We're back in Oriental - it was windy and stormy all day. We set out from Belhaven early (7:30ish) and had to motor most of the way due to the winds being pretty much the opposite of the direction we wanted to go. We heard a call for the Coast Guard to rescue a sailboat - don't know how large, but they said that two people were in the water. We didn't see any submerged craft, so hopefully they were safely rescued and also, their vessel....this is the Coast Guard "fast boat" - Keith and Denise are probably familiar...


I hope everyone ended up safe....

More birdie photos on the way back today - this one is a brown pelican, I think....we saw the "family" of birds from the previous post on the way back also....I'm beginning to believe they are bald eagles....



I also love to look at the "working" boats...here are shrimp boats at home for the day on the intercoastal waterway....


This is coming back into our home port in Oriental....those of you that have sailed with us know this corner....there is a sandbar - seen here....this means that the water is LOW!!! Most days, you can see this sandbar thru about 2' of brackish water....we made it into the marina fine.
This is neat - every time we come into our marina, we pass a family fishing outfit - Endurance Fishing. I think I've mentioned getting fresh shrimp and fish from them before. They have two little boys that we see along the docks - tan - running around together - throwing minnow nets, fishing. Just two brothers having a good time. I've never even asked their names, although I've spoken to them several times. They remind me of Robert and Richard MANY years ago....

Today, as we motored into the marina, they were hurriedly running over to their dad's fishing boat - they (nicely) yelled to us "we're going to throw water balloons at you" - so Duane and I both eagerly encouraged them to "try to hit us" (it was hot!) - they were ecstatic - giggling, they threw their "arsenal" of 3 water balloons. The balloons hit the deck harmlessly....
Sounds strange to say, but I hope my GRANDKIDS get to grow up like this!

Greetings from Belhaven!! We are on the boat now - there is free wi-fi in the marina....

It was a long sail - we left Oriental about 9AM and arrived Belhaven at 4:30PM. Caught this barge on the way - I'm always fascinated by the small "tugs" (actually - a closer description would be "pusher")



Getting close to our destination - Duane is putting the sail in order.
This is out of order, but I kept trying to get 8 knots reading on the GPS - we actually had periods of good wind.


The navigational markers usually have a bird or two in residence - don't know what these are - maybe someone with a bird watchers guide can clue me...I don't think they are bald eagles - even though this photo looks like their heads are white, other photos I took in the same sequence shows a brown head....
This is the breakwater approaching Belhaven - it's a fairly protected harbor
Glory Days at the River Forest Manor Marina...ahhh air conditioning....it's only 92 outside!
So don't look next if you're weak stomach-ed - I had a 'incident' with my freezer door.....it fell on my finger - trapping it....kindof hurt!! Not sure that fingernail will stay on....we'll see. If not, I'll be obliged to post a gross photo of that too....by the way - the pinkie finger is not used much in typing!!

Not a lot going on - Richard just got back from his orientation at Appalachian State... he seemed to enjoy it.

They are baling some beautiful hay at the Siler City airport. This is a shot at the edge of the parking ramp. Other than that, it's hot and dry!

The Literary Meme

From T's Blog - a different list than the one I posted earlier - Interesting list - I've read quite a few of the "dusty books":

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Yeaaahh!! Graduation is now behind us! (At least as far as high school is concerned!!) Next week he heads to Appalachian State for his freshman orientation...

Here's Richard right before we all headed to Chapel Hill, trying on his mortar-board.



Last year, we were in Cameron Stadium, the very old UNC gymnasium - terrible acoustics and no air conditioning. This year, we were at the "Dean Dome" - wow, what a difference! We heard every word and were quite comfortable.

I snapped this shot - meant to get Mom/Frank and Granny/Cordy holding hands on the way into the Dean Dome - but didn't quite get both couples (Mom and Frank are ahead..)

Richard in line to go into the stadium.


Miranda in line on the other side of the stadium....




We got great seats off to the side so we saw Richard walk across stage directly towards us.
I just couldn't get a great, in focus shot that far away. Richard is pretty much in the middle of the photo - like "Where's Waldo"...



All done, now for all of us to get our photo with the new graduate...


He's being silly here...


Granny trying on the cap...it's much too large!!


Mom and Richard...he's being good about this.
Grandma and Richard.
Granny and Richard - something must have been funny!!

