NaNo: halfway through

Squeaking along on wordcount …

After a week of paper grading and a weekend of sailing and boat-related stuff, the two-day advance on my wordcount had evaporated. Tonight (Sunday) is the halfway mark of NaNo, and I barely eked out the 25K halfway wordcount (actual total 25,023) just before midnight.

I do like what I came up with … it’s an account of my main character’s first up-close encounter with a high-performance racing sailboat. The fictional boat is named after a pirate ship, Avenger. However, there’s some question exactly which ship of that name is intended – the real one that prowled the Caribbean in the 1720s, or the movie one from 1944. I’m not sure myself which one it is, but I’ll figure it out eventually.

This is the most recent passage from Murder on the Sports Desk. The scenes leading up to the event are totally fictional, but Hannah’s first encounter with Avenger is absolutely what I experienced when I first set foot on an Etchells.

“Just feeling a little low, that’s all,” Flash said. “Maybe if I get some time out on the water, I’ll feel better. I haven’t had Avenger out in a long time.”

“See, there you are,” Hannah said. “Just get out sailing tomorrow, and things will look better for you.”

“Why wait for tomorrow?” Flash asked. “We can go sailing right now.”

“We?” Hannah asked. “What do you mean, ‘we’?”

“Look, you’ve been saying you’re going to come sailing on Avenger with me for a couple of years now,” Flash said. “Let’s do it now.” He got up, pulling Hannah up by her arm.

“But I have papers to grade …” Hannah protested.

Flash riffled through the stack of papers next to Hannah’s laptop. “Looks like you’re almost through with them,” he said. “You can finish them off after we get back.”

“But it’s getting late,” Hannah said. “By the time we get the boat ready to go, it will be late afternoon, and we won’t have time to sail.”

“We’ll have enough,” Flash said, pulling Hannah toward the companionway. “You’ll see.”

“But my health …” Hannah said.

“Has been an excuse you’ve been making for far too long,” Flash said, now prodding Hannah up the companionway. “Don’t sell yourself short. You can do more than you think you can do.”

“But that boat,” Hannah said, stumbling slightly into the cockpit, “it’s so … scary. I like boats that are more like my living room, like this one – which actually was my living room not too long ago.”

“You need to challenge yourself,” Flash said, stepping out of the cockpit onto the dock steps and leading – no longer pulling – Hannah along. “Get out of your comfort zone, try something new.”

Hannah tripped on the top dock step and found herself falling forward, into Flash’s arms, and she felt the strength of them around her as he held her up. She smelled the scent of his musky sweat and the cigarettes that he smoked, ordinarily a smell that would have repelled her. “But … but …” she said, her voice trailing off into a whisper.

“But you’ve run out of buts,” Flash said, helping her to stand upright on the pier but keeping an arm around her to guide her along toward where his boat was berthed. “Come fly with me.”

Hannah found she was no longer resisting Flash’s force, and soon she was face to face with Avenger, long, low, sleek, and black, looking very much like a shark, waiting to devour whatever prey came into its path. The boat was fully rigged, with a mainsail on the boom, a jib hanked onto the forestay, and lines run to a spinnaker in a bin on one side of the boat’s cockpit. All the halyards were hooked up, the sails were ready to hoist, and all but two of the docklines had been cast off. Flash had clearly planned and prepared for this supposedly impromptu sail. She stopped short. “You already … you ...” she said. “You tricked me.”

“No,” Flash said. “I knew I was going to get you to come sailing with me today.”

“But I can’t …” Hannah said.

“You don’t have to do anything,” Flash said. “I single-hand this boat all the time. If you want, you can help with jib trim, but you really don’t have to be anything more than just a passenger if you want.” He stepped onto the boat, holding Hannah’s hand. “Come on aboard.”

Hannah stepped onto Avenger’s deck. In a way, it was so simple. The deck was flat and clean, and it was the same level as the pier she was stepping off of, with only a gap of a few inches of water to step across. The boat barely rocked as she stepped onto it. Physically, there was nothing, absolutely nothing, momentous about the act of setting foot on Avenger.

But there was something else that felt tremendously important. In some ways, the very simplicity of boarding the boat marked a change – never before had she boarded a boat in such a way that the term “boarding” seemed like inflated verbiage. “Boarding” implied at least some effort, such as stepping over a gunwale or climbing steps or even using a gangplank. Boarding wasn’t supposed to be as easy as taking a small step sideways.

That difference, however, wasn’t the only thing that made stepping onto Avenger significant. There was something else, something Hannah couldn’t quite fathom, about the boat. She seemed to feel a vibration coming from it, not a physical vibration, but almost a psychic aura, that was unlike anything she had ever felt before. Resonance, that’s what it was, like when a particular note is sounded near a string that is tuned to that note; the vibrations in the air will cause that string to vibrate, too. Avenger was causing her to resonate.

How was this happening? Hannah found herself asking. Why? What was it about this unabashedly aggressive, streamlined, high-performance boat that resonated with her, a completely lazy and unambitious sailor? And why had this resonance begun the moment her foot touched the deck? She didn’t believe in fate or predestination or anything like that. If a boat was going to appeal to her, it should be only after she had had some experience with that boat, learned about its strengths and weaknesses, evaluated whether it was right for her. No boat should set her soul humming the instant she touched it. And yet this one did.

Flash sat down on the deck near the tiller. He slapped a spot on the deck a foot or so forward of where he was sitting. “You sit here,” he said. “If you want to trim the jib, you can sit more forward – here are the jib sheets.” He pointed to a pair of lines run through cleats near the front of the cockpit. Hannah realized that, along with the jib sheets, there were at least two dozen other lines used to operate the boat. About half of them were arrayed along the front edge of the cockpit; most of the rest ran through a console at the center of the cockpit, and a few came to the edges of the cockpit. She realized that this boat had more strings to pull than she had ever thought possible on a sailboat.

She sat where Flash indicated, and as she did so, the resonance between the boat and her increased. She should have become discouraged at seeing all of the different lines that this boat had – she wouldn’t expect that she could possibly understand them all. But that didn’t seem to be the message the boat was sending out; it seemed to be challenging her, urging her to set her sights higher. Wasn’t that what Flash had been telling her only a few minutes ago?

Flash untied the dock lines, tossing the stern line onto the broad, flat aft deck of the boat and leading the bow line to the corner of the pier, where he cleated it. The wind was coming at about a 45 degree angle to the dock, so the boat was soon pointed into the wind. Flash came onto the boat and raised the mainsail. Then he went to the pier, untied the dock line, and gave the bow of the boat a shove out into the channel as he hopped onto the boat. He dashed back to the cockpit, took up the tiller, sheeted in the mainsheet, and Avenger was underway.

Oh, and the sailing this weekend … My ace guest helmsman didn’t show up. The guy who was going to do committee boat duty bailed, so Pat filled in as emergency substitute (again). The wind was extremely strong, much more than Cornhusker and I could cope with by ourselves on Black Magic. So I joined Zorro as crew and Cornhusker helped Pat on committee boat duty. Saturday was rough; Sunday was rougher. I have a lot of bruises – and two broken nails.

My new 17” Lightweight Wheeled Executive Travel System

Also known as a “suitcase”

My laptop is big. It has a 17-inch screen, but it’s bigger than a lot of other laptops that have 17-inch screens. The screen makes for gorgeous movie viewing, and it allows me to keep a lot of open windows going all at the same time.

My laptop is heavy. It has more than 4 hours of battery life for word processing and wi-fi access (less for movie watching). The ability to run this big, gorgeous screen for 4 hours requires massive batteries.

When I bought this laptop, its mission was to sit on my desk during the weekdays and come along on occasional weekends.

Then the community college where I teach went paperless. Now, all of my course paperwork, grade sheets, communications from on high, and homework submitted by students who miss class resides not in a dead-trees file folder, but on my laptop. That means that I now have to lug this behemoth around with me, gorgeous screen, massive batteries, and all.

I had a nice case for it. But that case had two problems: It had room only for the laptop and not for the other books, papers, and stuff that I have to carry around – which meant that I had to have another bag for all of that. And it hung from a shoulder – first the right, and then when that got too sore, the left. By last week, I was in agonizing pain.

Yesterday, my birthday present from my folks finally arrived – a new case for hauling my laptop around. It has wheels. It has space for the laptop (a padded sleeve that’s just barely big enough) plus room for lots of other stuff. It’s made of polycarbonate. It’s fire-engine red.

It’s officially called the U.S. Traveler Manhattan 17” Lightweight Wheeled Executive Travel System. Whew. I try to teach my students to be more efficient and less verbose in their writing, and then I come face to face with an amazing example of diction inflation.

So today I loaded it up to roll off to teach my classes. I discovered that it’s not quite large enough, although it would have been had it not been for the H1N1 virus. Because of the flu, I’m supposed to carry a bottle of hand sanitizer and a box of tissues with me to all classes. I found a corner to fit the hand sanitizer in, but there wasn’t room for the box of tissues. I had to carry that separately.

NaNo update: cruising

More than a quarter of the way through …

I’ve had a couple of good days of cranking out the words for National Novel Writing Month. Between yesterday and today, I’ve produced nearly 5000 words, and I feel like I’m on a roll. I’m at least getting some interesting characters set up, and some interesting conflicts, one of which will eventually lead to murder (still not at that point in the story yet).

In the last post, I gave a novel excerpt involving a sailboat, presumably of interest to those of you who arrive at my blog via the sailing corner of the blogosphere. This time around, I’m focusing on the scene of the crime-to-be, the sports desk. Hannah has arrived at the newspaper to file her column for the following week – as a newbie in the world of journalism, she wants to come to the paper instead of filing online until she gets the hang of what she’s doing. As she enters the newsroom through the back door, she has to pass by the sports desk, which, the previous week, she had compared to a zoo. This week, it’s even worse.

When Hannah entered the newsroom, she found the state of chaos that she had expected, except this time the feeling was more intense. Somehow, there seemed to be an underlying layer of anger, and all of the people at the desk were cursing at each other and generally fuming. Soon, she realized why – they were short on staff. Most particularly, Agatha was missing, and the hole represented by her empty desk resembled the gap of a missing tooth in a hockey player’s mouth. Then Hannah stopped to wonder, why had the hockey image come up in her mind? The game on the television wasn’t hockey; it was another college basketball game. She quickly dodged around the sports desk and took refuge behind the partition that protected the features desk.

“The weather seems stormier than usual,” Hannah said to Etta as she sat down to upload her column.

“Oh, yeah,” Etta said. “We’re talking near riot conditions here. Watch out; Abernathy has decided Dean can’t handle things, and he’s come to take charge.”

“Abernathy?” Hannah asked.

“Oh, you probably haven’t met him yet,” Etta said. “He’s the real sports editor; Dean’s just the second in command. He doesn’t usually come in on Saturdays, except in times of crisis.”

“So what’s the crisis this time?” Hannah asked.

“Agatha Chin, the agate clerk – she’s the one who puts together all the box scores – well, she called in sick,” Etta said. “Now, normally, we’d have enough others around to answer the phones to cover for her, but two of the stringers also didn’t show up. Dean tried calling everybody on his list, but so far, no good. That’s when he called Abernathy.”

“So there’s a lot to do and nobody to do it?” Hannah asked.

“You might say that,” Etta said. “They’re all busier than a one-armed paper-hanger over there. I’m expecting them to start recruiting people off the street any minute now.”

Hannah plugged her thumb drive into her workstation and uploaded her Grammar Goddess column for next week. “It’s all yours,” she told Etta.

“Thanks, hon,” Etta said. “Let me give it a quick look-see …” She pushed some keys on her keyboard. “Yep, it looks good.”

A sudden roaring noise erupted on the other side of the partition, and somehow Hannah guessed that it probably wasn’t a great play on the game on the television. This sounded more like a barroom brawl, although without the breaking glass. “What was that?” she asked.

“I don’t wanna know, and I don’t think you wanna know either,” Etta said.

Dean Michaels came staggering around the partition. “You gotta help me,” he said, to nobody in particular.

“Help? How?” Etta asked.

“Abernathy’s gonna have my ass if I don’t get a warm body in Agatha’s chair in the next five minutes,” Dean said. “You got any reporters you can spare?”

“It’s Saturday, honey,” Etta said. “Ain’t nobody here but me.”

“Wait,” Dean said. “Hannah’s not nobody. She can help!”

“Who, me?” Hannah said. “I don’t know anything about box scores.”

“You don’t have to,” Dean said. “We have templates for them all. All you have to do is answer the phone and type in the numbers.”

“That’s all?” Hannah asked.

“Oh, well, not quite all,” Dean said. “You also have to monitor the wires for the national boxes and add them to the file, and you also have to add the box scores that other people leave. But it’s really not hard.”

“And I would want to do this … why?” Hannah asked.

“To do us all a really big favor,” Dean said. “And to make a few bucks. OK, very few bucks. But you’d be saving my life.”

“A moment ago you said you needed to save your ass,” Etta observed. “Now it’s your whole life?”

“Whatever,” Dean said. “Hannah, could you please help? Pretty please?”

“I suppose I can try,” Hannah said, wondering what she was getting herself into.

“You serious?” Etta asked. “I think you’ve flipped your lid.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you,” Dean said. “Lunch is on me tonight.” He led Hannah around the partition and escorted her to Agatha’s chair. Settling into it, Hannah felt a bit like Gulliver in Lilliput – the chair was jacked up high, the keyboard was set low, and there was a footrest under the desk. There was probably at least a foot difference in height between her and Agatha. She set the chair lower, raised the keyboard tray, and kicked the footrest aside, then adjusted the angle of the monitor so it pointed at her face rather than her chest.

