May 01 2008

Google Ocean

Published by Laureen under Uncategorized

Jonathan sent me a link this morning that made my whole day.

Google diving into 3D mapping of oceans

Man! Does it *get* any cooler than that? I don’t think so.

The tool–for now called Google Ocean, the sources say, though that name could change–is expected to be similar to other 3D online mapping applications. People will be able to see the underwater topography, called bathymetry; search for particular spots or attractions; and navigate through the digital environment by zooming and panning. (The tool, however, is not to be confused with the “Google Ocean” project by France-based Magic Instinct Software that uses Google Earth as a visualization tool for marine data.)

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Mar 20 2008

Off the Market

Published by Laureen under Uncategorized

There’s a phrase that describes what happens to you when forces beyond your control converge to create a situation you can do nothing about, usually to your detriment. But it’s profane, and so I’ll just point you here:

http://www.wisebread.com/could-your-city-go-bankrupt

::sigh:: Our house is officially off the market as of yesterday, and we’re going to be back looking for leasers/renters. Thanks, Vallejo, for the fiscal ridiculousness that led to this situation. I always knew that town had it in for me.

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Mar 19 2008

First Do No Harm; Shark “Attack” in the Bahamas

Published by Laureen under Uncategorized

As folks who read both my blogs know, I’ve been superbusy over on ElementalMom, not so much over here. But this article, from the thoughtful and thoroughly-researched DeeperBlue.net crossed my feedreader this morning, and I had to comment.

Sharing the Truth About the Shark “Attack” in the Bahamas

The media’s response to this tragedy has been horrific. It is one thing for a reporter to cut and paste misinformation gleaned from another article… but seeing the blatant fabrication of “facts,” reports, and quotations in some stories has made me ashamed to have ever called myself a journalist. Physicians take the Hippocratic Oath when they enter practice… perhaps there should be a similar mantra for members of the media, to help guide them as they provide “truth” for the hungry eyes and ears of the world.

This event was a terrible, but freak accident. Roughly 40 people die each year in parachuting accidents in the US alone. An equal number die in skiing accidents, again, just in the US. In 2007, there was only ONE shark related fatality… worldwide. Yet, we managed to kill more than 100 million of them. =(

To all you faithful readers: If you hear people talking about this event, or about sharks in a negative manner, please interject and help enlighten them to the truth about sharks. If you help convince even ONE person that the media hype is undeserved or sensationalized, you will have made a difference.

What he said. Please, if it comes up (and I know I’ve been asked about it), speak truth. There are enough damn lies out there as it is.

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Mar 13 2008

And This Is Why…

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The last post in this blog was raving about how wonderful Paul Watson is. And this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7294564.stm

is why we need him, more like him, legions of people willing to do what he does. Because they will not stop, the whalers. And I still cannot figure out why.

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Mar 08 2008

Sea Shepherd

Published by Laureen under Uncategorized


When I have gotten older, and the boys have grown up and moved on to adventures of their own, I want to be Paul Watson’s henchman.

Y‘know, people talk all the time about how “when I am an old woman, I shall wear purple“, and they expect you to get all old and eccentric and wacky. For my 60th birthday, I wanna buy myself an ironclad trawler, paint *it* purple, and go work for Paul, sailing the seas for whatever marine life is still left by then.

I dunno. Maybe I’m just hostile and crazy because of all the environmental badness I’ve been posting about on this blog for months. Maybe I’m just really sad because I’ve figured out that the Great Blue Heron that used to roost here in the marina in the windbreak and drop gorgeous blue feathers on the ground is well and truly gone. Natural causes? Sewage? Oil? Who knows? I just know he was great, and now he’s gone. I know I haven’t seen our resident harbor seal in months. I have to assume she’s gone too.

Sea Shepherd Crew on Bow
I love what Sea Shepherd does. I love that they named their new ship Steve Irwin. I love that they are unapologetic for what they do; enforcing laws that already exist, when no other enforcement agency can or will. I love that Paul Watson will say things like this, in a recent article in the New Zealand Herald:

At the last Sierra Club Conservation Governing Committee meeting, there was a discussion about supporting hybrid cars to help prevent global warming.

Although I believe that hybrid and alternative cars and transportation should be promoted, I am wary of sending out a message of false hope.

Instead of tackling the impossible to try to prevent global warming, we should be focusing attention on how to live on a warmer planet. The Sierra Club could provide some leadership here. No one else is, to the best of my knowledge.

