Alternating

First I got stranded when the jeep failed to start when I went out to run errands at lunch. Then a few weeks ago I was stranded at the library when the jeep failed to start again. The library here in Podunk is right by the police station. A cop was in the parking lot and he tried to get the jeep started and to stay running. No dice.

The library is 2 miles from home, and it was a rare night that Todd was home before me. He came out and got the car to, kinda, stay running and he drove it home. Then it sat in the driveway until we got the chance to replace the alternator with one that, um, alternates?

I took turns driving Todd’s bitchen Acura, and our big red pickup truck, a.k.a the meat wagon, to and from work. I got home in the truck one day and said “You know, I am going to stack that firewood over there, and I am going to crank up my iPod inside the truck and rock out while I do it.” And then the music stopped a half hour later. And then the truck wouldn’t start anymore, because listening to music for a half a fricken hour in the truck drains the battery. (Does that sound ridiculously short to anyone else?)

“So, this only tells me that if I took the bus to work, the damn thing would break down and I’d strand dozens of people, that’s how bad my luck is with cars right now,” I complained to my sister on the phone.

“Don’t say that,” she laughed. “I am sitting in my car listening to the radio while the kids have soccer. With your luck you’re going to strand me now too.” But her car actually started though, because she’s got way better luck with those things than I do.

I am married to MacGuyver, and he replaced my alternator on Saturday, while simultaneously preventing a nuclear reactor from melting down and stopping a runaway freight train from derailing and plowing into an animal shelter filled with newborn puppies. Well, not really, but when you’re married to MacGuyver everything he does is astoundingly cool like that. And this morning on the way to work I was able to participate in the jeep wave again.

Thwarted

I am not afraid to admit it.  They're out to get me.  It would seem that every piece of technology I've touched lately has in one way or another stopped me from getting to point B.

First it was while we were on the 2 week leg of the trip this summer.  I filled my camera's memory card.  "No problem," I thought.  "I'll just dump these onto Todd's laptop."  I pulled the card out, slid it into the laptop, copied and pasted.

"What are you doing?" he asked.  I told him that I was loading my pictures on to the computer to get them out of my camera.

"Hey, what's with this funny icon?" I asked.  He took the computer from me. 

"Beej, this is my work laptop.  It's encrypted.  Now all those pictures you put on there are encrypted.  You'll probably never get them off of here now."  And then the tantrum ensued.  Luckily, Todd managed to unencrypt them, but I still haven't had a moment to get them off of his laptop and onto mine.

You see, my own laptop has been slower than weight loss.  I've complained about it, ad nauseum.  I've started negotiations for a new one "If you get me a new laptop, I will never ever ever pester you about leaving your dirty clothes in the living room ever again.  For the rest of our marriage."  The offer piqued his interest, but we've been too busy to pick a new one out.

"Ah, you don't need a new laptop.  Yours is riddled with viruses.  Let me take this into the office and get it cleaned up for you," he offered.

"What do you mean 'riddled with viruses'?  My manuscript is on there.  Man. U. Script."  Then hyperventilation ensued.  A lot of it.  A paper bag over my mouth may or may not have been involved.  I will neither confirm nor deny.

So, the laptop's in surgery.  I was supposed to go get it yesterday after work.  During lunch I ran some errands at the bank, got an oil change and the swung by the dive shop to pick up a tank that had been serviced.  I said goodbye to Red, the owner of the shop, and inserted the key into the ignition.  When I turned it nothing happened.  The engine didn't roar to life, I didn't pull out of the shop and drive back to the office.  Nothing. 

I got my jumpers out and went back into the shop and held them up as Red was on the phone.  He winced then followed me out.  We clamped the cables on.  I turned the key.  Nada.  I glanced at my watch.  I should have been sitting at my desk for a good 10 minutes by that point.

Phoned AAA.  Roadside assistance dude came out but was able to provide no such assistance despite the fact that I was near the road.  I turned the key while he hit various parts of my engine with a stick.  I didn't think that method would have worked anyway, but kept my mouth shut.

Three hours later the tow truck arrived.  The driver hit the engine with a stick as well.  He turned the key and the engine roared to life in perhaps what would be the last time the starter on my car would ever work.  I drove home, pulled the car into the garage and now I wonder if I'll ever get it out again when Todd and I take it to the mechanic next week. 

