Link to a drawing

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Its Fall and what TECH to take


It is fall. It's the first day of fall 2010. Arguably the best season in New England. There are many warm days before we relinquish the land to winter. The air is dry and crisp, perfect for working out doors. Splitting and stacking fire wood and waving at passing tourists. The great buses full of what we call "Leaf Peepers" are on the highways. The "colors" sweep down from north and the leaves drop. The Peepers are driven up from the south. I encourage them to take the leaves when they go. Only a few do and those don't take enough. We still have too many to rake up. 


It was a fantastic summer by all accounts.  The summer of 2009 was awful. It was damp and sunless and gardens suffered. The dampness brought a blight that infected potatoes and tomatoes. The same scourge that sent the Irish across the sea a hundred and sixty years ago. At the end of that year I crossed the sea as well, to Madrid. I thought Madrid's winter would be mild. I understood from the web that it would be winter but tolerable. Just reaching the mid 30's at night then warming to 65F during the day. Sunny and dry. It wasn't like that. It was the wettest, coldest winter Madrid had seen in 50 years. All of Europe set records for winter's discomfort. The train that passed under the English Channel froze up and didn't run. Airplanes sat on tarmac aprons and didn't fly. I decided this winter would be different, for me anyway.


I am taking a lot of technology with me to Ecuador. A laptop computer, a page scanner, camera, MP3 player, Ebook, batteries and a charger. I could go cold turkey for three months. I don't know what I would gain by doing that. Less crap to haul thru airports and streets? Would my character improve? I'd find plenty to do. But I wouldn't listen to Spanish language broadcasts and lessons on internet radio. I wouldn't be able to listen to all the old BBC comedies I like. The great novels I want to write wouldn't be typed. This blog and others would have to wait for my visit to an internet cafe. There are substitutes for all this. The camera and scanner I'd take to support the web page(s), scanning drawings of things real and things imagined. Photos of Ecuador and the people I meet. There are programs on the laptop to let me manipulate the images and scanned drawings. I'll limit the stuff I do take. I'll not take anything I can't afford to have grow legs and walk off. If everything did suddenly disappear I could be content with a pad of paper and a couple of pens. With that I could write those great stories and accounts. A pad and drawing pens would be enough to render scenes of the towns and mountains. The story could be told in ink, as was done hundreds of years ago.

No comments:

Post a Comment