Save your playlists incase your preferred music service folds, or you wanna switch and copy playlists over https://soundiiz.com/
Roon is some spendy software ($14/mo or $800 lifetime), but it does a great job of cataloging and streaming all your music files at home, your digital music library: all those mp3 and flac. https://roon.app/en/
If you have a home collection, Media Monkey does a great job of picking up where iTunes got stupid https://www.mediamonkey.com/
If you don’t want to shell out the $800 above, but still want to stream your music, Subsonic is a long time no brainer: it just works http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp
Slightly more expensive than $0, Plex also is worth a look. I dabble with its music features from time to time, it’s pretty, but just doesn’t scratch my itch quite right. $5/mo or $120 lifetime https://www.plex.tv/
Plex came from a for-profit splinter off home theater software XBMC, now MLK own as Kodi. https://kodi.tv/
Most platforms offer Family Plans. If you can find a couple buddies to split a plan with you, it’s the cheapest way to get ad free. I’ve spent time with Pandora, Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, Tidal. Only a short dabble with Amazon Music, they offer many tracks free, but it doesn’t take long to find something you want that’s behind that paywall.
Lossless is becoming a thing. If you have expensive gear ($1000+ home system, $500+ headphones) you’ll want to learn about it. Big dollar amounts! It works out nice because if you aren’t in audio at that level, you probably won’t notice an appreciable difference between “high-def” vs lossless music quality. Lossless streamers, at this moment are: Tidal, Apple Music, Amazon Music Unlimited. If you have Bluetooth anywhere in your audio stream, it’s not lossless.
Batch 008 – Cabernet wine kit 2019 My first wine kit. The kit was a box of juice and some ingredients shipped from Canada via Amazon for $42. It tastes good! But pretty aggressive flavor at the moment. I put tape on the two cases it made, and will let it age for a few months before cracking another bottle, maybe until September 2019, six months in bottles. The kit itself wasn’t difficult, you do need a few items to make it work if you’re just going to do it yourself. My only complaint about the kit is that the labels suck! So boring. “Private Reserve” really? meh.
Batch 009 – Skeeter Pee 2018 The first 5 gallon batch I did of Skeeter Pee was easy, fun and delicious. And this year I’m going bigger, 16 gallons type bigger. 81 bottles of Skeeter Pee goodness.
batch A Filtered water from the Safeway filter machine. Lees/slurry from 2018 Prospect Lalvin 71B yeast. It took one day longer to fully ferment than the batch B.
batch B Tap water from my basement sink. Lees/slurry from 2018 Prospect standard wine yeast Lalvin EC1118. I had ran out of powdered wine tannin to add, so I added 4 bags of long sitting black tea. I read somewhere the tannins in tea will do the trick for that flavor. Four bottles of B are marked “NS” for no sugar back sweetening.
Batch 003 – Caledonia2017 These grapes are from Matt and Hannah, and named for their daughter Caledonia. There are two grape vines, apparently with one providing lots of flavor, and the other providing lots of juice per grape. The juice itself tasted awesome, so we’ll see how it turns out. The grapes were frozen for some amount of time, so I’m not sure of their pick date. I guessed 2017. I remember that I pressed these in my make-shift 5 gallon bucket press before primary fermentation: they were fermented without the skins. 10/26/18 got it all bottled up today with Matt’s help, and a sweet new floor wine corker: very nice! Sad, I forgot the last step of wine: potassium sorbate to kill all that yeast left over in there. Of course, we back sweetened, and may get exploding wine bottles in a few days! Fingers crossed. pics
Batch 002 – Prospect 2017 Made from same grapes as batch 001, but I’d learned a little more. Did some blind taste testing, did a better job balancing flavors with back sweetening. 15% ABV. pics
Batch001 – Prospect 2017 Started this first batch without doing much research into wtf I was doing. It tasted real tart, and perhaps vinegar-y at first. I still have hope that it will chill out over a few years. No idea of the ABV – alcohol by volume. pics
Aug 12th 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville NC. How do you talk to your kids about race, and when, how. Need to talk to your kids when they’re young, or they’ll think their misconceptions are the right ones. It’s white privilege that talking to your kids about race is an option, as opposed to a necessity to survival. Her kids 9 and 12 school hasn’t talked about it. Sam Sanders got race talk before sex talk. He thinks it’s that way for a lot of black kids.
