Escape from Black Friday - A Sample Route

Brooklyn forecast for Friday: Variable winds less than 5 kt becoming WSW 5 to 8 kt in the morning. Sunny, Sunny, with a high near 56. Seas around 1 ft.

Wow. PERFECT weather for getting outside and doing something to work off the turkey and pie, huh? May I make a suggestion? Blow off the awfulness at the malls, get out there and make the most of it!

See the picture above for a great example of a suitable route for an Escape from Black Friday. Either arrow will work.

Haven't seen anything this clearly marked where you are? Well, that anyone who's a regular reader here probably already knows their escape options, by land or by sea (and probably had their own Escape planned long before I even thought of posting about it) but if you're not sure, I bet this site can help.

It's going to be a lovely day in the Northeast, and the snow will be here soon enough. A fall day like this is a gift - it would be such a shame to waste it on shopping!

Oak Beach Forecast & Tides, and a little self-indulgent pre-IDW moaning.

Marine forecast

FRI
SW WINDS 5 TO 10 KT...INCREASING TO 10 TO 15 KT WITH GUSTS UP
TO 20 KT IN THE AFTERNOON. SEAS 3 TO 5 FT.
Sunny, with a high near 69.

FRI NIGHT
W WINDS 10 TO 15 KT. SEAS 3 TO 5 FT.

SAT
NW WINDS 10 TO 15 KT. SEAS 2 TO 4 FT.
Mostly sunny, with a high near 64.

SAT NIGHT
NW WINDS 5 TO 10 KT. SEAS 2 TO 3 FT.

SUN
NW WINDS 5 TO 10 KT...BECOMING S. SEAS 2 TO 3 FT.
Mostly sunny, with a high near 61.

Tides

Tides for Oakbeach starting with April 29, 2011.
Day High Tide Height Sunrise Moon Time % Moon
/Low Time Feet Sunset Visible

F 29 Low 2:56 AM 0.1 5:55 AM Rise 3:50 AM 16
29 High 8:17 AM 0.7 7:47 PM Set 4:38 PM
29 Low 3:04 PM 0.1
29 High 8:45 PM 0.7

Sa 30 Low 3:40 AM 0.1 5:53 AM Rise 4:14 AM 10
30 High 9:04 AM 0.7 7:48 PM Set 5:36 PM
30 Low 3:43 PM 0.1
30 High 9:26 PM 0.8

Su 1 Low 4:24 AM 0.0 5:52 AM Rise 4:40 AM 5
1 High 9:47 AM 0.7 7:49 PM Set 6:36 PM
1 Low 4:23 PM 0.0
1 High 10:03 PM 0.8

Well, at least the weather looks good. And it will be fun, the Instructor Development Workshop. It will...

I am feeling a little stressed out/depressed about the class, though. All of my Facebook friends know the situation because I've been whining about it on a regular basis over there. Basically, late Winter/early Spring is budget season at work. The last time Sebago did an IDW, I couldn't do it because it overlapped with the presentation prep time. This time, the timing was actually perfect - our presentation was on the 14th, I think it was, we had the week before slated for building the deck, and then there were going to be 2 weeks where things were back to normal and I was going to have evenings free to prepare.

Well, that all changed, the presentation is today, there have been intense 12-hour days for all and I am just mentally wiped out.

I do mostly have my stuff together. I've been paddling all winter & so my kit is all reasonably well organized in little bags that pack in a big bag & then transfer to my day hatch. I was able to make it to West Marine yesterday for a few sundries that TQ & I needed or wanted.

I got a little Facebook fun out of that trip - yesterday's status:

How to make your sailing friends jealous:

OH MY GOSH! I just went to West Marine and I spent SEVENTY DOLLARS! Can you BELIEVE I spent that much money in ONE TRIP???

I'd left a key item at the club (lightweight hood with noseclip) when I did my big Spring boat cleaning on Sunday. Fortunately it was found by a clubmate who left it in the clubhouse for me, but that was an important enough for cold-water immersion work that I would run over to New York Kayak today to get one (Randy had told me he had the right ones in stock) if I hadn't had mine in hand by last night, but TQ was my knight in shining Taurus and ran me out to the club to pick it up.

There are a couple more items that the EMS (Eastern Mountain Supply) store across the street should be able to cover for me.

But man, I'm just rattled right now, and very nervous about jumping from the mental intensity of preparing the budget to the physical and mental intensity of the first 3 days of this 6-day process without one single day to sort of catch up with myself. I do have hopes of an early "pau hana time" today - 3-ish would be awesome but I really, really wish there were 48 hours between the start of the budget presentation and the start of the class, instead of 24. I'll do my best, but...phew.

