Check out my Wordpress blog

I'm coming out of blog-retirement for a while to write about my upcoming knee replacement surgery, so check out new posts at http://whereintheworldiswalter.wordpress.com/

I'm trying something new

I've been playing around with WordPress as a blog host/template to see if it's any less annoying than Blogspot. If you want to see how it's going, check this out:
http://whereintheworldiswalter.wordpress.com/

The End of the Line

Well, my faithful readers, after 18,826 page views of 450 posts over almost 3-1/2 years, I'm going to retire from blogging for a while at least. StatCounter tells me my readership is down over the last few months, and I admit that posting for me is becoming more of a pain than pleasure. It's likely those two facts are related.

Anyway, it's been fun while it lasted. Check back once in a while. You never know when I may just have to post a political rant or distribute some pictures from some exotic (or mundane) location.

'Bye for now....

Captive

No, I haven't been taken hostage.

Yesterday I listened to Jere Van Dyk being interviewed on the local NPR morning show. He is a journalist who had been in and out of Afghanistan since the '70's and who went back in 2008 to the "tribal" areas on the Afghani-Pakistani border to find and interview various Al Qaida and Taliban types. To hear it said that way, I make him sound like one of these swashbuckling, adrenaline-loving writers who put their lives on the line just to prove their manhood. And maybe he was at one point, but I enjoyed the interview so much that I called Megan up and asked her to go with me to hear him speak at Townhall that night.

He's on a book tour promoting his book Captive, about how his best-laid plains in Afghanistan went badly awry. He ended up being held in chains by the Taliban for forty-five days. In person, he does look like the swashbuckling, adrenaline-loving kind of guy. He's 60ish, very fit, and with near-Hollywood good looks. But in his talk he came across like he did on the radio: a very soft- but well-spoken  and intelligent storyteller with a great deal of humility. I think he may have gone there as a swashbuckler, but he had the crap scared out of him, and came back a different man.

His talk was so engrossing that I bought his book (a dead-tree edition, not for my Kindle). I've just started the book, but so far it's a pretty good read. I'll report back when I'm done.

Birthdays and World Cup Soccer

As much as I wanted to watch the World Cup final yesterday, Megan had a better idea even though I had no idea what it was. I trusted her, and it turned out my trust was not misplaced. She can be a truly devious woman, and she managed to keep her true intent a secret until we were there. Where was there? It was Sunday brunch at the restaurant at the end of two chairlift rides to the peak at the Crystal Mountain ski area.

The weather and views were truly spectacular! For all you flatlanders out there who might not recognize it, that's Mount Rainier in the background.

Here's Megan, looking rightfully pleased with herself for her deception!

Not only were the views spectacular, the food was great! A good spread of fresh fruit, the usual bacon and eggs and hashbrowns, and a lovely roast of lamb with a horseradish a cream cheese condiment. I'll have to try and re-create it the next time I prepare lamb.

But what about the World Cup? Megan was able to keep me updated with an app she downloaded on her very smart Droid phone. I was cheering for The Netherlands, but it was hard to be too despondent on a wonderful day in the mountains. Thanks Megan!!

Report from the CITW

Here it is. The first post from the CITW. The fiber optics cable that resides inside the conduit I so lovingly installed is now officially lit, and I am now connected with the outside world.

I installed the orange stuff coming out of the ground. The PUD installed the rest.

The internet company hooked up a wireless modem and turned the internet on.

And I even have a phone attached to a plug in the wall! How '80's is that? The phone is not absolutely necessary, but cell coverage out here in the wilderness can be pretty spotty at times. And there is something to be said for a phone that is associated with a place, not a person.

While all this was going on, I wasn't sitting by idly watching. I built this 22 bottle wine rack.! Now all I have to do is fill it up. Those two bottles there look pretty lonely.

World Cup Soccer

I'm not much of a sports fan. I think American football is ridiculous; baseball is boring; basketball is a game for mutants; and hockey is only moderately interesting (in my Canadian genes or something). I do watch golf once in a while, especially the major tournaments, but I can certainly understand the feeling that it's like watching paint dry.

But not so with World cup Soccer. The game at this level is fascinating and spellbinding and has me hooked. I've watched several games, and for the most part I've watched them alone, so it's not like it's a social thing. I've jumped up and down and yelled at the TV to point that Farley retreats to his cage when I'm watching a game.

The Ghana v. Uruguay quarter-final game was heartbreaking. Ghana, the underdog and the only African team left at that point, scored first and were taking it to the Uruguayans. Then Uruguay scored and it was tied. The game went into 30 minutes of extra time, and on the last play of the last second of extra time, the Ghanaians kicked what should have been a sure goal. The goalkeeper was way out of position, and the ball was only stopped at the goal line by another player using his hands. The result - a direct penalty kick, is a goal about 80% of the time. The Ghanaian missed his chance, time was up, and the game went to the penalty kick shootout. The Ghana team lost the shootout 4-2. This had to be one of the best games ever in the history of sport.

