Author: drew

One of the (many) differences between living in a regular apartment or house vs. living on a sailboat is the general lack of vertical wallspace on which to put up artwork.  I had pretty much resigned myself to a spartan decorating scheme, and I had placed all of my treasured artworks into storage for some future date when I have wallspace again – but about a month ago I had an epiphany.

Actually it wasn’t an epiphany at all, because the idea wasn’t my own.  I’m not sure of the exact words then, perhaps I could say “I was enlightened”?  The story is simple; it happened while I was walking home from an art opening called “Robots and Monsters” at the Ayden Gallery, which I had just been to with Trent and Shauna.  I had become somewhat smitten with a gorgeous painting by Peter Hogan, entitled “Bizbot 2” – click the link to see the unfinished version; the final version had a lot more polish, very much a victorian portrait of the subject, complete with a perfectly-suited gilted frame.

Anyhow – walking away from the gallery, I was loudly lamenting the fact that I had to leave such a ridiculously awesome piece unpurchased.  The artist was asking $300, which, while out of my pricerange, would technically have been possible if I tightened up my belt for a month or two – the problem was that on the boat I literally have nowhere to hang it.  So what could I do?  Lend it to someone and hope they don’t fall completely in love with it?  Wrap it up and place it in a storage locker for a few years?  Nothing seemed appropriate.

At this point, Trent made that face he makes when he’s about to state some conclusion that he feels you really should have arrived at on your own, and said:

“You live in the same city as the artist, and you own your boat.  Why don’t you just commission them to do a piece on a bulkhead or something, to paint a part of the boat?”

At this point I think I actually stopped in my tracks with my mouth open.  Of COURSE!

So.  Long story short, last Tuesday the lovely and talented Shauna Eve came by to paint the first of what will hopefully be many original and lovely art pieces painted on the internal hull and bulkheads of Tie Fighter.  This piece, entitled “The Stowaway”, graces the starboard side of the bathroom/dressing room in the forward cabin.  Lovely!

It’s been incredible to me just how many talented musicians I’ve had spend time on the boat over the summer, and I certainly look forward to more jams and mini-concerts in the months to come.  The water is an excellent stage for performance – I don’t know why it never occurred to me to extend the boat itself as a canvas for some of the exceptionally talented visual artists in my life as well.  Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to give you that little push to make you realize the full potential, even when you stare at it every day.

So who will be next?  I don’t want to force the issue; I figure the right artists will become apparent when the time is right.  For now, I can’t help but grin every time I see the Stowaway.

Having no TV, no stereo and currently no sound on my laptop, my entertainment options on the boat as of late fall neatly into four categories.  On cold, rainy December nights, I can:

• play Nintendo DS,
• make music with my guitar, mandolin, harmonica and/or voice,
• derp around on the internet, or
• read books.

With the weather being mostly lousy and Christmas (ie: Visa bills) right around the corner, I’ve been hitting all four pretty hard lately, although some a bit more than others.  My Nintendo games collection is quickly growing stale and I’m already on the internet for at least eight hours a day for work, so I’ve been spending a lot more time making music (more on this soon), and I picked up a few more books at the used bookstore the other day.

I’ve just finished reading the first of them, Michael Swanwick’s “Bones of the Earth”, which was entertaining; kind of another take on the whole ‘Jurassic Park’ genre but with a clever take on time-travel.  I didn’t think it was quite up to the level of sheer brilliance of his other novels, specifically “Stations of the Tide” and “The Iron Dragon’s Daughter“, but it was a fun light read and I finished it over two quiet nights on the boat.

In the wall cubby beside my berth – which no longer leaks and destroys books! – I’ve got Neal Stephenson’s “Quicksilver”, the first installment of his ‘Baroque Cycle’ trilogy.  In the past two years I’ve started this book three times, but the previous two attempts I didn’t manage to push through the slow first few chapters enough to develop a relationship with the characters.  His phenomenal book “Snowcrash” was lean, fast-paced and exciting, but then his next novel, “Cryptonomicon“, was much larger and lumbering, coming in at almost three times the length of “Snowcrash”.  So far the Baroque Cycle books are following that trend, with each book of the trilogy being at least the length of “Cryptonomicon” – and as I understand it they’re all one story, split into three chapters because of the sheer size of the body of work.  But hey, I’ve got some hours to kill at night, so maybe this third attempt I’ll actually get through it.

When I mentioned that I was catching up on past fiction that I hadn’t ever gotten around to reading – in particular, I’ve been poring over lists of past winners of the ‘Hugo’ and ‘Nebula’ awards for exceptional science fiction writing – Trent loaned me a short stack of books that I had shamefully confessed to not having previously read.  In the past month I caught up on “Fight Club” (different enough from the movie to warrant a reading) and “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” (significantly different from “Bladerunner”, the movie based on the book).  And, since I had mentioned reading and seriously enjoying Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle”, he loaned me Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions“, a bizarre story of American crazy, and “Welcome To The Monkey House“, a collection of short stories.  I really need to return those four, and hopefully sign out a few new titles from the Library of Trent.