“OK, here’s how it works,” Dean said, pulling his own chair over next to Hannah’s. “You’re already familiar with the basics of the system. Here’s the templates folder; when a call comes in, you pick the template you need – high school basketball, college basketball, hockey, you’re not going to need football or baseball – open it, save a copy to your working folder, then just enter the stats in the right spots in the template. The folks who give you the numbers already know the routine – it’s usually an assistant coach or a parent volunteer – so they’ll be giving you the numbers in the order you need them. Got that?”

“So far, so good,” Hannah said. “Then what?”

“So then, when you’re not answering the phone, you’ll be scanning the incoming wire,” Dean said. “When a score comes in, it’s usually already formatted correctly; you’ll just copy it to the working directory. You aren’t going to need all of them, just the NBA, NHL, top twenty college teams, Pac-10 college teams, and Pacific Hockey League.”

“OK, I think I get that,” Hannah said. “You said something about adding something to a file?”

“That’s when you work on the finished product,” Dean said. “First, you’ll collect all of the box scores for each sport into a file for that sport. Again, we have templates for the headers for them all. Then you’ll put all of that together into one big file that you send over to the copy desk right before deadline for each edition.”

“Sounds like a lot,” Hannah said.

“Once you get into the swing of things, it goes pretty easy,” Dean said. “You can even tailor the content for each edition – put the high school basketball scores for the little places out in the sticks into the regional edition, city scores in the metro edition. Those small-town coaches love it to see their itty bitty team’s score in the big high-powered newspaper.”

The phone rang. Hannah took a deep breath, put on Agatha’s headset, and answered the phone, “Capitan sports.” Over the next 30 seconds, a fast-talking assistant coach from a small town somewhere inland read off a bunch of numbers that Hannah put into a basketball score template. It was a good thing she was a fast typist, she realized, so she could keep up with the chatter on the other end. When the call ended, Hannah saved the box score in her working directory.

“There, you’re getting the hang of it,” Dean said, as he returned to his own desk.

For the next twenty minutes, Hannah alternated between answering the phone and scanning the wires. Sometimes more than one phone call would come in at once; if Hannah was already on the line when a new call came in, it would ring, seemingly randomly, some other phone on the sports desk, and whoever got the call would take the box score and add it to Hannah’s working directory.

Denny Damon came in, slightly less animated than usual. “Seagulls got skunked,” he said. “At home. Again.” He looked at Hannah, sitting at Agatha’s desk. “Oh, I see we got a new agate clerk.”

“Just temporary duty,” Hannah said. “I’ve already got a day job.”

“Give me a couple minutes,” Denny said. “I’ll have that box score for you.”

Two minutes later, the hockey box score appeared in the working directory, and Hannah took a look to see just how bad the carnage was: Sierra Gold Miners 7, Siete Mares Seagulls 0. The other statistics were not so bad; both teams had had about the same number of power plays, and … “Wait, Denny, is this for real?” Hannah asked. “The Seagulls had three times as many shots on goal as the Gold Miners?”

“Afraid so,” Denny said.

“Did we even have a goalie in the net?” Hannah asked.

“I think he was made of ectoplasm,” Denny said. “The puck went right through him every time.”

NaNoWriMo: so far, so good

Caught up on word count – for now

As I warned before this month began, November is National Novel Writing Month, so much of my time is being eaten up in the effort to crank out the words. I started out the month behind on words (to keep pace, I need to produce 1667 words a day), but today I had a good session and caught up to where I should be, and then some, at 8525 words. As usual, my story is focusing on a character, Hannah Montgomery, who teaches at a community college, lives (or used to live) on a sailboat, is engaged to a police detective, Harry O’Malley, and frequently runs across dead bodies whose murders need to be solved. Just to give you a flavor of what I’m working on, here’s an excerpt from the book, the most recent passage I’ve written.

When Hannah got out of the meeting, Harry was still on duty at the station, and she didn’t really care to go home to an empty house, so she headed over to the marina, where she kept her boat, Nice Ketch. Now that she slept nearly all the time at Harry’s house, she seldom stayed on the boat that had once been her home, but she did like to keep an eye on the boat to make sure it didn’t deteriorate. And sometimes, she did need some alone time away from Harry, and Nice Ketch made a pleasant sanctuary.

She climbed up the dock steps and into the cockpit, remembering that not too long ago, she would have needed Harry’s help to do that and to get down the companionway of the boat. She unlocked the hatch, removed the hatch boards, and slid the top of the hatch open, then climbed down the companionway, a ladder leading into the spacious interior of the boat.

Everything was shipshape, as she had left it. Back when she lived on the boat, it would never have been so tidy; especially since she had nobody to please but herself, she wasn’t particularly fussy about housekeeping. But now that the boat wasn’t her primary residence, it could be kept neater, and Harry, amazingly enough, was pretty good at that kind of thing. Jackets and sweaters were now in a hanging locker, not tossed on the settee in the salon. The chart table was bare, no longer the site of Hannah’s laptop and random piles of paperwork. In the galley, everything was neatly stowed, the teakettle no longer parked on top of the stove, ready to be set to boil at a moment’s notice.

It was a chilly day, however, and Hannah decided she could use a nice cup of tea. She got the kettle out of the locker where it was stowed, filled it, and set it on the stove. Then she realized that, as she was no longer living on the boat, she had shut off the valve on the propane tank for safety. She climbed up into the cockpit, opened up the propane tank compartment, and opened the valve. Then she went back below, turned on the switch inside the boat to let the propane flow, let the gas get to the stove, and lit the burner under the kettle. Next, she got out a mug and a tea bag – Earl Grey, one of her favorites, and sat down on the settee.

The cabin was beginning to warm up, and Hannah stood up to take off the heavy cardigan she was wearing. She started to put it in the hanging locker, but then she changed her mind, tossing it on the settee, just like old times. That seemed more like it, she realized. The boat wasn’t merely neat; it was too neat, as if nobody belonged to it anymore. She pulled her laptop out of the large tote that she always carried it in, and she set it on the chart table and booted it up. Might as well check email here, she thought as she settled down in front of it. She found herself smiling, remembering the way she used to work here for hours at a time.

A shout came from above through the open companionway hatch, “Ahoy Nice Ketch!” Hannah recognized the voice of Flash Duran, and she smiled even more. She always looked forward to seeing him – although she had yet to keep her promise to let him take her sailing on his racing yacht. Somehow, that boat looked intimidating, and she hadn’t worked up the courage. “Permission to come aboard?” Flash asked.

“Granted,” Hannah said.

Flash came down the companionway, with a slightly crooked smile beneath his pencil-thin mustache, vivid blue eyes contrasting his unruly, curly dark hair. “I saw your companionway was open, and I figured you were home,” he said. Interesting, Hannah thought, that Flash still viewed Nice Ketch as her home. “Thought I might pay a visit.”

The teakettle began to whistle, and Hannah went over to it and poured boiling water over the tea bag in her mug. “I was just having some tea,” she said. “Would you like some?”

“No thanks,” Flash said. “You got any diet cola?”

“I have no idea,” Hannah said. It had been so long since she’d spent any quality time on the boat, she wasn’t sure of the inventory. She opened the lid of the refrigerator and discovered some shriveled cold cuts, some moldy cheese, a jar of mayonnaise that had seen better days, a couple of bottles of beer and – yes! – one can of diet cola. She handed that to Flash, picked up her tea, and went to the port settee, where the folding table was extended. Flash followed and sat down beside her.

The International District

Sometimes, a name IS important.

For many years, a certain area of Albuquerque was known as the "War Zone," not just informally, but actually in Albuquerque Police Department communications and reports – it was a collection of lower-income neighborhoods, with a very large population of immigrants, and an extremely high crime rate, exacerbated by much gang activity.

But then things began to change.

The changes started out small. Some of the residents of the area started to get together. They started to pressure the city for better street lighting – or at least for the city to maintain the street lights that existed but seemed never to get fixed when they broke. The people wanted other street safety measures as well – more speed-limit signs, and speed humps, roundabouts, and other "traffic calming" measures, things that would discourage drive-by shootings and also make drivers drive more carefully, so it would be safer for kids to play outside.

Somewhere along the way, the area residents also decided that they did not want the place they lived to be known as the "War Zone." They went to the City Council, and they got the name "War Zone" officially deleted from the police department's vocabulary. Instead, they promoted the use of the term "International District," to emphasize the richness and diversity of all of the different cultures, both American and immigrant, that live in the area.

At the time, my response was, "Yeah, right." Like changing the name of that area would really make the crime go away. Like no longer calling it the War Zone would make it no longer be one. Like the wonderfully New-Agey "International District" would magically be full of peace and light.

As it turns out, the residents of the area were willing to go beyond the semantics and well-meaning thoughts that so often characterize outsiders' attempts to improve the quality of life in less-privileged communities. They did it themselves. With inspiration that came from people within the community, they got organized. They put pressure on the city to provide infrastructure. They formed neighborhood watches that cooperated with the police to get crime under control. They formed neighborhood associations where everybody got to know everybody else, and they got to caring about their neighbors and wanting to help each other out and work together. They got together in work parties to clean up the neighborhoods and refurbish the decaying community center. They put together a community garden.

Now, as one of my students who lives in the area says, it's a safe, happy place for children to play. And even at night, after the children have gone to bed, it's not the same as it used to be. In the past, once darkness fell, the streets belonged to the gangs. Now, people are out in the streets, and there's life. Vans and pushcarts sit on street corners and sell tacos and tortas and such, and there are plenty of customers out. It feels like what I imagine an ethnic neighborhood in a big city might feel like – socialization, togetherness, community.

Sometimes a name really DOES matter.

NaNoWriMo upcoming

Looking for characters and clues on the sports desk

Those of you who have been following my blog for a while know that during the month of November, I vanish – or at least fade out for a while. That's because November is National Novel Writing Month, when I take up the challenge of writing 50,000 words in 30 days.

I've been participating in this event since 2004, and I've always made the 50K-word mark. That first year, I did an action-adventure yarn that ended up going nowhere, but since then, I've been doing murder mysteries. The formula is simple: I start in an interesting location, I create a totally obnoxious, unlikeable character, I give about a dozen people reasons to want that character dead, I kill that character off, and then I spend the rest of the 50,000 words investigating all of the suspects. My main character is a community-college English instructor who sometimes gets some help from her police-detective boyfriend.

In past years Hannah and Harry have investigated murders at the community college, the yacht club (who could ever imagine that sailors would bicker and have conflicts?), the family reunion (that one was my mom's idea), and the little theater. In this year's NaNo novel, Hannah has been invited to write a guest column on grammar for the local newspaper, and she discovers intrigue and then murder on the sports desk.

So … this year, I'm asking for input about what sorts of characters might be hanging around the sports desk, or be subjects of articles and investigations by reporters on the sports desk, or otherwise might be involved in a murder on the sports desk. I've got a few ideas from when I worked on the sports desk of a metropolitan daily newspaper some years ago, but I'm interested in hearing others' ideas.

When I mentioned this year's title to someone who works for a sports promotion firm, she immediately suggested that I kill off a photographer. But I'm kinda sweet on photographers, especially as my son is now in college learning how to be one.

FWIW, based on the chronology of when last year's NaNo novel ended, it's hockey season.

Sail tuning clinic and other great stuff

… including a lot of time on the water …

The past couple of weeks have been very rough, and so it was a good thing to get to the lake this weekend. Zorro had finished putting new bottom paint on Black Magic, so it was time to put her back in the water and move her back to the other marina, where the mast-up storage lot is. But in the meantime, she, Constellation, and Caliente were to be used Saturday in a sailboat tuning and sail trim workshop to be run by Zorro and Dumbledore.

We got to the lake late Friday afternoon; Zorro and Dumbledore and a couple of other sailors had just set sail, but the winds were so extremely light that they didn't get very far. We went to the mast-up lot and pulled out Syzygy, our MacGregor, which had been parked in Black Magic's spot for the past couple of weeks, de-rigged the MacGregor, and hauled her to her usual storage lot.

Saturday morning, we launched Black Magic in extremely light conditions and sailed (or, really, drifted) the block or so to the marina, where we tied up for the clinic. In addition to the three Etchells, Dumbledore's J/24, Kachina, was available as a demo boat, and two cruising sailors had brought their boats in to learn how to tune the rigging on their boats. We also had two sailors on hand who didn't bring their Catalina 30s, but who wanted to learn more. While a lot of the finer points of rig tuning apply more to racing boats than cruisers, even cruising boats can benefit from a well-tuned rig, and so the cruisers really appreciated the lessons.

Then it was time for the lessons in sail trim. There was still very little wind, so we took the sailors out on Constellation, Caliente, and Kachina. Pat and I ended up with Zorro on Constellation, Dumbledore took the cruising sailors out on Kachina, and a couple of others were on Caliente. For a while, things weren't very exciting, as even the racing boats weren't exactly going fast. The guys on Caliente gave up and went back to the marina.

They quit too soon. Almost immediately, the wind began to fill in. It never got really stiff, probably reaching a maximum of about 10 mph, but it was just right for sailing lessons. Constellation and Kachina had a good mock-race upwind to one of our turning marks and then back downwind to the marina; Dumbledore reported that the cruising sailors had a great time. After Kachina headed back to the marina, we stayed out for another hour or so, and all in all we had a great time.

Sunday morning, Pat sailed Black Magic to the other marina, while I drove the truck and trailer to meet him at the other boat ramp. The wind was great, and Zorro on Constellation and Carguy on Caliente were out sailing, too. From the parking lot at the top of the boat ramp, the three Etchells looked wonderful out together. We hauled Black Magic out, and just as we were finishing putting everything away, we got a call from Zorro – he and Carguy were going to take a break for lunch, where we could join them and then go out sailing with them afterward.