Other games I watched and enjoyed included Ghana v USA, 2-1; Brazil v Chile, 3-0; Germany v Argentina, 4-0; and The Netherlands v Uruguay, 3-2. In a couple of hours I will be watching Germany against Spain; on Sunday I will be watching the final; and in 2014 I think I'll go to Brazil for the next World Cup.

In the meantime, does anyone out there want to come over to Fremont for a World Cup final party?

For those of you with Iphones or want to get one

Watch this all the way through. It's pretty funny....

Gulf Oil Spill

If you want to get pissed off or depressed or both, check out these apocalyptic images from the Gulf.

American Exceptionalism

I had read reports about how the US had refused help from foreign countries in containing and cleaning up the mess in the Gulf, but I had dismissed them as the usual anti-Obama blather from the usual right-wing-whacko sources. Then I came across this article from the Financial Post, a respectable Canadian publication. Here's an excerpt:

Some are attuned to the possibility of looming catastrophe and know how to head it off. Others are unprepared for risk and even unable to get their priorities straight when risk turns to reality.The Dutch fall into the first group. Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. "Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour," Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.To protect against the possibility that its equipment wouldn't capture all the oil gushing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch also offered to prepare for the U.S. a contingency plan to protect Louisiana's marshlands with sand barriers. One Dutch research institute specializing in deltas, coastal areas and rivers, in fact, developed a strategy to begin building 60-mile-long sand dikes within three weeks.

But wait, there's more:

The Americans, overwhelmed by the catastrophic consequences of the BP spill, finally relented and took the Dutch up on their offer -- but only partly. Because the U.S. didn't want Dutch ships working the Gulf, the U.S. airlifted the Dutch equipment to the Gulf and then retrofitted it to U.S. vessels. And rather than have experienced Dutch crews immediately operate the oil-skimming equipment, to appease labour unions the U.S. postponed the clean-up operation to allow U.S. crews to be trained.

If this is all true, the US government is truly exceptional - , EXCEPTIONALLY ARROGANT, EXCEPTIONALLY INCOMPETENT, AND EXCEPTIONALLY STUPID!

Check Engine Light

I think that Audi (and probably most car makers) should replace the check engine icon with a check wallet icon. My check engine light came on a couple of days ago, and today I'll pick the car up with the light off, but my wallet lighter by $1500!

I guess I shouldn't bitch too much. The Audi can be expensive to maintain, but it's been a great car and has over  100,000 mostly trouble-free miles on it.

A Few Firsts

This weekend saw a few firsts in my world. I finished The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. It was the first fiction book I'd read in a while, and I quite enjoyed it. I tend to read mostly non-fiction, and I quite enjoy the genre, but  I should mix in the occasional page-turner more often. TGWTDT is a gripping whodunit like the board game Clue where there are a limited number of suspects because the crime happened on a small island that was totally closed off completely at the time of the crime. It's smart and sexy and a bit gruesome in spots. All in all it's a good read. I might even pick up the second one in the series.

I took Megan the Elder up to Edmonton with me. It was her first time in that fair city, and the first time she'd spent any significant time with my Mom and sister Marian, and it was the first time she'd met Peter, Tom, Devin, Sarah and Alvin. It was a typical family weekend with lots of food and drink. A good time was had by all, and by all reports, everyone passed inspection.

Here's Tom at the grill. I'm sure it wasn't his first time at the grill, but it was the first time he'd cooked for me. 

Here's a shot of Mom and Megan on the deck at Tom and Dev's place.

But wait! There's more! When we got back to Seattle, we took our first ride on Seattle's light rail system. It worked pretty well taking us to downtown Seattle quickly and comfortably, and all for only $2.50! I think this will become my usual way to get to and from the airport. Bus connections are good from Fremont to downtown, and from there it's a quick, CHEAP, and hassle-free way to get there.

I laughed out loud

I got an email from daughter Megan who, as some of you know is working this summer in the wilds of Alaska. She shared some of her experiences up there, and mentioned the possibilities for a love-life up there. (Men outnumber women by a zillion to one.) She quoted a line about a woman's chances there saying,

"The odds are good, but the goods are odd!"

More Big-Boy Toys

I just got back from a few days "working" up at the CITHW. There is always lots to do up there and my project list is endless. Fortunately most of the projects have a big fun component to them. This week's project was to move a bunch of dirt to improve the drainage in my yard. Here's a "before" shot looking at what is a small lake after the snow melts or a big rain.

Here's the fun component, another big-boy toy. Here it's doing double duty  holding the tape so I can measure the grade with a theodolite. And no, a theodolite is not a person from Theoddle. It's that telescopy-looking thing in the foreground.

