Unique Treen

Read about my cottage industry -- Unique Treen

File it under: It could have been worse...

We've been in below freezing weather for a couple of weeks now, more snow than I've ever seen here in Duvall before, and it's been snowing since last night. We thought we were snug in our house, wood stove doing it's job, plenty of wood on the porch, no problems. I'd walked the yard the day before looking for problems with our hose bibbs, but they all looked fine. I suppose I should have looked closer, but even still I wouldn't have seen the problem.

I got up around 8:30 this morning, Rita had been up for a while & decided to go back to bed for a bit. I walked downstairs, fed Lola, and settled in to check my boat in the Volvo Ocean Race Game & watch the news on the tube. After a while, I heard a hissing, whumping sound that went on for a while. It sounded like snow sliding off the roof to me, so when it quickly stopped, I soon stopped worrying about it. After half an hour or so, I got up to take a leak & heard more hissing & the sound of water running...in the garage! I quickly opened the door & saw water spraying from behind my wood storage rack. Fortunately I knew where our house shut off was & shut the valve. I was never so glad to hear water stop running.

I surveyed the damage, most of the spray had been contained by plywood (BS 1088 waterproof wood even), but my tool box with battery chargers & precision measuring instruments was soaked, great. Rita had gotten up by this time and was actually brushing her teeth when I shut off the water. She came down to tell me about it, and I told her the bad news. I knew there was a valve on the same wall as the leak, so I had her climb underneath my work bench & shut off the valve, then I opened the main valve on the other side of the garage. Silence, perfect, we wouldn't have to join Lola squatting in the yard, and also wouldn't have to try to find a plumber on a very snowy Sunday.

The cleanup was reasonably straight forward, but I'd accumulated a bunch of wood since I first bult the rack, so it was about as full as it could get. Plus there was a bunch of other stuff that had accreted over the years. Rita & I moved all the stuff out away from the front of the rack & started moving the water towards the garage door. This sounds simple, but remember it'd been snowing for days, and the snow was right up to the garage door. Sweep the water out the door, and it seeps right back in out of the sponge-like snow. I finally swept a bunch of snow out away from the door a couple of feet, and that was enough to keep it out. Rita manned the leaf blower to move the water from where the broom couldn't reach, and I swept the rest out the door. The leaf blower does a great job of moving lots of water, so the job was over with fairly quickly. I blew out all of the drawers in the tool box to get the majority of the water out. Fortunately there was little in the top box where the precision stuff was, but the bottom drawer had about half an inch in it. Sears was smart enough to include drain holes in all of the drawers, so getting the water out was pretty easy once the tool pads were removed.

Here's the site of the leak, I haven't torn away the drywall yet to find the actual culprit, the only pipe that seems affected is our out front hose bibb, and it's not like we're likely to use that any time soon. I've got our blower running across the floor and the water's mostly dried up, plus the propane heater's cooking away to dry out all the wood & various & sundry other things that got soaked in the half hour or so shower that corner of the garage went through.

The good news & bad news:
The garage floor is cleaner than it's been in a while, but there's about to be a big hole in the dry wall.

Having BS 1088 plywood against the wall in the rack was pure luck, but it kept hundreds of dollars of wood mostly protected from the spray, but it's still going to take a long time to get everything dried out.

Holes in the drawers of my toolbox were a good idea by whoever designed the box, but again, it's going to take a while to dry everything out.

I'm glad we were home when it happened, imagine the damage done if it'd been running all day? I went & looked at the hose bibb to see if it showed any signs of distress or freezing, nothing. So I don't feel too guilty about not finding the problem before it got to this point. Also, it's inside a wall that's between our front porch and the garage, there's no insulation between them, so it's not overly surprising that it was the one to burst, but I'd never thought of where the pipe was before, so I'm still not sure what I could have done to prevent it.

So, all in all, it could have been lots worse. I'm really glad I knew where the water shut off was, otherwise we'd still be fighting it, or digging up the meter box out front to get to it from there.

Why is buying a GPS so hard?

I wanted to get a Garmin Nuvi 880 for Rita for her birthday. She really likes our 276c, and I initially was just going to get her one of those since she already knew how to use it, but after a bit of research I decided on the Nuvi 880. It has voice recognition, Bluetooth for phones, "where's my car", etc. I found one on Amazon for about $550 & ordered it. Several days later it still hadn't shipped, so I gave them a call. The customer service guy was very apologetic, said that it had been "oversold", and they should be getting more in the next week. I decided to cancel the order, and they were gracious about it. Eh, no big deal, I'll find another one, call them to make sure they had them in stock, problem solved, right? Hah, silly me. I did some more research, found one for $390 at a camera shop in NYC, gave them a call, ordered it, figured I was done, then the fateful question: "do you want the 2008 maps for that"? What do you mean do I want the updated maps, doesn't it come with the updated maps? Oh, no says he, the maps are 2007 maps, and don't you want have the latest maps? I demure, ask him to just complete the order, but he won't let go. I tell him that I don't want to be upsold, which triggers a "oh, so you're in the industry" response from him (actually I learned the term at MSFT when our VP was talking about the difference between XP Home & Pro), but he still didn't let up on his spiel. I asked several times if he could just finish the sale, and he kept trying to sell the updated maps. Finally I just told him to cancel the order, now he launches into his full on New York accent & accuses me of being stupid for not being willing to pay less than half of what Garmin's selling them for (I didn't point out the obvious that nobody in their right mind pays MSRP), and that I should do more research, blah, blah, blah. Once I got him stopped long enough to confirm that he'd canceled the sale, I simply hung up on him mid-sentence. I searched around for a while & found another place that had it for $405, I decided to simply order it online & skip the phone conversation. No problem...for about two hours, then I get an email asking me to call them to "confirm" the sale. Crap, what could they possibly want to confirm unless I blew my own address when I filled in the form, not overly likely. So, I give them a call, and he "confirms" my address, which was exactly right, then "OK, well let's just finish up your order". "Did you want to get the memory card for this so you can store extra maps on it?" No thanks, I've already got a card that fits it" says I. Well, this is on special this week, usually it's $136, but it's on sale for $62, that's over half off!. Sigh, here we go again. Can you just complete the sale I ask? Don't you want the latest maps" sez he. By now I'd already checked Garmin's site & knew that at worst if you bought an "old" unit, you could update for $54, so any price he was offering beyond that was pure bullshit. I asked him if he could just confirm the sale, 3-4 times, when I could get a word in edge-wise into his spiel. Finally I just told him to cancel the sale. I'm pretty sure this guy and the previous guys were related somehow because I got the same response. Once I got a confirmation from him, I hung up on him too...mid sentence. So, now I've ordered & canceled three of these things. I found an electronics place I've done business with before, that also wasn't located in NYC, and ordered it online, it should be delivered late next week, a week late for her birthday.

Oh, and the $62 memory card the last guy was trying to sell me? I bought 3 of them from Woot! for $13 or so yesterday.

The K-words lose a founding member

I'd forgotten about this post, I'd started it right after talking to Neil months ago, wrote a bit on it, and then never got back around to it till just now. He told me the story of telling his eldest, John , about the "K-words" a few weeks back. John thought it was a pretty good story. So do I ....

Last night my friend Neil let me know that his husky Kobok hadn't made it through the day. Kobok had been part of his family since the day after he was born, and his death came as a near surprise. They knew something was wrong, and he was around fifteen years old, but when he took him to the vet yesterday, he expected that Kobok had eaten something that didn't agree with him, and the vet to charge him a couple hundred & tell him that he'd be fine in the morning. That didn't happen. Having been through this a few times myself, I can imagine what Neil & his family are going through today. I thought I'd tell some stories about Kobok to memorialize him a bit.

Pioneer Park was where we walked our dogs when we both lived in the Olympia/Tumwater area about 12-13 years ago. We had a number of dogs that would join us, but Neil & Mary's Kayla & Kobok, and my dog Josh where sort of the anchor dogs of the pack. Neil would usually give me a call early-ish on Saturday mornings so we could hie the hounds down to the park. I'd usually be asleep when he called, content to let the answering machine pick it up. Not long after I'd first met Neil & Mary, Josh, my golden retriever, fairly quickly learned that hearing the names Kayla & Kobok meant he stood a pretty good chance of going for a walk. This caused a pretty predictable response, a wound up dog wanting to go get in the truck for his walk, NOW! I learned to be careful saying their names around Josh to prevent his reaction. I started calling Kayla & Kobok "the K-words" so he wouldn't know what I was talking about. Neil had also learned about this & took to leaving messages on my answering machine that went along these lines:

"Josh, go get Dave!" "Where's Kayla?" "Where's Kobok"? "Do you want to go for a walk?" "Go get Dave!" "Where's Kayla?" "Where's Kobok?". You'd think that this wouldn't work, but it did, Josh would whip himself up into a frenzy, and come banging into my bed to wake me up. Then as expected, we'd usually go to meet with the K-words & their people for a nice walk & chasing his favorite softball or Frisbee.