So after lunch, I joined Zorro on Constellation, while Pat got on board Caliente with Carguy. The winds were getting stiffer, and there were a couple of small thunderstorms in the area, but nothing too threatening. We figured we could expect a few brisk gusts from them, but those would only make things more interesting.

We had some good sailing, and with the two boats close together, Zorro could give Pat and Carguy lessons in sail trim, to help them improve their sail handling. We went up and down the lake, and then back and forth between some buoys nearer the marina. Pat and Carguy decided that a nearby cloud looked a little too threatening – and besides, Carguy's girlfriend wanted him to get home to El Paso to attend a party – so they headed back to the marina. Meanwhile, Zorro and I decided that cloud looked like it was breaking up, so we stayed out.

For about another half hour, we had more good wind. Then that cloud broke up as we had thought it would, and the wind began to fade. Then it went away, and we were once again in "Slow Boat to China" mode, two miles out from the marina. Oh, well, at least that gave Pat a good opportunity for a nap.

So let's see what we accomplished this weekend:

• Major stress relief from some seriously awful things that have been going on over the past three weeks.
  
• Some cruising sailors who now know how to make their boats perform better, and at least two who would like to volunteer as crew for racers on regatta weekends.
  
• Improved racing sailboat handling for Pat and Carguy.
  
• An opportunity for Zorro and me to hone our karaoke skills.
  

Yeah, it was a good weekend.

Is less more?

Looking at the past to answer the current question

Over at Proper Course, Tillerman has posted a writing project assignment, "Less is More," inviting bloggers to either agree or disagree with that statement and apply it to sailing or blogging about sailing or whatever else we happen to do on the water.

I have two posts from the past that might be seen as addressing the issue, and they are distant enough in the past that many of the current regular visitors to this blog may not have seen them. With some updates, I'm reproducing them here.

One post, whose title was something like "One of these things is not like the other," has disappeared from my blog archives (I have spent two hours searching for it, and I'm convinced it's not there anymore). It featured a picture of our MacGregor, Syzygy, parked alongside my Etchells, Black Magic, in the parking lot above the main boat ramp at Elephant Butte Lake. Both boats were rigged – I believe there had been a regatta, in which Black Magic had been a participant, and Syzygy had been the committee boat. The post went something like this:

Can you see a difference?

One of these boats has a cabin, bunks, a toilet, sink, stove, electricity, stereo system, motor, and various other luxuries.

The other one doesn't. It just goes fast.

The other post, "Strings to Pull," from September 2006, gives another answer to the question:

Yes, the Etchells is a special boat

This picture shows how the Etchells can be both simple and complicated at the same time. Above the deck, the boat is very clean. There is very little to trip over, very little to get bruised on, very little to get tangled up. In the terms used by mathematicians, the Etchells is very elegant: it has power in simplicity.

On the other hand, the Etchells also has a whole lot of controls that most boats, even most racing boats, don't have. Very few other classes of boats allow racers to change the setting of the shrouds during racing, and almost none permit adjustments of the mast at either the partners (the joint at the deck) or the butt (where the bottom end of the mast rests) during a race. But Etchells sailors are permitted such adjustments. And then there's the legendary fraculator – it's the line that Etchells sailors point to when they really want to emphasize that this boat is different from all others. Yeah, some other boats have fraculators, but not many.

Here is a quick quiz: How many lines can you identify? If you can name at least half of them, then you probably already sail an Etchells, but if you don't, you should get in contact with the nearest Etchells fleet, because some skipper there probably needs your talent. To make the task easier, I will list the lines, so all you have to do is match the names with the lines in the photo.

Aft mast block

Bilge pump

Boom vang

Forward dock lines

Forward mast block

Fraculator

Jib halyard

Jib luff

Mainsheet

Mast aft

Mast forward

Outhaul

Port jib fine tune

Port jib sheet

Port spinnaker sheet

Port spinnaker twing

Port lower shroud

Port upper shroud

Port shroud keeper

Spinnaker halyard

Spinnaker pole keeper

Starboard jib fine tune

Starboard jib sheet

Starboard spinnaker sheet

Now, of course, there are some lines that don't show up in this picture, such as the mainsheet fine tune, the starboard spinnaker twing, the starboard upper shroud, lower shroud, and keeper, the spinnaker pole topping lift, the foreguy, the backstay, the traveler, and the aft dock lines.

Yeah, when you sail an Etchells, there are a lot of strings to pull. Learning all of those strings is, for me, part of the beauty of the boat. It's not a boat for sissies, and it's also not a boat for intellectual lightweights. It's a boat for people who think, and who have brains to process a whole lot of information very quickly and then translate that information into action. I'm only just learning, but I love all of what I have learned from Black Magic, and I plan to learn more.

So … Is the Etchells a boat in which less is more, or a boat in which more is more?

Sunset, moonlight, Sunrise Regatta

Not much time to write; will try to keep this brief

This past weekend was the Rio Grande Sailing Club's Sunrise Regatta, consisting of four fleets: 10-mile, 25-mile spinnaker, 25-mile non-spinnaker, and 50-mile. The regatta gets its name because if the winds are light, sunrise is about when the 50-milers finish.

Pat and I got to the lake Friday afternoon, so he could take the club's motorboat out and put flashing lights on the navigation buoys that were to be used as turning marks during the race, so sailors could see them after dark. Before going to get the boat, Pat dropped me off at the Rock Canyon Marina, where I was to meet Zorro to sail with him. When I got there, he was already out sailing on the lake, but after about a half hour, he came to pick me up.

The wind was brisk, and so I had to hop on board Constellation from the dock while the boat was moving fairly fast. In order to make the jump easier, and since it was only going to be a short sail, I left almost everything in my gear bag, which I stowed on Windependent, Twinkle Toes' boat, on which Zorro and I and a few other people would be sailing in the 25-mile spinnaker fleet Saturday. Thus, when Zorro and I set sail, I was wearing my hat, sunglasses, and PFD, but I didn't have my non-sun glasses, my lip balm, or my cell phone with me. Well, we weren't going to be out long, so I wouldn't need those things – or so I thought.

It was late afternoon, but the wind was good, so Zorro decided to make a reconnaissance trip to the southernmost of the turning marks, to verify exactly where it was so we wouldn't have to hunt for it Saturday. As we arrived at that mark, the wind began to fade. On our way back to the marina, as the sun was going down, so was the wind. Then, when we were about halfway back, the wind went away completely. If I had had my cell phone, I could have called Pat to bring the motorboat and give us a tow in, but, well, I didn't have it. As it turned out, Pat had tried to phone me to ask what was up, but when he didn't get an answer, he figured that Zorro and I were simply enjoying our time on the water.

At this point, well, we didn't have much choice but to sit there and enjoy the sunset and try to find at least a little bit of a hint of a puff of wind. So we did. The sunset was glorious – but I didn't have a camera, or even a cell phone, to take a picture of it, so readers will have to take my word on that.

It was about this point that some song lyrics started humming through my head … and Zorro's too. I ended up with "Slow Boat to China" stuck in my brain for the whole weekend, and then some – it's still floating around my synapses. Zorro admitted that he, too, thought of the same song, although I was thinking of Jimmy Buffett's version, and he was thinking of Bette Midler's.

Just about as the sun set, we picked up just a hint of wind, and then a little more, and the boat was again moving, although not all that fast. The light was fading from the sky, and I realized I wouldn't be able to see all that well in the dark with my sunglasses on, but I didn't have my other glasses to change into. I tried going without any glasses on, but I'm so nearsighted, I couldn't see a thing – dark glasses were better than no glasses. Zorro admitted that his own night vision wasn't so great, either.

Meanwhile, in the east, the full moon was rising. So was the wind. Constellation picked up speed. We put up a spinnaker to get back to the marina more quickly. The wind built. And then it built some more. We were flying along, keeping pace with the waves, as the silvery moonlight reflected off the water like a million diamonds and gave us just barely enough light to see what we were doing. It was an awesome feeling, surfing the waves, the wind in my face, ripping along in the glow of the moon.

When we arrived at the marina, we found the harbor entrance almost by accident, and when we came to the dock, a fisherman on the shore facing the marina had a spotlight that provided enough light to allow us to get into the slip without incident.

I have in the past blogged about a peak
experience
with Team Zorro … this was another peak experience.

Saturday was the Sunrise Regatta. On board Windependent were boat owner Twinkle Toes, Zorro, Blondie, Blondie's boyfriend, and a friend of Zorro's from Belize who now lives in the U.S. and has his own boat. Zorro was at the helm, Twinkle Toes on main trim, Boyfriend and Belize on jib trim, Blondie tailing, and I wherever there was a hole that needed filling. Winds were stiff, and they gradually got stiffer as the day went on, but they never got to the really insane levels that they sometimes get. For the first half of the race, in particular, they were in the range that was great for a Hunter 34, enough to make such a big and clumsy boat move smartly. Later, they got to a level at which reefing the sails would have been good, but this boat's not rigged for easy reefing, so we kept full sail up and just pressed on.

One of the rules of thumb about racing on Windependent is that something ALWAYS breaks. That is especially true in rougher conditions. But this time around, we got lucky. There were two things that broke, neither of them a serious problem. On the first upwind leg, because of the stiff winds, we didn't raise a full-size spinnaker; instead, we used an old Etchells spinnaker that Zorro had donated to the cause. It did the trick, bringing the boat up to the maximum hull speed for a Hunter 34. It also looked very silly, just a little handkerchief high up and out in front of the mast. As we were approaching a narrow channel leading to the northern part of the lake, Zorro was talking about how we were going to take that sail down in order to zigzag through the channel – and then there was a major wind shift and we broached. The spinnaker was ripped to shreds in the incident.

The second thing that broke was the nail on my right pinkie. That's OK; I don't think I've ever had a worthwhile sail on which I didn't break a nail or two. If there were no broken nails, it was probably not fun. Maybe whenever Windependent races, I should be on board so what gets broken is one of my nails, and nothing important.

In our fleet, we were second over the finish line behind the J/24 Hot Flash, but we beat her on corrected time.

Oh, yeah, that song … Consider this a lengthy intro to a Poetry Corner – another one on Frank Loesser, whom I've featured before. This is the version that Buffett sings, adapted from Lyrics Depot.

On A Slow Boat To China
By: Frank Loesser
1948

I'd love to get you
On a slow boat to China
All to myself alone

Get you and keep you
In my arms ever more
Leave all your lovers
Weepin' on a far away shore

Out on the briny
With the moon big and shiny
Melting your heart of stone
Honey I'd love to get you
On a slow boat to China
All by myself alone

(instrumental)

I'd love to get you
On a slow boat to China
All to myself alone
A twist in the rudder
And a rip in the sails
Driftin' and dreamin'
Honey throw the compass over the rail

Out on the ocean
Far from all the commotion
Melting your heart of stone
Honey I'd love to get you
On a slow boat to China
All by myself alone

Honey I'd love to get you
On a slow boat to China
All to myself alone

Yes, I’m still alive

But not very …

Some of you may have been wondering why I seem to have disappeared off the face of the Earth. I've missed two important holidays, National Punctuation Day and World Rivers Day. I also had a day of racing with Zorro (good) in very light air (not so good), that I want to report on.

Meanwhile, my Internet access has been limited. Something seems to be wrong with the wireless connection in my laptop, so it will no longer communicate with wi-fi or Bluetooth – it used to be great friends with my mobile phone, but now the two are not talking to each other. My wireless switch is on, but the computer acts as if it is off. So I don't have access at work except through computers owned by my employer, and those are limited to academic purposes only.

Then over the weekend, we were staying at a place that usually has high-speed Internet but didn't this weekend. I had been hoping to get a post up about World Rivers Day on the day itself, but that was not to happen.

It looks like I'm going to have to take my beloved laptop to the shop for repairs. I hope it's just something simple like a loose connection, because Pat and I don't have money to pay for any really serious repairs. If I'm lucky, the college can lend me a laptop to cover for while mine is in the shop – since the college has gone paperless, I need a computer in the classroom to take roll, record homework completion, and make on-the-spot updates to the class websites.

Meanwhile, the past couple of days have been very windy in Albuquerque, and the pollen counts for ragweed and sagebrush are way up. My sinuses have been making sure that I'm not having fun. On the bright side, the powers-that-be at the college have decided, as part of the effort to minimize the effects of an H1N1 flu outbreak, to issue all instructors with a box of tissues and a bottle of hand sanitizer to be taken to all classes so students can use them as necessary. The tissues are not going to waste. I'm not the only allergy sufferer around; several of my students have allergies as well. It's a small box of tissues, and it's going to run out quickly; I hope the powers-that-be will be willing to issue a new box when this one runs out.

Anyhow, I am still here … just not as often.

Aaarrrrhhh, matey!

It's International Talk Like A Pirate Day …

Every blog should have its own favorite holiday, and my brother Jer's blog, Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas, has chosen International (formerly National) Talk Like A Pirate Day. The holiday first started when a couple of guys were playing around talking like pirates, and they hit on the idea of naming September 19 (the birthday of the now-ex-wife of one of them) Talk Like A Pirate Day.

It was while celebrating this holiday that Jer and my other brother, fuego, got the inspiration for the cult classic short film Pirates of the White Sand.

I'm almost late in acknowledging this holiday, but if I don't get this post up by midnight, well … it's still not yet midnight in Samoa.

So hoist a tankard of grog, watch out for the F-117s, and say aaarrrhhh!