There is no preventing global warming. Global warming is a process we are currently experiencing and well into.

Bam. There is is. His delivery reminds me of John Muir and Edward Abbey and Farley Mowat; also heroes of mine. People who said what they thought, and didn’t really care too much about softening the message so people could hear it without getting their knickers in a twist.

So often, people equivocate. We’ve learned to speak in the language of passivity, the language of ambivalence. We’re getting a bit short on heroes these days. So it makes my heart sing when someone, anyone, steps up and says what everyone knows but no one will say: It’s gotten dire out, and we need to pay attention.

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Mar 06 2008

Dreaming and Planning?

Published by Laureen under Uncategorized

Lonely Planet, whom I adore, sends out a newsletter called “the Comet”. The issue in my inbox right now is called “Dreaming and Planning.” And there’s a lot to think about there. Here’s the quote they start with:

The pleasures of travel don’t begin and end on the plane. Dreaming and planning, hitting the road, and the mingled joy and sadness of coming back home - it’s all part of the deal. So come with us on the whole sweet journey, from that first castle in the air to the snow dome on the mantelpiece.

I keep thinking about this.

When Jason and I were first getting together, I took him with me on a trip to Australia and Fiji. He’d never been out of the US before, and so there were a lot of logistics to deal with; passports, luggage, learning to pack, repacking, flights, reservations, research. Putting that trip together was some of the best few months… Sure, there were bills to pay and costs to reckon with. Sure, I booked us in the cheapest rooms the diving liveaboard on the Great Barrier Reef had available, and we weren’t nearly as cooshy-comfy as the honeymooner crowd on the boat, with their deluxe suites, were.

But one thing the staff on that dive boat kept saying kind of stuck in my head. They kept saying "once in a lifetime trip". And everyone nodded like, yeah, this is fantastic, but this is probably the only time we’ll ever do this.

And once we got back to the States after all our adventures on that trip, people would shake their heads, admiringly, and say, "once in a lifetime trip" like we’d never do anything like that again.

Why do people say stuff like this? And more importantly, why do they believe it? Just because life is a one-way trip doesn’t mean you have to only do fabulous things once. The newsletter goes on to talk about the homecoming blues.. because you know, being at home is so much less fantastic than being on the road.

Is it, really?

Try this on. What would your life be like if home was where you and/or your family were, and adventure was just the life you were leading? What if you led your life in such a way that you were always either planning for the next, or doing it? How would that be different from how and what you spend your time on now?

Go ahead, breathe that one in. Answers in the comment field, folks. =)

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Mar 04 2008

Cutting Back?

Published by Laureen under Uncategorized

By way of Unclutterer, another fascinating attempt by American media to buzz-ify what they don’t actually understand:
Consumers cut back on small pleasures.

The first thing the observant will notice is that the title says "pleasures"… but the URL says "luxuries". Two very different words, dontcha think?

And then the article goes on to talk about things like coffee, bottled water, snackbars, and fast food.

All it says to me, yet again, is that it’s gotten really, really surreal out there.

Since when is our economy based on Starbucks purchases? Since when is eating McDonald’s three times a week anything but a bizarre form of self-abuse? Here I was, expecting to see an article about stuff like long car trips, visits to the theater, and that sort of thing. But no. Americans are cutting back on bottled water. Oooooooooooh. All the way through this thing, all I could think was, "no wonder health care in America is so overburdened; we do nothing but try to kill ourselves".

I swear, sometimes, I wonder how the rest of the world stands us. People, you know, who *talk* to each other for entertainment, because that’s what they can afford. People who eat what they can get, because that’s what there is. People who actually stop everything to watch the sunset, because it’s beautiful. Come on, America: "Small cost item" and "small pleasure" are not synonyms.

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Mar 02 2008

A Fine Day Out

Published by Laureen under Uncategorized

Despite the fantastic weather, through a twist of fate or bad luck, none of the people we’d invited sailing yesterday could make it, so we ended up going out with just the folks who live here.

That never happens. Unless we’re only going to the pumpout, that is.

Because the forecast was for wind and windier, we spent some time before we left cleaning the boat. When you live with small kids and crazy-busy people, stuff accumulates, gets tossed aside and neglected, and the cockpit is one huge horizontal surface that collects stuff. So we spent a few hours cleaning up the boat, which sounds thankless, but is satisfying in a way that cleaning up a land house simply never was. Seeing the cockpit all ready for sail just makes me go ahhhhhhh.

