Category Archives: Daily Blog

A blog entry with personal information tied to the day it was created.

Tuesday Evening off the English Coast

It still blows my mind to be able to write a blog entry that anyone interested can read while sitting aboard an 85,000 ton ship plowing through a foggy evening on the north sea.

We just had a great meal in the animator’s palette. Good food and I really liked the effects better than those on the newer Dream. They were more subtle, but still grabbed me and dragged me in. If there’s ever an advertisement for the imagineering team, events like that are it.

I’m heading up on deck to see what the foggy evening does to the ship’s lighting on deck. I’m hoping that the fog and the colored lights will make for some great shots. Won’t really know till I get home and get them on the good monitor. Once I have them post processed and am back on a reasonably large pipe, I’ll post whatever seems worth sharing.

The sketches that emerged on the screens during the meal also remided me that need to get my Intuos tablet out and try to take my rather feeble drawing skills to a better place. I’d love to be able to sketch competently…so far I’ve always found more important things to do but I think the time has come to find the time.

Newcastle

Just got back from our outing in the Newcastle area. Took a bus from the royal quay in Tyne and roamed around for a while with the guide describing everything from the local council flats to various remnants of Hadrian’s wall. Stopped at lunch time in BlancSomething where there had been an abbey (where the monks all wore white) long ago. At this point it seems to be a nice, small tourist destination with a little hotel and a few other estblishments. It was an interesting drive in as we were on a full sized tour bus and the roads were not wide enough for anything to pass on the other side. At least once a car approacing frrom the other direction had to back up until we found a spot where they could creep past.

Lorna got to see many, many sheep but onlly from a long distance behind walls (and she said barbed wire). She was also upset that folks up here raise sheep for meat more than wool. Sheep are friends not food.

We had a nice tea and sandwiches lunch at a small eating place in the town, Lorna had a ham and white bread (real country white she says) sandwich with the best scone with whipped cream and jam she’s had in England so far. Lorna notes that the little old church in the village sure as hell smelled ancient. I have pictures, but after burning 100 MB posting pics yesterday, the rest will keep until I’m home.

I grabbed some macro shots of very nice flowers that I’ll post once I have a bigger net link.

Back at the ship by 2:15. I’m going to pull my shots off of the camera chips to my storage drives and get batteries recharging.

As we got back to the ship, a group of local dignitaries was heading out. Looks like they gave them a tour of the ship and lunch with the captain. I expect that the Disney visits will also be a nice boost to the local economy.

I took quite a few shots out the windows of the bus with my little camera. I’m not at all confident that any of these will work out, but it seemed work a try. Not something Ido often enough to have a solid feeling about.

In the North Sea heading for NewCastle

On the Disney Magic and having a great time!

Currently we’re nearing the end of our first day at sea on the Magic. Today was an ‘at sea’ day and relatively quiet. The weather has been excellent. We had a chocolate and wine tasting this morning. Fun, interesting and tasty.

We’ve been meeting folks on the cruise this time. I guess we’re becoming a bit more gregarious this time around. We grabbed dinner with a number of folks who had been on the pre-cruise facebook group and have seen several of them around the ship since then.

So far I’ve taken a few pictures, mostly sunrise and ships on the horizon (and a bunch from Dover and London before we sailed out). We saw a huge wind farm this morning while chatting with a couple we had met at the dinner and I grabbed a few shots of that. Currently my outgoing bandwidth is limited (pay per meg with a first level limit of 100 MB) so I’m going to keep the picture postings down until I get home.

I’m going to try to keep posting as things progress and may extend entries during the day as more happens.

Getting ready for formal-ish night tonight. We didn’t bring full formal wear as our weight and bags were limited in order to make getting here sane.

A few shots from the last few days in reduced size.

Deep in the castle ramparts

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Beauty among the ancient stones

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The view from our room in London 🙂

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Science Fiction and Science Fact…

I was just talking with someone here at work and they mentioned being introduced to the works of Charlie Stross and in particular the laundry files. That got me thinking about some of the tangential things that I discovered after following Charlie’s blog for a while. The book Ignition is a very cool walk through the early work in developing rocket propellants…particularly fun is anything that is ‘hypergolic’. Hypergolic fuels ignite spontaneously when fuel and oxidizer are mixed (a little thought make the importance of this clear as the consequences of dumping a few dozen pounds of fuel and oxidizer together and THEN having them ignite can be unfortunate in a boom! sort of way). Another connection near to this one was the hop to Derek Lowe’s medchem blog with particular attention to his things I won’t work with articles (which have been few and far between of late 🙁 ). The items in these articles are more diverse than the stuff in ignition, but no less interesting…

Munchin is gone…

Muchkin is gone.

