Kaimusailing

It was a mild night but I managed to find a sleeping position that caused pain and I awoke at 4:40 AM. It was chilly and I kept under the covers, did the usual smart phone things, the Washington Post Crossword, Google News, St. Marys weather on wunderground.com, and read a few entries at NotAlwaysRight. I felt the need for more sleep and did slumber a bit, but eventually had to get up and make breakfast. No need for the little heater, I put on my shorts and short sleeved shirt, light the stove, heat enough. I go to the pilothouse and the little fridge to get an egg, ham, and cheese.
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The kettle of a pint of water takes a while to sing while I fill my morning pill case with various pills, then I have to juggle frying a ham and cheese omelet, brewing pour over coffee, and putting pills in the case. For some reason things go along smoothly, if I relax and let the coffee brew, takes time when I’m filling the pill case.
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I get a sandwich made with the omelet and do an online jigsaw puzzle. I take my time eating breakfast, as usual. Then I get my roll of personal toilet paper to bike to the communal toilet for morning duties. I bring my lovely smart phone and reading glasses in case I need to wait, which happens from time to time, but mostly it happens if I don’t bring the phone. I don’t need to wait.
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I’ll make the rest up, you know it can’t ever happen, I get to work, clearing the tarp off the moribund beam covers, get the trim router out, with the right bit to round off the edges, go over all the beam covers and the deck box cover, then get the angle grinder and change it to the flap disk and clean up all the edges in an artistic way, by eye, by feel, not very uniform. I even tried the belt sander that the knaves had left under the boat for those months, it still works, but needs lubrication of the front roller, the tension release mechanism doesn’t work, frozen up by rust, but maybe can be fixed. Don’t need it right now.
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I have a late lunch with Eloisa of cream of chicken florentine soup. It is the last of that. I will definitely make it again. Each day has been getting warmer and the mornings less chilly.
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The next day is difficult with aches and pains after doing work. They show up the second or third day. My hip is hurting. I get my epoxy utensils organized, change into epoxy friendly clothing, put on the plastic gloves and begin with the first 3 oz batch and begin brushing it on the beam covers and the deck box cover. I also put it on a couple of 5mm hardwood plywood panels, on an area about 31 inches by 14. The resultant panel pieces will be sandwiched together to make one panel piece that will be cut into 4 strips to make slats for the floor of the roll up deflatable dingy.
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The dinghy has 6 slats, two are new replacements, the other 4 are thrown away, half rotten, and the new ones I’m making will have epoxy and glass top and bottom. Stiff, strong, durable, I hope.
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The day goes right up to almost 80 degrees, remarkable for mid-February, and as I work along I feel it. Can’t handle the phone with epoxy fingers or use the water bottle without contaminating it. Also, I haven’t been working very hard on the boat, so I’m out of shape as a boat worker. I take a break and know to take at least a 15 minute break. Then I can continue. There is a rain forecast and I am running out of time, the job will have to be half done. I cover 3 of the beam covers that have only a primer coat of epoxy, finish putting a layer of fiber glass on the remaining cover and deck box cover. I hope to have time the next day to glass the rest.
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The next day I make the usual breakfast and it continues to be mild, no need for the little heater in the galley. 3 items come in, one is a GPS dongle, or USB GPS module, another is a wine opener, wing style, and to get it free shipping from Amazon, 5 USB thumbdrives, 64gig. So I am paying about $4 apiece for a 64gig thumb drive.
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It is threatening rain, and it does rain a little bit now and then. I bring plywood project panels that have been glassed in one corner and the next step is to cut the corners out, size about 31X14 inches, then cut into 3” strips, and glue the unglassed faces together to make 4 roll up dinghy planks that slide into sleeves in the floor of the dinghy. I cut them out and glue them with 3 spring clamps and one C clamp.
