Travels and Images
WEEK 49 2007
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First Post,
17 March 2002
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Five Years
Ago, This Week, 2002 |
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Ago, This Week, 2003 |
Three
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Two Years
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A Year Ago,
This Week, 2006
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Saturday
- went out to lunch with friends, Indian, down near the mall in
Palmdale. Good food. It wasn't as horrible a traffic mess as I'd
feared. It's the 'new' restaurant, but the 'parent' here in Lancaster
has apparently become terrible. So it goes.
Mostly I napped, but I did put a few hours of work in on organizing
some of my work done in the last month. In the evening I went over and
watched Shrek III. Not too bad, actually. It's fun looking for the homage's in it. The Brothers Hildebrandt, for one. Charlies Angels,
for another. And the many riffs on the various cartoon characters were
entertaining. Snow White, for example, has Dopey tattooed on her arm...
A Joke:
On the way to the work this morning, I rear-ended a car. I knew it was going to be a bad day.
The driver got out of the other car, and he was a dwarf.
He looked at his dented car and then looked up at me and said "I am not happy"
I said, "Well, which one are you then?"
And, your honor, that's how the fight started...
(via One Happy Dog)
Friday 7 December
2007
Friday
-
I am currently listening to Adams
Versus Jefferson. So far about 2 CD's in, and there is not
much new.
There was a bit of a biography, perhaps a chapter, about Charles
Cotesworth Pinckney, about whom I knew little. I might switch to a more
interesting book. Tyler Cowen, over a Marginal Revolution
(an economics blog) exhorts
people not to continue with books they don't find interesting.
I dunno. To mangle a phrase:
Ninety
percent of success in life is showing up. The other ninety
percent is perseverance.
Serendipitously, I was looking for the 'the
most beautiful libraries' article a week or two ago and had forgotten it was
linked by Cowen (I thought it was Sheila O'Malley). It's under the 'books'
categorization.
Which categorization, as I should say, or cataloging, is an issue here
(to
paraphrase Killick). I can't find stuff I've posted on my own blog. After five
and three quarters years, at roughly a post a day, often with two or three separate subject items, it's getting hard to
find
stuff! But that sort of spiffy extra is too hard to hand roll, and I've
been too lazy
busy to set up real
blogging software like Wordpress or Movable Type.
The Channel Islands 42nd Annual Parade of Lights
is tomorrow night, and I've offered to let my friends watch it from the
boat. I've things to do in Lancaster, but left them a key.
So it was time to go down to the boat and clean a bit. It was cold, and windy, and
it had rained last night. The boat was dry and tight, and the engine
started easily.
MV was coated with the
remnants of ash from the fires of last month, but a bit of hose work
washed that off. After that I cleaned the main cabin ( in the
sense that I picked up all the various bits of junk in the main cabin
and stored (tossed) them into the aft cabin) of the Nor'Sea. The front
cabin looks so much better!
Four toolboxes, two broken Autohelms, a kayak paddle, kayak seat,
sleeping bag, rope, wire, drills, buckets, clothes, coolers, diesel
fuel additives and varnish, brushes, whatnot.
I need to really clean the interior surfaces one of these days. There
is a light coat of fine ash to mop up. Then I need to paint. I've put
that off, because I wanted to re-wire the electrics which would
probably necessitate drilling and sawing of newly painted stuff, but
maybe that was a bad decision. Fresh pain looks good, and makes one
feel positive about the potential of things. Which might lead to the
rewiring, And more sailing!
I also flushed the head and put fresh water in it. Boat heads,
unattended, give an odor off after a while. Indeed, it's probably time
to replace the hoses and inner workings.
Thursday
6 December 2007
Thursday
- the movie version of Pullmans' The Golden
Compass is out I think. The special effects, in the trailer
I've seen, look amazing. I read that book, and it's sequels, a couple
of years ago. The first was the best of the three books. Like the Garth
Nix series of books mentioned last week it is somewhat anti-religious,
wherein God is
simply a being formed, first, by random chance from
the void (sort of a theological mirror image of the scientific big bang
theory). Indeed, in Pullmans' books God is actually the bad guy, in
Nixs'...dunno, the
series isn't finished. Probably good.
I suspect we may have met him (her?) in the Nix series, already.
In the same vein was Steven Brusts' To
Reign in Hell, and if I recall rightly. God was bad in that
one.
Wednesday 6 December 2007
Wednesday
- another day. I think I may have some corrupted files from
yesterday - what a pain. I do my part, why can't Bill Gate's second
rate software do it's?
Book #62 was
Cyclops,
by Clive Cussler*.
I alluded to this last week, with the Zil versus '57 Chevy
line.
That was really just a paraphrase, but close enuff. I'd forgotten a lot
of the plot - the whole moon base plot line, for one thing, and that it
wasn't a nuclear bomb but a fertilizer ship + munitions ship + oil
tanker that the evil Russki's were going to detonate in the harbor. Got
to have that nautical theme...
Anyway, my Dad had it on audio and I've been listening to it on the way
to and from the work site. Simi is a long ways from Oxnard, so it works
out timewise OK. It's an old Brillance cassette, with multiple tracks
spread
separately across the left and right balance channels. It works pretty
well.
Tuesday 4 December 2007
Tuesday
- somebody loaned me a set of Wellingtons',
so the feet stayed nice and
dry. This channel has water three to six inches deep in it, so ever
'waterproof' boots have trouble, if they are made out of leather. I'd
scotchgarded my Merrell's but didn't have too much hope to keep dry -
but the nice rubber waders worked like a charm. Not as comfortable to
walk in, but they'll do.
Monday December 2007
Monday
- back at work, not a lot to say about that. The water was deeper than
last week, my boots got a bit damp.
Sunday 2 December 2007
Sunday
- finished up the laundry and some bills, back on the road to Oxnard.
