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.