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I had announced I would make gumbo and today is the day. I have a gumbo kit from Louisiana and I first make rice and begin prepping the Holy Trinity, green pepper, celery, and onion. Young Andy left me a red/orange pepper and I have a green pepper, so the peppers are twice what is called for in the recipe, I have the remnants of a full bunch of celery and it produces an equal amount, if I chop the leaves too, and I need two onions to have the correct ratio of veggies. The gumbo kit consists of powdered spices and who knows what, that is boiled in 2 quarts of water. Then they say to add your protein, chicken, anduille sausage, or seafood, whatever gumbo you are making. I add the veggies to the kit and water and go back to slice up the sausage. I add the sausage and then consider how long to let the mixture cook.
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I ride over to Eloisa’s side of the boatyard and she has had a rough day, but now she got her door latch fixed, and reorganized her vamper. We decide to take a leisurely bike ride with Blue, her black dog, getting his exercise. He is a smart dog and hangs back. He had a rough time on a previous biking trip, so he does not do much until we turn and head for home, then he leaps ahead and leads us.
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The gumbo is doing great, although it is soupy. Eloisa returns with Blue to take 5. I begin gathering stuff for a gumbo meal. Two bottles of red wine, the sauce pan of rice, the stock pot of gumbo, now getting ½ lb of frozen shrimp, just throw it in, laptop and GPS module, new wine opener, a bunch of bowls and plastic spoons, I take a photo of it all and send it out to prospective customers. Bring paper towels.
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Robert shows up and politely says he has just eaten. Scratch one off the list. No reply from Roughrider Lynn and Helicopter Dave. Eloisa shows up with paper towels. I had already opened a bottle of wine and we commiserated while she fed Blue some roasted chicken. Lucky doggie.
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The gumbo is loaded with flavor, and probably a lot of unwanted chemicals, not thickening the way it should. We eat as much as we can, what am I going to do with all this gumbo. I check and Lynn and Dave have returned, I call, please take some gumbo. Eloisa says the no-see-um’s are after her, so she leaves, I uncork the remaining bottle of wine for her to take. I add about a quart of gumbo to the remaining saucepan of rice, then go back to Kaimu to get a small tupperware and zip lok bags for the rest. On the way back I run into Lynn who has a 1 ½ pint jar of gumbo, thanks Lynn, and I pack away the rest into the fridge.
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I thought getting the GPS module to work would not be a big problem, as I have used these several times and made notes on how to get them working in Linux and OpenCPN. It didn’t work.
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I find out that the latest Ubuntu and OpenCPN require enabling serial ports, which is what a USB port is. For those who care, open terminal and run the command “groups” without the quotes. If dialout doesn’t appear, run the command “sudo usermod -a -G dialout and here put your username. Exit out of terminal and reboot. Run command groups again and dialout should appear. After doing this I found GPS data coming in through NMEA window in OpenCPN connections. There are other commands that I have already posted over the past few years to see what usb devices there are and look at data from them.
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When I attempted to do this on Lynn’s laptop, it didn’t work and I spent a lot of time trying a slew of methods both to analyze the gps module and try and get data from it. Perhaps I needed to make a new installation usb stick and reinstall nx64, that’s the name of the latest 64 bit navigatrix operating system. I began to wonder if it isn’t compatible with Panasonic CF-C1.
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Making new stick and wiping the drive (not Lynn’s, a spare drive that is a twin of hers) resulted in the same difficulties. It took 4 hours to save Documents, Downloads, and Desktop to a separate drive. It would take about the same time to copy them onto the new installation, but I noticed it wasn’t booting up properly, there were other errors, for instance the mouse cursor would not appear. I decided to use a 32 bit version of navigatrix, the pae version.
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I remember having problems with my own primary laptop, this one, and I am running Ubuntu 20 on it because NX64 would not finish loading its boot loader. Now I had two installations that wouldn’t install GPS or Realtek wifi adapter. I wiped Lynn’s hard drive and created a 32 bit pae Navigatrix installation thumb drive on one of the new USB sticks. Creation and installation went smoothly. The GPS installation didn’t seem to work, no lights on the module, but in OpenCPN the NMEA data stream was showing GPS data. Some time later OpenCPN changed the GPS location from off the coast of Africa to on the shore of the North River Marsh in Georgia. My guess is it took that amount of time for the GPS to get a 3D fix and then OpenCPN accepted it. Must be a flag that indicates the GPS is truly locked on.
