God. Seriously.
It’s Tuesday, and I have two more days to get everything out of my house and have it ready for the new folks to move in. There’s still so much to do!
This week has been very expensive – I thought last week was pricy, what with the purchase of the $1700 generator (which, by the way, seems to be somewhat overkill for my needs! I probably could have gotten away just fine with the 1000w version instead of the 2000w – oh well, I guess it doesn’t hurt to have too much power), but this week has had four >$100 trips to Canadian Tire and two >$100 trips to the boating store so far! Worse yet, there’s no end in sight, as I’ve still got to completely overhaul the electrical system, finish repairing all the fiberglass problems on the deck, and then hopefully I’ll have time to start making the interior look a little more like a home and less like a hunting camp.
One nice thing though – I realized yesterday as I was loading in some groceries that my nomadship (heh) is nearly complete. I’ve got canned and dried food to last a month, two months if I really had to stretch it. All the fuel tanks are full, and there’s another hundred liters of diesel in jerry cans in the amas. The water tanks are full too, giving me over a hundred liters of potable water – all I’m really lacking for an extended absence is a source of fresh protein (ie fish or meat). Not that I really *need* to be ready for any sort of extended absence… but given the econopocalypse, impending west coast earthquake, swine flu, etc, it’s nice to know.
I don’t know if I mentioned, but the second time we had the boat out, the binnacle (thingy that sticks out of the deck like a podium that the steering wheel attaches to) pulled out the deck, exposing poor workmanship – don’t attach important things with short woodscrews! – and a small patch of rot that I’ll eventually have to tend to. I got around to fixing that yesterday, pulling the binnacle completely off and re-attaching it securely to the deck with long bolts and wide washers. When I went to reconnect the steering, however, I noticed a bunch of slack in the lines. I called Bill, the guy who sold me the boat, and asked what he thought of that.
Well, turns out one of the steering lines had slipped from a turning block. That turning block happened to be deep in the stern of the boat, reachable through an access panel, but still at the end of arm’s reach. I got to spend the next hour and a half up to my shoulder in the wall of the salon, trying to free a thick steel cable from the pulley it had fouled. Waaaay fun.
Seriously, every day something breaks on the boat, and I have to learn how to fix it. Sooner or later I’m going to know every square inch of her. In some ways I growl about this, as I look at weekend sailors with their gorgeous, perfectly-functioning boats, but in a much stronger way I know that this is the universe’s way of ensuring that the boat becomes truly mine. It is a series of tests, and as I complete each one I feel stronger for having done so.
Anyhow. Just to add to the stress, I’ve been accepted to speak at Open Web Vancouver, a big web conference in June. I’ve never actually spoken at a conference before, so we’ll see how that works out…