Does anyone know of a store I could go to to buy the proper frame of mind?

Spam Musubi

Just because.

BTW, speaking of spam, has anybody else noticed that there's been a strange spate of linkless spam lately? I thought that the whole point of spam was to try to get lots of people to come look at whatever it is that the spammer is trying to promote, but the latest trendlet in spam (based on the sample that ends up in the filter) seems to be just random short anonymous notes with no apparent commercial intent. No links, no names, just a note.

They frequently claim great enthusiasm about finding "this forum", which might make sense except that blogs aren't really forums, and might still make sense if they were being left in recent posts where there are sometimes actual discussions in the comments, but they aren't, they're always back in the older posts where there aren't any comments because JS-Kit took down the Haloscan system I used to use & replaced it with something that insisted I wasn't a member of my own blog every time I tried to sign in.

There are requests to exchange links or be added to RSS feeds, also with no contact info - how is that supposed to work?

There was a joke that had been a chestnut originally, rendered near-incomprehensible by translation & re-translation via Google...

Strangest one so far was philosophy, I think:

To be a adroit lenient being is to have a amiable of openness to the world, an skill to trust aleatory things beyond your own pilot, that can govern you to be shattered in very outermost circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something uncommonly impressive relating to the fettle of the righteous compulsion: that it is based on a conviction in the up in the air and on a willingness to be exposed; it's based on being more like a weed than like a prize, something somewhat fragile, but whose very item attractiveness is inseparable from that fragility.

I think it might be brilliant, but it's way too deep for me.

What's up with this stuff, anyways? Some new purehearted, noncommercial spam movement? Electronic performance art? Spam for spam's sake? Recognition, at long last, of the fact that spam doesn't come in links, that would be sausage? Or is it just the electronic equivalent of "Kilroy Was Here"?

Lunchtime Mini-Rant, Subject: Oh, Come On, Maureen Dowd.

In her opinion piece in today's NY Times, Maureen Dowd totally loses me at the second paragraph: "Military guys are rarely as smart as they think they are, and they’ve never gotten over the fact that civilians run the military." Don't they say anything in J-school about not making idiotically insulting overgeneralizations unless you happen to be working for a tabloid that specializes in such BS?

Not that what the general did wasn't pretty dumb. But two wrongs don't make a right, and two stupids don't make a smart.

(cross-post from facebook)

Can we please put the horse to bed?

Mind if I vent for one post?

Well, if you do, please feel free to go away & come back in a day or two. Because really, this is one ridiculously tiny thing that left me slightly perturbed, in the middle of a couple of very interesting events that I attended last week (namely, the mapping meeting on Tuesday night & the maritime professionals evening at the South Street Seaport). I really enjoyed both & was very glad that I'd managed to manage my workload in such a way that I was able to go. The material was all engaging, well presented, forward-looking, made a person feel good about the Hudson's history & future. Sort of inspirational at times. I hope to have time to come back to those!

So with all the inspiration & interesting stuff, it was a bit of a bummer to overhear one of those inspirational speakers trot out that tired old chestnut about people taking kayaks on the working Hudson being just like people taking horses on the highway.

I first saw that in a Times article written somewhere around a decade ago, back when I first started paddling. It wasn't the same guy back then. I really thought that particular horse story had long since been put to bed, but apparently it's still out there kicking around.

I didn't feel like calling the guy on it. I have mixed emotions on the topic myself, honestly. I've seen people out there doing some pretty silly things in kayaks. I've done some pretty silly things out there in kayaks myself. I think anyone that's been boating (in any kind of boat) on the Hudson for very long can remember at least one time when they made somebody sweat bullets - themselves, if no one else. Happens to the best of us, and it not unique to kayakers at all. Still -- the horse-on-a-highway scenario? It just doesn't paint a very accurate picture, and I think that it would behoove us to put that particular simile out to pasture.

Failing that, maybe next time I hear somebody make that argument, I'll just ask if a few minor adjustments could be made to the highway concept, just to make it a better reflection of the situation as it actually exists on our urban waterways. Ready? Here we go:

1. Imagine that the highway was carved by Pleistocene-era glaciers.
2. Imagine that the highway is simultaneously being used by semis, minivans, Formula One racers, model T fords, bicycles, mopeds, that thing Jack Black drove in Nacho Libre, school buses, motorcycles antique & new, large hotels that have somehow become mobile, vintage Bugattis, VW Bugs, Australian road trains, beat-up old pickups, clown cars and oh yes, some horses.
3. Imagine that the highway is a mile across, with one fairly wide lane right down the middle. The semis and the road trains have to stay in that one. Everybody else is allowed to go in whatever direction they need to or want to, within the constraints of the rules of the road (see point 4).
4. Imagine that the rules of the road were written specifically to address all of the interactions between the between all the different vehicles (see point 2) travelling in all the different directions (see point 3).