The tractor has a loader on the front and a scraper on the back. It was pretty well suited to moving fairly large amounts of dirt around a relatively small area. And it came with all the modern conveniences....

When I was finished with the grading, I got a couple of loads of gravel delivered and spread them around for the finished product you see here.

 

In spite of the use of powerful big-boy toys, there was still a fair bit of manual labor doing the finish raking. To add to my exercise, I cut up the tree that fell onto my porch a couple of months ago. I fired up my new Husqvarna, lopped the log into fireplace size pieces and then split them with my new muscle-powered maul.

Who needs a health club membership when you have a CITW?

Gulf Oil Spill

I won't bother redoing my calculations of the spill in terms of Olympic-size swimming pools or tanker trucks. It's too depressing and ugly out there, and it looks like it's only going to get a lot worse. This is a good article on what is probably going on down there. It's written by an industry insider and even though it has a fair bit of jargon in it, it's pretty much understandable to a layman like me. Essentially what he's saying is that the well is compromised "downhole" and that explains why all the efforts to cap the well on the sea floor haven't and will not work. The only hope are the relief wells being drilled, but in the meantime, the oil will continue to gush unabated.

And if, like me, you've wondered about the mechanics of drilling a well offshore, here's a great article written in easy to understand language.

Read them and weep.

Sarah Palin is truly an idiot

She can't even survive a friendly interview with Bill O'Reilly. And even Bill O'Reilly can't hide his exasperation with her inane idiocy. She can't put a coherent sentence together, and when she comes close, she lies. She complains that Obama hasn't accepted help from nations that have expertise in oil recovery and containment and won't even return their phone calls. According to this article in the Washington Post, Obama has accepted expertise and equipment from Canada, The Netherlands, Mexico and Norway.

Oh well, none of this will penetrate the fact-free zone of the Tea Partiers and Republicans.



And to think she was a contender to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency, and to think she's a serious contender for 2012.

I'm off to the CITW

Now that I got the Abby Sunderland semi-rant off my chest, I'm headed out to the CITW to do some chores. Except that they won't really be chores. I bought a bunch of stuff to continue rigging the Hobie cats, and I want to rearrange some of my toys in the shop so I can get them all inside. (Right now, cat #2 is outside) I also want to make like a lumberjack with my new chainsaw and cut up some dead fall. I do need to replenish the wood supply for next winter, and with some luck the wood will be suitable for firewood. With all those trees around, it would be a shame to actually buy firewood.

I had a good weekend on the water. I took WaveGuide to Bremerton on Saturday morning and raced on Great White with Dan and crew. You can read Dan's take on the race by clicking on the Dan's blog link on my blog. Dan's a great example of a really good sailor. He knows his boat inside out, he's great technically, he's patient (both with the wind and water conditions and semi-experienced crew like me), and he's got more local knowledge of the winds and waters in the area than anyone. We waxed the competition!

Dan warned me about the currents in the Bremerton Marina, but I pooh-poohed his concerns thinking that with my 700 HP, twin screws and bow thruster, I could get out of anything. As it turned out, my boat was moored east-west on "P" dock, and by the time I left, the currents were running pretty strong to the north, pinning me against the dock. My bow thruster did not have the power to get my bow pointed away from the dock, and I had one hell of a time getting out of there. So much for all my years and thousands of hours on WaveGuide! It wasn't pretty, but I made it out without doing any damage or hitting anything. Whew!

Abby Sunderland's Somewhat Creepy Adventure

The idea of a 16-year-old girl (or boy) sailing around the world alone bothers me on a whole lot of levels. Living your dream is one thing, but whose dream is Abby living? Is this a replay of the Balloon Boy syndrome where publicity-hungry parents try to get a meal ticket from their kid's adventures? Are the parents living vicariously through their kids? Is Abby risking her life to live up to her parents' hopes and expectations? Who pays for all this? Who pays when it all goes wrong?

I tried to embed this video made by the LA Times before she left, but some reason it wouldn't take. You can watch it here.

On one hand, in an age when so many parents are so paranoid and fearful that they won't let their kids play outside alone, it's refreshing to see parents let their kid play alone in the world's oceans for six months. On the other hand, isn't there a happy medium between smothering your kids and sending one of them off alone on a sailboat around the world?

I've done quite a bit of sailing over the last few years, including an open water multi-day adventure sailing from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas, skippering bareboat charters in Croatia and Greece, and lots of racing in the Puget Sound. Every time I go out, I learn something new, I do something stupid, and I realize how little I know about sailing. Even after ten years and thousands of hours on the water on power boats and sailboats, I only know enough to be dangerous. It sounds like Abby was born sailing, and that's a different learning dynamic than a prairie boy like me taking to the water late in life, but it's difficult if not impossible to imagine someone sixteen years old having the skills and maturity to take on a task like a solo round the world voyage.

