Author Archives: Maria Langer

How to Extract GPS Coordinates for a Google Maps Location

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It’s a lot easier than you might think.

Like most folks who depend on the Internet as a source of information, I use Google Maps a lot. But rather than use it to track down street addresses and get driving directions, I use it to pinpoint places out in the middle of nowhere that I need to visit by helicopter. There are usually no street addresses, and even if there were, they wouldn’t help much while flying. What I need are GPS coordinates.

You might be in a similar situation. You see a place on a map and, for one reason or another, you need to know its exact GPS coordinates. Fortunately, Google Maps can help. Here’s how to get those coordinates.

  1. Use Google Maps (not Google Earth) to display the location you want GPS coordinates for. In my example, I’ll use satellite view to find a dirt airstrip I know along the Verde River north of Phoenix. You could search for an address if you needed the coordinates for a street address.
  2. Google GPS Step 1Hold down the Control key and click right on the spot you want the coordinates for. A menu pops up. (You may be able to simply right click, but I’ve had limited success with that on my Mac using Firefox; Control-click always works.)
  3. On the menu, choose Center Map Here. The view will probably shift a bit.
  4. Google GPS Step 2Above the map area, in the blue bar, click the Link button. A window appears with two text boxes in it. The contents of the top text box, which are selected, includes a link to the map that you might paste into an e-mail message. It also includes the GPS coordinates, which I’ve indicated with a red box around them. Sometimes the GPS coordinates are not so obvious and you’ll need to scroll through the contents of the box to find them.

Note that the coordinates are in digital format. In this example, they’re 34.160043°N 111.727266°W. (West and South are negative numbers.) Some GPSes use this format; you can usually specify the format you want to use in your GPS’s settings.

If you need coordinates in degrees, minutes, seconds format, you’ll need to do some simple math. Let’s take a look at how it works for the first number: 34.160043.

  1. Take the whole number (34) and set it aside. That’s the degrees.
  2. Take the number after the decimal point and multiply it by 60: .160043 x 60 = 9.60258
  3. Take the whole number from that calculation (9) and set it aside. That’s minutes.
  4. Take the number after the decimal point and multiply it by 60: .60258 x 60 = 36.1548
  5. Take the whole number from that calculation (36) and set it aside. That’s seconds. Keep in mind that if you want a more precise number, you can include the decimal places after it. You might also want to round the number up or down depending on what comes after the decimal point. In this example, the number after the decimal point is 1 so I’d round down and use 36.
  6. Put the numbers you set aside together in degrees° minutes‘ seconds” format. In this example, you’d have 34° 9′ 36″.

My helicopter’s GPS uses a degrees° minutes‘ format, so I’d stop calculating after step 2 and wind up with 34° 9.60258’.

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Easy, To Die For Butternut Squash Soup

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I can’t get enough of this stuff.

One of my favorite things to eat is butternut squash soup. Trouble is, when I have a flavor in your mind and I find myself eating something that just isn’t quite as good, I get seriously disappointed. You know what they say: If you want something done right, yadda yadda yadda.

Here’s the recipe I like. It’s remarkably easy to make, but in case you have a serious case of lazy bones, I’ve included a few shortcuts to make it even easier.

Ingredients

  • 1 medium onion, chopped. I use sweet onions. Lazy? You can buy them pre-chopped in most supermarket produce departments or the freezer section.
  • 2 tablespoons margarine or butter.
  • 2 cups chicken broth. I use canned. Although one can is 15 ounces (I think), that’s close enough.
  • 1 pound butternut squash, pared, seeded and cut into 1-inch cubes. This is probably the most labor-intensive part of the process. Those squash are a real pain to pare. And where have you ever found one less than 2 pounds in size? I usually do it the hard way, but today I stopped off at Trader Joe’s and picked up a 2-pound bag of butternut squash already prepared. (So, of course, I made a double-batch of soup.) You might be able to use frozen squash if it is unseasoned; I’ll leave that up to the seriously lazy cooks to experiment with.
  • 2 pears, pared and sliced. I use fresh pears whenever possible, but I suspect that you could get away with canned pears, as long as you rinse off the sugary syrup they insist on canning them with.
  • 1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves. Yeah, like I’ll find fresh thyme in Wickenburg. I use dried but only half as much.
  • 1/4 teaspoon of salt. I usually omit this, especially if the broth does not have reduced salt. You can always add salt later; you can never take it away.
  • 1/4 teaspoon white pepper. I use regular pepper, which I grind as I need it.
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground coriander.
  • 1 cup whipping cream. This is killer stuff and makes the soup very rich. I suspect you could use half and half to make it a little less deadly.

