16°49' W
16.02.08
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leaving las palmas.
enjoying some leftover lasagne. it's comparitively rare there is anything left after a meal at all, so there's no such thing as leftover day on the flying cloud. we're just hungry, i guess. jenny claims that i am skinner than she is, yet i eat more than matt. 'where does it go?' she says. one thing i have learned from working at camp s is that the 'will work for food' contract actually is a good deal for someone with my metabolism.
i am reminded of ian waters' suggestion that before a dinner date or family dinner with the significant O, he tends to eat dinner first; then at the event, a normal person sized portion is easily put away, and noone has to double any recipes. restaurant bills are more reasonable and one doesn't have to walk away feeling like eating dinner after getting home from eating dinner.
tonight's constellation is Virgo, based on which part of the sky is clear and other nebulous factors. there was still a lot of light pollution from the various canary islands and the moon is super bright. tonight the moon set about an hour into my watch. not bad stars on the ocean side after that, and a couple shooting stars, one of which had a green tail that lasted at least until i remembered to start saying the alphabet. which took longer than it should.
for the second leg of our journey, my watch will no longer end with jupiter rising, venus rising and then rose rising. miss rose has gone off to work and from now on it'll be marilyn rising (for the spillane watch? i suppose). and at the moment we've crossed another time zone so dawn is roughly an hour later than it was. watches are all GMT, and that will not change en route.
funny thing about leaving port. it's the leaving part that sticks out and not so much the port part. after many days in las palmas i found a bakery, a music store, a place to get AA batteries. stuff like that.
the music store was disappointing. i went in and had to tune a cheapish classical guitar with a cutaway and didn't like it all that much. 170 euros. not all that cheap. but not all that nice for nearly $400. very light strings. ew. also played an F-style mandolin that was super flat, and even not in tune with itself before i touched it. also: light strings = no like. there's just no tone in floppy strings.
the only halfway pretty instrument in the shop was a used flamenco guitar way in the back of the store. i waited around for about 15 minutes to have this dude tell me i wasn't to play it. mostly tuning out of tune instruments and playing a bit of bossa nova. the counter dude explained that it wasn't for sale and that it was his father's. which explained not a lot, though perhaps his father is andrès segovia. though i had considered picking up a tuning fork, i decided not to buy anything and left. my hands were clean. and come on, it's just a guitar. it had friction pegs and the flamenco-style fingernail guards on the top. a beautiful instrument. alas.