And then there's the creepy part. Abby and her family are all born-again Christians. They prayed about the decision to let Abby go in the first place, and they're crediting her rescue to the prayers of thousands around the world. What kind of family is this, and what kind of god do they worship? Are they so arrogant and self-important that they believe that god will protect Abby if things go wrong? Are they so fatalistic that no matter what happens, it's all god's will? Have they dumped their parental responsibility on to god's lap? Do they really think that god succumbed to public pressure and changed his mind about letting Abby live after presumably sending the storm that wrecked her boat in the first place?

I don't get it.

Fisheries Supply

Yesterday I went to Fisheries Supply to buy a few odds and ends for my Hobie cats. I've been shopping at Fisheries for years for all sorts of things for my boat. They have a great selection of all things boat related, and they have a knowledgeable and usually helpful staff. But yesterday I was shopping in the sailing hardware section of the store, a section of the store, that given my history of powerboat ownership, I had rarely ventured into before. I needed a bunch of things, from shackles to quick-release pins and from righting lines to bungee cord. I wasn't 100% sure exactly what some of these things were, and I certainly didn't know where to find them. The 60' of 1/4" bungee cord was the first thing on my list. I didn't immediately spot it among the racks of reels of various types of lines, so I asked the sales guy at the desk. He pointed "over there" but it wasn't immediately obvious to me where he was pointing. I asked, "Where?" and he said, "Look at my hand, look where I'm pointing!" as if I were some sort of dummy. I again asked, "where?" and in exasperation, he took me the reels that were a couple of aisles over from where we were. I thought he would give me a hand measuring and reeling off the cord and cutting and labeling it. Instead, he pointed at the marks on the floor and told me to measure it out myself. OK, I can do that, but when I was done I asked for his help with the other items on my list. Until this point, I had tried to keep it light and hoped to engage the guy in the story of my Hobie cats and get some help and advice from him. He walked away from me telling me that he wasn't a "personal shopper." I really had to fight the urge to dump my basket of stuff, scream some obscenities at this guy, and walk out in a righteous huff.

But given that Fisheries is probably the best place to get all this stuff, and given that I didn't want to run all over town tracking it down, I put my head down and kept shopping. I eventually found most everything on my list. I did have to ask the A-hole for help one more time to get some wire rope and fittings for the forestay. He said he'd be a minute, but five minutes later sent his associate over to give me a hand. The associate, having surely been told what an unreasonable ass I was, was cordial but cool.

I got what I needed and left the area, but on the way to the checkouts, I stopped as the customer service desk to complain to the manager. He was quite sympathetic, thanked me for my input, and said he'd deal with it. I had the distinct feeling that this was not the first time he had heard complaints from irate customers about the sail rigging department personnel.

A day later, I still have mixed feelings about how I handled all this. On one hand, I think I took the adult and rational course. On the other hand, it would have been much more satisfying to blow up, create a major scene, and let the jerk know how I really felt.

Last Night at The Tractor

Megan and I went to see Eilen Jewell last night at The Tractor. Even though The Tractor is my favorite music venue in Seattle, I hadn't been there in months. I'm not sure where I first heard Eilen Jewell's music. It was either Pandora or KBCS, but wherever it was I was immediately struck by her voice and her style, and it wasn't long before I bought one of her albums. It's hard to pigeonhole her style, but I'd call it a sultry jazzy and bluesy style of swing. It's a bit of a retro sound, and physically she's a bit of a retro woman. She's attractive enough, in a 50's sort of way. She's got a great group of talented musicians backing her up. From the first chords of the first song, you knew that you were listening to a polished and professional group. She played all the songs that drew me to her in the first place, and played enough of a new album for me to buy one on the spot. Good stuff!

Zoe Muth, a local Ballard singer-songwriter, opened for Eilen. Zoe's got an interesting voice, but she needs some more interesting songs to sing. Her opening song was a bit of a depressing dirge that almost put me to sleep. Her backup band was pretty good, but somehow didn't quite mesh. That became glaringly obvious when Jewell's far more professional group took the stage.

I thoroughly enjoyed the night out, and will certainly go to see Eilen Jewell again any chance I get.

On the Water

The maiden voyage!

She's kind of pretty, isn't she?!

Mike and me approaching the dock.

I'm looking pretty pleased with myself, aren't I?!

Cats in the Woods

We had a great weekend at the CITW. Our mission was to assemble one Hobie Cat and to get both of them rigged and ready to sail. I hadn't really done anything other than look at the cats in the garage since I delivered them some months ago, and even though I downloaded the Hobie 16 manuals (isn't the internet wonderful?) and got Mike Sinclair's written hints and tips from 20+ years of Hobie racing, I wasn't looking forward to sorting through the piles of parts and cables and try to put it all together.

