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.