The first place to start any progress is to start having conversations, bit by bit, starting small.
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by BeverlyTatum amazon. 20 years old, but a good book about race questions with children.
Waking Up White by Debbie Irving amazon. Race is a social, and kids need concrete examples.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCCjy4HqEEY
Kaepernick sits down during National Anthem.
“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Kaepernick told NFL Media in an exclusive interview after the game. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” nfl.com
This American Life episode 627 – Suitable for Children. Details a trip as a child, and as an adult to the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore.
When you step inside the museum, it’s dark. Immediately to the right, there’s a wax figure of a slave. He’s on his knees, his teeth knocked out, and he’s being held down by two white slavers who pull his head back. They’ve shoved a long funnel into his mouth and are pouring gruel through it, force-feeding him. Brown gruel spills out of his mouth. As an act of rebellion, some slaves wouldn’t eat, so the slavers made them. This is the very first thing you see.
[…]
For me, that’s the point. When they leave shaken, when they leave crying– and that’s often the reaction– I have no problem with those tears. What people are going to talk about years later is going to be our slave ship. And they are going to say, I never forgot your lynching exhibit.
And everything else, it seems like a movie, if you don’t have a sense of exactly what people were fighting against. If you think that Rosa Parks, that what she did had something to do with the seat on the bus and you don’t understand that that act was going to get her jailed, but it could have gotten her lynched, as well.
I found it difficult to reload these things in the field. I was watching friggin youtube videos on my phone to get it figured out. Here are my notes. Hope this helps someone!
Actually might be harder than you think! There are many things that you’ve got if you’re living where you’ve been living for a long time. Once you move to a new location, you’ll find yourself without things you didn’t even know you had.
In my moving around I learned a few things about myself. Three things I absolutley need to be happy.
1. a safe place to live
2. something to do with my time (usually a job)
3. friends to call and hang out with
1. Place to live
Barenaba Ln
There have been two or three occasions where I “sold everything and moved.” One of them was out to the Big Island of Hawaii. My brother and I moved out there, and while we knew one guy and his family, essentially we didn’t know anyone. We arrived with only a couple of bags of clothes, and had packed up some things from our last house and mailed them to ourselves there. Jensen and I rented this total dump of a house for $750/month, three bedroom house. There were two of us, and we wanted another roommate, making rent a reasonable $250/month each. Here’s a pic of the house on the left.
So, Jensen and I got the house sorted out. It was empty! No furnishings. We had a kitchen and no silverware. We had a living room, and no place to sit. I had this picture that I can’t find of Jensen and I sitting on a box throwing cards into a hat in an empty living room. Our stuff was in boxes, but we didn’t have anyplace to put the stuff even if we unpacked the boxes. The picture struck a cord with me because we were in an empty white room. We had no furniture. We were in a town where we didn’t know anyone. I remember that striking home with me: I didn’t have anyone to call even if I wanted to. I didn’t have a job to go to. We had nothing there at all.
Sitting in that empty room, throwing cards into a hat was a learning moment. This is what happens when you take everything away and start fresh.
2. something to do with you time
The easiest and most obvious thing here is a JOB. You gotta get a job to pay rent because the savings you moved here with is dwindling. I was hitting the job market hard. I had nothing else going on, so I dedicated most of my day to getting a job. Even in a little town like Hilo, there were some jobs to be had. Nothing that paid much, but at my portion of rent $250/mo, I didn’t need much.
How about school? Another great thing to be doing in a new place. Your days will have purpose. You will have someplace you need to be, things you need to do. I’m no zen master. In fact, if I don’t have anything going on, I will start making stuff up. And those “projects” can often be pretty useless. But I like doing things, it feels good.
School and job easily segues into the third part:
3. friends
Imagine going to a job, and coming home. Your home is comfortable. You’ve got internet, a TV, maybe a goldfish and a couple of potted plants that need watering from time to time. You get home, check your blogs, and go to sleep. Next morning, wake up, go to that job, come home, repeat. For me, that is a frustrating cycle. I need people to talk to, joke with and hang out with. When I work a job, it’s usually so I can have a little money to spend on the weekend, gas money for camping, or movies, or other stuff. My job is important, but the people I meet are more important.
