Review: A Bike Ride - 12000 miles around the world

 I enjoyed my read of Lone Traveler so much that I looked for Anne Mustoe's first book, A Bike Ride - 12,000 miles around the world.  It wasn't available from the library or on kindle format so I bought it on eBay used. The book arrived and I read it while on vacation.

Written in a clear, transparent style that reflected her experience as a Principal of a private school (she calls her self former head mistress), the book is a single narrative comprising of her notes while traveling. Being an English writer from before the current spate of travel books by women, the book is unusual in that in doesn't depict a woman running away from an abusive relationship, trying to find herself, or recovering from some prior trauma. It also doesn't depict an incompetent person trying to execute a trip in way over her head. Mustoe is competent, preparing for her trip with meticulous research (even to the point of scheduling vaccinations at various points during her journey), with not a single shred of self-pity in sight.

There's even a great section in the book where she describes how she deals with sexual propositions while on the trip, and an encounter in a 3rd world country where a group of school children started chasing her on their bicycles. By and large she follows famous routes (like Alexandra's conquering army), and she's slept in situations that would cause many distress (e.g., on a table in a room filled with cockroaches), yet at no point does she claim pathos or pity.

Her tastes in food really reflect her culture. For instance, she rode all through India enjoying the cuisine, but would arrive in Thailand and hate the food! (She really didn't like rice or rice noodles) She loved Malaysia, a former British colony, and didn't enjoy mountains but didn't mind deserts.

I really enjoyed the book. Recommended.

Review: Eye of the Dragon

 I enjoyed Fairy Tale enough to check out Eye of the Dragon from the library and read it.  This is how Stephen King does fantasy --- there's very little world building --- he assumes a medieval generic fantay setting, and just dives into the (rather simplistic) plot and characters. The narrator frequently breaks the fourth wall, addressing the reader directly, and the voice of the narrator is awesome --- this is what Stephen King is great at --- the tone is conversational, transparent, and a very easy read --- he never makes the reader work.

The plot and world is where things don't quite work. The magic in the universe is never defined, explained, or has limits drawn around it, so the ending doesn't feel fair. Secondly, there's a lot of detail the plot depends on that feels quite artificial and contrived. You just have to accept it. To his credit, King's narrator is so convincing and personable that you will by default accept it while reading, only later realizing that the plot is kinda fishy.

It's enjoyable and light reading, but don't expect anything that bears repeated reading.

Review: Fire TV Cube 3rd Gen

 Of all my Alex-enabled devices the Fire TV Cube is the one that consistently gets the most used. It was a bit slow, however, and never supported Zoom, so when the 3rd Gen Fire TV cube came up and Amazon offered a 25% trade-in offer, I bought it.

This thing is fast! It comes up faster, and downloads faster. And Amazon's PMs as usual did a fantastic job --- on setup it just carried over all the settings from the previous version and everything worked as expected. What I didn't like was that it didn't also download all the previous apps --- those had to be downloaded separately. Fortunately, it's fast so I didn't have to wait long --- I guess that meant it was still a good product decision.

What's not so nice was that the remote wasn't the Pro remote.  I ended up buying one separately so that when the kids hid the remote I could still find it.

All the existing features of the Fire TV Cube are there --- just faster. It automatically turns on the speakers for music, and does all sorts of other nice things. There's a pass through HDMI port, but I haven't bothered trying it since it's not recommended for the PS5. I haven't tried the Zoom feature yet. I'll try it soon.

All in all, it's a worthy upgrade. I have no idea why the competition hasn't caught on yet. I guess as usual, Amazon gets under-estimated!

Re-read: Farewell My Lovely

 There's nothing quite like Raymond Chandler. I picked up Farewell My Lovely and the prose just sucked me in and before I knew it I'd read the whole thing in a couple of evenings. Sure, the time and place are dated, and perhaps Chandler didn't like women or at least enjoys making them villains, but his prose makes everything so enjoyable that time just flies by. Recommended.

Review: Reality is not what is seems

 Reality Is Not What It Seems is Carlo Rovelli's quantum loop gravity for the layman. Rovelli writes really good prose, and he covers the history of physics all the way from the ancient Greeks to Einstein, Heisenberg, and Bohr. The descriptions are vivid and easy reading, and the launch into quantum loop gravity stalls a bit as he tries to avoid math, but then he carries right along into the reasons why Quantum Loop gravity is important and what the implication is for the existence of time and why it appears the way it is in general relativity.

The idea is that at the quantum level you have events linked together in a topology, which relates events to each other. Time, then, is an emergent property of a lot of quantum events at the aggregate level. He then points out that if quantum loop gravity shows that space has a minimum size, then a lot of the singularities in existing theories go away.

Finally, what I love about the book is its defense of science and the scientific method:

The answers given by science, then, are not reliable because they are definitive. They are reliable because they are not definitive. They are reliable because they are the best available today. And they are the best we have because we don’t consider them to be definitive, but see them as open to improvement. It’s the awareness of our ignorance that gives science its reliability. And it is reliability that we need, not certainty. We don’t have absolute certainty, and never will have it unless we accept blind belief. The most credible answers are the ones given by science, because science is the search for the most credible answers available, not for answers pretending to certainty....science and religion frequently find themselves on a collision course. Not because science pretends to know ultimate answers, but precisely for the opposite reason: because the scientific spirit distrusts whoever claims to be the one having ultimate answers or privileged access to Truth. This distrust is found to be disturbing in some religious quarters. It is not science that is disturbed by religion: there are certain religions that are disturbed by scientific thinking. To accept the substantial uncertainty of our knowledge is to accept living immersed in ignorance, and therefore in mystery. To live with questions to which we do not know the answers. Perhaps we don’t know them yet or, who knows, we never will. (kindle loc 2772-2782)

Short, eloquent, and easy to read. There's nothing about this book not to recommend.

Review: Silca Synergetic Wet Lube

 There all sorts of web-sites that go crazy about chain lubrication, and if you believe the experts, the only way to lubricate your chain is to strip the chain of oil and then bathe it in hot wax. I'm not quite interested in that kind of extra work, so I don't do that. I go for web lubricants and sometimes neglect the lubrication until the chain starts to squeak.

Some of those web-sites will recommend the Silca Synergetic Wet Lube as the best lube for someone who can't be bothered to wax. The claims are hyperbole, as I've discovered the hard way that the lube like all other lubes attracts dirt and gets gunky. What caught my eye, however, was the dispensing bottle. When the lube first came out, the bottle came with a needle dispenser. This lets you get the lube exactly where you want it, especially if you're not lubricating the chain, but pivot points on other bicycle components. Having a needle dispenser also means that you aren't wasting lube --- it's easy to get exactly one drop of oil per link.