So all shipshape and prepared for the gusts the weather department said were happening, we headed, natch, to the pumpout first. Where we were met, oddly, by a group of folks who wanted to talk liveaboard. I got the impression in my scant few minutes of chat that they were not boat people at all… of course, that was aided by the fact that they were all excited to be at the fuel dock (the grottiest, most seagull-crap-covered spot in the whole marina), trying to drum up pleasant conversation with people engaged in dumping garbage, recycling, and gallons of human waste into their appropriate receptacles. Generally not the sort of activities one uses when one is talking up “the life”. I think they finally got the message when one of them, who had not addressed a single comment to me previously, pointed at my rather prominent (at this stage) belly, and asked “boy or girl?”. Couldn’t help myself. I replied brightly “Human! I hope!” and hopped back on the boat.

Finally, time to head out. The channel out of the marina has accumulated some pretty serious mud banks during all the storms this season, and they haven’t dredged it yet, so paying attention to depth matters. And due to the personality of the boat’s former owner, the only depth finder in the boat is inside, at the nav table. (Quick Aside: the way the former owner told the tale, he was in a rally, racing somewhere, and was such a dick (his words) to another racer that when they left the boat to go to dinner, the guy snuck over and codelocked his depthfinder. And in four solid years, the owner never bothered to fix it, since hey, he was in tropical water and “you could just look over the side and kinda figure it out.” No joke.). So it was a great opportunity to give Rowan an important job; keep an eye on the depthfinder at the nav, and let us know if the numbers go below five. Rowan totally dug having a real job to do, and we totally loved not slamming into the mud banks that have caught so many of our marina compatriots.

Not long after heading out, both boys went down for naps, miraculously freeing me up to actually… sail. Due to being The Mommy (which despite sometimes being annoying, I recognize as something temporary, to be cherished rather than railed against) and The Hostess, I rarely get to use the sailing skills I so carefully honed prior to our purchase. Mostly, I am involved in the care, feeding, and orientation of non-sailing folks, and it’s a great time. But this time, I actually got to drive the boat.

When I haven’t done something for a long time, natch, I start to wonder if I’ve lost the skills. Just a few days ago, I caught myself trying to remember some arcane bit of rules of the road, and having to look it up, which was kind of distressing. So imagine the sheer joy when we decided to tack, I threw a quick glance over my shoulder for a steerage spot, we tacked, and it turned out that my spot was the numerically perfect spot to have finished the tack. It sounds so simple and so dorky to be so excited by such a little thing, but there you have it. At least I can still feel the wind, and the boat and I can talk to each other about it, which feels profoundly good.

We headed over to the Aquatic Park, and practiced heaving-to just outside their walls, so that as we drifted, we still got a lovely view of the park and the City. Jason and I debated the arcanery of heaving-to in a catamaran versus the little J-24s we learned on, drogue placement in storms, and whether or not I’d actually read somewhere that in order to reduce the risk of pitchpoling in a cat, you should deploy the larger drogue from the aft and a smaller from the fore, both windward. (Anyone? I swear I read that somewhere, and cannot find it now.)

We poured ginger ale, sat in the nicely sunny and warm cockpit, and watched the City drift by. We’re not sure whether it was our windage (both water tanks were empty, so we were pretty high up in the water for us), or the fact that we required full jib up to stay hove, but we still were making between .5 and 2 knots, so we ended up back in the traffic areas in no time. I eased us gently out of being hove to, and we headed downwind for home as the wind picked up steadily.

There is something crazy-cool about cruising downwind with the waves at a steady 6-7 knots without even really trying, as a big old orange sun sets perfectly behind the Gate. We brought the sails down, headed into the Marina, where Jason executed another brilliant docking, despite the fact that the wind was howling by now, and pushing us square off the dock.

It was, to paraphrase Wallace, A Fine Day Out.

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Feb 28 2008

A Project In Every Room

Published by Laureen under Uncategorized

Long ago and far away in another world, when Jason and I first moved in together, in our search for rental digs (very very hard to find in Santa Cruz, CA), we settled on a place that I considered to be “cute and funky” and Jason, with his lifetime of experience in building trades, considered to be a just-barely-avoiding-condemnation deathtrap. But it was affordable, had a view of the water, and was a short walk from the beach. So we went for it.

I should have known that that would be the beginning of a theme in our life together. The theme of “A Project In Every Room”.

