recompile your kernel

Been working hard. Real hard. I turned in my timecard yesterday, and was chatting with Coach about the sheer amount of work being spilled into the website. He asked if they could start calling me Da Man around the shop if I finally got this puppy whooped into shape. I said I would prefer Da Geek or something, even though most people at the shop call me Da Burglar.

Liz came up and slapped down her timecard right next to mine.

“Dane, you see this. 82 hours of work in two weeks! What are you complaining about, with your 76? That’s nothing. That’s nothing!”

I flipped my card over, revealing 26 additional hours spent working at the Hook.

“Oh.”

Even with that, I’ve still managed to get out and have some adventures. Two days ago after work I went out on the far-side of the Hook and practiced waterstarting for an hour or so. Yesterday the wind in the River was fairly light so I finally got a chance to sail out of the Event Site, which is the biggo hangy-hangout on the Hood River part of the Columbia. I didn’t have enough wind (or enough sail or really enough skill) to waterstart, so I just uphauled and got out into the River. I went out and back three times (which, for a river that’s a mile wide, adds up to a decent session), got into the harness a couple times, and had a good time just lazin’ about in some light wind conditions.

What’s more? I actually ended up DOWNWIND, which is the opposite direction of DOWNRIVER, which is the opposite direction that Rowena wants me to go.

Progress? You bet your ill-fitting Speedo with your hands held behind your back and your unit thrust forward.

Let’s see, what else, over the last couple days?

I started figuring out the steamy underbelly that is Hood River’s covert technological society. There’s a lot of brainpower in this town, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of computer programmers/designers/coders, that hide in their home offices or above Andrew’s Pizza or beneathe the sidewalks. Something can happen, here. My spider-sense is tingling.

Met Bruce Peterson, the man whose name is all over my Sailworks 4.4 Revolution sail of ill-fame. There are pictures of this man at The Hatchery, thirty feet in the air. These pictures are typically found in Windsurfing Magazine, shot by Eric Sanford. Eric Sanford is an assistant editor of Windsurfing Magazine. The head editor of Windsurfing Magazine spends his summers in White Salmon, right across the River from ol’ Hoody town.

It was never a really big part of my life (for some reason I never caught the aviation bug), but I keep finding myself talking airplanes with customers down at the Hook. One guy studied at University of North Dakota – Grand Forks. Another guy is building a RV-8 in a hangar at The Dalles (my uncle is building an RV-6A in Minnetonka), and is sticking a 300 horse engine in it. One family flies from Idaho to The Dalles every couple weeks, picks up their van that they store in the airport parking lot, and drives down to Hood River to windsurf for the weekend.

“Our daughter has been travelling a lot for the last couple years. Right now she’s in Hawaii, and before that she was all over the East Coast for a year. She’s taken to a gypsy lifestyle.”

“You mean she steals children and plays the accordion?”

“… Dane, you’re a weird one.”