I’m Still Here

In April I wrote a blog entry. And then a week went by and I didn’t write anything else. And then another week went by, and then a month, and then another month. Before I knew it, 4 months went by.

But it’s not like I didn’t have anything to say. I just kinda went dry, that’s all. I continued to have adventures, but life stuff happened too. I’ve been on 2 trips this summer, and am just back from sailing Sabine back from Vermont.

What happened was I just got tired. Work has been kicking me in the ass lately, and when I get home the last thing I want to do is to think. I have been working on the book during lunch hours, and trying like hell to sell it. But the man’s been wearing me down lately. I need to find a way to keep that from happening. I don’t know how yet. So far I’ve come up with ideas that involve purchasing large quantities of lottery tickets. I think to formulate a more certain plan.

But I am still here. And I will write about this summer’s adventures. I promise.

And Then,Bbefore I Knew It, An Entire Month Went By

It’s been awhile, yes, I know. What can I say? It’s all February’s fault.

See, I hate February. A lot. It’s a short month, but a pretty damn long one. Todd, the dogs and I all get cabin fever after awhile. Luckily February this year went by without any major spats in our house.

But let me tell you about the toll February has on me.

I mentioned the cabin fever. That can be remedied by a hike on a Saturday afternoon. However, this year the snow on the ground remained at knee height for much of the month. It had melted enough to be a soggy pain in the ass, but still too much snow to go tromping around in.

It also kind of pisses me off. I get irritated about having to spend each day of my life sitting in a cubicle from 8 to 5. I look outward chanting “There’s got to be a better way” under my breath. Exasperated, I haven’t found it yet. And so the month continues.

Now that most of March is over, I look forward to other adventures. I look forward to the Owl Prowl we’re going to this Friday night. I look forward to a vacation in Florida in June, and sailing back from Champlain in July. I look forward to diving. I look forward to spending whole days with the top down on the car.

But for now, I wait for March to be over. But on NPR this morning they said that we’re in for 2-4” of snow tonight. Just when I thought it had all melted for the year.

I Tried Not To Get Sucked In

I tried, I really really did. But the holiday season got me again. The overall busy-ness, the overeating, the trying to cram way too much work into the last few weeks of the month, the all of it. And here I am on January 3rd, noticing that I hadn’t posted since the middle of December. Gah!

Well, resolution time is upon us. And here are mine. I think I will finally take that damn cooking class I resolved to take last year. There’s one coming up next week, and I want to cross it off my list.

The next is to plan and cook dinner 2 nights per week. I am not talking about throwing a frozen pizza in the oven, I am talking about planning an actual balanced meal 2 nights per week.

My last resolution is to connect with family more than I have. I was looking at all the Christmas cards we got this year, and thought about how nice it is to get handwritten cards in the mail instead of bills and junk. Then one of Todd’s cousins put together a calendar for the year and put every single family birthday and anniversary on there. My goal is to send a card to each family member on their birthday or anniversary this year.

I say bring it on 2011!

Knock Knock! Who’s There?

Not me, that’s for sure.

Sabine hit the water last Friday, and we’re still in that early sailing season flurry of activity. The spring cleaning is largely done and the water system has been flushed free of anti-freeze from the winter. While I can now swish some highly chlorinated water in my mouth when brushing my teeth, I still wouldn’t drink an entire glass until the inline filters are installed. And that installation is somewhere on the list next to “install anchor windlass” and “put the sails on.”

We’ve begun our weird summer existence of living part of the time on the boat and part of the time aboard. Now that I am set up for that kind of life, it’s great, but it takes a bit of planning each week. We ask each other what nights we want to stay aboard and what nights we want to stay at home. There are things to do at home like get the mail and do the laundry. Which days will Todd be busy and can’t bring the dogs in to work with him? The dogs go to work with Todd on most days, so they just commute with Todd from the boat instead of from the house. But there are some days that they just cannot go with him. Like today, for example. We have a function to go to after work tonight, so we stayed at the house last night and left them home today. Tonight we’ll stay at the house, but tomorrow night we’ll probably be aboard. I think.

Deciding to stay aboard is often done on a whim usually over a flurry of emails between Todd and me. And for that reason a matching set of toiletries have been bought to keep aboard. Prescriptions now travel in my purse. And a change of clothes that I can wear to work is now kept in the stateroom closet. I wear jeans to work most days, so I don’t care about wrinkles or stuff like that. Todd keeps a set of his work clothes hanging in the truck or at work.

