I’ve been working on writing five different things, but none of them are ready for the light of day yet. One is my version of a fairy tale, one is a dark piece, one about death, another on things mundane, and finally, the last one is a return to the subject of time. Regarding time, this is not a look at my usage of it or others who waste it; instead, I’m looking at the very nature of what it is. Then a hint about the entry on death: I’ll be considering how little I can know about it and that I’ll never be able to convey anything about it from my own experience in a blog entry.

Been dealing with a few dozen loose ends that pertain to many things in our lives as we get ready for summer, a kind of spring cleaning. Finished our taxes today, that’s always a relief. Then there are all the other things that need clearing out before any serious travels can commence.

Trying to get a lens that I’ve dropped repaired for the fourth time, this time to fix a dented front filter ring that is stopping me from attaching and removing a polarizer. It was just this past July that I’d sent it in to repair most of its guts as the auto-focus no longer functioned and some broken interior piece was causing serious zooming issues with the lens when we were in Europe last year. Previous to that it was a dysfunctional image stabilization system. If you think I should change brands from Canon to something else, you’d be mistaken. This 17-55mm f2.8 lens has snapped well north of 150,000 images for me and is simply perfect. That lens has taken photos in the wilds of Alaska for more than 30 days, it’s been weeks in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, visited Death Valley and Yellowstone where it encountered hot and cold extremes.

Today I received the first firmware update to the Bionic Lester MK3 that is really allowing the filter to feel like a real module. Sound in and out is a bit limiting, but with some modulation capability life begins to be injected into the thing.

Caroline had her hair trimmed today by Sydney who’s been taking care of these duties for nearly a decade now. I’m out this evening writing this stuff (look at the time stamp on the iced tea above) because the wife is out for dinner with her coworkers who are dining with a visitor that had come into town. The big news though which should probably be a blog entry of its own is that Caroline is starting to move the ball forward in trying to resolve her need for dual citizenship. You see Caroline is still a German citizen working with a Permanent Resident card a.k.a. the Green Card. There are reasons for desiring both German and American citizenship and maybe someday I’ll write about what they are, as of today it was simply getting some documents notarized for sending them off to Cologne, Germany.

So not a lot to share that has any real novelty. Some might say that has been true of many of my entries, but these are for Caroline and me and the digital memory that will be constructed by an A.I. in the future from these fragments. That memory will effectively be a shadow of me representing an artistic interpretation of a person born in the middle of the 20th century. Hmmm, I should write a blog entry just about that, titled “A.I. John and how the landscape turned digital.”