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Eloisa came down with an inner ear disturbance that really threw her off, dizzy, feeling sick to her stomach. It is a recurring problem that she knew how to deal with. I said what about my cooking? She said in spite of that. Ha ha. I was suffering too with my obsession with the recalcitrant computer. I was spending all my time butting my nerd head against the computer’s brick wall.
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Eloisa had been going out to get coconut palm leaves. Seemed crazy to me, but I can understand stubborn and obsessive. She gave me a little coconut palm fish. These are Hawaiian designs. A reef fish. Made of coconut fronds.
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I had a ton of leftover gumbo and planned a Sunday Gumbo Dinner, but she was ill and couldn’t eat anything, so I postponed it. No harm done, no one was invited yet. I had chicken ramen soup with canned chicken after talking to my older brother, in Hawaii. He always gets me thinking about food. I was up later than usual, like midnight, 1AM.
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The next day was Pizza Night, but there would be no pizza, we had to finish off the gumbo. My plan was to make rice in my new Omnia oven, just put the rice and some olive oil in the oven, put it over low heat while the water for the rice boils in the teakettle. Pour the water over the sizzling rice, cover, and retreat to the communal porch to suss out the computer problem.
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Getting the GPS to work was great. Now I had to get the Realtek wifi adapter working, which I had done before, but didn’t I save the procedure somewhere? I stubbornly persisted without any success. I was getting nervous. Time was ticking along and soon I would have to stop to do something else. Eloisa was trying to do a job for Robert and Robert had taken me shopping while he did not have to buy anything. When I got back to the boatyard I brought a few items to Eloisa on her job. She wanted and apple, maybe some cheese, maybe some bread, I had them all in a plastic shopping bag and gave them to her. She seemed to be doing better.
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I was back at the communal porch grinding my mind on the stupid computer problem. It could be something entirely simple. I found a file I saved with a long dialogue, I had to parse through it. I knew it was the right set of instructions to get the elusive Realtek driver installed because of the detail and the references to other linux distributions. I worked my way through and bingo, after rebooting the laptop the wifi adapter started blinking its blue lights.
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I began moving gumbo things to the stone table outside of the woodshop. I set up a box of cabernet, rice still in the oven, which is movable, the full saucepan, of gumbo, bowls, spoons, a certain laptop computer, on, with the North River Marsh on its display and a red boat icon situated on the shore of the marsh, and some plastic cups for wine.
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The no-see-ums were out in force. It is late February and around 78 degrees. The weather we like is what the no-see-ums like, so we suffer when conditions are perfect. I handed over the now fully functioning laptop to Helicopter Dave and Roughrider Lynn, relieved. Eloisa was coping well, covering herself with a filmy wrap, but after a while she had to leave to get away from the bugs. We all did. Robert was a no-show, but he was glad to have some gumbo saved, just for him, in Kaimu’s fridge.
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I felt like I had overcome huge obstacles, but I also had called up to the Bad Crowd to wish Eve a happy birthday, she had her happy voice which is pleasant, and she was driving up to Easton, MD, I guess to celebrate getting older.
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The next day I did all the same things that fixed Lynn’s laptop on its twin, my backup. What had taken about 3 weeks to do was done in a couple hours. I visited Eloisa who was working on an old Chris Craft, removing bungs, still recovering from her bout of vertigo. She gave me an apple. I asked Robert if he wanted the leftover gumbo and he said would I like to join him and Eloisa for dinner at the local Mexican restaurant. I was starving.
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We dined outside with the two dogs, who received attention from everyone who passed by, wanting to pet them, asking politely. The dogs got their own dinners and we had good conversation. The bill was only about 50 bucks for such a nice day and nice dinner.
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The image is of a couple of Polynesian birds woven by Eloisa of coconut palm fronds. Birds of a Feather flock together.