Just read a saying i really liked by an retired cop that had been a cop for 27 years. He was commenting that he didn’t support the new HR45 bill ( Blair Holt Firearm Licensing & Record of Sale Act of 2009) for gun control and went on to quote what he said was an old saying.
I have added a new cooking section to the website where I am posting some of my recipies and or ones from other people that I like and use. You can find the cooking link at the top of the site and then the subpages with recipies on them to the right once your at the main cooking page.
I must say that in the last year or so I have come to have a lot of problems with the pricing of books in general. The retailers and publishers have a lot to answer for. I have just gone along with everyone else in assuming that it just cost a lot of money to publish physical books and ship them to the store etc and then the store needs to make a decent profit to pay for their employees and floor space. In the last year though as digital editions of books have started to come out the prices in general aren’t reflecting any savings to the end purchaser. I leaves me wondering at the truth of statements made by publishers as to why they charge as much as they do for books. If we are no longer paying for the printing, the physical paper, the shipping and the retail floorspace and salaries of the sales people then what are we paying for. In the case of authors it is fairly criminal how little they get per book. One author I spoke with was getting royalties of only about 3% and in my opinion getting ripped off royally. Amazon right now is selling their books at around 30 dollars a copy and they are getting about 1 dollar per copy. If they published their own digital edition through amazon it could sell for half the cost and still get 5.25 a copy.. a 500% increase in profits. Or they could setup their own website and self publish from it using paypal and keep all the profits minus fairly minor expenses. It could published in PDF with the file locked to keep it from being easily copied. The simplest method would be to just have a link on the website that took you to paypal for payment and when the author got an email showing receipt of payment they could email to the purchaser. A little more difficult up front would be to set it up so that when they paid, it redirected them to a download page. As to loosing revenue doing this because it would be possible for people to give copies of the book away without paying for them. Well that is true. However it is not the problem you might think. Baen as a publisher has sold and given away full unencrypted copies of all the books they publish, in digital format, for years now and according to them it has not hurt sales. They say it has actually increased sales overall.
I recently purchased a 48 foot reefer trailer (an insulated trailer pulled behind an eighteen wheeler.) it is 48 feet long and 8 feet wide outside dimensions and 7 feet 4 inches by 47 feet 6 inches or so on the inside with about 336 sq feet of floor space.
We took valkier (a Downeaster 38, Mast head sloop cutter rig) out a couple of Sundays ago. It was supposed to be Angela, Zsanic, Jay, Eva, Barbara and me on the boat but a few days before we were scheduled to go out Angela found out she had to work. When she did she offered to let me captain the boat and take everyone out anyways. To be honest I have several people that have made similar offers of letting me take out their boats and I never have felt comfortable being responsible for their boats. Up till now I have always just said thank you for the offer but never taken them up on it. However, in this case, there were a lot of people looking forward to going out on Valkier and it would be the only chance Eva would have to go sailing before she went back home to Slovakia. I have probably sailed as crew on Valkier more than just about any other boat other than my own so I am very comfortable with how she handles and sails. The next positive is that Jay was going to be onboard and I knew that I had a very experienced boater and sailor to give a hand if I needed it.
I used to get practical sailor magazine up until I had some issues with my subscription. When I tried to contact them about it I got no response at all. Not a yes, no or maybe. Just silence. So I quit renewing. I received two promotional offers to renew today in email and it just struck me wrong so I felt motivated to send them an email back.
We went sailing today from Valkier’s new home. What a difference a face dock on the the ICW makes from being buried deep in a marina. Leaving is just a matter of pulling away from the dock. No backing and carefully missing the other boats in their slips or worrying about the current carrying you into them etc.. It also is really nice to sit on deck looking at the unobstructed view of the marsh accross the waterway and watch the sun come up.
I got to help Angela and Zsanic take Valkier to her new home up in Southport. It’s sad that they are now more than a hour away but I have to say that the new digs are 1000 percent better. Valkier now has a marsh view the a strong breeze almost all the time. You can come out and sit on deck in the morning with your coffee or hot chocolate (poisen of choice) and watch the fishing boats and private boats heading for Bald Head Island or Oak Island heading out while the sun comes up.
After a lazy morning Orin decided we were going to motor back down the waterway to Little River. We spent a fairly quiet and uneventfull day on the water. Maybe 6 hours travel time.
Spent the night on Walkabout. Jay and Barbara invited me and Zsanic to stay on their boat while we were up in southport instead of staying on La Bon Vie. Being a bigger boat and with less people spread out it was nice. 
also the air conditioning didn’t hurt.
Spent the day motoring to southport for the race on saturday. We had hoped to sail but the wind was just not there. Most of the day the ocean was so flat you could see the clouds reflected in it.
It took me a while to get to where I could write about this. It still leaves me feeling sick, stressed out and enraged.
Friday was Zsanic’s birthday and I took her, my sister and mother to see “Get Smart” at the Coastal Grand Mall In Myrtle Beach, SC. We parked at the far end of the row right in front of the movie theater entrance. Three hours later when we came out my car was gone. Stolen.
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