One year ago today: June 4, 2013, I made this meme.
Five years ago today: June 4, 2009, we cook a ham.
Why this picture out the window of the Amtrak last month? To prove a point. Is there anything special about this photo? No, it is one of the rejects from my trip last month to Winter Haven. It’s a boring scene unless I help you look for things. That palm tree, which is probably not native to Florida, is being smothered by kudzu, an invasive Japanese vine. It seems to root in any open vacant area, such as the railway embankment. To the left of the palm there is some other unfortunate plant that is a goner. Did I prove a point? It depends on if you saw the kudzu on your own.
I can’t help the notion that purely descriptive writing is done for little else than the money. To me, it is the gossip of the publishing industry. I know that I could do it, but it would bother my sense of taking pride in what you do. I view hack writers as the ones who churn out the words, then scratch sand over it and walk away. The Oz and I are getting together this afternoon to go visit that infinite marine supply shop in Ft. Lauderdale. Two authors and no doubt this writer’s meet-up will be discussed in fine and lively detail.
For a mini-project, I’m taking a deeper look at this sextant part of celestial navigation. This is one component only of a much larger process. I confess to not paying much attention in class about trigonometry and I see a refresher coming on. SOH/CAH/TOA. Remember that? “Sock-a-toa” as in “soc it to me”. I never had much use for sine waves and nobody explained why bother. Time to put it back together.
See that tall tree outside my front door? I’m going to measure its height. I have no trouble with triangles, it is this sine-cosine-tangent stuff I don’t know. For example, I know that all I have to do to measure that tree is to walk away from it until the treetop is at a 45 degree angle. According to isosceles, the tree would be as high as I had just walked plus the 61-3/4 inches from the ground that my eyes rest. But I’m after learning the calculation, not the logic, see?
The lawn maintenance company notices the extension cord. The squatters tried to run for it between the trailers (manufactured homes) shown here. The one guy on the ground claimed that he lived here, meaning in the house he broke into. To a crooked lawyer, technically, he wasn’t lying. Nobody knows how long they were there, but it could have been quite a while. It seems they only got caught because the lawn people here showed up extra early one morning [and saw the extension cord].
Prof. Oz calls and we decide to go up to that marine store in Ft. Lauderdale. As writers, the talk turned to the meet-up last night. According to Oz, my meeting was tame. He belonged to a group in town here and says there was a fight broke out. Somebody called one lady’s output “stupid” and one thing led to another. I would have paid admission to see that. Anyway, we wound up at the best place I could have gone to find out more about navigation. I believe I found the lifeboat sextant and be it plastic, it is neither flimsy more all that cheap. I got the guy down to $80, which I will think about overnight.
A patron there gave me a twenty-minute mini-lecture on navigation and even pointed to which used books were best for my quest. He pointed out navigation on land is the more difficult for lack of a good horizon, but to avoid complicated mathematics, I choose to learn ocean navigation first. I usually know where I am on land, you just find the nearest McDonald’s. Return over the next few days and I’ll show you some of the unusual items I bought. Like plastic razor blade.
Um, while at the marine shop, Oz got a first class demonstration of my ability to chat up the best looking and youngest gal in the place. It is an art most guys never learn. The shock is not the talk, because anybody can memorize pick-up lines. The shock was the positive reaction of the lady—which no man can fake.. Hey, she was twenty-five-ish, old enough to spot a liar, old enough to know what she wants. It was I who discontinued the conversation. If, when I return to buy the sextant, she is of the same disposition, only then I will proposition her. But I have never taken advantage of any woman that way. Never had to, probably never will.
One gem I found in the sale bin was a massive chart of the Florida Keys. On waterproof paper and four foot square, these cost a fortune when new. Cost me two bucks. Another thing I learned was that navigation charts are only good for four years as each leap year throws the arrangement for a dump. And a reading of the sun’s angle describes a circle on the Earth’s surface. Think of it this way, if I first see the sun directly overhead at an angle of 90 degrees, I could move exactly one hundred miles in any direction and the sun would be at a different angle. But as long as I stay one hundred miles away, that angle would not change. And what shape is a collection of all the points exactly one hundred miles from a center?
So far, this has been fun.