On another occasion I got a call from Neil to tell me that Kobok had gone walk about...again. Kobok as a husky, felt he was honor bound to run often and far. On this particular weekend I think he was found roughly fifteen miles from where he got "lost", and not by us, a good samaritan found him way out by Black Lake & called the number on his collar. That didn't keep us from driving all over the Olympia area looking for him all weekend before the call though.

Neil & Mary went to great lengths to keep Kobok in their yard, but his instinct for running coupled with a keen sense for weak points in the defenses allowed him many forays into the wild in his day. Sometimes even the defenses helped in his escapes, you'd find stretched out chicken wire where he'd managed to jump high enough to get his hind paws into it while he scrabbled up and over the top of the fences designed to keep him in. In time he lost much of this ability through age & injury, but I don't think he ever lost that spirit.

A couple of weeks before his final day, Rita, Lola & I had a chance to say goodbye to Kobok, even though we didn't know it at the time. Lola was to go through her own scare within a week or so that thankfully had a better outcome. He was still up & wobbling around, and probably would have run off if given a chance & a cane to do so.

Thoughts on Obama

This past Tuesday the US did something we've never done before, we elected a man in an election that a lot of people thought he could never win. Me & my brother included. I've thought about this for several days and have drawn some conclusions.

• Race. I'm proud of my country for surprising me. I thought that race would be a bigger factor than it was, but even in southern states Obama did well. I was worried that he might lose due to this factor, and expected to be somewhat embarrassed by it if he did. I'm glad this didn't come to pass.
• Religion. I don't quite understand how religion plays such a huge factor in any election to office in a supposedly secular country. I find it difficult to believe that Obama hasn't been affected by listening to rants from his clergyman, and I worry about it's influence on his thinking process. I can't wait for the day when the first atheist gets elected to high office, maybe they'll be a scientist too. I'm sick of fighting about who has the best imaginary friend, be it in an election or world politics.
• Electioneering. This is just a general rant about the advertising of politics. I wish there were some way of being able to screen out commercials, radio ads, and there's a special hate for the signs along the road. I have considered putting together an initiative to require a bond for placement of the signs, and a requirement to account for them w/in 72 hours of the polls closing, or forfeit the bond, and pay for the collection of their signs over and above the bond. Maybe a bounty. This has obvious problems (Joe-bob going around collecting signs all during the election & then presenting them for payment, however, this does suit my requirements, there will be less signs). It's an idea in the formative stages, got any suggestions? Back to electioneering, I wish candidates would focus on what they plan to do, how they're going to do it, and how they're going to pay for it. What I don't want to hear is how bad the other candidate is, or their lack of education, scruples, whatever. I simply don't care and don't want to hear about it. In the end, all politicians are crooks of some sort or another, as paraphrased from The Hunt for Red October "I'm a politician, that means when I'm not kissing babies, I'm stealing candy from them." On this count I have to give Obama high marks, he struck out at McCain about his record, etc. but he managed to run a pretty decent campaign, and I thought some of his steps here were particularly classy, like staying away from Sarah Palin's daughter's pregnancy story. It was very nice to see him not only keep his campaign workers away from the story, but to go out of his way to publicly state his stance so there was no question.
• Organization. High marks here as well. Obama gets the power of the internet, which means that the Democrats had an edge over the Republicans who don't seem to understand the power. This is a lesson they need to learn, and quickly, or they face continued domination by the Democrats.
  
• Socialism. This is probably my biggest complaint with Obama's platform. His Robin of Loxley complex. While I make nowhere near his $250k lower threshold, I don't see the benefit of taxing the rich at a higher rate simply because they've done well for themselves. This has three deleterious effects as far as my economics education goes:

1. Taxing someone or their corporation at a higher rate because of same random cut off point discourages growth. If I had a company that had been creeping towards the quarter million/year point, it would be advantageous to stay below that threshold simply to avoid the higher taxes.
2. This leads to fewer jobs. If I'm trying to stay below the threshold, I'm not going to hire more people to push my business across the line unless I can step boldly across that line to support the new tax rate & make enough more money to afford it. This is similar to how over time works, there is a break over point where it costs you more to work more, so you get paid less for working more because the rate at which you get taxed changes. When I was working tons of hours at MSFT as a contractor, I calculated this breakover point at 63 hours, and I had to work another nine hours before I started making money again. This leads to:
3. Take my ball & go home. If they're going to be taxed out of step with the rest of the country, why work at it so hard? In fact, why work at it at all? Why not retire early & see the world? In doing so they're relieved of the tax burden, they're no longer paying for medical insurance, or any other benefits they might have offered their erstwhile employees, no leases, no nothing except do I want a Mai Tai or a Pina Colada for breakfast?
   
   Obviously these are generalizations and a lot of people would stay in business simply out of loyalty to their employees and customers. But if enough do take their ball & go home, it'll hurt the economy. Also, I'm not an economics major, these are just my observations and leanings from a Republican upbringing. However, I still feel angered to think that my taxes are going to pay for other people's benefits who are too lazy to get up and work for themselves. I don't mind paying taxes for a number of social programs, especially schools, teachers, preschool, tutoring, free lunches & books. I view all of these as beneficial to everyone. A well educated populace is far less prone to crime, makes far more money, and hence pays more taxes, and benefits everyone. I don't see the same benefit for socialized medicine, if you've got the education, you don't need to have socialized medicine, the economy can support the expense as provided by your employer who passes on that expense to their customers. In the end, we all pay for each other's medical expenses simply by existing in a given economy, there's no need for the government to provide it for you simply because they can. Use the money instead for better teachers, schools, etc. I also don't mind paying for infrastructure, in order for me to pay for my family's expenses, I have to drive fifty two miles round trip each day, to do that, I have to drive on roads that were paid for out of the public coffers. If instead I had to go overland in my 4x4 to get there each day, well, I probably wouldn't be working there, it would simply cost too much in fuel, repairs, and beat up kidneys to do so. So I'm glad there are fairly nice roads to drive on that we, the taxpayers paid for.

The plight of Grover

A week or so ago, Rita was visited in the middle of the night by a raccoon. Ever since she was injured a couple of months ago, she's been sleeping downstairs on our futon because it's hard for her to get up & down the stairs with her broken foot. The raccoon frightened her quite a bit, but now she understands that they're more mischievous than dangerous. However, that knowledge hasn't made her any more amenable to having "the fella" as she likes to call him, entering our house at will to flip over Grover's food bowl for a midnight snack. To this end, we've been sealing our dog door each night to prevent his ingress. This isn't a problem for Lola, she rarely goes out at night (that I'm aware of anyway), but Grover is used to coming and going all night as he pleases. He's been able to do this for all of his thirteen or so years, so now having the door closed is a problem for him, and us. Grover & I have an agreement, he gets to sleep & eat in the house, & I get to feed him. That's about the extent of our interaction. During the summer we almost never see him, and during the winter he spends more time in the house bulking up on chow & snoozing in remote corners like behind the piano or under a couch. When it's cold outside, he'll generally spend the night in the house, or so I thought. It turns out that this is not the case, he likes to go out around 2:30am or so to carouse or whatever it is that he does in the middle of the night in the middle of winter. This is a problem for us if he's in the house and the dog door is closed because he will voice his displeasure by loudly meowing until something's done about it. The other problem is, he's afraid of Rita, so even if she goes & opens the door for him, he won't go out, he'll cower somewhere out of sight. So this means that if we want any peace the rest of the night, I have to go downstairs & open a door for him to get out. Like last night. Can you say sleep deprived? I have a hard enough time getting to and staying asleep, so getting up to let a cat out is tantamount to getting up for the day. So here I am, up since 2:30 or so, trying to make it through the day. Stupid cat.

On being a nurse...

So, how do you know someone's sick or injured at home and has been for some time? When the pharmacist at your local grocery store sees you standing in line to drop off a prescription, and he says, "so what does she need today?".

So we went to see Rita's doctor on Friday to have the stitches removed. The doctor prescribed some milder painkillers to help her deal with the pain. She's never quite found the groove for keeping ahead of her pain, so it's common for me to have to watch her cry in pain just about each day since this happened. Not fun. The emotional toll on me has been a bit more than I expected, but I try very hard to keep myself upbeat and try to keep her spirits up. I try not to lose my patience with her, I know she's in pain, and that she doesn't tolerate it very well. I try to stay ahead of her needs and make sure she's as comfortable as I can in light of her situation. To this end today, I went down to get her latest prescription filled. I dropped it off at the pharmacy, had the little conversation at the top of this post with the pharmacist, and told them I'd be back in 20 minutes or so as I needed to run over to the local hardware store. So, I did exactly that, then came back to pick up the prescriptions as well as some fruit & other things that she likes to eat so she'd have them for the coming week.

