Kaimusailing

Life with the new phone. It’s a lovely phone but I am easily seduced. Photos are amazing. If only we could have a camera with instantly interchangeable lenses and touch screen selection of zoom level. Have to see what it will do at night, just the same as my other seductives.
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We are into a somewhat winter weather scheme, 40’s at night 60’s daytime. Not too bad. The difference here as opposed to Crisfield, much further North, is that I could bike around Crisfield with no problem, here I am in the North River Marsh and it’s about a 5 mile bike ride just to get out into civilization. Some people love it. It is a unique situation. I call it the Gulag, Dodge City.
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Pizza Night with store bought pizza and chilly weather wasn’t that bad. Wine was the lubricant. I was coming out of a week of digital hermitage trying to unlock the stupid phone, now it was unlocked and I was happy. .
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One of the services I purchased to help unlock the phone didn’t work and they refuse to refund me. Not only that, on PayPal they have it set up as a subscription, and I will be paying every month about $30. Of course I ended that subscription, which I can do on PayPal’s site. Also I requested to open a claim, I dispute the charge. We’ll see how that turns out. Not the end of the world. Two other services also didn’t work, but they refunded me. I carefully went through my Pay Pal activity and noticed a couple other subscriptions which I canceled.
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One thing about the new phone, it has a big battery which takes a couple hours to charge up using the inductive charger, but the phone seems to run forever. The larger screen makes typing text much easier and viewing YouTube more enjoyable.
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An OTG adapter was on its way and USPS tracking indicated it was sitting in the PO on
Monday. A couple of fellow boatyarders agreed to pick it up for me, but when they asked, the PO said there was nothing for me there. Finally I went there myself and explained it might be in something as small as a letter. It’s a tiny adapter, USB-A to USB-C, with a grounded pin that signals the Android phone it’s plugged into that the phone can be host to whatever is plugged into the other side of the adapter. The PO responded to me and produced the letter sized package that had the little adapter in it.
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I returned to the boatyard and stashed my groceries at the back of Kaimu near the swimming ladder. I returned Robert’s vehicle near the Breezeway and then I saw Eloise, actually Eloisa, with her dog playing in the yard. She had a tennis racket and a tennis ball, batting the ball out for her dog to retrieve and eagerly come back to do it again. She said she had rotator cuff damage in her shoulder and couldn’t throw the ball too much without causing more damage. She picked the racket up at Goodwill for a dollar. I had to go back to Kaimu to stow away groceries. I had chicken, onion, celery, carrots, and mushrooms to make a traditional chicken soup. I also had two jars of “Better than Bullion”, one was roasted chicken, the other was basically mirepoix ingredients, a kind of vegetable bullion paste. Should make a good soup. I have to keep the batch size down, I’m just now devouring the last of the borscht that I made a week ago.
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If I am going to launch Kaimu, I have to clear the decks, also clear the space under the crossdeck. It’s kind of sheltered but when it rains, water drips down all over the place. I moved the old refrigerator to the free pile, then moved the replacement fridge down off the deck to the ground and over to the free pile. The replacement needed an old spring clamp to keep it shut, so I included that with my donation. A while later I noticed someone had taken the spring clamp. It was old and the spring was rusty. Nothing is safe.
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When you start up a new phone, Samsung makes it very easy to transfer contacts, etc., to the new phone using its Smart Switch app. I found that Webb Chiles wasn’t in my contact list, so I had to find one of his emails of a while ago, and got him back into my contact list. There was a YouTube video going and that went along with an email to Webb. It was a performance of the Tornadoes of Telstar, an iconic instrumental of the mid sixties.
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Webb eventually replied, that’s not me. I had to tell him how it happened. Typical. There was another clip of the Tornadoes, more recent, and the gray haired guys played their one and done hit, maybe they have been doing this for 60 years. At least it’s not Green Onions. Google it.
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Radio Bill once said I was cryptic, but I’m not into that.