Alas, all good things come to an end and if you buy the lube from Amazon at this point it comes with a standard applicator which is much harder to control. Fortunately, I kept an old dispenser and poured the oil over to the new one. (I should have just moved the cap over) So I expect that if I break or lose the dispenser I'm going to hunt around for a new lube.

Does the lube make the chain last longer? Beats me. My switch to 11-speed is relatively recent so I've yet to wear out a chain. And chains are so cheap anyway it's probably not worth spending $20 worth of lube for a $20 chain.

If you can find the old dispenser, get it. Otherwise, I'm not sure this is worth the steep price.

Review: Acceptance - A Memoir

 Acceptance is Emi Nietfeld's memoir about her childhood and tertiary education years, topped with her successful career at Google and Facebook as well as a bestselling author. A childhood where her father decided to become a woman, her mother being described as a "hoarder" (you quickly discover what it means and it's not a good thing), followed by spells of institutions mixed in with forster care but then success at getting a full scholarship as a boarding school.

Many parts of the books are dramatized --- there's a definitely vibe that comes from being a person who's successfully marketed herself to Harvard and other Ivy League schools. For instance, she mentions that she wrote her college applications while sleeping in her car. When you get to that section you realized that she did it only for a couple of days before her pro bono famous college counselor told her to get to a shelter to get evidence for it so she could write a statement of extenuating circumstances. (I had no idea that that was a thing!)

That's not to detract from Nietfeld's achievements --- she did win national writing competitions (including the Horatio Algier award --- which she successfully turns into a skewering of the kind of person who sponsors those kind of awards). It's also a statement about how important a prestigious university like Harvard is --- she claimed to be the kind of student who got Bs and A-s in an institution where due to rampant grade inflation, it would have been an equivalent to be a C elsewhere, but the aura of Harvard was such that she managed to get a $130K/year job offer from Harvard, which she turned into a $200K offer by getting a second offer from Yahoo, where she had interned and been compared to then-CEO Marissa Mayer.

Nietfeld also describes her rape with unflinching detail. It took place in Budapest where she stayed at a hostel where there were only 2 men, a red flag which she hadn't been taught to avoid. It happened to her in between her high school and starting college, which led to her taking a gap year, which incidentally also made some of her sponsors from the Horatio Algier writing competition withdraw their support!

Her description of Harvard reminded me of the time when I went to graduate school and everyone else had an NSF fellowship but I had no idea what one was:

Harvard’s hands-off approach might have been ideal if I wanted to “explore” and “find myself.” But after everything, I mainly wanted to explore lucrative careers and find myself incredibly wealthy. Given my lack of parental guidance and ignorance of elite social norms, the freedom that Harvard offered didn’t feel like freedom at all. Instead it felt like another way other people knew the rules and I was in the dark. (kindle loc 4167)

Right at the end of the book Nietfeld got access to her childhood records and realized that much of what she thought was her fault turned out to be just how the system worked:

I  saw in the records that from my very first therapy appointment after my parents’ divorce, discussions of my mom’s diagnosis and potential treatment took up as much space as my own. Professionals knew she was sick, but they didn’t hesitate to medicate me rather than her. When I found my descriptions of our living situation, I wondered why no one had investigated. A decade after Ingrid first showed up at our front door, she told me she was glad I hadn’t let her inside. She knew Child Protective Services would’ve taken me away: “It would have made a bad situation worse.” One downside of a broken child welfare system is that no one wants to use it. While some families, largely those of color, have their kids taken away because they’re poor, other families who need interventions, like mine, do not get them. Much later, Annette told me she’d filed at least one maltreatment report. They told her there was nothing they could do since I wasn’t in immediate danger. As far as she could tell, no action was taken. (kindle loc 5010)

All in all, I found the book compelling reading.  It's probably going to be used as a defense of how the current systems work, since clearly it's possible for someone to work herself out of the horrible situation she found herself in. But obviously that's survivorship bias. There were probably many kids like Nietfeld who didn't get her successful outcome and we'll never know their story.

Recommended, but you'll need a strong stomach to get through many sections of it.

Review: Lone Traveller - One Woman, Two Wheels and the World

 I picked up Lone Traveller at the library donations box for $1. When I picked it up I had no idea who Anne Mustoe was, but the first chapter had such a fresh attitude that I brought it home and read it in 2 days.

The book is not a linear travelogue, and so jumps around in time and trips. Mustoe starts off the book modestly, explaining that she always wondered why Devla Murphy chose to set off across Europe in the middle of winter rather than waiting until Spring so she could have good weather. Of course, by the middle of the book you're traversing the great Australian outback with her followed by stories of her traversing the silk road, and then you realize this is one tough cookie!

The big difference between British women writing about their travels and American women writing about their travels is the complete lack of incompetence in the British. They don't go for the self-pitying, I'm in such a mess that I need to do something crazy and totally incompetent in order to make up for a poor childhood, bad ex-husband, or some unsatisfactory relationship with a parent. Even when she is being harassed by the Chinese police and put on a bus and warned that bicycle touring in China was illegal, she would simply accept it, take the bus ride, and then after other adventures of a non-cycling nature, she would just get on her bike to keep going.

Mustoe travels in a much different style than I do. While I wouldn't feel comfortable cycling without knowing how to fix a flat, she flat out asserts that in most places you can find some mechanic who can fix your flats for you for pennies, a small sum for you but enough to make a living for them, and that there's no point learning how to fix a flat! That drives Mustoe to make certain decisions that I wouldn't have made --- for instance, she buys heavy bikes with heavy duty tires to minimize flat tires, and so travels slower while taking more time to do her trips (she quit her job to do her first big round the world trip and apparently her books made her famous enough and sold well enough that she never went back to work). As a result, while I look for mountains and views and try to stay high and cool, she goes for the flattish deserts and historical routes like the Silk route. Her knowledge of history is impeccable, and she clearly does a lot more studying of the history of the land she travels through than I do.

A surprising amount of the travel in the book is her putting her bicycle on buses, boats, and so on to get around obstacles or to get to the start (or finish) of a ride. Like myself, she eschews reservations, doesn't like camping, but carries a tent anyway. In many cases, she starts by asking if she can pitch a tent outside somebody's home and by the time evening rolls around she's invited into the home to stay for a night.

As a former principal of a school, she deals with potential predators with verve. She says she's perfected the icy stare and confident manner with which to scare of would-be harassers. Her stories in this regards are great. I think many people who are put off from traveling solo would do well to read her book. Recommended!

Review: The Peripheral

 I bought The Peripheral back when it was a $2 special.  I bounced off it and put it away without a thought. Then I started watching the Amazon TV show and decided that hey, I can read a book way faster than watching a TV show, so I tried again.