And last but not least -

5. Imagine the horses were there first!

:D

Grant me all that, and I will readily agree that taking a kayak on the Hudson is EXACTLY like taking a horse on the highway!!!

Thus endeth the rant.

Please be aware that my tongue has at least partway planted in cheek (otherwise there wouldn't have been as many bad horse puns) for this post. I do need to get serious here at the end, though. I do want to mention, in the guy's defense - he wasn't saying that kayaks should be banned in NYC entirely, he was just saying that there are places where it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for a person to be hanging out in a kayak. I completely agree with him on that point. The question is, do you really want to flout the Public Trust Doctrine & carve out industry-only areas to keep recreational craft from causing problems, when there are already rules (and, one can at least hope, common sense) that should do the same thing? Furthermore, there were some interesting points made at the Tuesday night mapping meeting about the frustration that members of the professional maritime industry feel as their workplaces are gradually being turned over to developers & recreation (Exhibit A: Todd Shipyard Graving Dock).

I think anyone can respect that, even if we don't always like the way it's expressed.

New favorite animated movie...

>
I went to see The Secret of Kells on Friday. Pure magic. Almost made me cry, it was so beautiful. This scene was one of my favorites. The man from whom the cat Pangur-ban steals the key is Brendan's uncle, the Abbott of Kells, who is actually not the bad guy, just frustrated with his nephew's disobedience in leaving the safety of the walls of the abbey at a time when raiding Vikings are about.

It had been a rather long gray week at work (I've finally begun trying to tell my superiors that I think I'm in over my head with my current duties in a way that I don't think can be overcome by some online course, and it's been horribly depressing). Friday afternoon, I checked my email & there was an email from the International Children's Film Festival (I joined their mailing list last year when I was trying to get into one of their screenings of Sita Sings the Blues, I did and it became another instant favorite of mine). It was full of beautiful stills from the movie, which I'd been thinking of seeing since I first heard about it, and there was something extra-special about the Friday night showing - the director was going to be there doing a Q&A after the film. I was on Fandango buying a ticket a minute later - this sounded like just the antidote I needed, something to drive the week's woes out of my head for a while.

It was just what I'd hoped. There are some things that I've seen, or read, or heard, or even sung myself (especially back in the days when I sang with a small but excellent choir, my own voice alone can't weave that kind of spell) that just leave me feeling almost suspended, holding my breath after it's over holding the feeling for one more moment. This was one of those.

Wonderful movie. If you enjoy animation at all, and you get a chance to see it, do go!

I wish I'd been feeling a little less shy during the Q&A - I should've asked what the Irish in the song meant. Lovely, though, isn't it?

I think the thing about the Q&A that left me the most excited was that the same group is now working on an animated version of one of my favorite folk stories, the Irish legend of the Seal Wife. Short version of the legend - you've probably heard it - a man comes upon a group of selkies - seal women - who've shed their sealskins one rare sunny Irish afternoon & are sunning themselves on the rocks on the shore. The man sneaks up & steals one of the skins & that selkie is trapped when the rest resume seal shape. The man takes her home, marries her, they have a couple of kids & she's all settled into being a housewife until one day, she somehow finds the sealskin, which her husband had kept hidden in their home all those years. She goes down to the sea, puts it on & is never seen again.

I love this story partly, of course, because what water lover wouldn't love to be able to become a seal, or a dolphin, or the like?

But I also identify very strongly with the concept of being taken away from one home, making another, but never quite letting go of the loss of the first.

The versions of the story that I've read never seem to go too deeply into emotions - just a simple, straightforward "This happened, then that, then that". But I can never think of that story without embroidering it in my own mind. How did she feel about where she was? Did she forget until she found the skin? When she found it - how hard was the decision to make? When she was back in the sea, did she miss her home on the land? There's an Irish song I know, An Mhaighdean Mhara, that does go into that - the children are singing to their mother, and she to them (hm, if Dad's in there it's a verse I never learned...) - but the versions of the story I've heard tend to leave things interestingly open to interpretation.

I always thought that if I knew how to make animated movies - that's the story I'd want to start with.