The Pony, part 2

The story continues

Now we get to the fun part of the assignment: starting an argument between the two characters. Here goes …

Steve was late getting home. First, there were those two customers who decided to buy exercisers at the last minute, and their orders had to be written up. Then he'd been called into Mr. Orvis' office for a private conference. And then there'd been that important business of getting Rachel's birthday present. That took even longer than he had thought it would.

At the sound of Steve's key rattling in the lock, Rachel jumped off the bed and ran to the front door. "Daddy! Did you get my pony?"

Steve tossed the Kay-Bee shopping bag onto the sofa next to Lisa and picked Rachel up. "Happy birthday, Princess. How've you been?"

"Where's my pony? You didn't forget?"

"Daddy would never forget his Princess' birthday, now, would he?" He put Rachel down and picked up the bag. "But you'll have to wait until after supper for your present."

"You didn't get my pony."

"Shut up," Emily said. "I can't hear the TV."

Steve started toward the master bedroom. Rachel followed. "You didn't get my pony!"

"Rachel, Princess, you know we can't get a pony unless Daddy gets a raise."

"You got the Nintendo for Lisa. You got the Barbie Dream House for Emily. You like them better than me."

"No, Princess, you know that's not true – "

"You hate me!"

"Wait a minute – "

"They get what they want. I want my pony!"

"Princess, I told you – "

"I want my pony! I hate you!" Rachel charged at Steve, pounding her fist into his stomach. Taken by surprise, he dropped the bag. As it bounced off the corner of the bed, it tipped over and a cardboard carton fell to the floor. Rachel turned and looked at it. About a foot wide and nine inches tall, it had a picture of a tan-and-white pony and the words "Misty of Chincoteague Gift Set."

Steve knelt down to face Rachel. "I know it's not a real pony. But it's a really pretty model, not a silly toy. And I can read to you from the book after supper. It was one of Mommy's favorite books when she was a little girl."

"No! I want a real pony!" Tears streamed down her face.

"Princess – "

Rachel picked up the box. "I hate it! I hate you! I hate Mommy!"

So fast that neither Steve nor Rachel saw it, Steve's hand snapped out and smacked across Rachel's face.

"I hate you!" Rachel flung the box at Steve's head. Steve ducked and the box glanced off the top of his head and hit the wall behind him. Rachel spun around and dashed out of the room. Steve heard the apartment door slamming and Rachel's feet thundering down the stairs.

Halfway down the stairs, Rachel came to a sudden halt. Daddy's car was parked in the fire lane, parallel to the curb, a small horse trailer hitched behind it.

The Pony

This is a gift for Harlean

Harlean says she wants a pony. I don't have the wherewithal to give her one. But I can give what I wrote for a writing exercise when I took an Honors English course in fantasy writing, taught by an author who was writing about vampires long before vampires were trendy.

This piece came about in stages. In the first stage, we students were to write a description of some random person whom we had seen somewhere, someone whom we did not know but whose image stuck in our minds for some reason. Then we were to imagine someone else who was in some way connected to this person. Then we were to imagine the thoughts that each person had about the other person. The final step was to create an argument between these two people.

It took me some time to find the things I had written, as I do not understand Pat's filing system. I took this course in the summer 1993 term, and I found a file drawer where Pat has stored a whole lot of stuff from 1986 through 1989, plus some stuff from 1998 through 1999. I actually had to move some furniture to get to the shelf where he has stored the material from about 1991 to about 1995. I still don't know where the 1989 through 1991 stuff is, nor the 1995 through 1998.

You can probably guess by now that these documents don't exist in an electronic form – they're all papyrus or dead-trees. In order to make this project available online, I'm going to have to type it in. As I do so, I will be making some changes, such as replacing brand names with generic terms, and I may do some editing for grammar, but otherwise I will reproduce the passages exactly, unless I make a typo, which I don't plan to do.

Character #1

He is clean-shaven with short – but not radically short – light brown hair. His face is boy-next-door handsome, wholesome, tanned, with just a trace of crows-feet beginning to show at the corners of the gray eyes. He is wearing a light blue polo shirt that's just tight enough to show that his pectorals and biceps are in great shape, and a pair of tan sweat pants that are so clean and pressed they look like casual slacks. He is showing a customer how to use one of the pieces of exercise equipment at the physical-fitness equipment store at the mall; he pauses briefly to squat down and greet the customer's little boy.

"That reminds me – I'd better get a birthday present for Rachel before I get home tonight. She's six already. Where did the time go? I wonder what I can get. She's asking for a pony – as usual – but Heaven knows we can't afford that. Maybe in a couple of years we can build that house in Cedar Crest that Beverley's dreaming of, and then we can get the pony. But for now, what does Daddy get for his princess? Some princess, actually .She hasn't worn a dress since she got out of diapers! She's not into dolls or dress-up, just keeps talking about that pony. I could get her a toy pony, I suppose. Or a book about a pony. When she was born, we said we'd get her lots of books, give her an 'enriched environment.' Some enrichment she got – two big sisters competing with her for space in that tiny bedroom. It will be nice when we can move someplace with a big yard, give them lots of room to be active in. I don't want to end up with three plump little couch potatoes for daughters. Maybe we can go the playground for a game of catch before the birthday party – Beverley always takes such a long time over the cake, getting it perfect."

Character #2

Rachel sits on the lower bunk, a large picture book open on her folded legs. Lisa and Emily are in the living room watching TV, so she has the room to herself. She has curly blond hair, cut as short as Mommy will allow, and Daddy's gray eyes. She is wearing a T-shirt with Smurfs on it (Lisa and Emily's hand-me-downs were always horribly cute) and orange denim shorts with a small hole in the seat. She has lost interest in the book and is gazing at the wall opposite, where she has taped up every single picture of horse, pony or donkey, from every single magazine Mommy and Daddy ever get.

"I wonder what Daddy's getting me for my birthday? Maybe a pony? Daddy and Mommy are always talking about not having enough money, and we'd better wait until we get a house in the country so we have room to keep a pony, but I bet that's just stories. When Daddy has a present for Mommy, he pretends he doesn't and lets her think he forgot and then surprise, he has the present anyways. I bet he's doing that with my pony. I wonder if he'll get home early tonight for my birthday? I love it when he comes home early because we can play ball. Lisa and Emily don't like to play ball with Daddy, but I do. When I make a good catch, he picks me up and gives me a big hug, and I like that, too. He smells so good, especially when he's hot. He's the best-smelling grown-up in the world."

Okay, so these are the characters. Stay tuned for the argument …

Unclear on the concept

Being well-meaning is good, but it's not enough …

Something that bugs me a whole lot is people who are all gung-ho about saving the planet (reducing our carbon footprint, saving energy, saving water, saving the whales, saving … whatever) but who don't really have a good idea how to go about all of that saving.

One of my pet peeves is the so-called "water-saving" toilets that flush themselves whenever they feel like it. How does it save water for a toilet to flush itself when flushing is not needed, especially when somebody is seated upon said toilet and isn't finished? And then, to make matters worse, once the person IS finished, there is often not a manual flush option, so matter that should be flushed goes unflushed. Don't the powers-that-be trust the general public to flush the toilet when a flush is needed? Just give us toilets that use very little water per flush; let us decide when to flush.

Many of the people who are most vocal about saving the planet are also not terribly well in tune with it. It seems they often come from urban or privileged suburban backgrounds, and they aren't so aware of the realities. One current example is a project called the WaterPod, in which a colony of artists is attempting to create a self-sustaining ecosystem on a barge. They found out it wasn't so easy as they thought it would be. "I kind of thought we'd just be able to float around," one crew member said. NOT! Gardening takes work, and so does maintaining a boat. It's not the Garden of Eden. On the other hand, if this crew learns from the experience, it will be A Good Thing.

One of the most horrible examples of "unclear on the concept" was the 20^th anniversary Earth Day celebration in New York City in 1990. Pat and I had been to a conference of Girl Scout leaders in upstate New York, and we had a weekend in the big city before returning home to Iowa and Minnesota and Kansas and Alaska and New Mexico. First, there was a parade. It consisted of a bunch of people dressed up in primitive costumes mostly depicting endangered species, with the occasional unicorn or mermaid thrown in, carrying banners saying things like "Save the Wales" (yes, that's how it was spelled, although the guys carrying that banner were wearing little other than some body paint that seemed to depict orcas). Yes, the participants in the parade had a lot of enthusiasm, but they really didn't seem to go much beyond trendy sayings. There was no meaning.

Worse was the rally in Central Park following the parade. Pat and I didn't know how awful it really was until after we got home and we saw the footage on the television news showing the bulldozers corralling the 600 tons of garbage that had been left in the park by the rally participants. Here we were, a group of people from an organization that abides by the saying, "Leave the campsite cleaner than you found it," and we were observing an event that was supposed to be about saving the planet, and the people participating in that event were completely clueless. We may have been just hicks from the sticks, but we were utterly aghast. I don't think that an Earth Day event in Iowa or Minnesota or Kansas or Alaska or New Mexico would have resulted in much trash to pick up at all – maybe if the trash cans or recycling bins got full, there would be some overflow.

Good intentions alone are not going to save the planet. The good intentions have to be backed up by good science and realistic expectations. Carrying a misspelled banner while wearing body paint to look like an orca is not going to save the orcas. Thinking that operating a self-sustaining ecosystem will be like the Garden of Eden is utterly unrealistic. Toilets that flush themselves when they don't need to be flushed will not save water. Holding a rally to promote ecological consciousness while producing 600 tons of trash is completely counter-productive.

The WaterPod people might perhaps learn from the EarthShip people. It's a similar concept – create an ecologically self-sustaining dwelling – and while it's in a different environment (the desert near Taos, New Mexico, as opposed to the water off New York City), many of the same principles apply. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the EarthShip was at a similar level of development as the WaterPod is today: idealistic people planning an idealistic way of living. Early on, the EarthShip had similar problems to the WaterPod, such as people discovering that idealism alone isn't enough to make a project successful; some hard work is involved as well, and there are hardships in the lifestyle that many modern Americans aren't willing to tolerate. The good news is that, with four decades' worth of improvements, the EarthShip has become a viable mode of living. Houses are spacious and comfortable, and improvements in technology have led to better solar and wind electricity generation, more efficient storage battery systems, and appliances that consume far less energy while providing greater convenience.

But even with all the improvements, EarthShips aren't for everyone. It's important to provide ways that people can contribute to the well-being of the planet without making a huge sacrifice, and without moving to the desert outside of Taos. Mainstream developers need to provide housing that people will buy that is also environmentally friendly. Artistic Homes is such a developer. People who buy in one of Artistic's green subdivisions have three options: a small photovoltaic system on the roof that provides for about a third of the house's electricity needs; a larger system that provides for all of the needs of an all-electric home; or, for those who prefer to use natural gas for heating and cooking, a yet larger photovoltaic system that provides more power than the house needs, with the surplus to be sold to the electric company to pay for the cost of the natural gas. All three options also have a direct-heat solar system for heating water. The idealists may scoff at such a conformist solution, especially one that is produced by a big-business developer, but the thing is, it's realistic and doable, and the only sacrifice people have to make is paying more for their homes – and that added cost is offset at least partially by tax incentives.

Meanwhile, people who already own homes and aren't looking to buy new ones can – if they have money – install solar or wind powered electrical generating systems. While it might be romantic to be "off the grid," being on the grid is actually an advantage nowadays, because a battery storage system becomes unnecessary. The way it works here in Albuquerque is typical – if a customer has a "cogeneration facility" (solar or wind power generation system), then when the customer is producing more power than the customer is consuming, the meter runs backward. If the customer consumes more than the customer feeds into the system, the customer is charged the retail price for the electricity. But if the customer generates more than is consumed, the power company pays the customer the wholesale price. Essentially, the customer becomes one of the providers of the product, and the power company resells it for the usual profit margin.

That's good for those people who have the wherewithal to install their own generating systems. The power company here in Albuquerque has proposed a way of allowing people with less money to get in on the action – the power company will lease space on the customer's roof for a photovoltaic system owned by the power company, and the power company will pay the customer rent for the rooftop plus a royalty based on how much the system produces beyond what the customer uses. At first glance, that looks good. The customer doesn't have to come up with the upfront cash to buy the system. However, in asking state regulators for permission to create this plan, the electric company has requested a tradeoff – that the electric company be allowed to regulate the number of customers with their own cogeneration facilities, and the size of those facilities. That's not good. We want to encourage cogeneration, not put caps on it. The question now is whether public outcry can sway the overtly corrupt regulators. This is where we need the fanatics – except they don't seem to understand the issue. They're just blindly opposed to anything the power company wants, and they don't produce any sound reasoning to back up their arguments.

Yes, we want to save the planet. Yes, we admire the idealists. But the actual saving of the planet is going to happen when sound thinking replaces fanatical and ignorant idealism. And sometimes, corporate America is an ally rather than an enemy.

But as far as I'm concerned, self-flushing toilets are always the enemy.

Avoiding the sandwich

Pat and I may have lucked out on this one …

Pat has headed to South Texas again to take care of the Old Soldier and various matters relating to his finances and medical care. He is dealing with messes both physical (the house is deteriorating, and the Old Soldier's live-in companion has not been keeping up with housework or taking out the trash or stuff like that) and figurative (unpaid bills, undeposited dividend checks, a large sum of money on the verge of being sent to the state Unclaimed Property office, mixups between the nursing home, doctors, Medicare and others). When he phoned tonight, I was arriving home and mentioned that I had just found a cat mess in the hallway; Pat assured me that he would much rather be cleaning up cat vomit than what he's having to clean up there.

