Star Gazing

I'm not a star gazer.  All I see when I look up are a whole bunch of white dots.  Oh, I can find the big dipper, and so the little dipper and north star.  Sometimes I can even find the belt of Orion.

It's not that I'm not interested in the stars.  Like many cruisers, I like to sit on the deck on warm nights and star gaze.  I just have no idea what I'm seeing.  That's about to change.

I wrote about spending too much time online.  Since I retired, I have this new found need for knowledge.  I'll spend countless hours googling whatever pops into my head, or scanning my news feed in Facebook looking for a nugget of brilliance.  Yeah, I know.  It's pretty rare.

One of my Facebook friends posted a link about a free program called Stellarium that shows you the night sky and identifies stars and planets for you.  I downloaded it and configured it to my location in Brunswick, Georgia (with some difficulty).  Two nights ago, I got to see the stars even though it was overcast here and, looking out the window, I couldn't see squat.  Yesterday was partly cloudy, so I'd hoped to find the stars that were displayed on my laptop up in sky.

This was at 6 PM looking west.  Cool.  You can even see the twilight. Yes, it really looked like that, although the land scenery was a village in France or something.

Here is another shot, looking east at 7:22 PM last night.

That big bright thing is something called the "moon", with "Jupiter" above it at 1 o'clock.  I poked my head outside and there they were,

The other nice thing about Stellarium is that I can now star gaze without actually having to go outside.

If you'd like to download it, go to www.stellarium.org.  And to save you an hour of trying to find where to set your location, just hit the F6 key.

And finally, I can't stop laughing about this one.

Yeah, I found it on Facebook. So what.  It's still funny.  C'mon, I know you're smiling.  Maybe even laughing out loud, like I did.

So you're asking "So Dave, are you ever going to do something productive?  Anything?  We regular followers are thinking of banding together for an intervention.".  Well, today I need to go get some blood work done for my every three years annual physical, and then go to the Walmarts to pick up some meds, and then we'll see.  It's perfect painting weather here in Georgia, but Pam has today off from work.  I think we should spend quality time together and go to the movies to see "Lincoln" rather than me painting all alone.  I'll let you know tomorrow what we actually did.

Please root for the movies.  I have plenty of time for painting.  Here's our forecast...

5-Day Forecast for Brunswick, Georgia

Today: Partly Cloudy, High: 74 F, Low: 55 F

Tomorrow: Partly Cloudy, High: 74 F, Low: 55 F

Sunday: Partly Cloudy, High: 75 F, Low: 56 F

Monday: Partly Cloudy, High: 78 F, Low: 55 F

Tuesday: Partly Cloudy, High: 79 F, Low: 54 F

Hash House Harriers

Each of us follow blogs for our own reasons.  Maybe you're bored in your cubicle and need an escape, or maybe you're living vicariously through the writing of others, or maybe you feel better about yourself when you read about some of the really stupid things other people do.  I follow blogs for all of the aforementioned reasons, but I also follow blogs to learn new things.

Now that I no longer work, I find I want to spend many hours of my day learning.  Whatever. Important things, political things, trivial things.  It doesn't matter.  It keeps my alleged brain working.  I read several message boards, I read CNN and my hometown newspaper online, I follow Facebook (way too much), I study photography websites, and I follow other blogs.  There is a list of the blogs I follow at the bottom of this page, on the right.

One of those blogs is "Zero to Cruising", a blog I just started following not too long ago.   This one was titled "Where to Spend Christmas".  OK, I need to know that, so I opened their blog.  This is the first paragraph.

Countless times we’ve posted on this blog about the fun that we have had hashing in Grenada. I honestly don’t think there is any better way to make friends and really get to know the islands than to get involved with the local hash groups. As such, we were very pleased to be able to join in with an equally fun group of hashers here in Trinidad this past Saturday.

?????   What is "hashing in Grenada"?  What is a hash group?  What is a hasher?  Isn't that illegal?

So I turned to Google for the answer.  The answer, in a nutshell, is that hashers are drinkers with a running problem.  Every couple of weeks, a bunch of folks gather to run (or walk) a course, and at the end drink.  Sounds like a lot of fun!  Except for the running part, this is my kind of group!

I never cease to wonder at the marvel of Al Gore's internets.  What a wonderful thing.

Repairing the Floor in the Shower

Yesterday would have been a great day for painting, but I was bothered by the shower floor.  Some of the caulk was loose and I recaulked it the other day, but in so doing I found some spongy spots in the wood frame around the perimeter of the floor.  Since I've been putting off painting the outside of Drift Away for so long (too hot, too cold, too windy, don't want to), an extra couple of days wouldn't hurt, so I decided to tackle the shower.

The first step was to scrape off the loose paint and the caulk I put on the other day.