Even got to goofing around with some colored pencils one night, trying to draw the moment she goes back - I'm no Bowsprite, but I'm definitely a doodler - and it came out like this -



she's got the sealskin in her arms, but she takes a good long look back at the cottage before she puts it on -


and then even once she's turned back to a seal - something of who she was is still there...


Imagine that drawn about a zillion times better, like, by an actual trained artist, and animated, and that's sort of what my make-believe cartoon movie about the Seal Wife would look like.

And y'know, if Disney decided to do it, I don't think I'd want to see it.

Cartoon Saloon's?

Can't WAIT.

why that bugged me so much...

BTW, I think the reason that that bugged me so much is that there was a certain extreme low point that I hit in high school, after we left Hawaii. Mostly I did a very very good job of hiding how homesick I was, but oh god, this one day it all just broke loose. In gym class, of all the idiotic places.

I look back on that & the one thing that I still can't figure out to this day is -

Where were all the grown-ups?

So I guess I read about a kid ending up getting put in a bad situation that the grown-ups should've maybe seen coming - it hits a few zillion nerves.

I really do hope the kid is too young to get it.

Politi-LOL

moar funny pictures

I am back-dating this because I refuse to interrupt my iceboat reverie for politics, but inspired by the inimitable Tillerman, I cannot resist just one leetle LOL.

ees vaffer theen...

Winter? I'd like to bag it!

The Bag:

The book is a standard-sized paperback - it's there for scale, but I will mention that I just discovered Hiaasen this winter through my building's unofficial book exchange (aka the coffee table in the laundry room) and have been on a total kick - tons of fun!

The Big Bag:


The Really Big Bag:



Y'know, I wouldn't mind winter so much if it weren't for all the stuff!

I just finished packing for 3 days out in PA with TQ. In the summertime, that would be the first bag - "The Bag". La la la.

A winter weekend?

I could easily have gone with option #3 - "The Really Big Bag" (originally purchased for traveling to a kayak camping trip in Canada).

In the interest of rush-hour mobility, I pared things down to Option #2 - the big bag - but I had to add a small supplementary bag (daytrip size, not shown) to do it!

Ugh! I Hate Winter!

Of course the reason for the supplementary bag is that the Allegheny River is not yet frozen solid, just skim ice as of today - I've got my drysuit in the big bag because paddling IS on the weekend's program. In January! Should be fun. I won't hate that.

Still, I'm really looking forward to packing for >Hawaii by comparison. Probably looking at around 10 days, I have a carryon that's a little bigger than Bag #1 here & as long as I have some sort of laundry access, I should totally be able to avoid checking bags. Travelling to warm places is so much easier!

Oh, hey, and speaking of Hawaii - there was a fun surprise on MSN travel this week. Travel writer Beth Collins married a guy from Hawaii, loved the place so much they moved there for a a while & still visit his parents whenever they can. Usually these articles that purport to give you "Hawaii's secret places" are still giving you sort of tourist-focused spots, and pricey ones too (maybe they're secret because normal people can't afford them?) - but Ms. Collins's Oahu Exposed? Well, there are at least 5 things on her list that were already on my tentative itinerary for my trip out there, 6 if you count "eating shave ice" although I will probably get my fix at Aoki's, and it's nothing short of mindboggling to see absolute fixtures of "small kid time" memories like the Aiea Loop Trail (I feel like I did about a hundred hikes & picnics with the Girl Scounts at the Keaiwa Heiau State Recreation Area where that trail is - I wonder if you can still see the old Japanese war plane wreckage, we used to love scaring each other by saying we saw bones down there...) and the Waimalu Shopping Plaza (SHIRO'S SAIMIN YAY!) mentioned on a travel article designed for mainland consumption!

Irony and the Ady Gil

You heard about this, right? The collision between the Ady Gil, that ultraspiffy, futuristic, carbon-neutral Batboat-thing that the Sea Shepherd organization is (oops, was) using as part of their campaign to harass whalers in Antarctica, and the Shōnan Maru 2, part of the Japanese whaling fleet? Been a lot of talk about it on the internet. I've watched the various videos & personally, I've got no idea who was actually at fault in the collision (I think COLREGS say that when 2 boats collide, both skippers are at fault, but I also think that's assuming that no skipper would ever actually want to hit another boat, which in the case of these Sea Shepherd folks is clearly not always the case - I'm not saying that that's what happened this time, just that historically - well, keep reading).

If I had to put money on what happened, I think I'd go with a scenario close to the one Commenter #3, Andy (not Sebago clubmate Andy, another Andy) lays out over on the Old Salt Blog. As long as betting is optional, though, I think I will just keep my money in my pocket.

