Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Very Local Summer

View from the deck of Peace IV... typical perfect RI sunset...

Lately we haven't been going far. Most weekends, at most we drive or bike the grand total of 18 miles to the lake or salt pond. During the week, pretty much we go nowhere except home, and stuff within bike riding distance from home. Not that I've been riding my bike much... Kinda got stuck in a ride-less rut.. this heat and humidity and deer flies drive me a little insane lately on top of real and imagined work or family reasons i've been packing on the gut, and getting slow. btw, I may propose a RAMHADAB course adjustment this year to include more mellow trails. Some members of the pandapas folk are in the same boat as me.

Anyway So, about 1/2 the nights after work, Mrs 40 and I will head over to Wickford harbor to putz around. The other night I made it out of work early enough to go kayaking in the fancy wood boat. I've been using the wood boat more these days... even though after ten years its starting to show its age.

The other night it was pretty calm, so after a hot lap around the island, I headed out past the breakwater and figured it was nice enough to start paddling south. My rough plan was to cross the cove, and then was planning to check out all the beaches etc on the way back. I only had about 1.5 hours of sunlight, so I was going pretty fast. About 1/2way across the cove, I noticed a pretty classy looking catamaran anchored in further, so I headed over to check it out.



When I got closer the women asked if the boat was homebuilt. I said it was and asked if theirs was too.. It was. 'Come Closer so I can see your boat', she ses. No prob. After a few minutes of mutual admiration, I was invited aboard via the elegantly simple dinghy dock that was lowered down like some sort of modern pirate gangplate you can see in the lower part of this pix.. Sweeet.

We chatted for quite awhile, this classy ship is a Wharram designed Tiki 46, Hull #1, Peace IV. The brilliant simplicity of the design had me speechless. Plywood construction, hulls LASHED, yes LASHED, to the main deck, basic tiller steering with stuff you could pull together at home depot (no kidding), with performance on par with a scaled up hobie 16. yeah... freaking amazing. I was in awe. I kept snapping pix.... here is the view down the 46 foot hull at their wind turbine:


Anyhow, I took way tooo many to post here, but for more info about this Tiki 46 go check out this webpage. The long story short: this world cruising pair met, built this machine, and is travelling around the world on a shoestring budget, living like royalty, all from income from selling Wharram Plans! Even I know I'm waaaay to much of a dreamer to pull off buulding something this sweet... I have a hard time enough keeping up with the garden.

Before long, the sun had set, and I was a good mile or two outside the breakwater with no lights except my small bike blinker. I thanked Ann and Neville and headed back home right as the schoolie bluefish started popping out around the harbor.


Looks like that is the last pix bloggers going to let me post, so I'll end for now. More posts to come now that I have a computer at home (it is sweeeeeeeeeeeet if you were wondering). Long overdue, more garden musings, my latest Greeeeen rant, and ideas about Slip N Slide-ADAB(oh yes... begin thinking of candidate weekends this summer.....) and er, well.. a post about the new tarmac they layed down on Interstate Liberty Church Road and The Hallville Turnpike.

-40

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Finally, new computer


Fate of the old computer..


Mrs 40 and I had been clunking along for the last 7 years with a very old celeron desktop with 512 meg of ram. the hard drive crashed about annually, thoughh after the first time we got wicked smaaat and bought a USB backup hard drive.

Well, two months ago it died once again, and I'm giving up fixing it. Its amazing what you can get for a laptop these days, price and performance wise. Long story short, I can finally update the blog (can't use my work computer for that), upload vacation and trip pix from the last 2 months. Thanks to my credit card cash back bonus deal, the laptop was free!! whooo hooo. Anyhow, I just finished setting up the critical stuff, like downloading firefox to avoid the evil internet explorer, and finding an ancient copy of winamp that works just fiiiiiiiiiiine. Tomorrow I'll probably get to putting itunes on it... yeahhhh. nice.

Stay tuned for updates! -40.

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

I'm Back!

Hey,
Thanks CTLP for posting the FARTAB Vol 5 pics and recap!!!
Ouch.. My head hurts just *thinking* about my Cinquo de FARTABO performance... I swear I knocked something loose in my brain on that trip. Just not right. After the trip Baldboy Wonder emailed the results of his cooler autopsy.. between Kaptain Krunch, BBW and I we somehow consumed 1.5 bottles of Gin, and only 1/2 bottle of Juice. Could explain the early sleepy act...when we got to the campsite. Just a thought.

As the title of the post, I just got back from being away from the southernmost point of the Beermuda triangle. I spent a few days travelling for work, then took off on vacation with Mrs 40 up to Montreal, then up to Vermont for a kayak and camping trip with BaldBoy. I still have to download my pictures from those adventures and will post a recap when I get time.

In the meantime, Check out the video of this f*cking moron....You have GOT to be kidding me??? How did this chump get elected???

I'm beginning to agree with J Howard Kunstler, that GW b*sh and republicans will be going out of business if we make it out of the energy/food/global warming/housing crash/economy crash/insert ongoing disaster here.
On a lighter note: stay tuned for vacation and maybe more fartab pix!
-40