Absent

I will post some updates tomorrow! As for now I am beat tired and am headed for bed.
My phone still doesn't work and I still haven't found a cheap one to buy so e-mail is the best way to get ahold of me...
I can't believe tomorrow is a day away from July already!

Good night for a boat ride mate

Yesterday Jim took the big boat out for an evening cruise and had Dave and Doug along. Dave is the prof he is working for through pacific challenge and Doug is a grad student who is also from Australia. It was a gorgeous night but I definitely spent the entire time trying to understand what they were saying. Their accents were unreal and they were hilarious. Jim got the boat in and out of the slip just fine!! This is not a picture from last night but it is the Winona bridge and we did go under it.

11 hours to start the week

I guess watching baseball can make you pretty tired. When I got home and saw my bed I couldn't resist. I went to bed so early that I got 11 hours of sleep before I had to wake up for work this morning at 7 am. I had a dream that could be made into a movie too. It was such a good dream that I almost want to try to get 11 hours every night and maybe quit Wincraft and become a film writer.

Scuba Leeeeeiiiiiigh

Today after work Jim took me scuba diving. Where? In the Winona State pool. It was really neat. He did some skills training with me and my ears adjusted better than I thought they would. I always have trouble with them. The whole get-up was a little big and made for some uncomfortable times but it was well worth it. One of the outdoor pursuits classes he is helping teach right now is going through their scuba diving unit so he had them rented out for awhile and thought it would be good to see what its like to be in one, and for free. I learned right away that laughing, underwater, and goggles don't mix well. It was serious time and no laughing would be allowed. Jim was a good instructor and I hope the next time I have on a tank I will be about to jump off of a 20 foot boat somewhere off the coast of somewhere beautiful.

The picture obviously isn't me but I did give Jim the go ahead many times in the pool and did deflate myself like he is doing quite often. I learned that I am very buoyant.

One way to not need a license

After work today I couldn't bare to leave the inside of one building and go in the inside of another (my apartment) so I went straight to the big lake to read my book and I learned how to not need a fishing license. A truck pulled up and 2 guys got out of it decked out in fishing gear and headed for the lake. I thought they were going to invade my personal bubble because they were headed straight toward me but all of a sudden they disappeared into a clump of bushes. I had never seen anything like it. You can almost see them in this picture I took from my phone but not really. (You can also see Sugarloaf in the background). They were fly fishing and it actually turned out to be a major distraction because they kept catching a bunch of sunfish and one of the guys was really good.
Well I am now back in my apartment and I think we have a rotten watermelon and cantaloupe sitting on the counter because I can smell them from the couch.

20 Interesting things about the Titanic

1. Construction on Titanic began on March 31, 1909 in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
2. Construction was completed in May 1911.
3. The designers of Titanic never, despite opinion to the contrary, claimed Titanic was “unsinkable.” They did claim that because of its construction, the ship was “virtually unsinkable” but the word “virtually” was left out in much of the reporting. What a difference…a word makes…
4. Every single item on board Titanic was purchased new or custom made—even the china, iron railings, and furnishings.
5. 300 men worked in shifts around the clock to shovel coal into boilers. This ensured the engines ran at top speed.
6. Out of a crew of 900, only eighteen were women. This was said to be rooted in a longstanding superstition that women brought bad luck to ships. Seventeen of the stewardesses made it on lifeboats and survived the disaster.
7. Colonel John Jacob Astor IV was the wealthiest passenger on board, with an estimated wealth of $87 million.
8. A first-class stateroom on Titanic—which included a sitting room, two bedrooms, two dressing rooms, a private deck, and a private bathroom—cost $4,200 for the trip. (Someone calculate what that would be in 2011 dollars.)
9. Over half of Titanic’s passengers were traveling in third class, also called “steerage.” Most were emigrating to America. The cost of a third class ticket was said to be $36.25.
10. The iceberg was spotted at 11:40 pm on April 14, 1912 and struck the ship’s starboard side.
11. Titanic had fifteen bulkheads (a series of vertical partitions in the bottom of the ship), each of which had watertight doors. Only twelve of the doors (a little over a third of the doors) could be closed automatically from the bridge, however; the others had to be closed by hand. When the ship collided with the iceberg, some of the manually-operated doors were left open. In addition, the bulkheads were only ten feet above the waterline, so when the ship began to sink, water poured over the top of the bulkheads into the next, etc. This rendered the watertight bulkheads ineffective.
12. The closest ship to respond to Titanic’s distress call was Carpathia, which was 58 miles (four hours) away.
13. Titanic finally sank at 2:20 am. Carpathia began rescuing survivors from lifeboats at 4:10 am. She rescued the last of the passengers at 8:30, then left for New York at 8:50.
14. Many passengers and crew were confused about how the lifeboats should work, and many thought the boats should first be lowered into the water before people boarded. This is one reason many lifeboats were launched with less than full capacity. The first lifeboat launched with 28 people, despite its capacity for 65.
15. If all the lifeboats were filled to capacity, 1,178 people would have survived instead of 706.
16. The ship has a maximum allowed capacity of 3,547, but lifeboat space for only 1,178 people. Of the 2,223 on board the ship when it sank, 1,517 died. The majority of deaths were caused by hypothermia.
17. There was a ship (the SS Californian) that was much closer to Titanic than Carpathia. Both the US and British inquiries into the disaster found that the SS Californian and her captain failed to come to the rescue of Titanic’s passengers. A 1992 report found that Californian had actually been farther away than originally thought.
18. The wreckage of Titanic was undiscovered until September 1, 1985, when it was discovered by a joint French-American expedition.
19. It is said that Captain Smith downplayed iceberg warnings early in the evening and declined to reduce the speed of the ship. The US findings blamed Captain Smith’s “indifference to danger” and “overconfidence and neglect” for the disaster. The British inquiry found “that the loss of the said ship was due to collision with an iceberg, brought about by the excessive speed at which the ship was being navigated” but failed to find Captain Smith negligent.
20. In 1898, before Titanic had ever been designed, a retired merchant marine wrote Futility or The Wreck of the Titan. The book was about a ship that hit an iceberg and sank as it was attempting to cross the Atlantic faster than any ship had and is said to contain chilling similarities to the real-live disaster that happened fourteen years later.

MORE eggs please?

This morning I woke up early and was excited to see that the sun was out since it was cloudy/rainy all day yesterday. I didn't waste any time and I brushed my teeth and put on my swim suit and headed out the door. I was going to spend the morning pretending to be a boat owner in the marina and read the Sunday newspaper and drink my coffee. Well on the way to the Marina is lovely Mcdonalds which has a lovely and cheap mccafe menu. So I pulled in and ordered an iced Mocha for almost a dollar (can't beat that) and thought it would go nice with some scambled eggs. I didn't see them on the drive-thru menu so I just said can I have a side of scambled eggs please? She put it on the menu screen and it was $1.39. As soon as I saw that price I thought wow I should start preparing to eat half a dozen eggs this morning...

When I got the marina and open my little carton of scrambled eggs there was probably 4 big bites. Not worth it. Not worth it at all. But then I realized how cheap their iced mocha's are and felt a little better.

To give you a perspective, I thought my eggs would look a little more like this.

New E-mail Account!

My password expired for my Winona Account so I had to switch to a new one sooner than I thought. My new e-mail account is winona.leigh.moore@gmail.com

If you have sent me something there in the past 3 days I am sorry but I will never be able to see it. It is lost in cyberspace!