So, I manage to walk up to the pick up counter just behind some woman who's buying some Advil with Sudafed. In case you're not aware, at some point some genius figured out that pseudoephedrine is classified as a class 1 precursor for crystal meth, so they came up with the CMEA law. This requires that the pharmacy collect your name & address and limit the amount that you can purchase, and keep that information for a minimum of two years, and in Oregon, you actually have to have a prescription for it. This has got to be one of the stupidest laws I've ever seen. It took the pharmacy tech at least seven minutes to take down her information before she could actually sell it to her. I would like to know how often anyone EVER looks at that information if ever. I'd bet that it's never-ever looked at after it's taken down. This is a case of the whole of the American public being penalized by the bad behavior of illicit drug makers similar to the entire flying world being penalized by stupid laws that are already proven to not stop terrorists. This type of legislation shouldn't be allowed, it's knee jerk reactions to a short term problem. I also wonder how much if any this has slowed down the production of meth. I'd also bet that there has not been a significant change, and all the crap we have to go through to simply buy an over the counter drug is for naught.

So what does my being hung up at a pharmacy counter have to do with taking care of Rita? In the long term, probably not much, but in the short term it pretty much guaranteed I was going to get home from my errands after the Seahawks game got started. Now, once again, this is hardly an earth-shattering problem, but it's one of her all-time favorite things, and I'd promised to be home in time to wake her up for the game. Fortunately I'd thought ahead and set our DVR to record the game mostly because the last couple she didn't make it all the way through, so I wanted her to be able to watch the game afterwards if she decided to go take a nap.

I don't really have a coherent ending for this, but here we sit, watching the game together, and she's happy watching the home team stomp on the Arizona Cardinals. And yes, I was late getting home, but that just meant that we could fast forward through some of the commercials at the beginning of the game.

Veteran's Day

Today is Veteran's Day, a holiday in the US that, with the exception of government organizations, is universally ignored. Technically tomorrow is the observed holiday that you're supposed to get off, but I've never once worked for a private company that gave the day as a holiday. The closest was Microsoft who provides two floating holidays that you could designate as you chose. If you wanted to take off Veteran's day, you could, if you wanted to observe Saturnalia instead of Christmas, more power to you, take it off. I usually used one of my two days to make Memorial Day weekend longer for the the annual pigroast we used to do. Notably, I didn't take Veteran's Day off though, I guess I figured that the two days coming up for Thanksgiving were going to be good enough. I'd usually use the other day as part of a vacation to a new country each year.

So, what's the point of this post? While technically I own a company, it's just me, so I can take any day off that I want. Besides, it's not like the company is active, so it's really a moot point. However, should I ever own a company that has employees, anyone who's a veteran will receive Veteran's Day off as a paid holiday. I believe that this should be the norm, when a new employee is brought on board, you ask for a copy of their DD 214 discharge papers and once they're provided to prove they were in the military, they're eligible for Veteran's Day off. Is this fair to the folks who work for me who aren't veterans and don't get the day off? Yes, we as veterans have provided an invaluable service to our country. Even though the huge majority have never fired a shot in anger, or for that matter even seen an engagement with an enemy, the service was still there. I think one day a year to recognize that service is not too much to ask. If the folks who work for me have a problem with that, well, maybe they shouldn't have taken the job in the first place.

How the world got smaller because of surveyors

I had an interesting talk with one of my co-workers the other day. He's been surveying for about twenty years longer than me and other than being a bit long winded (which is the pot calling the kettle black), is quite well versed in not only our current surveying methods, but how it used to be done as well. Any good surveyor is a student of the past, we need to be because we frequently have to use very old data that was measured in very different ways than we do now.

We were looking at a section where a couple of different Records of Survey disagreed with each other by as much as ten feet in the East-West direction and a couple of feet in the North-South. Without going into much detail, when the Public Land Surveying System was developed, any errors that occurred were concentrated ("thrown") into the west-most sections of land. The section we were working in happened to be one of these, so errors and discrepancies aren't without precedent. This lead to a discussion on how the modernization of measurements has made the world smaller, and every step forward in technology makes all our measurements shorter than it's predecessors.

Egyptian rope stretchers used 3-4-5 triangles to relocate survey markers washed away by the yearly floods of the Nile. I have used this exact technique to lay out a parking lot for shipping containers on Blount Island, FL. The locations of the containers have changed and it looks like the parking lot has been paved, but this is the same area. The problem we ran into was that we were using rope that stretched. So the triangles got out of shape over time, and my calculations were slowly skewed so that we didn't get as many parking spaces as I'd first predicted. What happened was that the triangles got bigger due to the stretching, so our 30' x 40' x 50' "right angles" were out of whack.

The first big revolution in measuring technology was the Gunter's Chain. A chain is 100 links, measuring sixty six feet long. Sixty six seems like a strange number, but it divides nicely into a mile eighty times. A section is eighty chains, or one mile square. The problem came from having a device sixty six feet long and having to pull it in a straight line for a mile. You would naturally have some kinks in the "straight line" no matter how skilled the chainmen. And any slopes would have to take into consideration the slope distance traveled versus the horizontal distance traveled. There are other considerations as well, such as height above sea level, but I'm not going to go into them. So, as the chainmen measured their miles with their chain, their measurement would always be long due to the inherent inaccuracies of the method. The original General Land Office (now the BLM) surveys of the western US were all done in this manner, using Gunter's Chains.

Next comes the steel or invar tape. These were made in lengths up to 300' feet and skilled chainmen using special chain clamps, tension gauges, and chaining "bucks", could get very precise measurements using them. However, the same problem existed, you still had to make several setups to measure, and each of those setups introduced error causing the lengths measured to be long again. So, the surveyors using these types of tapes were finding that the measurements of their forebears using chains were always a little longer than what they measured with their tapes. The world had shrunk a bit, and surveyors had to accommodate the changes while still perpetuating the original surveys

Next came electronic distance meters (EDMs), which shrunk the world even more. These became prevalent in the 1970's & omnipresent by the '80s. This is about the time I started my surveying career. The only time I have used the earlier instruments is in school and on the occasional side job when an EDM wasn't available. All through my college education for surveying, we used "chains" (which were actually the tapes mentioned above, but nobody calls them that), and theodolites with no electronic capability at all. I remember being amazed at seeing my first EDM when the instructor brought one in to show us. The only electronics I had available to me during school was my HP 41cx I'd bought for work. Since the advent of EDMs, the world has shrunk even more. No longer are we tied to the ground by some sort of rope, chain or tape, now we measure distances by shooting a beam of light to a reflector, and measure the amount of time it takes for it to get back. From that we can calculate the distance to the reflector since the speed of light is for all intents & purposes is fixed. Distance equals the speed of light multiplied by the elapsed time divided by two (round trip) (D = (T x S) /2). Then some manipulations for air density, elevation above sea level, curvature of the earth, and various & sundry other things, choose a measuring system (meters or feet, but make sure you choose the right feet), and voilà, you have your distance. Now we had a pretty good idea of just how far our forebears had really gone when they were out slogging in the mud and rain in forests, deserts, across rivers and lakes, and up and down mountains and valleys.

However, in about 1990 something new came on the scene: GPS. With GPS & the appropriate software, we can get sub-centimeter accuracy for a given point, anywhere on the surface of the planet. Now we can measure without having inter visible points, we don't even need chainmen any more (well, sort of), we can go stake a job, or collect data with just a backpack and antenna on a rod. And those points we measured so accurately just twenty years ago are even closer together now.

This whole process isn't new, in the 1600's King Louis, upon being presented with an accurate map of France said "I've just lost more territory to surveyors than I've lost in any war".

Rant: outboard repair shops

So quite a while back I bought my little 4hp Mercury Mariner along with an Avon 3.15 for about $800 total. Killer deal as far as I was concerned and I still think that. We've never really had occasion to use the outboard, but the PO showed me that it ran, and was still peeing properly when I bought it. So, months go by, we still never use the outboard, but we want to take it with us on a trip attached to the Avon. I go to do some basic checks on it before bringing it to the marina, and I notice that it leaks gas from what I think is the carb float when I tilt it forward on the stand. Last thing I want is it dripping gas the whole time it's being towed behind the boat, so I decide to take it to a shop to have it repaired.

I call the shop up, and I have to make an appointment to bring it in for about a week later. This particular shop was chosen because it's close to my office and I was impressed by the number of course completion certificates on their wall when I'd been in there before. I'm surprised by the need to make an appointment but figure they've just got their bookkeeping in good order and they know they'll have time free to work on the engine when I get it there.

I was wrong...

When I dropped it off, the guy who helped me get it out of my truck said it should be done by "early to mid next week", "unless you're in a hurry?". I thought, nah, don't need it right away, next week is fine & told the guy so. Second mistake (first was bringing it there in the first place).

A week later I call them up asking about it: "let me see if I can find the work order..." "it doesn't look like the guys have gotten to it yet, is next week OK?" Sure.

A week+ later, I go by to pick it up assuming that it's long since been done. "who told you that it was done?" "well, they must not have checked the schedule, we only ordered parts for it a couple of days ago" You mean 8 days after I brought it in was the first time you even looked at it?

