Somewhere along the Transfagarasan Road in the Southern Carpathian Mountains is a wonderful place I call the “Four Springs” (La Patru Izvoare). A crystal-clear pond near a bend in the road is the home of four mountain springs whose water has an amazingly fresh taste. After filling up the pond, their collected volume pours into a larger brook that flows down to Lake Vidraru.
I hope you enjoy this short video clip I filmed there!
That is a question every single one of us should ask ourselves, as early as possible in life, ideally when we’re still in school. It’s not too late for you now if you’re out of school. It’s just that it’s so important, you should do it as soon as possible. Asking it makes you aware of yourself; it raises you out of the dull routine of supposed life and supposed work that you thought you ought to be doing and opens your eyes to the possibilities that are out there. You’d be surprised how much of what we consider reality is just supposition — a matter of perception.
So, what if money was no object? What if income became irrelevant? What would you do with your life? Would you be willing to sacrifice a life of supposed luxury to pursue what you really love to do? It doesn’t have to be a permanent sacrifice, you know… It need only be for a while, until you get so good at what you do that the income will come automatically.
You only have one life to live, remember that, and for most people, it’s not that long. What would you do? Don’t you want your life to be fantastic? Don’t you want it to be amazing? I do. I want my life and Ligia’s life to be fantastic and amazing and spectacular and I hope that others want the same thing for themselves. We sacrificed a lot to be where we are today and yes, the effort was and is worth it, because we’re doing what we love.
As I was thinking about this tonight, a video appeared in my news reader, a video which talks about this very thing. Coincidence? I think not; we make our own fortunes.
Watch it and then take at least a few minutes (a few hours is better) to think about your life. What do you or did you want to do with your life? Are you doing it? Why not?
If you’re a parent, think about the life of your children. What are you pushing your children to do? Is it really worth it to impose yourself on them, only to have them blame you and avoid you later in life, when they discover they’ve been pushed down a path they didn’t really want? Do you want them to accuse you of manipulating them? There’s a thin line between guidance and dictatorial control when you’re a parent, and so many parents cross it…
The video is courtesy of the TragedyandHope channel on YouTube and it came to me via Likecool.
We recently visited Lake Vidraru, located in Romania’s Carpathian Mountains, alongside the famed Transfagarasan Road. We hiked, drove off-road, went boating, visited nearby landmarks, so look for more photos in future posts, but in this post, I want to show you two time-lapse videos that I made using photographs taken during the trip. These are my first time-lapse videos, so it is a special occasion for me. I hope you enjoy them!
The first is a record of our boating trip on Lake Vidraru. It’s made up of 628 individual photographs, which I obtained by setting up my camera and tripod up on the bow of the boat, securing it to the mast with a rope and setting my remote to take photos every 10 seconds. It was a bit tricky to get the photos because the boat’s engine made the tripod vibrate quite a lot, plus I didn’t have a straight horizon line, because of the boat’s yawing. It required a bit of post-processing work but I think it came out alright.
The soundtrack is “Sonata No. 5 in E minor – IV Allegro” by Vivaldi, interpreted by Keith Lewis on the cello and Carol Holt on the harpsichord. It is public domain, available from MusOpen.
The second video came out much better, mainly because I had a steady surface on which my tripod could sit (that’s really key in time-lapse photography). It shows landscapes of Lake Vidraru, recorded over the course of three days from the vantage point of the Valea cu Pesti Hotel, which overlooks it. It’s made up of 1,920 individual photographs, taken at 5, 10, 20 and 30 second intervals.
The soundtrack is “Piano Concerto No. 3, Op 37, 1st Mvt” by Beethoven, interpreted by the Davis High School Symphony Orchestra. It is also public domain, available from MusOpen.
Nowadays, when we rarely pop open the hoods of our cars on our own, and the only things we usually worry about are putting in the gas and taking them to the dealer or the mechanic for their scheduled maintenance, we can hardly fathom what goes on inside those modern engines.
This wonderful video, made in 1937 by Chevrolet, shows how a typical engine was lubricated and is guaranteed to amaze you. I bet you had no idea that an engine we think of as primitive, given its almost 100 years of age, is so complex.
At the same time, the video will give you a new appreciation for what goes on inside your car’s engine. I bet it’s even more complex now.
Are you inclined to take your car for granted now? It is a marvel of modern engineering, isn’t it?
If you’d like to see more videos like these, subscribe to the US Auto Industry channel on YouTube.
Sometimes the very simple breakfasts are the best. Raw honey, scooped out of a fresh honeycomb just picked from the beehive, made by happy, healthy bees growing on pesticide-free land, slathered onto fresh-baked bread and washed down with raw almond milk. This is the ambrosia of the gods.
Enjoy!
