Stormy's Corner

On our own!

Today we dropped off Anne-Marie, our instructor, at the Moorings and sailed over to the Bight ourselves.  It all went very smoothly, no hiccups until after we moored and the fastening that held our mainsail to the halyard broke, but Jeanne managed to fix it.  Willy T's wasn't officially open but they fed us anyway.  Good food and a couple of Dark and Stormy's.  After we finished eating they immediately informed us that we had to go and their boat left Willy T's before we had even gotten in our dingy!  So we went back to the boat and had a few glasses of wine and several long philosophical discussions.

Snorkeling at Monkey Point

We sailed to Jost Van Dyke today and anchored next to Foxy's Taboo. 

On the way over we stopped at Monkey Point for some awesome snorkeling.  Big coral with lots of ledges.  Lots of fish of different kinds and sizes.  Caves.  And I saw a turtle! About 2.5 feet in diameter. I floated right over him for a while until he decided he wasn't sure what I was and swam off.

We motored a lot today as their was little to no wind but a huge storm coming up behind us.  After we anchored, we had our lesson standing in the cockpit so that at least our heads would stay dry because nobody wanted to sit in the hot steamy cabin.

We took our last test (of three) today and we all passed!  After the test we went over our wrong answers as a group and I haven't laughed that hard in a long time!  We all went over why we had picked the answer we did and our reasoning (or guessing) was often hilarious - even to ourselves.

Docking

We arrived at the North end of Virgin Gorda today where we practiced docking, my least favorite of all boating activities.  We did pretty good and I asked to practice again in the morning.  50 foot of boat with lots of mass in winds and currents next to hard surfaces like docks just make me really nervous.  We learned how to do it with just two people.  Figuring out which spring line to tie up first is much less intuitive than you'd think.  We all had to think about it quite a bit.

Maneuvering and Man Overboards

Today we sailed from Marina Cay to Anegada.  On the way we learned how to turn the boat around in a space no wider than two boat lengths when motoring.  It's called back and fill and it uses your prop tilt to help push you around.  Then we practiced man overboards which was a lot of fun.  Poor Bob the life jacket got tossed overboard 6 or 7 times as we learned two ways to quickly turn around (while sailing) to recover someone.  Be careful coming in to Anegada.  We ended up with less than two feet of water under our keel where we anchored for the night!

Salaway

We are on Salaway, a Beneteau 494.  There are four of us, Anne-Marie, our instructor, and Larry and Jeanne, my fellow students.  We sailed from the Moorings in road town to Marina Cay where we anchored for the night.

According to Anne-Marie, the Last Resort in Trellis Bay has a comedy show on Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights that is well worth seeing.

Cane Garden Bay, the beach

I'm sitting here on Cane Garden beach on Tortola staring across the cove at blue and turquoise water with islands in the background and puffy white clouds in the sky and wondering what makes it beautiful. I could sit and watch forever.

On my way over the taxi driver, a West Indian, said "There's Skyview."
"What is it?" I try to see what stands out. The mountain top? The building?
"Skyview."
"Oh. Where?"
"Skyview!" He points at the sign.
"A restaurant?"
Clearly frustrated with me now, he says "Yes, a restaurant."

FYI, the last two weeks of September is the low of the low season and all the beach bars are closed.

P.S. Locals consider Cane Garden one of BVI's most polluted waters because they don't think the waters circulate fast enough to deal with what's dumped in it. Looked and smelled clean to me, like almost all of the BVI.

Mariner Inn

Mariner Inn is nice.  I was a little worried because the reviews on TripAdvisor were pretty iffy.  But it's been remodeled recently and my room has tile floors, tall ceilings, balcony and king size bed.  Fridge, coffee maker and hair drier.  The bathroom wasn't remodeled with the rest.  My sink squirts water sideways.

They kept the bar open until we got here.  Before we even checked in they asked us what we wanted so they could hurry up and close.

On my way to a sailing class in the BVI

I'm on my way to the BVI!  I'm on the Denver-Newark part of my DEN-EWR-SJU-EIS trip. 

