Archive for July, 2010

Mosquitoes are Maddening

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

Being in San Francisco for so long, I have become accus­tomed, men­tally and phys­i­cally, to a sub­stan­tially less aggra­vat­ing envi­ron­ment than I had pre­vi­ously known. Being in Massachusetts – hot, muggy Massachusetts – again, I am recall­ing some of the things that I had left behind – some bad, some good. One thing that I had all but for­got­ten was mos­qui­toes; we don’t really get notice­able num­bers of mos­qui­toes in South of Market, San Francisco. Being here, and it hav­ing been rain­ing recently, the mos­qui­toes were out in full force, while I was work­ing on my boat’s trailer. As such, my sweet, deli­cious, George-blood has been con­sumed by a great many foul lit­tle beasts that have left behind their hor­ren­dous, anti-coagulating, inflammation-inducing, anti­gens of pain.

I’m not sure if my mem­ory is soft and mos­qui­toes have always been this unpleas­ant, if I used to be more adept at avoid­ing their painful bites, or if I had once devel­oped a tol­er­ance to their venom that has since sub­sided. However it may be, I hate mos­qui­toes far more now than I recall hat­ing them in the past.

I’m pretty sure that mos­qui­toes, like sand fleas, are some­thing that I wouldn’t mind sac­ri­fic­ing entire food chains to see go extinct.

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A hole in the water into which you pour time and money

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

One of the things that I’m look­ing to do as a part of this trip east is bring Synchronicity, my Hobie 16, out to California. Given that I haven’t sailed Synchronicity since 2007, the first orders of busi­ness were to free her and fix her up.

It took me about a week of on-and-off yard-work to exca­vate Synchronicity from the weeds that had over­grown her in my absence. Having exca­vated Synchronicity, it was dam­age assess­ment time.

Synchronicity’s trailer was struc­turally alto­gether but one of the tires was flat and both of the wheels were pretty thor­oughly rusted; addi­tion­ally, all of the lights and wiring were shot. So I bought new wheels and a whole new set of lights and wires. I’ve got the wheels swapped out and I’ll redo the wiring tomor­row, if it doesn’t rain. All told, not a lot of effort in repair­ing the trailer but a decent bit of expense, espe­cially when com­bined with the cost of buy­ing a trailer hitch and get­ting it installed on my car.

Thankfully, Synchronicity, her­self, seems to be hold­ing up pretty well. I had to replace all of the ropes and one of the shrouds that I dam­aged while clear­ing away the weeds, which is some expense and lit­tle effort. The main hal­yard also needs replac­ing and, on a Hobie Cat, it’s not just a sim­ple rope, so that’s another lit­tle expense. The mast, sails, tram­po­line, and hull struc­ture are all in good shape but the gel­coat on the bot­tom of the hulls is pretty sad. I might fix the gel­coat now but odds are pretty good that I’ll wait until I get back to San Francisco, as it may be a bit too time/effort inten­sive for my remain­ing week and a half

Between all of the repair costs and the expected decreases in fuel effi­ciency for the drive west, I expect that it’ll prob­a­bly cost me a good $500-$800 to get Synchronicity out on the waters of San Francisco Bay. Take that plus an esti­mated 30 – 50 hours of my time and ask me if it’s worth it.

Heck yes it’s worth it! There are few things in the world like sail­ing a catamaran.

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Blessed be thee Saint Leibowitz

Monday, July 12th, 2010

I have, just now, fin­ished read­ing A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. and, I must say, it is a fan­tas­tic read. The occa­sional use of Latin and Hebrew caused the book, at times, to fly over my head but I believe that may well have been the point.

The book is a story in three parts of a Catholic abbey estab­lished in the wake of a nuclear holo­caust. This par­tic­u­lar abbey has been charged by its founder, one Brother I. E. Leibowitz, with accu­mu­lat­ing and pre­serv­ing human knowl­edge. Much as the Irish monks dur­ing our last dark ages, these monks are the shep­herds of knowl­edge in the next dark age.

In spite of being in the future, the book con­stantly feels as though it is in the past, and it pro­vides me with a sym­pa­thy and fond­ness for Catholicism that I have not felt before. While I still can­not abide the dogma of the great Catholic empire, I must admit that they do serve us all by pre­serv­ing knowl­edge, at times.

