Had a great time at the 2008 PaddleFest at Howard Amon Park in Richland. My 11 year-old daughter, Kirsten, and I arrived at about 11:30 and quickly signed the liability releases so we could begin our fun.

She got in a little whitewater kayak and had a blast. While she was doing that I looked for an available kayak and found that Greenies, a local store, had their Hobie Mirage line of kayaks available. These kayaks are interesting in that the ‘mirage’ drive allows you to peddal instead of paddle. The back and forth motion of your peddaling is transferred to some ‘fins’ underneath the kayak that propel the kayak. To me they look like sea turtle fins moving back and forth. A hand-controlled rudder is used to steer the kayak and works real well

They had a Mirage Adventure available and I quickly asked if I could try it out. “Of course!” Getting on the kayak was very easy and I was amazed how fast I could get the kayak going and the maneuverability. What I didn’t expect was to find out how out of shape my legs were! I can paddle a kayak for hours but peddling tires me out after 10 minutes.

We then hooked up with Ethan Ebersold who is a distributor for a number of kayak companies and kayak accessory lines. In our discussion Ethan suggested I try the 16-foot Fathom kayak from Eddyline and put Kirsten a little purple 10-foot Emotion Edge kayak. I really enjoyed the kayak and Kirsten did a pretty good job following around behind me.

After spending 1/2 an hour in the kayaks we got out and went looking for a tandem kayak we could both try. The only available one we found was a Hobie Mirage Outfitter, so Kirsten and I both were able to peddle this one. It was great fun.

We went back and forth between the regular kayaks and the Hobies till it was time to go at 4pm. We were both tired and ready to relax. I think we will be renting some kayaks over the next few months since a purchase at this time is beyond my budget.

Just got back from the Grand Opening for the new Famous Dave’s Legendary Pit BBQ. The food was great, though I was glad I was near the front of the line because they ran out of ribs a couple times.

Famous Dave’s Legendary Pit Bar-B-Que is a chain of southern-style barbecue restaurants serving pork ribs, chicken, and beef brisket (they don’t do steak). The first Famous Dave’s restaurant was started just outside of Hayward, Wisconsin, in 1994. From the grand opening ceremony they said that this is the 171st location they have opened. They have 4 location in Western Washington but this is the first location east of the mountains. Guess that says something good about our economy here.

Well, I am sure the restaurant will be busy here at first, so will let everyone in town come visit them then will come visit after all the kinks are worked out.

Last Thursday I was supposed to go kayaking again in the McNary Wildlife Refuge waterways. The wind kicked up quite a bit that afternoon causing some pretty good swells on the river. Except for the instructors the rest of us are novices and so decided to play it safe and postpone the outing till the next Thursday.

Instead of coming right home I decided to pick up a few of the geocaches out in this area since I don’t get this way very often. I pulled in to find the Fort Walla Walla geocache near the Heritage Marker sign and took this photo of Wallula Gap. I was using my new Olympus Stylus 850SW camera. The picture is not as sharp as my Canon but it is nice to have a camera that I can throw in my pocket. The other advantage is the “SW” part of the name — Shock and Waterproof! I can take this camera out in a kayak, to a pool, out in the rain, with no worries. And if I drop it, it should survive.

I saw this picture that was taken of my 3 year-old grandson at his birthday party and just had to post it. His laugh and joy during the whole party could only make you realize how good God has been to our families. We also celebrated his mom’s (my daughter’s) 26th birthday — wow! How can I be 29 39 and have a 26 year-old?

May our Sovereign Triune God continue to bless both of them and the rest of our families in the coming year. Amen!

The Good: God; The Bad: Us Christians; The Ugly: Our Sin

I just saw that Pastor Doug Wilson has a new book coming out, Evangellyfish. Here is a blurb from Christianity Today:

“Before I dipped into this novel, I was told it was a satire. What satire? I was a pastor for 10 years, and reading this made me squirm. Wilson grasps the untold ambiguities that contemporary pastors experience. This is realistic fiction. No, make that just realistic.”
— Mark Galli, Senior Managing Editor, Christianity Today

“I have no desire to read yet another Elmer Gantry knockoff about a sex-obsessed preacher and his congregation of hypocrites. Fortunately, Evangellyfish isn’t one more on the pile. Doug Wilson isn’t writing about ‘those crazy Christians,’ he’s writing about us crazy Christians. When you start this short novel, you’ll want to believe it describes that big church across town. By the time you finish, you’ll remember that it describes the bigger church you’re a part of, that scandalous body that God keeps calling his. Wilson understands better than most that ‘judgment must begin at the house of God,’ and that God still dwells there despite the most squalid conditions.”
— Ted Olsen, Managing Editor, News & Online Journalism, Christianity Today

What’s it about?