Often, people in Pat's and my age range get classified as the "sandwich generation" – trapped between caring for our aging parents at the same time as we're caring for our own children. At least we seem to have dodged that bullet. Gerald is largely self-maintaining now; we sent him off to college last year, and this year, he moved into an off-campus apartment. Financially, he's better off than Pat and I are, thanks to a college fund that the Old Soldier started for him when he was 5. He still has to be frugal if the money is to last for four years, so he shops at thrift shops for clothing and furnishings for the apartment, and he also got a part-time job – but he is not a financial drain on us. And he's independent enough that he doesn't need his parental units taking care of his every little problem.

Others in the blogosphere have recently written about their offspring's milestones of independence, often wistfully. Tillerman has just seen the second of his two sons get married, while Yarg ensconced his son in the son's first apartment. There are interesting resonances especially with Yarg, involving not only the same milestone as Gerald's, but also architecture (Gerald's original intended major) and Frank Lloyd Wright (a major presence in Tempe/Scottsdale and part of why Gerald chose architecture as a major and ASU for college). Gerald has since decided to switch majors from architecture to photography, but there are still the parallels.

Meanwhile, I don't seem to be feeling the same sense of loss as other parents watching the fledglings leave the nest. Maybe it's because Gerald's always been independent, and we've always encouraged that. He's been doing his own laundry since he was in middle school; he's always enjoyed cooking; the state of cleanliness (or lack thereof) of his room was pretty much his own business. His last year of high school, he wasn't home all that much, with Boy Scouts (after he turned 18, he became an Assistant Scoutmaster), the Albuquerque Youth Orchestra, Key Club, his German class trip to Germany, his We The People team trip to the national finals in Washington … so when he went off to college, there wasn't much of a change.

Instead, I'm actually feeling relief. As Pat and I – especially Pat – deal with the increasing needs of the Old Soldier, it's good to know that Gerald, rather than being an additional drain on us, is actually a support. During his summer break, he traveled to South Texas along with Pat to help take care of the Old Soldier.

Meanwhile, Gerald turns 20 in 12 days. What should Pat and I get him for his birthday?

Coincidence?

Or is this a new sort of political information gathering?

Here in Albuquerque, the race for mayor is on, with two challengers hoping to unseat the incumbent mayor. He, in turn, waited until the last minute to declare his official candidacy, turning in his paperwork late on the last day before the deadline.

When he finally did declare his candidacy, he opened an office in a small strip mall just around the corner from Gerald's old high school. The building is new, but it was completed just in time for the economic downturn, so it's nearly empty. There's only one other tenant – a psychic offering tarot and palm readings, among other services.

Review: The Art of Spelling

A book that is both fun and useful, depending on who you are

Normally, I cringe when I see Pat browsing the bookshelves in a thrift shop. We already have far more books than we have shelf space for, and he inevitably brings home a few more.

The Art of Spelling: The Madness and the Method, by Marilyn vos Savant, which Pat picked up for two bucks, is an exception. First, it’s nice and small, so it doesn’t take up much of the precious shelf space. Second, the value of the information it contains is huge.

The first two-thirds of the book (“The Madness”) is an analysis of spelling – its importance, characteristics of good and bad spellers (less intelligent people are generally poor spellers, but poor spellers are not usually less intelligent), psycholinguistic processes involved in spelling, and why English ended up being the most infuriatingly inconsistent language to try to spell. The second section (“The Method”) has a more practical orientation: It gives the reader specific analysis and strategies to help the reader develop a customized method to deal with his or her own spelling bugaboos.

The first section of the book will appeal to scholars, word-lovers, history buffs, amateur psychologists, and the like. Vos Savant has put together some very good research with a few interviews with primary sources, and she presents the material in a light-hearted way that makes for more entertaining reading than the typical scholarly tome.

It’s the second section, however, that I find most useful. For ages, I have been searching for something that will be useful for those of my students who have trouble spelling (and thanks to spelling-checkers, that number is growing). These students are classified as “developmental,” although I prefer to think of them as “pre-college” – that is, they do not yet have the writing skills to succeed in college-level courses, so they’re working on developing those skills. These students are not helped by advice to “read lots and lots, because the more you read, the more you will learn how words are supposed to be spelled.” Yes, children who grow up amid great heaps of books and who therefore read a lot for pleasure will assimilate good spelling. That doesn’t help a high-school dropout who never associated reading with pleasure and who now has no time for recreational reading because she’s working two jobs to support her 3-year-old daughter and pay the rent while also attending college.

Another method of dealing with spelling is to bombard the student with a gigantic heap of “rules,” most of which aren’t really rules anyway – they’re just descriptions of how, in most cases, words operate. Not only are these rules overwhelming; because they are simply telling how spelling operates most of the time, they don’t cover all situations. A student who blindly follows such rules (assuming he can remember them all) will make mistakes.

One more piece of advice I often see about spelling is just simply to memorize and memorize and memorize. That may work for a 13-year-old spelling bee champion (although such a champion does learn shortcuts to cut down the required memorization). Rote memorization separates words from their meanings, while my students need to learn to spell words within a living paragraph, the words’ natural habitat.

For a short time, I had found a Website that gave good spelling advice, in a way that was helpful, accurate, and non-overwhelming. Unfortunately, that site was only available for about two semesters, and then it disappeared – no forwarding address. I Googled the site’s author to see whether she might show up somewhere else, but I came up dry. I was left with whatever advice was in the grammar text my community college’s department was using in a particular term (ranging from generally inadequate to totally inadequate) and my own advice (mostly inadequate).

Now, I have discovered this book, published nearly a decade ago, that in its second section deals with spelling in a way that, except for a couple of forays into erudition, is exactly what my students need. The first section of the book, with all of its scholarly stuff, will go way over their heads for the time being – but if they can get through the pre-college work and into college studies, they’ll be able to get it eventually. What’s valuable for them right now is the practical stuff in the second part of the book.

In that part of the book, vos Savant provides a couple of diagnostic tests that will allow a student to find a pattern in his or her spelling errors. This diagnosis is hugely useful: I often find that a student with poor spelling says, “I can’t spell anything right; I’m hopeless.” But what’s really the case is that the student has problems only with one or two issues, such as unaccented vowels or doubled consonants. Because the student has usually run his work through a spelling checker, I can’t always tell what that student’s error pattern is – all of the words in his essay are correctly spelled; they’re just not the right words. If the student knows what his particular spelling issues are, then when he’s proofreading (which he should do BEFORE running the spelling checker), he can look primarily for those particular problems.

In addition, vos Savant gives advice for dealing with each particular spelling problem. Once a student knows that her spelling problems deal with apostrophes, she can learn the relatively short list of rules about apostrophes, and she’s home free.

Another issue that vos Savant deals with is different learning styles. Something that works for a student with an auditory learning style may be totally useless for a student with a motor learning style. So vos Savant will recommend that a student with a motor learning style write a word (both with a pen and on a computer) repeatedly to embed the shape of the word in the student’s motor memory, while for an auditory student, she will recommend pronouncing the word carefully and hearing how its sounds reflect its spelling.

Now I have some tools that I can give to my students to help them with their spelling. Thank you, MvS.

Magic Uncles revisited

Although, it turns out, I haven’t really visited them in the first place …

Many years ago, when I was first venturing out into the blogosphere, I had written a bit about Magic Uncles. I thought I had written a post about them, but a search of my archives turns up nothing; instead, what I wrote was a comment on Muddled Ramblings.

At the time, Jer, on his epic road trip, was visiting an old high-school friend who had married, settled down, and produced multiple offspring, and these offspring were totally excited by this stranger who had rolled into their lives, in a cool car, bringing a change of routine and representing something other than safe, ordinary, ho-hum life as usual.

I use the term “Magic Uncle” to describe this sort of relationship – the person doesn’t actually have to be an uncle, and, as in Jer’s case, may not even be a relative. A Magic Uncle is a relative or friend of the family, and his role is to bring fun and interest to the kids’ lives. He is single and childless, generally not tied down in any serious way, and he typically drives a fun car. Because he’s not fully embedded in adult life, the kids perceive him as being more like them and less like the (much too stuffy) parents. Every kid should have one.

When I was a kid, my Magic Uncle was Dupes, who can be seen at (Enter Title Here) doing something strange involving a cheese puff. He was my mom’s cousin, who had come to live with my grandparents when his home situation went bad. He was single, and he was a younger than my mom. He had recently finished a tour of duty in the Navy, and he drove a Mustang Mach 3. On the Fourth of July, he was the one who got the fireworks and then shot them off the end of the boat dock at the lake house. He was always joking and goofing around. He got married when I was in high school, but as you can see from the photo on Gerald’s blog, he never completely outgrew the silly stuff.

Captain JP has recently made some comments that lead me to believe he’s a Magic Uncle – in his case, literally. That is, literally an uncle, not necessarily literally magic. I don’t know that he’s brought any tree seeds home from Narnia. He often mentions his nieces and nephews, especially in the context of borrowing a couple of them to participate in some fun activity or other. As best as I can tell, he’s single. I don’t know what sort of car he drives, but a cool car is merely a plus and not a defining factor; Dupes continued to be a Magic Uncle even after totaling the Mach 3.

I had thought about inviting Captain JP to bring along a few nieces and nephews to enjoy the Five O’Clock Somewhere Experience. I figured he could have the elegant guest room, and they could have the one with the train set. But then, he took dibs on the room with train set. Now, that’s a defining factor of a Magic Uncle – still not too grown up to enjoy some good toys.

The Five O’Clock Somewhere Experience

If you want to experience this place in Real Life, what can you expect?

Captain JP, on his blog, has issued a writing challenge. He has made the observation that, for example, the music industry nowadays is not making much money off music sales, but rather, it's generating revenue with concerts and other live experiences. So he has challenged his fellow bloggers to describe the experience that someone could have with a live experience of their blogs.

Pat and I had already thought a bit about the idea. We're seriously strapped for cash at the moment, and we briefly considered making the place available as a vacation rental – there's a real-estate agent who lives nearby who would handle all the paperwork and stuff. At least for the time being, we've decided that the work involved in making Five O'Clock Somewhere into a vacation rental would be too much hassle; we'd have to remove a lot of our personal stuff and lock up the rest, and we'd have to do a whole lot of cleaning. Still, if our financial picture gets worse, I'd rather convert the place to a vacation rental (which we could still use ourselves when nobody's renting it) than lose it.

Since we haven't converted Five O'Clock Somewhere to a vacation rental, I'm going to base this experience on the premise that you're houseguests there, but if we do make the conversion, many of the experiences will be the same.

First, if you're electronically tuned-in, be prepared for communications deprivation. There is no high-speed Internet, only dial-up that is extremely slow because it's delivered over a noisy rural phone line. There is no cell-phone signal. There is no television – broadcast signals don't reach into the mountains, cable doesn't go there, and we don't have satellite. There is a land-line telephone capable of local calls and 800 numbers but not long distance, so if you want to call beyond the Chama area, you need to have a calling card. If you really need to leave the office behind, Five O'Clock Somewhere is the perfect place for you, because no matter how hard they try, the folks at the office won't be able to rope you in.

Next, you need to be prepared for some other areas in which life is more primitive. Electricity is not all that reliable, at least compared to 21^st-century cities. The electric co-op does an excellent job, given that it has to cover thousands of square miles, with lots of hazards (dense stands of diseased trees, large birds building nests on power poles, and so forth) that city and suburban power companies don't have to deal with – and the co-op provides its power at about half the price that the city power company charges. Flashlights and matches are in the bottom drawer in the column of drawers below the kitchen telephone, an oil lamp is on the dining table, and candles are all over the place, including the dining room, living room, and all bathrooms. My favorite sort of power outage is the kind that happens during a thunderstorm at night or in the evening. The lightning flashes with almost x-ray blueness, and the thunder either bangs (if the lightning is really close), roars (if it's farther), or rolls (if it's farther still). The wind whips around the house, making blasts through whatever windows are open, sometimes from one direction, sometimes from another, and always it brings an iron-tinged freshness wherever it comes from. The rain comes down, sometimes just a few spitting drops, and sometimes a heavy torrent. And sometimes it's what the Navajos call the "female rain," a steady rain that just flows for a long time. The smell of the rain, the smell of water, is so fresh and clean, and no matter what advertising and promotional moguls may say, this smell has never been captured in a fabric softener or air freshener. If you really want your laundry to smell this way, the only way to do it is to hang it up on a clothesline just before a mountain thundershower hits.

Another thing you'll have to cope with is the fact that you're many miles from anywhere. If you're missing something, you can't just run down to the corner convenience store. The nearest convenience store is 16 miles away, and it closes at 10 p.m. The nearest Wal-Mart is 70 miles away. I do keep a supply of toothbrushes and trial-sizes of toothpaste, deodorant, shampoo, and various other toiletry items in the cabinet in the guest bathroom, in case you've forgotten something. I also have some luxury spa-type bath supplies, so if you want more than just a quick shower, you can have an experience. The water at Five O'Clock Somewhere is full of the sort of minerals that people pay big bucks to take a bath in, and we even have a Jacuzzi tub to maximize the experience.

And then you'll have to put up with the critters. On the road into Laguna Vista, you may sometimes find that the cattle from the adjacent ranch, primarily Scottish Longhorns, have gotten out of their pastures and are wandering along the road. They don't move particularly fast, and if you honk your horn at them, they move even slower – unless you're dealing with a bull, who may decide he doesn't like the sound your car is making and take decisive action. Your best bet is simply to crawl along, until the cattle eventually meander to the side of the road, and admire their woolly primitiveness. You will also have to deal with elk (they don't move as slowly as cattle, but they do seem to like to block the road), deer (ubiquitous; a day when you don't see deer is rare), coyotes (I've never understood why many people don't like the howling), bobcats (beautiful but elusive), bears (NOT sweet, and a lot of idiots who have treated them as such have caused a lot of bears to get euthanized because the bears got to treating humans as sources of food, and in a bear brain, a source of food is the same thing as food, so the bears tried to eat the well-meaning humans.) So at Five O'Clock Somewhere, you're going to have to tolerate the wildlife, and you're going to have to make sure not to feed the bears, or even leave any food around that the bears could eat. The best way to deal with the wildlife is to have a camera always at hand – I really wish that I could have gotten pictures of the mama bobcat and her two kittens a couple of years ago as they passed through the backyard.

