I went to bed relatively early last night, after waiting for the launch of Endeavor on webcast. I like to watch the space shuttle launch, it’s a wonderful show of might, a technological prowess each time and there’s the sheer beauty of this huge rocket soaring slowly with this enormous furnace at its base. Yesterday, NASA had to scrub the launching for the third time, due to weather conditions, and postpone it to this wednesday. Anyway, I went to bed early (1am, its' early to me) but couldn't sleep. I read a lot but when my eyes were too tired to read I tried to sleep, without much success. I dozed off but the heat, some firecrackers in the street were always conspiring to wake me up. I guess that finally I fell asleep in the morning, an agitated sleep full of bizarre dreams. I woke up early (8am, for me it's early) because I had to catch a train heading for the country. Holiday!
The journey was uneventful and the train right on time. In the TGV there was this old lady who hung onto her mobile phone for dear life, called someone to give her position when the train left ("just left Paris, dear, arriving in an hour, hopefully"), fell asleep, snored lightly all the way to Saint Pierre des Corps, only to wake up just before the station to utter in her mobile that she was arriving in five minutes or so. Some tracking!
The remainder of the day was spent explaining the workings of a DSLR to my brother in law. Since I have the Sony alpha 200 with two lenses (18 - 75 and 55 - 300), I don't need anymore the Nikon D40. In a spirit of eliminating redundancy I gave the Nikon to my brother in law. I never was fond of the Nikon anyway, I found it not very handy, clunky, complicated. The Sony is a real treat, very simple to use, not too heavy, its looks are of something sturdy not elegant but solid. I love it and I think that I snap better pictures with it than with the Nikon.
I'll spend some days here in Touraine, between the forest and the meadows. Brace for some pastoral pictures and uneventful entries. I'll try to tell some tales though, memories mostly, as I am traveling all over my old stomping grounds. I was born here, fifty two years ago, and spent all the years of my youth here, some in this very house.