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.