As luck would have it I am sitting next to a woman from Colorado who is reading a Sailing for Kids book so I pulled out my Basic Cruising book and we had quite the conversation.  They just bought a 30+ foot Beneteau in the Florida Keys in anticipation of retiring in 18 months when the youngest is done with high school. They plan to keep their house in Colorado so they can live there during the summers.  She really liked their wind generator.  Said it kept their fridge cold all the time.

Prisoners of Age

P1010058,
originally uploaded by Storming.

Prisoners of Age is a photo exibit of elderly prisoners in the American prison system.  It's an amazing experience.  I remember one photo of a man who got out of prison and went and robbed a convenience store because he just wanted a six pack of beer and a steak.  People in for life, that know no other life, for things that must seem petty after 20 years.  And then there was the 80 year old woman who was just creepy.  She'd kept her housemaid prisoner for years and tortured her kids.  And she was quoted saying she just loved little kids.

We saw it at Alcatraz.  If you go, be sure to take the time to walk around.  It's also showing in Philadelphia, Ottawa and Dublin.

Working too much? There's hope

Normally work hours go down when life gets better, but in recent history we've been working not only more effectively but also a lot more hours.  This Business Week article, The Real Reasons You're Working So Hard...., does a good job of explaining how we haven't yet adapted to the new business environment.  We don't yet know how to maintain social networks and effectively manage hundreds of emails a day yet.  (Gee, and that's news?)  The good news is that they seem to think we will learn.

More weather

I found this tag from Weather.com that seems to work more reliably.  So here's the weather where I'm at:

Weather where I'll be

I won't be posting anything next week but you can watch the weather forcast for where I'm at.  Thinking about the weather forecast makes me miss my grandmother.  She used to watch the weather channel all the time and she would call me up and tell me what my weather was supposed to be like and she'd want to know if they'd gotten it right!

Or if the image above is not working, which seems to happen more often than not, you can go directly to the Weather Underground page for Road Town.

Frustrated with customer service ... again

Maybe I should get a job as a T-Mobile rep.  I know more than the folks that answer the phone.  I called T-Mobile today to ask what roaming cost in the BVI and Puerto Rico.

The first guy told me calls from BVI would be free.  The web said $2.99/min.  So I called back and it took the woman 10+ minutes to confirm that yes it was $2.99/min.  (Took me less than 30 seconds to find it via Google.)  Then she told me text messages were free.  I asked her to check because I thought they were 35 cents/message, and she confirmed, "oh, wow, yes they are 35 cents each!"   (If for any reason you want to check it out yourself, here's the web page: International services.)

Reminds me of the time I was talking to a United rep and he was trying to convince me that the longer trip was better because it had a shorter layover.  (Like I want to sit on an airplane any longer than I have to!)  I finally asked him in frustration if he'd ever flown on an airplane and he said no, he hadn't!

How much do dogs sleep?

My dogs sleep a lot.  A really lot.  So I decided to see if I could find the real answer to "how much do dogs sleep?" According to Sleep and Dreams in Dogs and Cats:

Under controlled laboratory conditions both cats and dogs sleep about 13 hours per day but they wake up more frequently than people do.

According to Planet Dog:

• Adult dogs spend approximately half their life sleeping,   typically 12 hours a day.

• Some breeds need more sleep than others –   as much as 18 hours per day! (typically larger breeds).

I think mine sleep more than average - closer to the 18 hour limit.  They sleep 8 hours a night with us.  They sleep while we read or watch TV in the evening.  And they sleep all day if we leave them inside.  I'd bet they are only awake 4-5 hours a day during a normal day.

How much do your dogs sleep?  For other dog related posts see my blog Humans for Dogs.

Photo by mikecpeck.

What makes a good teacher?

The answer seems to be experience.  From Tenure, Turnover and the Quality of Teaching - New York Times.

The most important single influence is experience: first-year teachers are much less effective than others. The second year is significantly better, and by the fourth year, most teachers hit their stride.

But it's not as clear cut as it sounds. 

It is not entirely clear whether this experience effect is learning by doing (the more you teach, the more effective you become) or survival of the fittest (those who are not good at teaching tend to drop out early).

I think they miss the point though.  What makes a good teacher?  They assume it's a teacher whose students improve on tests.  (And that may be the case but it should not be assumed.)  The business world tells us it's all about metrics.  People will tend to do what you measure them by.  So if good teachers are those whose students get better scores on tests, teachers will work hard to make sure their students do well on tests.

