Saturday - I went down in the afternoon
to the Thousand Trails campgroud again. Very nice, very peaceful, but
it doesn't leave a lot to write about. If it wasn't for the just past
full moon the stars would have been spectacular - as it were they were
very nice in the brief time before the moon came up.
Friday 4 June 2004
Friday - visited the small City of Ojai,
with some friends. I've never been there before - it's a pretty little
town. I'll have to visit again when I've a chance, and spend more time.
Today was some sort of music festival - apparently it's quite an event
there. Much busier than usual. We had a very nice lunch at a restaurant
a bit out of town, essentially in the midst of orange (lemon?) groves.
Thursday
- pretty busy today. Looks like a new contract for me - which is good,
the current contract has (in theory) expired, although I expect an
extension for a couple of weeks more.
Wednesday 2 June 2004
Wednesday - as a youth I played quite a bit with 'Erecter Sets'. These don't seem
to be around any more, the big thing is now Lego's. But the British
incarnation the Erecter set, 'Meccano,' is alive and kicking apparently - someone has now built a Babbage mechanical computer out of them ( link via The Eternal Golden Braid. )
The Mars rover Spirit has 'imaged' a small crated they have named Fram:
The was a ship FRAM, built for Fridjof Nansen to a design by Colin Archer and used to explore the Arctic Ocean in the 1890's. There seems to be a number of references to the golden age of polar explorations during this Mars exploration.
The Fram
Which reminds me, I remember seeing the Gjøa, Roald Amundsen's boat,
in which he made the Northwest Passage. As a child I visited with my
father while she was on display in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park,
outdoors and in poor shape. Sometime in the 1970's she was returned to
Norway, and hopefully restored and treated better. San Francisco is a
beautiful city but narcissistic - anything not deeply related to it's
own navel gazing is liable to be ignored and abused.
The Gjøa
Which in turn reminds me - somewhat later I remember seeing the
Manhattan, another Northwest Passage veteran and a modern oil tanker
moored at the refinery docks in Benecia, California. I think I wrote about it once in these pages, but can't seem to find now.
With Global Warming - if it exists - the Northwest Passage may become a commercial possibility and a source of national contention.
update:
Hah. According to this page the Norwegian Maritime Museumstill has the Gjøa outside. Oh well, these old fishing boats are tough! (And somewhat smelly - perhaps keeping an old herring boat indoors
was just not a viable project!) Anyway, it sounds like a marvelous
museum to visit - viking boats, the Fram (indoors), and many other
things of interest. I just need to add it to my list of things to do
someday!
By the way, "search" in Norwegian is apparently "søk".
Tuesday 1 June 2004
Tuesday - Sunday afternoon I went down and spent some time with friends at the Thousand Trails campground again.
It being Memorial Day weekend it was busy - crowded actually. We had a
good time - a swim, a barbecue, and a rousing game of Song Burst afterwards.
In Song Burst you are given the year, the artist, the title, and a
'clue' from the song - often the first line of a verse (but not always)
and challenged to finish the next few more lines of the song. My team
lost, but only by a little - had the game lasted a bit longer or had
our opponents another Pina Colada we woulda clobbered 'em! It's harder
than it sounds - verses are often very similar, and a single wrong word
can cost you a score!
After playing the game we decided to just go through a few more cards
and see - as a group - how many we could do. Pretty much all of them,
it turns out. You learn things - Johnny Mathis did 'Someday Soon' in
the 1950's. I knew the Judy Collins version but had no idea that it was
a cover and not original to her.
It's interesting that everyone at the camp - but me - knew the lyrics
to the Mickey Mouse show. I can't remember ever having watched it. Not
the original with Annette Funicello, not the sequel with Britney
Spears.Most of the group were grade school teachers, perhaps that had
something to do with it.
Monday 31 May 2004
Monday - Memorial Day. Here is a picture from the Moving Wall exhibit from when it visited Lancaster in July of 2002. There is another war on now (which I support) and sadly it means a roll call of names for another monument someday. The World War II Memorial was dedicated in Washington D.C. yesterday, sixty years after that war.
These days the French insult us, stab us in the back, and invite the
Germans to D-Day ceremonies. Gratitude: the weakest of all human
emotions. But going to war for gratitude would be unethical. One should
not do an act for praise, but because the act is good in and of itself.
Sunday 30 May 2004
Sunday - the chicks are being fed by the
parents out on the patio. It's cute - there is a sudden rise in the
sound level and I'll look out to see the larger bird disgorging food
into the tiny upraised mouths. Some for you and some for you and some for you...
Then the parent is off for more food. The feeding cycle will then
resume in about twenty minutes when the adult has collected enough bugs
for the chicks again.
The telephoto on the digital camera isn't enough to catch much detail
from inside the house and the parents avoid coming back if I'm outside,
so no pictures for now. I'll get out the good telephoto lens from my Dad's
SLR and try using that.
Another thought on small boat voyaging from David Hays:
For a while, after Joshua Slocum,
small-boat voyages became almost a British specialty, often in the
Vertue-class sister ships of Sparrow, or slightly bigger versions of her, such as Wanderer III.
I studied for a year in London soon after the second World War, and my
theory is that for the British the cold and damp and bad food on a tiny
boat were indistinguishable from home; they didn't realize they weren't
in their living rooms.
Last night I watched Seabiscuit with some friends - I had never seen it. A pretty good movie - I am told that the book is much better however!
Photo Notes: This
is a sundial along the Interstate 5 in california. The consequences of
our daylight savings time policy can be seen here - the shadow of the
sun says "noon" but my quartz watch says one o'clock!