Fortunately, I convinced Mike and Kris (and Marie and Jerry) to come out for a weekend and give me a hand. and I'm sure glad they came. Mike knows these cats inside and out and could have put them together blindfolded. Left to my own devices, it would have taken me several days to do what we did in seven hours last Saturday.

As it turned out, I was too busy working to take even a single photo, but fortunately Megan was able to digitally document our progress. I don't have the originals, but I managed to copy a few of the photos from her Facebook page. If you're Facebook friends with Megan, you can see a whole bunch of photos on her page. When I get the full complement of photos I'll post more. In the meantime, here's a taste:

 If at first you don't succeed, get a bigger hammer. Especially one from the woodpile.

Megan took a break from taking pictures to give us a hand getting the mast up.

Here are the two of them - on land, but pretty much ready to sail.

After the boats were assembled and rigged, we took down the sails and got them ready for transport. By then it was 7PM, so we retired to the cabin for some well-deserved brats and beer.

On Sunday, we took one of the boats to Fish Lake for its maiden voyage. It was a bit drizzly, and there was virtually no wind, but we went for it anyway. The Fish Lake boat ramp is sheltered in a bit of a cove, so once the boat was in the water, Mike and I had to paddle out a little way to catch some wind. There wasn't much out there, but Hobie cats are so light and have so much sail area that it doesn't really take much to get them moving. We had a good sail and I more or less learned the ropes without the danger of going too fast to get out of control. When Mike and I were done, Mike and Kris went out for a bit, and then Megan and I went out. Judging from the ear-to-ear grin on her face the whole time we were out, I think I may have a sailor on my hands.

We did learn a valuable lesson getting the boat out of the water. Once the boat was on the trailer but not yet tied down and with the mast still up, I pulled it out off the ramp so that others could load their boats. Well, like a dummy, and even though we'd been warned about the overhead wires, I proceeded to try and pull down a power line with the mast of the boat. Fortunately, I was going about a half mile an hour when the mast hooked the power line and tried to slide the boat off the back of the trailer. Even then we didn't immediately realize what was wrong until someone looked up. I backed up, we pushed the boat back on, and proceeded to a safe area to drop the mast and tie down the boat. It was a good lesson to learn, especially without doing any damage.

I won't have any pictures of the boat on the water until Megan posts them on Facebook or I get my hands on her memory chip, but I will post them when they become available.

Thanks again to Mike for all his expertise. We couldn't have done it without him.

Oh, and one more thing. The boats need some names, and I'm having a hard time coming up with anything other than the less than socially acceptable names that first came to my depraved mind. So if anyone can come up with some catchy names other than Breaking Wind and Blow Me, let me know.

Grottfest '10

For those of you not lucky enough to be one of the Facebook friends of me or Hal or Mike, here's one of my favorite shots of Grottfest '10.

A few ways of looking at the Gulf oil spill

It's been confusing trying to figure out how much oil is spewing from the broken pipe from the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf. Not only is the actual volume hard to figure, but the news media talks about gallons per day or barrels per day, and unless you're really paying attention, they're all just a bunch of big numbers. And then they'll say that the Exxon Valdez dumped 10.8M gallons of oil into Prince William Sound. How many barrels are in 10.8 million gallons and how does that compare to the spill in the Gulf?

What got me thinking about this when Megan the Elder asked me to put this all in perspective by putting it in terms of Olympic-size swimming pools. I figured that might make sense, so I did some number crunching. When the well first blew out, the amount of oil being spilled was estimated at 1,000 barrels/day. That was later revised upward to 5,000 barrels/day. Since then numbers like 10,000-20,000 barrels are tossed about, but I've seen guesstimates as high as 60,000 barrels/day. Nobody knows for sure.

I checked on the volume of Olympic-size swimming pools (OSSP), and found a number of 660,253 gallons. A barrel of oil is 42US gallons, so there are 15,720 barrels in a pool. That's well within the current range of estimates for the daily discharge from the blown-out well, so for the sake of argument, let's say the well is dumping out one OSSP of oil per day.

Another way of looking at it is in terms of acre-feet. That's the unit used for measuring large volumes of water stored behind dams or in lakes. An acre-foot, as the name implies in an acre of water (or whatever) one foot thick, or 325,851.4 gallons, or 7,758 barrels, or roughly half an OSSP. So the well in the Gulf is blowing out about two acre-feet of oil per day. Most residential lots are 1/4 acre or less, so imagine you and eight or ten of the lots in your neighborhood inundated with a foot of oil every day.

And yet another way of looking at it - Your typical tanker truck holds 9,000 gallons of whatever. In terms of OSSP's, it would take around 73 tanker trucks to fill the pool, or truck away the oil from the spill if that were possible. That's a truck full every 20 minutes, every day, for 43 days so far.  Something like 6,300 trucks and counting. If each of the trucks are 50' long, and if each of the trucks were lined up nose to tail, the line would be 60 miles long!