Airplane Shots

The things you can see from an airplane window ... shots of Mesa Verde and the Grand Canyon by Doc Searles:  Dulles to LAX, 13 April 2004 - a photoset on Flickr.

Frequent Flier Mile Programs

I travel over a 100,000 miles a year so I have lots of miles and lots of experience with the airlines' frequent flier mile programs.  I'm usually pretty loyal to United because they have a hub near me and I have 100K status with them, but when it comes to using miles, I'm partial to Continental.  They by far have the best web site, tools and programs to figure out when and how you can use your miles and to actually use them.

My favorite part about frequent flier mile tickets is that they are very flexible.  You can (at least right now) change the day and time of your return at any time without penalty.

For keeping up on frequent flier mile program changes, I recommend The FrequentFlier Crier newsletter. 

I'm going sailing!

I'm quite excited!  I'm going to spend the last week of my summer break taking a sailing class in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) with Offshore Sailing School.  The class will give me bareboot certification so I can go down and rent a sailboat on my own.  (And hopefully it will give me the confidence to do that!)  For the current weather conditions in the BVI check out Weather Underground.

Lots of Eyes Discover New Things

Sharing data allows lots of people to help discover and invent new things.  For example, this guy found Roman ruins by examining satellite photos of land near his home.  The photos were made available by Google Earth.  Enthusiast uses Google to reveal Roman ruins.

Interesting theory on what makes us eat more

I just read a very interesting article by Seth Roberts, "What Makes Food Fattening.  (The Freakonmics blog pointed me to it.)  Nobody knows what makes food fattening but Roberts had a lot of interesting theories.  The article was well worth reading but if you don't have the time to read all 77 pages, here's my summary.  (Note that all the figures were at the end of the article.)  I'm going to state these as facts but the paper makes it very clear that they are all still theories.

• We have body fat "set point", a level of fat or weight that our body tries to maintain.
• This set point is variable and depends on what we eat.
• Food has a flavor and an amount of calories.  The higher the amount of calories, the better the flavor will taste.  This is flavor-calorie association.  So if a banana had 200 calories, it would taste better than bananas do now with only 100 calories even though the banana flavor is the same.
• The faster your body notices the calories, the higher this flavor-calorie association is.  So if it's flavored sugar water, it reaches your digestive stream quickly and it'll have a higher flavor-calorie association than food that needs to be broken down and processed by your stomach.
• Foods can be paired together and have a joint flavor-calorie association.  French fries don't have much flavor, so their flavor-calorie association would be low, but when we eat them with high flavor foods (like hamburgers), the hamburger/french fry flavor-calorie association is high with hamburgers contributing to the flavor and french fries (and hamburgers) to the calorie part.
• The more flavor-calorie foods you eat, the higher your fat set point is.  This has something to do with when foods are plenty, food is more diverse and flavor-calorie associations go up.  When food is scarse, they go down and our fat set points go down.
• Japanese are thinner because their food has less flavor and so the flavor-calorie association is weaker.
• Fast food has a very strong flavor-calorie association and it's very consistent.
• The more consistent a food, the more likely you will develop a flavor-calorie association with it.

His advice?

• Eat new foods often!  Your body doesn't have a flavor-calorie association for it.
• Vary food flavors often.  If you cook at home, make your dishes just a little different each time.
• Consume calories with no flavor.  This will decrease your set point.  (Roberts claims drinking fructose water between meals will actually decrease your set point and cause you to lose weight.)

I'm not sure what I think about it all yet, but it's a lot of food for thought.

2:36pm: I forgot one:

• Eating the same food all the time makes it boring and lowers the flavor-calorie association.  All liquid diets are boring and so people eat less of them.

 

Do Men Make More than Women?

According to Warren Farrell in Exploiting the Gender Gap - New York Times women make less than men by choice.  According to Farrell, women choose to work fewer hours, travel less and occupy safer occupations.  Single, childless women make 177% of their childless male counterparts and "people who work 44 hours a week make, on average, more than twice the pay of someone working 34 hours a week."

More food for thought. 

P.S.  Take all his statistics with a grain of salt.  I don't think he's always comparing apples to apples.