Another place I sold it all and moved to was Bozeman Montana. I showed up in that town with one friend, and again, didn’t know a soul except the person I went there with. I knew that even though I liked this person a lot, I needed more people. I looked around for a restaurant job. Waiters are witty, chatty, night owls who are good with strangers and probably don’t have day jobs. I looked around for a busy restaurant in town with young people and took a good look at the other employees. Would I like to be friends with these people? I did, so I applied, and it all worked out great.
Yet another time I sold everything and moved to California with my now wife, we both got jobs. I made some decent friends at a restaurant I worked at, and school I was attending. Alison got a job at REI. She said it was because she’d worked at an REI before, and it was easy to transition there. REI doesn’t pay worth a damn, like any other run of the mill retail job. But the people, now they are special. Alison and I went on all sorts of adventures with her true friends that she made at work.
If you don’t like people you work with, and haven’t found any groups to participate in (did you look at meetup.com? I’ve had success there), then cold calling is an option. I think this is easier for boys because we’ve had to do cold calls for quite some time. We learned by hitting on women. Think of it like you’re hitting on girls, but instead, hit on dudes. You size them up, does this dude look like the kind of person I want to be a friend? Then chat him up. It’s really that easy, and difficult!
I think jensen is standing on a curb or something
I met one of my favorite roommates in just this way. I was working at a pancake house in Hilo, and there was this dude with a giant backpack who was taking up one of my booths. I got to chatting to him, and turned out he was looking for a place to rent in town. I had just the place. I made a date with him for beers later, and we hit it off right away. Rick, Jensen and I were all a terrific match, and had some really great times for a whole year at Barenaba Ln. You can imagine that story either way where Rick was a girl, and she and I ended up dating, so wonderful! Or, Rick turned out to be a cool guy and a wonderful roommate, also wonderful! The process I used was the same. Albeit a different end-game 😉
How about you…
Does selling it all and moving appeal to you? Have you ever done it before?
What sorts of things do you need for basic functioning? How about to function and have a good time every once and a while.
Get to know yourself a little better by trying to take a step back. You are already a complex person with needs, if you know it or not. You’ve already done a lot of this work already, you just need to identify it. Dig up some old photos and start looking at different parts of your life.
In these photos, where were you? Mountains, beach, hot, cold, city, suburbs, water, desert. Do you remember being happy there, or miserable? (both are helpful) What did your daily life look like when that picture was taken? How about your weekends or vacations. What sort of job did you have? Like it, hate it, tolerate it? Did you make friends at that job?
Look at pictures of you with friends. Where did you meet them? How close were you with them? How long did it take for you to become close with them? Friends don’t fall off trees. (Hopefully they don’t)
Ideally, friendships would start natural, unforced, comfortable, organic. Unless you grow up with someone, how else is it going to start? It’s okay to start off awkward. Generally people seek connection with others. When you first meet someone it seems forced, awkward, shallow, and it probably IS. Once you start to develop some rapport with them, some stories, and share some experiences together, it will start becoming more natural.
Side note here. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Dude circa 1934 answered these questions on his own and wrote a book. Here they are from him:
Self-Actualization needs – realizing personal potential, self-fulfillment, seeking personal growth and peak experiences.
To wrap up
Moving to a new place is hard! You may have an easy time of it where “things just fall into place,” but those things that fall into place are still important. For the times when it doesn’t work out, you can approach it from a more cognitive side. You gotta identify those magic things, and make them happen. You’ll know if something is missing because you’ll be miserable, or sad, or uncomfortable. Things won’t feel right. Use that as an opportunity to learn about yourself: what are your needs, and how can you meet them?
I recently got to put into practice a plan of mine: getting wood to heat my house from the forest with a truck and a chainsaw. I gotta tell you, it was awesome.
Alison and I went on our own and managed to get a couple of bits in our truck. Not a total wash, but a small amount. Her little, brand new, Stihl kicked butt. While my big ol’ 044 Stihl not so much. I forgot to put bar oil in it, and it got try and stopped spinning the chain. Thankfully I didn’t destroy it.
