Month: June 2008

Kayak Construction: Saturation coat

I’ve spent the time since the last time I blogged about my kayak project working on epoxying the seams, and trying to round them. This involved a lot of messing about with files, sanding sponges, and the palm sander, and syringes full of epoxy thickened with wood “flour”. Yesterday I declared “good enough”. It’s not perfect, but I think that after putting more layers on it will be fine.
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I’m probably not the first person to think this…

I was talking to myself about my upcoming Prius purchase. (Yes, I do that a lot. But not when the men in white coats are looking.) And two thoughts were running through my head:

  1. The energy savings between this and my existing Corolla are not cost effective, so I’m really just doing this because the car is geeky-cool and sends a message
  2. I’m going to have to get another Macintosh bumper sticker for the new car

And it suddenly hit me: The Prius is the Macintosh of cars. It’s geeky-cool, it has features that others are starting to copy, it does things just a little differently than most of the cars out there, and it’s more expensive than other cars in its class.

Well, that explains a lot.

Second race: 25.33. I suck a little less

Well, I paced myself a tiny bit better, and it wasn’t as windy and wavy out on the bay. So I managed to shave some time off. I’m not 100% sure exactly how much, because I think the time I was given last time was minutes and seconds because they were hand timing, but this time their computer worked and the times are in minutes and hundredths of seconds.

My friend Rob and two other members of the Huggers club showed up, and it was nice to have people in the same circumstance as me to talk to. Plus the real racers recognized me and were more friendly towards me this time.

I tried hard to pace myself, but as usual when I head into wind and waves I start paddling as fast as I can. I actually caught the guy who started ahead of me at the turn around, the older retired gentleman in the impossibly light open canoe I mentioned last week. But he pulled away steadily on the downwind leg and continued to pull away on the flat. He finished in 23.80. They didn’t get my split time, so I can’t tell exactly how much slower I was on the second half. That’s too bad because a split time would be good to show me how much better I’m getting at pacing.

Unfortunately this time I didn’t even win the “big heavy bald guy” category, because there was a real racer in a kevlar kayak who was about the same size as I’d be if I lost my beer gut, and somehow his 30 pound wisp of a kayak counted in the “touring kayak” class. He did it in 18.68. He even beat all but one of the people in the unlimited kayak class. But because he was a big heavy bald guy, I found it easy to find an excuse to strike up a conversation with him and that got me talking to more racers, and I could ask some technical questions.

Great fun. I just hope my elbow pain can stay at a low enough level that I can continue to race.

The bizarre calculus of life

A friend of mine was saying something about how his pets are like kids to him. That’s something that only people who never have had kids say, and it kind of pisses me off. Because I love and cherish my pets, and I wouldn’t want to live without them, but to me a child is a child and a pet is a pet, and there is a deep divide between them. After all, if you’ve got a dog who is getting blind and crippled and in pain, you can put it down. Most cultures frown on you doing that to Grandma. If your dog is untrainable, pees on the floor and bites you, you can give it away. Can’t do that with your kids, even though some people joke about wanting to do it.
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