In summary, so far the spill has dumped these equivalent volumes of oil:
-43 Olympic-sized swimming pools
-430 big city lots covered 1 foot thick
-60 miles of tanker trucks lined up end to end
-2.6 Exxon Valdez tankers

It was a bit of fun to crunch the numbers and put everything in perspective, but that's about the only fun thing about the whole sordid mess.

Why are we in this hand basket and where are we going?

I haven't done a political rant for a while, but that doesn't mean it isn't pretty depressing out there with gushing oil rigs, markets melting down, and various never-ending wars.

In spite of the fact that it looks like the economy has bottomed out, I've never quite trusted the financial "recovery." Unemployment is high, housing is still in the toilet, and bankers seem to be back to business as usual. I came across this scary video during my morning net-surf. The ups and downs of the current market are eerily like those of a couple of years ago.

Watch it and weep. Or have another drink.

Alberta Oil Sands

Normally I'm proud of my Canadian roots and the fact that Canada really is a kinder gentler nation than my adopted homeland. Canadians don't torture people as a matter of government policy; they have universal healthcare; right-wing-whacko fundamentalist politicians are rare; and on and on and on. But on environmental issues, Canada is not so kind and gentle. One big one overshadows all others.


H2oil animated sequences from Dale Hayward on Vimeo.

Fiddler on the Roof

Having earned a well-deserved reputation for sleeping through various musicals, operas and plays over the years, I was pleasantly surprised that my eyelids stayed in the upright and open position for the entire performance of Fiddler on the Roof last night at The Paramount.

I think this is probably one of the best musicals of all time - not only because I stayed awake but because, unlike a lot of musicals and operas, the music and storyline are understandable, moving and entertaining.

Megan the Elder loves the musical and the movie. She owns a videotape (how 80's is that?!) of the movie and brought it to my place a few months ago to watch it with me. I was vaguely familiar with the storyline, but I had never seen the play or watched the movie in its entirety. And in spite of the fact that musical movies don't usually work for me, I was quite prepared to do my boyfriendly duty and watch it with her. I was unprepared to enjoy it as much as I did.

So when this highly professional production came to the Paramount, I jumped at the chance to grab a couple of tickets to see the real thing. Having already seen the movie, seeing the stage production was a bit like reading the book after seeing the movie. I was prepared to be disappointed because there usually are big and sometimes huge differences between the original and the movie. But not in this case. The movie was a faithful reproduction of the the stage version, and both are fabulous!

Big Boy Toys

In some ways it seems kinda odd that such a low-tech exercise like digging a trench is necessary for such a hi-tech convenience like the internet. And yes, I know that things like wireless internet through the cellular network and WiMax via a cellular-like infrastructure can bring modern communications to a lot of places without digging a trench to that place, but neither of them are available at my CITW. And no, I haven't forgotten that back in the day when I used to work for a living, I made a good living (which continues to this day) on the low-tech side of the very high-tech communications revolution of the 90's.

In Chelan County, as well as providing power, the Chelan County PUD (a semi-communistic power co-op) provides the fiber optic cable that various internet, CATV, and telephone providers use to compete for customers like me. Normally, the PUD would simply pull the fiber through the existing underground conduit that brings power to homes and cabins like mine. And they would do this at no cost to me! But unfortunately, my cabin was built in 1974, about the time that underground power installations were shifting from direct burial cables to cables in conduit. My cabin is fed with direct burial cables. In those cases, the PUD would trench in the new conduit for the fiber, again at no cost to me. But with recessions and budget cutbacks, the PUD no longer supplies underground conduit runs of more than 50'. The run from the road to my place is more like 150'. So after some conversations with the PUD, they offered to supply the conduit at no charge if I took care of installing it.

I leapt at the chance to rent a giant Tonka Toy and brought Hal along to join in the fun. The object was to dig a trench from the house to the utility pole by the driveway without cutting the existing power and water lines. I had a locate service mark all the underground lines and fortunately they were all on one side of the driveway. We only had to be extra careful and dig by hand in the areas right at the pole and near the house. And while we were in the digging mode, I bought a 20' culvert to install at the driveway.

If I had grown up in the video game age, operating the excavator might have come more naturally. There are two 4-way hand controlled joysticks, two 2-way foot controls, and for extra added excitement, one of the hand controls has two extra directional functions. So by my calculations, there are at least 14 different ways to move things, and all of those functions can be engaged simultaneously with any one or more of the other functions. To calculate the permutations and possibilities are beyond my limited mathematical capabilities, but trust me, the possibilities are endless!

Here's Hal at the helm. Fortunately we never came to blows about whose turn it was to be the operator and whose turn it was to portray the typical utility worker leaning on a shovel.

Now it's my turn. It takes a while to get all the moves coordinated, and then just when you think the machine has become an extension of your body, it all falls apart and you have to think about every move.