Dad and Richard trading jabs

Now they're behaving like civil adults (just for the moment!)


Frank and Richard...

And the last shot of this nature was the two brothers - Robert had played with the high-school band to give them some extra volume in that big stadium.


Miranda and Richard - thought this was a great photo of Miranda.


Now on to the party the next day!!

Bobby and her husband Joe arrive on their Harley.


Big Al - one of our great neighbors



Relaxing with the folks.

Gabbing with the folks about his blown-up-engine in his 4Runner...


More great neighborhood shots

Then, we all napped...

Miranda brought me the "professional" shots from their prom.....aren't they lovely?



Richard said "Mom, I promise I was smiling just one second before they snapped this shot..." Still very nice...

A very HOT weekend at the boat in Oriental!! It was 97 degrees here - and it's usually a few degrees cooler than home due to the proximity to the water....

We kept it a cool 74 degrees inside the boat - so sleeping was quite pleasant - almost chilly!

One of the reasons we came down this weekend was to pick out our new slip in the new section of the marina. Here's a shot showing the new slips in the foreground and the existing slips in the background (you can only see the masts, really).






The developer had a tent set up and at our allotted time we wandered around discussing the pros/cons of various locations. It appeared we were about 4th in line to chose a slip.

This is the view from the one we selected -

Our slip is to the left of the pier. Note the clubhouse/bathhouse in the background....hehe - this was the important criteria for being near the first in line - you get to be close the the bathrooms!!


Another interesting tidbit from this weekend....a friend from Siler City airport - John, and his girlfriend Karen went for a sail with us - they are a really neat couple. She's a nurse and he flies the Forest Service fire spotting planes. He also sings with a great baritone - and if I can ever figure out how to put audio on my blog - I'll upload a clip!!

Banned Book Meme

We're down at the boat in Oriental this weekend. The marina now has FREE wireless!! Yippee!! Before, we had to pay about $10 per day to use wireless...they would let you access the marine weather for free as a public service. That's what I was doing this morning. Imagine my surprise when my mail downloaded. Cool....

I came across this the other day and thought it was interesting.. The top 110 Banned Books in America.....copy it into your blog and BOLD the ones you've read or partially read. Amazing how many of them you've read!

Banned Book Meme

Tagged by Karen

These are the top 110 banned books. Bold the ones you've read or partially read.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman#11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Consider yourself tagged. Also: some of these books are puzzling inclusions. Little House On The Prairie?

Richard got his yearbook yesterday....Back last December, we had a half-page "Senior Ad" published for him. I looked thru many old photos and chose the ones I thought represented him well. It was hard to choose from all the photos - and equally hard not to include some cute ones that might embarrass him!


Flipping thru the rest of the yearbook, imagine my surprise when I saw this amongst the "Senior Superlatives" ...... apparently his female counterpart didn't appreciate the honor.... very fitting award for lead-foot-Richard.

When I stepped out of the house this morning, I noticed that the gardenia bushes were in bloom. They're so good-smelling! These bushes were harmed tremendously last April when we had an unexpected Easter freeze. I was not sure they would survive - but they sure did!

Duane and Richard took a car-tow-dolly to Asheboro to pick up Richard's 4Runner....he had taken it to a "mud-event" about a month ago and it didn't survive very well. He had called from the airport saying it was not running very well - so he brought the courtesy car home instead. (blown up engine....) This is Richard after he was working on the vehicle in the hangar yesterday....he wanted a hug....


Seems like this will be a Richard post... he has recently bought a LARGE fish tank and put mostly Oscar-fish in it. Well, there was a feeding accident (to much food spilled into the tank) and it caused the water to foul. I volunteered to clean it out while Duane and Richard went to retrieve the errant vehicle.

The plan was to vacuum the rocks to remove the debris and most of the murky water. To this end, I used a neat little device - a "drill-pump". It's just a small pump you power using the drill - with an "In" and an "Out. One way it suck dirty water out - one way it puts clean water back in.


Here I'm sucking dirty water out from the rocks. I was careful not to suck fish in (although the big fish actually hid in the big rock throughout the operation).
I sucked all up a few inches of water out - the hose was run into the tub to drain.
Then I reversed the hoses and pumped clean, warm water out of a bucket under the faucet in the tub.
Hard to see, but this is one of the oscar-fish - he's about 4 inches long and supposedly will get much larger - eats the small fish you saw above...