I arrived home after 6 by that point, frustrated that I'd missed an entire afternoon of work.  I turned on the desktop computer that I rarely use and attempted to log in to work.  Access denied.  Tried again.  Access denied.  I swore.  I threatened.  I negotiated.  I used various phrases starting with the word "mother" until finally something went right and I got in.

I worked for a few hours and stumbled upon an email from the surgeon currently operating on my laptop.

"Hi Beej, hoped it would have been ready but there are about 6500 pieces of spyware on it.  It keeps blue screening, but I am still working on it."

"That's OK," I wrote back.  "It's not like I was going to get there anyway.  It would seem that my jeep has about 6500 pieces of spyware on it and the starter blue screened today."

But today is another day, and I am determined for it to go better.  It'll start with taking Todd's car to work instead. 

Not Meant to Be

How can something as useful as a radar system on a boat be such a damn pain in the ass? I shake my fist at the sky.

It all started when we bought the system. We put off installing it because we had more pressing issues—like the boat’s annoying habit of randomly filling with water and threatening to sink. She had other annoying habits, like leaking water into the boat from the decks. We've since gotten those issues resolved, and now we’re on to other “nice-to-haves” like a radar system and an anchor windlass.

A few summers ago we decided “this will be the summer of functional radar!” We installed the radar antenna (the dome) on the mizzen mast. We ran the wire down the mast and cut it. We plugged the other end into the back of the display and wired it to the electrical panel.

We spliced the cut wire back together, just like we’d done on every other electrical system on the boat. When you’re running cables on a boat, it’s rare that you’ll run one long-ass cable from point A to point B.   So you cut and splice to make working with the wires easier.  The radar cable has gigantic plugs on either end. To run that cable in its entirety, we’d have to drill gigantic holes into every wall to make the ends fit. To avoid that colossal pain in the neck we decided to slice and splice.

Todd finished the splice then turned on the radar display. It counted down the 60 seconds it takes to warm up, while Todd rubbed his palms in anticipation. The screen, however, remained blank. A call to Raymarine tech support informed us that cutting the wire wouldn’t allow the signal to carry over it anymore. Basically we severed the connection, never to be sliceable again.

We back burnered the radar until this summer. In the mean time, our radar unit had gone straight from discontinued to extinct. Ordering new cables to run down the mast and through the boat proved to be a month long ordeal. We installed the new wires, plugged them into the dome and into the display. We tested the unit while we were still in dry dock and were able to see the other boats around us. We cheered and jumped up and down.

On Friday night we ventured out into the bay for a few moments. We’d been working so hard to get ready for the big trip, we needed a break. The radar happily showed us the boats sharing the bay with us that night. It even showed us the navigational buoys. Then it, inexplicably, stopped working.

And then it wouldn’t, inexplicably, start working again. Todd ran a few diagnostic tests, which revealed nothing. He took time out of work today to go out to the boat and go over the system with Raymarine tech support on the phone. Turns out a circuit board in the dome is no longer functioning, and therefore no longer collecting information about the boats around us.

As I mentioned earlier, the system we purchased brand new just a few years ago has gone into extinction. No replacement domes for this system are to be found. Sending the dome back to Raymarine for repair will take $500 and 15 days.

We don’t have 15 days. We leave for New York City on Friday.  I spent a few hours today trolling the Internet and calling every possible source I could think of.  No dice.

I console myself by saying that Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic without a radar system. Surely we’ll be fine going the length of Long Island Sound without one. But Chris didn’t have to deal with drunken jackholes cruising around in their boats on the 4th of July weekend.

Looks like I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled even wider on my shifts on watch on Friday night.

Perseverance

There are 17 days left until the big trip up the Hudson. 17. Less than 20. Just more than 2 weeks. We are starting to freak out a bit because there is still so much to be done to make sure Sabine’s ready. We spend entire weekends preparing her, we spend entire evenings as well. The temperature is rising outside and in our heads as well. We’re tired. We’re getting burnt out. The promise of an awesome trip with new and functioning systems is what keeps us going.

When we bought Sabine she had a manual anchor windlass. This is the machine that sits on the bow of the boat that pulls the anchor and the chain out of the water and up into the boat. The manual windlass had long since seized. But hauling up an anchor and chain by cranking the handle on the winch back and forth never appealed to either of us. An electric windlass has long been on our list.