I see that, so far, I have mostly been dealing with what's outside Five O'Clock Somewhere. I suppose I ought also to touch on what's inside. In real-estate terminology, we're a 4-3. That is, we have four bedrooms and three bathrooms. We have a dining room, a living room, and a den, with a relatively open floor plan. Without any strain whatsoever, we can accommodate six guests, and with some stretches, we can find sleeping room for about four more. In the living room, we have an entertainment center, with Dolby 5.1 surround sound. Yeah, we may not have cable or satellite, but if you want to watch a DVD movie (we have lots, or you can bring your own, or you can rent one in Chama), you can get the full experience. We have a full-scale gourmet kitchen, with lots of appliances, gadgets, and widgets; if you're into fancy cooking, you can have a ball. We have music – we have a baby grand piano in the den, and some smaller things like recorders. If you have a violin or cello, I can crack the rust out of my fingers to play along. We have a game table (I've re-covered my grandparents' old card table with indigo velvet), and we have a variety of parlor games, from the standbys like Mille Bornes and Monopoly, through the more involved like Risk, to cult favorites like Illuminati and Kingmaker.

And if you just plain don't want to do anything, that's OK too. In the warmer time of the year, you can hang out on the front deck and watch the world go by. In winter, you can relax in front of the fireplace in the den, and you can doze to your heart's content.

All these gypsies

Sometimes, it may work best to declare a writing project after there are already entries …

I noticed an interesting phenomenon earlier today when I was wandering the blogosphere. Over at Messing About in Sailboats, Adam has posted a peaceful picture, Gig Harbor Morning, focusing on a boat named “Gypsy.” Then, over on frogma, Bonnie posted a video clip from the musical Gypsy.

I’m spotting a pattern here. If everybody’s posting things about gypsies, I might as well do so too. Here’s a picture of the Hunter 25 Gypsy Soul, sailed by Magnum, Mrs. Magnum, and Brother of Magnum in the 2005 Sunrise Regatta at Elephant Butte Lake.

A small anniversary party

And, it turns out, a small world

On August 22, 1959, Barbara Lee Teague, of Arkadelphia, Arkansas, wed Philip Anthony Seeger, of El Paso, Texas, in a ceremony in the First Methodist Church in Arkadelphia. That means that, this past Saturday, my parents marked 50 years of life together, and they're still going strong.

Because of a conflict that I just couldn't get out of, Pat and I missed the celebration they had on the eclipse-watching cruise in the Pacific. They had a reception Sunday after church in Los Alamos, for people who weren't able to join the cruise. I missed that one as well – I wasn't feeling so great, and I wasn't up to mingling with a large crowd of people. However, after that event, there was a much smaller gathering at their house, and that was a speed that I could cope with. Besides Pat and myself, the other guests were my uncle and his wife, who have lived in Boston for a long time – she, nearly all her life, and he, since college days – and the neighbors who lived across the street from my parents for decades – both of whom hail from Boston.

At some point the conversation came around to sailing and sailboats – we had mentioned we had a boat for sale, and then we had to explain that we were selling the MacGregor but that we had an Etchells that we were definitely keeping. The folks from Boston understood, and we ended up showing pictures of Black Magic and talking about sailing. The conversation wandered back into the past, and we discovered that all four Bostonians had at least a passing acquaintance with sailing, especially dinghies. One had raced Widgeons as a girl; one had been on some sort of dinghy that she couldn't remember what was because the people at summer camp, year after year, made her tie knots that she didn't understand before she could get on the boat. Two had sailed MIT Tech Dinghies – probably about the same time as each other, although they don't remember each other; if they were actually there at the same time, they had no way of knowing that one would someday become the neighbor and best friend of the other's kid brother.

Of course, sailing wasn't the only topic of conversation; we were, after all, celebrating two people who have kept together, through thick and thin, etc, etc, etc, for a half century. That's worth a toast.

Happy 50^th anniversary, Mom and Dad.

Texas vegetable barons

A new sort of hero for a new age

A few days ago, I had mentioned to Bonnie of frogma that Pat had come from a background of Texas vegetable barons. To be more specific, the Old Soldier had been the son of an entrepreneur who had been a pioneer in the early days of truck farming.

In the early part of the 20^th century, land developers enticed people to come to such barren and remote places as the southern tip of Texas, with promises that the land and the climate were close to what Eden had originally offered – eternally warm temperatures, fertile topsoil, and, the developers promised, easy ways of shipping the abundant produce to the frigid North.

In the beginning, it wasn't that easy. The topsoil, it turned out, wasn't all that great. The climate that encouraged plants to grow also encouraged a lot of insects and blight. And the ability to ship vegetables north was not so great at first; it took a while for the railroads to establish reliable lines, and trucks, despite the term "truck farming" being used to describe what the farmers in South Texas were doing, just plain weren't there.

Bonnie, at frogma, has suggested that I write a story or maybe even a novel about the Texas vegetable barons. That might be possible. In Pat's family, there have been incidents that would lend themselves to the broad tapestry of a historical novel, and some other situations that involve personal drama on an individual level. I would certainly have to change a lot of details in order to protect members of the family, but the overall story line would be engaging.

In the past, dramas from Texas have involved oil (Dallas) or cattle (Lonesome Dove). Those industries are not currently in favor, given America's current over-dependence on fossil fuels and obesity epidemic. Perhaps a drama about vegetable barons would be more politically correct.

A new Olympic sport

And it will increase spectator interest, too

Conan O'Brien Tuesday evening was a rerun, but I hadn't seen the full show before – I'd stuck around for the monologue last time, but missed the rest. This time, I watched the whole thing, including the final act, which was a performance by the world champion pole dancer, supported by some of her cast-mates from Cirque de Soleil, Zumanitye.

It was an awesome performance, impressively athletic as well as stunningly beautiful. This lady is nimble, strong, graceful, and very, very sexy. She wasn't simply shimmying against the pole; she was climbing it, bending around it at seemingly impossible angles, and even vaulting up onto it, twelve feet in the air.

As I was watching, it occurred to me: This should be an Olympic sport. The latest decisions by the Olympic powers-that-be have shortchanged women's sailing, but this could be a venue where women can expand their influence. Pole dancing is certainly more athletic than, say, rhythmic gymnastics or ice dancing. It combines the rhythm of music with the athleticism and gracefulness that are valued in traditional gymnastics. And a pole is a lot more substantial than those silly hoops or ribbon-on-a-stick thingies.

Plus, with the changes in the past couple of decades that have allowed professional athletes to compete in the Olympics, pole dancing opens the games up to a really broad spectrum of new talents who otherwise would be relegated to obscurity. What more could anyone want?

Playing for Change

Yeah, I know I said I don't fall for "inspiring" messages, but this one was truly inspiring – without the quote marks

A few months ago, Adam Turinas put up a video on his blog. I was lucky enough to have a high-speed Internet connection that weekend, and so I was able to view it. The song was "Stand By Me," and it was produced by a project called Playing for Change.

The video features dozens of musicians, mostly street performers, but some other groups as well, intercut with each other, all performing seamlessly together, in spite of being thousands of miles apart, from Santa Monica to New Orleans to Amsterdam to Moscow to Congo to Katmandu, and even a group of Native American drummers from Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico. The power of this video is that so many people, from so many different places on Earth, could produce music in harmony without even meeting each other. That's how unifying music is.

The project's name operates on multiple levels. Sure, playing for change is what street musicians do – they rely on the change that passersby toss into their hat or instrument case. But this project is also looking at changing the world, as the title of the program that I watched Monday evening on my local PBS affiliate indicates: "Playing for Change: Peace Through Music."

The program showed how music can be a unifying and healing force in such places as Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine. It can be a motivation for change in places like South Africa. It brings people together, and it does so in a way that transcends language or religion or ethnicity.

In the early 1980s, there was a trend toward using music to help disadvantaged people, starting with Live Aid's "We Are The World," and continuing with several other such projects, such as Farm Aid. But those projects, while they gained a whole lot of attention for a short while, didn't really have any lasting impact. They were started by celebrities, run by celebrities, very glitzy, and they just didn't have the to-the-gut honesty that Playing for Change has. Live Aid doesn't have Grandpa Elliott, a street musician in New Orleans who lost not only his home but his whole neighborhood to Hurricane Katrina but who has no thought of leaving – as he puts it, not even a "bulldoozer" can take him away.

I am not on a high-speed connection at the moment, so I can't embed the video in this post, but I can give you a link to "Stand By Me." Watch it.

Annoying “inspirational” messages

There are some venues that should be off limits …

I tend to distrust optimism. I have found that, in most cases, it is unrealistic. I can listen to a motivational speech by, say, Zig Ziglar, and I can understand how his energy and enthusiasm can inspire people to try harder. But I'm not one of those people. In the 1980s, Bobby McFerrin had a number-one hit telling people, "Don't Worry, Be Happy." I just couldn't buy in.

I tend more to favor the cynical view. I don't think that just thinking happy thoughts is going to make the rest of my life turn happy. And while, maybe, some positive thoughts are going to be positive for my performance, whether at work or at sailing, I don't think that they're going to have all that great of an influence, as compared to actually working at it.

I tend more to agree with such sites as Despair.com, which point out the absurdity of the usual optimistic platitudes. One of my favorite sayings is, "The light at the end of the tunnel is really the headlamp of an oncoming train." Another is, "The early bird gets the worm, but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese."

Meanwhile, I have recently been attacked with motivational messages from a quarter that I would have thought sacred – the wrappers on my feminine-hygiene products.

This is a brand that I believe in; the products are superior to any others. The new product line, labeled "sport," is even better in terms of comfort and performance. However, because of the "sport" label, the manufacturer decided to put motivational slogans on the wrappers. So several times a day, I get a message such as "You go girl!" or "Keep your head in the game!"

This evening, I got one that is an insult to race committees – it assumes that either the race committee didn't set a square course or that there was a big wind shift during the race: "Reach for the finish line!"

What I missed

I wish I could have been there, but …

Two weeks ago, most of my family was on a ship in the Pacific Ocean near Iwo Jima to observe a solar eclipse. I, alas, was unable to be there, but I did get to watch things get dark via the ship's webcams.

Many of my relatives have super-duper fancy digital cameras, so I was expecting I would get to see some awesome photos. That was indeed the case. The very best photos, according to the acclamation of those who went on the trip, were those taken by my own offspring, Gerald.

Here is a shot that he got during the totality of the eclipse. What's spectacular about it is the detail of the moon's surface that can be seen. Obviously, the side of the moon that faces the earth is not getting direct sunlight, since the sun is behind it. Instead, sunlight reflecting off the earth is illuminating the moon, a phenomenon known as earthshine.

Mafia mosquitoes

All right, who's hiring the thugs?

Here in the desert, we don't have many mosquitoes, but we have a few, especially when the summer monsoons are underway. Right now, we have a break in the monsoon pattern, but we still apparently have a couple of the critters buzzing around.

A couple of nights ago, I had a cluster of mosquito bites on my left kneecap. The itching was vicious until I could get to the hydrocortisone cream. This evening, I had a cluster of bites on my right kneecap.

Why the heck should mosquitoes target my kneecaps? Is that the place where the blood flow just beneath the skin is easiest to suck up? Or is it just that a pants leg against a kneecap is easier to bite through? Or … what?

All I can figure is some inept mob boss with a very low budget has it in for me, and the best he can afford to hire to kneecap me is a bunch of mosquitoes.

Writing project final results (sort of)

Still awaiting a couple of late entries …

So here is the final tally of the Getting the spouse to come along writing project: We have a total of 208 activities in seven locations, listed in ten blog posts or comments, submitted by seven contributors.

Tillerman gives us 50 great things to do in and around Tiverton, Rhode Island. From Captain JP, we have 50 activities on the Ultimate London Walk by the Thames, and another nine activities involving Escaping London, in London. Greg and Kris describe eight Things to do near the Sailing Club on the Willamette.

O Docker provides Two things to Do In San Francisco To Keep Your Spouse Sailing

Another non-blogger just mentioned that there are a zillion non-sailing things to do in San Francisco. I'm writing about just two, so that should leave him plenty of choices.

I have to come up with non-sailing activities almost every time I sail. My wife sails to humor me, not because she's awestruck by the sheer wonderfulness of a rushing wake and perfectly trimmed jib.

Two weeks ago, we sailed over to one of San Francisco's swankiest marinas and parked the boat there for five days. We decided to do some touristy things that no hip San Francisco native would be caught dead doing. I can get away with this because I'm from a backward, cow-town in the central valley and don't know any better.

We now have some folding bikes that we can take on the boat, so one day we rode them over the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito.

It's actually very cool that one of the world's most spectacular bridges is open to foot and bicycle traffic. Besides seeing the bridge's famous art deco structure way better than you can driving across, you also get to stop and check out some of the most astounding marine views anywhere - the Marin headlands, Angel Island, Alcatraz, the Bay Bridge, and the classic city front. And it's all for free, if you ride your bike or hike across. We went for the full tourist drill and took the ferry back - about $8. Sausalito is a great lunch stop and it's rumored you can find some tee shirts there, too, if you're into that.