A bit less than a week later, I call again about it: "we ordered parts for it last week, they'll be here tomorrow, and your engine should be done that afternoon" So I go by the following afternoon... "who called you to let you know it was done?" No one, I was told yesterday that it'd be done today. "who told you that?" The guy I think is the owner strolls out of the back and says "probably me". He's apologetic, says the parts haven't come in, and he's short of mechanics, but it'll "definitely be done by early next week"

So I called yesterday and spoke to a receptionist..."it looks like we ordered parts for it a while back"...yes, more than two weeks ago... "did anyone call you to say it was done?" No, your owner told me it'd be done "early this week". "Oh, well, I don't know what the status is" You've had it for a month, it's probably covered in spider webs. "well would you like me to find out more for you" YES "OK, I'll do that & get right back to you"

That was yesterday afternoon, still waiting for that call...


Grrrrr

Kudos to Stroller Girl

I drive about 26 miles every morning to get to work. My alarm goes off at 5am so I can be on the road by about 0540 or so. By that time Rita has usually made me lunch and some tea to drink on my way in, plus a bit more in a small flask to take the edge off of the early morning arrival at work. I'm definitely not a morning person, give me a few days off, and I'm up till 2-3am, and getting out of bed around 10-12am or so. What does all this have to do with Stroller Girl? In reality, not much, I just wanted to give you a sense of how early this takes place.

Who is Stroller Girl you say? I really have no idea who she is, but nearly every morning as I'm driving to work, almost in the exact place every time (underneath the 522 bridge where it crosses SR2 if you really want to know), I see Stroller Girl. She's in her early to mid 20's, the baby she's pushing along is probably less than a year old, and I think she's trying to get back in shape after having the baby. Rita thinks there's more to the story than that, but I think it might just be that simple, she's out exercising. She's obviously NOT enjoying herself, her face is generally in a not-quite-grimace, her cheeks are bright red from the exertion, she's staring straight ahead, intent on whatever her goal is, and the baby is usually lolled over in the stroller, sound asleep. She probably wishes she were anywhere else but there, but she's there...every morning. That impresses me, and I just wanted to say kudos to you Stroller Girl.

Rave: Banana bread!

A couple of months ago we used some of our award points from a credit card since they were about to expire. We rarely use this card anymore because they refuse to lower the interest rate on it, we keep it around mostly because we had something like 70,000 points on it, and didn't want to lose them by canceling the card or having them expire.

Anyway, one of the things we bought was a bright red mixer because Rita thought she'd like to learn how to do some baking. She has a friend in Pennsylvania who does a fair amount of baking, so she wanted to try some of her recipes. She knows that banana bread is one of my favorites, so she tried that first, you can read about it here. Her first couple of tries were less than spectacular, but still resulted in pretty edible banana bread. She was disheartened, especially with the first one which we nicknamed "the banana brick", but it still tasted pretty good. For her next effort, she talked to her friend Gertrude who advised her on how to improve her process, and she ended up with an extremely moist loaf which tasted really good, but was sort of messy to eat. After consulting with Gertrude again, she figured out that she'd left out a cup of flour from the recipe, which would explain the moistness. So yesterday, she made a couple of loaves which turned out perfectly. She gave me one to bring into the office, and it's more than half way gone, and I don't expect it to last, especially since the chainmen have discovered it. If it does make it through the day, it's coming home with me. The other loaf is safe at home, where it should be.

Oh, remember the mixer? Turns out the the best way to mix the batter is by hand, not with the mixer.

A short rant...

Last night on my way home from work I got a call from Rita asking if I'd pick up some KFC. I'm not a big fan of their food, but occasionally it's nice, and they do make pretty good coleslaw & half decent baked beans. Their chicken is so-so, certainly not like it used to be when I was a kid when it was still run by Colonel Sanders. I seem to remember at some point after he was bought out and his recipes monkeyed with, the colonel described the food as tasting like cardboard, but I can't find a citation.

Anyway, I'd been to this KFC before, and was far less than impressed. The place is a dump, the dining area is a sty, the employees seem to wander around in a daze, and the guy I assume is the manager looks like a sloppier version of a low end biker wannabe, except with fewer teeth and lower hygiene standards. It had been months & months since I've been there last, and they were still in business, so I thought maybe things had changed.

I was wrong.

The staff looked "rode hard & put up wet", there was food scattered over about half the tables, including a couple of tables that had most likely had children at them judging by the puddles of milk & soda all over the tables, the benches and the floors. This is supposedly a fast food place, but they've lost the meaning of this. It took about twenty minutes for my order to be filled, after I'd waited in line for another ten or so. It wasn't like they were cooking anything (in fact the only person in there who looked like he knew what he was doing was the guy cooking the chicken), they just dragged their feet going anywhere. The little old lady who was putting together orders apologized to each customer for the long wait as she gave them their food. Also there was a prominent sign on the woman's bathroom that the light didn't work, how hard to change a light bulb, or call an electrician?

Once the food is delivered, it goes into poorly designed foam trays with plastic lids. The lids don't fit well onto the foam trays, and simply pop off. The tray bottomss don't nest into the top of the lids, so they don't stack well, and simply slide off of each other making it treacherous to try & get them home w/o taking them out of the bag and putting them side by side on the floor somewhere.

At least they still make decent biscuits.

The emergency Coke

Rita's a very organized person, she's a "place for all things and all things in their place" kind of person. I, on the other hand, am a slob, and my organizational strategy is to find things where I last used or put them. This drives her crazy, and I try to accommodate her, but am doomed to failure, our brains are just wired differently. When I deliberately put something somewhere, that's where I expect to find it next. The problem comes when her organization strategy overwhelms mine.

A bit of history: pretty much since I've started the job I'm in now, she's been getting up to make me lunch & tea for my drive in. When I worked at Microsoft she never did this, but I think she has taken pity on me having to get up at zero-dark-thirty each morning so I can be at work by 06:30 (fortunately this is generally only four days a week). When I went to work in the mornings at MSFT, I'd generally drink a Coke on my way in, and she'd rarely be up for the event. The tea she's been making me is much more preferable, but on the occasion when she doesn't get up (like this morning), I'll still grab a Coke on my way out and drink it while driving in.

To me, Coke can be the nectar of the gods, just the thing to get me going, quench my thirst, and get my blood sugar levels up, with a bit of caffeine as a kicker. If you know how sometimes a Coke is the only thing that'll work when you've over-indulged the night before, you know what I'm talking about.

To this end, I try to keep an "emergency Coke" secreted away in our drinks fridge. I put one in the little bottom tray for when I've managed to wipe out the rest of the supply in main part of the fridge, I'll still have one left for "emergencies" like this morning, when I didn't have tea to drink on the way in.

I've noticed that my emergency Coke has disappeared on other occasions, but I just figured that she'd drunk it, no big deal, I'd just put another one back there the next time I load up the fridge with Coke. However, now I suspect that it's not her drinking them, it's her removing them from "her" drink area and putting them where they're "supposed" to be. She keeps root beer, ginger ale & other drinks that she likes down there, and I think having an interloping Coke offends her sense of order, so she takes it out and puts it up in the regular area for Cokes, where I happily drink it without realizing that I've just consumed my emergency Coke, because once up in the main part of the fridge, it's perfectly camouflaged as a regular Coke.

Thoughts on recent events

So, I've been reading about the Korean hostages recently freed from the Taliban in Afghanistan, Senator Craig's scandal, gay marriage in Iowa, etc. Pretty much all the things you're not supposed to talk about when you first meet someone, politics, religion, with sexual orientation thrown in for good measure (twice).

I'm glad the Korean missionaries have been released, and feel sorry for the two that were executed, although I'm somewhat surprised there wasn't more carnage. What bothers me is that the Korean government has given the Taliban some semblance of legitimacy simply by just talking to them. Now I understand that the first thing you do in a hostage situation is try to establish contact to negotiate. And I also understand that by capturing people from a less powerful country (than say the US or UK), the Taliban stood a better chance of not awakening a sleeping giant. What I don't see is how any of this made the slightest bit of difference in the long run. The hostages were freed for the promise of the ROK removing their non-combat troops by the end of the year, something they were going to do anyway. Both the Taliban & the Korean government swear upside down & sideways that no money changed hands, but I think that's unlikely. There was no other incentive for them to be released, certainly not the reassurance of the government that they really were going to do what they said they were going to do anyway. And what of the outrage of the Korean people, the news reports I've read indicated that they were angry at the US, not the Taliban for the incident. I'm sorry, but I just don't see the connection. Twenty-three well meaning folks go to a foreign country that doesn't want them, to do what they believe are good works under the auspices of whatever Christian church they belong to, for a people who believe that apostasy is cause for putting folks to death, and they expect to have an uneventful trip? Now the Korean government has bailed them out, probably for a ransom, and promised to do what it said it was going to do anyway, and, oh yeah, we won't sponsor any more christian missionaries to "your" country. Frankly, I'm disappointed in the Korean government, they didn't used to be that way. In Vietnam, if a prisoner found out that they were to be interrogated by ROK troops, they'd starting talking immediately in the hopes of preventing the interrogation. The ROK troops had a well earned reputation for fearlessness and harsh treatment of any prisoners they might take. Too bad that Korea has lost that respect.