Still - I will just toss out one observation that I've left on a couple of blogs -

I think it’s ironic that Sea Shepherd’s screaming about the sinking of the Ady Gil, while simultaneously selling t-shirts featuring a list of those boats that they themselves claim to have rammed or sunk.

Brief return to JS-Kit comment thing - and A Tale of Two Help Desks.

JS-Kit support staff has evidently returned from vacation, so I have turned their system back on in hopes that they can do whatever it is they need to do so that will allow me to turn their system off without losing five years of comments.

Somebody referred to my "optimism" recently! :D



Afternoon update - or - It was the best of help desks, it was the worst of help desks.

Funny thing is, I got to deal with both on the same day!
******************************

The Worst of Help Desks:

I'm turning the Echo comment system back off & returning to Blogger's. That silly idea I had that somehow they could transfer the old Haloscan stuff into Blogger? The customer "support" rep straightened me out (and about as gently as Cesar straightens out a really obstreporous dog, too). Customer support? More like customer suppress. I guess I shouldn't be too upset, Haloscan was available as a free service and I never gave them any money, but it is a bit of a bummer to basically lose almost 5 years worth of comments (there's a way to export so I can store them on my hard drive at home, but you can't import them to Blogger - there are a few ways to import the file to other comment systems but from what I've read, they take a good bit more technical know-how & time than I possess).

My favorite part of the exchange? Well, I found out on I think it was Monday of Christmas week that I had 14 days to "upgrade". I was forced into a middle-of-the-holidays system switch. I didn't have time to deal with it during the week of Christmas. I finally started messing around with it on Monday of the following week, discovered I had issues pretty quickly, emailed the help desk on Monday night. Got an answer Tuesday which didn't really answer the question I'd asked. Well, I'd worded my question badly. I tried to clarify what I was asking but got no answer. Figured out the thing about old Blogger vs. new Blogger, emailed again, still no answer.

Customer support had basically hung up on me after the morning of the 29th.

This morning's email included this helpful advice:

"Please make sure you are contacting us not in a weekend or on holidays if you need an immediate assistance."

I absolutely can't understand why JS-Kit decided to do this switch over a period of time when they must have KNOWN they were going to be short-staffed (like every single company in this country during the last 2 weeks of the year). Seems like if a company is providing a service that a lot of people use, and decides to suddenly spring a profound change to that service on those people, the absolute first thing they'd want to do is make sure that all hands will be on deck to help their users through the transition.

Oh well.

On the plus side, hey, that did finally inspire me to update my blogrolls, which were hopelessly out of date!
*********************************

The Best of Help Desks:

To close on a positive note, here's a similar topic, only different! I have just got to say that folks at the B&H Photo Live Chat support center ROCK. I finally broke my old WP20 over Thanksgiving. Might have been fixable, but I'd been thinking about getting a new one anyways, the WP80 had some appealing features & I'd apparently also managed to somehow abrade the surface of the 20's lens just enough that once a blob of water got on it, it wouldn't come off without being wiped off with a dry piece of cotton. Fine as long as I could get into my dayhatch, but that didn't work in rough stuff like, oh, f'r'instance, heavy chop off Montauk:

From 5 Years Around Long Island, Year 3

(that's a new album, btw, finally got to uploading those over the holidays but didn't quite manage captions yet, so it's 140 pictures, 0 explanations, give me another weekend or two & there'll be a storyline there!)

So when I finally dropped the WP20 for the last time (the shortest little fall, in a padded bag even, but enough to jar something in just the wrong way), instead of sending the old one back to Pentax for repair, I just decided to go for the WP80. I went to B&H on 11/29/2009 & came home with a pretty blue one.

On 1/1/2010, without one bit of abuse, the new one simply stopped working. It was past the 15 day return date. I wasn't expecting an exchange when I contacted their chatline, I was just trying to figure out whether I should send it to Pentax or bring it back to the store (I'd bought the B&H extended warranty service so I wasn't sure which was right). I described the problem. "What's your email?" typed Nathan. I provided that. "Do you still have the packaging?" he asked. "Yes", I typed. "OK, I just emailed you a return authorization. We'll exchange that for you."

Faaaaantastic!!!

Please stand by, we are experiencing technical difficulties...

JS-Kit called it an "upgrade", but I'm not of the same opinion.

I'm talking about the comments, of course. Tried leaving one lately? It's not as simple as it used to be.

This blog is fast approaching the 5-year mark. When I started blogging, Blogger's comment system didn't have a character-recognition feature to filter out the junk, and the spambots ran amok. Haloscan offered a simple, free comment system that a lot of people were using. I installed that & was happy enough with it that even though Blogger did get their comment system upgraded to the point where it worked a lot better, I never bothered switching back.

