Mom

I'm on my way to Ashland tomorrow. Mom is on her way off this coil of sorrow, this vale of tears.

She's comfy. There's not really anything that hurts or that is bothering her, or that can be fixed. Really there isn't anything that even needs fixing. She has a very nice room, and people that love her to check in from time to time, and help her with a sip of this or that or a little spoonful of something yummy. She's just old, at the end of a very long and well played run.

New Process

Bin Laden's Last Facebook Post

Last week I took the boat up the Willamette towards town to see the fireworks. It was so noisy and loud and full of drunks and speedboat wake downtown that I turned right around and went back to Swan Island, the farthest south end on the beach to set up my camp. And I did see the fireworks, the very tops of the colorful highest rockets as they esploded way over the buildings downtown.

The second evening there was an enormous and quite oblivious or maybe extra-hungry beaver that swam up to my camp and proceeded to gather and consume cottonwood shoots for dinner. I will try to get the video to up load after I get home next week. It's a hoot.

Let us see if this new dropbox process will work with the massive panorama I took with my phone over the 4th of July camping trip down to Swan Island- not a spectacularly romantic spot for a vacation but in its own way a very nice place to camp. Especially considering it is well within the urban industrial area I love so much, and that the floating-homeless-camp boaters have so thoroughly fucked up Willamette cove.

I did not actually melt, unlike some.

Of course I celebrated the end of Oregon's rainy season with a 2-day camping trip to Hayden Island.
It rained all night both nights, but during the days there was enough time between showers to get things set up.
I had a lot of new gear this year, like a new tent, inexpensive but large for its price range and a real 3-season setup, speaking of setup, Of course I did not find the assembly instructions until it was up, which makes me ask how come they put the instructions in the bottom of the bag, why not put them in last so you find them before?. I just figured they must have been left in the box it came in and were still home on the floor with the box I haven't yet thrown away.
Once I figured out that you put the poles through the front short sleeve ,then through the back long center sleeve and then through the other short front sleeve, so the poles cross and recross like the arches on the Sauvie Island bridge would if you dropped acid and spent a long time looking at it, but the tent sprang up into shape and the full rain fly fitted just right and I didn't get so much as a drop of rain inside.

Sand, another story.
It being wet the sand clung to everything especially feet so every time I went in and out I brought a about a pound and a half of sand, so the little whisk broom I got out of the dumpster at the marina became my most cherished possession.
Self-inflating sleeping pads seem to take a bit of getting used to, adding or letting out tiny amounts of air makes a big difference, and I slept OK considering I was scared to take a sleeping pill the first night, then terrified even worse as herds of marauding deer crunched searching through my campsite for edibles all night long, I'm not kidding, in the morning the hoofprints were everywhere. I dont know why it gave me such a scare and re-scare all night, I know they are herbivores and won't really attack you but my feelings didn't get the memo and I laid there all night terrorized unmercifully. Until I did fall asleep gladly and slept until the sun was well up.
I say sun metaphorically, really the rain became visible was all, but eventually it did stop and I went for a long walk on the beach.

Where I found this guy.

This is the reason I did not go swimming at all. A hundred yards up the beach this seal lion has been dead so long that its skeleton has fallen out of the billowing shroud of skin and anchored the whole mess to the bottom.

I poked it with a stick, thinking maybe I could get the skull  and I could collect me some teeth but the bones aren't even in there any more. That part at the top of the photo that looks like the face is not the face. I don't know what it is. It is as if the whole thing has melted in some chemical vat or something. I had to wade out there to get within stick-poking distance, and my threshold for gore-suppression wasn't as elastic as I had hoped and I got grossed out sooner than science would have demanded. I am not a scientist, and I didn't get many answers but I did wonder what killed this thing.
Back in the 60s a dead sea lion washed up on Bastendorf Beach and laid there stinking all the summer of 64, so in the spring our surf club dug a big hole and buried it, but 2 weeks later a big storm rolled in and dug it up again, and it stank up the summer of 65 as well. It vanished that winter.
I will check it out later this summer and tell you if it is still there or not., but until then as far as I am concerned the beaches of Hayden Island are closed for swimming.

Bye Bye Sweet Charlotte

My pal Charlotte is moving back to Mill Valley, California this month. I will miss her.

When a sincere, lively, smart and sweet young person pays attention to me and listens to what I have to say it makes me want to be very careful to think before I speak, and that is a valuable and rare influence in my life.

Catching up Before it gets too hot to Post

I gotta catch this thing up so I'm throwing some unrelated events together with some photos. I fully expect to be very busy quite soon now that it is summer and time for actual boating.

Some people can only go to the plan. Some, like my pal, like to see where that little road goes.

When I took this picture from a little wide spot along the road that goes down to the harbor in Port Orford Oregon I did not know that there was a little house for sale right behind me. $79k. Makes me wish I wasn't quite so humble in my life-plan. I would like to see this out my front window every morning, even with a highway in between. I would not, however, like to freeze balls when the north wind blows 40 mph all blessed summer long.

