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Office toys

Have I mentioned the blimp? The blimp Brian has? It’s an indoor toy. It’s a large helium-filled balloon, neutrally buoyant, with propellers mounted on it. Two for horizontal mobility and directional control. One for vertical. They are all reversible, and all controlled by remote control. For flying technique, you fire the fans in bursts. Once you get it going the direction you want, it just continues on its own momentum for awhile. Come to think of it, even if it’s not going the direction you want, it does the same thing.

I was working at a client with Ken and Stephanie. I was describing the blimp therapy program I was considering putting into place in our office: we have a blimp like Brian’s gassed up and ready to go. Anytime someone is feeling particularly stressed, they can grab the blimp controls and fly it around the office for awhile. Then they’ll go back to work, feeling much better.
Stephanie raised the conversation to an entirely different level when she suggested we could fly the blimp through the offices with inspirational messages attached to it. You know, the poster with the cat holding on with just his fingernails with the caption “hang in there baby”. That sort of thing.My suggestion of “work harder. work faster” was immediately rejected.Maybe we should just attach a web camera to it so I could fly it through the offices and watch everyone work right from my own desk. That wouldn’t be too offensive would it?
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Motorhomes

When we came back from our trip in late January, the next trip coming up in March seemed so close, and the weather was so mild, we decided to not winterize Shamu, and just plug it in and leave the furnaces set low. I don’t like to winterize. I’m sensitive to the aroma and taste of the antifreeze. It takes quite a while to get all traces of it cleared out. For the first couple weeks, it seemed like a really good idea to not winterize it. Then we had some cold weather, and we used an entire tank of propane. When we took it out to refill, it caused us to reconsider our winter strategy when we realized it was going to cost us $50 a week during cold weather to keep the furnaces going.
We had some warm weather Saturday, so we dumped the tanks, weatherized the water lines, topped off the propane for next trip, then shut everything down. It’s now dormant in the driveway.

The last time we had the motorhome serviced, we had them install a hot water bypass. Now it only takes one gallon of fluid to winterize the whole thing. Hard to imagine not including a hot water heater bypass in the construction of a new motorhome. Do they properly assume that most motorhomes don’t have to go through cold weather?

We’re now in the middle of some welcome winter weather. Fourteen degrees outside and it’s not even dark yet. We’ll probably get down to zero tonight. The clouds are right down in the trees, the windows are fogged, and it’s snowing. I love it when it does this on the weekends, so I can be here to enjoy it.

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Sailing

Just in case it has flown below your radar, the Americas Cup is almost over. In the first race, in heavy weather, the New Zealand Boat had to withdraw due to equipment failure.

In the second race, a great race all the way, the Swiss boat pulled off a dramatic come-from-behind victory on the final leg to win by seven seconds. A win by seven seconds after a race of eighteen miles!

In the third race, the New Zealand boat had a chance right up to rounding the final mark, when they made a sail handling error raising the spinnaker and lost seconds upon seconds before they got it sorted out.

The Swiss boat, Alinghi, is up three races to none over Team New Zealand in a best-of-nine series. It could all be over in two more races.

It’s on the deuce. Five pm Wednesday, mountain standard time. That would be four pm pacific coast time. They will be broadcasting Thursday afternoons race live on Wednesday our time.