One quote, from the lat­ter por­tion of the novel, tick­led my fancy a great deal:

They man­aged only to demon­strate that the math­e­mat­i­cal limit of an infi­nite sequence of “doubt­ing the cer­tainty with which some­thing doubted is known to be unknow­able when the ‘some­thing doubted’ is still a pre­ced­ing state­ment of ‘unknowa­bil­ity’ of some­thing doubted,” that the limit of this process at infin­ity can only be equiv­a­lent to a state­ment of absolute cer­tainty, even though phrased as an infi­nite series of nega­tions of certainty

– A Canticle For Leibowitz (pp. 301 – 302)

The quote is not par­tic­u­larly rep­re­sen­ta­tive but, to be hon­est, I feel that it would be hard to find any quote that would be prop­erly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of this book.

A Canticle For Leibowitz is a won­der­ful read; one of few, recently, that has suc­ceeded in keep­ing my atten­tion from start to fin­ish, and I highly rec­om­mend it.

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Is it wrong to make the same wish on two shooting stars?

Friday, July 9th, 2010

One of the nice things about Woods Hole is that there are few enough lights that you can see the stars in the sky. It’s really quite pleas­ant to be out on a moon­less night and see so very many stars scat­tered across the skies.

Sometimes, being in San Francisco, I for­get how nice it is to go for an evening walk through empty, dark streets, with trees to the sides and stars above.

To get back to the tit­u­lar ques­tion, I’ve been see­ing quite a few shoot­ing stars – I think that I’m up to five since get­ting here – and I’ve always liked the tra­di­tion of wish­ing on shoot­ing stars. Being as I am, I don’t really put much merit in wish­ing, except inso­far as plant­ing things in one’s own sub­con­scious can be ben­e­fi­cial, but I also rather enjoy harm­less, mean­ing­less super­sti­tion from time to time. Of course, when things come down to super­sti­tion, eti­quette really takes on a strong role but eti­quettes of super­sti­tion tend to vary greatly. I find, that there are rel­a­tively few things that I would actu­ally want to wish for and that num­ber has already been over­come by the num­ber of shoot­ing stars that I have seen.

Is it poor form to reuse a wish on a new shoot­ing star?

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Fortune Cookie: 2010-07-03

Monday, July 5th, 2010

Special touches have been
planned with you in mind.
Lucky Numbers 56, 20, 41, 9, 29, 37

Commentary: One should not always over­look the salad at a Chinese restaurant.

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2010 Journey East: Some numbers

Monday, July 5th, 2010

I’m rather fond of keep­ing metic­u­lous data about var­i­ous things and the list of such things cer­tainly con­tains sta­tis­tics about my car. Having fin­ished the trip east, here are some num­bers from the trip:

Odometer leav­ing San Francisco, CA: 1715
Odometer arriv­ing Austin, TX: 3532
Odometer leav­ing Austin, TX: 3540
Odometer arriv­ing Atlanta, GA: 4730
Odometer leav­ing Atlanta, GA: 4730
Odometer arriv­ing Concord, MA: 5837
Odometer leav­ing Concord, MA: 5850
Odometer arriv­ing Woods Hole, MA: 5947

The fol­low­ing num­bers are a lit­tle off because I started and fin­ished with par­tially full tanks of fuel:

Total diesel con­sumed: ~115 gal­lons
Total cost of fuel: ~$340

The astute reader will notice that I have been get­ting fuel econ­omy in the upper thir­ties of miles per gal­lon. This is cor­rect and, when observed on a more gran­u­lar level it does seem to be show­ing a trend upwards, though that trend is likely not sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant. As I intend to con­tinue mea­sur­ing my fuel con­sump­tion for the life of my car, I will be able to give bet­ter data later, when I am more than 6000 miles and 15 tanks of fuel in.

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2010 Journey East: Here I am, I guess

Monday, July 5th, 2010

Well, I’m sit­ting here in our house in Woods Hole, sip­ping a beer, read­ing an inter­est­ing physics paper about the holo­graphic prin­ci­ple, and I thought that it might be good to take a few moments to update you all on the past few days.

Having left Matt’s place in Atlanta on Friday morn­ing, I jour­neyed up through the Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and into Connecticut on Friday. Baldr and I slept at a rest area in the back of my car in Connecticut and then went on to my par­ents’ place in Concord, MA on Saturday. Saturday evening, after din­ner, I fin­ished the jour­ney down to Woods Hole, MA so as to avoid any morn­ing traf­fic on Sunday (the 4th).

In the process, I man­aged to fin­ish Cloud Atlas and I am pleased to report that it was, in fact, quite good.

