Dave and Anke’s Luna
AWESOME home-built Bolger-based sailboat, with a junk rig.
Beautiful work.
from http://www.akzeigers.com (formerly http://www.alaska.net/~mzeiger/DaveAnke.html)
Luna – a Bolger-based sailboat with a modern junk rig
With sails down
Platt’s “The Chinese Sail”
Brian Platt authored a really nice description of the characteristics of the Chinese junk rig. Really detailed photos and diagrams explain the sheeting of this easy-to-reef sail.
(Pictures from http://www.friend.ly.net/%7Edadadata/junk/platt/platt_chinese_sail.html)
A junk
High Tea
The ephroe
Sheets
Duckworks
What a great little online magazine for amateur boatbuilders. Lots of helpful tips from people who’ve “been there, done that.” (And Matt says the Internet is only good for porn. . . . hah!)
One of the biggest problems with my current sailboat is that it is difficult to rig in windy weather because of the loose-foot-design. The second problem is I cannot reef the sail in stormy weather, which can crop up very quickly in our area. (For some reason, our canyon attracts tornadoes and other quickly-arising storm fronts.) The two-part mast design requires that I tip the boat sideways in order to get the mast in. This is inconvenient for any number of reasons. Last problem, and the least of my concerns, Matt, even hunched over in the cockpit, is always a prime candidate for getting hit with the boom before we’ve fully hoisted the mainsail. The last problem is easily solved by installing a topping lift.
However, the rest of my gripes can only be solved by making a new rig altogether.
The website I mention above has some interesting tips from others.
The Worst Day of Sailing
All of my sailing friends have had “one of those days” when one seems to spend more time fixing than sailing. But I think we all still subscribe to the opinion that “The worst day of sailing beats the best day of working.” The guy below demonstrates this idea.
 from http://andrewlinn.com/040827_sail/worst_day_out_start.htm |
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Truly! Who wants to be a millionaire, when for a mere $50, you can have sailboats like these?! This race is awesome.
1st Place – Grand Champion!!!
2nd Place
3rd Place
4th Place |
Puddle Duck Racers
So, the end of my medical residency is fast approaching, and just as I was looking for a place to live 3 years ago, I am again in search of that perfect place. A place with water. A place with lots of water.
I went into my current job knowing full well that the largest lake near me is only 440 acres. However, more important to me was that I liked the people and the area in which I wanted to work. So although I interviewed in Corpus Christi, Houston, Galveston, and even Austin, simply because all these places afforded me easy access to either coastline or a large body of water, in the end, I chose the place that was landlocked.
The most important thing I learned from my sailing club is that, if one really wants to sail, one will find a way. Honestly, trailering a sailboat 45 miles seems ludicrous to me now, but it was something we did frequently. Because we wanted to!
One nice thing about sailboats, is that there’s a size for any body of water you can find. Even a swimming pool. Shorty Pen is a big proponent of Puddle Duck Racers. They’re so cute! Like fuzzy little ducklings. . . . If ever I could clean out my garage, I’d like to make one with a Chinese junk rig. Made from a single sheet of plywood, they’re soapbox sailboats. A prime example of customizing one’s Puddle Duck Racer (PDR) is Jason Nabors’ Sea Flea shown below.
 The Sea Flea #33 The Sea Flea is a race legal PDR.The only diffrences [sic] are that it has a small cuddy cabin for over night camping and has lines above the ten inch mark that are based on the West Wright [sic] Potter Sailboat. In order to race a PD it must meet a simple set of specifications. The bottom must be a rocker shape with a flat bow and transom. The rocker shape only has to be maintained for 10″. After the 10″ mark you can design it any way you like . You may also rig it any way you like. You cannot have any such items as outriggers or motors. The only power you are allowed to use is the wind. The basic PDR takes about a weekend to build although I spent the entire winter working on mine. . . . Excerpt from http://pdsa.20fr.com/ |
He even made one with a roller-furling jib! I’m so inspired!
