Gone to Carolina in my mind

I apologize for the lack of updates lately. I realize it has been nearly two weeks since I posted, but there really has been little to say. I generally follow a practice of posting here at least once at each location, so if we stay parked for a few weeks, updates tend to be much fewer and further between. In the last two weeks, we have been moving around, but that has mostly been because we are parking on the street and subject to a 72-hour rule.

After my last post, we moved just a few blocks away, to another on-street spot that we thought might be a bit quieter (map). While we certainly had less freeway noise, we were just a few doors from a fence company, which not only moved all its trucks out of its yard and onto the street every morning, but also seemed, from the sound of it, to be having caber-tossing contests every morning using galvanized fence posts. The county maintenance yard next door was similarly noisy, with the road department trucks having backup races at 7am (feep -- feep -- feep). Still, it was quiet overnight, and we stayed our full three days.

We moved right back where we had been for another three days after that, and then moved back down to Mountain View (map), where we'd been once already on this visit. That let us take light-rail downtown for a late dinner on Tuesday with the motorcycle regulars, many of whom attended a dirt-riding seminar at the regularly scheduled dinner time. It turned out that Louise did not need to be in Redwood City last week, so we just stayed in Mountain View until our clock ran out, then moved here to where we sit today, back on the street in Sunnyvale (map).

This was a good jumping-off spot for dinner Friday with a long-time friend in San Jose, as well as for dancing to one of our favorite bands Saturday night on a hilltop overlooking south San Jose. This was the very same band that played at our wedding, and also at my 40th birthday bash lo those many years ago.



Louise needs to be back in Redwood City tomorrow, and we'd already be rolling up that way right now if not for the fact that someone is coming over this evening to Freecycle the fish tank, fish included. We've had this five-gallon tank, or the smaller 3-gallon one that preceded it, on board Odyssey for nearly half a decade now, having introduced it to you in this post. We have five fish at present, some of which have been with us nearly that long, and must be some of the most well-traveled tropical fish in the world. Some of these fish have been to most of the continental US and a good part of Mexico with us.

Louise, who is the fish-keeper, has decided to pass on the tank as a fully working system, complete with fish, to someone who wants it while the fish are still relatively healthy, and everything is working and in good condition. She had also freecycled the older 3-gallon tank a few years ago, but that went empty. We'll miss them, but after five years it was really time to move on. Louise will be happy to have her nightstand back, which has been given over to fish-dom for a long time. I'll be happy to be less worried about bumpy roads, which we quantify nowadays by how much water sloshes out of the tank (we lose almost none in normal driving).



We've been slowly working our way through the list of bay area friends we want to catch up with, meeting with our financial professionals here, and getting projects done around the house. One of those was to replace the blinds; after seven years, the Bali double-cell cellular shades we have were just done. In addition to some streaking from window leaks, which are, thankfully, now behind us, the operating mechanisms had deteriorated over time, and they had become hard to operate and prone to tangling. As long as we were in more or less one place for a few weeks, we decided to special-order some replacements at Lowe's. We waited until they put them on 20%-off sale and then ordered new ones all around; this time we opted for the room-darkening variety in the bedroom. They mostly look just the same as the old ones, but much cleaner and silky smooth to operate.

I've been chipping away at my long list, and had the living room counters covered with project detritus this morning. I've also got several balls in the air regarding appointments over the next couple weeks, and we've been starting to make plans for Trawler Fest in Anacortes mid-May. So of course the phone woke me out of a deep sleep at 5:50 this morning with a call from our Red Cross chapter asking if I could go to North Carolina to respond to the tornadoes there.

At ten till six with no coffee in me I nearly said yes without thinking hard enough. But we've been doing this a long time, and at our level we know that we are never called to a major response by our chapter unless we have already heard about it through other channels. So I had just enough presence of mind to defer it until we could talk to leadership in Washington. It turned out that I was probably not requested for my specific skills but rather my name had simply bubbled to the top of a list of available resources in the midwest. Of course, we're not actually in the midwest right now, even though that's where our chapter is. Ultimately after catching another hour of sleep and another round of back and forth we decided I would go to North Carolina if they needed me there. By the time I got that message back to the chapter, the positions were already filled, and it was unlikely anyway that anyone wanted to pay for cross-country air fare for a lower level position, so I am off the hook.

Before that came to pass, though, it was an adrenaline-filled morning as we pondered what to do with the mess in the living room, how to get ready, and where to park the bus so that it would not have to move in my absence. (Louise can drive the bus just fine, but we also have a borrowed car at the moment, and it is impossible for one person to move both at once.) We'd have to wave off the fish tank exchange, and I probably would not be back in time to make Trawler Fest (not that that matters much).

In any case, at this writing it appears I will not be needed in North Carolina, but our hearts are with all the people affected by the extreme weather events across the country and in North Carolina in particular. We know some of the folks who are responding and you are in good hands. We are there in spirit, wherein comes today's title, with apologies to James Taylor.

Back on the street

We are parked on an industrial side street in Redwood City (map), just off Veterans Boulevard. There are two other rigs here, and there is an RV service facility just a few feet away, helping to lend some legitimacy to the spot. Because it is a city street, we are limited to 72 hours in this spot, which will take us until tomorrow afternoon. A car parked across from us seems to have tested the limit, as evidenced by a bright green sticker on the driver window; a tow truck picked it up yesterday.