Well, now JS-Kit has purchased Haloscan & all of us Haloscan users were given the option of "upgrading" to Echo (which is that -- thing -- that you see now when you try to leave a comment).

I wish I'd taken the option of exporting when it was offered, but I had no idea how radically different the Echo was going to be.

I'm now trying to get my comments back onto Blogger's system but even that is complicated by the age of my blog - it would seem that I have got an old-school Blogger setup, to the extent the uninstallation instructions at JS-Kit direct me to go to a tab that does not exist for me. If you're a Blogger blogger, you probably have something called "Layout" that maybe features buttons that you click to change features? I have got something called "Template", which is a window that shows the HTML for the blog. Customization was all done by pasting code into that same window. There are no buttons to click to revert.

Ain't progress wunnerful?

Anyways, I've got somebody at JS-Kit trying to help me out (I think, although I never heard back from her after I tried to clarify about the non-existent tab - I suspect they are a bit swamped, though, so I may just be working my way up the queue). I do hope to be back on Blogger comments before too much longer.

Whether all the comments left on Haloscan ever make it into that system remains to be seen. That's a sad thing to contemplate - I frequently think the comments end up being as interesting, if not more interesting, than my original posts!

BTW if there happen to be any other "old-school" Blogger users reading this & you have any hints, I'd love to hear them.

If you can figure out how to use "Echo", that is!

:(

These were a few of my favorite posts

Starting with a gratuitous pretty picture - TQ & I went for a great hike in the Pound Ridge Reservation on Christmas Eve Day, it was a beautiful day, there was still lots of snow on the ground & we chose a five and a half mile loop.

I'm back in Brooklyn now, and TQ's back in PA, and I thought my first post when I got home would be about the interesting thing I saw for the first time in Mill Basin when TQ & I picked that as a good destination for a small-craft advisory day.

But I did have a little time to browse some blogs while we were up in CT, and I rather liked the idea Capt. JP recently floated (ha ha) in his blog as a nice end-of-year activity - namely, to look back over our blogs & pick out a few of our favorite posts of 2009.

2009 hasn't been my best year ever. Hasn't quite been the worst year, there are a couple of years that are tied for that honor, but it's been rough. Primarily because of the work situation, which has been pretty close to overwhelming at times (although it seems like everybody I know has either too much work, or none, and I really prefer being in the former situation), and then I'm still missing Hawaii a lot (I do hope to get out there for my 25th high school reunion in 2010, though). I guess you'd think that I'd list TQ moving far enough away that getting to see him has gone from a 2-hour Metro North jaunt to an overnight Greyhound trip as one of my grievances - oddly enough, though, although things haven't worked out quite as he'd hoped, in some ways I still think the move's been a good enough thing for him that it balances out the added aggravation. No, that's not really one of my favorite posts - just one that reflects one major development this year.

So, yeah, not my best year ever. And all along, I sort of felt like that was slopping over here.

But looking things over - I did manage to get in a few good posts here!

Here are a random few:

My favorite actual BOATING post of the year:
I've been a bit bummed out about how my continuing kayak education ground to a halt this year. With the changes in the BCU last year, Sebago chose to re-embrace the ACA. Unfortunately, the training sessions to turn the Sebago coaches back into red-blooded American Canoe Association coastal kayaking instructors of various levels happened right in the middle of budget season at the day job, and asking for a couple of vacation days to go get myself recertified as a kayak instructor would've gone over about as well as ham for Chanukah (heh heh). Didn't even make it up to Lake Sebago to help out with a class once all summer.

But thanks to Sebago's Sailing Committee, I did have one phenomenal learning experience this year, the sort of thing that I just couldn't WAIT to get home & write up. The post ended up being pretty long - I could easily have made it into a 2 or 3 post thing - but it was My First Dinghy Race and in the end I just couldn't stop writing until I had everything down!

It wasn't a good race. Not a bit. But boy, did our sailing co-chairs ever carpe the teachable moment afterwards. I can't read that post without finding myself champing at the bit to try it again.

