Last time I tried this, the formatting got all messed up, and line wraps were funny. But, it might be necessary, especially since my Dad said he couldn’t read my blog when he was in China. China has a way of blocking websites. So, I’ll need some way to post stuff from the road.

Anyway, this seems to be the solution (if it works). I’ll send email to a super-secret email address, and my blog will check that address regularly. If there’s something in that mailbox, it gets posted. I wonder if formatting works? Here goes nothing…
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I had this thought tonight as I was driving home from the beach. I spider had landed itself on my windshield while the car was parked by the lake, and as I drove home, it scuttled into my car, across the dashboard, and out the passenger-side window. I rolled up the window on the passenger side so it wouldn’t come back in, and I could see it clinging to the glass outside.

I figured that in about 15 minutes, I had just transported that spider much further than it could have made it on its own in its entire life. It’s going to have to start a whole new life now, with different friends, in a different environment, and practically on a different world. Yet, I think the spider will do fine, or at least will carry on doing normal spider things.

It made me wonder what it would be like if that happened to me. What if, within a span of 15 minutes, some outside force moved me further than any conceivable human transport could take me within my entire life, and landed me in a completely alien, but still habitable environment? How would I adjust? I think it would be distressing.

In a related thought, I saw a kitten at the animal shelter the other day who had just had one of its front legs amputated from the shoulder. It was heartbreaking to see such a cute little animal with nothing but a stitched up wound where it should have a leg. The kitten didn’t seem to be suffering though. It was playing with a stuffed mouse, tossing it around the cage with its remaining front paw, standing up on its hind legs and exploring its environment with great curiosity and energy.

Anyway, the whole point of this is that I think animals are so much more adaptable than humans, because they live in the moment. We can be distracted by feeling sorry for ourselves for our various predicaments. Whether or not we deserve to feel sorry for ourselves is irrelevant; it is still distracting and can prevent us from doing what needs doing. Yet, our ability to base an emotional state on a past memory of how things were is still valuable. It helps us to learn from history, and to predict an outcome based on prior events. Still, I can’t help but think that if we could train ourselves to be more present, like animals are, we might have something to gain from it.

I went to the Chinese Lantern Festival at Ontario Place last night. It was pretty expensive ($25) and of questionable cultural value. The cooking demonstrations were being done by Mandarin, which isn’t exactly the pinnacle of Asian cuisine, to put it mildly. Anyway, there were a lot of tacky, but amusing things there. Here’s what part of it looked like.

I did pick up a free guide book to Shanghai, which will come in handy on my trip in October.

Here’s a pic I’ve had in my head for a while, but needed to wait until I could get the flowers for it.

The concept is pretty thin, I admit: wild flowers in a non-wild setting. But it was quick and fun to shoot anyway.

I had the chance in the last few days to redo my website. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, gathering ideas, figuring out problems that needed solving. The things I wanted to achieve were:

• Create a clean and modern layout
• Make it easy to maintain and update
• Feature, in detail, some of my favorite photos
• Improve my search engine placement in key areas
• Make the site more business-oriented to make it easier for people to find information about hiring me and licensing my images
• Guide people into the right areas of my full portfolio, which has gotten too big to navigate
• Modernize my full portfolio to make it match the new site

I finally put it all together in a mass of CSS, PHP, Javascript and MySQL. I learned a lot about these things in the last week… probably more than I ever wanted to know. I saved myself a lot of trouble by using Gallery to manage my photos and testimonials. Gallery is great for producing thumbnails and storing the descriptions and photos in a database. All I had to do was learn how to write some code that would pull this info out of the database and put it on the screen so it looks nice.

Anyway, now it’s done. Have a look!