On to Senator Craig. I know nothing of his record, or much at all about him other than what I've read in the past couple of weeks about his being railroaded out of office. I read Ben Stein's article about this the other day, and I have to say I agree. While I think it was pretty ill advised to plead guilty to the charge, certainly in the day of the Drudge Report, I think I can see some reasons why he might have pled as he did. That said, it seems to me that Ben's right, all he was arrested for was tapping his foot while in the bathroom. If this is the case, his guilty plea makes all the more sense, as he thought it was just a bit of nonsense more quickly dealt with by a guilty plea than to spend the time in court. Nobody wants to advertise that they've been arrested in a sex sting, even if they're not guilty. A quick, easy out, especially for a public figure might look like a good idea. But they have to understand, someone's going to find out, it is public record after all. And they're going to tell someone else, etc. till it gets onto a news desk somewhere, and it blows up in your face & ruins your career. As a republican he has to (or should) understand that the liberal press (IE democratic) is just dying for stories about elected officials they can drag in the mud. Did you see the coverage for this on CNN? It was seemingly every fifteen minutes or less for a couple of weeks straight. Now, possibly he was trying to solicit sex in that bathroom, if so, then I think he's too stupid to be a senator anyway. And possibly he is gay or bisexual, if so, who cares? I can't see how either leaning would affect your ability to work as a government servant. In any case, I feel badly for the guy, my gut feeling is that he was arrested by an overzealous cop, then tried to make it go away as quickly as he could, and it came back to bite him, once the media got a hold of it, it ran like a wildfire till he was escorted out of his office (well, the end of this month).

Iowa allowed same sex marriages for a while, then they were ruled illegal again. And those who'd had their marriages performed already? Their licenses were invalid. My thoughts on this whole mess are these: who cares? If folks want to get married, let them. We've been down this exact same road in other states. If you're worried about them having kids, you need to go back to biology class, if you're worried about them adopting, no studies that I'm aware of have shown that kids raised by gay parents are any different than any other kids. In fact they're probably more well adjusted. If you're worried that your insurance premiums will go up because all of a sudden they support same sex unions, you need to come to your senses and live in the twenty first century. If you're worried that they'll corrupt our youth, destroy our military, or whatever, I think you need to think outside your little world.

Rant: How hard can it be to turn off a fan?

The office I work in shares a single bathroom for about a dozen people. There's also a shower room that folks use when they ride their bikes in or go running or whatever. Both of these rooms share a single exhaust ventfan. For some reason, the noise of the exhaust fan just drives me nuts. I've actually moved my desk once to get further away from it, but it's still there. I'm not sure what it is about this particular fan, most don't seem to bother me. I spent five years in the USN as an electrician's mate, and quickly learned that on board ship, the sound of running fans meant that the generators were up and running, no sounds of running fans (otherwise known as silence) indicated a long, generally bad, day for the EM shop. You'd wake up in the middle of the night to some new noise, but if you heard fans, you knew you were probably good to go back to sleep. If you didn't hear fans, you might as well get up and head to the shop, there was work to do. But in general, hearing fans running meant things were going well. That was then...

Anyway, there are several culprits at work who seem incapable of turning off the fan after they use the bathroom. Others are more considerate, and leave the switches in the same position they found them, off. Fortunately, one of the worst offenders spends the majority of his time in the field, so after the start of day, I don't have to deal with him. The other worst offender is an office puke like me, and I find myself getting up several times a day to turn the switch off after him.

So, you're sitting there wondering why I just don't say something? Well, it seems like a petty thing to be upset about, even if it does drive me crazy. Plus some of my coworkers have noticed my habit of turning off the switch every time I walk by and have figured it out for themselves w/o having to be asked.

Oh, and the kicker? I assume that the folks who leave the fan on also presume that they're doing any subsequent user's olfactory glands a favor by venting any noxious odors they may have left behind. However, where does the vent fan vent? Into the office space behind me. So all they're doing is redistributing their funk into the office, not out of it as you'd expect. At least the guys who occupy those offices spend the majority of their time out in the field so it's not like they're being bombarded by the funk.

The tyranny of baseball

Several years ago when Rita first got here to the US, the only sports she showed any interest in were Formula 1 and America's Cup racing. The only sport she's played competitively is badminton, and she's raced sailboats. To accommodate her interests, we bought extra channels on cable TV so she could watch them, since neither are well represented here in the US.

Every fall with the advent of football season, I'd be spending extra couch potatoe time watching the games. She could not understand what I saw in the game and made her opinions quite clear. Then, about two years ago something changed, all of a sudden, football started to interest her. This was great! No more feeling guilty about not working on something in the house while I was watching the Seahawks play whoever. She was very frustrated at first because she didn't understand the game, and certainly not the nuances, especially penalties. She understood the concept of penalties, but it drove her crazy that she couldn't see them as they happened as I usually can. Now, I've been playing & watching football (well, maybe not playing so much anymore) since I can remember, so it's fairly easy to keep track, at least for me. Pretty soon though, she started to understand the various signals the referees use to indicate penalties, and such, and the game became more interesting to her. In time, she began to be fascinated by the other aspects of football, specifically the inner workings of the NFL, how trades worked, how they figured out who plays who, how they decide on where the Superbowl will be, things I've never-ever cared about, and never will. By last season, she was a frothing at the mouth Seahawks fan, had to have her 'hawks shirt on for the games, knew everything there was to know in the public domain about each of the players, could tell you their life stories, where they used to play, etc. This even extended to the refs & umpires, never before could I have told you the name of any of them, not one. But she knows.

Then, early this year (or maybe last year, I have no idea when the season starts and never will, just don't care, seemingly the season is year 'round, but dunno), she became interested in baseball, specifically the Mariners. I've never been interested in baseball beyond hoping that our home team would have a good season, something I wish on all our home teams (till now). However, I've been to exactly one professional baseball game, and experienced that Homer Simpson realization: "I never realized how boring this game was without beer", except that I'd always thought it was boring, just had no idea it was even worse in the stadium, even with beer. At least my tickets were free...

By this time next year, I expect she'll know as much about baseball as she does about football.

So now, while the Mariners are playing 44 games in 45 days, I have to endure baseball on the TV. It was bad enough when the guys I used to commute with would listen to the game on the way home, at least then I could tune it out by sleeping or listening to tunes. But now it seems all pervasive, it's all baseball all the time. Even my co-workers are listening to the games on their radios or online. Not only that, I have to listen to stats, analysis, and bitching about the team. Apparently they've lost their last seven or eight games. All I can say is that I hope they continue to lose so they don't end up in the playoffs where the tyranny would continue.

I'm drawing the line at basketball...

Oh, and F1 racing? No interest anymore, even if a race is on when it's easy to watch (instead of the middle of the night), she can't be bothered. And America's Cup? We got to watch exactly one race (in four years).

Customs Inspector Gan, the really expensive breakfast and revenge...

While we were over in Malaysia my SIL brought us out for breakfast at a favorite place of theirs called Raju's for breakfast. As a bit of history, one of the first meals I ever ate with Rita was at Raju's, about five years ago. My all time favorite picture of her is from there as well. Anyway, Rita, Ho Li & I went there and pigged out on Roti Canai , chicken curry, fried fish, teh tarek and teh halia (pulled tea and pulled tea with ginger). I left the fish to the Malaysians, fried fish for breakfast is something I wasn't really hankering for. Our waiter, Ivar, was desperate to either have his picture taken, or simply to see what the photos look like. I'm still amazed at how much interest a simple digital camera can garner at times. Anyway, we took several pictures with him, and let him take some of us as well. I wanted to see how the do they pulled tea, so we asked him if he could do it at the table. He went and asked and was told that I'd have to come into the shop to see it done. I followed him inside where the heat from the various giant woks kept the temperature hovering in the near sauna range. Apparently pulling tea is the job of the tea puller, and not Ivar as he wasn't allowed to pull the tea for me. I caught them on video arguing over it (film at 11 or whenever Rita gets home with the camera) till Ivar simply takes it from the tea puller and shows me that he can do it as well.

After breakfast Ho Li wanted to walk down the street to talk to her art dealer about some paintings she'd had taken back earlier in the week. As we walked around the shop, we found some art that we really liked, and started trying to work a deal with James, the owner. We found one that we particularly liked and I thought the buying session was over, but after more wandering around, we found a pile of paintings that were done in China that we both liked. By this time James was helping another customer so we dug through the pile seeing what we could see and chose a couple of pictures that we liked. Ho Li rounded up James and asked him what the paintings cost, I was expecting to hear maybe $1000 Ringgit (about $330 US), instead, he said they were $5000 MYR, each! I wasn't about to pay $1700 each for these, no matter how much I liked them. It turns out that the paintings were only there to be framed and really weren't for sale as they were going to an exhibit. James made a few phone calls and was given a price of $1500 MYR each, much more reasonable. Still more than I wanted to pay, but how often do you get a chance to buy original art that you really like? We made the deal for the three paintings which came to $4000 MYR with framing. After the deal was struck we asked James about shipping to the US and a confused look came over his face, he'd thought the paintings were for 'Datin Gan (Ho Li's formal title) so he'd given her his best price, not the gwai-lo price he'd have given me. In any case, this was far more than I'd expected to pay for breakfast...