John Mitchell is the pastor of a small, modestly successful Reformed Baptist church in a city in the Midwest.

Chad Lester is one of the most successful pastors in North America, and he is the leading light at Camel Creek Community Church in the same city. He is, speaking in theological terms, a dirt bag. And yet, his quasi-secret sexual misbehavior leads only to church growth success followed by publishing success, followed in turn by ever more church growth.

John Mitchell hates everything that Lester stands for and yet, unbeknownst to him, envy of Lester’s success has him secretly by the throat. He thinks of it as indignation, or righteous concern, or something, but the real issue is that he is peeved that Lester appears to be blessed by God for being a creep, and he, Mitchell, struggles in obscurity for being faithful.

When Lester is falsely accused of the one rotten thing he didn’t do, and his ministry starts to implode, John Mitchell is dragged into it much against his will.

According to pastor Wilson, Evangellyfish is not a dark comedy but rather a medium brown comedy. He also wants to make clear that “all the characters in Evangellyfish are fictional, I made them all up out of my own head. Any resemblance to any real people, living or dead, is their own darn fault.”

Two months ago I purchased a Gateway M-6319 laptop at Costco. After waking up out of sleep mode, the system would not recognize a memory card if it was inserted. I thought I could live with it, but you really don’t want to have to reboot the machine just to copy pictures off your SD card.

I went to Costco and stuck my SD card in the demo model they had on display. Same problem. I called the Costco “Consierge Service” and was told they did not have a solution. So I decided to return the laptop and get something else.

That ended up being a HP Pavilion DV9823cl that they had on sale (clearance?). It has a gig more memory than the Gateway and a 17″ rather than 15.4 inch screen. Since I will be using this as my primary home computer and rarely lugging it around, the large screen will be nice. It also surpasses the Gateway by having a firewire port, s-video out, and an HP Expansion port, though I may never use them. Oh, and the card reader works all the time.

Here are the specs:

• Microprocessor: 2.0 GHz AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual-Core Mobile
• Microprocessor Cache: 2 X 512KB L2 Cache
• Memory: 3GB DDR2 System Memory (2 Dimm) (Max: 4GB)
• Video Display: 17.0” WXGA+ BrightView Widescreen Display (1440 x 900)
• Video Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce Go 7150M
• Hard Drive: 250GB 5400RPM HDD (1 x 250G, second slot available for upgrade)
• Multimedia Drive: LightScribe SuperMulti 8X DVD±RW with Double Layer Support
• Network Card: Integrated 10/100 Ethernet LAN (RJ-45 connector)
• Wireless Connectivity: 802.11a/b/g/n WLAN
• Fax/Modem: High speed 56k modem
• Sound: Altec Lansing
• PC Card Slot: ExpressCard/54 Slot (also supports ExpressCard/34)
• Media Reader: Reads Secure Digital cards, MultiMedia cards, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, and xD Picture cards
• USB Ports: 4 USB 2.0 ports
• Firewire: 1 IEEE 1394 port
• Webcam: Built-in with integrated microphone
• Headphones: 2 jacks; 1 w/SPDIF Digital Audio & 1 stereo
• Microphone: 1 jack
• Expansion Port: HP Expansion/Docking Port
• Weight: 7.8 lbs.
• Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium Edition

Of course the real fun was removing any and all personal data from the Gateway before returning it. I deleted all the cookies, passwords, and temp files in Internete Explorer and uninstalled any program that may have contained personal data. I then emptied the recycle bin and used a program to ’scrub’ the empty space on the hard drive. Now I have the ‘joy’ of reinstalling all the software onto the new machine….

Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning only to find he has metamorphosed into a giant bug. Why? Who knows. The question is never asked or answered by anyone in the story. We do know that Gregor, as a traveling salesman, mindlessly works at a job he hates to support his family and pay off the debts of his father’s failed business.

His family never appears to pitty him — they are too self absorbed in the hardship that Gregor’s metamorphosis will place on them; he won’t be able to work, his appearance would shame the family, and other self-absorbed problems.