Notice the look of intense concentration. And jeez... is my gut really that big? I guess that's what happens when I haven't played racquetball for three months. But then again, if I ever have to rejoin the labor force, I could get a dirty wife-beater T-shirt, some tattoos and a cigar so I could pass as a heavy equipment operator.

The trench has a nice graceful curve to it, don't you think?

Amazingly enough, we managed to install both the conduit and the culvert without breaking anything. I tried to use the excavator to do some badly needed grading in the yard, but the machine and my limited operating skills weren't up to the task. So I'll have to leave that for another time on a different machine.

I can hardly wait!

The trip back

I had a good visit with my Mom and family back in the Homeland. And if anyone doesn't think I was in the Homeland, get a load of this:

And a half block away:

These shots were taken in Rosthern, Saskatchewan, the town closest to the villages that my parents grew up in.

The trip back was great. Sister Marian and I drove from Saskatoon to Edmonton listening to several episodes of This American Life. I spent the night there, drinking beer and playing dominos with the Dukovacs, including  Sarah and Alvin who recently moved to the wilds of Alberta from the wilds of Zambia. It was good to see them all.

I had a good drive back to Seattle, leaving St. Albert at 5:30AM and arriving back in Seattle at six in the evening. The drive through the mountains was fabulous, with lots of sunshine and lots of deer, elk, and even a couple of black bears.

I took a few shots of Mount Robson, which more often than not is shrouded in cloud. I tried something different this time, taking multiple exposures of the same shots, and then manipulating them in a program to get high dynamic range (HDR) photos. Here's the normally exposed original photo:

Here are the underexposed and overexposed shots.

With the magic of computer manipulation, here a couple of the results:

Here's another variation:

I'll have to play with this program some more, but it looks pretty cool. You can get anything from almost comic book to painting effects. I've meant to play with this style of photography ever since I did the Left Five Dead photoshoot. You might remember this photo from that series. It was done in the same HDR style.

Carbon Footprint Expanders

I delivered my latest toys up to the CITW yesterday.

I unloaded them and put them in the garage to wait for next winter. I don't feel too bad about my carbon footprint. I figure that expansion is at least somewhat cancelled out by the two zero emission toys next to them.

Oh, and Hal said if I buy two more of anything, he's going to start calling me Noah.

I'm in East Glacier, Montana right now after a long day on the road from the CITW. I drove through driving rain, snow and lots of sunshine in between. Here in East Glacier, the temperature is 24 degrees and there's lots of white stuff on the ground. The roads were wet, but clear. I hope it doesn't get any worse and the drive to Saskatoon tomorrow isn't too "interesting."

The Price of a Trip to Canada

Since I'll be heading up to Canada tomorrow for a week or so, I thought it would be a good time to examine some of the costs.

 

The semi-disposable wood fiber (fibre for you Canadians) dish cloths I can find only at Home Hardware in Canada. 

$1.99

Roger's Golden Syrup. A sugar cane syrup that is far tastier than any of the corn syrups so readily available in the States.

$2.59

Mother's Day with my mother.

Priceless!

Espressicano

Whenever I go into a coffee shop, I know what I want but I don't know how to order it. I usually ask for a short, double-shot Americano with lots of room, or I ask for a double espresso with a double shot of hot water. What I want is a cross between an Americano and an espresso, but I don't want to use ten words to describe such a simple drink. So the other day I came up with espressicano, and ordered one at my favorite drive-up coffee stand on the way up to the CITW. The barista laughed, but she knew what I wanted.

Cool! Maybe we can start a trend. If each you, my six loyal readers, used espressicano to order a coffee, it could go viral! Who knows, it could be another "shot heard 'round the world."

Burn Baby Burn!

Maybe I haven't been watching the news closely enough lately, but I haven't seen any of these images from the Gulf of Mexico on the mainstream media. I also haven't heard many chants of Drill Baby Drill!

Another great baseball play!

A couple of weeks ago I posed what I thought would be the baseball play of the year. Well, now I'm not so sure. Take a look at this:


I'm still not that much of a baseball fan, but a few more plays like this could change my mind.

Debate with a Tea Partier

I recently concluded a lengthy correspondence with the author of one of the ranting emails that I posted a month or so ago. As it turned out, this guy would have denied being a Tea-Partier, and thought he was being quite reasonable in his arguments. He is an atheist, not an overt racist, apparently not a gun-nut (guns didn't really enter into our conversation), doesn't support Sarah Palin, and readily agreed that Bush and previous Republican administrations were far from perfect. I never met the guy and didn't talk to him - our only contact was email. When I replied to his email with facts, not rants, he replied in the same civil tone. I thought this might be the opportunity to understand the mindset of otherwise reasonable and educated guys like him.