Now we had to figure out how to get them home. Since Ho Li & Co. were headed for Singapore in a few days for Chinese New Year, she volunteered to bring them down in their SUV for us. After that I just had to get them on the plane to the US.

Skipping ahead a few days, it's the 2nd or 3rd day of CNY, and the Gan's are on their way down from Muas, which is where Gan's parents live.

A couple of side notes here. Ho Li's husband's name is Gan Ah Tee, but nobody calls him Ah Tee, everyone simply calls him Gan, which is the equivalent of everyone calling you by your last name. So when I say Gan, I mean him, and when I say "the Gans", I mean the family.

Also, tradition (as I understand it) is that you spend the first day of CNY with the mother of the husband (Gan), and you spend some of the subsequent days with the mother of the wife, in this case Rita's mom, who is a Wong. In Chinese culture, women don't take the last names of their husbands, so Rita's last name is still Ho, and her mom's last name is Wong. However, they would be known as "Madam [insert husband's last name]". I think...

Anyway, Ho Li's family was on it's way down to have dinner with us. I was looking forward to this as I like spending time with them. The day was dragging on, and I was to fly out the next morning at zero-dark-thirty, so I decided to take a nap. About an hour later, Rita comes in telling me that Singaporean Customs is on the phone and wants to talk to me about the paintings. I'm mostly asleep, so I'm trying to answer the questions from the customs inspector some of which strike me as odd. But, since I'm trying to be polite (and I'm half asleep), I don't ask any questions and keep trying to answer each question she asks me. Finally she asks me if there are any Singaporeans she can speak to, and my semi-functioning brain realizes that no, there really aren't, everyone in the house is either Malaysian, or American (me), which I tell her. This seems to fluster her which again seems odd to me, but then she asks to speak to Rita ("is your spouse still there?") again which seems even more odd, but I hand over the phone. Rita talks to her for about three seconds, and then just stops speaking for a while. Finally she says "do you want your notebooks or not?". I'm dumbfounded, I have no idea why she's asking a customs inspector about notebooks, and then I hear giggling on the phone. My niece Kris had pulled a fine joke on me, with not a little help and encouragement from her parents. Rita threatened to renege on her Ang Pao package and everyone had a good laugh at my expense. The notebooks that Rita had referred to was a bunch of ...notebooks... which Kris collects, that we'd brought from the US for her as presents.

Soon enough, the Gan family arrived at Sun's place. The younger kids were very contrite explaining that they'd had absolutely nothing to do with the joke so they'd make sure to get their red envelopes for CNY. As they walked up, I'd found a spare red envelope and as Kris walked up, I pulled it out as to give to her, then tore it up in her face. A weak attempt to turn the joke on her, but it made me feel better. Kris then explained that it hadn't been her idea (trying to be contrite as well, after all, there was cash in the offing), and that Ho Li & Gan had been the instigators. This was probably quite true, but it was more fun to torment Kris.

So, now the question is, what kind of revenge can I exact?

Jet lag...

I don't know what it is about this particular trip, but jet lag has just been kicking my ass since I got home six days ago. My first day back I went to work, and felt OK, I made it through the day and felt pretty tired at the end of it, but no big deal. The second day, I felt like a giant cotton wad was behind my eyes, and it wasn't capable of cognitive thought. I went home early thinking it was just a bit of jet lag and I'd be alright the next day. Hah, silly man. The next day, Friday, I went into work for about six hours (I normally don't work on Fridays), then went to go run errands, and then visit with my sister who had shoulder surgery that afternoon. One of my errands was to get my hair cut. I managed to leave my jacket at the barber shop which required me to have to go back and get it at some point. When I got home, the neighbor's dog I was supposed to be watching had decided to go walkabout some thirteen hours earlier. Now neither of these things has anything to do with jet lag, but they were things that I simply didn't want to deal with. Picking up the jacket I could pretty easily put off, the barber shop is owned by friends and they would hold it for me, but the stupid dog was out somewhere, and it was heading towards freezing that night, and I was worried about him. I sat in my office wondering what to do since I had no way of knowing where he was, so no way of going to get him. It was about 9:30 in the evening before I had the brilliant thought of walking across the street to listen to my neighbor's messages (which incidentally is how I'd learned that he'd been picked up by another neighbor about a mile away about thirteen hours earlier). I was loath to call these folks this late at night, but I felt responsible for the dog, and they were just good Samaritans. Now, had I had cognitive ability earlier in the day when I knew he was gone (I ran home to do some other things and the side gate was open and he wasn't there), I'd have simply walked across the street to listen to messages, and he'd have been rescued hours and hours earlier. This simply hadn't occurred to me. No brain function. I spent the rest of the weekend with ambitious plans that came to naught, the only thing I'd planned to do that I actually did was get my hair cut. And I screwed that up by making another errand for myself.

I think it would help if we experienced actual sunlight here in the Seattle area during the winter, but it's more of a general greyish-ness, so I don't get the visual cues my body's circadian rhythms are expecting as clues to sunrise/sunset cycles, so the transition from SE Asia time to Seattle time is taking longer than usual. In Singapore & Malaysia, the sun pretty much rises and sets w/in ten minutes either way of 7:30, day in-day out, 365 days a year since you're so close to the equator. Here in Seattle at this time of year, the days are still fairly short, and the nights long, so even the length of the day/night cycle is out of whack from the SE Asia version. Add to that the dark days, and it's not overly surprising that your body takes a while to synch back up.

Now I've experienced jet lag before, but not on this scale. I find myself simply falling asleep in front of the TV fairly regularly, only to wake up 45 minutes to a couple of hours later, completely out of touch (which isn't what I want to say, but I can't think of the phrase). Then I go to bed, sleep a few hours, wake up, feel motivated to do something, which lasts till about the time my feet hit the floor. Last night I went to bed at around 11pm, woke up about 2am, and I've been up since. Today's going to be a long day.

Asian hospitality part two

I found the people in Malaysia and Singapore to be pretty pleasant to deal with for the most part. You still get the occasional person who acts like somebody pooped in their oatmeal that morning, but I think that's universal. I wanted to point out some folks who stood out, as well as some general observations.

While in Melaka we stopped for lunch at a famous place for chicken rice balls which were pretty good. The lady who was serving us seemed to recognize Ho Li, and went out of her way to keep us supplied with cool drinks, extra rice balls (Keith must have put down twenty by himself), smiling the whole time, and asking us about our trip. Nice lady, wish I'd have taken her picture.

Also in Melaka, we stopped for Rita & her sister to go look for some delicacy or another (we did this several times). They left me in the car with the engine running so I could soak up the AC (or aircon as it's called over there). Sitting under a tree right in front of me was an older guy in a uniform I didn't recognize. I indicated through the window that I'd like to take his picture and he nodded and smiled in consent. I took his picture, then rolled down my window to introduce myself. His name was Rom Kumar, and he was a Nepalese soldier who'd been in Malaysia for over twenty years, and had less than five to go before he could retire and go home. He said he couldn't wait to feel the cold air of Nepal against his skin again, I commiserated with him. Melaka was very hot, and I'd already had one episode of my knees going wobbly from dehydration.

As we were walking back down the hill that the fort of A Famosa in Melaka was on, a Japanese tourist asked me if I'd take his picture with the fort in the background. Of course I agreed, and he thanked me very formally in Japanese, I was glad to be able to say do itashi mashite in his language to tell him he was welcome.

The girls in the front office of the Royal Langkawi Yacht Club tried very hard to help us locate a friend's boat out in the anchorage, even though they weren't staying at the club.

We turned down a random road in Langkawi after we'd given up looking for our friends mentioned above and ended up on a track that led to a fishing village. We drove as far as we could go taking in the sampans that were high and dry on the mud flats. One of the few boats that was floating (closest to the sea) had a fisherman and his son working on the boat. We were catching a flight in a couple of hours, and had some drinks left over that we didn't want to carry with us on the flight. Rita offered them to the fisherman, who accepted everything except the beers as Muslims don't drink alcohol. They chatted for a while and he told her that if we could come back the next day, he'd take us out for a tour of the island in his boat. I wish we'd have found him the first day instead of two-three hours before our flight back out of the island!

