On a recent trip to Victoria, BC, I went for a morning hike along the beach road very close to the ocean. At a distance I heard a little bird happily chirping away. It did not pay attention to the many people walking their dogs very close to the branch where it was perched. So I approached my feathery friend with my camera ready to shoot. It paid no attention to me, even though I was only three meters away, but it seemed to be totally absorbed in the song it was singing. Enjoy.
Occasionally I will post a video highlighting the natural splendour of the Arrow Lake region in the West Kootenays, BC, Canada. Technically, a video consists of thousands of individual images, which when strung together create the illusion of motion. The original one hour long video recording was reduced to just over a minute. It creates an impressive video effect. In my video editing program I accelerated the slowly moving clouds by a factor of 50 and 75. Because no frames have been lost in the process, the video file still kept a size of over 40 MB. The Fauquier-Needles ferry takes five minutes to cross the lake, while on this accelerated video it takes only a few seconds. Enjoy.
Here is a very short video clip I shot with my Canon video camera a few years ago. As I pointed out before, it is important to set up the bird feeders in late fall, so our feathered friends discover the source of food early and make it their main feeding station. As you can see from the many visitors, the bird feeder in our backyard was indeed a major attraction. Enjoy.
For New Year our friend in Germany sent us a couple of videos of his family celebrating Christmas, enjoying an impressive fireworks display on New year’s Eve and of his wife Edda playing the Halleluja by Leonard Cohen. Edda is the granddaughter of my Uncle Bruno. If you look at the Kegler family tree, you will find her on Chart IIc. Never have my wife Biene and I received a more touching and more precious New Year’s greeting than this video. A big thank you goes out to Dieter, Edda’s husband, who made this beautiful recording! It is my hope that you like it as much as we do.
A few days before Christmas our son Stefan and his partner Laura went into the mountains to hunt for our Christmas tree. He recorded their adventure on video, which I would like to share with all my friends who might not be familiar with masses of snow in our nook of the world in Canada. I would also like to take this opportunity to wish everyone and all a Happy and Blessed New Year.
Historical Photo of the University of Calgary in the Mid 60’s
After a few sessions in the Calculus Course I realized that I had underestimated the scope and depth of this extremely demanding subject area. I was of the mistaken belief that I could easily sail through its content with a minimum of effort, as the course appeared to be merely a review of what I had already learned at the German high school. Also the lecture hall for the Math 211 students was overcrowded with more than two hundred students in attendance. The course was compulsory for all first-year students in the Departments of Engineering and Education. Then there were the obligatory tutorial classes, which were much smaller and more conducive to the nature of a question-and-answer period. The tutor, a young graduate student by the name of Jenkins, was very keen on telling us off-color jokes and even more questionable mathematical riddles very much to the embarrassment of the female students in the class. When asked to explain how to go about solving a particular math problem, he appeared often evasive and rarely was of any real help to anyone. So we got into the habit of helping each other.
This is how I got to know Brian Fisher, with whom I immediately struck up a friendship that was going to last a lifetime. I helped him to get through the course with a passing grade, while he freed me from my social isolationHis mother was a very caring person. Seeing that I had been on a hunger diet she insisted that I should join the family for Thanksgiving. For the first time in my life I looked at an oven-roasted turkey, smelled the aroma of the carved up slices on my plate that together with the mashed potatoes drenched in mouth watering gravy, the cranberry sauce, and the mix of carrots and peas presented a most wonderful culinary delight. This was truly a treat for someone like me, who out of budgetary constraints was content with a diet alternating between chicken noodle soup on one day and chunky dinner out of a can on the next.
In the meantime the calculus course had become increasingly more difficult. We were now struggling with the concepts of mathematical limits and the first derivative. At the end of the tutorial class a female student intending to become a music teacher approached me rather timidly and asked if I could give her some help with a problem that Mr. Jenkins had been unwilling or unable to explain. Why the curriculum required that primary, music, art and all other teachers not embarking on a career in secondary math had to take this course, I could never figure out. I was able to give her some valuable clues without providing the answer. On the next tutorial class she cheerfully told me that thanks to my help she was able to solve the problem and asked me a little less timidly this time if I could spare a few minutes again after the tutorial to assist her with a question she had some trouble with. As I showed her the steps that would lead her with some work of her own to the answer, I noticed how excited she had become during my lesson. And when I saw her joyfully singing and prancing down the hallway, I realized that she had more on her mind than just receiving extra help from me. So I told her there and then that my fiancée was coming to Canada next spring and that we intended to get married soon after her arrival. Disappointment was written all over her face. But she managed to say, “I am so happy for you two.” I had to repeat the story a few more times during the course of the year, when I felt I was being approached by some other girl with similar intentions. I had no trouble doing so and did it each time I felt in my heart that someone has been trying to cross the line. Before I immigrated to Canada I had often listened to the popular Johnny Cash song ‘I walk the line’ on the American Forces Network in Munich. It has been one of my favourite tunes and lyrics to this very day.
The Peter and Gertrud Klopp Family 