The story was sent to my MP3 player by Great Book Audio but the story really had no coherence to me. It may have been Kafka’s intent, but the story seemed to have no purpose. It did not illuminate anything of the human condition or do any of those other things that a ‘classic’ is supposed to do.

The only thing that made sense was something I found when scouring the web to see what I missed and one writer suggested it was actually a dark comedy. That I may agree with. Only in a comedy would someone wake up, find themselves turned into a bug, and their first thought be “I am going to be late for work”. What clinched this interpretation for me is the web personality test that asks: Which character from Kafka’s The Metamorphosis are you?

My middle name is ‘Oscar’ so the Oscar Mayer Hot Dog song was always brought up by my ‘friends’ when they found out my middle name.

Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener
That is what I truly want to be
‘Cause if I were an Oscar Mayer wiener
Everyone would be in love with me.

The weinermobile is Oscar Mayer’s other trademark and now they have added a Mini Cooper version as part of the company’s 125th anniversary celebration. This thing looks real small, of course having New Your Giant Michael Strahan standing next to it helps.

ABC did a spot showing both full size and Mini Cooper weinermobile.

HatTip: DriversDrive

I just finished listening to part 1 of “Atomic Bombers” by Russell Vandenbroucke. It was part of the L.A. Theatre Works‘ “The Play’s the Thing”, an award-winning and critically acclaimed weekly radio show. This is one of the featured podcasts from the Relativity Series, stories about scientists and their discoveries.

“Atomic Bombers” has the wise-cracking physicist Dr. Richard Feynman acting as our guide through an offbeat journey into the New Mexico desert, the Manhattan Project, and the race to build the first atomic bomb. What I have heard so far is quite entertaining and educational as well. I am not sure how long the files will be available, so get them while you can.

Links: Part 1, Part 2

This past weekend I joined up with another cacher, Ken aka Tomison, to head over to the Missoula Cache Machine. We started caching when we got to Spokane at around 3pm and did not stop till the clock said it was 2am in Coeur d’Alene. The only reason we stopped then was that we realized that we were still 3 hours away from Missoula and with the time change we were not going to make the 5:15am start time for the Cache Machine.

We had taken 11 hours to drive what would take the average person half an hour. But we had attempted 60 caches, walked, actually jogged, a couple of miles, and found 55 of the caches along the route. I only wish we had written down the odometer reading when we started so we would know how many miles we drove to cover what the map says is only 35 miles. I am guessing we drove over 100 miles, but what took the most time was searching for each cache.

I would guess it takes at least 5 minutes to find even the easiest cache, some taking just a minute to find after you finally unplug the GPS from the cigarette lighter and get your led headlamp and your flashlight turned on; some taking 15 minutes, either because they were well hidden or, more likely, we were blind. If you cannot find the cache after 15 minutes, it is time to head back to the car and move on to the next cache. After finding the cache you reverse the process and then try to figure out the best route to the next stop.

Where did the time go? Who knows. It is all a blur because we drove 3 hours non-stop to Missoula from Couer d’Alene just to continue caching for till 8pm that night. 29 hours from first cache till last but that will be the segment of the story.

I had run across information about Northwest Trails a couple of months ago but there were no maps available for this far corner of South Eastern Washington so I did not pay it much attention. When traveling over to the Missoula Cache Machine we located a couple of caches that were along trails included in this project. In the same way that road maps on the GPS increase its usefulness by a factor of 10, so being able to see the trails that give the best route to the cache increases the usefulness of the GPS even more.

Northwest Trails, according to its web page, is a community effort designed to record and collect GPS data for trails in Washington, Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, British Columbia and Alaska and use that data to create custom trail maps for Garmin GPSs. The Northwest Trails map is “transparent”, which means the trails appear as data laid over the top of any other map loaded into the GPS. Trail types are are broken into four types:

• Main Trails: red dotted lines
• Minor trails (game traces, etc.): thin red dotted lines
• Paved trails: maroon dotted lines
• Unpaved roads: maroon dashed lines

With enough user input, the map coverage will hopefully expand to include GPS-verified coverage of all trails located in the Pacific Northwest. To help with this I have submitted my first map, the Audubon Nature Trial in Kennewick’s Columbia Park. I have overlaid the trail and waypoints on Google Earth below.