But then, later on, I went chainsawing with Jensen. That kid is lucky, I’ll tell you what! We stopped the truck twice, and managed to get a half load each time. By the end of the late afternoon, Jensen and I had piled that truck about as full as I’d ever want it to be. I need to get a net or something so I can pile higher, and still tie it all down. I have other plans for making life a little easier too. Here’s an awesome picture of my plan.
I’m going to get some rigging stuff, and use it to haul these little logs down (or up!) to the road. Then I can chop them up right there next to the road and it’ll be way easier on my back. This last time Jensen and I went, I had to throw the same stump like four or five times to get it into the back of the truck. Lots of hunching over, picking up, and chucking.
Once I got my 044 back from the shop, got all the right fluids in it, and I had even been out chainsawing once before, everything went much smoother. Jensen and I went up there in a late afternoon, and in a couple of hours killed it. We filled the back of the pick up. Jensen had followed me out there, so he was able to just keep on driving home back to Seattle. What a great weekend I had with him. It’s so great to be close to family.
Things on cruise have been going pretty good. I’ve been busy standing
the 04×08 watch, and the 16×20. So it’s from 4-8AM and PM. We call ’em
mirror watches. I’ve spoken with Alison about watches, and she’s a fan
of the 04x08s as well. I sometimes find it a little hard to get much
sleep between these watches though! I would need to get into bed at 2000
(800PM) and be asleep right away so I can wake up at 0310 and get
dressed and assume watch at 0345. Early mornings for sure. But it’s nice
to catch the sun rise and sunset. Magically, by the time watches roll
around again, I’m fairly re-energized and ready to stand the four hour
watch.
Recently I’ve been standing as the cadet watch officer CWO. As the CWO I
run the bridge, radars, electronic charts, our vessels cross track
error XTE our left/right distance from our intended track line. I
maintain the ship’s logbook, do weather observations, and stand a look
out incase other vessels come near. We’re certainly out in the middle of
the ocean now though! I haven’t seen any vessel, or even caught an
electronic beacon from another vessel in about three days. And we can
sense stuff at around a 50 nautical mile radius! A lot of big blue out
here.
Celestial navigation has been a real challenge, and fun too. I’ve been
using my sextant everyday. Up until today, we’ve been overcast much of
the time. That has made shooting moon, stars, and even the sun
difficult. There are two main goals with celestial navigation. First to
fix your position in the ocean to a spot within 5 nautical miles of your
actual GPS reported position using nothing but your brains, a few
reference books, and your sextant. The other goal of c-nav is to figure
out how much error your gyro compass has. A regular compass uses Earth’s
magnetic field to point to (near) north. Our gyro compass simply point
in the same direction we point them in when we turned them on. When we
turn them on, we always point them at true north. As the voyage goes
one, eventually even the best of gyro compasses begins to wander off
true north, and we need to determine that by comparing the direction of a
celestial body appears to be (by the gyro compass) and the actual
direction to that body we calculate by our brains and books. While a
small part of celestial navigation is very romantic, 90% of it is number
crunching! Ah well.
I have one more watch as CWO this evening at 16×20, then we’re off to
“professional training” next week. I’m looking forward to switching it
up a little bit, getting regular sleep, and doing stuff that isn’t quite
as difficult as running a bridge of the TSGB.
I recently read the book Born To Run. It was a great book. Only a few books that I’ve read have ever actually changed my behavior, this was one of them.
After reading the book, I began running again, and in some very different shoes than I’d ever ran in before.
These shoes are called Vibram Five Fingers. The most obvious thing about them is they look like gloves for your feet. I’m into these because they have a little foot support as possible.
A few points that Born to Run makes is that humans evolved without shoes. For thousands of years we got on fine without Nike Air. Our feet have arches. Our feet are very sensitive. Our feet have as many bones as the entire rest of our body. After thousands and thousands of years of evolving the human body, and our feet, how is that putting on shoes can help? Have running and walking injuries increased, or decreased with the advent of shoes?
Born to Run points out that people with the most expensive shoes suffer the most injuries, where the opposite is true of cheap shoes. The author guessed that people ran more carefully in beat up cheapo shoes than brand news Asics.