I realized now that William Gibson is actually not a very good writer. He's a great ideas person, with certain characters like Molly Millions which have obviously become iconic and will stick with you long after you're done with the book or story. But the actual writing style is detached, and the characters actually never develop during the story. What it's replaced by is a world-building style where the in-cluing is done densely, at a fast clip, and without long exposition. That style was innovative and unique when Gibson introduced it in the 1980s, but to be honest more modern writers have surpassed even Gibson at this point.

It's a cliche that the book is better than the TV show, but in this case the TV show is actually quite a bit better than the book. So I'm stuck watching video anyway in addition to reading the book. A win for Gibson, not so much a win for me.

Review: Growing up Human

 Growing Up Human is written by an archaeologist. The question behind the book is to ask why childhood takes so long for humans, and how the various pieces of it comes together. The early part of the book is fairly straightforward and no doubt you've heard about how puberty onset is affected by body fat. The details are interesting:

A study carried out by Taipei Medical University researchers found that for every extra gram of animal protein eaten a day, the age of a girl’s first period moved forward two months. This is something of a cycle, it seems, as mothers who hit puberty at an earlier age go on to have bigger children – and they are more likely themselves to have an earlier puberty. Somewhere in us is an insistent little voice telling us to accrue fat – so we can have more babies...Not only do we have critical levels of body fat for reproduction, we need much, much more fat than other primates. Our female rhesus macaques from the lab hover between 8–18 per cent body fat; human females struggle to reproduce with less than 17 per cent. (kindle loc 1054-1064)

There's quite a bit of section devoted to debunking the recent fad behind attachment parenting and all the baggage that goes with it, as well as an interesting factoid about how your teeth effectively have a scar in there which indicates your growth line:

 Being born is sufficiently traumatic that a baby’s body sort of stop-starts normal growth, and that stop-start shows up as a neonatal line, which is a scar through the inside of your teeth where all the little cells had their moment of existential panic. It exists in all of your kiddie teeth and even in ones you have as an adult – the first big chunky adult chewing tooth that comes in was actually forming before birth, so you can see the scar there too. (kindle loc 1933)

Brenna Hassett has a good sense of humor, especially when it comes to methods of baby carriage and how the body wrapping fad doesn't mean much:

 Babies who have gone on to lead full and happy adult lives have been positioned strapped to chests, strapped to boards, hung on walls, in their parents’ arms, in slings or even – and this is a personal favourite – strapped to a board and then hung on a wall. (kindle loc 2068)

There's a huge long section about breast feeding. She debunks all the myths about how easy breast feeding is, and notes that even macaques have difficulty with it:

It’s not just humans – research has shown macaques struggling and many monkeys are just, quite frankly, very bad at babies the first time around. But the rather cruel thing is that human mothers are made to feel particularly bad about it.

Mammal milk maven Katie Hinde and anthropologist Brooke Scelza were able to discuss breastfeeding with Himba mothers from Namibia, where every single mother was able to breastfeed, something that certainly isn’t true in most Westernised cultures. The authors picked out two key factors that accounted for this remarkable success rate: the support of other mothers, and the absence of any taboo or stigma associated with breastfeeding in public. The things that inhibit breastfeeding in other societies – like working hours or social rules that prevent frequent feeding – are simply not a part of Himba life, along with the stress or even the guilt associated with not breastfeeding. (kindle loc 2458-2465)

 I loved the section about the invention of grandmothers:

While male strategies for reproduction appear to consist of both making a bloody mess and captivating primatologists, the more subtle strategies of the female have often been overlooked. Some strategies aren’t even that subtle. While the rest of our primate relatives have been merrily living out the spans dictated them by sensible models of energy in, energy out, and fitting appropriate periods of dependence and maturity into their size-appropriate life spans, humans have been busy developing a world-changing evolutionary female adaptation. Something so radical that it may be single-handedly responsible for our reproductive success and the subsequent overrunning of the planet; something so unlikely so as to be almost unbelievable: grandmas...An incredibly small number of animals live past the ability to reproduce – even our own species’ males maintain some generative capacity until nearly the end of their lives. Here are some animals with grandmothers that are done having babies: Orcas, short-finned pilot whales, us. Here are some animals without grandmothers: every other animal in the world.13 There are plenty of species where some animals don’t reproduce for whatever reason – perhaps they are not the dominant breeding pair, perhaps their mate has died – and continue to live without reproducing, but this is a very different thing to what we (and those whales) do, which is to live past our biological capacity to reproduce. (kindle loc 3001-3025)

There's even a casual debunking of why human males are slightly bigger than human females:

 We might actually be mistaking the reason human males are a teeny bit bigger; perhaps rather than trying to become an ultimate fighting/loving champion, males are just bigger because females are smaller. And females are just smaller because they stop growing earlier so they can put that energy into babies because, as you may have picked up from the theme of this book, babies are important. (kindle loc 3307)

 The last part of the book covers the effects of poverty on childhood:

if poverty was ever classed as a cause of death it would be number one in the world – in every country. Poor children are more likely to suffer preventable childhood diseases, more likely to have growth falter and to die before they reach adulthood. When it comes to childhood, there is just the one real difference to reckon. It is the one that was there between the snarky schoolboys of Aristophanes and the slaves that served them, and it is still present today, and that is the time we give it. (kindle loc 4818)

The book points out that the history of human evolution is our gradually increasing investment in childhood, and the recent trends in American society to de-emphasize education and childhood is an aberration.  I read this book and highlighted many sections of it. It's definitely worth reading.

Review: Existential Physics

 Existential Physics is Sabine Hossenfelder's book about what is or is not scientific. Her beef with physicists is that sometimes they speculate without actually explicitly saying that they're doing so, and that some of those speculations have no evidence in support of them. There's chapter after chapter of this relatively short book where some of these questions (such as what happened before the big bang) are explored, and the answer is probably somewhat boring, but it's very likely that she is right --- there's so much that we don't know, and the scientific evidence only takes you so far. Past that, you get into the realm of religion or philosophy, and Hossenfelder points out that scientists aren't better equipped than the typical lay person to speculate in those realms.

The book is short, and it explores things like AI, quantum physics, cosmology, and math. One interesting insight is that it's kind of pointless to try to translate mathematics into plain English, because if it was easy and possible, then there wouldn't be a need for mathematical notation. So your best bet for actually understanding those topics is to dive into the math. But of course, not everyone has the time or inclination to put in that much time into math, so we end up with these stories that attempt to translate say, the Schrodinger Wave Equation into English, which then has the problems she describes, people stretching those analogies into talking about what the actual science doesn't say.