The next day, it was tourist time all over again. After 30 years in northern California, I prayed I wouldn't run into anyone I knew and finally took the boat tour over to Alcatraz (they won't let you dock a private boat there). It's much cooler than I ever thought it would be, and we were both glad we went. Alcatraz is now a national park, so the tour is actually very well done - not nearly as hokey as it would be if a commercial outfit ran things. There's a lot of history there beyond the obvious and you're surrounded by more spectacular bay views at every turn. If you must have a sailing connection, you can check out one of the oldest lighthouses in the bay - and it's still functioning.

But face it, haven't you always wanted to be in the actual dining hall where Clint Eastwood and Burt Lancaster pounded their tin cups on the tables?

Behave yourself, though. The tear gas canisters are still hanging from the ceiling.

I gave my own 25 Things to do in Sierra County, near Elephant Butte Lake, and Pat responded with 14 more ideas in the comments. For Heron Lake, I listed 25 Things to do in (or near) Northern Rio Arriba County; Pat added 12 new ideas and repeated one of mine (I'm not counting that one). Finally, Cousin Andrew lists 33 activities in Little Rock on his blog, Beer and Trucks.

Even though the deadline has officially passed, I'm still awaiting contributions to this project from jbushkey and EVK4. Other latecomers can still submit ideas as well. All contributors get a pint of their choice next time they come to New Mexico, plus if multiple contributors show up at once, there's a chance at a VIP screening of "Pirates of the White Sand."

Things to do in (or near) Northern Rio Arriba County

In New Mexico, we're not just about desert

Since I sail in two different primary venues, that means I have two different areas to promote. In the previous blog post, I covered 25 things to do in Sierra County, near Elephant Butte Lake, and now it's time to cover things to do in Northern Rio Arriba County, near Heron Lake. Since the lake is practically on the Colorado border, some of these adventures go beyond the county, but they're all close enough to the lake to take as a day trip.

1. Get a feel for the region with a visit to the Ghost Ranch Piedra Lumbre Education and Visitor Center, outside Abiquiu. While the center no longer has the live native animals that it had back when it was a living museum, it still has exhibits on the geology, ecology, history, and culture of the region.
   
2. Visit the Rio Arriba County Courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, where you can still see bullet marks in the walls from the raid led on the courthouse by civil-rights activist Reies López Tijerina in 1967.
   
3. Take a whitewater rafting tour down the Rio Chama Wild and Scenic River. Plan to get wet and also to see spectacular canyon scenery as the river plunges between colorful sandstone canyon walls.
   
4. Hit the Central United Methodist and Humane Society thrift shops in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. The Methodists are especially good for clothing, while the Humane Society is big on furniture, appliances, and housewares. Both carry a substantial selection of books.
   
5. Take a hot mineral bath in Pagosa Springs. As in Truth or Consequences, there are a variety of prices and styles of baths available.
   
6. Go lake fishing. Because of its high altitude, Heron Lake abounds in cold-water fish that don't usually live this far south, such as lake trout and kokanee salmon. Fish from the bank, bring your own boat (taking precautions against mussels, of course), or hire a guide. Clients of our favorite, Don Wolfley of Stone House Lodge, regularly show up in the "Catches of the Week" section of the Albuquerque Journal's fishing reports.
   
7. Take a ride on the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railroad. This narrow-gauge train takes all day to cover 63 miles of twisting track that crosses the New Mexico-Colorado state line 11 times along the way while carrying passengers through spectacular scenery that can't bee seen from the highway. The fall colors are especially awesome at the end of September and the beginning of October (exactly when the trees turn depends on the weather each year).
   
8. Go for a retreat at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert. This community of Benedictines believes in simplicity and quiet. Visitors don't have to be Catholic; they should, however, be interested in peace and solitude for meditative thought. If you don't want to drive 13 miles down a dirt road to get there, but you want to experience some of the calm, you can buy the monks' CD of Gregorian chants in many gift shops in the area. Their Monks' Ale (yes, they have a microbrewery) is also available at many supermarkets and liquor stores in New Mexico.
   
9. Visit Wolf Creek Pass, way up on the Great Divide. Just be sure, if you happen to have a truckload of Rhode Island Reds, that you haven't stacked them taller than the snow sheds on the other side, and check to see that your brakes work.
   
10. In late summer, attend Chama Days, the village's annual fiesta. It's a small-town fair with a Northern New Mexico flair; the parade includes units from a dozen different area volunteer fire departments, as well as some super-decked-out lowriders.
    
11. Speaking of lowriders, Española bills itself as the lowrider capital of the world. In July, as part of the Española Fiesta, you can attend a lowrider rally, with hundreds of stunning vehicles.
    
12. Go fly fishing in the Rio Chama, the Rio de los Brazos, or many other smaller local streams. It's more challenging than fishing in a lake, but for fly-fishermen, I've noticed it's the art of casting and outwitting the fish that keeps them happy.
    
13. Dine at the High Country Restaurant and Saloon. This is the finest eatery in Northern Rio Arriba County, where people go for special occasions. The food is great, and prices are reasonable. The bar stocks a good array of micro-brews on tap. Sunday brunch is an event, with a buffet, plus an egg station where the chef will construct a custom omelet or cook up your eggs exactly the way you want them – even over-easy.
    
14. During holiday season, take a drive through the village of Los Ojos, where on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, the streets are lined with luminarias, a Northern New Mexico holiday tradition. Originally, small bonfires were lit along the road to light the way for the Christ Child; the bonfires have been replaced by votive candles in paper bags. On a windy night, it's definitely a labor of love to keep those candles lit.
    
15. Shop at the Chama Valley Supermarket. In early 2008, the old market's roof caved in under a heavy snow load; the rebuilt market is bigger and better, but it still keeps the needs of a small, rural, mountain community in mind. It carries a little bit of everything, from staples for low-income locals to gourmet fare for tourists who arrive in quarter-million-dollar RVs; from gardening supplies to tractors; from gourmet cat food to cattle feed; from toasters to entertainment centers.
    
16. Take a hike. The Friends of Heron and El Vado State Parks have been working on a trail around Heron Lake, plus there are trails on Forest Service land all over the area.
    
17. Go birdwatching. In one of the great conservation success stories, the osprey has made a recovery to the extent that there are several nesting pairs who return to Heron Lake every summer to raise their young, plus a few other pairs elsewhere in the region. In early July, the state park sponsors an Osprey Fest to celebrate the birds. But osprey aren't the only birds in the region worth watching; visitors to the park have a chance of seeing everything from broad-tailed hummingbirds to bald eagles.
    
18. Eat at Cookin' Books. No, this isn't an accounting firm; it's an eatery that serves a variety of creative deli-type foods, and it's also a bookstore that carries a fairly specialized selection of works by local authors, literary fare, and books with a spiritual theme. If the soup of the day is Hungarian mushroom, you're in for a treat.
    
19. Volunteer at the Chama Valley Humane Society. As is typical of small-town humane organizations, these folks could always use more help. If you can walk a dog or socialize kittens (also known as playing with them), the Humane Society can use your help. If you don't have time to spare, they could also use donations of money.
    
20. Go camping or RVing. In Chama, you can find a full-service RV park that is the northernmost member of the Texas Association of Campground Owners (Texas counts New Mexico as "Region 8"), as well as several others. If you're on a lower budget and/or don't need so many amenities, both Heron Lake and El Vado Lake state parks offer camping sites with full hookups for $14 a night and primitive sites for $10 a night.
    
21. Attend community events at Shroyer Center. About once a month (more often during the summer), there will be a breakfast or a dinner or an ice cream social or a chili cook-off or … something. Shroyer Center is the community center for the Laguna Vista community, and most of the events are fund-raisers for the center itself or the Laguna Vista Volunteer Fire Department. These events have two foci – food and fellowship. While Laguna Vista is a gated community, it's pretty easy to get invited in as a guest, especially if you mention to one of the real-estate agents who live there that you might be interested in buying a vacation property. Of course, if you're a friend of mine and Pat's, there's no problem on that front.
    
22. Go hunting. Pat and I don't hunt, but we have friends who do, and they say that this end of Rio Arriba County has some awesome game to shoot at – we have colossal elk, lots of deer, turkeys, and a lot of other game. Hunting is not allowed in Laguna Vista (unless you're a mountain lion) or in the state parks, and on the Jicarilla Apache reservation it's allowed only if you hire a guide and pay big bucks (the advantage is that these guides are really good), but there are other lands, both public and private, where it's easier to get permission to hunt.
    
23. Go off-roading on the backside of El Vado Lake. According to Gerald, it's hard to get to, there's nobody there, and it's fun. Plus there are great views at less cost than $600,000.
    
24. Paddle a kayak around Heron Lake. If there's not enough wind to go sailing, a kayak is just about the best way to get around. Heron is a no-wake lake, meaning that motorboats aren't allowed to go any faster than trolling speed. The upshot is that it's very quiet – everybody there is sailing, fishing, or paddling.
    
25. Come to Five O'Clock Somewhere, where you can take a bath in the Jacuzzi tub (our well water is full of the same minerals that Pagosa Springs has), and finish the day with cocktails on the deck, which, like Tillerman's, is on the front of the house and faces the lake.
    

So there you have it: things to do near Five O'Clock Somewhere. You still have a few hours to make your own contribution to the project by writing about non-sailing activities near wherever it is that you sail … until midnight tonight (Samoa time).

Things to do in Sierra County

I'm about to miss my own deadline, so I'd better get cracking

In my How to get the spouse to come along writing project, I have challenged readers to come up with lists of things besides sailing that can be done near their home sailing venues, so sailors' non-sailing travel companions have something to do, and so sailors themselves can have something to do when the weather doesn't favor sailing. The deadline that I set for that project is July 31, so that means I'd better get to work on my own answers to the problem.

So here are some activities available in the vicinity of Elephant Butte Lake:

1. Get started with a visit to the Geronimo Springs Museum for an overview of the history and culture of Sierra County. Part of the charm of this gem is that it is not slick or fancy like a big-city museum; rather, the people who have put together and maintain the exhibits show a great love for what they do, and the small-town feel of the place is beautiful.
   
2. Have a soak at one of the many hot mineral baths in downtown Truth or Consequences. They're available in all price ranges and all styles: natural pools, semi-constructed pools, classic tile bathtubs, hot tubs, family-style, clothing-optional, you name it. One of my favorites is the Charles Motel and Spa, where the baths are like those in a classic sanatorium from the 1880s through the 1930s.
   
3. Get a massage or other spa services, available at many of the same places where you can take a bath.
   
4. Float down the Rio Grande on an inner tube or in a raft or kayak. The water may look calm, but when the farmers downstream are taking their irrigation allotments, that current is powerful. The rapids may not be world-class, but they're just right for getting wet and beating the summer heat.
   
5. Go birdwatching. In the desert, a large body of water like Elephant Butte is a mecca for wildlife. In addition, being close to the Mexican border means that Sierra County gets many species that aren't seen in the rest of the United States. You can wander around Elephant Butte State Park on your own, or you can take a guided tour, either on land or on water.
   
6. Dine at Los Arcos Steak and Lobster House. If you are a carnivore, this is the place to eat. Sierra County is beef country, and the folks at Los Arcos know how to prepare it. The seafood is also good, especially for someplace more than 1000 miles from the nearest ocean. From 5 to 7 p.m., the early-bird specials are a bargain, especially given the high quality of the steaks.
   
7. Visit Spaceport America. No, it's not a whimsical amusement park; it's a real, honest-to-goodness spaceport, the first commercial spaceport in the United States. It's still under construction, but when it's complete, tourists with a huge pile of money to spend will be able to take a flight on Virgin Galactic into space. Already, the spaceport launches scientific experiments and special payloads such as cremains – one of the most famous "passengers" to get such a launch is James Doohan.
   
8. Eat at Hodges Corner. This eatery offers great prices and hearty, down-home cooking with a New Mexico flavor. The fried chicken is the best in New Mexico (sorry, Mom, yours comes close, but Hodges' is better), and it beats most of what I've had even in the Deep South. You can also get such classics as liver and onions, chicken-fried steak, and meatloaf, plus New Mexico favorites like massive smothered burritos. Breakfast is especially great – the cook gets over-easy eggs perfect. (I wanted to provide an online link to the restaurant, and I predicted, accurately, that Roy Hodges would not have created a website for his restaurant, but I couldn't find an online review of the place either. I'm going to have to correct that oversight by writing my own online review.)
   
9. Go fishing. You can bring your own boat (be sure to have it and your trailer steam-cleaned before launching if you come from someplace with quagga or zebra mussels); use of the boat ramp is included with your state park admission fee. You can rent a boat at Marina del Sur or Rock Canyon Marina. Or you can hire a fishing guide, who will provide the boat and guide you to the best fishing spots. Elephant Butte is most famous for all sorts of bass.
   
10. Go geocaching. In honor of the New Mexico State Parks' 75^th anniversary last year, the Parks Division placed a special geocache in each of the 75 state parks. In addition, there are several independent geocaches in the area.
    
11. Take a hike. The Friends of Elephant Butte Lake State Park have been helping to expand and maintain the trail system, so there are plenty of good places to explore.
    
12. On Labor Day Weekend, head south about 40 miles to Hatch to take in the Hatch Green Chile Festival, celebrating the harvest of New Mexico's most famous food crop.
    
13. Visit Ralph Edwards Park and enjoy the playground, skate park, picnic area, and free wi-fi.
    
14. The second Saturday of every month, enjoy the evening Art Hop in downtown T or C, when most of the galleries and some of the other businesses are open late into the night. The hot springs have attracted many alternative healers, new-age philosophers, and others to the area, and the result is a vibrant arts scene.
    