In our land house, we lived with a project ongoing in every room for the entire time we were there. New drywall in the half-bath, new flooring throughout (ripped to the subfloor), new paint, new doors, new tile, new plumbing, new electrical… and of course, a project would get started, and something would come up, then another project would demand attention, then another something would come up… and before you know it, it took six months to get the place ready for market, because of all the loose ends to be neatly tied up.

So here we are, in the boat. See it coming?

But here’s the cool thing about boats, instead of houses. In houses, all that construction is a pain. It’s a nuisance. It’s something guests look at and turn up their noses over. But in a boat? It’s the steady state of things. Everything is always being maintained, or repaired, or upgraded. Go to any gather of hardcore boaters, and you will hear discussions about what they need to do, have done, or are doing. And what’s supercool is that everyone cares. Everyone listens, everyone shares tips, product names, tools, advice. You invite other boaters over, they specifically ask to see your projects, and next thing you know, you’re getting quizzed on your fiberglassing skills and the operating hours of the local hazardous waste disposal facility (at this marina, people actually collect each other’s stuff for the dropoff if they’re going to do a run. How cool is that?).

It’s a wonderful easing of my mind, to realize that all the projects underway are actually a selling point, rather than simply outward signs of mayhem. It’s a clear indicator that, while yes, things break, that things could always be better, and that within this environment, you’re encouraged and supported in reaching for that better state with the labor of your own two hands.

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Feb 26 2008

So You Want To Be A Liveaboard?

Published by Laureen under Uncategorized

Mitzi

A few weeks back, I got an email forwarded from the Berkeley Parents’ Network, from a woman whose family was considering a move like ours, looking for some practical, BTDT advice about making the big leap. We chatted back and forth, and set up a day to have them come sailing.

Eduardo checks trim

Unlike our previous adventure with having folks aboard, this day looked to go off without a hitch! And a grand thing that was, too. It’s always bad to have the boat break when you’re pitching the lifestyle to someone. It was kinda weird to me, in that I still feel like a total boat novice, yet here I was, looking back over the last two years’ worth of adventure in getting to this spot, trying to help them hit the high spots and avoid the lows that we’d run into.

Mitzi, Eduardo, and little Mario came aboard, and immediately we all began The Grand Tour. Usually, the new-to-the-boat tour involves me showing people how the head works, where the galley is, and that kind of superbasic info. But these were wannabe liveaboards, so it was an entirely different tour. For them, the discussion of the weird cabinetry, the funky panels, the other odd “gotchas” we never would have known to look for ourselves. I warned Mitzi about the “oh, so you’ll be in charge of the galley!” class of assnine comments she’d most likely face. We talked about how weird it is that in boat culture, women are still considered largely to be obstacles to their more adventurous men. We bitched about Strictly Sail and its many limitations. Eduardo picked Jason’s brain about engines, sails, insurance, delivery, and all the stuff that was pretty much Jason’s half of our researching (we figured out early on that if we were going to have any hope of catching up to where we wanted to be, we were going to have to divide our research labors. It’s worked out well for us.)

Rowan and Legos

There was a great deal of conversation about mono vs multi. Obvee, multis are not nearly so common on this coast as they are, um, pretty much everywhere else, and while they’ve got a lot going for them, for the cruising and liveaboard family, they’re an acknowledged PITA in terms of finding space for them, and getting them here without ending up bankrupt. So we talked boat culture, good financing companies, and marina politics. We also talked family culture, and the advantages of a fairly stable platform for when you’re raising small kids. We talked about lego storage.

Under the Gate
In what is becoming our favorite activity with guests, we dodged outside the Golden Gate. One day, I will collect everyone’s “under the bridge” photos all in one place. But for as calm as it was inside the Gate, it was hoppin’ outside. Waves were around 10′, period was around 16 seconds, and it was a fabulous rollercoaster. So fabulous, in fact, that the dolphins were out playing in it too. Sadly, they’re far too shy to have posed for the camera, but take my word for it; seeing those fins was probably the highlight of my month. There is something about watching a dolphin move that just makes me gasp. Probably too many former lives as a sea creature.

Due to hanging out far too long, we ended up back to the dock significantly after dark, and they had to hustle to get Mario home for bedtime. As is often the case, I thought of all the perfect things I should have said, the pointers I should have passed along, the bits of wisdom I’d picked up here and there that I should have mentioned. And I was blown away by how much information we’ve accumulated in such a short time. It seems, when you’re totally head-down in doing it, like you haven’t learned much at all, because there is so much ground to cover. But when graced by the opportunity to stop and look back, it’s wildly encouraging to see the starting point, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay off in the distance.

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