The wood frame was indeed wet.  I used my heat gun to dry it.  A heat gun is really useful when working on an old boat, good for anything from drying wet wood to unfreezing old seacocks to stripping paint to softening hoses to get them off barbed fittings. 

I've used Git Rot many times, on old boats and my 100 year old house.  It's not cheap, but it works.

I drilled 1/4" holes every couple of inches all around the frame.  I injected the Git Rot.   It soaks in through capillary action.  Unfortunately, it has to dry overnight, so we had to shower in the clubhouse the next morning.

The next day, I slapped on one coat of West Marine deck paint.  The stuff really stinks.  It's now waterproof but it needs one more coat.  I'm going to wait for a sunny day so I can leave all the windows open when I finish it.  I'll need to paint the shower walls too.   Might as well do it all at once.

That West Marine deck paint is really good stuff.  I'm very happy with it.  It applies easily and has a great non-skid texture. If you need to paint your decks, or want a non-skid surface on something around your house, consider it.

Jekyll Is For The Birds

We go to Jekyll Island a lot, as you regular readers know.  Pam and I love it there, as do our dogs. There's plenty of room for them to run and lots of sticks to chew on.  Yesterday was especially good for bird pics.

Great Blue Heron.

This is the path to the beach.  Pam takes the dogs and I the backpack (water, dog bowl) and camera.

Seagull.

Pelican.  I love how close to the water they fly.

If  you enlarge this photo and look above the sun, you'll see three dots.  They're birds.  The water was so still you can see the birds (dots) in the water too.

A Smoke Detector Went Off Yesterday

Pam and I were sitting on the aft deck enjoying gin and tonics and the warm Georgia sunshine.  Pam got up, saying she heard something.  She came back and said the smoke detector in the middle stateroom went off.  I went down there and sniffed around but didn't smell anything burning.  Pam had turned the detector off and it didn't go off again.

I went into the forward stateroom and thought I smelled the faint odor of an electrical burn.  I summoned Pam and she thought she smelled it too.  There's a smoke detector in the forward stateroom.   If there was a problem, why didn't it go off?  I pushed the test button and it works.

The only thing running was the small refrigerator in the forward stateroom.   I checked the middle and forward bilges and didn't smell anything there.

Maybe just a malfunctioning smoke detector?  Maybe the sun streaming in the port stirred up some air currents and dust?  I'm baffled.  Anyone have any ideas?

I took this photo of Olivia a couple of days ago.  I really like it.

One Funny Photo and two Videos

I took this of my friend's boat yesterday afternoon.

Why is it funny?  Here, let me zoom in for you.

See the plastic owl?

As for the video.  I hang out on a few message boards, one of which can get pretty political.  One poster (I'll call him "Karl") posted about Marco Rubio's wandering vague statement about the age of the earth, saying science is a theory and no one really knows.  He came under attack from the left.

Karl posted about this Obama statement that's making the rounds on right wing blogs and shows.

Obama's exchange with CNN's Campbell Brown at a forum on faith in politics:

Brown: Senator, if one of your daughters asked you -- and maybe they already have -- “Daddy, did God really create the world in 6 days?,” what would you say?

Obama: I'm trying to remember if we've had this conversation. You know, what I've said to them is that I believe that God created the universe and that the six days in the Bible may not be six days as we understand it, it may not be 24-hour days, and that's what I believe. I know there's always a debate between those who read the Bible literally and those who don't, and that I think it's a legitimate debate within the Christian community of which I'm a part. My belief is that the story that the Bible tells about God creating this magnificent Earth on which we live -- that is essentially true, that is fundamentally true. Now, whether it happened exactly as we might understand it reading the text of the Bible. That, I don't presume to know.

Karl wanted to know why Obama didn't state that the world is 4.5 billion years old.  I responded "because he wasn't asked that question."  Either Karl is thick, or he was messing with me real good.  I made this video which is only a bit of an exaggeration.

These Xtranormal videos are a lot of fun.  It might be even funnier to copy and paste the actual postings.

I also did one about Ruby and Chevy...

It doesn't take much to amuse me.

Funny Photos

Those of you who read this blog regularly probably understand that I sometimes have an odd sense of humor.  You also might recall that I've said that photography has made me look at things differently.  Sometimes the two mix and I see humor everywhere.

Here are a few examples from yesterday.

Camouflage to go fishing?  I dunno, I just found it funny.

Olivia was going nuts and needed to run, so I took the dogs to the beach.  You can see, literally.   She's nuts.

Port and Starboard.  They should switch sides though.

Nope.  No idea.  Maybe he's afraid of pit bulls?

I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving.  Pam and I missed being with family, but we enjoyed the spread put on by Brunswick Landing Marina and our fellow cruisers.  Man, there was a lot of food!  And a lot of people.  Luckily, it was a beautiful day, sunny and 70 degrees, so we could use the outdoor picnic tables.  We all never would have fit in the club house.

Thanks Sherri!