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The worst thing is the conjunction of my birthday and a bit later, Valentine’s Day. Watch out for cops if you are in Chicago. Down in the boatyard, Dodge City, Apocalypse Now, the No-See-Ums are assassinating the yardbirds. You don’t need a flu shot, you’re in the boatyard. Probably the covid variant is having trouble here too. We’ve all been feeling a bit ill for a while, hard to figure out. There is one bathroom for all, a condemned kitchen that I sometimes cook in, some porta-johns, not a place for a fragile heart.
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First I have to get old, then I have to get right with my heart for Valentine’s.
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Not happening.
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Not the not getting old part.
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It has been a day since I wasted the laptop with a spray of wine. I don’t remember how I did it, but maybe all I need is a keyboard. What a shame, I had so much to write.’
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I spent more time with my lovely phone. The laptop was not responding. I was almost forced to do some meaningful work. I got the new batteries into the galley, stacked up on one another like a black rectangular pagoda. I could continue with work that causes my back to make crunching noises, or make soup. I made soup.
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Helicopter Dave was using the communal kitchen to make an herbal cancer substance, I don’t know much about it, but it ties up the hot plate with which I was going to make my soup. He said he needed 20 minutes to come to a stopping point, so I rode the bike around the yard. It was chilly in the shaded areas, but in the sunlight I felt fine with shorts and tee shirt.
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I was given the go ahead to use the small dirty kitchen. I noticed the sink wasn’t draining, but I had to rinse some stuff and prep veggies. I did so using the minimal amount of water, but the sink kept rising. My chicken thighs weren’t skinless and boneless, but cost the same as the ones I didn’t buy. These must be special. They went into the stock pot with the right amount of diced onion, sliced carrot, and sliced celery. I prepped some mushrooms and threw them in. I used a chef’s tongs to keep things from burning to the bottom of the pot. I knew the thighs had to get cooked, and more importantly, get singed a bit. I kept at it, from time to time, while spending time with my new lovely phone, how lovely. Don’t ruin the soup.
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Helicopter Dave wanted to know how soon he could get the hotplate back. Like, wasn’t I done with my soup yet? Conflict.
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The communal kitchen sink was filling up, not draining, it looked pretty bad, yet I didn’t need it so much, cooking, not rinsing anything, yet. I biked to the communal bathroom over at the other end of the yard and came back with a black commode plunger, just the right size for the communal kitchen’s sink. In I went and plunged, and plunged, and the result was no draining of the sink, but something black and stinky was coming up in the contents of the sink. Plunge, plunge, plunge, just more bad stuff. Can’t anybody else write this, I’m feeling faint.
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I worried, what would I do when I had to use the sink, it was filling up, not draining, plus, things might fester over the next few hours. How can I cook here. I don’t know if I really had any ancestors in the Gulags, in Siberia, but now I’m here, what could be worse.
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The soup wasn’t affected, all the ingredients went in nicely prepped, it was the sink, looking like a cesspool. Get away. Bring the stock pot full of soup out into the open, onto the communal porch, set it down. I was hungry. Late lunch. Two bowls of that soup. Great soup. How do I rectify this?
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I had to get a 5 gallon bucket and set aside the contents, most of which were things that were saved from something else, set them aside, clean the bucket, rinse, use the bucket as a kitchen washbasin. Clean all the gear used to make the soup, clean everything.
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In the end I took a couple of 5 gallons of sink waste and poured it off where it wouldn’t do any harm.
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So, I had great soup, but no takers today. Cold weather, the soup will be better the next day.
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I wanted to write about eggs, because I awoke at 3:30 AM, and that wasn’t as bad as waking at 4 AM. It’s just the way I felt. But eggs, what about them. What do I care?
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Cuddily had called me and now two nights in a row, the news from Crisfield was dire. The big New Year’s bash at the American Legion resulted in 20 covid cases. Cuddily was OK, but spending Friday night at home alone with a Paul Newman pizza. Her heart is in the right place. I was concerned about Eve, and others that partied that night. It sounded like my Bad Crowd was intact, but now wary and laying low, no pun intended.
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I texted Cuddily that she was a good egg. Eggs are like people, only different. Both are easily counted and handled by their outside shells, but both are much more mysterious inside. The inside of an egg is the universe of life. The inside of a human is the universe.
