Good morning. The world is flat.

I have just put on my morning coffee and it is brewing but not fast enough for me.

As I was wandering through the kitchen I noticed the knife I use to cook with. It is nothing more than the old Green River butcher knife that I used back in '86 to clean halibut with. The handle is still wrapped with the seine twine I put on it the day I got it to provide a non-slip grip.

It's funny to think about for a minute because there is a pretty nice set of knives over on the counter that remains largely unused except for the paring knife which I occasionally use to open plastic packages with.

I have listened to people talk about their cutlery and how much they spent on this and that and all of the things that go along with cooking, yet I can't help think about how many meals I have prepared with the old work horse.

From time to time I recall my adventures in the halibut fishery and of all of the things I have done on the water and for that matter ashore I always remember halibut fishing.

Unlike crab fishing where you empty the pots as they come in, you wrestle halibut in over the side and the entire process is nothing more than brutality in it's finest form. It is pure savagery and I truly loved being involved it.

Anyway, the knife.

It is my observation that I tend to have just a few work horse items that I seem to regularly use and the rest of the things I own are things I either do not use or only use occasionally.

If you look at a wrench set as an example, the average guy realy only uses about three or four sized wrenches most of the time, the four that come to mind are 3/8s, 7/16ths,1/2 inch and 9/16ths, and that's about it.

At this point some reader is going to babble on about how just yesterday he needed an 11/16th and I do not doubt it, but I daresay that was probably an exception. The four sizes I mentioned are still the basic four that bear the brunt of the average homeowner.

In my case the same sort of thing holds true for that dopey knife. It bears the brunt of my cooking around the house.

It is funny how there are certain little workhorses in out lives, the little go-to items that we seem to constantly grab to do things, and it is rather odd that we wind up with a bunch of stuff we seldom or for that matter sometimes never use.

It seems that about 10% of our tools do about 90% of the work.

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In other gnus, My wellhead finally caved in after all of these years. It lasted 63 years.

What? Wellhead? What do you mean by that?

Back when this place was built for GI Joe back in '48 there was no city water and the house originally had a well and a pump for domestic water.

They eventually installed city water but left the pump installed.

When I moved in almost 20 years ago it was still there and the realtor pointed out that it was just the thing for washing my car and so on.

From time to time I would run it just for the sake of keeping it going and occasionally I watered a few plans with it.

Yesterday I fired the pump us but it produced no water whisc really does not surprise me because the thing is so old. The pump still works, but no water is forthcoming and I think I am going to have to pin the blame on the wellhead because it is 63 years old and is probably nothing more than black pipe and has finally rusted out and caved in.

The nook the pump is in has actually been a source of mustiness and cobwebs over the years and is a pain in the ass to get around in. Maybe I'll just jerk the pump and the tank out, knock the mounting pad off and seal everything up.

Then I can install a permanent light and maybe Drylock the wall and have some more usable space in the basement, but not right yet, though.

I will do this sometime in the fall after I make sure it just isn't a case of the well being temporarily dry. We'll see.
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I just glanced at the clock I keep that is on UTC and it is now 11:30 in Greenwich, England. The instant I saw it I knew that it was about 0730 here.

After years of being at sea where we use basic 24 hour time, and working as an SWL as a kid and so on it is rather odd how I can look at a clock set several time zones ahead and know in an instant what is going on here.

I recall many years ago when someone brought up the subject of time. He mentioned that he used a shortwave and time ticks to set his watch and deducted the proper amount of hours for the time zone because WWV uses UTC. A guy who was a contractor shouted out, "Who the hell cares what time it is in Greenwich, England!"

Like a lot of people he wasn't even willing to take a passing glance of something as simple as time and the way things have been set up.

Years ago it was a confusing hash of local times, based on high noon at a specific geographical location. It was the event of the railroads that brought the time zones we have. Prior to that towns would set their watches by whatever, generally basing it on local high noon.

The railroads needed to syncronize their activities so they created the standardized time zones we now have.

That contractor never realized that the very cartography that laid out the plots he was building on had their finger in the pie of coordinated time.

Today time, and extermely accurate time is a very real need for things like GPS and other navigational needs.

Hell, I needed accurate time when I was crossing the Pacific in a sailboat because I was using a sextant for Pete's sake!

While I am pretty sure that I would have hit North America from Hawaii with no major sweat and I know I could have hit the Strait of Juan de Fuca by running a parallel, but having some idea of longitude sure made it a whole lot easier.

Still, I remember the answer I gave the contractor.

"A whole lot of people that have made your life a whole lot easier that you take for granted care a LOT about what time it is in Greenwich, England."

Now that I am on this subject, there are quite a few things that work and work well based on a false premise. One of them is celestial navigation. It is pretty much based on the premise that all the stars and pplanets are equidistant from the earth. As we now know, they are not, but celestial navigation works.

Another thing that comes to mind was when I blew the mind of the aforementioned contractor. He was doing what most small time general contractors do. He was basing his building upon the premise that the world was flat. In general, this works because the amount of distance something will be out of plumb in, say three stories is pretty miniscule.

For you readers to understand what I am talking about, plumb is a line that drops straight to the center of the earth. Two plumb walls in reality are not parallel, but for, say a house, it's most certainly close enough.

If you built a wall from the North pole to the Equator and plumber the both ends of the wall and carried the line down to the center of the earth the two lines would meet at a 90 degree angle.

Still, for something as small as a house, plumbing the walls is close enough.

It is when you get into something big where the curvature of the earth commes into play. What comes into my mind is the Verazzano Narrows bridge in New York Harbor.

Careful higher mathematical calculations were needed because the two end pillars on that bridge are NOT parallel. They are plumbed to the center of the earth and there is a very measurable difference between the two tops of the pillars and the bottoms of them.

Still, all in all for smaller projects things seem to work out OK basing reasonably sized construction projects on the premise that the world is flat.






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