Cooking Instructions

  1. Cook and stir onion in margarine in a medium pot until tender.
  2. Butternut Squash SoupStir in broth, squash, pears, thyme, salt, pepper, and coriander.
  3. Heat to boiling; reduce heat heat and cover.
  4. Simmer until squash is tender, 10 to 15 minutes.
  5. Puree soup in a food processor or blender. You may have to do this in batches. You might also want to wait until the soup has cooled a bit; I cracked my food processor bowl by processing hot soup. I now use my glass blender.
  6. Return pureed soup to pot.
  7. Stir in whipping cream and heat until hot.
  8. Garnish with pear slices and toasted pecans if desired.

Yields 6 1-cup servings.

This is a great soup for Thanksgiving. The squash and pears are in season right now so it’s the perfect time of year to make this. Treat yourself. You won’t be disappointed.

The Golf Ball Drop

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Good thing I don’t play golf.

Yesterday at about noon, I did another golf ball drop from my helicopter. It was my second ever. The first didn’t come off all that well.

The event was at a golf course about 3 miles off the approach end of Phoenix Sky Harbor runways 25 L/R. I’d called the tower the day before to tell them what I’d be up to and make sure it wouldn’t be a problem. (The ATC folks at Sky Harbor tower are great.) At the time of the event, planes were taking off on runway 8 (north side of the airport, farthest runway from where I was) and landing on runways 7 L/R. I was cleared to cross the extended centerline and then let the tower controller know when I was landing, doing the drop (low level), and ready to depart again. The whole time I was flying, I was listening to airliners departing from the runway; I was never told to switch to the south tower frequency.

Golf Course Location

Golf Ball Drop

Hovering over the drop zone.

I did much better at this drop than the last one. The conditions were good. The drop zone was on the driving range for a golf course in Tempe. Although there were some serious wires to the north, there were no obstructions near where I had to drop. That means I didn’t have to climb above any obstructions for the drop (which is what messed me up last time). Winds were light out of the east, so there was no pedal dancing — I was able to point the helicopter’s nose right toward the spectators for the entire flight.

Although I’d originally been told to expect 900-1100 golf balls, we only had about 400 on board. They all fit in a box. We cut three of the box’s four flaps off, leaving the drop guy, who was provided by the client, with a handle he could use to hold the box while dropping. (This was the drop guy’s first time in a helicopter. Too bad it was such a short and boring flight.)

This time, we dropped out of the door behind mine. This made it possible for me to see exactly where the balls were falling. (Duh.)

My instructions were to drop between a big red flag and a smaller red flag at the cup. The folks who ran the show expected the balls to roll down the hill from the big flag toward the cup.

Golf Ball Drop

Dropping golf balls over a driving range in Tempe.

I was in about a 150-foot hover over the drop zone. When it looked as if the balls weren’t going to roll, I hovered sideways, right over the cup. The shower of balls came much closer. I didn’t see any balls go in, but a bunch of them gathered around the cup. One sat right on its lip. There would be a winner but no in-the-cup winner.

Afterwards, I landed and exchanged the ball dropper guy for my ground crew helper, a Black Hawk pilot named Jonathan who’d come along for the ride. Jonathan took the in-flight photos you see here.

Next time, I’m sure I’ll make the hole.

Hello, Safeway? What’s with the three prices?

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Fantasy pricing and imaginary savings assault the senses and insult shoppers’ intelligence.