When I was going through this book, I kept saying to myself, "What she's saying is obvious. Why does she have to write it down?" After I finished the book I realized that what she saying wasn't always obvious, it's just that she said it in such a way that you see the reasoning. That's the hallmark of a great teacher, which makes this book worth reading. Recommended.

Review: Pixel Stand 2

 I've had a few friends buy the Pixel 6a over the holidays using my Superfans code, which grants both them and I a $100 coupon from the Google Play Store. The coupons aren't stackable, so you can't stack 3 of them to get yourself a free phone or anything like that --- they pretty much either get you a Pixel Stand 2 or a Google Pixel Buds Series A for free (or a $100 discount off say, the Pixel Buds Pro).  Unfortunately, the coupon is a discount off the regular price, so sale prices, etc do not apply.

The Pixel Stand 2 comes with a 30W charger, and can charge your Pixel phone at either 21 or 23W depending on whether you have a Pixel 6/7 or Pixel 6/7 Pro. The reason to use wireless chargers over regular wires is that the USB-C port is the first thing to go on most phones, and if you get your phone wet, it's not a good idea to plug it in. The standard Qi charging standard is set at 10W, which means the Pixel Stand 2 charges twice as fast.

In practice, you don't get the fastest charging speed unless your phone is below 50%. But that's fine. Even above 50% it's still faster than my old Qi charger. There's a fan in the stand which spins up to cool the phone (or maybe it's the charger that needs cooling). If you're in an office (for those of us who still visit offices), the Pixel Stand is great --- you'll drop it in for the time between the meetings and your phone charges as fast as when you plug in a wire, but without the hassle.

As a bonus, the stand lets you pick Google Photo Albums to display as a screen saver. Using Google Photo's face recognition feature, you can pick members of the family you'd like to see displayed and you'll get a random selection of those photos. This is especially great for me since I stopped using Google Photos as a data sink a few years ago when Google started charging for photo storage, so my screensaver only shows me pictures of my kids back when they were tiny.

At full retail price of $80, the Pixel Stand 2 is too expensive for my taste. But if you're looking for a good use of the Superfans coupon, I think this one is awesome! Recommended.

Review: Chivalry

 Chivalry is Collen Doran's graphic novel rendition of the Neil Gaiman short story of the same name. The story predates Doran's rendition of it by several years, and Doran reveals in the end-notes that it was her pandemic project, discussing how she envisioned it originally as an illuminated manuscript before giving up after many technical difficulties to render it in a more conventional format.

What is to Doran more conventional is for anyone else simply an amazing piece of comic book art. The book juxtapositions conventional side by side panels with entire full page (or in many cases an entire spread) illustrations that overwhelms the eyes with richness, detail, and story. Your eyes could linger on multiple details that serve the story while reading, and the story while simple (and short!) is charming and perfectly set off by Doran's illustrations.

The story is well worth your time, as is the amazing art. Recommended.

Review: Gorewear Shakedry Cap

 

I was so impressed by the Gorewear Shakedry Jacket, that when the Shakedry Cycling cap went on sale I bought one.  Little did I know that I would use it almost right away as a series of atmospheric rivers arrived during the California winter. I used this under my helmet, and one time I made the mistake of putting on the cap and forgetting to put on the helmet --- the feel of the cap means that I can't really feel any ventilation of the helmet when I'm wearing it!

As you can see from the above picture, water beads up nicely on the helmet and it doesn't let any water in. This is perfect since the Shakedry jacket does not have a hood. The brim of the cap doesn't quite protect your glasses from getting water on them, but on the other hand, there is a little bit of shielding. When worn under a helmet it can get hot if it's not raining, but if it's raining you don't mind. If it's not raining, don't wear the cap!

At full price no way would I consider this worth the money, but at the current $33 discounted price I consider it a reasonable purchase. It's light enough that I will carry it on tour.

Recommended.

Review: Anker Nano 3 511 Charger

 Chargers are unsexy technology, to the point where smartphone makers no longer ship them in the box because your'e assumed to have a billion of them at home. The Nano 3 511 Charger, however, is exceptional. I bought one over the holidays for $18, and it's tiny. 30W is more than sufficient for most smartphones, but what amazed me was that I plugged it into a Dell XPS 13, and it would charge that as well while it was running! If you do reboot the XPS 13 while plugged into the charger, it would complain about being plugged into a not very powerful charger, but it would still boot, run Windows Updates, etc. The charger does get hot, but what charger doesn't when maximum load is being pulled from it?

The charger is light enough that even when plugged in upside down it doesn't fall out, and the foldable prongs prevent damage when travel. These are way better than the 18W bulky chargers that came with previous iterations of Pixel phones. Well worth the money.

Review: Lamy Toothpaste Squeezer

 If you squeeze toothpaste out of a tube, you know that it's a pain to deal with different people squeezing different parts of the tube so you always end up having to squeeze it from the bottom again when it's your turn. The toothpaste squeezer solves this issue.  This particular one also turns into a stand for your toothpaste, which means it dispenses nicely. It also has a key that lets you get toothpaste out by turning a key. I tried it and it really works. Recommended.

Review: Far Sector

 When I saw that Far Sector was written by N.K. Jemisin I checked it out of the library. It's a green lantern novel, but about an unusual lantern with an unusual ring. This green lantern is a black woman, and is investigating the first murder in 500 years in an alien city far from home.

The setup is unique, but unfortunately, the alien civilization doesn't feel very alien --- it has all the conflicts and power struggles of contemporary New York, and the injection of cyberspace with some bitcoin jargon as well as the introduction of the default state of being emotionless (with a counter-drug to alleviate that) not helping things along. We don't get a good explanation of how people can be motivated without emotions (or even how society would reproduce), nor are the characters and power groups within the society interact well enough to get invested in them or believe that they are real.

The protagonist, Jo Mullein, is much more fleshed out. Unfortunately, we don't get any idea as to why she was selected to be a green lantern, nor do we get a good understanding of how committed she is to the green lantern corps.

Part of this is the high expectations I had coming into the comic. Consider what Alan Moore was able to do with the green lantern corps in 23 pages, and I expected far more from Jemisin in a 12-issue run. It's probably very good compared with the standard writers the green lantern books get nowadays, but it's far less interesting than anything by Alan Moore.

Review: Nulksen Tire Inflator

 The battery on my costco purchased jump starter (bought in 2014) is dying to the point where it couldn't even inflate one tire when fully charged, so it was time to get another one. The Nulksen Tire Inflator was on sale for $40 during the holidays, so I picked one up.

It came with a cloth case, a hose for Schraeder valves, a pin for balls, and a couple more weird nozzles for whatever other thing you might want to use it for. The hose screws into the device, and I immediately took it out of the box and air'd up all 4 tires of the car with no problems. The device vibrates while doing so, enough to move the inflator and scratch it on the ground, but otherwise it worked.

