The Adventures of Andrew Maurer

I’ve had an incredibly busy past 4 days. Thursday – math provincial, Friday – english provincial, Saturday – Spring Fair, Sunday – Sun Run. Oh, and I finally bit the bullet and bought a digital SLR on Thursday! The provincials went well, I don’t think I did well on most of the English exam, but I felt like I wrote a good essay. The topic was “Imagination is required for progress”, or something along those lines. I intro’d with a quote from John Lenon, “Imagine all the people”. I then wrote my two body paragraphs, the first on Mugabe – a man who has used his imagination for evil, hindering progress, and the second on the Dalai Lama – a man who has made great progress towards promoting peace. I concluded by again referring to John Lenon, “John Lenin thought he was a dreamer, but he wasn’t the only one. We are all dreamers.” As for the math exam, I understood everything except one question on probability, “three numbers are chosen between 1 and 9. What is the probability that at least 2 will be even?”

As for the camera, I’m loving it so far. There are however, many functions I am still oblivious to and still a myriad of buttons that I do not yet understand. I went around on my first photo shoot today, if I may be so bold as to call it that. I only used the stock lens, yet the quality of the pictures is very impressive. I like the relatively small aperture of the stock lens – this means I can take nice close-ups with artistically blurred backgrounds. If I was to purchase another lens, I’d go with either a macro (close up lens) or one with an even smaller aperture than stock. The above picture is a combination of three – the same frame with 3 different exposures. It’s definitely my favorite picture so far.

The sheer number of people at the Sun Run today was mind boggling – 59,000. From the start line, I jumped up to look back and was met with an ocean of tightly packed bodies as far as the eye could see. The run itself was very tiring. I haven’t run a 10k race or even trained on a 10k route since the Sun Run last year. I ended up drafting a man from the 5km mark all the way to the end which significantly helped my time. Everyone filed into GM place at the end, it was packed. The complimentary juice, bagels, bananas, oranges, and power bars more than made up for the lack of free space. I hope that the run will have motivated me to train more and get ready for the next race, whenever that may be.