fdsailor.blog-city.com — August 2004
11:19 Wonderful sailing
All Saturday it was raining, and so became a house cleaning, reading and sleeping day. On Saturday night I went down to the sailing club and set up my tent (G still had things to do, so she stayed home, to join me later on Sunday). It was really wonderful to set up tent on such a nice warm night, and sit alone in the quiet reading and listening to crickets.
Sunday morning arrived - the sky had cleared and the sun was shining through the tent netting. I lazed around for a bit, woke up, and emerged from the tent. I ate my breakfast muffin and cherries (acquired the night before - Wegmans), and went down to look at the lake. It was really strange - there was a single large, long, low cloud that just stood over the lake in an otherwise cloudless sky. On the far side of the lake was mist, and it looked really surreal. The wind seemed to be around force 3 from the west, however, so we put the boat together and want out.
During the racing that followed the wind visited every point of the compass. It varied from 2 to 12 mph, with the emphasis on the 2-6 range. We had fun, however, and were successful, all told. The day was warm, around 28C.
However, the best sailing of the day was much later. G came down to the club around 5 pm - by then the wind had steadied out to a wonderful, steady 8-10 mph from the north. The motorboats were gone, and we had a wonderful sail - well worth the wait. We ate at Casa de Pasta (yumm), then came home. Not a bad day to end a weekend!
11:58 pm - Perhaps summer has arrived
Gee, I guess its been a busy week. For last week and this week I am working on a really strange proposal for work - I can't go into details, but I could characterize it as: We offer A, not because we would be likely to win the (competative) proposal for A, but so our proposal is compliant. We hope that in truth, the customer really wants B - which is not what the request for proposal asked for. However, we are in a great position to offer B. So it is not bait and switch, but rather hoping that once the customer sees the cost of the proposals for A, they will decide that B is what they really wanted.
Yes, it's confusing to me also. Try writing proposal text describing this!
We have been slowly and surely cleaning the house, a) because we need to do this every now and then, and b) so we can get it under control before Masha (our exchange student) arrives - things will be too busy afterwards as we all have fun and get her settled in school.
On Friday I had a group picnic / party at Rochester Canoe club. No, they don't have canoes there, just sailboats. I ate too much, played ping pong, and took a number of people sailing on the club's JY-15 sailboat. It was fun.
This weekend was a mixture of house work and outdoors fun. Saturday we spend much of the time cleaning the basement (we have just been randomly putting stuff there for the last several years, and since we wanted to store some things, we figured we would clean it up). We moved G's "big" loom (about 1.5 meters on each side) down there, and I am setting up an area to play table tennis also. On Sunday we spent the day at the yacht club (as we do every Sunday). I didn't race in the morning, so we did some shopping, and sat on the hill and talked to some friends. In the afternoon sailed in Lasers (a single-handed sailboat about 4m long). We ate dinner at the club then came home and eventually went to sleep.
Tonight I ran "around the block" for the second time - a great accomplishment for me, something that I thought I could never do. What is so hard about running around the block, you say? Well, first of all, it is 3. 7 miles (6 km) round trip - a big block. Secondly, and most significantly, it is one big hill. Good news - you get to run down this hill. Bad news - you get to run up the hill also. 1.5 miles of about a 10% grade, and 16% or so in some spots. For my future statistics, I ran the 1.7 miles in 33:14, which works out to a pace of just under 9 minutes a mile.
My mini-obsession of the week? Table tennis. A long-standing promise I have made to myself is if we ever got the basement clean enough and curtains up to keep balls from getting lost, I could get a new ping pong table. I have one, but it was salvaged very used from my home town rec center - a good quality table, but very beaten up. Actually the obsession is figuring out if I can get this in the basement, period. Good tables are heavy (100 kg+), big, and although they fold up, they don't come apart into pieces (at least easily). More on this when as it develops (like all good obsessions on this site.
9 pm - A good weekend
Well, another weekend has come and gone, but this was a good one. On Friday (which I have off), it was raining all afternoon, so I cleaned the basement - it has been YEARS since it has been clean, and this triggers a deal I have had with myself for some time now - if the basement ever gets organized enough that I can play table tennis there, I will buy a table. Of course it is not that easy - we are also working on a system of nets that keep the balls under control (our basement has lots of opportunities to swallow balls). But this project is going forward.
The house is actually pretty clean right now, which is good, because Masha (our exchange student) arrives in a week+. Most details are addressed - provided she succeeds in getting her visa this upcoming week. But this will happen and all will be well.
Saturday was great - we slept in, I baked brownies for breakfast, we ate some and gave the rest away. The day was just great, even if it was a bit cool for August (23 degrees), but it was sunny. FINALLY. In late afternoon we packed our tent and went to the sailing club. We set up the tent, and went to dinner, which was really tasty (and good wine). We then went and saw a very silly movie - The Princess Diaries II. Very slapstick, yes, but it had a cute Standard Poodle, which was the main attraction for us. A bit more wine would have helped the humor, but it was fun either way.
