Category: Revelation

Wet one

I went kayaking for the first time in 3 weeks today. The weather wasn’t looking great, but I figured it had been too long. I was right about the weather – it started raining when I was about 2/3rds of the way to the weir, but it wasn’t a cold rain so I kept going. I was alone, so I was paddling as fast as I could. Probably too fast. Mostly I wanted to see how far I could go without pausing, and then after I had to pause, how few pauses I could take and still keep up a decent pace. That’s sort of how I built up my fitness when I first started cross country skiing and again when I started mountain biking – go fast, and work on increasing the range, instead of doing the more conventional starting with long slow distance and building up the speed, which is how I started running.
Continue reading “Wet one”

Construction project, Day 3.5

I had a phone call from a very nice person at PygmyBoats. She was calling me because I’d ordered the wrong size spray skirt for the kayak kit I’d ordered, and she wanted to know if I was ordering them for the kit, or for another boat. It turns out that the Arctic Tern 14 is a “medium” size boat, but the Arctic Tern Hi Volume is a “large” size boat. Also, when I saw the “1 hand toggle” on the order form, I’d actually ordered 1 pair. Oh, and I got the UPS tracking number – they said that I should get it Friday or Monday. I’m hoping it’s Friday for obvious reasons.

That can’t be a coincidence, can it?

I’m reading the latest Analog (or at least the one on top of my to-be-read pile, which grows faster than I can read it down, but which usually acts as a stack rather than a queue), and came across a story “Sand and Iron” by Michael Flynn. I noticed the name “Slugger O’Toole”, and immediately started thinking of the song “The Irish Rover”. And as I read further, I realized that all of the names in the story seemed to correspond to names in the song. Here is the mapping, in roughly the order they appear in the story:

Story Song
Nagaraj Hogan Hogan, from Country Tyrone
Captain Amos January ???
Micmac Anne Mick McCann from the Banks of the Bann
Slugger O’Toole Slugger O’Toole, who was drunk as a rule
Maggie Barns (aka Maggie B) Barnie McGee from the banks of the Lee
Fighting Bill Tirasi Fighting Bill Tracy, from Dover
Johnny Mgurk Johnny McGurk, who was scared stiff of work

As you can see, I can’t figure out “Amos January”, and the only unused name in the song is “Malone”. And the Maggie B to Barnie McGee mapping isn’t exactly a slam dunk either. But everything else works so well, to the point where Mgurk hides from work as well.

Construction project, Day 2

Another day of interesting discoveries:

  • Our drill SUCKs. It’s a not incredibly old Skil 4.1 Amp corded drill, and it doesn’t have enough power consistently to drill 3 inches into the end of a 2×4. It also has a standard old chuck instead of one of those new quick ones – I must have spend 80% of my time switching between drill bit and nut driver bit.
  • In spite of having a degree in structural engineering, I forgot that a parallelepiped with non-rigid joints needs cross bracing or it will collapse. I guess I’ll go get some strapping or something tomorrow.
  • This is probably going to end up being a fair weather project. After finishing the two parallelepiped, I put the particle board sheet on one (and attempted to put on the second one, but that one collapsed), and there is almost no room to move around the garage. I might rip a foot off the edge of the sheets to give me some room.

Anyway, the work surface is nearly done, and I can probably safely go ahead and order the kit.