We drove to the top of Gunung Raya on Langkawi because I wanted to see what the whole island looked like, plus I figured that it would be somewhat cooler up there. There were some spectacular views on the way up, and at times I thought our poor little Proton Wira rental car wasn't going to make it, but we finally did. At the top of the mountain is a large communications array that's under lock and key. There is also something that looked to us like a resort. We drove up that road to find more locked gates and some guards who were fairly interested in us. There was a large set of stairs that wound up around the building to the right, and I figured we could just go walk up those to take some pictures, but no, that wasn't allowed for some reason. To the left was a tall tower (highest point of the mountain), and some ornate gates. We asked if we could drive up there as well, but no, that wasn't allowed either. Well, could we walk up there? No, not allowed. Huh... So we decided to content ourselves with taking some pictures looking down onto the north side of the island which was all you could really see from our vantage point. The guards seemed contented with this, and promptly ignored us. After wandering around for a while, a European couple (they looked Italian to me for some reason) wandered out from the ornate gated compound and walked down past us chattering away happily. Now what was so special about them that they were allowed up there? No sooner had that thought gone through my head than the guards were motioning for us to come over to see them. Apparently they let people up into the compound (I'd started thinking of it as the Eagle's Nest), but only one at a time, and now they'd take us up into the security area so we could look around. It turned out that the Eagle's Nest belonged to Mahatir, the former PM of Malaysia, and it was guarded year 'round by these guys. To get into this gated compound you went through extensive security which consisted of carefully walking around the gate so you didn't fall into the gorge below. I'm not kidding, look to the left of the picture above and you'll see what I mean. Huge five meter high wrought iron gates, and all you do is walk around them to the left. Anyway, the guard turned out to be something of a closet tour guide, obviously very proud of the compound and took his time explaining things to us and showing us around, including taking us out onto the breezeway that connects the compound to the big tower I mentioned earlier. We weren't allowed into the tower itself for some reason, but the views from the breezeway were pretty spectacular. We made sure to take some pictures with the guard who's name escapes me right now, the Malays in particular seem to love having their pictures taken with you.

Asian hospitality part one

My relatives in Malaysia and Singapore were simply wonderful to us during our trip.

Rita's sister Ho Li, lives in Kuala Lumpur with her husband Gan, their four kids, Kristyn, Kathryn, Keith and Kenny, two Indonesian maids, Dar & Dawin, their driver Isa, who doesn't live with them but is basically on call 24/7, and don't forget Ben and Sam, the two golden retrievers. She works as a stock broker, and manages everything about running the household. I touched on this in an earlier post, but wanted to elaborate on her life a bit. While taking care of the household, children's functions, managing the maids, social activities, both adult and kids, etc., she found time to locate flights for us, as well as accommodations on Langkawi. She also took us down to Melaka to tour for a day, out for lunches, and to shop for the paintings we brought back (the really expensive breakfast at Raju's). Her schedule is incredibly hectic, but she seems to take it all in stride, as if we were the most important thing in the world. Now possibly this is just my westerner's view of an inscrutable Asian woman, but I never even saw her ruffled. I'm sure that we were a pain for her to schedule around, but you'd have never known it. I notice that even with all the evident stress, she laughs a lot, and she & Rita are thick as thieves. They talk to each other all the time, and I'm grateful that phone calls back and forth are as inexpensive as they are so they can.

Her husband, Gan, although extremely busy with a business transaction he was working on (I never-ever saw him without both of his phones), similarly made sure we were comfortable, even though he left the minutiae to Ho Li. He took time out of his incredibly busy schedule to take us out for a couple of nice dinners, as well as a tour of the town to show us the sites. He's a jovial guy who loves to talk about skiing. He started skiing in Asia a couple of years ago, and when they came to visit us for xmas last year, he got to do some skiing here in the Seattle area as well (a whole other story). He had recently spent some time in China and took some lessons while there. When he was fitted for boots, he felt that they were too tight, but made the mistake of listening to his coach's advice, and ended up with a blood blister on his big toe. He was in incredible pain, but in typical Asian stoicism, he just cowboyed up and kept skiing. Now he's got a big black toenail to grow out, and a good story to tell. Rita had spent a fair amount of time looking for a pair of ski pants for him because they simply can't be found over there. We brought him some good insulated pants, I hope he gets to use them a lot.

He was also very proud of his house, he took me for the cook's tour to show me the whole property. He had had extensive work done to the house after he bought it, a lot of which related to security, but also for esthetics and light. He'd also added a swimming pool, which was a favorite hang out of mine, I spent a fair amount of time either playing with the kids, or swimming laps, plus it was the coolest place in the house. The pool also has a jacuzzi, but the pump and heater weren't working properly. I wanted to take a look at it, but the electrics scared me, and I had no desire to work on sketchy wiring while standing in a pool of water, plus I had no tools to work with.

One of the things I noticed is that my relatives are very-very-very reluctant to allow you to pay for anything. And if you mention something you might want, don't be surprised if it shows up after their next trip wherever. I had to learn to not say things like "I wish I had a Coke", otherwise some pretense would be found to go out for a bit so that they could "incidentally" pick up my wished for item.

While out shopping with Rita's brother Sun, we stopped for a snack in the basement of Sim Lim Tower. He made sure that I went to find a table, so he could pay for the snack himself. An hour or so later we decided to have lunch there after hooking back up with Rita who had gone somewhere less geekish to shop for a while. Again, he made sure that we went to go get a table while he went to choose some food for us. The only thing I was allowed to buy on that particular trip (except geek stuff for myself) was some extra drinks when the curry we'd ordered got a bit hot for everyone. One of the things I really-really wanted to do while I was in Asia was go sailing. After our trip to Langkawi and my failed attempts to find a boat to rent there, I was determined to find one in Singapore. The second day we were back, Sun took Rita & I out looking for that boat. At least in Singapore, there were boats to be rented, while in Langkawi, we had a hard time just finding any. The problem with the boats in Singapore is that you have to belong to the club that's doing the renting in order to actually rent them. I thought that my Catalina International Association affiliation would help, but no dice. So Sun drove us to probably six different yacht clubs only to get turned down at each. Some simply weren't open because it was CNY, and others wouldn't let you rent unless you were either a member, or with a member. Sun was picking up a friend flying in from Thailand that afternoon who was a member of the Republic of Singapore Yacht Club, who had J-24's for rent. I was very-very careful not to express a wish for him to host us on the boat because I knew he'd probably do it, even if he was only going to be in town for three days. I'm sure that Sun had better things to do, but you'd have never known it. The irony is, on the day that I got back to the US, someone on the Catalina forums responded to my query about someone in Singapore who could host us. Had I thought about it, I could have probably come up with the same solution myself.

Now when I've got visitors, I go out of my way to accommodate them as well, but I was starting to feel guilty about imposing on them. I know they don't view it as an imposition, but my western upbringing knows all about fish and visitors. I try not to make myself a chore for my hosts, but some is inevitable.

My mother in law lives with Rita's brother Sun in Singapore. This is traditional, the parents will eventually live with the oldest son. As Sun is the only son, the responsibility falls to him. She was sick, actually running a fever, but still rode along with Sun at midnight to pick us up from the airport, and make us something to eat when we got home. I don't think Rita even noticed that she was sick that first night, but after twenty some odd hours of transit, I don't think she can be faulted for not noticing. The next day, she was worse, and spent a fair amount of time in bed, something she simply did not want to do because it was her job to be a good host. My own mother was this way, you couldn't walk into her house without being offered a cool drink (usually ice tea, she grew up in the south), and she would go to the same length that Rita's mom was even if she were on her death bed. Now bear in mind that this was in the days running up to Chinese New Year, the biggest celebration of the year for most Asians, so her not cooking, chopping, shopping, etc. was an indication of how ill she was. Fortunately, Rita's oldest sister Doris brought her maid Linda over to help. Now, according to Rita this was also unheard of, her mom would never let someone else across the threshold to her kitchen unless she was simply incapable of doing it herself. Not that she didn't try, but between Rita, Doris, Linda & Sun, they were able to take most of the load off of their mom so she could rest. Every time I offered to help, I was gently rebuffed with a smile as if it were unthinkable for a guest to help. The illness didn't stop her mom from getting up in the morning to make us breakfast. On more than one occasion I'd get up and walk out into the living room, and she'd be snoozing on the couch waiting for us to get up so she could start cooking. Once again, I felt guilty about this, especially since I knew she was sick, but there seemed nothing I could do, except encourage her to rest. There's a bit of a language barrier, she doesn't speak a lot of English, and I speak far less Chinese. She understands more than she speaks, but I had to keep reminding myself to talk to her, instead of trying to talk through Rita or her brother. The day of the big dinner (I'm jumping ahead in time here) for CNY at Sun's place, Doris came by with her husband Cheong Heng, and children Su-An, Dexter and Su-Lin. She was concerned about their mom, so she decided to take her to the nearby hospital for a "jab", what we'd call a shot in the US. I'm not sure what was in the shot, but it seemed to help, she was on her feet the next day, and improved from then.

Doris & family had just recently moved into a new apartment that she wanted to show us. The first night she came over with her daughters, the youngest, Su-Lin, was nearly desperate for us to come over, but we weren't able to go that night. Ho Li's family (the Gan's) were on their way down, and would be staying with Doris for CNY, so we planned to go visit when the whole gang was there. Apparently it's simply not done to stay at a hotel or anywhere that's not family when you come to visit, so Doris's place would be swelled to capacity with the extra six people, but this isn't even thought about, you're simply accommodated. Similarly at Sun's place, her mom had given up her room for Rita & I so we'd have some privacy and our own bathroom. I felt incredibly guilty about this, but we'd have actually insulted them if we'd have chosen to stay at a hotel so we wouldn't put them out. Unthinkable.

