Introduction

 This blog came about as a result of having reached the milestone of being here for 80 years. I view the occasion with a slight sense of  surprised bemusement, largely because of a less then stellar family health history and the the fact that I spent a good deal of the first half of those 80 years smoking and drinking heavily. Fortunately I found a better path to travel and now have a few thought to share and tales to tell as this journey approaches an end.

 There are a few things I miss. Departed friends (my 100 year old mother-in-law tells me this one will become larger), civil discourse, trees and fireflies (see subsequent post on tornado), online forums and writing about boats since Duckworks ezine departed.

I'm not particularly concerned about the physical ramifications of ageing, considering this current time to be heavily into the bonus category. It helps that I can still do things that bring me peace and joy, albeit at a  slower pace, particularly boatbuilding and canoeing.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Metric

  From my earliest days I measured length, weight and volume with feet, inches, yards, miles, pounds, ounces, tons, pints, quarts, gallons and so on. I learned early on that most of the world used a different system with meters, grams and liters, a somewhat shorter list.   But I was educated and operated in the feet, pounds and gallons universe. Didn’t think much about it for many years until I started using a little shareware program called Michlet that was strictly metric. The program was not particularly user friendly but was powerful in providing solutions to problems that I was quite interested in. Translating from one system to another and then back again was tedious but necessary. An answer in meters per second meant nothing to me I need to know what it was in miles per hour or feet per second. Intellectually I knew that the metric system was better in many respects but learning a new language late in life was both difficult and I’d never be quite as proficient in the later syst
Read more

What will it weigh

  Sometime after Susie and I moved here to the hills I was talking to someone about what a current boat project was going to weigh. It was probably our son Mike here on a visit, to the best of my knowledge the only maritime discussions about weight with locals revolve around fish and fishing gear. Anyway I was discussing the various ramifications of material selection and building technique as related to what the thing was going to weigh. Susie was on the couch crocheting and said “I know exactly what it’s going to weigh”. Oh really, says I. Yes she replied, It’s going to weigh “a little more than you’d like” all your boats weigh a little more than you’d like. I was stunned. Susie is always right; we’ve been married for a long time. But I hadn’t realized her knowledge extended so far into to my passion for boatbuilding. But she was totally right. All my boats and related things through the years have weighed “a little more than I’d like” without exception. There’s no good way to
Read more