He is certainly an advocate of personal freedom, but I was not successful in getting him to define freedom in anything beyond the usual bromides of personal responsibility and the caricatures of rugged individualism and American exceptionalism so beloved by the right. When I pointed out that in my opinion universal healthcare would be good for personal freedom because it freed you from the worry of bankruptcy due to illness, the freedom to move to another job or the freedom to start your own business without worrying about insurance. He replied that yes, that would be good, except that you'd be trading freedom for security, implying that the more secure you are the less free you are! I replied that using his logic, the best place for personal freedom is a country like Somalia where there is no security. He acknowledged my point, and didn't want to follow the Somalian model, but didn't (or couldn't) elaborate further.

He had a distinct nostalgia for what America used to be and bemoaned the direction in which we're headed. He was one of the air traffic controllers who replaced the striking PATCO controllers who Reagan fired back in '81. He hates unions and loves Reagan and what he thinks Reagan stood for, even though he was unable to say what Reagan stood for beyond the bumper sticker sound bites. I acknowledged that unions had their excesses but that on balance it was unions that built the American middle class and created the "good old days" that he longs for. I pointed out that inflation-adjusted wages actually declined during the Reagan years and that the only reason household income rose was because more women entered the labor force. In fact inflation-adjusted wages actually peaked in 1972! To support his argument, he replied by sending me a chart showing household income had risen during the Reagan years at least partly due to the increase of women in the labor force!

He talked a lot about economic freedom being linked directly to personal freedom. I sent him a paper by done by the Heritage Foundation (not a left-wing fringe group by any means) ranking the economic freedom of countries around the world. #1 is Hong Kong, #2 is Singapore - not exactly beacons of personal freedom in anyone's books. Interestingly enough, #3-#6 are Western democracies that he would define as "socialist." Canada is ranked #7 and the good ole USA is #8. What does that say about the link between economic and personal freedom?

He talked a lot about the constitution and what the Founders originally meant, but was like talking to a person who believes in the literal truth of the Bible in spite of the many contradictions. No, he didn't want to reinstate slavery, but he certainly was for State's rights. I couldn't pin him down on the line between federal government and state power.

Deficit spending was a huge issue for him, but he wouldn't (or couldn't) point to anything substantial he wanted to cut. He thought that the 47% of Americans who don't pay federal income tax were free riders on the rest of us tax-paying patriots. He neglected to include the payroll taxes, property taxes, sales taxes that those 47% still pay. He also neglected to acknowledge that many of those non-income tax payers simply didn't make enough to pay taxes, and he neglected to say how much income tax he pays. I suspect he's retired and pays little or no income tax. He definitely wanted to keep his social security and medicare but wanted them "reformed" - whatever that means. He agreed that military spending would have to be trimmed, but big cuts weren't necessary.

I could go on and on, but at the end of the day (don't you hate that expression?) it wasn't a very satisfying dialog. He acknowledged the points I raised, but towards the end or our correspondence, he essentially said that he couldn't raise the facts or statistics to support his arguments, but he knew what he felt in his gut.

It's impossible to reason with a "gut feel."

Projects at the Cabin, Kabine, Hütte, whatever

As noted in my last post, daughter Megan and I drove up to the CITW on Tuesday to work on a few of my projects. Getting the massive table there was a bit of a trick, but the Audi was up to the task. And no, I didn't duct tape it to the roof rack. The duct tape was a futile attempt to keep the straps from vibrating noisily at certain speeds.


I borrowed a belt sander from Hal to take off the existing finish and sand out a few gouges in the table. Well, in the final analysis, I think I added as many gouges as I removed. I think you should have to be licensed to operate one of those things. They can be dangerous. I was going to take off all the finish and give the table a clear finish, but sanding the pedestal down to bare wood would have been a major chore, so I didn't. My intent never was to restore the table as a fine piece of furniture, and in that I was successful. 


So that the table top would match the base, I decided to stain it all. It turned out a bit darker than I expected, but it'll be fine.


When I wasn't working on the table, I was working on the deck gate. I had been blocking off the opening so that Farley wouldn't take unsupervised excursions in the area. Making gates is always a bit fun, a bit challenging, and a more than a bit satisfying when it all works out. You want to match the gate to what's already there, you want it simple and strong, and you want to make it swing through it's arc without binding or twisting. It all seems pretty simple, but it always gets complicated. It took me a while to figure why the gate didn't line up all that well with the deck railing, even though the gate was level and true. It turned out the existing deck railing was off kilter! I was able to adjust the existing railing fairly easily, and now everything's fine.


Here's the table in what I think will be its final resting place. I've still got to put on the last finish coats and get some chairs, but I think the table will work out perfectly in its new location. 


I initially thought that I'd move the TV and stereo over to the other side of the living room, but that turned out to be more difficult than I had first envisioned. So I gave up and left it in place, and now that the table is in, it looks like there should still be more than enough room for the couch and TV. I did move the love seat over to the other side.


All in all, it was a successful trip.