He was a neighborhood stray that looks similar enough to a rescue kitten that had gone missing shortly after we first let him outdoors that he picked up his name. The original (I’ll call him Munchkin beta as the cat that just passed from this world earned full title to the name over his many years with us) was adopted with his brother butterfly. After butterfly died of liver disease, muchkin beta went out one day and didn’t come back in.

Some time after that we saw a black and white stray around the neighborhood that from a distance looked like the original. He didn’t want to come in the house and quite a few folks were feeding him so we just let things ride, assuming that our Munchkin had gone a bit wild and keeping an eye on things.

One day, Munchkin arrived at the door with his head an neck pretty badly ripped up and he walked right in and lay down in the house. We took that as a sign and brought him in to get his wounds cleaned up. At the vet, they mentioned that he was unfixed which pretty much dismissed any possibility that he was the original cat come back. We got him fixed and vaccinated and from that point forward he was part of the household.

He still ruled his stretch of the neighborhood and roamed far and wide. He became a wonderful pet who loved laps (but hated kissed on the head).

More later…

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

A bit of a grey and drippy day outside.

Work

Starting to get traction at KMC and feeling like I’m going to be contributing significantly in the near future. Nice to be getting there as at Kiva/Amazon it never really felt like I was going to make a significant difference.

Eva is Gone

Buried Eva last weekend. She was a good little cat and didn’t deserve whatever congenital problem did her in. I hate putting down a pet…I am particularly sad when the critter is young and otherwise doing well. We adopted her last fall before Alyssa went off to boot camp. One of Alyssa’s friends had a stray they couldn’t or wouldn’t keep that they were feeding outside. We adopted her and took her in. She took a little while to settle in, but in the end she had established her place in the house. She liked Lorna more than she liked me (she’d accept pets, but never really trusted me). She was in the process of domesticating Yagami and she really disliked Khan. Otherwise she seemed to have a ‘you don’t bother me and I won’t bother you’ attitude.

Lorna visiting Lys

Lorna is flying out to Chicago soon to visit Alyssa. Lys seems a bit stressed by things…and I do understand. She’s got school to deal with, friends coming and going around the training center as they start and finish their own training, a serious boyfriend in the process of deploying to Peal Harbor and I think she worries that home is changing/slipping away. Hard transitions to make, even when you’re able to come home on the weekends from college…she’s dealing with them far from home and with no chance of visiting for some time. I feel for her and will try to do what I can to help provide a stable point of reference. I think Lorna is pretty stressed at the moment as well. Between putting Eva down, Leo being in the hospital and the trip (which always stresses her even though she tries not to show it) she’s a bit on edge.

Catio

I’m starting in on building the ‘catio’ to allow the boys some outside even when we’re not letting them out the door of the house. We’ve bought a bunch of the piece parts (wood, hinges and such for the door and lots more deck screws to hold it all together). I’m adjusting the design to add a sloped roof with shingles (from the brick or two that we had left over). Lorna wanted a top rather than the wire top that the original design called for. The option in the plans she got was for a flat roof made of plastic (not sure where they get polycarbonate panels, but the local home depot doesn’t have them). Given our sometimes snow loads in the winters, a flat roof seemed like a way of asking for trouble. This will be a one to two pitch roof with standard roofing shingles on top. Should do the job and look reasonable as well. I’ve cut the base 4x4s and dropped them in place by the side of the house. I’ve also cut an angle template to help set the table saw tilt for the long rip on the top board that the roof sheet will attach to. There’s still a good bit of figuring out to do before this project is done, but I think we’re headed in the right direction. Next step will be to bed the 4×4 timbers a couple of inches into the soil of the garden to lock them into place. After that is done I can start putting the main frame of the structure together.

Lee on the mend

Lee should be coming home from the hospital soon. Hoping that he can keep up with moving around on a regular basis. This cellulitis thing has been a bit scary. I believe that he went in on Friday and he may be coming home today. Lots of antibiotics along the way and hopefully a bit of a wake up call.

I’ve got to figure out how to partition these posts between public stuff and private. Ideally there’d be some sort of tagging on the post, but I don’t expect that to be supported here. Plan B would involve keeping two posts every day, one public and one private. Not sure I’m up to that so there may just be the private one for now.