We were seven adults during the most populated portion of this year’s annual trip to the cottage on Kennebec Lake – five when these pictures were taken.
Five years ago, I would have been hard-pressed to put a label to a single one of these devices beyond the generic “cellphone”, “battery charger”, etc. But in 2012 I can pretty much recognize the lot.
This is what the five of us decided we needed to complete the 2012 cottage experience.
Digital SLR cameras – three (two on the table and the third to take this picture); e-book readers in the photo include a Kobo Vox, Amazon Kindle and a non-Vox edition of the Kobo; five smart phones are visible, as are a trio of music players, including the one plugged into the centre of the speaker set; one laptop computer; two iPads; a small digital clock and an array of charging devices and cables round out the paraphernalia.
And I can almost hear the “WTF?”s from here. Are you really “getting away from it all” by packing this much technology up to the cottage? Well yes we were, and here’s why. With one exception – my brother-in-law was on call and had to be reachable because he works with natural gas and the technology required to support the business. If something breaks at his workplace, there’s a chance (albeit a small one) that if left unattended, it could become the kind of problem that leads the morning newscasts the next day.
The days of heading up to the cottage to “get away from it all” would seem at first glance at a picture like this – at least in our circle – to have been consigned to the pages of family history.
But when you think of it – not so much. Because that array of devices does not, in fact, represent any sort of quantum shift in our preferred forms of cottage pastime – simply a different way of getting at what we’ve been doing for years.
Run your eyes over all that technology again and relate them to what you typically do at the cottage. Even 30 years ago we were reading, listening to music, taking hikes or canoe jaunts to take pictures or catching up on the news with whatever daily newspaper was available at the nearest campsite’s store.
That’s pretty much what these devices did for us this year. I ploughed through a many-hundred-page long Stephen King novel simply by tapping the right side of the e-reader screen to “turn the page”. Our daily newspapers were actually treeware but I also kept tabs on some favourite columnists in media that weren’t available at the campsite’s store.
And this year my brother-in-law and I – both golf fans – didn’t have to wait until we got home to discover who won the Canadian Open. In fact, had we wanted, we could have followed in real time shot-by-shot updates either of the tournament itself, or whichever player we wanted to follow.
I don’t have a deep message here; but I do have a baby boomer’s sense of awe in the fact that each of those e-readers has the power and the memory capacity to pack hundreds of books internally; the music players house thousands of tunes and the cameras’ memory cards have replaced damn near an infinite number of rolls of film.
My daughter laughs at our stories of the “prehistoric” days when I would link my computer to the phone and start the connection process before supper in the hopes of actually getting a connection by the time I had my after-dinner cup of coffee in hand. (If you’ve seen the John Badham movie with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy, “Wargames”, you know what I mean – when “floppy disks” were actually floppy.)
And it wasn’t more than 20-25 odd years ago that I hit Blacks cameras before a trip to buy 24 rolls of 35 mm colour film and lucked into a sale that gave me a free canvas tote bag with every two rolls of film. A few of those twelve bags have since died but we’re still using several of them.
And at that time, we didn’t see any of those photos until after returning from the trip, holding our breath while hoping that Blacks’ processing machines wouldn’t break down while our photo negatives were in the bath. (And yes, it did happen once to Leslie who lost dozens and dozens of photos of a Europe trip. Fortunately, sister Lindsay had been on the same trip and had a second set of prints made from her negatives, which did survive the processing.)
And here’s their sister Mary in multi-task mode, demonstrating the proper way to use pretty much all of this hardware simultaneously. Almost makes it look easy, doesn’t she?
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The little bike (a Piaggio in this case) is one example of what the Ontario Ministry of Transport’s Vehicle Licensing Bureau officially calls a “Limited Speed Motorcycle”(LSM). The theory is that you can’t kick it up to the highway speeds of an actual motorcycle so riders can get away with some privileges (or rule-bending) that are not allowed to non-LSM riders – for example, buzzing along the many cycle paths in the National Capital Region. And theory aside, I actually saw an LSM rider a couple months ago optimistically (suicidally?) steering her machine onto an access ramp for the Queensway – a six-lane speedway where, at least at times other than rush hour, if you’re doing less than 100 km/h, almost everyone else is blowing by you as if you were standing still. (That’s where the song “Blew By You” comes from, by the way. Trust me; I read it on the internet... *cough*...)
The only reason I point that out is to complain about a recent encounter I had with an LSM rider at a busy intersection in Ottawa. As I was waiting at a red light (I was in my car at the time), he approached from the right – as motor traffic – until he got to the intersection. Apparently, he wanted to turn left from his lane – across my nose. And he accomplished this by hitting the pedestrian crossing, yanking his LSM to the left, and crossing in the pedestrian walk. Then he turned 90 degrees right, zipped across in front of me – again in the pedestrian walk – until he was two-thirds of the way across. Then he turned left and barrelled past me going the opposite direction to me – but once more in the motor traffic lane!
I also noticed that he was not wearing a helmet.
Without checking the relevant laws, I _suspect_ he broke at least a half dozen laws in the five seconds it took him to execute that highly dangerous little maneuver. And I also suspect that had I started my roll when my light turned green and smacked into him, he would have been at the head of the line of two-wheeled riders complaining about not being treated with the respect they deserved as a legitimate part of motor traffic.
So this message too is simple: LSM riders or cyclists, it cuts both ways. You want respect and a shared road? Then you observe every last one of the traffic rules applied to the motor traffic you want to be part of. (I can’t tell you how many times I have seen very well-equipped, apparently professional bicyclists, for example, barely slow down at a red light for no more than the time it took to determine nothing was coming and then barrel through the intersection.)
And I hasten to add I have many friends who are avid cyclists and at least one (I’m looking at you, UT!) who rides an LSM. And I’m referring to none of them with this complaint. (At least not that I’ve observed.) I’ve also chatted to my LSM-riding former co-worker and he is fastidious about observing the rules under which he is allowed to ride. If only they all were.
Frankly, when I was bound to rush-hour traffic, I envied him the licence to use the bicycle paths.
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As I write this, Parliament has just resumed after its long summer break; the federal Finance Minister has already made it clear a brand-new omnibus bill is on the way – a nasty piece of legislation that a majority government uses to bury several contentious bills under the broad “budget” label and then sweep them collectively through the House without the debate they deserve.
But you’ll pardon me if I shrug. It’s one of the privileges that come with retirement. To quote the Camp North Star cheer in the movie, “Meatballs”, “It just doesn’t matter!”
Besides, I have more on my mind these days – and brace yourself. We have another trip coming up and I plan to craft a post-trip report on these pages. So for now let’s just say, well... ciao!