WEEK 38 2009
Last
Week-
Sun-
Mon- Tue- Wed-
Thur- Fri- Sat- Next Week
Picture of the Week
MAIN
PAGE
First Post,
17 March 2002
|
Seven Years
Ago, This Week, 2002 |
Six Years
Ago, This Week, 2003 |
Five
Years Ago, this
week, 2004 |
Four Years
Ago, This Week, 2005 |
Three Years
Ago,
This Week, 2006
|
Two Years
Ago,
This Week, 2007
|
One Year
Ago,
This Week, 2008
|
Saturday 19 September 2009
Saturday
- another long day at work. But we got a lot done, and I need to make up some lost time in the last few weeks.
The day started of in an interesting way: I was in the shower, happily singing away, and there was a sudden "BOOM"
and the lights went. Apparently a transformer in the neighborhood
failed. Having no power I couldn't make coffee or even toast a bagel,
so I had to stop at IHOP on
the way to work. Such is life. When I returned in the evening, about
7:30pm, the power was on and the clock read 12:43, so we apparently had
5 hours without power. The ice cream in the fridge, normally rock hard
was quite soft.
A friend is off to DisneyWorld, which
will be cool. I get to take them to the airport very early tomorrow, at
4:30am we head out to LAX. Yay.
Friday 18 September
2009
Friday
- A long day. Because of various deadlines projects other than my
main project had priority. Sigh. Only a few months left to get it
done...
More
work tomorrow here in Ventura, so I had to pass my LPAC ticket for
tonights' performance to someone else. No watching of chainsaw juggling for me :-(
Warm,
and foggy. Marine layer anyway. I seemed to have the Ventura house to
myself in the evening, room mates all gone. I watched Monk,
one of the last few episodes, and...well....eh. I can see why they are
making it the last season. I admit to mild curiosity as to who killed
Trudy, Monks' wife.
Looking at the scores I see the the 49ers'
did indeed win last week. This coming weekend they play Seattle,
another team with a 1:0 record. Well, good luck to them.
Thursday 17 September
2009
Thursday
- not quite so bad a day. I had to spend a significant amount of time
cleaning up more of other peoples messes, but it seems mostly done, and
I got a bit of the open channel tasks done.
It
seems to be warming up - I think I will stay over this weekend. I told
someone I would take them to the airport, and maybe I'll get some
sailing in.
Sadly tonight there is a football game down the street at the high school, with hugely amplified commentary. Sheesh.
Book #55 was The Nutmeg of Consolation*,
by Patrick O'Brian. This was another audio tape, liberated from Dad's
estate, and much enjoyed. Aubrey and his company at the
beginning of the book are marooned on a desert island after a shipwreck
and typhoon, and battle natives, are rescued and get another ship,
fight the French, and eventually end up in Botany Bay in Australia (New
South Wales) in the dear old Surprise. Recommended.
The nutmeg in question is a Dutch ship given to Aubrey after the shipwreck and destruction of the Diane,
a captured French frigate. It was also one of the titles of the sultan
they had traveled around the world to treat with in the previous book, The Thirteen Gun Salute.
So, how many ships has Aubrey lost? There was the Sophie, and the horrible Polychrest, and another - on a lee shore somewhere - whose name I cannot recall, and the Diane
- four at least for which Aubrey was in command. Then there was
an open boat journey in an earlier book, suggesting a sinking, for a fifth ship - though perhaps this was not Aubrey's command. I can't recall the details of that sinking - expanding rice?
Wednesday 16
September
2009
Wednesday
- a long but not a good day, dealing with various dysfunctional
entities. To top it off, when I got home the neighbors were having
a party - with lots of small children shrieking & music playing -
that lasted until nearly 10:00pm.
Something caught my attention in A Fighting Chance.
There is a picture of workmen putting a nylon coating on the hull of
the English Rose III, their plywood dory. It seems a good idea, waterproofing and strengthening, but I
recall that Peter Nicols, in Sea Change,
read a couple of years ago (Book #5, 2007), had such a coating on a
boat he had bought. It failed and separated from the hull in mid ocean,
and lacking any good caulking his wooden boat leaked severely and he
finally had to send out an SOS and abandon his vessel, just a few
hundred miles from the Bahama's.
You know, when I was a boy my father had a fiberglass coated plywood
boat to which much the same thing happened. A part of the fiberglass
sheathing fell off, unbeknownst to us, during a ski trip up at Lake
Shasta in Northern California. We had a nice day out, but when we went
down to the lakeside the next morning there was just a foot of the bow,
sticking into the air. I can raise a thin smile & small chuckle
now, but it was quite horrible to see at the time, and ruined the
vacation.
The Hahn family motto, after this and a number of other nautical disasters, became a rather bitter: "Buy a Boat, Have Fun!"
Tuesday 15 September 2009
Tuesday
- a long day, thirteen hours in the office. But we did accomplish a lot.
Monday 14 September 2009
Monday
- back at work. Eh.
Book #54 was Myth Directions, and #55 was Mything Persons,
both by Robert Asprin. These are books #3 and #4 in the 'Skeeve'
series, written quite a while ago. Really they are novelettes, and just
sci-fi candy. In fact, it's a bit preachy - like Spider Robinson's stuff,
and rather annoying after a while.
Asprin was a
bit of a nut, apparently. He died earlier this year, and despite
several very very popular series, in apparent poverty. Some obituaries
related that he had terrible troubles with the IRS - apparently having
unilaterally decided not to pay any taxes.
Sunday 13 September_2009
Sunday
- my brother found an evaporative cooler - swamp cooler, in street
lingo - on Craigslist. We went by and looked at it. It was in very good
shape, only a couple of years old - they had the receipt from 2007, and if a bit
small for his house (only 5500CFM), the price was certainly
right. We loaded it up and took it back to the house.
We had already measured the window we intended to put it into, and when
we went around the side of the house we found that someone had already
run a copper water line from a spigot on an exterior faucet to that
spot. Indeed, there were holes in the exterior stucco where they had
bolted a unit to it, under the same window. We used the exact same
holes and by early evening had it in, and running. Neither of us liked
the frame that came with it, so we'll probably build a better one at
some point.
By which time we finished and had it up and running the 95F or earlier
had cooled to about 70F, and clouds.
Book #53 was
A
Fighting Chance: How We Rowed the Atlantic in 92 Days, by
Chay Blyth and John Ridgway. In 1966 the two of them, fellow soldiers
in a British parachute regiment, rowed
an open dory across the Atlantic Ocean, taking nearly
three months. They didn't loaf, they rowed the English Rose III together all day and at
night traded off two hour sessions,
or 'stags' as they called them.
Brutally hard self punishment, the sort of thing Englishmen are famous
for. Neither had any experience in extended rowing, and they didn't
bother to practice beforehand. Blyth was a sailor, and did the
navigation, but this was a different type of voyage than he had done
before, and perhaps there was no way to 'practice' for such an
extraordinary effort. Pure determination and cussedness, more than
skill, pulled them through.
They had competitors, also trying to row across - and whose boat was found later, empty and upside-down far out at sea.
Blyth, by the way, makes an appearance in the Naomi James' Alone Around the World, (Book #35, read earlier this year), as one of those encouraging her to undertake her voyage.