Possibly the most generally useful post of the year:

Every now and then, I actually post something here that could actually be considered "useful". Usually that's just a regurgitation of somebody else's information - I always end up doing a cold-water boating piece with links in the Spring, plus when specific important safety things come up I'll usually re-post those here (this year's big ones being an Orion flare notice & then of course the ones about the new off-season lifejacket use requirements - a lot of people have come here through searches for both of those this year). But my particular favorite of the actually-trying-to-be-helpful ilk was actually one of my multiple responses to Tillerman's Lists challenge. I think I did three - the first two were painfully kayak-geeky, think it was the 5 things a kayaker needs to pass a New York vessel safety check and then the sixty-seven other things you actually should have to paddle safely - but the last one was 24 Great Ways to Get On The Water In NYC, and although I am not big on self-back-patting, I really thought that I came up with a good assortment of boating possibilities, enough to make just about anybody happy, and none too horribly expensive. That got a ton of hits when it got picked up by NewYorkOlogy, which is a great site for finding fun things to do in NYC.

Post that got the comments that cracked me up the most:
OK - there was one where I posted a terrible, terrible pun in pseudo-French, and that brought on a whole string of like-minded puns (like I think it was Capt. JP himself who offered the motto of the French navy: "A l'eau, c'est l'heure!"). That was a pretty funny bunch of comments but I can't remember the bad pun that started things off. Anybody? The one I do remember as giving me the repeated giggles was the March explanation of where I came up with "frogma" (dogma of the amphibious). The comments were so good, I made a separate post out of them.

Post that incited the most jealousy:

This one.

Mwahahaha!

Check the comments in that post if you don't know who got jealous, or why. A-HA! Added bonus - that was where the original pseudo-French pun popped up!
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It's getting late & I need to get up to go paddling in the AM (yay! tamale paddle II!) so I will wrap things up here with one last post...although it does seem odd that I haven't listed a single paddling post here! Well, the time is what it is, so here it is, last but not least:

Best Post Left by Some Total Airhead Who Got Into My Blog After I Forgot To Sign Out After Blogging At Kinko's (That's My Story And I'm Sticking To It):

Totally Cool Soho Stores Fighting Global Warming!

Indeed. One Newtonian air conditioner at a time. That Bubbles, what a piece of work!

Capt. JP, thanks for the good idea. Fun to really take a good look back over the year!

Note to the media -

Re: Tiger's crash.

Personally, I don't need to know anything more.

Honest.

So stupid, the hounding. Even NPR had to talk about it this morning. I just don't see why it's so important that the whole world knows. The original report was plenty for me - I mean the one that said "Tiger Woods was in a car accident. Nobody seriously hurt."

I'm On A Boat - US Navy Version!

Engaging Frogma parental (& job retention) controls:

WARNING: NSFW (unless you've got headphones, but still...). The following video contains foul & explicit language. If you are under the age of 18, please send permission slip before hitting play. If you are a parent of mine, do not hit play, period, just surf off & come back in a couple of days when I will have a nice wholesome report on the great Thanksgiving TQ & I are going to have - this year with my old friend Am & her family (yay!) near Poughkeepsie, and woohoo, I think our usual Escape from Black Friday hike is going to be Breakneck Ridge! So come back & check that out. You'll like that one.

There, parental control duties done. If they hit play, they can't say I didn't warn 'em, right?

And now, for the rest of you - you all remember Lonely Island's I'm On A Boat, right (link to original, just in case you were actually somewhere without internet during the couple of weeks this was going viral on the boat blogs - like, say, on a boat, maybe)?

Well...I just stumbled across a version that I think cracked me up even more.

I think that this VERY live crew (blue or gold? dunno!) may have beaten Lonely Planet at their own nautical-themed (pashmina afghan!) game!!!

Go Navy!

speaking of empathy...

And as long as I'm being cranky -

Boy. Can you even begin to imagine what it would be like to be a Jewish kid at this school?

I actually don't think I can.

Midwesterners are nicer than New Yorkers.

Where did that come from?

Well - very sadly, DaveO, of The Lake is the Boss, and Silbs, of Silbs Says have both been posting about a local paddler - an actual paddling companion of Silbs', and a paddler who knew what he was doing - who disappeared one night last week on Lake Superior. His car was left in the parking lot where he launched & his kayak & lifejacket washed ashore.

I'm not going to go on much about this because what can you say about something like that. Always gives me the chills a bit to read about any boating accident, especially a kayaking accident - it's true that there's nothing like messing about in boats, but boy, there's always some risk there & something like this just drives that home, doesn't it? My heart goes out to all his friends & family & I hesitate to say more for fear of saying something dumb.

But it really hit me, as I was looking at some of the comments attached to articles -

Maybe Midwesterners really are a little more decent that New York people in some ways.

Seems like any time you see an article about a boating tragedy in the Daily News or Post here (not so much the Times), you end up seeing some just shockingly mean comments. Schoolyard bully namecalling. "Idiot", "moron", and worse. Words that just shouldn't be left there on a public forum, where maybe people who cared about whoever's been lost can stumble over them & hurt themselves even worse. But there they are, and there the editors let them stay.