Not only has it long been on our list, it’s long been in our basement. We bought one five years ago or so. We also bought an obnoxious length of chain that I swear weighs a metric ton. The chain has been sitting in a barrel in the backroom at New England Yacht Rigging. Maggie and Charlie were nice enough not to hassle us about keeping it there all these years. If anything it became a running joke. The weekend before last Charlie nearly fell over when we went there and finally took it out of the shop.

Last Sunday we started the great anchor windlass installation project. Since then the project has involved a custom stainless steel plate fabrication by a local machine shop. (I wish I lived closer to home. I grew up in a shop just like that one and Dad would’ve had it done lickety split for me.) We bolted the machine onto the plate and onto the bow. Over last weekend we started running wires, and last night we installed the control box and finished all the wires.

We stood on the deck, with the remote control in hand, and pressed the button. The sun had just set and the summer temps dropped, thankfully. We’d been crawling in and out of the boat, slick with sweat, sticky and crabby. The no see ‘ums were swarming; I swatted frantically at my arms, legs and neck. We looked at each other expectantly and Todd pressed the button, but nothing happened.

The rotors on the machine did not spin. The chain did not retract below deck into the anchor locker. Nothing. Happened. I winced. Todd let out a frustrated sigh. He picked up the manual, originally written in Italian but badly translated, and tried to diagnose the problem. Over the course of the installation he’d already found 2 errors in the wiring diagram.

Out came the jumper cables and the voltage meter. We tested different configurations of the wiring, assuming another translation error caused the problem. We managed to get the machine to pay out the chain, but not return it to the anchor locker. Todd uninstalled the control box and puzzled over it.

“I think we got a faulty control box,” he said as he swabbed the sweat on his forehead with the sleeve of his t-shirt. We were crouched in the forward-most section of the boat. The air was stiflingly hot in there.

“Well, do you think we can order another?”

“Beej, it took weeks to get this from Italy the last time. We don’t have weeks.”

“That was 5 years ago. Surely they’ve managed to establish a distributor in the US in the last 5 years, no?”

“I don’t know. But look, there are screws in the top. They wouldn’t have put screws in this thing if they didn’t want me to open it, right?” he reasoned.

He unscrewed the top and meticulously laid out the parts. He pointed out the two electromagnets in the box, “See, the electricity causes the spring to activate the lever. Then the metal touches the contact which sends power to the motor. When the up button is pressed, the left lever is engaged. When the down button is pressed the right one is engaged.”

He connected the electromagnets to the jumper cables, and tested each electromagnet. They both worked. But the lever on one of them was turned the wrong way, so it never would have established the connection with the contact.

He reassembled the box, and then we pressed the buttons on the remote control. The chain went up, and the chain went down.

And then we cheered, high-fived and hugged.

And it never would have happened if Todd hadn’t had the perseverance to carefully trouble shoot the problem, disassemble the components and never give up.

When Nerds Get Married and Send Each Other Emails

Recently Todd's jumped onto the iPad wagon.  At first he regarded it as a toy.  But the more he played with it and the more he customized it, the more he molded it into a useful tool.  For example, he's downloaded an app for tides, so now we can check the tide schedule for anywhere in the US.  This is handy for when we travel through the narrower parts of Long Island Sound next month.  Going with the tides will make a world of a difference in terms of defining our ability to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time.

He's got the iPad dialed in to the point where he can access his work computer through it using some hoodoo voodoo called Virtualization.  Now when he sends me emails, they look like this.

******
Dear Beej,

Blah blah blah blah... Todd speak, yadda yadda.

Love, Todd

Sent remotely from a VMware virtual desktop
******

Just this morning he wrote to me, and it was in this format, with this "sent remotely from" thing appended to the end.

So I wrote back:

******
Dear Todd,

Blah blah blah... yadda yadda, Beej speak.

Love, Beej

Sent from a crappy computer on a desk whose load bearing properties are questionable.
******

I Knew I Married Him for a Reason

Todd fixed the blog a few minutes ago, and I'll be back to posting again soon.

Trying to Figure This Whole Blog Thing Out

I use blogger.com to publish this blog. I publish via FTP because I use my own domain name, and not a blogger domain.   About a month ago I was informed that I need to migrate to a blogger domain because FTP publishing will no longer be available. So, that’s annoying. I don’t want a blogger domain. I have a perfectly good one, and see no reason why I have to switch to blogger, other than to improve their brand recognition.

So, Todd and I have to figure out how to keep a blog on followsabine.com in the next few days, as the end of the FTP publishing world will come to blogger on May 1.

I ask you, Internet, what do you think we should do?