Happy Canada Day (July 1st), Happy Fourth of July! It's been a weekend of contradictions - Wild storms and sweltering heat, smoke, fire bans, and fireworks. As I write this (July 4 in the evening) I can hear the crashes and bangs echoing around the lake from our American contingent. Much of Eastern Canada's cottage country is a mixture of of local Canadians from nearby cities, like Ottawa and Toronto, and Americans who travel up to enjoy our beautiful lakes from New York State, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other states in the northeast. Many of them have been coming for generations. So in early July, the lake reverberates with fireworks. I enjoy the spectacle but it freaks out my dog (and most pets) and it also very stressful for wildlife, so I have concluded we need the "noiseless" variety.
I have taken a few days at the lake by myself to work on the first draft of my latest book. It has been extremely hot, so I have spent much of my day in my bathing suit, sitting in the shade on my chaise longue or rolling in and out of the water. I have just emerged from my final sunset swim of the day and I have the fan aimed directly at me. I can't imagine how unbearable it must be for people in small, airless apartments in the city.
The lake is my inspiration. The peace and quiet (well, except for fireworks and tubers and jet skis), the solitude, the lack of distractions, and the slower pace help me focus and imagine. The heat, not so much. Tomorrow I head back into the city because I have a presentation to do to the Lac Bernard Cottage Association about my research for my Amanda Doucette books. My talks to book clubs and groups have normally been informal and low-tech, just me sitting on a chair and yakking for an hour or so. When the pandemic disrupted all that, the talks went virtual. Zoom was a wonderful way to stay connected, and it also allowed listeners to tune in from anywhere. But it's not very dynamic. You are staring at a screen of thirty tiny photos or just staring at your own face.
To liven things up, I started experimenting with sharing photos on the screen, and I prepared a number of talks with Powerpoint slides peppered through them. At first, many things would go wrong. I couldn't share or coordinate with the person running the event, but we all became ore adept with Zoom, I found it a lively way to add variety to the talk (and keep people awake). Tomorrow's presentation is in-person, but I decided I wanted to transfer some of the benefits of screen sharing to the in-person stage.
In the course of researching each of my Amanda Doucette books, I spent weeks on location and took hundreds of photos. So I have prepared a slide show of some of the iconic photos of each trip and I will use them to illustrate my talk. What could go wrong? Lots. First, we needed a projector and screen, and that projector had to be compatible with my MacBook Air (which has almost no ports. No USB, no HDMI, just the miniUSB). The projector uses an HDMI cable. One of the event organizers tested his own computer with the projector, and it works, so the plan was for me to email him my PPT slides and then run the slide show from his computer. But the PPT file was too large for email. He suggested linking via the cloud. I use iCloud and Dropbox, he has Google and Microsfot's OneDrive. I was able to find a long dormant Microsoft account from my Skype Days, but I spent several frustrating hours trying to get my email and password to let me in. But it is done. Tomorrow is the test! All fingers crossed that it works. If not, it will be just me on a chair at the front, yakking away for an hour or so.
Ain't technology grand?
