Way Out, Man

So the doctor said, " Heidi Sue, you are going to die of something. Some day. But my job is to manage things so that whatever it is whenever it is, doesn't happen until the last unavoidable minute. And that when that day comes we know we did everything we could to put it off. And to make it something that doesn't fuck you up for a long time before letting you go."
I couldn't really argue with that. And when I think about all the heartache I been through these last 20 or so years I don't think I could take another 20. I will do it and some days be glad to, but life is intense enough that I am secretly glad it has an ending.
So with all that in view I gotta just grit my teeth and go for it with this Interferon bullshit that is going to start up week after next.
SO when it gets to be June and I feel like poop and everything tastes like hydraulic fluid I will just take it like I meant it and let it go in the interest of a longer and cleaner old age.

If you figure the rowboat is 8 ft long and you measure it by holding a little ruler on the screen and then rotate the ruler to measure how high I am I come out to be about 7 1/2 feet tall. Sitting down. Try it. That's me on the beach behind Walker's Island down  the river near Cathlamet on the hottest day of the summer of 2010. My God I love that place.

Hope

I live in a 70s apartment building kind of a socialist modern type thing of poured/cast concrete construction. The floors in my little studio where I have lived for the past 10 years are simply asphalt tile over goop over about a foot and a half of well-cured concrete. I like how it is cool and smooth on my bare feet in the summer time.I have a neuropathy that makes it feel like I am walking on lumpy  tubesocks even when barefoot so the smooth floor is nice to give me kind of a baseline reset when the neuropathy gets bad. But tile-covered concrete is very unforgiving when, say, you drop your $500 asus-Garmin gps cell phone. (spell-check wanted me to say ass-Garmin, or anus-Garmin)

It's not the fall that destroys the 500 dollar investment, it is the sudden landing on the concrete. Moment of impact equals velocity in feet per second divided by time of application of force in seconds and values of applied time under 1 second can yield some very large moment for a relatively short drop.
My old Nokia flip phone which has been my salvation now through 3  different self-inflicted disasters tends to not take focus very seriously.

I dropped my phone
And after an intense hour in the T-mobile store where the guys are just as nice and competent and helpful and patient as guys can be and another hour online I am right where I started when I picked it up off the floor.

Fucked.

I pay $5.99 a month insurance, but since this phone is no longer made or supported by Garmin the insurance insists that for my $130.00 deductible and the twelve monthly premium payments I have made for a total of $203.00 out of pocket they will send me a generic android phone and boast of their useful service. Bullshit. My little Garmin is a gem, it does navigation on my sailboat, and it tracked me through 11,000 miles on greyhound in and out of coverage, and even when I had zero bars I still knew where the fuck I was, even way the hell up there in the Canadian Rockies.
But I got options.
I know how shit works.
So I got on Ebay and bought a dead-but-intact garmin-asus for $40 and the CPR shop at Mall 205 will swap out the glass for another $40 and good to go. Which gives me hope. And that is not the only reason. Hope grows on trees up in here in Northwest Peeazortlin...

The poor little delusional flowering ornamental plum tree here in the courtyard at Williams Plaza thinks it is Spring and so it grew these over the last two nights.

 Even though February isn't hardly half over this tree isn't even the first one in NW Portland to make us some fresh green to brighten up our shabby rain-sodden lives. And I am grateful, even though I know good and well that it could all go horribly wrong if the jet stream goes crazy and starts some shit with an  arctic air mass. But, as my sister-in-law says, "we live in hope"

My Sailboat Beat Me Up

I know it wasn't what I said at the time but now that I have finally made the decision to split the sheets with my lovely little money pit Felicity Jane I can tell the truth. And maybe somebody else can make her stop her wicked ways.
I used to spend the night on the anchor in a spot just above Columbia City out of the channel on the Oregon side. It is far enough away from the beachfront houses on both sides of the river that I feel like I have a bit of privacy, yet close enough to the main river that if you are feeling lucky and the wind is right you can sail off the hook without even starting the motor. Sometimes.

Scene of the crime
That's Columbia City to the left there the big-ass houses go right down to the water and the fog was coming in and the wind was picking up and it felt like trouble but I was too dumb to know it.

 On morning two summers ago I was up on the bow of Felicity Jane trying desperately to get ahold of the chrome stainless slip shackle on the end of the jib halyard and I lost my grip and it went flying. It only weighs eight ounces, but it is stainless steel  in a shape like a half a set of  brass knuckles tied on  the end of a 35 foot rope and the wind was whipping it all around in crazy 70 ft circles.So there was clumsy me, slipping and sliding like a kid catching a frog in a swamp and this chrome fist-on-a-rope flew way out past the bow and then whipped right back fully blast into my left cheekbone catching me right on the edge of the frame of the left lens of my glasses, short and sharp and just as nasty quick as you please. Hard.

I had a shiner for two weeks like I have not seen in many many years and folks on Trimet and at my AA meetings did double takes all that time and more than one of them wondered, though nobody said so, what  sonofabitch did that to that poor old woman, and what excuse did she make to her friends.

Where Did My Balls Go?

