August started off calmly. I did some overdue bike fixing (lost fairing bolt, slight but noticeable radiator leak), then gathered my stuff, and went on a four day motorcycle trip. My first vacation alone in over 35 years.
The Protagonist’s Quest
This went approximately as well as could be expected.
On the first day, I decided to ride with my photography backpack on my back. That bag is heavy, so you don’t want this in the side or top trunk for stability reasons. I should have known that this wasn’t a good idea… I said it was heavy, so I was bound to notice that. My left collarbone told me it wasn’t happy with its predicament. Five hours later, as I arrived at the little “apartment” (kitchen, bedroom, bathroom and patio) in a rural area of Limburg, I decided that next day’s trip would include finding a solution for that.
Which I found in the form of a red baggage net, which securely ties the bag to the passenger seat, just before the rear axle so that it doesn’t upset stability. And in such a way that I can actually entrust thousands of euros worth of gear to it without being worried.
After that, I had the day to myself. I decided that I would spend some time with the satnav (my phone, in a holder mounted above the dashboard) turned off, so as to get purposefully lost.
That worked out nicely! At some point, I did see a sign come up saying “Deutschland”, which came as a surprise. 🤣
After a blissful day of getting lost and enjoying the ride, at the end of the day I turned the satnav back on, and it turned out I was a bit further from “home” (the apartment) than I thought.
On the third day, I was sort of tied to the house by a gastro-intestinal issue that made me want to stay close to a bathroom, so I spent the morning and half of the afternoon on the patio. This turned out to be a bit of a blessing — I managed to completely empty my mind, listening to birds. And the horses, which were in the meadow that the patio was overlooking.
They were very friendly and approachable, and in serious need of petting.
In the afternoon, my bowels decided to be on their best behaviour, so I did actually get some riding in, again, with the satnav off… and it was just gorgeous.
It looked and sounded and smelled — and felt — like August at its best.
I found out that I have missed going solo more than I realised.
What else was there this month?
Well, we also had some nice, clear night skies, which meant that my beloved and I could experiment with the Lens2Scope adapter that I got her for her birthday (see my previous update).
Looking at the moon with the adapter on the Sony G tele, on a very clear night, had me go full-on wow. On full zoom, you only get about half of the moon in the image, and the image is so sharp it cuts.
Janny spent most of that time getting used on how to operate the stuff. It’s not as easy to spot something without the automatic star finding stuff we had on the Meade, and on top of that she needs to find her way around the tripod, and how to change lenses and all that. But she’s getting the hang of it, and she’s really enjoying it, so I call that a win.
It did make me lose my lightweight yet super-steady carbon tripod… that’s somehow suddenly hers as well. So I got myself a nice secondhand Manfrotto tripod, seemingly made of volcanic rock and forged steel or something… which is not problem, because I only use this tripod in and around the house.
It’s also amazing how, if you take a longer exposure picture (say, 10 seconds), the photo shows you many, many more stars that you can see with the naked eye.
So, how’s your health doing?
My latest visit to the internist was very encouraging. The lab results were great — no issues found, and the one kidney that’s left is functioning above expectation. The medication, whilst having done a number on my general sense of well-being earlier this year, appears to have done what it says on the back of the box, so to speak.
I also (slowly) feel that I’m regaining some of my former shape.
Good! All’s well then?
… ehh, no. Not everything worked out well this month. I caused a valuable connection I had made to blow up in my face, and even more upsetting, two people in our circle are facing the prospect of meeting their Maker.
Apparently, Fate decided it’s too long ago we’ve attended a funeral. Our last one was early July, so I beg to differ.
One of these two people is someone who inspired me to take up some local volunteer work, so I joined the Dorpsteam (that’s a team of people who form the link between the village and the municipality we are part of). I decided to stick some effort into trying to figure out how to get the fragmented volunteer initiatives in our village to be… less fragmented, and see if they can be helped out. On top of that, I’m seriously considering the idea of helping foreigners (we have some Ukrainian refugees and a handful folks from Poland here) to acquire a working knowledge of our language. Unfortunately I have no idea how to take that on. I’m currently thinking of a conversational approach, but I’m very open to ideas! So if that’s something you know about, please let me know!
By the way, do you still code or what?
Funny you should ask! I have, for the first time since my retirement, started an entirely new programming project — this one is to handle automation of the update email subscription process (see tthe new menu item at the top). For this, I’ve picked up working with a new IMAP/SMTP/MIME library called Mailkit, and I’ve also, for the first time, created a .NET 8 Windows service. So at least that was fun.
It’s not finished yet — I’m still at the proof-of-concept stage. But it works.
Tomorrow is my second meeting with the village team. I’ve drafted up and circulated a document describing what we can do to fix the fragmentation of volunteer efforts and how to help them, so that will be interesting.
I will want to research how to help foreigners to speak Dutch, and I have a few ideas of articles to write. So that’ll keep me off the streets.
But I’ll need to keep busy to stop my mind from going around in circles.
I am not sure what September will look like, but I’m not looking forward to it. It is likely to turn out grim overall.