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The next day started chilly and warmed up. Blue skies with wispy cirrus clouds. More jet contrails, but not as many as before the pandemic. I spoke with Helicopter Dave and although I was eager to watch a football playoff game later, he said he couldn’t get NBC with his antenna. Hey, he’s a couple hundred feet closer to the TV station. He can see my antenna from up on his deck. See my antenna, it was about 35 bucks at Walmart.
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I had prepared a Panasonic CF-C1 for Roughrider Lynn and Dave and it died while they were on their adventure. They gave it back to me. These laptops are great, the hard drives can be swapped out in seconds, batteries, 2, can be hot swapped. The screen can be rotated to make it a tablet. There is a wrist strap so that you can hold the tablet with one hand while using the other to make entries. I took their batteries and hard drive and both worked in a good chassis. Their chassis was bad. Now I had my CF-C1, ruined by too much wine, and theirs, both just need a new chassis. Bingo, on eBay I find a pair of chassis with no hard drives, that’s OK, for a hundred bucks and about 20 bucks shipping. Bought and done. Long live CF-C1.
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I was avoiding the battery replacement job in the galley, actually in the dinette. I had hoisted the batteries up on deck and they were ready to go. I hemmed and hawed, but I needed to do it. Hoist the batteries with the staysail halyard and lower them into the galley forming the rectangular black pagoda. It’s a simple job, unscrew one of the solar panel leads into the charge controller, start with the dinette’s port side seat which has a couple of batteries. Unfasten the wires from the batteries, making sure not to mix them up. Remove the old batteries. Replace with the new batteries, hook up the wires. Move over to the starboard side of the dinette and do the same with the batteries there. Simple. Each battery is about 66 lbs and in an awkward position. I spent a lot of time looking for tools and buying panasonic laptops.
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When working with heavy items that you are reluctant to work with, at some point the reluctance kind of falls away and you feel strong. What a big mistake. I’ll be taking ibuprofen for a few days. It’s not anger, but it’s close, it’s determination, I’m not going to let these stupid batteries defeat me, ugh. This was strenuous work, tedious fiddling with the bolts that mount the wires. Lots of wire. All the batteries are connected together along with the charge controller and the inverter. I went crazy and cut off a couple of bolts that were too long for me to deal with in a patient manner. I used the angle grinder with cut off wheel, spraying sparks on my favorite Hawaiian shorts. Should have worn something else. I was thinking about how they ignite the big rockets at the launch pad with showers of sparks, I hope that doesn’t happen.
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Also it was time for the big playoff football game. I reset the TV set and put it on the channel that Helicopter Dave couldn’t get. As the game started I finished up the job, connecting the last of the batteries and reconnecting the solar panels to the controller. It was late in the day and there wasn’t much solar coming in, only about a half amp to the batteries. They quickly charged up to 12.7, and held that charge as the sun set.
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I began drinking wine. We are forecast to get hit with big wind and rain overnight and into the day Sunday. I’m already achy, having a weather front come in doesn’t help, doing yoga postures with 66 pound batteries also doesn’t help. Wine helps.
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One of the batteries is pregnant, or looks that way, it’s big and round. A relic for some future anthropologist to discover. “We have here an icon, a pregnancy from the rectangular black pagoda discovered in the old marsh dig. We wonder what those people were worshiping, what fertility cult was surviving in that mud world.”
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I won’t be able to get everything properly ready for the big storm, but I don’t care. The batteries are taken care of. I will care even less if this wine has any effect.
.The next day the batteries were up to 13.2 volts getting charged by solar. The morning was a miserable wind and rain storm, then it cleared, but the wind increased. Gale warning till Monday morning. It was football playoffs, Wild Card Sunday.
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The image is of the Northern part of the North River Marsh taken with the standard lens camera of the Galaxy S20+. Because Sailblogs shrinks images to about 700 pixels wide, zooming into this image on the blog will result in blocking, pixelization. However, zooming into the raw image shows incredibly sharp detail even when zoomed in as much as possible. The cloud detail is very sharp.