The USB C plug recharges it using USB C which is very nice, and it can act as a flash light as well. I tried the ball inflator and it worked, and I even tried it on my wife's e-bike in Schraeder mode, and it checked out with decent accuracy. I don't dare try it for high pressure presta tires, since I already have good floor pumps for those. Besides, exercise is good for you.

For $40 + tax, getting something that works well is fine! It's way lighter than what it replaced!

Review: Fairy Tale

 Fairy Tale is Stephen King's novel of a world crossing adventure. It describes a 17-year old who in the course of helping a mysterious neighbor, discovers that the neighbor's shed contains a well which leads to another world. Like many examples of the world-crossing genre, it turns out that he has a special role to fulfill in that world.

The story builds slowly, and Charlie Reade (the protagonist) has a transparent, cheerful, interesting voice which makes for great reading. King is probably at his best when convincing you that Reade is a real person, and establishes the milieu he lives in as no one else can. The protagonist being an almost adult rather than a young child makes the book different than many other examples of the world-crossing genre, and lends the story believability.

Once the story crosses over to the world of Empris, however, a lot of the world building feels lacking. There's definitely no sense of deep history, and many set pieces or important plot points feel like superficial objects meant to act as MacGuffins rather than something real. For instance, one major motivation for Charlie to enter deep into the enchanted capital explicitly draws inspiration from Something Wicked This Way Comes, but at the end of the book the explanation is a huge disappointment.

All throughout the book are sprinkled references to Bradbury and HP Lovecraft, and there are many pieces of brilliance in the novel --- more than enough to keep me reading. It's not a coincidence that the novel is set in Illinois, the same locale as in Bradbury's novel. The climax feels like it comes a bit too easy, but the easy to read prose and moments of brilliance kept me going anyway. Recommended.

Men's Carpis

 I had a pair of Men's Capri pants I had somehow found online ages and ages ago, which were perfect for cycling and bike touring. They were light, had belt loops, and didn't extend far below the knees so you could ride in them and not worry about pants legs getting trapped in the chain. One of them completely fell apart during a tour one year, forcing me to buy women's capris when I was in Bolzano, but those were so narrow-waisted that even Arturo told me that I wasn't allowed to gain weight during that tour. (Perish the thought!)

I could not for my life of me find replacements. "Men's capris" returns crappy results. I eventually learned that the manly term for carpis is 3/4 pants! Jack Wolfskin was the first to come up with their Desert Valley 3/4 pants.  Their standard price of $70 was too much for my blood, and even at $49 on sale it was barely tolerable. I got them and they ride well, with side-pockets that are perfect for a phone and a wallet, as well as two button-up pockets on the outside of the thighs for things you don't need while riding. I like them enough, but they were so pricey I didn't think it's worth a second pair.

Amazon is full of knock-off Chinese products, so I looked on amazon, and 33,000ft has a Men's Hiking Golf Capri pair of shorts for a much more reasonable (though still expensive) $35. These come with double zipper pockets on each side. The belt loops are a bit wide (for clipping say, a badge for going to the office), but the premium feature on these are the cuffs at the bottom of the hem. There's a QR cord there for cinching them down tight so they don't rub against brake cables along the top tube while riding. These are a clear winner and it's worth getting a second pair or watching if they go on sale.

If you hike in California, there are many good reasons to wear full-length pants --- tick protection and mud protection makes sense. But those same pants are annoying to wear on the bike and frequently get chewed up by bicycle gears and chains, so for the daily cyclist, these are the pants to get. I'm glad I found them!

Review: HeCloud Diving Flashlight

 I've had poor experiences with underwater flashlights in the past, and they've never survived more than a couple of trips. I knew I was going to need flashlights for the Puerto Rico trip because of the bioluminescence tour we wanted to go to. The HeCloud Diving lights came in a set of 2, and at $27 seemed worth the risk.

I was very impressed when I saw that the lights came not only with AAA battery holders, but also rechargeable lithium ion batteries that are custom fit for the flashlight. You can't carry those in checked baggage, so be careful! But having both meant that we could carry the lithium ion batteries in carry on, and also carry the AAA battery holders (preloaded) and not bother carrying the chargers.

The lights were bright, easy to use even for Boen, and robust --- we didn't have to be careful with them or baby them. We didn't actually dive with them, but they were also light. And if one flooded, we had a spare right away. I wish they hadn't bothered with the strobe feature, but in any case these were good lights and I can recommend them.

Review: The Big Questions of Philosophy

 After listening to David K Johnson's Sci-Phi, I picked up The Big Questions of Philosophy expecting similar levels of entertainment. But I was disappointed.  This wasn't because he's any less competent as a lecturer or that the ideas he explains are wrong or badly defined, but because of how much time is spent on Religion rather than philosophy. While I get that some people who study Philosophy might want to spend a lot of time thinking about omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence, since I don't actually think God exists, that's like spending time thinking about the physics of how Santa Claus gets down chimneys.

The rest of the course is reasonable, the discussion of free will, the existence of government, and the quick tour of Rawlings and his detractors, but I wish he'd spent more time on that instead of religion.

I definitely recommend Sci-Phi a lot more than this great courses series.

Review: Troy

 Troy is the third book in Stephen Fry's Greek Myths trilogy, and to my surprise it doesn't include the Odyssey, just the Iliad. As a retelling, it's much more detailed than Rosemary Suthill's children's books, and goes into details about Achilles and the backstory in gruesome detail. The narrative voice is enjoyable, and I had a lot of fun. Recommended.

2022 Spanish Virgin Islands: Epilogue

We celebrated Xiaoqin's birthday at a restaurant with Mark Brody, with both Bowen and I having swordfish burgers, an exotic specialty we'd never had before. 

 We spent the next day touring Old San Juan's forts, where Boen and Boen got inducted as junior rangers. The weather was warm and beautiful and we got some great food in old San Juan. The condo we'd rented was in fact, exactly in between the awful first place we rented and the noisy hotel we'd stayed on the second night, but this place was quiet and had great facilities.

Our return flight was marred by an unusual snow storm in Seattle that cancelled hundreds of flights out of that airport and delayed our return to San Jose by 6 hours, but after all that we got home. Our casualties on this trip were limited to my diving mask from my 2007 dive certification, and my pair of Keen sandals.

I would agree with my wife that it was ok doing the trip once, but we felt like we exhausted all the possibilities of the Spanish Virgin Islands and had no need to return for another visit.

