 for a five-minute glimpse of the Titanic. Imagine the good that money could’ve done otherwise. Or contrast the media attention and “all hands on deck” search and rescue operation which was basically guaranteed to be futile while boatloads of refugees are ignored completely.
Guess what? I just saved $250,000!
Seems fitting that a rainbow would appear to be landing in our newly landscaped backyard, both because it’s Pride Month but also as a reminder of all the good fortune that Shea and I enjoy in our lives.
Unfortunately, you may have to join a waitlist to get access to this tool (at least I did.)
But then again, maybe I don’t want to talk to myself (at least out loud!)
I just spoke to myself, and it was weird.
You can now clone your voice using a few seconds of audio, give the robot personality, and deploy a clone of yourself.
Here is a step-by-step process on how to do this in less than two minutes:
— Santiago (@svpino) June 21, 2023
May have told this story before but my parents won a trip for two to Las Vegas and it happened to coincide with a week that Shea and I had booked off.
So after a bit of chaos to get Pace (two going on three) a rush passport, we booked and ended up going along.
It was a great trip and we didn’t even have Pace get abducted (though the story of hearing “Little boy? Where’s your mommy?” from the hallway outside our hotel room will go down in family lore!)
Anyhow, the Bellagio Fountains were a highlight of the trip…
