Kaimusailing

I wrote up a blog posting about an outrigger canoe design but deleted all of it. It can wait until I actually get to build the canoe, probably next fall in the boatyard in the woodshop.
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Meanwhile I found the little wok I bought last year, cleaned and seasoned it. Maybe it’s stainless. I made fried rice and then later shrimp with garlic sauce. I used brown rice that was overcooked, mushy. I was using squeeze bottles of ginger and garlic. Don’t argue, much easier than fiddling around peeling garlic, etc. A video on YouTube showed a Chinese restaurant processing a huge amount of garlic and then jarring it in vegetable oil. When they fry in the wok they just throw the garlic/oil into the wok and go about their business. Ginger should be peeled and very thinly sliced. I haven’t seen how they preserve that, probably the same way.
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Now I have a shrimp, avocado, asparagus stir fry recipe that I will try tonight.
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The stir fry turned into a garlic sauce recipe with the above ingredients. Very good.
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My work on the Atomic 4 had reached a point where the head was off but the engine was still locked up in spite of flooding the pistons with Blaster penetrating fluid.
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I found a YouTube fellow who tests all kinds of mundane stuff including penetrating fluids. He found that the cheapest, Liquid Wrench, was the best. His YouTube channel is called Project Farm.
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I purchased a 10 ton hydraulic ram from Lowe’s online for only about $120 and had to wait about a week for it to arrive. I had a similar tool, but now that one is rusted and I left it down in the boatyard in Georgia.
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The new one came in, 66 lbs of it. I had to wrestle it off the porch at the house, down the steps, into the CRV, over to the marina, out the dock and onto the boat. I couldn’t envision getting onto the boat without falling into the marina with a 66 lb anchor in my hands. I opened the package, opened the carrying case, and removed the hydraulic ram and pump. They were heavy. Much bigger than the one I had had before.
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When I tried to use it, it looked like there was air in the hydraulic lines, like when your car brakes are spongy. The massive piston would extend when I gave the pump a push and then retract when I tried to pump it again. I found out I had to bleed the hydraulics. I watched some YouTube videos about that and also used some common sense, just position the pump above the ram and let the air bubbles rise up. There was more to it than that and a 3 ½ hour session on phone with my older brother in Hawaii, including consuming more wine than allowed by my doctor, gave me enough courage to continue.
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This apparatus is heavy and unwieldy. I needed to work in spurts. Take a break. Cook something to eat.
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I had gone to the VA doctor for my annual physical and he said my cholesterol numbers were good but that was because I drank so much wine. You have to cut down on the wine, he said, are you kidding?, I said, do you watch the news?
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I had been gravitating toward poke bowl kind of meals with avocados, while we can still afford them, cucumbers, etc., then salads with the same ingredients. I made fried rice in the little wok and then tried garlic sauce. Very easy and one of my favorites.
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I had a vague idea about making an avocado shrimp with avocado sauce recipe with pasta, something I had made with Eloisa in the boatyard a couple years ago. While in the store they had asparagus on sale, mushrooms, I had a lot of ingredients and didn’t know what to make.
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Mother’s Day came around and Cuddily let me know that Cornelia Marie was planning a brunch and I was invited. 11 AM. Got to get over there. Homemade bagels, homemade smoked salmon, strawberry shortcake, mimosas, champagne, plus Saddlebred pinot noir, one of my favorites and a gift to the mother of the house. She had had a traumatic experience cleaning around the wine bar and sent two bottles of wine overboard to crash on the tile floor. What a mess. Now I provided a few replacements. Don’t smash the glass this time.
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The event went on all day, including a long conversation with a psychologist. Well, we are all psychologists, especially after a bit of wine.
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I wasn’t getting much done. I had to get the giant hydraulic ram working.
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I found out that you had to do the bleeding process 5 or 6 times. It was hard to do it even once. This is a substantial tool. It’s like I’m weightlifting, do some reps, then rest, don’t overdo it. Eventually I got the ram to extend without remaining in one spot just oscillating, out when I pump, back in when I try to return the lever to pump again. Now it extends out without too much equivocation.
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Maybe I will be able to get it to work on the actual problem tomorrow. We are entering the same rain event that is affecting Cap’n Webb Chiles in Hilton Head, hey, come on, it’s only water. At least I will be inside hovering over the Atomic 4 with a 10 ton ram to accost it. It will turn.
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As to the cooking, I remember stir frying a salad, complete, and now I stir fried garlic sauce with green stuff, asparagus, avocado, and romaine lettuce. Romaine lettuce can be substituted for bok choi. I had some shrimp from the Food Lion that was on sale. My previous bag of frozen shrimp that I had been portioning out for things like fried rice, etc., had slipped off the counter and when I found it the next day, the stench inside was almost as bad as what we beheld at the Fisherman’s Grill next door to the marina some time ago. Ugh. We keep going back to see if maybe they have improved. Going back less frequently now.
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I awoke at 2 AM and had to pee. I was reading a book from my 400,000 ebook collection and I was hooked on it. It’s called The Lost Girls, and when I try to bring that up online I get lots of hits on other books that mainly center on the Gilgo Beach murders on Long Island, NY, plus some other mystery and crime novels, some involving vampires and such. The book I am reading is not like that at all.
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It’s a travelogue of 3 youngish New York women who decide to take a backpack trip around the world. They each have things they want to see and they all contribute to the chapters of the book. Once I started reading it I was hooked. At 4 AM I was wiping tears from my eyes about their visit to Kenya and a little 3 year old girl who was a survivor of parents dead of AIDS, bonded with one of the travelers. I recommend this book, but you will be hard to find it, it’s not a tragic murder mystery or a vampire fantasy, it is real, very real.
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I made another garlic sauce recipe. It included ham and asparagus, cucumber, avocado, all stir fried at high temperature with a small amount of red jalapeno chili powder. Boy that has some kick to it.
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At the Legion I said that I thought Eloisa might travel up to Crisfield, if she could get her vehicle situation sorted out. The next day I was on the phone with her and Teri called asking if Eloisa was in town, so a 3 way phone call. It’s easier to carry on a phone conversation when you have an extra hand to get in there and handle some of the chore. Teri dropped off and then my friend Tom called from Clearwater in Florida and we had another 3 way phone call. Eventually that ended and I called Cuddily and Eloisa called in again to ask us to listen to her weird engine noise when the air conditioner was on. It was weird, like maybe the fan was hitting something. The fan only comes on with the air conditioner. She is shopping for another vehicle, so just another reason to move on from that car. Cuddily expressed an interest in driving down to Cape Charles and seeing that town, a place she or I have never visited.
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I drove down with her, almost 2 hours, the next day and by the time we got down there I was very hungry. I was doing some of the driving and she was researching where to eat lunch. We decided to go to the Shanty and we did, had orange crush drinks, seafood, and waddled out, sated. I recommend that place.
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We walked to the boardwalks and harbor jetties. Apparently Cape Charles was much like Crisfield back in the day, not any more. It is more like Fernandina Beach. We had ice cream and hydrated in an Irish pub. This is like a mutual therapy session. We were both relaxed and eager to take a nap when we ot back.
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Why hasn’t Crisfield taken off like Cape Charles? Good question. There are other towns on the Eastern Shore asking the same question. The image is of the rocks at the shore of Cape Charles.