Review: Great Courses - The Theory of Everything

 I started watching The Theory of Everything as a bit of a lark --- Dr. Don Lincoln of Fermi Lab is an experimentalist, and I that it's a very different perspective from the purely theoretical physicists' take. The video covers everything from Relativity to Quantum Chromodynamics, Quantum Electrodynamics, the Standard Model the Electroweak Unification, and all the details therein. What it provided that's somewhat unique in terms of presentation is a perspective on the difference between (for instance) Grand Unified Theory (GUT) and the Theory of Everything (TOE). It also provides a historical perspective on physics and all the successful unifications in the past, as well as the unanswered mysteries such as Dark Energy, Dark Matter (they're not related), why we still don't have a theory of Quantum Gravity, why we still don't know what caused inflation and what topics of ongoing research are happening. The approach is light on math (though yes, equations still happen) but the presentation is engaging.

It's a great way to consolidate the lots of little pieces of understanding I picked up here and there, and was definitely worth my time. It's available on Kanopy, and therefore free to most people who have access to a library.

2022 Spanish Virgin Islands: Punta Arenas to Punta Del Rey Marina

 Waking up pre-civil twilight, I did my morning routine, making coffee for everyone, including one last pancake for Boen. By first light, everyone was awake and ready to raise anchor and set sail. Weighing anchor was easy, and raising sail was also easy because of the light wind. In fact, once the sails were up I started worrying about whether that 2.5 hour journey would end up being much longer, since we did no better than 3 knots!

Fortunately, once we cleared Punta Arenas the wind picked up significantly. It also changed direction frequently, requiring us to constantly adjust our sails and course as we tried to head up as much as we could to avoid having to come about. We got to see sunrise from the Yamuy, and constantly adjusted the auto-pilot. At one point the auto-pilot started to give CAN bus errors, and we'd have to sail manually while the darn thing rebooted itself.

To our surprise, the wind picked up and gave us 5-6 knots of speed, and by the time we rounded Cabeza De Perro, we were doing the better part of 7 knots and debating whether we had time to sail further so as not to arrive at the marina too early! We called the Sail Caribe and they said they would be waiting for us so we sailed directly to the harbor entrance, dropping sails at the last minute and then motoring in slowly to give ourselves time to mount the docklines and fender lines so we were ready to dock at the fuel dock.

At the fuel dock, we were greeted by the crew members and I was relinquished of the responsibility for the sailboat. The diesel bill turned out to be $94, surprising Arturo and I as well as the dock crew. "Did you sail alot?" asked the crew to Arturo. "As much as we could for the last 3-4 days, but we ran the generator every night to make water." It was a gratifyingly cheap diesel bill.

The crew cast off, turned the boat around, and immediately docked opposite the fuel dock, surprising me. We were plugged in with the AC turned on and told that the dock taxi would be here to pick us up 15 minutes before our taxi arrived. There was nothing to do but clean up the boat, get our $500 cash deposit returned, and eat lunch. It was Xiaoqin's birthday and Google was kind enough to grant us such an amazing deal on a trade-in that she got a new Pixel 7 for her birthday.

The offboarding onto the taxi went without incident, as did Arturo's departure at the airport. Our sailing trip was over.

2022 Spanish Virgin Islands: Bahia Isla Chiva to Punta Arena

 We had a leisurely breakfast, turned on the engines, and raised the sail. With a tail wind behind us, we easily made 5 knots past the tip of Vieques, going 3 miles out to dump the septic tanks again, before turning into a beam reach and arriving at Punta Arena in less than 3 and a half hours. Upon arrival, the point seemed to be filled with boats, but we would later find that one boat after another would depart, leaving us with only 2 other boats to share the bay with. What got us to stay despite the apparent crowd was that most of the boats looked like they would not support anyone on it staying overnight, so we were confident that it wouldn't be a loud party.

We dropped anchor in 15' of water, and snorkeled around in what looked like mediocre water. The water was calm, however, making me eager to make use of the paddleboard. To deliver the kids to the beach. I discovered that the approach to the beach was very steep, so ended up delivering Bowen and Boen to separate parts of the beach as I found a better entry later. I decided I join the snorkelers, but the snorkeling was fairly mediocre.

The beach was unlike any of the other beaches we'd seen in the Spanish Virgin Islands: the sand was coarse and easy to clean off. We walked the length of the beach heading South, and unlike the beach at Bahia Isla Chiva we pretty much had it to ourselves, as one boat after another pulled off --- the only other sailboat, a Catamaran, pulled off to join a BBQ on Puerto Rico proper.

When we were done, I swam back to the boat, got out the paddleboard and ferry'd the kids back to the sailboat, making them jump from the paddleboard to swim the last 10 yards so that they'd be sand free when they got to the swim ladder. I then used the paddleboard to explore more of the Bay to the North, and found some places that looked quite a bit clearer. It would have been a pain, however, to move the boat, since the coral was interspersed with sand, making it tricky to find a good place to anchor.

Arturo and I went snorkeling to see if the snorkeling was any better --- it was indeed a lot better, and he spotted lots of stuff, but I was tired and the visibility still wasn't great --- the water had looked much better from the paddleboard than it did from snorkeling. Besides, we had to pack! The next morning had to be an early start as we had been warned that it took 2.5 hours of sailing from Punta Arenas back to Punta Del Rey Marina. We extracted all the luggage out of one of the V-berths after showering, and started packing away everything that could be packed.

That evening, we enjoyed our last beautiful sunset from the beach, had dinner, and did a little bit of star gazing before clouds came over and occluded our views. I would wake up in the middle of the night to pee and would see one last shooting star in the early morning before waking up for real the next morning.

Review: Heroes - The Greek Myths Reimagined

 Heroes is part two of Stephen Fry's Greek Myths books. This book covers Heracles, Orpheus, Perseus, Theseus, and many of the heroes from Greek mythos. It's all told in a modern style, with many entertaining asides and snide remarks, and is just heck of a lot of fun to read. It's completely uncensored, so I'm sure many people would have issues reading it to their kids, but you know what, that's what makes the book so good. If you've always wondered about all the Greek mythology references being made here and there in popular literature, this series is well worth your time.

Review: What if? 2

 I queued up for What if? 2 as soon as the library's digital queue opened. In many ways, it's a great book for fans of What if?  In other ways it was a bit disappointing. This time, it seemed like he picked questions that weren't nearly as interesting as the ones in the previous book (such as, what if you filled the solar system with soup). In some cases, he has entire filler chapters that are filled with questions, but no answers, or at most a small cartoon as an answer.

Nevertheless, the answers that were in the book are still well researched, entertaining (when there are answers), and full of jokes. Bowen turned up his nose at the book at first but I loaded it onto a kindle for a car trip and he found himself reading it.

Recommended.

