The rain had stopped while we were sleeping, but everything was still wet and muddy outside. Fortunately, we didn’t have much farther to go. Also fortunate was that the tide hadn’t washed the canoe away (though it seemed to have moved — not so much as to have caused the tarp covering it to have lost the rocks on the corners holding it down to the ground, or for the canoe to have escaped from under the tarp, but moved nonetheless).
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We woke up all cleaned up, rested up, and comfortable to a breakfast of overnight oats, before breaking camp and setting back out down the river. The weather was a little cloudier than the day before, and not as windy, but still relatively warm and sunny.

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With the temperature having dropped some overnight, we were treated to a gorgeous (if somewhat chilly) foggy morning to breakfast (the last of the bagel and cream cheese) and break camp in.

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We woke up around sunrise on the 7th, got a weather forecast from the satellite, and set to making breakfast. The planned breakfast was stuffed french toast, and the weather was cooperative enough to let us make and eat it before starting any rain — but not to break camp and get on our way. We had to scurry vulnerable things under our tarp as a strong shower passed overhead, before we could finish our preparations to get on our way. Once underway, we had scattered showers and strong, gusty winds pretty much all day. Fortunately, the winds were consistently tailwinds.

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After a couple of months of planning, provisioning, etc., D and I set out for a canoe trip from Otter Rapids to Moosonee, with an optional side-trip to James Bay. We left Hamilton at about 8 in the morning on Saturday (the 5th), planning to drive all day, pitch a tent in Otter Rapids, and then start paddling on Sunday. We figured on having about 155km to paddle from Otter Rapids to Moosonee, and 12.5 paddling days in which to do it before our return train. That said, we were aiming for 8-9 days to get to Moosonee, and the balance to be free to rest up and maybe get that paddle in to James Bay.
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If this post successfully crossposts to LJ, it will be the last one. Crossposting from my WP blog (kiwano.melon.org) to LJ has been getting increasingly broken and clunky. With the current ToS related departures, I don’t think I have enough readers there to justify continuing with the crossposting. All of my old entries (though not all the comments) were copied over from LJ to kiwano.melon.org via some backup tools back when I started making my posts as crossposts from kiwano.melon.org. Locked posts are still locked on kiwano, and can be accessed by logging in (kiwano.melon.org accepts OpenID credentials, so you LJ/DW/etc. credentials should still work if you don’t want to create a new account).

Anyhow, time to see if the crosspost succeeds and this is my last LJ post, or if my entry a few days ago was is…

Over Christmas, the topic of gifts naturally came to my mind as something that there’s quite a bit to say about. Of course it’s taken me a while to set aside enough time to write these thoughts up (in fits and spurts, here and there — further complicated by the that this topic has proven large enough to need to be split into two posts). An upside to this is that the thought of gifts should once again have divorced itself from anxieties around the sense of obligation that seems to be attached to Christmas gifts. That’s not really the sort of gift I’d like to focus on, preferring to look at day-to-day gifts that may be small, intangible, and further removed from the scope of commerce.
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I’m pretty sure that I had intended to write this post in August. I got about half of it done then, but didn’t finish it. I could come up with many reasons why I didn’t finish posting it then, but can’t imagine any of them being particularly meaningful. The only thing I can really think of to say on that topic is obvious: I didn’t make this post in August; I am making it now. Also a point that may not be obvious now, but should be soon (and may serve as something of an excuse, though I intend it more as a caution): this post is long.
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Having boldly claimed in my last post that I believe optimizing for conviviality to be a good thing, I clearly have a duty to back that claim up. The evidence that I find most convincing is that I generally tend to feel very content with the parts of my life that have developed from this optimization — but since that might simply be a quirk of my personality or my circumstances, I’m going to make an attempt at an argument that such a quirk is relatively widely shared (and maybe even more than a quirk).

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A few months ago, while chatting with my friend Steven about the heuristics and algorithms people apply to our lives, it occured to me that a heuristic that I’d been applying (not necessarily strictly or perfectly) to my own life for the past several years could be summarized as “optimize for conviviality.” Working from the idea that this is a pretty good heuristic to be applying in one’s life, I started toying with the idea of maybe writing about it a bit on the internet.

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