Rotundus.com

...of a camera battery charger. Back in March (20-25) we (myself and family) took a weekend excursion to Calgary and Lethbridge. A couple days before we left Shena asked me if I was taking my battery charger for the camera (EOS D30). I said "No, I'll charge them before we go." On either the Wednesday or Thursday before we left, I charged the batteries during the day, and Shena packed up the charger for me when they were finished. Not knowing where to put it, she put it in my camera bag. Normally, it goes in the computer desk, out of the way. We drove out through the night on Thursday, arriving in Calgary around 0900 MDT. I headed to bed for a few hours, and, due to just taking it easy, didn't pull the camera gear out on Friday at all.

Saturday, I headed out with Dave to do some railfanning along the Laggan Sub as far as Field BC. At probably our first stop, near Exshaw, I removed the charger from the camera bag, with much griping about how "I told her I wasn't taking it." That was before taking this shot.

We carried on, taking a couple more shots, on this page and I completely forgot about the charger. I'm not sure where Dave found it, but I suspect it was either with a bunch of his stuff on the back seat of the whistle-mobile (I mean, Dave-mobile), or it slid under the front passenger seat, but I really can't remember. Monday we left, checked out the Lethbridge area, and headed home on Tuesday.

A while after we got home, I was making preparations for a canyon trip on the 12th of April, and wanted to charge the camera batteries beforehand, to make sure they wouldn't die on me. After searching all the usual places, and then some, I came to the realization that said charger was likely still in Alberta. I called Dave, and by sheer coincidence, he had sent me an email that morning, or the night before, which I hadn't seen yet, but told me that he did, indeed still have my charger. At that point it looked like I would be heading out to Lethbridge in a week or two for job interviews, travelling through Calgary in the process. That still hasn't happened, but it will at some point this spring.

As it turns out, Roger went to visit Dave on the last weekend of April, as Dave mentioned in another post. My charger hitched a ride back to the Valley as a stowaway around the 26th or 27th of April, over a month after it went to Alberta. From there it waited in Langley for a week, before it was handed to my brother-in-law Jason, then to my mother-in-law, who dropped it off in the evening on May 4. So, a couple thousand unnecessary kilometers (okay, several hundred miles!) later, my charger has been reunited with its owner! Amazingly, my camera batteries did not die on me in that time frame, I suspect because I have my good set in the camera right now. So, many thanks to Dave, Roger, Jason, and Mom deGlint for getting my charger home!

I decided to cut my planned time in Europe a little short - about 10 hours in total. It should give me just enough time to view ... terminal 4 at London Heathrow ;-)

As you might have deduced, I decided to skip the western Europe tour for roughly 3 weeks in the mid-East. If all goes according to plan, I'll be leaving on May 17th and returning June 5th.

Lately I've been working my way through Philip Longman's book The Empty Cradle, and today I stumbled across a Washington Post article on population trends in Japan:

Japan, now the world's second-largest economy, will lose 70 percent of its workforce by 2050 and economic growth will slow to zero, according to a report this year by the nonprofit Japan Center for Economic Research.

Population shrinkage began three years ago and is gathering pace. Within 50 years, the population, now 127 million, will fall by a third, the government projects. Within a century, two-thirds of the population will be gone.

In what is now being called a "super-aging" society, department and grocery stores have recorded declining sales for a decade -- and new car sales have fallen for 18 consecutive years.

I've been skeptical for some time regarding the future of investments that have done well for the last few generations, but set those concerns aside and tossed a bunch of money into mutual funds earlier this year, hoping that the market had bottomed out. I wonder if my earlier assessment was correct - statistics on Japan's continued sales declines seem to support such a conclusion.