Wickenburg has two supermarkets: a Basha’s and a Safeway. Safeway is newer, better stocked, generally cleaner, and closer to my house. It’s also generally more expensive. I deal with it.

KleenexBut what has started to seriously bug me is the price tags Safeway has littered its stores with. If you’ve shopped in a Safeway or Vons, you know exactly what I mean. Half the merchandise in the store has three different prices on it: the “old price,” the “low price,” and the “club price.”

The old price is clearly bullshit. There’s no way in hell that a box of 200 Kleenex ever sold for $2.99 in our Safeway store. It’s clearly a fantasy price dreamed up by the folks in marketing. Say it cost a bunch of money and now it’s a whole bunch less! Customers are saving $1/box, right?

Wrong, if it never cost $2.99.

Then there’s the club price. If you join “the club” and submit your club card or phone number each time you shop, you get an even lower price. Of course, you also let the folks in the Safeway home office know every single thing you buy there. What do they do with this information? One thing they do is spit out coupons at checkout for items you’re most likely to buy. That’s not terribly harmful. But what else do they do with this information? Perhaps share it with other organizations so they also know what you buy? So they can target you with their marketing, too?

Do you really want people to know if you buy things like laxatives, hemorrhoid creme, or adult diapers?

Yet providing your magic club card number knocks another 49¢ off the box of tissues. That number is part of what’s tallied up as your savings at the bottom of your long receipt.

Spring MixI’m guessing, however, that they don’t expect people to really stop and think about it. Or do the math. Instead, they expect us to simply react to the yellow tags.

What else could explain this image? Look carefully. The club price saves you a whole penny over the supposed low price. This isn’t higher math, folks. $5 ÷ 2 = $2.50. The club price is $2.49. $2.50 – $2.49 = 1¢.

It’s bullshit, all of it. Yellow tags all over the place with fantasy prices and imaginary savings.

Why do they do this? It’s simple. They’re betting that people are too stupid or lazy to do real comparison shopping. They concoct in-store savings, conning people into thinking they’re really saving money. But are they?

In reality, if shoppers went to another store, that store’s regular price may be the same or less than Safeway’s “low price” or “club price.”

Mind games, that’s what it is.

And that’s what bothers me. These yellow tags all over the place make shopping confusing. They make the store an ugly mess. They sully the supermarket shopping experience — as bad as it already is.

You can’t just go into a supermarket and pick up the groceries you need. Instead, you have to face wall after wall of ugly yellow price tags that insult your intelligence with their fantasy pricing and imaginary savings.

Why? I call it bullshit.

Jack the Dog

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The best dog.

Our first exposure to Jack was in mid 2001. The year before, we’d put our 14-year-old Dalmation to rest after a life of controllable health problems became uncontrollable with age. He was my third dog — my family always had dogs — and my husband’s first. His loss was shattering and we took some time off to see if we could live without a dog in our lives.

Nine months later, we were thinking of trying again. We’d decided that we wanted a smart dog. While Spot had been smart enough to fetch the newspaper from the curb, fetch my slippers, and distinguish one toy from another by name, he wasn’t quite smart enough to stay out of the Arizona sun or avoid the back end of a protective mare when a newborn filly was in the area. I didn’t think Dalmatians could fly, but ours did. He was never quite the same after that, either.

Jack in the PaperWe’d been talking to people about dogs and learning about different breeds well-suited for ranches. I’d decided that something like a border collie or Australian shepherd would be a good breed. So when the newspaper mentioned a border collie/Australian shepherd mix up for adoption, we decided to take a look.

Understand that Wickenburg is a small town and nothing much happens. In order to fill the pages of the local weekly rag they call a newspaper, they’d often show photos of pets up for adoption. (I don’t know if they still do this. We stopped reading the crap they printed when they became the propaganda arm for a corrupt mayor and Chamber of Commerce.) The town didn’t have a Humane Society back then, so all unwanted pets were brought to Bar S Animal Clinic, which happened to be the vet we used for Spot and our horses.