2022 Spanish Virgin Islands: Esperanza to Bahia de Isla Chiva

 I looked through the guidebook and realized that there was an anchorage we had bypassed on the way to Esperanza, which was Bahia de Isla Chiva, which supposedly had good snorkeling. Sure, we'd have to do some motoring, but after the long day yesterday and dropping off Niniane and Dan this morning, we could go there, drop anchor, and check it out. If we found it good, we could stay there, otherwise we could sail to Point Arenas and not be worse for where.

Dropping Niniane and Dan off turned out not to be so dramatic --- despite the luggage (and they'd taken a lot of the non-perishables off our hands), when the dinghy wasn't loaded with extraneous people (i.e., my family), once they could get Niniane and Dan off they could just hand the luggage over without any drama or even tying the dinghy to the dock! So after all that, the dinghy was back on the Yamuy's davits by 9:30am, and we motor'd over to Bahia de Isla Chiva.

We were the only boat at that location, so we anchor'd in about 15' of water over seagrass, and then jumped in with mask, snorkel and fins to check our work. There was a surprising amount to see, starting with a starfish that had parked itself over our anchor chain, and then a barracuda had settled in near the island. The snorkeling was mediocre compared with past experiences, but with the water this churned up there's only so much you can do. Still it took a good hour to do all the snorkeling we wanted to do before it was lunch time.

After lunch, I paddleboarded Boen to shore, but immediately realized that it was too hard, and when returning to the Yamuy, declined to paddleboard Bowen over. We swam instead as I noticed that despite giving me a headstart, Arturo made it to the beach snorkeling faster than I could paddleboard. Swimming a shore was fine, and the kids enjoyed the beach while we walked along it.

The beach was popular, being less than half an hour's drive from Esperanza, and we met some fairly large groups, but they would all disappear around 4pm, since most of them had a bioluminescent tour to go to! Arturo had wanted to snorkel on the Western end of the point, but it looked so rough that I talked him out of it. He did find a pair of shoes that were his size and were abandoned though! At around 4pm, clouds appeared over the island and we swam back to the Yamuy.

We debated what to do the next day. The charter company recommended spending the night at Punta Arenas, but sailing back all the way to Isla Palominos was a possibility, though it was likely to be crowded and noisy with parties. We saw that Icacos was also a possibility, but if you got there and conditions were unpleasant you didn't have a lot of choices left. We decided to just sail to Punta Arenas and have a look.

2022 Spanish Virgin Islands: Culebrita to Esperanza, Vieques

 We woke up early on thanksgiving sail determined to sail. The sail from Culebrita to Esperanza was mostly a beam reach followed by a run, and after having to motor the first half of our trip we were determined to make do without fossil fuels as much as possible this day. With an early breakfast, we swam around a bit to see if there was anything to the reef behind the boat, but all we saw was turtles, which were still great.

Once out of the point around Culebrita and headed east, we hoisted the sail, discovering that the sail ties instead of the zippers around the sail covers were a pain to untangle. With the motorized winch, however, getting the mainsail up was a snap, and soon we were reaching towards Vieques with a 10 knot wind, making 5 knots.

With a gradually strengthening wind, we soon made the 3 mile mark and could open the sewage tanks and dump the tanks. We were suspicious as the dumping of the tanks was quite obvious on one side but not the other. We would eventually figure out that this was because the leeward side pontoon's dump valves would be below water but the windward side wasn't, so you couldn't actually see it.

Sailing is a delight --- there's no engine noise, and on a beam reach you have plenty of speed. Nevertheless the crossing was rough enough that Arturo needed medication, which Mark fortunately had.

At Punta Este, we cleared the rocks and started heading West. This put the wind behind us, which calmed down the journey even further. The Yamuy didn't like sailing directly downwind, however, and all our efforts to sail wing-and-wing came to naught. The entire Eastern half of the south coast of Vieques is off limits, since it was once run by the navy and there could be unexploded ordnance to snag the anchor. We sailed pasts all the harbors until we reached Esperanza, where we spotted the Pier (said to be good snorkeling), and dropped anchor. We identified that we were short a few gallons of water, and there were more groceries we wanted to buy, so after lunch, hoping that a supermarket would be open, we dropped the dinghy off its davits and proceeded to the Esperanza dinghy dock.

The Esperanza Pier was obviously not a site to park the dinghy, but the "dinghy dock" so to speak was in bad shape. The pier itself looked like the frame had been taken apart for parts, and the dock wasn't low enough to step off the dinghy onto the pier. We'd have to have multiple people gripping the dinghy, while Dan the climber and Mark would knot tie it up. We would eventually figure out that the right way to do this was to get people off the dinghy before trying to tie it up. I was not looking forward to doing this in the dark for our bioluminescent tour!

Esperanza didn't look like a town with anything other than hotels and supermarkets. Despite being Thanksgiving day, there was a surprising number of boutique hotels and tourists in town! With our luck the way it was, we visited all 4 supermarkets and it was the last one that was opened. We bought ice cream, and more provisions and water, and somehow there was an avocado in the grocery bag at checkout so I paid for it. We couldn't figure out who had put it there, and eventually it was decided that some previous customer had decided against it at the last minute and I'd just unfortunately assumed that it was one of us.

Back at the Yamuy, Arturo had time to snorkel to the pier, but upon coming back he said, that you would only do it for exercise. I didn't feel the need to exercise, but a rainbow came up and it looked gorgeous. Of course, we were immediately showered by a raincloud as it swept over us.

Dinner was the traditional turkey - presented vegetable plate, and Arturo pulled out the stop to make a paella with what we had. The sunset was gorgeous, but I knew I had to dig out the flash light for that night time landing at the "dinghy dock." The cruising guide said that Esperanza was trying to be a yachting destination, but without improving the dinghy dock there was no way I'd go for a repeat visit!

Nevertheless, we all made it safely to shore in the dark, and did Abe's Bio Bay tour. Arturo had done previous bioluminescence tours and told us to set our expectations low ,but it was magical --- mosquito bay truly had the best bioluminescence anyone in the party had seen --- you'd dig your kayak paddle into the water and it would light up with a ghostly light. You could cup your hands into the water and blow it and it would sparkle. You could splash the water and it would light up when it fell back in. I was stunned and amazed and wished it lasted longer. Apparently thje bans on swimming and anchoring were fairly recent --- one of the hurricanes had caused mosquito bay to lose its bioluminescence for months, and not knowing how to bring it bad, they just banned everything until it came back. We have no footage or photos of this tour because none of the equipment we had could see the bioluminescence. You'll just have to see it yourself. And now we understood why there were so many tourists and boutique hotels in Esperanza --- there was no ferry that ran after the tours, so everyone who came to do a bio bay tour had to stay for the night!