Taking your breath and other things: Telaga Tujuh

Telaga Tujuh (literally Seven Wells) is located on the southwest corner of the island of Langkawi, close to our resort Berjaya. The seven wells are up at the top of about 700 steps which the locals tell you will take about ten minutes to climb. Yeah, right, if you're an 18 year old surfer, not an overweight, pushing 50 year old, more like 45 minutes plus, and you're going to want to make sure you take water with you (we didn't).

We started our trek up the falls by stopping at an ice cream shop so Rita could get a cone. As we started up the asphalt road (why can't we just drive up this part? enquiring minds want to know), a couple of westerners passed us (remember the 18 year old surfers...these two could have played that part). The girl warned Rita to be careful with her food, as the monkeys were aggressive, and would try to steal it. Up till this point we hadn't seen monkeys anywhere near us, but these seemed to be the magic words because no sooner than the warning been issued than a troop of about seven came out of the jungle and started closing in on us. It looked like a mother and several yearlings along with one other possibly female about the same size as the mother. I was amused to see how they had absolutely no fear and walked right up to us. They started to cluster around Rita's feet, eyes on nothing but what was in her hand, so she decided the best thing to do was to chuck her barely started ice cream cone across the drainage ditch. The mother was across the ditch in a millisecond with the cone in her hands, eating as well as any child would. As we watched, she deftly removed the paper cover so she wouldn't have to eat that, and continued to devour the cone, not sharing with any of her kids. We left the monkeys to their meal and continued up the hill on our "ten minute" walk.

The hill is a pretty steep incline, maybe 30° or so, but it's paved asphalt (makes the engineer in me wonder what admixture they used to keep it from slumping in the tropical heat, but that's another story), and occasionally a motorbike would roar past us, making me wish we'd rented one of those instead. The bottom of the road was closed off to vehicle traffic, but bikes could get around. To the right of the road was a set of stairs that Rita wanted to get onto thinking it'd be easier going. I thought the stairs were a good idea, but because they were currently below us, I wasn't about to lose altitude to get to them. I figured they'd eventually catch up to us, and I could save the heartbeats necessary to climb down then back up to where I already was, altitude wise. Make sense? Me either, but when your heart's pounding in your ears due to the exertion, that's the way your mind works, or at least mine does. We quickly realized we were in for more of a hike than we'd bargained for, but I've long since learned that you sort of walk yourself into shape in the first few days of vacation, so I wasn't going to let a little thing like a giant hill deter me. The builders thoughtfully included benches every 50 meters or so to rest on, and by about the third or fourth one, we were resting at every one, sometimes in between depending on the relative steepness. About halfway up, Rita was ready to quit and go back down. I was too, but wasn't ready to admit defeat, and the slightest indication that we could go back down hill would be jumped upon by the distaff side of my family, so I pretended to be OK as best I could. I'm sure the incessant puffing, red cheeks and dripping sweat were not any indication of my condition. Besides, we hadn't brought any water with us (stupid, stupid, stupid), and I knew there was water to swim in at the top, and by now we were closer to the top than the bottom, so why not go on? This wasn't helped by a couple of (German?) ladies who we met on the way back down from their visit. One seemed enthused by her visit, but the other when I asked "is it worth it?" replied, "it's not to die for, and if you miss it, you won't know what you missed". All this did was anger me as she obviously expected me to keel over of myocardial infarction or something, so I was more determined than ever to get to the top. Along the way a Malay guy came running UP to us, running in leather cowboy boots, long pants, but no shirt. He stopped while he caught his breath in the 20 seconds or so that took (another surfer wannabe I guess) and explained to Rita that we were a bit more than half way, then he took off again running. I watched him run up the hill, then noticed that he too had to stop and really catch his breath, maybe I'm not the only one who fakes things? At long last we got up to the top of the falls, and it was quite the sight. Again my engineer brain was asking how in the hell did they get all the materials up here to make two bathrooms, an observation tower, concrete walkways, etc? Most likely some poor bastards had to carry the sacks of cement up on their backs because the asphalt road had ended about 1/3 the way up,and all that was left was the stairs and the pipe. Somehow they'd carried up tons of cement, 18" pipe (the wells actually supply water for villages below), plus all the lumber to make railings the entire way up, etc. A large undertaking in equatorial heat, although it was actually quite pleasant under the jungle canopy, if a bit buggy.

We wandered around at the top of the hill, looking for a nice place to get out of the sun and into some water. There was a family camping up near the top, and they were washing dishes in the water which everyone else below them was swimming in, so we decided to walk upstream. We found a nice little grotto where the water was deep enough to sit in, if not swim. All I wanted to do was cool down anyway, so I plopped my butt in the water. Ahhhhh.... Rita did the same and we took some pictures to commemorate the occasion.

On the way back down, we stopped nearly as frequently as on the way up. The steps are so steep, and stopping your (or at least my not inconsiderable) weight with each step got tiring pretty quickly. Our quads and calves would hurt for a couple of days afterward. About a third of the way down, we stopped for a longer breather than we had been, and this is where we met some of the most interesting people. As we sat there, a number of people walked by, invariably asking "how much further?". One group walking up was a guy with a gaggle of kids behind him. He walked up asking "what kind of accent is that"? referring to hearing another American accent. This turned out to be Joe Rooney, ex-USMC aviator, and a Delta Airlines pilot on extended leave to sail around the world in his 54' ketch "Leprechaun" with his wife and five kids. We talked to him for a while, and at some point I lamented about my inability to find a sailboat to rent upon which he immediately offered his dinghy to us so we could go exploring. That sounded like a good plan to me, and we made plans to meet up with him the next day. Joe's wife had just left that morning to fly home to Spokane, WA for a month, so he was trying to figure out whether their first meal as "bachelors" would be hot dogs or mac & cheese. One of the smaller children pointed out that there were no hot dogs so mac & cheese it was. The kids wanted to move on, so we said goodbye with every intention of meeting up with them the next day.

Soon after Joe & family left to head up the hill, a British couple, John & Valerie walked up asking the standard question, "how much further?". They stopped and chatted for a while as well, and as they were heading to Singapore right behind us, Rita invited them to join us at her family's Chinese New Year there. We didn't really expect to see them, but you never know. As it turns out,we saw them that same night as we were having satay for dinner in Pantai Cenang (Cenang Beach). They stopped and chatted for a while and said they'd look us up in Singapore in few days (they never did).

While talking to John & Valerie, another westerner walked by drinking a Guinness. Presuming him to be from the UK, I asked him if he had another for me. He answered in halting English that he only had one Guinness, and it was mostly in his belly. He was obviously carrying more beer with him, so I teased him about being greedy. It turns out that he was simply being literal, I had asked for a Guinness, which he had no more of, but he was more than willing to hand me a Carlsberg, which tasted just fine,even if it was a bit warm. I think he may have been Romanian, or something close to there, he definitely had a Slavic accent. I was to pass this little bit of karma on when we were ready to fly out the next day by handing a British couple three beers we didn't want to try to get on the plane with us. As it turns out, Air Asia doesn't care if you bring them, you just can't drink them while on board. Of course I discovered this about two minutes after giving them away. Oh well, can't hurt to refill the karmic tank.

After we walked to the bottom of the stairs, Rita wanted a soft coconut to drink, and I was dying for some cold water, so we stopped at one of the hawker stalls. The Malay lady running the place had the coconut whacked open before I could even get the camera out. We sat at a table talking out the hike we'd just had and within less than a minute, we had a long tailed audience eyeing her coconut. The macaques are fearless, will steal anything they can get their hands on, and they're fast. We shooed him away, Rita finished her coconut and wandered off to peruse the stalls. I sat there drinking water enjoying the shade and soon enough, my little friend was back. He hopped up onto an adjacent table, obviously eying the coconut, and judging whether he could get it from me or not. Pretty soon he decided and in a flash, he was in the air on his way to my table making a scooping dash at the coconut. I'd expected that he'd try something like this and as soon as he jumped, I swatted at him with my Tilley Hat. This surprised him, and he changed direction in flight, landing on the far side of my table from me. Now, this table wasn't more than four feet across if that, so I had a monkey basically right in my face. He kept making slight moves towards the coconut, and I kept raising my hat to swat at him again. Pretty soon he decided to retreat a bit to a cage where they keep their coconuts (to keep the monkeys out). The staring battle devolved into a hissing, glaring and flashing of teeth confrontation...by me. He sat there for several minutes contemplating his next move and just as I thought he was going to launch another attack, he wandered off behind a tree. I thought, aha, he's trying to lull me into a false sense of security, and sure enough, he kept peering around the sides of the tree. By now it had occurred to me to get my camera into video mode, so I started filming him with the camera, but deliberately looking away like I didn't see him. He wandered around at the base of the tree for a while then simply wandered off. I was disappointed that he hadn't tried again, I'd have probably given him the coconut since there was little left in it.