15. Take in a movie at El Cortez, a classic movie theater built in the 1930s and currently kept alive by a couple who run it more as a labor of love than as a money-making operation. The atmosphere and the prices (for tickets and snacks) are both something out of the past (although they don't have Junior Mints).
    
16. Head up the road to the Camino Real International Heritage Center. This stunning museum is, alas, located somewhat off the beaten path, so far fewer people will bother to go there than should. A joint project of the governments of Mexico and the United States, the museum celebrates the history of the region, especially the highway that formed a lifeline from Veracruz, through Mexico City, to Santa Fe during the Spanish colonization. On Sundays, admission is free for New Mexico residents.
    
17. Shop for used bargains at one of the dozen or so thrift shops, including one run by the Humane Society.
    
18. Check out the used books and bargain-priced remaindered new books at Black Cat Books and Coffee – where you can also get, as the shop's name implies, coffee, tea, and awesome homemade baked goods. You may also meet the current resident black cat.
    
19. Visit the half-sized replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Veterans Memorial Park. Because T or C has a veterans' hospital and an excellent veterans' home, there are a lot of veterans in Sierra County, and there is a strong commitment to honor the fallen.
    
20. The first weekend in May, enjoy the Ralph Edwards Fiesta. It's a classic sort of small-town fair, with a parade and carnival and various other activities – with the twist that it honors a nationally famous game-show host who caused the town to acquire its current name.
    
21. Buy vintage clothing, jewelry, and accessories at one of the boutiques in downtown T or C, where you can find just the right non-conforming fashion statement.
    
22. Go bats. The most famous bat cave in New Mexico is Carlsbad Caverns, which is about a three-hour drive away. But about once a month during the summer, there's a tour you can take if you have a sufficiently rugged vehicle and make a specified donation to the Geronimo Springs Museum, onto Ted Turner's Armendaris Ranch, which abuts most of the eastern shore of Elephant Butte Lake. The tour departs from the museum in early afternoon, visits some wildlife-viewing and habitat-restoration sites on the ranch, and arrives at the mouth of a cave about sundown, in time to watch the bats pour out on their nightly foray to devour half their weight in mosquitoes.
    
23. During the holiday season, about two weeks before Christmas, there's the Floating Lights Parade on Elephant Butte Lake, in which people who have boats decorate them (often quite spectacularly) and then participate in a parade to display the lights. Shore activities include bonfires and local civic organizations setting up booths and trailers giving out free food to anyone who wanders in – visitors can sample dozens of different recipes for posole and chile con carne, plus a lot of other tasty dishes – and drinks too, especially hot apple cider and hot chocolate.
    
24. If you love a scenic drive, take all or part of the Geronimo Trail National Scenic Byway. This loop passes through the Rio Grande Valley and up into the Black Range and around and about. You'll see small villages, ghost towns, panoramic views, desert scenery, mountain scenery, old mines, apple orchards, and all sorts of other things. Some of the mountain parts of the drive are especially fun in a small, nimble car, as the road does awesome twisty hairpins; other parts of the drive are unpaved, so four-wheel-drive might be a good idea in bad weather.
    
25. Volunteer at the Humane Society's no-kill shelter. This animal shelter takes in some pretty hard cases, animals that have been abused or that have disabilities (such as deafness) that in other shelters might mean the animal is euthanized. But at this shelter, animals get the best possible treatment. The shelter works hard to find adoptive families for all of the animals, no matter their special needs (I know of at least one person who adopted a deaf cat and has never regretted it), and for those animals who don't find an adoptive family, the shelter provides a nurturing environment. One friend of mine, upon reading the Humane Society's brochure, said, "I wish I was a cat, so I could get that kind of treatment." Note: this shelter provides services for more than just cats – dogs, rabbits, horses, goats, guinea pigs, and all sorts of other critters find a home here.
    

Coming up next: Activities near Heron Lake.

Writing project update

There's still time to enter!

So far, the turnout for the Getting the spouse to come along writing project has been rather disappointing. We've had four responses from three people. On the flip side, we have 117 or so exciting things to do in those people's three locations.

First, Tillerman weighed in with 50 great things to do in and around Tiverton, Rhode Island. Apparently, he envisions his friend sticking around for a very long time and provided plenty of suggestions for the spouse to enjoy, finishing up with cocktails on Tillerman's own back deck.

Not to be outdone, Captain JP responded first with The Ultimate London Walk by the Thames, which included 50 stops along the way, for the tourist with lots of stamina and good walking shoes. He followed that up with an additional post, Escaping London, in London, with nine more activities, starting with hiring a bicycle to ride along the Thames Path.

Finally, Greg and Kris give us Things to do near the Sailing Club on the Willamette, with about eight more activities.

There's still time for more participants to submit entries; this project is open until July 31. Simply compose a blog post, or post a response in the comments here, telling about things besides sailing that can be done near your local sailing venue, so non-sailing travel companions can enjoy themselves, or for sailors to do when the weather isn't suitable for sailing. As with the previous project, all participants will get a complimentary pint of their choice the next time they find themselves in New Mexico, and if multiple participants show up at once, a VIP showing of Pirates of the White Sand is a distinct possibility.

So keep those entries coming!

Darkness at noon

Except here it was actually in the evening

This evening, Albuquerque time, the longest-duration solar eclipse of the 21^st century was happening across southeast Asia and parts of the Pacific Ocean. The very best place to watch this eclipse, where the totality would last the longest, was out in the Pacific, a couple hundred miles east-southeast of an island called Kagoshima, which is, in turn, somewhere east-southeast of Iwo Jima. So that's where my folks, Gerald, Jer, Fuego, MaK, Z-Dawg, and assorted friends and relatives were, on an Italian cruise ship. (Two days ago, my blog had a visit from somebody claiming to be in Italy but also claiming to be in the UTC+9 time zone (Japan, Korea, central Australia), but I don't think it was a member of that particular party, since the visitor came on the usual search.)

So I decided to see if I could catch at least part of the eclipse live over the Internet. Now that I'm lugging my behemoth of a laptop to work every day and accessing high-speed Internet at work, it seemed feasible – especially since my lesson plans for this evening involved a lot of time during which the students would be working independently without any lectures from me. At the location where the eclipse would be longest, the penumbral phase would begin about at mid-class break, and totality would occur shortly before class ended.

But when I set out to find Websites where I could watch the eclipse, even from locations not at the best place, I found surprisingly little. There was a location that required a plugin that I didn't have (something having to do with making Firefox compatible with that other horrible browser). There was a location that invited me to come to the Griffith Planetarium in Los Angeles to watch a webcam feed there but that didn't give a link to that webcam. There was a location that asked "subscribers" to log in and gave non-subscribers an opportunity to give a credit-card number. There was a website that theoretically had three cameras on different islands along the eclipse's path, but while the names of those islands really looked like hotlinks, they weren't; they were plain text set in a different color with underlines.

In the end, I never found a single webcam that would show the solar disk. I did, however, find one site with two webcams that would at least show how dark it got. They were about 650 feet apart, pointed in opposite directions, and they were right at the very best spot, because – you guessed it – they were mounted near the bridge and on the stern of the ship that all those other people were on. This wasn't streaming video; the webcams updated themselves once a minute, and I had to refresh to get a new view – but still, I could at least get some idea of what was going on.

The view from the stern of the ship was particularly dramatic, as the sky grew darker over the churning wake – I'm guessing the captain was steering along the center line of the eclipse path as fast as was reasonably prudent in order to get a few extra seconds of totality.

It never really did seem to get all that dark. Part of that may have had to do with my wi-fi connection resetting itself, so there was a gap of time while I convinced the computer that it really did want to reconnect, but depending on exactly where the ship was, the eclipse had probably reached totality before the connection failed. When I did reconnect, 20 minutes later, it was much brighter, and the ship had slowed to the point that there wasn't much wake.

So in the end, it wasn't all that exciting, but, hey, I got as close as I could to being along on the voyage. A lot of the people who were on the trip have great cameras, so I should at least be able to see the shots they got. Meanwhile, I have bookmarked the ship's webcams, so I can keep track of the rest of the journey.

On the water (at last) with Zorro

The drought is over

It has been a long time since Pat and I have been sailing, or since we have seen Zorro. Pat has had to take repeated trips to South Texas to deal with the Old Soldier's health problems and other affairs. Meanwhile, I've been working – normally, I would take the summer off from teaching, but with Pat not currently working, we have needed the income. In addition, Zorro's employment has kept him away from the lake much of the time (it's nice for him to have not merely a job, but one he's well suited for, but it involves a lot of travel out of town). And he keeps having girl trouble: He just wants to have a good time with no commitment, but the women he's been dating lately have, after about two dates, started talking about moving in with him, getting married, getting rid of the cats, changing his housekeeping style, changing his lifestyle, and generally trying to do a total makeover of his personality – in other words, making him into not-Zorro. He's been spending a lot of his time and energy trying to get disentangled from them.

So none of us got in any sailing during June, and while Zorro had managed to get in a bit of sailing on his own last weekend, the last time Pat or I had been sailing was the Race to the Elephant at the end of May. We also had not seen Zorro since that weekend, and I was getting especially stressed-out and depressed. I needed a good dose of Zorro.

Finally, this weekend, the universe has come into alignment (which may or may not have anything to do with the solar eclipse that Gerald, Jer, Fuego, and others will be watching in just a couple of days). Pat and I were at the lake at the same time as Zorro, and we were able to go sailing with him.

Friday afternoon, we headed for the lake. When we left Albuquerque, we were in hot, dry, windless conditions. By the time we got to Socorro, we were in thunderstorms that had not been predicted in the weather forecasts that we had seen, with very little rain but a lot of gusty wind. When we arrived at the lake, the clouds were heavy, the wind was screaming, and there was lots of lightning. We met Zorro, Carguy, and Carguy's girlfriend at the marina; they reported that up until just before Pat and I had arrived, sailing conditions on the lake were fantastic. Zorro had been on Constellation, and Carguy and his girlfriend had been on Caliente, which Carguy has just repurchased from Ribbons, and they had had about three hours of winds in the vicinity of 15 knots. They had just gotten in to the marina and tied up when the gale started raging.

It was a little disappointing to have missed out on that afternoon's great sailing, but it was good to see Zorro again. Pat and I went to dinner with Zorro (during which time a squall moved through, with fierce winds, lots of lightning, and about 10 minutes of heavy downpour), and then we joined Carguy, Carguy's girlfriend, Dino, and a couple of Dino's workers at a house on the river that Dino has recently purchased that he's remodeling into a vacation rental (3 bedrooms, 2 baths, spa tub in the master bath, fireplace in the living room, and a fantastic deck over the river where one can sit and be soothed by the whooshing sound of the rapids just downstream, for just $1000 a week). Dino, Zorro, Pat and I relaxed on the deck in the dark, listening to the rapids and the occasional night bird, catching up with each other's lives. Dino had a fishing rod in a holder mounted on the rail of the deck, with a line trailing into the water, but he didn't seem to be expecting to catch anything.

Pat and I then headed for our lodging for the weekend, the guest room of Cornhusker and Bassmaster's house. Cornhusker is off on an adventure in the Pacific Northwest with a friend, but Bassmaster is, at least sometimes, around.

Saturday morning, we ended up sleeping in extra-late. Pat attributed this to "cumulative fatigue" from all of the stress that we have both been under, although there may have been other factors. Zorro phoned about ten, saying that the wind was looking really good and he was going sailing; we might be able to get in touch with him later.

Eventually, we got moving. Pat wanted to take care of some sailing club business with the State Parks people. While we were working on that, Zorro phoned. He had just had a fantastic time on the water, in 20-knot winds that were left over from the front that had moved through the previous night. Single-handing in those winds, in the hot sun, had made him tired and hungry, so he was going to get some lunch and then go out sailing again. Pat and I arranged to meet him for lunch and then get out on Constellation with him for the rest of the day.

It was beautiful. As the frontal system moved away, the winds abated, so they were generally in the 10-15 knot range. Carguy and his girlfriend were out on his Newport 28 with some prospective buyers, and we sailed to them, sailed with them for a bit, sailed away for a while, rejoined them for a while … and so forth. Meanwhile, Zorro put Pat through some fairly rigorous training on foredeck duty and headsail trim. This is really good, as Gerald is now at college and not usually available to run things on the front end of the boat, and so I'm going to have to depend on Pat for all of that. Conditions were stiffer than Pat is accustomed to, especially when trimming the spinnaker, so he got a workout. He also seems to be getting more coordinated – today, he clocked me over the head with the spinnaker pole only three times, and he stepped on my toes only twice.

Several times, we thought about going back in to the marina. There were some heavy clouds hanging just northwest of the lake, but they never came in close. We kept an eye on them, but as long as they held off, we were having just too much fun sailing to quit. We sailed up and down the lake several times, which gave Pat a whole lot of practice with that spinnaker. What finally led us to head in to the marina was the fact that we were running out of daylight. If there had been a full moon, we might still be sailing; but it's approaching new moon, so there's no light to sail under once the sun is gone.

Once in the marina, we helped Zorro put his boat away, so he could go back to El Paso. He said he had thought about staying over another night and sailing more on Sunday, but he didn't think there would be enough wind to make that worthwhile. Later I checked the weather forecasts, and it looks like he made the right call – the forecasts are nearly unanimous that there will be very little wind Sunday. Pat and I may go out with Carguy and his girlfriend on Caliente, and Zorro thinks that would be good – they're almost total beginners on the Etchells, and in gentle conditions, Pat and I can teach them things.

I guess that means we've graduated to the next level. There's an old saying in medical school about learning procedures: You watch one, you do one, you teach one. Then you've learned it. So Pat and I are now at the third stage, at least according to Zorro.