Food remains to be an issue. The only thing I have in the fridge on the boat is beer (and I hope that Todd thought to toss that roast beef sub from Sunday) yet I haven’t bought groceries for home either because we haven’t been there all that much. (Yes, it is possible to eat too much Subway. I wonder how that Jared dude lost all that weight eating Subway all the time. I can’t do it for more than a few days.) But that will be remedied when I can be bothered to buy some staples from the supermarket. I have to buy just enough so that things won’t spoil at home or aboard, yet enough so that we’re eating healthy and not overdosing on burritos and pizza.

But overall living on the boat is a healthier lifestyle. We don’t beach ourselves on the couch in front of the TV, because there is no TV aboard. We might watch a movie from Netflix on Todd’s iPad before bed, but that’s just about it. We do things around the boat and we’re more active. We go to bed with the sun and wake up with it the next morning—and because of that I am more inclined to jog in the mornings I am aboard.

And now to respond to the email from Todd, “So, wanna stay aboard tonight or tomorrow night?”

Living with the Bubonic Plague

While I was on my technology induced blog vacation, I have contracted what seems to be the Bubonic Plague. So it’s just as well that I haven’t been able to post, as you were all spared the gory details of my annoying symptoms.

I am back to eating solids now. Kind of. On Sunday I got cocky. I ate all kinds of things. And what didn’t I do for a Klondike bar? Oh, you’ve no idea! I ate pizza! Glorious pizza! Todd made jambalaya from scratch. The recipe called for roughly 8 metric tons of cayenne pepper. I arrogantly ate a few bites, and then promptly held my hands against my jaws to prevent my face from melting from the heat.

Yesterday morning I struggled through a few bites of toast for breakfast, and fed the rest to the dogs. I boiled an egg, and then split it in half for each dog as well. I got cocky and tried to eat a plain turkey sandwich. It took three hours to get through about ¾ of it before I gave up. Will someone explain to me why I thought Greek yogurt would be a good idea? Because really? It wasn’t. At all. Todd made me the world’s blandest chicken soup for dinner, and I ate about three bites of it before I declared I was done eating anything for the rest of my life.

But today is a new day. I am feeling better. My energy is returning. It’s amazing the effect that food has on my energy. My fuel tank is full. I am not doubled over in agony. My stomach isn’t making noises only heard from caged lions. And I am about 3 pounds lighter. Win win!

The major downside to living with the Bubonic Plague, is the lack of energy. We’re getting ready to launch Sabine, and there is still oh so much to be done. Working on weeknights is largely a bust, as we’re both tired from work. (I don’t know how we used to do that all the time? It used to be that we’d work on the boat until a million o’clock on weeknights and still go do our jobs. Where have those days gone??)

On Saturday we went to the boat, and then Todd promptly drove me home again. I squandered the day in a disoriented haze of illness. On Sunday, we made another stab at working on the boat, and declared the day a wasted effort as well. The new fuel tanks are inside the boat, but not hooked up to anything. The radar, while now functional (!!!) still needs to have the wires chased up the mast and through the interior of the boat. The boat’s a damn mess and it smells bad, too.

But there’s always next weekend.

"Daniel-san! Sell House!"

Todd and I have just put our house on the market. I have spent the last week painting every room in the house, and Todd has packed up all of our extra stuff and moved it into storage. It’s been a lot of work, and we’re finally to the point where we’re ready for the masses to come look at our house. The house is now so devoid of stuff that there is a slight echo in most of the rooms.

Last week I was almost done painting the house, and Todd was almost done packing up our stuff. We were exhausted so we stopped one night and watched The Karate Kid on TV. We were joking about how psyched Mr. Miyagi must have been to have all his chores done by some kid all in the name of teaching him karate.

Then Todd had a brilliant idea, “Hey, let’s put a sign out in front of the house that says ‘Free karate lessons inside.’ Then we can put on a phony Japanese accent and say things like ‘Pack box! Breathe in nose, breathe out mouth! Paint wall! Up! Down! Breathe in nose, breathe out mouth!’ We could totally get this house packed up in no time!”

:::

House hunting has been an adventure. We found a house that we like and we’re still ironing out the deal with the sellers. But going into houses and looking at them has been a lot of fun. It’s always fun to see the way other people decorate their homes, and to say “Oh good God what where they thinking?” when we see something particularly awful in a home. There was a log cabin that we looked at that was very nice. The seller removed the stove from the kitchen along with the woodstove from the living room. When we asked the agent where the stoves were he explained that the seller was afraid of the stoves getting stolen so he took them out of the house. In the kitchen there was a space where the stove clearly belongs, and the seller put a stool in that spot. Todd sat down on the stool, rested his elbow on the counter and said “So, is this where we sit and wait for the pizza to come?”

