Stats Don’t Lie

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I slept like crap on that boat trip.

Regular readers might recall that I spent 5 weeks as one of two crew members on a 27 foot Ranger Tug in August and early September of this year. I left 3 weeks earlier than I’d planned because of a personality conflict with the other crew member, who was also a high-volume snorer.


I’m sleeping a lot better now that I’m off that boat. The gap in readings is a result of my watch not picking up sleep data for a few weeks.

Well, I’ve been looking at the sleep stats on my phone — my Apple Watch tracks my sleep and reports results in the Health app — and the results are pretty conclusive: I’m getting, on average, about 90 minutes more sleep per night now that I’m back at home than what I was getting while on the boat (and during my high-stress cherry drying season before that).

My poor sleep on the boat was a result of several factors, listed here in no particular order:

  • The size of the “bed.” I put bed in quotes because even a twin mattress makes a larger bed than I was sleeping on. I’d estimate the width at under 3 feet and the length maybe 6 feet. I’m not a small (or short) person so this was a very small space for me.
  • The shape of the “bed.” It was a v-berth so there was a slight curve to the bed. I don’t think this was a major factor, but it was part of the bed situation.
  • The temperature in the sleeping area. It was hot and humid for the first 3 weeks of the trip. I can take heat, but the humidity was killing me. That got worse at night in a space with very little ventilation. We each had our own little fans and they helped a lot, but most nights I woke multiple times sweating with no bedcovers over me. It got better when we left the Canal and entered the Great Lakes.
  • My roommate’s constant pushing of her sleeping bag over onto my side of the sleeping area. Shit. As if my bed wasn’t small enough, I had to wrestle with her extra bedding?
  • My roommate’s snoring. I think this was the primary reason I slept like shit every night and needed a nap almost every day. The other crew member snored like a buzzsaw. Seriously, she is a prime candidate for a CPAP machine. I can only imagine the brain cells she’s losing to oxygen deprivation every night while she’s sleeping. Ear plugs muffled the sound but did not remove it. It woke me numerous times every night and was the reason I was often out of bed before 5 AM.

True story: the first night I was on board and we all went to bed, my roommate immediately began her high decibel snoring. I had no earplugs; I naively didn’t expect to need them. I got out of bed and looked around the very small boat for somewhere else to sleep. There was no place else. I was stuck in that forward cabin with the noisemaker. I sat in one of the main cabin’s seats for about an hour trying to figure out how I’d live with this for the expected 8 weeks of my trip. I was nearly in tears when I finally crawled into bed.

I obtained earplugs — the best the pharmacy had to offer — the next day.

I eventually recorded the sound of her snoring on my phone. If I can find it, I’ll share it here.

The thing that didn’t bother me? The movement of the boat. That was very pleasant. Stress: I had none, except near the end when I wanted to leave the boat but worried that I was needed on board.

Naps during the day saved my ass (and sanity), but that nap time is included in the time that my watch calculated for total sleep. So I was living on an average of less than 6 hours of sleep per day for 5 weeks.

Anyway, my upcoming trip should not have this problem. I’ll have that front v-berth to myself and might even be able to sleep with my head in the bow. I’m looking forward to it!

Schweizer Helicopter Intro Flight

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Another cockpit POV video from the FlyingMAir YouTube channel.

Here’s an intro flight given to an airplane pilot in a Schweizer 300CB helicopter by one of Canyon State Aero’s CFIs, Trevor, back in January 2020. (Regular viewers of this channel might remember Trevor as the CFI I practiced autorotations with in another one of my videos.)

In this video, they lift off from Mesa’s Falcon Field Airport (FFZ) and head out to the practice area east of there. Trevor does a standard intro flight — the kind they’d do for potential new students — before returning to the airport. This video includes cockpit chatter as well as all radio communications between takeoff and landing.

Since recording this video, Canyon State Aero was sold; I’m not sure whether its new owners are still operating a flight school. This was shot prior to Covid lockdowns.

To get this video content, I had to split the cost of the demo flight with the student, who was an employee of Canyon State. Many, many thanks to channel members and Patreon patrons. It’s your membership dollars that made this flight and video possible. I hope they enjoy their ad-free, 2K version of this video.

Clouds and Shadows Time-Lapse

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A time-lapse movie from a late autumn day.

I’m a huge fan of time-lapse movies. To me, there’s nothing that does a better job bringing what looks like a motionless scene to life.

So I make a lot of time-lapse movies. You can find a bunch here in the Time-Lapse playlist on my personal YouTube channel.

The one here was shot a few days ago on December 1. I used one of my GoPro Hero 8 cameras in time-lapse mode, set to take a shot every 10 seconds. When you do the math, this means each second of video is 5 minutes of real time. The video here covers from just before dawn to just after sunset.

What’s most interesting about this video — honestly, there wasn’t much cloud activity — is the way you can see the shadow of the cliffs south of my home move across the landscape. The sun rises beyond those cliffs and this time of year I don’t see it on my home at all. I blogged about this phenomena, which I call the Shadow Time; this is a chance to see it in action.