Anyway, leav­ing Atlanta, and dri­ving through Georgia for a while, I ended up in South Carolina. Driving through South Carolina on an inter­state, one sees quite a few signs adver­tis­ing the sale of fire­works. Initially, my reac­tion was mostly a ho-hum, fire­works are kind of fun but do I really care enough to stop and buy some. Thankfully, after pass­ing a dozen or so adver­tise­ments on the road, I came to my senses and real­ized that, of course, I want fire­works, big awe­some fire­works. Coming to my senses, and stop­ping at the next place I could find, I pro­ceeded to buy a bit over a hun­dred dol­lars worth of fire­works – pri­mar­ily mor­tars and bot­tle rock­ets as those are my pref­er­ence. We went through about half of the fire­works yes­ter­day while we watched the Falmouth fire­works from Fay Beach. A num­ber of youths (young­sters, teenagers, hooli­gans, what­ever you want to call them) clus­tered around us and we were nice enough to share my fire­works with them. It was rather pleas­ant to share fire­works with a younger gen­er­a­tion and I cer­tainly know that I would have appre­ci­ated it had some­one done so with my when I was that age; I couldn’t help but also feel good about pos­si­bly instill­ing some tiny amount of respect for the proper oper­a­tion of things that have labels like, “Warning: Shoots Flaming Balls”. Subsequently, Dave, Paul, and I played a rous­ing game of Power Grid, which is an excel­lent board game.

That’s most of what I have to report of the past few days; it’s nice to be here after so long away. I should be here for about the next three weeks so it’ll be inter­est­ing to see how things play out.

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2010 Journey East: Days 4&5: Atlanta via Louisiana

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

It’s Thursday night – tech­ni­cally Friday – and I’m sit­ting in JamesMatt’s liv­ing room, chat­ting with his room­mate. It’s pleas­ant here but per­haps I should back up.

Wednesday (Day 4), around noon, I packed up and left Austin. It was a lit­tle later than I had intended but being well rested was a pleas­ant out­come to achieve. Anyway, set­ting off from Austin, I set my GPS for Venice, LA and set out. To be wholly hon­est, dri­ving through Texas really isn’t all that inter­est­ing, espe­cially east­ern Texas. I don’t really have any com­plaints though; I’m really enjoy­ing the road, espe­cially the decent speed lim­its down here in the South (usu­ally 70mph, some­times 80mph). I’ve started lis­ten­ing, at Grace’s sug­ges­tion, to an audio­book ver­sion of the novel Cloud Atlas. Cloud Atlas is incred­i­bly engross­ing and, because of the nar­ra­tive struc­ture, at times rather infu­ri­at­ing; this infu­ri­a­tion later enhanc­ing the sat­is­fac­tion it pro­vides but I am not yet done so it is per­haps best to wait a bit before fur­ther reviewing.

After even­tu­ally leav­ing Texas, I entered Louisiana, which is so very full of swamp­land as to be quite impres­sive. I first drove across prop­erly immense swamp­lands dur­ing my 2005 trip to Florida and those swamps had noth­ing on Louisiana. The amount of water is both beau­ti­ful and stag­ger­ing. Anyway, work­ing my way across Louisiana, I even­tu­ally hit New Orleans. I drove through New Orleans and made my way for the tip of the Mississippi delta, the afore-programmed Venice, LA. I made it pretty far out that lit­tle strip of land before flood­ing halted my progress; so it goes.

It’s worth men­tion­ing that I’m not really so much mak­ing a slow trip across the coun­try to see the sights; that is a thing to do and it might be fun but it is not what I am doing; I am dri­ving from San Francisco to Woods Hole and dilly-dallying just a lit­tle bit along the way. As such, I didn’t spend much time in New Orleans as Atlanta was my next destination.

Proceeding through Mississippi, get­ting a bit tired, I started con­tem­plat­ing sleep. Eventually, I attempted to set­tle down at a rest area in the back of my car, with Baldr, for some sleep. Unfortunately, the rest area’s light and Baldr’s heat-induced heavy breath­ing made that a non-viable plan.

Slamming a 5 Hour Power and get­ting back on the road, I forged on. Finishing off Mississippi and push­ing through Alabama, I made it to Georgia in the wee hours of last night – Thursday (Day 5) morn­ing. Pushing on, con­tin­u­ing to lis­ten to Cloud Atlas, I hit Atlanta at about 7am; find­ing JamesMatt awake, we got some break­fast, chat­ted a bit, and then he went to work. Not hav­ing slept, I of course slept dur­ing the day. Matt returned in the early evening; we and his room­mates spent a while hanging-out; and now, every­one else hav­ing gone to bed, I write this before following.

Tomorrow, we make for Massachusetts, likely puas­ing (very briefly) in New York along the way.

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