:::

On another mission in Operation Sell House, I have removed our patio doors to get the glass replaced. The seals on the edges of the glass were blown and the windows got cloudy. They were like that when we moved in and we never bothered to do anything about it. Now that we’re trying to sell, we decided to finally do something about it. This morning we took the doors out and I took them to a window factory right around the corner from our house. They called at noon and said that they were ready, and they are still sitting in the truck because I cannot lift them by myself. As a result I’ve had a gaping hole in my house all day long. Bees, flies and other flying vermin have since decided to make my house their new home. I am hoping that Todd will be home from work soon so bats won’t come in when it gets dark.

:::
This weekend summer officially ended. We put the hard top on the Jeep. Another summer has passed.

Broken Laptops and 3 Day Weekends

Our trusty IBM Thinkpad broke down about 2 weeks ago. Todd’s been busy and hasn’t had a chance to move all the stuff from that hard drive onto our new trusty Sony Vaio. Todd has the mad computer skillz, and could migrate the hard drive in his sleep. But I think he’s been too busy to sleep lately too.

Do you know what that means?

That means I will either have to make the time to recreate the next installment of the canoe trip story from memory, or wait until Todd migrates that hard drive to the new computer—on which I have the story all written out already.

So now you’re thinking “Beej, you were on that trip. Surely you remember what happened next.” But life has been crazy. Work has been nuts, and the last thing I’ve felt like doing lately is to look at another computer when I get home from work, because I spend all day at a computer at work. Lately I’ve been wanting a bit of a break from spending that much time in front of a computer because the weather has been so nice lately. The idea of copying and pasting an entry is a lot more appealing lately, than actually sitting down at a computer to write one. I am a crappy blogger.

Last weekend my in-laws came into town. My in-laws are very fun people, and always up for a good adventure. They came down for a 3 day weekend, and Todd and I took Monday off from work. This time their visit was a bit different. In the summer when they visit we usually will go somewhere like Block Island for the weekend. But my father in law was suffering from bronchitis on this visit, and didn’t feel like he’d get good rest sleeping in the v-berth of the boat.

Friday night they arrived precisely at the moment Todd and I were installing a brand new stove in our kitchen. (OK, so the laptop broke, and the stove too? Oh, and the washer bailed on me this morning too. How psyched do you think I am right now? Not very, actually.)

Saturday we sailed the boat back to our home mooring from Jamestown. Our brief (one night) living aboard stint has ended, for now. But we had a beautiful sail all the way back. Uneventful, which is exactly the kind of sail we were hoping for. For once in our sailing career we weren’t sailing directly into the wind, and managed to actually sail most of the way. The dogs basked in the sun, the people drank beer, ate sandwiches and laughed all afternoon.

Sunday we headed to Newport to fly kites at Brenton Point. Todd has a collection of 2 line and 4 line kites that he can do tricks with. He also has tons on single line kites, and windsocks that he’ll fly as well. When we go to the beach he’ll drag all these kites out and throw them up to the sky with every single windsock he owns. I swear you can see our spot on the beach from satellites. It is for this reason that our friends call Todd “Toddicus Kiticus.”
Monday we went to the beach. And not just any old beach. We took the boat over to an island in the middle of Narragansett Bay called Prudence Island. There are residents on Prudence, and the only way to get there is by a ferry that runs to the eastern side of the island. We anchored the boat just north of Prudence, and dinghied at least a mile over to the beach on the island.

Just by our anchorage was a man quahogging. What exactly is quahogging? Well, it’s the fancy Rhode Island way of saying clamming. The man was raking for clams, so Todd took the dinghy over and bought 100 clams off of this man for $20. It’s good to live in the Ocean State for all the fresh seafood that’s so easily accessible to us. Now, if only there were shrimpers. Or Quaimpers?

We had the beach to ourselves. The dogs ran and swam all day. Todd and my mother in law snorkeled and watched the blue crabs crawl around underwater. Quite possibly the perfect day.

Hopefully this weekend Todd will have the time to migrate that laptop so I can continue the story. But then, we’ll probably be doing things like going to the kite festival in Newport, going sailing and maybe taking in a dive.