the doldrums

it has been very hot and still here the last few days, with no wind or rain, perhaps some in the night but that’s no use as it’s then hot and still again during the day. we have mainly been staying inside with the air conditioning on, i’ve been doing my accounting (the numbers add up even less in this kind of weather). this is what it must be like when you are on a boat and go into the doldrums where there’s no wind. robert once sailed back from hawaii to the mainland, los angeles, which took 21 days, on a sailboat that had just raced the same route but the other way and much quicker. they went through 4 days of storms, where they had to strap themselves onto the boat so they didn’t get swept overboard when the waves hit. then they had 4 days of doldrums, where they didn’t move at all as it was totally windless. they ran out of food nearing the end of the journey, and all got a huge craving for ice cream which they indulged when they go on shore, apart from one boy who by that time had gone a bit mad apparently, and didn’t want ice cream.

this reminds me of the area called the horse latitudes. this is a particular latitude where the wind is always very calm, so much so that the sailors used to have to throw their horses overboard as they didn’t have enough food to keep them alive on board ship. i guess they didn’t kill them to eat them as they didn’t have freezer space to keep the meat fresh.

it was around this time last year that we left belize to go up to montana and spent those 3 months in monty the motorhome. she is still parked in mexico waiting for us to come back one day. how i loved getting off the plane in to the drizzle and grey skies and huge mountainous scenery, it was truly amazing after the belizean weather and lifestyle.

last night we watched the hurt locker, the film that won the best picture at the oscars, to the disgust of james cameron who thought his avatar would win. well it’s quite obvious that the hurt locker is a more important film in lots of ways, dealing as it does with the iraq war and war in general and what it does to people.

here is a quote that actually referred to a powerpoint presentation:

some problems in the world are not bullet-izable. H.R. McMaster, Brigadier General, US Army, Iraq War veteran (b. 1962)

this week we met a girl called steph, she come to yoga sometimes but we’ve never really met her. she used to have probably the most interesting job i’ve ever heard of and is really cool. she is here in placencia doing volunteer work and teaching and doing fire dancing and things like that. i asked her if she used to  be a teacher in the states. no way, she used to train surgeons to use bio-medical surgical robotic equipment. ie the robots that go in and do the operations instead of the surgeon, so she had to re train surgeons to do the same operations they’d been doing for years, but by directing the robots to do them. robots don’t drink and therefore wouldn’t have shaky hands, so it removes the chance of human error and makes the operations much quicker and safer. she used to demonstrate the equipment on live pigs (anaesthetised), she once saw a person having brain surgery and felt pretty sick, but other than that she is totally not squeamish, you could hardly do that job if you were. she said they are going to be using nano bots soon, which are like tiny weeny robots, so she might go back to work for them again as that’s pretty exciting.