The story we got about the dog — who was already named Jack — was that he’d been owned by a family that neglected him. He was frequently out loose and had been picked up by the local dog catcher at least three times. The first few times, the family paid the fee and picked him up. But the last time, they’d decided not to. He was up for grabs. They figured he was 9 to 12 months old.

The newspaper clipping completely understated his personality. When they brought him out to the waiting area at Bar S for us to meet him, they practically had to drag him out on a leash. He was terrified. He didn’t want to come to either one of us.

Although he looked like a nice enough dog, I had doubts. I didn’t want a dog that was afraid of his own shadow. Mike and I talked it over and then talked to the folks at Bar S. I distinctly remember asking if we could bring him back if it didn’t work out. They told us we could, so we coaxed him outside to the car.

That’s when we noticed Jack was really different. He wouldn’t get in the car — it was like he didn’t know how. Finally, I sat in the front seat and Mike put him on my lap. He closed the door and we headed back to the office in town.

In those days, I owned a condo in downtown Wickenburg. After dealing with the last set of abusive and destructive tenants, I’d decided to turn the place into an office for us. I had the living room, Mike had the master bedroom. Our home was across town, about 5 miles away by car.

The condo was on the second floor. That’s when we discovered that Jack didn’t know how to climb steps.

His first gift to us was a big poop on the living room carpet.

He started coming around to us very quickly and that scaredy-dog personality faded away. He listened, came when we called him, and didn’t need to be on a leash around the yard. He also seemed to get along fine with the horses. And he understood what shade was.

Jack and MikeHe bonded to me — probably because he’d been sitting on my lap on that car ride. This was not ideal. I’d planned to get a parrot in a month or so and Jack was supposed to be mostly my husband’s dog. So for the first few days, I began ignoring him and Mike started lavishing him with attention. After a few days of that, he was Mike’s dog, although he responded to me equally well. But when we were together, it was always Mike that he went to first. That was fine with me.

We’d had him about a month when he fell out of the back of Mike’s pickup on the way to the office. It wasn’t light yet — Mike was telecommuting for a job on the east coast back then and would routinely get to the office around 6 AM local time. He wasn’t sure where Jack had fallen out, but he was able to narrow it down to a 1/2 mile stretch of road about a mile from our house.

We spent the entire day looking for him, calling the dog catcher, Bar S, and any other group that might know something about a found dog. I used my Jeep to drive up and down all the sandy washes in the area, calling him by name. We were convinced that he’d been injured and was hiding in the bushes somewhere, possibly dying.

When night fell, we knew the coyotes would get him. We were shattered. In just a month, we’d grown to love him.

At 3 AM, Mike climbed out of bed, unable to sleep. He came downstairs to get a glass of water. And who was at the back door, waiting to be let in? Jack. I don’t know how he spent his day, but he found his way home, safe and sound.

The next nine and a half years left indelible memories on my mind:

  • Jack and Mike at ParkerJack sitting on the edge of the back patio, watching the road that leads down to our house, racing around to the front when Mike’s car or truck rolled down.
  • Jack barking at the UPS truck or FedEx truck before it even came into sight, climbing into the open UPS truck door as I chatted with the driver and he fetched my package, accepting cookies from our mail carrier.
  • Jack at Howard MesaJack running around on our 40 acres in northern Arizona, chasing rabbits, crawling under the shed, looking for mice and rats.
  • Jack barking at the sound of coyotes, close or far, sometimes in the middle of the night.
  • Jack chasing lizards in the backyard and, more than once, catching them.
  • Jack riding in the back of my Jeep as we explored the old forest roads just south of the Grand Canyon or out in the desert along Constellation Road or up in the Bradshaw Mountains.
  • Jack “herding” the horses up the driveway at the end of the day, dodging Jake’s hoofs as he tried to kick him.
  • Jack in the ForestJack hiking with us up Vulture Peak, through the Hassayampa River bed, at Granite Mountain, inside Red Mountain, at the Grand Canyon, in the forest at Mount Humphreys, in countless other places.
  • Jack in the back of my helicopter, looking out the window as we flew over town.
  • Jack on the trail in the desert as we followed on horseback, watching him take off with high pitched yipping sounds as he closed in on a jackrabbit or cottontail.
  • Jack with Lee and Sharon PearsonJack riding in the back of the pickup, his head out in the slipstream as we drove around town. (He only fell out of the pickup that one time, although he did fall out of my Jeep twice.)
  • Jack playing with my neighbor’s dogs, who used to come visit for cookies and attention.
  • Jack racing around the side of the house when he knew we’d be coming out the front, looking at us with the “Can I please come?” face and racing to the truck when we said yes.
  • Jack whining when we prepared to leave and told him he’d have to stay in. It’s that whine that Alex the Bird picked up and mimics to this day.
  • Jack meeting us at the door as if he hadn’t seen us for years when we came home from a day out.
  • Jack ignoring Alex the Bird when he whistled Mike’s whistle or issued commands: “Hey, Jack!” “Go lie down!” “Go outside!”
  • Jack on his dog bed at the foot of the bed, or by the open french doors in our bedroom, or on a rug on the floor of our cabin or RV while we slept.
  • Jack trotting along ahead of us, on his extension leash, as we walked the few blocks from our Phoenix condo to Wildflower Bakery for morning coffee and breakfast croissant.

I could go on all day, listing the snapshots in my mind. Jack didn’t have a mean bone in his body. Everyone loved him.

He never seemed to slow down — until recently. In the 20-20 vision of hindsight, I should have realized there was a problem. I noticed about a month ago that he seemed to be breathing heavily, even at rest, once in a while. I mentioned it to Mike, but he didn’t notice.

Last weekend, he seemed a bit under the weather, spending more than the usual amount of time just lying around. We thought it had something to do with his food; Mike had bought something new. Jack had a sensitive digestive system and could only eat dog food. (People food literally made him sick — even good stuff like steak!) But by Sunday, he was back to his old self.

On Monday morning, Mike went on a business trip to Georgia.

Jack stopped eating on Tuesday. I took him to the local vet on Wednesday and Thursday mornings. He had blood work. He spent Thursday at the vet. His labored breathing prompted the vet to take an X-ray. That’s when he saw the fluid around his lungs.

I took him to another vet in Peoria for an ultrasound on Friday morning. By that time, he had to be carried everywhere. He was alert but weak, struggling to breathe.

The ultrasound picture made the problem obvious. The doctor was able to diagnose in less than a minute. Jack had a large tumor on his heart. It looked to be about 1/5 the size of his heart, so it had obviously been growing there for a while. The tumor was causing fluid to leak into the sac around his heart. That fluid was crowding out his lungs, making it difficult to breathe.

The tumor, because of its placement, was inoperable. Chemotherapy was not usually effective — although I admit that I don’t think we would have gone that route. Draining the fluid could buy him a few hours or days, but his condition would come right back to the way it was. There was even a chance that the fluid could fill as quickly as it was drained.

In other words, Jack was terminally ill and likely had a very short time to live.

Jack the Desert DogThe decision wasn’t hard. The worst thing you can do for an animal is try to keep it alive when it’s suffering. Jack, although maybe not in pain (yet), was laboring to breathe. It was taking everything he had. He couldn’t even walk anymore. He hadn’t eaten in more than three days. His condition was deteriorating quickly. I wasn’t even sure if he’d be alive when my husband came home that night.

After breaking the news to my husband, I did what I needed to do. The folks at Bar S Animal Clinic were unbelievably kind to both Jack and me. I cannot thank them enough.

Jack’s gone now and we’ll miss him. He was the best dog ever.

Note: I’ve closed the comments on this post in an effort to head off condolences, etc. While I appreciate any kind thoughts you might have in this difficult time, I believe that reading them will only prolong my grief. If you want to leave a comment, instead consider a small donation to your local Humane Society. And the next time you want to add a pet to your life, visit the local pound or Humane Society first. If you’re as lucky as we were, you’ll get to take home a pet as wonderful as Jack was.