We had hoped to be in our cozy digs over at the Bair Island Marina, where we had access to showers, rest rooms, and even a small laundry facility. As I wrote in my last post, that's where we headed Saturday afternoon, and we had an uneventful night Saturday. Sunday we strolled down to the dock and went out on the boat with Martin and Steph for a pleasant lunch at anchor on the bay, and to practice our anchoring technique. We took turns driving the boat and operating the windlass.

When we returned to the marina the assistant dockmaster informed us that they had a visit from the USFWS ranger, who told them all the vehicles in the refuge lot needed to be moved out or would be towed. She had got the impression that they would be checking over the next couple of days to make sure all the vehicles were gone. We were already in the middle of our first glass of wine when we found out, and it was fairly late in the day, so we decided to move in the morning.



Sure enough, while we were at dinner the ranger came by right at closing time and left us a warning. By then it was just us and a truck with a flat tire that had been there since our arrival three weeks ago. I'm glad we were out when he came by, since that made Odyssey simply "parked" and not anything more nefarious.

So we got a final two nights there before we had to turn our keys and parking passes back in and find other digs. Fortunately, we had already scoped out this spot as well as several others in the area when we first arrived, and we already know where we will be moving tomorrow when our 72 hours is up. Now that things have settled down and we are a bit less frantic, I'm trying to line up visits with more of our bay area friends over the next week or so.

Mountain View downtime

We are parked at one of our regular spots on the street in Mountain View, California (map). This is another one of those places where the area's truck drivers have discovered they can leave their trucks overnight; we recognize the flatbed double behind us from several previous visits. He appears to haul mostly cardboard recycling, and there are now a few dump trucks here as well. The former HP campus here is still vacant after many years, as is the county work-release center across the street. Both are for sale.

One of the great things about this spot is that it is just a few hundred feet from the light rail station, although with our borrowed car on this visit we have not needed it. It is a short drive or light rail ride to downtown Mountain View which has become a veritable mecca of dining establishments; we've had two dinners there in three days, one al fresco in the lovely weather of the past few days. Tuesday night we parked at Jack's house in San Jose, just ten minutes from here, where we also had pizza and a good turnout for my belated birthday celebration.

The last few days Louise has been making the social rounds of her girlfriends while I hung out at home doing battle with my new smart-phone. I needed to confirm absolutely that I would be keeping it before the 30-day grace ran out, and once I started that project I wanted to just get it all set up as I like it. Moving from a Blackberry with barely enough memory to run stock apps to a full-blown pocket computer has been something of a challenge, mostly due to climbing the learning curve.

My new phone is an Epic 4G, which runs on Google's Android platform. I've been tweaking it to remove the software bloat and spyware that Samsung installed at the behest of Sprint, mostly to try to improve battery life. Unlike the Blackberry, which I could charge every two or three days, this beast barely lasts a full day. It does not help that, while display sizes have mushroomed to enormous proportions, and speeds are now blazing fast, the batteries in most smart phones are no larger than those of much smaller models with slower processors and smaller displays.

In reading through the unending stream of help, advice, and complaints on the 'net, I have to chuckle at the level of whining. I got my first cell phone in 1984, when it took a car to power it. My first handheld models a few years later were the size of bricks and also did not make it through a full day on a single charge. Today I am running a modified operating system release honchoed by a 19-year-old -- cell phone batteries have never lasted less than a full day in his lifetime, never mind having no memory of a time before cell phones.

For the record, I spent the early part of my career working on mainframe computers. These were the size of a truck, and required roughly 15 kilowatts of three-phase power, with cooling to match. Generally, 60-100 people were using these machines simultaneously. I thought it would be interesting to compare those machines to the tiny computer I now wear on my belt:

	1980s Mainframe	My Cell Phone
Clock (cpu) speed	30 megahertz	1,000 megahertz
System Memory	18 megabytes	1,536 megabytes
Disk storage	<1 gigabyte	16 gigabytes

The disk storage back in those days consisted of half a dozen machines the same size and shape as, and bearing an uncanny resemblance to, full size clothes washers, and contained actual rotating disks, whereas my cell phone has a solid-state storage card, but it serves the same purpose and is even described by the same decades-old jargon ("mounting" a "file system"). And, of course, unlike the mainframes of the 80s, a cell phone supports only one user at a time, so I have access to 100% of those resources, and not 1-2% as did a mainframe user back then.

Making a configuration change or loading a new operating system version on those machines required weeks of planning, work, and testing in the wee hours of the morning before things were stable, and so I suppose I can't complain that I've spent perhaps a dozen or so hours getting my new phone set up. Neither can I complain that a battery weighing two ounces can only power a system ten times larger than my first mainframe for a little less than a day.

I think I have another day or so of fiddling ahead of me, and then the old Blackberry goes up for sale on eBay. In a few minutes, our 72-hour clock here will expire, and we will head back to the marina in Redwood City. We'll have dinner with our nieces tonight and we've been invited out on the boat tomorrow with Martin and Steph.