One year ago today: March 30, 2020, analyzing Auvoria.
Five years ago today: March 30, 2016, clap your hands.
Nine years ago today: March 30, 2012, it was the stress.
Random years ago today: March 30, 2009, Poof! Gone!
It’s the A/C compressor. Makes sense, the thing sits parked in Tennessee for how many years and the next month it is Florida running up to eight hours a day. Everything checked out including that “clack” sound when the clutch closed, meaning the problem was something that can’t be fixed by us. So I took it to a shop in Auburndale that solved the matter in five minutes. I declined to put a new compressor, since they require replacement of all the hoses and belts, which can run up to $1,000. This way, I get it installed for $300 which is exactly on budget. Famous last words?
Here is the mystery of the tinkerbell sound solved. This shows the sunflower seed ball hanging from a plant hook. Notice the round base attached to the window frame? There is a spot for tiny birds to perch and they like to clean their beaks on the metal. I thought it was the wind but finally we saw the action.
Upon ordering the compressor, I did something I said I wouldn’t. I went to the Auburndale library. It’s one of those useless for research, but if you’re into raising iguanas, they can help. There’s a big section for women who get pregnant and don’t know what to do next. Half the shelves are romance novels. No books on electronics, robotics, or anything intellectual for that matter. I had two hours to kill so I read up on carpentry techniques and low budget science experiments, the kind pushed by the Common Core people. Why waste money educating scientists when they are more useful as factory clones once that becomes part of the gig economy.
I still have my hobby of glancing at a clock I have set for Greenwich Mean Time and calculating the geographic position of the Sun. It’s become second nature and I like to promise myself I’ll go to the next step, which is determining a line of position. But that requires a chart and rules I don’t really carry with me. I thought of freehand or even one of those Boogie Board slate devices, but feel that would be getting into a bad habit. I automatically derive the longitude of the assumed position (AP) in my mind, but don’t write that down either. This is consistent with my prehistoric habit of no longer doing things once I know I can.
Just now I got ribbed about using jargon. See addendum for a quick description of the AP. Plus the usual comment that my hobbies mean I’ve got too much time, the usual source is somebody without the self-discipline required for any academic leisure. I don’t look at maps anything like I did in Boy Scouts, but apparently a lot of people never get beyond that. There’s something about being able to find where you are on an open prairie, or featureless desert, or way off in the ocean without resorting to electronic gadgets that I find redeeming.
Mozambique Island.
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After some seven years dabbling into celestial navigation, I cannot recommend any books on the subject. Each I’ve read is incomplete, contradictory, or strays off the subject. Sounds like books on electronics, dunnit? Possibly I should drop the word navigation, for it is misleading. It’s the captain or the pilot that does that based on the information you provide. My interest stops at finding a single static position at a single point in time. Printed Almanacs are hard to find, so I practice using whatever tables are available, today it was a 1973 edition.
This is the store-bought budgie seed feeder. The perches are modified to be more natural and comfy for my little visitors. Oddly, this best position is not favored by the birds and this only has to be filled every few months. But it is the only shade and shelter near a window so it stays. This design does not require a squirrel guard.
Did you know today was Starbucks’ birthday. Yep, not serving free refills for 50 years. To their credit, they did change the way America drinks coffee by mainstreaming the beatnik concept of the coffee house. I never fully accepted this as an improvement and part of their success involved driving diners who had stools and counters out of business. I consider Starbucks similar to craft breweries who add weird-ass flavorings to their product to appease the gastrozombies. They ushered in outrageous prices, long line-ups, and the concept of no free refill for which many like myself have never forgiven them.
Starbucks earns around $4 billion per year off $20 billion in assets. However, the company is a model of credit-capitalism, with only around $1 billion in equity. Why risk your own money when you can risk the banks—except when the banks lose, guess who they take it back from? Not corporate America, you taxpayers. Starbucks has been blasted with poor practice complaints, oddball accounting methods and are among the lowest paying of the unskilled labor positions. Starbucks created their own market niche and if they disappeared tomorrow, nobody would much care. Other than their 350,000 employees worldwide, I mean. They might have to get jobs where the refills are free again.
ADDENDUM
Okay, the quick explanation of GP and AP. GP is geographic position, the one spot on the Earth’s surface that the Sun (or whatever you are measuring) is directly above at a given moment. You need to know what time it is in Greenwich. You can then look up (called “entering the tables”) in an Almanac the latitude and longitude of that spot. This does not require a sextant. You are looking for two pieces of information, the GHA (Greenwich Hour Angle), and the Dec. (declination). GHA tells you how far west the Sun is from Greenwich, and the declination is a fancy word for the Sun’s latitude at that time. That’s all you need, think about it.
The AP is a bit trickier. Not every position is listed in the Almanac. You estimate where you are by dead reckoning. Choose a position nearby to where you think you are that does appear in the Almanac and that is your assumed position. This tells you how high the Sun should appear above the horizon from the AP at that time you found your GP.
This is where I normally stop. I know in my head the difference in angles between the AP and my true position gives me enough info to draw a line of position. Here the sextant reading comes in and I really need to practice that a lot before trusting it. There are some rules to be memorized about how to choose the correct AP, so I admit to only studying them for the north and west hemispheres. One does not actually calculate anything any more, you look up the answers in books where most of the work has been done for you. It’s easy to memorize, difficult to understand. Kind of like how C+ people do their coding.