Thankfully, I’ve never had any major running injuries. I did, however, begin to find it real boring. I wasn’t getting too much out of running, and what a neat way to spice it up than a new weird shoe.
I’ve been running in these off and on. Besides my calf and shin break in period, it’s been a real breath of fresh air.
It’s been a great trip! I got to see some really neat stuff, and I wanted to leave you guys with a few pictures
I’ve recently been initiated into the secret tradition of shellback. It was a disgusting ceremony, and I can say with certainty, that I’ve earned my shellback-dome. No more polywogg initiation for me! Ever!
The tortoises on Galapagos were terrific!
This shot was taken by Eric when he was ashore on Wolf Island. That is a very small island right here. I’m pretty sure that’s a baby boobie bird.
There I am waving “hello” but in this case goodbye,
and it wouldn’t be complete without the perfunctory sunset picture.
So, when ships go to the shore, the sailors get dressed up in civvies (civilian clothing, but we’re not military, they just call it civvies) and go ashore for liberty, or leave. Liberty is just time where you can do what you want! Usually this frosty adult beverages. What will generally happen is the crew piles into a small boat for a ride ashore. As soon as that little boat hits shore, it’s like a small explosive under the pants of each gussied up sailor goes off, and they all explode onto shore in almost perfectly opposite directions from each other. It’s totally weird.
This time, as we only had two days in Galapagos port, the chief scientist was nice enough to organize a guided tour of The Highlands. Our guide was terrific, and took us to the Darwin Foundation visitors center. It was great to see the tortoise breeding program that they have there. One of the more harmful invasive species on the islands are rats. They clearly came over from ships, and those rats will kill and eat just about anything their size. As a result, baby tortoises were being decimated, and the population was quickly declining. The Darwin Foundation started a breeding program where they take the fertile eggs from the nest, and let them hatch and grow in their protected cages until they reach the “rat proof” size. At that point, depending on the colors of the numbers on their shells, they’re returned to their respective islands to live their lives.
As each of the islands is pretty separate from one another, there are different sorts of species of tortoises on each island, and sometimes even in different valleys. Until the advent of dna testing, the definition of species had been pretty vague. One part of a specific species is that one is not capable of reproducing with another. There are many exceptions to this rule (mules, and more) but that was one guideline as to weather this creature was it’s own species or not. Now with dna, it’s something easy like any less than 95% similarities = new species. But I think humans are something like 98% the same as pigs… there’s a possibility I screwed up my numbers 😉
This is Lonesome George who is the last remaining of his species. The guide was excited to see how happy George was that his keeper was in the pen with him cleaning stuff out.
More interesting facts on the Galapagos: all the species that ended up here had to get there on their own. Because of the long distance they had to go, this usually meant they had some close connection with the sea, and were genetically simpletons. I remembered that with humans, we need a certain number of people to form a critical mass where we get enough genetic diversity that we can begin to reproduce and make future generations that are different enough from each other so they don’t get inbred. Genetic simplicity means that one male, and one female, or one pregnant female can show up, and even her offspring can make more of them to sustain a population.
Galapagos famous swimming lizards. They can stay underwater for long periods of time, but as the water is too cold for them, they have to spend a lot of time sunning themselves on the rocks (also hence the black color) to bring their body temperature back up
A boring picture with out an explanation:
ever heard the word “polywogg?” Well, it’s a term for someone who has never crossed the equator before. Or if they have, they have not been through the equator crossing ceremony. Luckily for me, we’re going to have an equator crossing ceremony, so I will loose my polywogg status before the end of the trip. The ceremony can be many different things, but it’s basically hazing as I understand it. I’m sure there will be many follow up hilarious pictures to add!
Oh so the picture: see the gps how it says: 0degrees 00.0001’S? Well that means I’m very very close to the equator by that gps’s estimation. Exactly 1/1000 of a nautical mile (6 feet). As one get’s closer to the north pole and Santa Clause, the S or N (latitude) will get closer and closer to 90 degrees. Each degree is divided into 60 minutes. Each minute of latitude is equal to 1 nautical mile (=1.15 statute miles you’d measure in your car), then from there we got to 10ths, 100ths and 1000ths of a minute.