Although PDRs might look clumsy and awkward, with experienced handling they look as if they handle very nicely. (Videos)
Freedom of Choice
Maybe it’s because I see life and death every day that I get bored watching T.V. shows these days. Maybe it’s because I see people without any real choices in life other than to accept that they have a terminal disease that makes me scoff when I listen to people complaining about the U.S. government taking away their freedom to smoke pot or to go above 45 in a 20 mph school zone. Maybe it’s because a lot of the patients who end up in my hospital have diseases that are fully preventable, by their own choice of what they’ve done in life.
And every day, I attempt to fix the results of poor choices. That is the price we pay for freedom — poor choices.
I still remember when I was just a medical student, a man came in who had serious liver cirrhosis (from drinking) and COPD (from smoking). As I was taught, I counseled this man (old enough to be my grandfather) about the hazards of continuing to smoke. I offered him two options — the patch or the gum. He wanted neither. Only oxygen by nasal cannula was what he wanted and needed to stay alive (for the meantime).
He was discharged from the hospital in stable condition, but we sent him to a veterans facility because 1) he was homeless and 2) he probably had liver cancer and would need further evaluation and treatment.
While he was in the hospital, he was visited a total of 1 time, by his sister. When he was discharged from the hospital, she paged me, and then asked to talk to me. The entire conversation consisted of her yelling at me for not making him stop smoking. I explained to her that I discussed the dangers of smoking and offered him smoking cessation aids, which he refused. “You didn’t do enough,” she yelled. And proceeded to emit a series of foul words which I will not repeat on this site.
I was quite livid at the time, but looking back on it, it was easy to see why she was angry. First, she was probably feeling guilty that her brother was in the hospital. Alone. After all, he’d been homeless for who knows how many months. Even he didn’t know how many months. She had to find someone to blame for the fact that her brother was not well. Nevermind that before his hospitalization, I had never even met the man, and she had known him for nearly all his life (which is maybe why he chose to be homeless rather than to live with her).
Secondly, control freaks like her are the reason Singapore* is considering outlawing smoking completely. They’ve outlawed chewing gum, as well. I’m happy to say that America is still a free country, and that as much as I deplore the effects smoking has on my patients who started this absurd habit of inhaling partially combusted material. . . I’m not fascist enough to tie a man down to a bed and force him to use a nicotine patch.
Nor am I schizophrenic enough to go blaming health professionals for refusing to force a man to accept elective medication.
Next thing you know, this lady will be lobbying in the Senate to impose nicotine patches on people against their will. “Chew that nicotine gum! Chew it! NOW, I SAY!“
Control freaks. They know how you must live your life, and they will force you to live a “good” life, even if it means making it a law.
* Singaporean politicians outlaw everything, including not flushing the toilet after use. In spite of people’s claims that Singapore is ”safer” that the U.S., my roommate from Singapore remembers that one of her classmates was murdered while jogging in one of Singapore’s parks. Safer? Hardly! You can’t legislate crazy people, people.
Burgee
What’s in a burgee? A club by any other name would sail as sweet. Our college sailing club worked hard to keep afloat, and I think we were the first ones to actually set up a website. But we never made a club burgee.
Burgees are fun things. When Matt and I moved to Texas, we designed a burgee for a our house. I never sewed it, though. I am no Betsy Ross.
I really like the Inter-Collegiate Sailing Association of North America‘s burgee. Its subtle choice of letters and placement says a lot about college sailing and college sailors.
Nationalism and the Strength to Be Nationalistic (Or “You Talk the Talk, but Can You Walk the Walk?”)
I called my parents up the other day to announce that we’d finished our tax return, and I was surprised to find that my dad plans to go to Thailand again. I am sad that he is being asked to go there, especially knowing what I know about the situation in Thailand.
There has always been Islamic terrorism in Southern Thailand, but lately, because of the Iraq War, the fundamentalists in many South Asian and Pacific Island countries are using it as an excuse to behead more people than usual. You know, the whole “stop bombing Iraq and we’ll stop killing more people than we were already doing before the Iraq War anyway” thing.
And of course, the American media plays the “useful idiot” and instead of portraying this as an ongoing thing that has been going on for decades, naturally, they try to blame the increase in violence on Bush.
And people who only watch American news fall for it, time and time again.
What’s ironic is that Thailand likes to boast that it has never been colonised by a European country. If things keep up the way they have been, they are likely to have their first taste of dust, but not from Europe.