I ran out of bluejeans. One pair was actually a little too big and rather than wait 3 weeks until I grow into them I cut them up last summer, cut the legs off to make, well, cutoffs. Which left the stubs or leg-sleeves laying around on my closet floor for 6 months. During which time I took a 4 1/2 inch high -speed angle grinder to my right thigh, which made a bit of a divot in said thigh, which healed up in a couple of months or so but the leg of my Levi's never did heal it only got worse.
I was saving the parts of the cutoffs to make a denim skirt, which would be the third one I made so far but the other two I made before I got fat and then I got fat and they only made me feel bad so I ditched them thinking I would never realistically be a 12 again in this lifetime. But it takes 4 legs to make a skirt, actually 3 but it ruins 2 pairs of jeans and for some reason I cut the legs off the  other pair, the last good ones don't ask me why so my only bluejeans with actual legs were the ones with the not very fashionable grinder slash in the right thigh.
The skirt came out fine actually a little large but I can take care of that soon enough as we have already seen.
Upshot being I bought brand new bluejeans last Sunday and they are weird.
Back in the day I always went to Kmart for my jeans, new pair every 6 months so I always had them in various stages of fadedness. I always got the Rustler boot cut and back then in size 28-30. Hah.
But that was back before Estrogen and girl-fat and those were the days packing stacks of 2 x 4 and shit and all effing day long, too. Burn them calories. Yeah.
After the NA meeting Sunday morning and after my pal Maggi and I drove out to the far east side of Gresham which is halfway to effing Kansas it takes hours to get there but we wanted to go to that Joanns to see her friend who works there and then, after we had us a couple burgers at the King nearby, we forced ourselves to go into the Kmart on, like, 215 and Burnside and we split up and I went into nostalgia mode looking for bluejeans.
So I poked around and went to the men's clothing section in the back of the half empty store (you can see where these guys are having issues with volume) and in the bluejeans racks on the very back wall there were the Rustlers, 12.99 except for this one stack in the middle, holy shit there they were the Boot Cut and they were 9.99 exactly what they cost 15 years ago. Now the straight legs were pre-washed but I had to have the Boot Cuts, which were of course stiff as Formica and shiny like brand new denim is and they had that sizing smell, too and I was in retro heaven.
Monday morning I went through the new-bluejeans ritual.
The first run through the laundry wash/dry didn't even dent them, but a second run through the washer by themselves and the dryer they started to soften up and onto the ironing board to put the crease where it is supposed to go. These were the 34-30. I was hoping not too big.  I needn't have worried.  I went to put them on and after a few deep knee bends and baby wipes and a couple of squat-thrusts and  I got them all zipped up and this is what I'm getting at.
Men's jeans are weird. The left leg is slightly but noticeably bigger than the other, and the crotch is cut low, so it feels a little like when your pantyhose starts to droop after all day up and down between your desk  and the copier and you can't be arsed to go back to the loo to fix them and you sit there in your cubicle trying to pull them back up through your skirt which doesn't really work, ever. But these new bluejeans really felt odd, and I did try to pull them up higher and I wiggled around and I couldn't get them right and apparently that's how they are supposed to fit, and then I finally realized what was the deal. That's where their package goes. Where they put their dick, down the left leg. And room for balls in the middle.
Amazing.
I had totally forgotten.

Buy This Boat

Honda BF15A and the serial # is in the 16k so that makes it 2001 or so It runs like a champ Dave Timmons changed the oil last summer. New Spark Plugs at the time probably only 20 hours on them now.

As photography goes, not so good. But there's the new radio, the new fuse panels on the left with 12 dedicated circuits all run to a junction board below aft. Then there's the Force10 galley range with spaghetti sauce which was pretty good actually if I do say so myself and there's an oven underneath. Biscuits!

The steps up the mast are worth a fortune in heartache I go up there all the time just to look around or fix stuff. The running lights are up here

That's the Raymarine tiller pilot at work on the starboard hand looking forward. Note the herringbone coachwhipping on the tiller, and the chef's mat on the floor to stand on it really helps when you make a long run.

You used to have to look at the red gas tanks all day long so I covered them up with this purpleheart grating and then I made a milk crate out of the leftovers so you don't get the rust ring from the propane cylinder

The knotwork on the tiller will never be this white again unless you paint it

The dinghy fits over the foredeck and it is easy to load and unload with the spinnaker halyard.

Freezing-ass motels

It was a nice enough place, right handy by the upstream Ashland exit, surprisingly quiet, clean enough and certainly not expensive, but does an adequate number of blankets come under the unaffordable luxury category? There was at least a heater in the room. but it sounded like a  F-101 Phantom on afterburner. Would it cost that much for a fake-feather duvet or even a couple of K-Mart fleece jobs?
They got the microwave in there and it worked, and the cable TV with the expanded basic lineup, and the WiFi  had 2 different nodes to hook up to, and the shower had beaucoup hot water and there were 3 towels and fresh ones every day but why in the dead of winter would you think that one fucking blanket would keep a person from freezing to death?
Fortunately my big brother Bob is a semper-prepare-us kind of guy and he had a couple of little stadium blankets in the car which I got one of and damn glad too. And I brought my bedrock from Portland  a little river rock about the size of a starbucks blueberry muffin. When I put it in the microwave to heat it up Bob hid behind the door but nothing happened except  2 minutes later it was reasonably warm to the touch which it stayed that way all night down by my frozen feet wrapped in a towel and worth the 3 lbs in my overnight bag. I got the idea from Bear Grylls the survivor guy on Discovery.
My one at home here is bigger and heavier a slab of granite from a broken countertop and it gets hot and stays hot way longer than a hot water bottle like all night toasty I use it all winter long.
Continental Breakfast? What the fuck is that? People on the continent don't like food? All kidding aside it wasn't bad, but the lack of imagination and taste seems to be universal in the hospitality trade under a certain level of sophistication.  I dont really care I dont eat breakfast anyway, but I do sleep at night, at least nowadays I would like to if I'm not too fucking cold.