We made it back to the boat by around 9:00pm, got everyone asleep. This was the last night Niniane and Dan would be on the boat, but we had no particular plans for the next few days so we knew we could take our time the next morning. It was too cloudy for star gazing anyway, so the kids got to go to sleep early.

Review: Mythos

 Mythos is Stephen Fry's retelling of Greek Mythology. If you've read anything by Stephen Fry, you can hear the voice coming through, with lots of stories about the Titans, Pandora's box, all told in a modern fashion, with lots of remarks and references and footnotes. It's incredibly readable and I thoroughly enjoyed it, learning about all the minor tales that I somehow didn't know, as well as a retelling of well known stories. Fry doesn't hold back from all the craziness the Greeks attributed to the gods. Well worth my time. Recommended.

2022 Spanish Virgin Islands: Punta Del Soldado to Ensenada Honda

 In the morning, we complained about the mooring ball knocking against the hull all  night. We'd barely gotten the boys into the water when the dive boat showed up! We swam over to it with our dive cards, and they told us that our first dive would be right there in Punta Del Soldado! On that dive, Arturo spotted a lobster (which I didn't see), and Niniane found a shark!

The second dive was at the same place we had anchored out on our first arrival to Culebra, where the dive boat tied up at a mooring buoy marked "Dive only" Despite killing a lion fish and trying to use it to bait a shark, we never found the shark the dive guide was trying to lure out. It was a nice dive anyway.

When we got back to the Yamuy, Dan announced that the referigerators were no longer powered. A flurry of texts back and forth had us removing panels, swapping fuses, and all sorts of other shenanigans trying to get it to get fixed and stay fixed, but eventually we discovered that just turning off the freezer would let the refrigerator work. Sail Caribe offered to come over late the next morning with a refrigerator, but since we wanted a quieter less rollicking night that night anyway, we decided to just visit the town of Dewey from Ensenada Honda and reprovision with food that didn't demand a freezer.

We motor'd into Ensenada Honda, and dropped anchor right in front of the romantically named Pirate's Blight, dropped the dinghy off the davits, and motor'd to town with garbage and so on in a hurry, since the grocery stores were about to close. We pulled into the dinghy dock where Boen got his ice cream so we could be "customers', while Arturo, Niniane and Dan provisioned the boat with canned food. We would have stayed for dinner, but we needed to eat everything in the freezer that was about to go bad!

That night, we ate everything in the freezer --- the seafood, the sausages, and the remaining burgers. The star gazing was surprisingly good in Ensenada Honda, since we were far enough away that there wasn't extreme light pollution. There was even some bioluminescence!

On anchor, in a very sheltered harbor, we finally had the quiet peaceful night everyone wanted and needed!

2022 Spanish Virgin Islands: Ensenada Honda to Culebrita

 We got up early, wanting to sail at first light. Well, sail was the wrong word. There was still sufficient weather from the East that prolonging the 45 minute motoring to Culebrita into a 2-3 hour sail seemed ill-advised.  Indeed, making our way out, we were greeted by a storm that gave us rainbows later after it passed us.

Arturo and I looked around for good anchorages and potentially good snorkeling for after Culebrita. The guidebooks had recommended the hike to the lighthouse, as well as the Jacuzzi hot springs on the north side of the island, but wrote that the snorkeling was only good on the side of the island with no good anchorages.  There was said to be good snorkeling near Playa Zoni, but it looked like questionable anchoring,  being so exposed. The most promising anchorage seemed to be Bahia de Almodovar, but that would require backtracking.

Arriving at Culebrita, the Bay had quite a few boats, but there was one obvious parking spot in the middle of the Bay between a few boats so I anchored there, calling for 55' of anchor chain but by the time we were done it was more like 70'. We settled there and its seemed like a nice spot. Mark wasn't feeling good, so he decided to skip the first excursion, but the rest of us decided to go hike to the lighthouse.

The kids resisted, but Boen finally agreed to be ferried to the beach via paddleboard, which I'd yet to use on the trip, so I did that, landing the paddleboard on the beach. Xiaoqin decided to stay and take care of him.

Hiking on Caribbean islands rarely impresses me, but the lighthouse hike was surprisingly good. There were lots of hermit crabs, and the hike had more wild butterflies flitting about the trail than any hike I'd been on. The lighthouse at the top was broken down and the lighthouse tower unsafe to climb, but there was a weather station which was a great place to get a panoramic view of the area.

After we got back I swapped with Xiaoqin and she hiked up to the lighthouse while I dealt with Boen. Actually, Boen wanted to return to the boat, so I paddleboarded him back to the Yamuy, where Mark had turned off the generator after filling the water tanks with fresh water. I then walked over to the Jaccuzzis for the view, destroying my Keen Newport sandals in the mean time. I would discover that Keen had switched to an "eco-friendly" glue, which would cause sole separation after only a limited use. I really liked Keen sandals but this experience will keep me from buying any more Keen sandals for the foreseeable future.

After all the exploration, we went back to the boat for a sandwich lunch. By this time Mark was feeling better. From the top of the weather station we had seen the "snorkeling beach", and it looked like fantastic snorkeling, so we arranged an expedition to do so. This time, I ferried the kids back to the beach on the paddleboard, but then swam this time as our plan was to snorkel. It turned out that the lone mooring ball in the bay was marked "dinghy only", but it probably was too much trouble to get out the dinghy for the short distance.

The snorkeling beach was a bust. The surf had churned it up so there was no visibility and the waters so rough that I scraped myself getting near the reef. We abandoned the idea, though Mark did end up going to the lighthouse and the Jaccuzi.

We were told that turtles were easy to see on the far end of the beach near the Jaccuzzis hiking trail, and indeed, I spotted no more than 4 turtles there. After 4pm, boats started leaving the Bay, and while there were still 3 boats that would overnight there, things got a lot quieter, and we had a nice quiet dinner followed by star gazing and some luminescence observations. There was no question of moving the boat --- it was unlikely that we would find a better spot to hang out overnight. The star gazing was great, with the lighthouse beacon on the weather station pointing East and therefore not interfering with our night vision. Culebrita was indeed a hidden jewel of the area.

Review: The Story of the Tour de France 2019

 I was a big fan of McGann's previous Story of the Tour de France, and when I saw they had a report of the 2019 tour for about $2, I tried it. It turns out that a format that works  in long form when you collect about 20 year's of racing history doesn't work when it's just one year. It reads like a long Velonews article, and you're left without sufficient context year after year, which was one of the best things about their collections.

My guess is, when they have collected enough updates for 20 years they'll publish it all in one volume. At that point it would be worth your time to read/buy that volume. Until then, I'm staying away from these annual updates. Not only is the price bad, without sufficient context there's just no point.