I hope you enjoy this quick video. I’m hoping to share a lot more videos over the coming months as I travel south in Arizona and California. If you haven’t subscribed to my personal YouTube channel, please do. Once I get 1,000 subscribers, I can do livestreams from my cellphone and I’d really like to do live presentations at some of the places I visit. I’m only 18 subscribers short of this goal!

Cowboy Cookies

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I think I can do better than The New York Times and Laura Bush.

The Harvest Foods supermarket in Quincy, WA, makes the most incredible cookies I’ve ever eaten. They call them Cowboy Cookies and they contain the best of all worlds: chocolate, oatmeal, coconut, and nuts. They’re relatively large, not too sweet, and just soft enough to give you the satisfaction of a soft, chewy cookie.

Because Quincy is a bit farther away than I’m willing to drive for cookies, I hunted down a recipe to make at home. I found this recipe from the New York Times. It has a backstory:

This recipe came to The Times in 2000 during the Bush-Gore presidential campaign when Family Circle magazine ran cookie recipes from each of the candidates’ wives and asked readers to vote. Laura Bush’s cowboy cookies, a classic chocolate chip cookie that’s been beefed up with oats, pecans, coconut and cinnamon, beat Tipper Gore’s ginger snaps by a mile.

I made the cookies today. Not a full recipe; I made a 2/3 recipe. (The recipe is very easily cut into thirds.) They were good, but not Harvest Foods good.

Too much sugar, I think. Not cakey enough; very crispy. With all those goodies in them, they should have been substantial. But they weren’t.

I started thinking about my favorite cookie recipe, for Oatmeal Chocolate Chips. I blogged the recipe 14 years ago and still love them. I suspect that I could modify that recipe to have fewer chocolate chips, a bit less oatmeal, and some additional coconut and nuts.

So that’s how I’ll be doing it next time. If you try it first, let me know how it goes.

Maria’s Marvelous Stuffing, 2021 Edition

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My favorite part of Thanksgiving Dinner.

It’s about 7 AM on Thanksgiving day. Even though I’m not hosting Thanksgiving dinner at my home, I’ll be a guest at a friend’s house and I asked her if I could bring the stuffing.

(Yes, I said stuffing. I know it doesn’t go in the bird so it shouldn’t be called stuffing, but I refuse to call it dressing. It’s stuffing. Period. No discussion will be accepted.)

What’s In It This Year

I love making stuffing and eating my stuffing. Why? Because not only is it delicious, but it’s also it’s a meal in itself. It has all kinds of things in it and every year that list is different. Here’s what’s in this year’s stuffing:

  • StuffingCloseup
    A closeup of this year’s stuffing, still in the pan.

    Jimmy Dean Sage sausage

  • Onions
  • Celery
  • Carrots
  • Garlic
  • Sweet potatoes (from my garden)
  • Butternut squash
  • Brown rice
  • Quinoa
  • Chestnuts
  • Almonds
  • Apples
  • Figs (dried)
  • Stove Top Cornbread Stuffing Mix

So yeah: it has meat, veggies, fruit, and bread in it. Because it has twice as much (by volume, anyway) non-bread ingredients than bread, it’s not really what most folks would call stuffing (or yes, dressing). In fact, it sounds like a meal in itself to me.

It’s great beside turkey or chicken and a good turkey gravy and cranberries can’t hurt it.

I make some version of this every year, whether I’m hosting a meal at my home, going to someone else’s home, or camped out in my RV out in the desert. Way back when I hosted family meals in my old home, I made huge quantities of it. It’s always the first thing I do (after having my coffee, of course) on Thanksgiving day.

I’ve never had any complaints about it. Most folks seem to like it, although probably not as much as I do.

That’s okay. The less they eat, the more is left for me after the big day.

Make It Yourself!

If you’d like to try making this, have at it. But don’t expect me to provide you with measured quantities. I wing it every year with whatever I’ve remembered to buy (like the chestnuts) with whatever I find in the fridge or pantry (most everything else). The only thing I measure is the water that has to hydrate the dried stuffing mix — and that’s so it’s moist enough. Even then, I usually add more so it’s plenty moist and survives some time in the oven or a microwave for reheating or keeping warm. I usually don’t add salt because the stuffing mix and sausage (and likely the gravy that’ll go over it) are salty enough; it’s easier to add salt later than try to remove it, no?

If you’re completely clueless about how to get started, start by lightly browning the sausage (or bacon works, too) with the onions, celery, and garlic. Then add the other ingredients that need cooking, stirring so they get some time on the bottom of the pan. Then stir in the ingredients that don’t need cooking. Then add the water, preheated to boiling. Cover the pan and let it cook for 5 minutes or so. Then add the dry stuffing mix, stir well, and remove from the heat. You’re done; it’ll be done in 5-10 minutes. I try to keep it warm until dinnertime, usually in a covered oven/microwave safe dish in the oven. That helps the flavors meld and the whole thing gets soft.

Yum.