Manai'a Explorations
HC SVNT DRACONES

2010 Cash Flow Mortgage 36.89% Automobile 24.58% Home Improvement 22.43% Grocery 3.94% Utilities 3.75% Insurance 2.29% Dogs 1.99% Restaurants 1.39% Accountant 1.08% Exercise 1.01% Camera 0.78% Entertainment 0.74% Deductible 0.49% Fuel 0.33% clothes 0.27% Hair cut 0.08%

Occasionally I get to mix work and pleasure. Photography is a hobby. Engineering is work. We needed to record the nameplate data on a CT that was in service. The bare conductors that connect to the CT have 13,800 volts between them, so approaching the CT was problematic. Gary and I rigged up a means to photograph the CT nameplate from the ground with an insulated telescoping fiberglass pole. It worked beautifully and got me thinking of pole mounted photography and videography possibilities.

July 2005. I had just quit my corporate job and was about to embark on my first foray into entrepreneurship. I was going to be a small owner in a partnership. My colleagues at the corporation thought it was a risky move. I put on a façade of total confidence. A few weeks later, I woke up alone in a Waikiki hotel and thought, “What have I done?” Thinking back, I have to laugh at myself. My perception of the risk I was taking was so inflated and my denial of my fear was so unconscious. But before I arrived in Hawaii, I took a wonderful bunch of teenagers to San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico and for a week, we helped build a very modest house for a very poor woman. The kids and I were slogging away at our manual labor in the oppressive heat and humidity and this big gringo showed up in a beat up van. He called himself an electrician and said he was a friend of the home owner. He brought tools out of his van and started helping us. I was suspicious at first – I had a bunch of teenagers I was resp...

Last night at the gym, a young woman was reading How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It: Tactics, Techniques, and Technologies for Uncertain Times by James Wesley Rawles. I asked her how she came to be reading such a book and she explained that she had heard about the book on Fox News and she had lots of anxiety about the economy and the national debt. She wants to be ready for the end of civilization. A few days earlier, I read an editorial by a very fearful Ted Nugent - Be Prepared for Evil . I've been reading Warren Buffet's biography The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder. Buffet's father was a US Senator from Nebraska. You could take his rhetoric, his fears and anxieties, his paranoia, from his era - Great Depression, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower - and drop it into a contemporary Fox News broadcast and have no idea that you were listening to rational logic that was 70 years old. It is identical to the rhetoric, fears, anxieties...

“We think with words, and when we don’t think with words, I think we come close to what mystics might describe as a mystical experience, because I don’t think that words would come into that.”1 *** There is a beautiful 80 foot waterfall in the jungle of Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. After a good rain, when the stream is running hard, Jane Goodall’s famous chimpanzees make pilgrimages to the waterfall and perform magnificent, ritual displays. As they approach the waterfall and hear the water crashing down on the rocks, their hair bristles, indicating excitement. They stand upright and rhythmically sway left and right. “They pick up and throw great rocks and branches. They leap to seize the hanging vines, and swing out over the stream in the spray-drenched wind …”2 After the display, they sit meditatively on streamside rocks and watch the water flow by. *** Years ago, my friend Glenn blew a launch at Miller Canyon near Sierra Vista, Arizona. For a hang glider to fly, for it to ...

The cab should be on next week. I'm guessing my truck will be on the road around Easter. .