Waiting up on the shelf, I’ve got a couple of pulpy Heinlein novels.  I really, really enjoyed the copy of “Time Enough For Love” that Tom loaned to me, to the point that I read it twice in the span of a year – but I have to admit that a lot of his other works can be pretty campy.  I have a soft spot for cheesy escapist sci-fi, but I can only take so much before I really need a book to challenge me, or to present a new situation or idea other than “…but our hero escapes peril and wins the girl yet again, because he is a brilliant scientist who is also an amazing warrior, and attractive to boot!”.

Lastly, I picked up a copy of Captain Joshua Slocum’s “Sailing Alone Around The World”, a hundred-year-old story of a solo sailing adventure in the days before diesel engines that was apparently required reading in many a junior high english class.  I’ve also got my eye out for a copy of Robin L. Graham’s “Dove”, the story of how the author set out on a solo ’round-the-world sailing voyage in 1965, at the age of sixteen, and returned five years later with a wife and a daughter.  Oh – and I’ve been told that I need to pick up a copy of Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden”.

Reading back through the past few paragraphs, I’m realizing that it only covers a fraction of the books I’ve actually consumed in the past two or three months, books that I’ve mostly already forgotten about and gotten rid of.  The difficult part about being a book-junkie while living on a sailboat is that books take up a fair bit of room, and if you leave a book collection to itself the books tend to multiply spontaneously.  Worse yet, they absorb the moisture in the air, first wrinkling, then discoloring and finally succombing to mildew or mold!

Getting rid of most of my books was one of the hardest parts of slimming down my possessions in order to move onboard – one of the sailing forums had a really good bit of advice though, and I took it to heart; they said (as I remember):

“If a book on your shelf does not have intrinsic value (ie, it’s valuable because it is a first edition, or a family heirloom, or a signed copy), or if it doesn’t have reference value (ie, it contains knowledge that you will regularly refer to), or if you are not absolutely certain that you will re-read the book in the next year, then it is just a trophy.  The book remains on your shelf merely out of vanity or laziness.  It can be easily replaced should you ever wish to read it again.  Get rid of it.“

That part really helped, and I brought three large boxes of books down to the used bookstore, and traded them in for a few sailing reference books that I’d needed, saving myself a few hundred dollars in the process.  I am now a huge fan of the used bookstore – I would be a bigger fan of the public library instead, but alas, I am a slacker and do not tend to return things in a timely fashion, and I am very hard on my books.  The used bookstore is the perfect match; if I think a book that I’ve liked would be enjoyed by a friend, I can just give him or her my copy.  If not, I can return a box of used books and pick out some new ones.  Either way, I currently have a large stack of books on my kitchen table, and today I will sort them into three piles; one pile going into storage, one pile of books to be returned to their rightful owners and one pile going to the used bookstore, to be exchanged for fresh meat.

I don’t often call out questions on this blog, but I’m curious to see if many readers here are… well, readers.  What have you read lately that was excellent?  What titles would you recommend I look for at the used bookstore?  Please comment, or if you prefer not to be public you can always just email me at drew (@) this domain.

The generator apparently failed because I am an idiot.  Worse yet, it’s a failure that has happened to me before, but I had simply forgotten about it.

In order to make the generator more handy for people lugging it around, throwing it in the back of the car, etc, the Honda EU2000i has a vented gas cap with a switch to open and close the vent.  If you neglect to open the vent, the gasoline being used up by the engine creates a negative pressure in the tank – and if living on the boat and working with diesel and gasoline engines has taught me anything, it is that any time you create a negative pressure, bad things happen.  Nature abhors a vacuum.

So yeah.  The generator wasn’t working because I accidentally closed the vent on the gas cap.  In my defense, the terminology is a little ambiguous – the manual refers to the cap vent as being “a guard against escaping gas fumes”, and the vent switch itself is labelled “on” and “off”.  Furthermore, the cap is labelled with a “0” beside the “off”, and a “1” beside the on – so does “on” mean the vent is open, or that the vent is guarding against escaping fumes?

There’s a silver lining though – with my warrantee, Honda will cover 100% of any needed repairs *if* I can prove that I’ve strictly followed the required maintenance.  The manual says that the valves have to be adjusted and the carborator cleaned every year or every 200 hours.  I’ve asked that the shop do the work while they’ve got my generator – the fact of the matter is if the generator dies completely in, say, February, I’ll be utterly screwed.  Better to make sure that it’s solid inside and out, and that I will have the benefit of a valid and useful warrantee if anything terrible happens.  This visit to the dealership will likely cost me a few hundred dollars, but will act as insurance against future problems.

Tonight, the weather station has predicted the biggest snowfall of the season to date; we’re due to get between ten and twenty centimeters of snow.  The sky is already cloudy as I write this from a coffee shop near Broadway; having no generator to charge my laptop battery I have to steal electricity whenever I can.  If I don’t get a call from the Honda shop in the next hour, I’ll be reading books by candlelight tonight, saving my laptop battery for potential work emergencies.