Maggi and I took a trip down to the South Coast for a 12-step (anonymity) convention in Coos Bay, after which we went on down to Gold Beach, returning to Bullards beach where we spent a restful night in a cute and comfy little yurt with a skylight and bunkbeds and quiet mossy trees all around.

Very comfy and relatively cheap at $30 a night and you can cook on the campfire and sleep on a bed.

Back in Portland I spent the next two weeks painting and adzing and generally messing about in the boatyard getting ready for the new boating season.

Under a thin veneer of mud and rotten bark beat a heart of oak. Simple, stout, and free, rescued from a throwaway pile mouldering under the pines above the gully.

Made with my trusty sharp as the dickens shipwright's hand-axe a new crossing mast-partners out of a crooked piece of tree.

Look at the photos above and below and tell me if  you see what this rotten old log turned into. I love my little hand-axe and my little folding saw. I feel like I could recreate civilization by myself if I had these and a forest.

 Then I bolted that thing on there with a  half-dozen galvanized bolts and good to go. The other one I made, pretty as it was, simply lacked the bomb-proof brutal strength to abide in that role of getting beat to shit in any weather and be stumbled and fallen upon with out shift or complaint. This new chunk of oak does all that and laughs.

Upshot being that she was ready to go in the water this past week.

Sorry about the lack of pixels, a screen capture from a HD video is pretty much Low Def, still you get the, ahem, picture.

Nice.

Phone

This picture was taken with my cell phone. I think it might be the best photograph I have ever taken. I even edited it in the -phone before I sent it over here to 3d world headquarters to brag it up on. There was one, taken with a film camera,  back in the day of the shrimp boats coming into Rockport Harbor on the Texas Gulf Coast at sunset that was pretty good. But it is long lost so there's no way, really, of knowing.
This version, edited in the HTC MyTouch 4g Slide, lost 90% of it pixels in the one edit, going from 900k plus to just 91k in that one edit.

This second copy I sent to my computer in the first phone version and cropped it a little bit to center things up same as before and it is 851,000 pixels. Now, I dojn't know how you feel about such things, but I like me some pixel density. You can compare and see how you feel about it.

Then I really lost my shit and cropped it again. It only has 251k pixels left but I think it is the better for the reduction in excess verbiage.

Not bad for a cell phone photo

Bad RAM; (UPDATE)

UPDATE: There was a note in my mailbox Tuesday when I got home from my trip to the South Coast with Maggi over the weekend. We took an early holiday to go to an NA convention at the Red Lion in Coos Bay and fuck around camping and driving around farther south. We even took the two-rivers tour to Glide but that is another story. Anyway I finally figured out it must be my new RAM back from the mfg and sure enough it was.
It was easy enough to install once I got my nerves to calm down, and for good measure I put the CMOS jumper back where it is supposed to go, which was the hardest thing, I had to look it up slowly and carefully you do not want to put that little fucker on the wrong 2 of the 3 available pins.
It is weird, though, not having any blue-screen crashes at all. I got kind of used to it, I guess.



Eventually I got plenty tired of rebooting from the frequent and inevitably inconvenient blue screen crashes of my new computer. Pissed me off.
So I started trying to find out why the fuck this brand new $900 machine just would not stay lit.
I learned how to access the event viewer, and what the results mean, and I found a program called blue screen viewer which kind of analyzes the crash dump and summarizes the findings. Crash dump, when the machine crashes it remembers what it was doing at the time so folks who know more than me can go in there and find out why it had to shut itself down. Interestingly, crashing is what it does so it doesn't hurt itself by trying impossible things or doing two things at once or really breaking anything, so it stops working and reports what happened.
Result being that it said the problem wasn't something the user (me)  did, or what the software did, but something in the lizard-brain wasn't adding up. They call it the kernel. Fine.
Blue screen viewer said it probably was a matter of bad memory storage.

The red part of the screen is the record of bad sectors in the memory module. It can run into the thousands of bad ones. I had 42 bad in this pass, while that's not a lot it is far too many. Your rig won't run with any at all.

So I learned another diagnostic, Memtest86, which is a weird program you load onto a DVD and reboot, so the system loads a simple operating program which writes a string of coded numbers into your RAM and then goes  back and reads the numbers in comparison to what it wrote  so you can tell if the memory is storing the right shit and reading the same shit it wrote.
Turns out, yes and no. I have 8 g of RAM, two 4g sticks. I took one out and ran Memtest86 on the other one. Bad. I ran 3 passes, and they all said there were bad sectors the first had 42 bad, the second 65 bad and the third got to a hundred even.
The other stick, to my surprise,  was OK.
G Skill makes a lot of memory devices, including this RAM, and they have a bit of a reputation for spotty quality control. On the upside, they were perfectly fine issuing me a RMA number, so I sent on the bad one and hopeful soon I will have a replacement. This computer runs fine on 4g of RAM but it is kind of weird not ever crashing. I am eager to get the new module in there, though, editing HD video takes lots of RAM so my video projects are all on hold. Pity, because I just got some new software, Sony Vegas Pro, and I'd like to try it out.