The commenters in Minnesota? Well, I think it was DaveO who once used the term "Minnesota nice". Or maybe Silbs.

Yes, there were comments questioning the safety of solo kayaking, etc., etc. But I didn't see ONE SINGLE COMMENT in which the sort of derogatory language that you see so much of in the online comments of the NYC tabloids was used.

I don't know if it's the posters, or if it's that midwestern newspaper editors pay closer attention to who's saying what in the comments - either way, it's just nice to see a little old-fashioned decency when it's really, really needed.

Anyways.

Terribly sad story going on up there. I hope...well, of course it would be wonderful to read that he made it to shore & was waiting for a rescue all along. Don't we all always wish for that ending when we hear of something like this?

But if it doesn't end up with that happiest ending, I do hope that at least enough can be found out to answer the questions that the people who cared for him are left with.

Wo bist der wahine?

Well...there's lots over there, of course.

But I was thinking more of here, in NYC, this Sunday, in the Mayor's Cup.

I'm volunteering this year, and it's a pretty awesome field, I may even go get a new camera in honor of the event (I've been playing with the idea of upgrading anyways), and I'm looking forward to everything except getting my non-morning-person self into Manhattan by 5 am.

But I just found out that although the mens' field is spectacular (particularly notable - Team Holland & Team USA slugging it out in honor of the Henry Hudson Quadricentennial) -

Of a field of 135 racers -

3 are women, and none of them are coming from a distance that can't be measured in city blocks. They're all good paddlers, but I guess I'm a little bummed out to find out how little pull this race seems to have for women racers.

Remember my September post, You Go, Alex? I didn't go into a lot of depth there, and I expect that post probably didn't make a lot of sense to anyone who wasn't familiar with surfski racing - but it's been a pet peeve of mine for a while that an awful lot of coverage of kayak racing really sort of doesn't mention women, even though there just have to be some good female racers out there.

So it was just really neat to see an Alexandra in there among the usual boyz.

I guess this time I won't complain too much when there isn't a lot of coverage of the women, knowing that all of 2% of the field is female -- although hint hint hint to any journalist stumbling across this, hmmm wouldn't that be an interesting take on the Mayor's Cup, what it's like to be one of 3 local women competing in a field of international elite men?

Still, I am a little bummed out to find out that I'm not going to get to see an Alex, or a Nikki Mocke (US surfski champion), or our own noted local speedsters Elizabeth O'Connor or Stefani Jackenthal in action. Would be fun, too, if a couple of the racers whose blogs I sometimes follow, like Sandy Bottom, a Purple Mirage, found this to be something for which they'd like to turn out - always fun seeing your home waters as seen through someone else's eyes.

Ah well. It's still a young race. Maybe down the road.

Mystified in Mystic?

Hmmm. Read carefully before attempting to visit Mystic Seaport in your sailboat!

Opens on signal, except when it doesn't!

Thank you, Pandabonium, for pointing that out! I'd hardly noticed the curiously turned wording of the sign.

Monday Mermaid Musings

I've liked this Coney Island mermaid mural for a long time. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you've probably seen her before; she's featured in A Few More Coney Island Pictures back in January & then she also pops up in my Last Day at Astroland Flickr set from September '08.

Funny, though, it wasn't until I sent her along to Mer-meister David at Never Sea Land that I finally figured out what was going on here -

This must be how the mermaids lure the mariners who're stone-deaf from twenty years in the engine room!

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(later the same day)

In fact upon further thought, I would bet that this technique predates both the hot dog & the internal combustion engine - the ancient folk of the fin probably went to work on the non-hearing sailor issue immediately after that demoralizing debacle with that Greek guy. I mean, that was in, what 11th or 12th century BCE & we humans are STILL talking about it? Talk about beating a dead (Trojan) horse!

That event really had to be something that had all self-respecting sirenae up in arms (and fins).

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(slightly later: oh, ok, one last thought to share before I buckle down & finish the big hairy report that needs to be finished before I go home, ick...)

In fact, a common term we use today may provide a semantic clue supporting my theory.

It would be really hard to concentrate & hold intensive discussions in a place as full of distractions as the ocean, so they probably built a special container that they filled with water and their finest thinkers gathered there to solve the problem at hand.

And thus was the world given the original...

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Think Tank!

BAHAHAHAHA!!!

:D

(Did I mention I'm 2 days out from one of the worst drop-dead deadlines of the year, here?)