Who stole September? Sheesh. All of a sudden the shorts are put away, the bag with the sweaters has to be found, and I even got some gloves out this morning for our bike ride with the dogs.
That might be a bit overboard, but I hate being cold, and have very thin blood or something. After the northeaster storm that ended yesterday, and four days of 50 degree rainy days I am so ready for the Florida Keys!
We do feel for our friends further down the coast who seem to be swimming everywhere, and catching fish on the sidewalks! We are all thankful Joaquin decided to stay away. Things could have been much much worse had that storm come ashore (or even close) on Sunday or Monday in the Carolinas…
On other topics, I had a chat with a friend after the last post about the refrigerator. He said I had without a doubt convinced him owning a boat and living aboard was something he would never do after following our posts. He said he could never fix everything like I did.
I have been thinking about that and want to point out to anyone else who might be having the same thoughts. If you have a dream, go do it.
If you think about how you will make it happen, or whether you can ‘afford’ it, or whether you will fail, or a thousand other things that will stop you – then you will be like the vast majority of people and never get your dream.
I have found that if I (definitely we) direct our energy toward something, no matter how impossible it might seem, and we really invest ourselves into it, almost always there seems to be another force that is working to help us.
I heard it said like this: the Universe (God) has to help you. When you take steps towards the thing you really want, then God and the Universe will take steps toward you to make it happen. And the thing is, that God and the Universe take much bigger steps than you!
Many of the things we have done on the boat have been failures – at first. But we learn and try again. The refrigerator was one. Sure learned a lot of lessons there! Remember the leaking fuel tanks? More awesome (and painful) lessons.
You might remember when we refinished the top of the salon table as the teak veneer had been sanded through? Well, the construction adhesive was not applied correctly and parts of the table started lifting over the last year.
Finally having enough of plates and glasses not sitting level, I ripped the top off the table a couple of weeks ago.
We came up with a great idea of laminating a world map to the top. It would look great, and we would have a map to use for history and travel plans – cool right?
Except that after waiting a week for the map, and buying a quart of polyurethane, we carefully laid the map on the poly while wet, and watched as the map soaked right through and shredded like wet paper as we tried to make it flat. Duh.
Then it was a frantic hour to get the mess off the wood before it hardened. And back to the old drawing board.
We ended up cutting a piece of birch plywood, staining it, and gluing it down. Then we polyurethaned that! Much better. Moral of the story? We learn as we go along and always have. We make lots of mistakes.
Now that all the hard stuff is hopefully done, we are spending some time making Yume pretty. The decks are getting a paint job. We pulled everything off the stern and put five coats of varnish on the wood, and rebed all the deck hardware, then put everything back.
We are fairly busy with our p4p Combined Federal Campaign events here in DC and Md. This week we have five events with an additional Saturday showing at an air show in Virginia.
I have to admit to counting the days before we can leave. I do not like sitting at the dock. Nor the traffic. Nor the crowds. Nor the cold.
But this too will pass.
Next week the Williams family is coming to vacation in DC and we look forward to seeing them. Maybe we can take them for a sail downriver to Mt Vernon!
