happylife

Twice cooked pork

I challenged to cook a new Szechuan dish item for my dinner. According to my dictionary, its name is  "twice cooked pork." It's one of the popular Chinese menu item in Japan and I like it next to Mabo Tofu. I found the reason for the item's name when I looked into a recipe on the Internet. Pork should be boiled with ginger and then fried with cabbage. Unfortunately, I made two mistakes on this cooking, and my first "twice cooked pork" was not delicious; it wasn't tasty and a little bit bitter, because I scorched the cabbage and I used salad oil instead of oyster sauce.

Tethered blimp?

Pilots are required to get NOTAM(NOTice for AirMen) before the flight, but it is sometimes difficult to understand because of a lot of abbreviations and strange words. When I was preparing for the night flight, I found this code in the NOTAM - "CZBB TETHERED BLIMP 490456N 1230006W (APRX 1200 FT BFR THR 25 AND 1600 FT RIGHT EXTENDED RWY CL) SFC TO 200 FT AGL 207 MSL. LGTD 0604290030 TIL 0605011700" I didn't know both the words, "tethered" and "blimp." As I didn't have a dictionary, I asked a Syrian instructor. Though he didn't know the former word, he knew the latter one. "Blimp is a balloon" he answered and I understood what the NOTAM meant. As I had a spare time before the flight, I drove to the exact point located on the NOTAM and took this picture. As you might know, this is a so called "tethered blimp."

Blueberry power

As I had a terrible experience about my eyes in the last night-flight, I prepared a secret weapon this time. I got it at Save on Foods in Ladner, the nearest village from the airport. It is a bottle of blueberry smoothie which contains a lot of effective component called anthocyanin. This dark blue material is said to activate human eyes and I felt it personally. I drank the beverage a few minutes before the flight, and I felt it worked very well; I could see the memo on my knee-pad in the dark airplane without difficulty. If you have difficulty in your night vision, I recommend that you have blueberries before night flying, driving and whatever activity in darkness. It would take effect at once.

GTD

"I'm surrounded with a lot of things to do, and I don't know where to start." Most people including me are living with vast anxiety and unseen stress, thinking like that. This book, "Getting Things Done - The Art of Stress-Free Productivity" by David Allen would offer you a kind of solution for this problem. The key concept is very simple; list up all the things you think you should do and deal with them one by one. It's important to forget everything, once you have list it up until you start to deal with it. This idea looks so natural and persuasive that quite a few people are dealing with their own todo's along with this book, which has become almost a bible for them. Basically I agree with this idea, but I felt confused when I read through this book first, because the definite method shown in this book is too complex for me. I'm actually facing against a confusing situation right now, and I really need this kind of method, but I feel it is difficult to practice this book as is, so I've decided to adopt only the key concept of this book and arrange the detailed way by myself.

It's too comfortable

My bedroom is occupied with a queen-size bed. It is between double-size and king-size. Though I am more than 180cm tall, I can fully stretch my hands and legs on it. As I adjusted its height and direction, I can see the horizon of English Bay with my body lying down on it. I use a sleeping bag instead of a quilt, because it is made of down and is more comfortable than a usual quilt. My bedroom is always dry because the sun light comes in even in winter. Taking a nap in the sunny afternoon on this bed listening to the sound of waves and young people's voice in the park is one of the happiest time for me. It is so comfortable that I have once experimented to sleep during the daytime and work at night, but I found that it is not natural for human body. I'm now taking care not to oversleep more than one hour.

A hectic day

I was woken up by a phone call of my friend from Seattle at 9:00 AM. It was just the start of my hectic, long day. She was with her sister who was on the way from Brazil to Tokyo as a traveler. As you know, travelers live in a traveler's mode which is very hectic and condensed time schedule. After getting some foods in a supermarket, we had an easy breakfast in my room. Then we started sailing in English Bay. Though the wind was a little bit strong, the sky was clear and there were no waves. I think it was the perfect condition for sailing. We enjoyed a glass of wine with snacks on my boat. After coming back from the sea and taking a rest in my room, we drove to Park Royal which is a kind of fashionable shopping mall in North Vancouver. I reconfirmed that ladies can spend time for window shopping as long as possible. We then drove to Squamish to enjoy the scenic beauty around How Sound. On the way back from there, we found a great water fall and took a lot of pictures. Though I didn't like sight seeing, I found that it is enjoyable with a bunch of  discoveries to do sight seeing sometimes. It was almost 11:00 PM when we dismissed.

A boat battery

Sailors use two kinds of batteries; one is called "cranking battery" and the other is "house battery." Both of them have the same voltage of 12V, which is equal to those of most car batteries. Actually, the cranking battery is just the same as a car battery except for the price. Everything for boaters is ten to twenty percent more expensive than car devices. As the name implies, the cranking battery is mainly used to start the engine because it has a characteristic of producing high power for a short time. On the other hand, in terms of the house battery, it can produce power moderately but lastingly. It is sometimes called "deep cycle battery" and has the feature of less discharging. As my boat needs no starter motor I have only deep cycle battery. I was surprised when I tried to charge it, because it had still 70% of energy though I charged it last more than one year ago.

Helicopter tour to Victoria

Late this afternoon, I got a lucky phone call from my friend who is working for Helijet as a helicopter pilot. He told me that I could get a ride on his helicopter at a super discount price. It was less than $50 for a round trip from Vancouver harbor to Victoria. As the airline is mainly for executive businessmen, the usual ticket price is more than $200 for one way. It was a huge, twelve-seater helicopter excluding two pilots, and had only four passengers including me. Different from the plane take-off, the helicopter took off without a long take-off rolling. It was a strange feeling to climb up almost vertically. Fortunately it was a super fine day today and the window view was great. It take three days to sail from Vancouver to Victoria on my boat, though it took only 35 minutes in the helicopter. I enjoyed walking around Victoria Downtown and flew back to Vancouver after three hours. It was such a great half-day trip that I ran out of the memory of my digital camera.

To go back to the sea

We started the painting job at 10:30 after getting another can of paint and finished all the job before noon. I asked the marina staff to lift up the boat again and go back to the sea. It came up to $500 in total for the maintenance this time including the lift and paint, excluding the labor of my friends and me. It's almost the same as a normal car maintenance cost for one year. We were thinking about enjoying sailing on the shiny boat, but the wind was a little bit cold and strong, causing choppy waves, so we docked at the public pier on Granville Island, and had lunch with beer together. The sky was blue and quite a few seagulls were hovering. After separating, I came back home and took a shower. It was so pleasant that I took a nap on the bed for hours. A few minutes ago, I woke up. It's about 18:00 and I have two more hours before getting dark. What should I do?

To lift up my boat

I lift up my boat at Granville Marina to paint the bottom this afternoon. Two of my friends help me. After the marina stuff lift up my boat and clean up the bottom surface with pressure water, we started repaint the bottom. At first, we scraped off the old paint roughly. This process is usually the hardest and dirtiest one because a lot of poisonous paint powder scatters. However, this time, we finished it super roughly in one hour. It is not perfect but I believe it to be enough for a half year day sailing. We used two kinds of paint; one is a so-called "precoat" and the other is "finish." Thought most owners paint precoat on the full surface of the bottom, we did it spottily, only at the pealed off spots. This process took less than one hour. We were to take a rest at a cafe near the marina, though the sky was getting dark and cold wind started blowing, which implies that a cold front is coming close, so we continued our job to paint the finish. Finish is poisonous black paint so that shells and seaweed cannot grow on it. We finished all of today's process before rain fell. All we have to do is painting the finish coat again, which is left for tomorrow.