On Sunday we woke up to sun but no wind. K and K came down and we ate breakfast together, followed by a hike in a local park. In the afternoon the wind had arrived - we borrowed one of the club keel boats (and "Ideal 18"), and took it out for a sail. It went just fine, even if it did start to rain in the middle of the sail. But everyone went home smiling. And we skipped dinner and had ice cream instead. Life is good.
9:30 - A tale of three obsessions
OK, here are three of my top obsessions today. Since this is a tale of obsessions, almost by definition most people will not be interested, so be warned (if they were interesting, they would probably be given a kinder name, like pasttimes, hobbies or projects.
Obsession 1: Running Win XP Professional primarily from a Power-user account instead of an Admin account. As it happens, there are lots of reasons that you don't want to run your computer on a day-to-day basis using administrator priviledges. Instead you can create an account with Power user priviledges, and then only switch over to admin when you, well, need to do admin type stuff.OK, so far so good.
The problem comes with virus scanners. Virus scanners (at least including Norton and McAfee) require admin rights to install their updates. These usually run quietly in the background, performing automatic updates whenever they need to. So, if for security reasons you are not running as an admin, and also want the security of up-to-date virus protection, WHAT DO YOU DO? Well, one thing you could do would be to leave you admin account running, or log in every week for so to do updates. And yes, I know this could work and even be the best solution. I am also looking at a feature called "runas" that XP supports. This allows a user to start a program as another uses, if the account and password is known. However, to make a long story short, things are not this easy in this way. I will spare you the details, and share the solution if I ever figure it out.
Obesssion 2: Table tennis. Gee, its been quite a few years since I have played table tennis. (a.k.a. Ping pong, but that doesn't sound snobby enough :-) ). Things have changed, even to this simple, basement game played all over the world. Probably the most obvious, and most unbelievable things is that they changed the size of the ball! For a very long time this was a 38 mm ball, and in 2000 they changed it to 40 mm. This slows down the game by about 10% (more air resistance), and tends to discourage the attacking style of play, i.e. serve, return, smash. Television is at play - it seems that this change will help television audiances better follow the sport. Oh well, not saying I agree or disagree, but it is amusing.
The second thing that is going on is that there is this thing called "reglueing" going on. Here I have not observed it first hand, but it seems to go like this. For quite some time now better players have been taking bare bats, and gluing their own rubber/foam sheets to them to make "custom" paddles. Well, someone notices that for the first several hours after doing this the rubber had much more life and spin. So now people have been using some sort of removable glue - they glue the sheet on, play for the afternoon, then remove the sheets and glue until next time. Strange = their obsessions, not mine!
Obsession 3 - well, not really an obsession, but a potential project. As it turns out, we have a hot tub out back - a wonderful invention. Cold in the middle of winter - no problem! Just climb into the 41 degree (C) water, and everything will be better. Greatest thing there is, and we highly recommend the SoftTub brand of tubs. http://www.softub.com/. But there is one small problems - the lids start off really light (probably 8 kg), but over a couple of years gain weight, ending up around 29 kg (okay 29.70 to be exact). You can buy replacements (and we did buy one), but they cost $250. However, if you exclude the cover, the cover is just one massive block of polystyrene foam. I can buy lots of that from the lumberyard in 5 cm thicknesses. Take several pieces, cut them into two different diameter circles (using the existing lid as a pattern), glue the two circles together like a wedding cake, cover it with some plastic, and put the old cover on top and you are done, right? Ok, maybe it is an obsession. I'll keep you posted on if it works or if I just end up buying another lid or something.
1:48 pm: Masha's visa is approved!! (finally)
11:50 pm: Masha has arrived
When I look at my last entry, I had written that Masha's visa was approved. Well, a week has passed, and how she is here. Cool. As it happens things had not gone totally smoothly - her passport almost got lost in the mail, and the entire family almost overslept and hence could have missed getting her to the airport (saved by her boyfriend, who called her cell phone in the morning). But that was then, and this is now. She has arrived, is tired, and has NO idea when her body wants to sleep.
Other that that, last week was uneventful - quite a bit of preparing ourselves for Masha, or rather preparing the house (not that Masha cares, but we have to clean the house at least once 5 years or so. The basement "table tennis project" is complete (lights, full netting to keep the balls from wandering), but with no table. THAT arrives tomorrow. This is going to be interesting - the shipping weight for the table is 320 pounds. Interesting, because the table is supposed to only be about 250 lbs. Perhaps a heavy wood box? This arrives by a semi-truck that hopefully won't get stuck on our road, and some means (yet to be determined) to get said heavy box onto the ground. To get it into the basement will be easier - take the two halves apart and downstairs.
Let's see - what else is there. The last 2 weeks of sailing have been essentially no wind days - yes, we went out, but found little useful wind, and certainly no trapezing. Running has been almost non-existent, but I did run 5.2 miles a week ago with a 8:40 pace, which is an accomplishment. I am preparing to run 10k for the first time - perhaps this weekend, although I doubt it since it is going to be rather hot.
I'll stop rambling now and do something productive, like sleep.
