Fun

Last weekend I passed my BCC certification, which means that I’m allowed to charter boats up to 25 feet from anywhere in the Bay Area (and around the world, too). On Thursday, I went out on my first solo trip. Our crew worked together well, and we had a good mix of just relaxing sailing, splashing through waves, and practicing. The only problem is that the ladies didn’t get as much time on the tiller as they probably deserved. But it’s difficult to make it fair when people steadfastly claim they are “fine” and don’t want to get involved. ...

Heard at work: “I don’t listen to NPR, they are too conservative. They are National Pentagon Radio.” And in reply: “Or National Pentagram Radio, depending on your point of view.” Perhaps this wide range of viewpoints is why we can never make any progress in American politics.

I enjoyed great music tonight at the Little Fox. The first set was Four Shillings Short, second set: Broceliande, third set: all 6 of them together. The venue was great, the bands were fun, the sound mix was awesome (that’s a big deal when the music itself is intrinsically acoustic), and the people I went with were fun. I even got up and danced a waltz at the end, and the band seemed to appreciate it. ...

I just stumbled across The String Cheese Incident via Hooping. It’s cool music. It makes me want to sit on a lawn with people I like talking to and enjoy a beer. Alas, the show coming up in the Bay Area is at the Warfield, which is not an outdoor venue.

OK, it is official, I am signed on to the trip to sail for 9 days off the coast of Croatia! Wow, this is going to be amazing! The sailboat we’ll be chartering is really swanky! We will be picking it up in Split, Croatia. From there we’ll probably be heading south in to the archipelago off the coast there. I really need to read up in my Lonely Planet to learn more about that area before I get there. ...

I took my first real sailing lesson today. It didn’t really cover much more than previous lessons, but getting more practice is always welcome. Also, you can learn the same thing a different way from two teachers, then integrate the best of both. Today’s teacher dislikes judging the wind direction using the weathervanes on the top of the mast, and instead taught us how to judge the wind direction by looking at the ripples on top of the waves. That’s a useful skill! ...

Wouldn’t it be cool to charter this boat for a week or so? I might get a chance to. More info when I know it for sure…

I went to the blog.meetup.com meetup for San Jose tonight. I met a cool group of people there. Conversation was good enough I forgot to leave and go get dinner, so tonight I’ll just have to subsist on a cookie and a mocha. Geek food! A while ago, I went to one other meetup, which was only so-so. It seems that bloggers are naturally a bit, uh, different socially, and that feeds into a successful meetup. Like the blogosphere itself, any lull was immediately filled with an interesting tidbit, keeping the conversation going. And then the brainstorming on any given topic ran to unpredictably strange ends. Somehow we manged to invent outsourced bus driving and coffee drinks with bacon bits. ...

When I got up to Arnold, I heard on the radio that the Calaveras County Fair and Frog Jumping Contest was running this weekend. So after I finished my chores (restack the woodpile, clean the gutters, sweep the roof, replace the disposer), I went down to check it out. It has been so long since I’ve been to a county fair. It was fun. I called Andrew and Holly and alerted them to join me. They had a good time too, and Holly says she got lots of up-close pictures of people just being people. ...

I was really looking forward to sailing lessons this weekend, but I got the schedule wrong and it turns out the first class is next weekend. I’m going to use this weekend to go up to the cabin and get it ready for the summer. Got to get all the flammable stuff away from it before the vigilantes (also known as the “Meadowmont Property Owners Association”) send us a nastygram. ...