I know part of the conflict in Thailand is that Malaysians believe the southern part belongs to them. I still say, there are better ways to figure this out than to kill people, most especially school teachers. I mean, heck, if I were go to around killing school teachers in the United States just because I disagree with U.S. policy, I’d likely be locked in a looney bin. But for some reason, Islamic fundamentalists going around killing civilians in Southern Thailand is acceptable because they’re “oppressed.”
In the DSM-IV, I believe it’s called 298.8.
What’s even more disturbing, is that somehow, they managed to distract Bangkok once again. What does the media cover? It’s covering protests because the Prime Minister is corrupt (excuse me again, this is coming from a country where it is commonplace to bribe a policeman out of a speeding ticket?) are being covered more than the fact that inconsequential hillbillies in Southern Thailand are dying.
Someone from Bangkok writes about a Muslim man who destroyed a Buddhist/Hindu shrine:
“What I’m more worried about is… this incident may end being some martyr cause and the Muslim’s down south will move their troubles into Bangkok.” http://bangkok.metblogs.com/archives/2006/03/erawan_shrine_h.phtml
Yeah, as long as it doesn’t come to Bangkok . . . . Funny, how the death of innocent civilians in Pattani doesn’t bother you until there’s no one left there to kill.
[I've purposely removed the list of the attacks on Southern Thailand in the last 6 months because I, too, am worried about the backlash on my fellow Muslims here in the United States who don't go around killing innocent people or destroying other people's religious artifacts. But in Thailand, the people in Bangkok are actually encouraging it by saying that this is all Bush's fault. Okay, so what if it is? Isn't it the job of the Thai government to protect its people? What in the world are the bureaucrats and academics of Bangkok doing besides quibbling over who is or is not paying their taxes? I sure am glad I don't live there.]
I know I’ve said it in the past, but I just want to say it again. I thank the U.S. Military men and women every day for keeping us safe so that the things my relatives are experiencing in Southern Thailand are not happening to my family here in the United States.
The Joy of Tax
Tax time was always a time when we had to tip-toe around my father. He is always in a foul mood around April 15th.
When I turned 18 and went to college, I inherited my 1099′s, and I too learned the joys of tax returns. I learned to hate April, the way my father did. While my friends were turning in their tax returns early, so they could get their refunds, I was always paying estimated quarterly tax and filling out Schedule B’s.
Every year, someone would brag that they filled their 1040-EZ return early, and would try to persuade me to do the same. They never comprehended why I waited till April 14th. I dreaded the years when my estimated tax wasn’t enough, and I would have to send the government $400 or more by April 15th.
So I was thrilled when the stock market crashed in 2002, and my inexorably ever-increasing yearly capital gains and dividends, which were more than my graduate student salary of $14,000 a year, finally dropped to zero. I no longer had to pay taxes on money that I never even got to see! (Why no one ever suggested I put it all in a Roth IRA in the first place, I don’t know.) For the first time in my life, I got a tax refund!
Nevermind that a “tax refund” is simply money one earns that is denied to one for 12 months. At least, for the first time in 30 years, the government was sending me a check.
This year my husband, who previously enjoyed his yearly tax refunds, has inherited my 1099′s. He too is learning the joys of the non-EZ tax returns. This year, he did the taxes because I was fed up with it. For the first time in his life, he had to fill out, not only Form 1040, but also the Schedule B, Schedule D, Schedule F (after we figured out that we don’t need the Schedule C, E, or J or Form 5329), Schedule SE, Form 8582, 28% Rate Gain Worksheet, Unrecaptured Section 1250 Gain Worksheet, and the Worksheet to Find Out if You Need to Fill Out Form 6251 (which we didn’t).
And, for the first time in his life, he is paying the government on April 15th.
For those three blissful years, after the stock market crashed and I got married, I didn’t have to fill out the Form 1040-ES. This year, Matt is filling out his first Form 1040-ES, and I can tell you, man, he is not happy.
I couldn’t help laughing though, when I saw his expression as he read Schedule D, Line 11.*
*To calculate Gain from Form 4797, Part I; Long term gain from Forms 2439 and 6252; and long-term gain or (loss) from Forms 4684, 6781, and 8824
