Self-Healing Technology

I love self-healing technology! It's kind of like skin. Cut it and it bleeds. But if you wait a while, it repairs itself. The mechanism is a mystery to most of us. But the results are the same: effortless repair, often just about as good as new.

Three examples:

1) My Sirius satellite radio receiver: A few months ago, I left it plugged into my car's lighter outlet overnight, and I forgot to turn it off. Three unfortunate things happened:

1. It drew down all of the power from my car's battery, thus requiring me to get a jump from Beth's MINI.
2. It blew one of my car's fuses, thus requiring me to replace an automotive fuse for the first time ever.
3. The display died. So I spent a few months driving around with no visual indicator telling me which station I was tuned to, who was singing or talking, what song was playing, what the current score of the hockey game was, etc.,...
   

Since then, I have made a real effort to remember to turn off and unplug the receiver after each trip (less because of the fuse and the display issue than because having a dead battery is a real bummer).

However, one day last week, I forgot to unplug it. (But I did remember to turn it off, so at least it wasn't draining power from the battery. Not much, anyway.)

Guess what happened.

Self-healing!

Most exciting. The display is now working like a charm. Now I can see what I'm listening to.

2) My car itself: I spent a week or two driving around with the "Service Engine Soon" indicator constantly lit. This was a little troubling, as I really don't want to have to invest money in a costly repair. But I checked the manual to see what this indicator really means. It turns out that it seems to tie into an emissions monitoring system. If the emissions go funky, the light comes on--presumably because the car isn't operating as well as it's supposed to. I guess it really means that it's not burning fuel as efficiently as it's supposed to do.

Anyway, as I was driving home from the book store the other night, I was fretting about this light, but I was also calculating (as the fuel gauge needle passed 1/2 tank at about 215 miles since my last fill up) that if this pace holds up, my mileage for this tankful is going to end up at somewhere north of spectacular.

Lo and behold, when next I looked down at the dashboard, the indicator had been extinguished. Self-healing technology! Hooray!

3) Beth's MINI's driver's side door lock: A few months ago, it stopped wanting to let her out when she wanted to get out. Instead of just being able to take the standard two pulls on the handle (the first to unlock, the second to open), she found herself needing to use the toggle switch on the center console to unlock the doors before it would let her out. Then at the beginning of last week, things got even worse! Now the toggle swich refused to do the trick. So when she got to work, she ended up having to crawl out through the passenger's side.

Actually, it seems that the toggle switch did unlock the door, but the door handle refused to actually disengage the latch, so the effect was the same. Luckily, this knowledge did lead to a somewhat less strenuous solution than crawling out the other side of the car: She could roll down her window and reach out to use the exterior handle to release her.

We contacted a mechanic friend to see whether he could fix the problem. He said he'd need to diagnose it and order any necessary part(s) and then he'd be able to fix it when the part(s) arrived. So that's a two day affair, and it's a pretty good trek from here to there. So we didn't make the appointment. (Beth came down with a nasty cold in the meantime, anyway, so she spent some days in bed, not worrying about the car.)

Over the weekend, we did some significant driving (as far as Long Island). You'll never guess what happened...

Self-healing! The MINI fixed itself.

Did I mention that I love self-healing technology?

T-Shirt Designs

Last weekend, we went to MINIs On Top 2006. We went up on Friday and I was wearing a t-shirt of my own design. I got several compliments on it, so I'm taking that as an encouragement to mention my t-shirt designs here. These are available through cafepress, in case you're interested. The two designs I'm offering at the moment couldn't possibly hold much interest for anyone outside of New Hampshire. Perhaps future designs will appeal to a wider audience. I'll be sure to post new designs here as I produce them. As with everything I post, I welcome your feedback.

Kayaking, Part 2

As "promised" in my previous kayaking post, here's a picture of our (Beth's) Mini loaded up for a kayaking trip. Pretty silly looking, eh?

Well, we went out again today, this time to McDaniels Marsh. This body of water covers well over twice the area of Grafton Pond, although it's extremely shallow. I remembered to take a GPS unit this time. We paddled together to about 1.25 miles away from where we parked before Beth decided to stop for a rest while allowing me to go on for a while alone. I got to what I believe was pretty much the far end of the marsh, at 1.65 miles from the car.

We saw a painted turtle, some small fishes, and a few ducks. I also spotted a couple of amphibians (newts or salamanders, I'm guessing), a kingfisher, and a healthy looking snapping turtle.

When we got back to shore I flipped my boat to try draining it, and (much to my surprise) discovered that there were about a dozen (maybe more) leeches attached to the hull! Which leads to my question of the day: Does anyone out there have advice for the best way to humanely remove a leech from a kayak's belly?

I'm really quite bewildered as to why they would have attached there in the first place. Surely, they didn't find it loaded with any tasty juices!

The best approach I was able to come up with for removing them was the "grab and pull" technique. This was fairly easy in the case of the smaller ones, but the larger ones really had quite a good grip on the boat and weren't too keen on letting go. I have nothing against the leeches (although I really don't want to transport them around the state) and I have no desire to cause them any harm. I can't help but think that the amount of squeezing I had to do to maintain my grip must have been uncomfortable, if not downright damaging, to the poor creatures. Perhaps I'm underestimating just how hardy they really are. They certainly turned out to be less squishable than they look!

After getting my hull cleaned, We flipped Beth's kayak and found leeches there, as well. She had fewer of them, which I'd tend to attribute less to the color difference in the boats than to my having gone farther into the marsh than she went.

New to Kayaking

After half a year on layaway, Beth and I finally completed the transaction and took delivery on our new kayaks this past weekend. We learned or were reminded of several good lessons:

• What is known in New Hampshire as a fairly small pond is the equivalent of what would, in Maryland, be known as a pretty substantial lake. Our first outing with our new boats was to a beautiful body of water known as Grafton Pond. It has apparently grown from its original size as a result of damming, but it's still considered to be pretty small. In Maryland, there are no natural lakes. (A fact I learned years ago from Beth, who knows many things.) This means that our Maryland-oriented sense of inland bodies of water is pretty warped. In a sense, these lowered expectations are good for us. They keep us from taking for granted the comparative grandeur of our new environs.
  
• When the wind kicks up, a flat body of water can become surprisingly choppy, surprisingly quickly.
• There are places (for example, one particular area I found myself in while trying to complete a circuit around a little island) where paddling against the current is a fairly futile exercise. Sometimes, it makes sense to just let the current do with you as it will for a while. When the view is nice and there's no rush to get anywhere quickly, this can be a most enjoyable approach.
• It is wise to carry a GPS device with you when kayaking. Covering pretty good stretches is really quite easy in a kayak, and without a GPS device handy, it would be easy to lose track of where you put in. As Grafton Pond is not very big (by local standards), and as we were eager to get out on the water, we had neglected to pack a GPS device with us. So, once out on the water, we made an early decision to not go into the various coves and out-of-the way areas of the pond. Instead, we made sure to keep the access beach in pretty plain sight. This, of course, detracted from what the expedition could have been, but we had a wonderful time anyway.
• Mini Cooper + roof rack +kayaks results in an assembly that's too tall to fit though our garage's doorway. So, while we can attach and detach the rack to and from the car inside of the garage, we have to load and unload the kayaks to and from it outside. The overall appearance of the whole assembly is fairly comical. (I'll try to remember to take and post a photo on our next trip.) We got ourselves some pretty short kayaks. Had we gotten the Pungo 120 model instead of the Pungo 100, the boats would actually have been longer than the car.