perfectly simple

Today I had no reason to play with my new headphones, I had the boat to myself. Scott has been downtown, and the boat had only the sounds I added to it, along with the songbirds who manage to throw their tweets all the way across the water to the boat. This afternoon the soft rain began, and since we've had a break from it for a while, the sound of it hitting the deck above my head is welcome again.

It has been a perfectly simple day, and the epitome of what I think people think living on a boat is like. This morning I got work done between cups of tea. After lunch I read some. At one point this afternoon I decided to take care of another menial boat task--cleaning the rust out of the contraption the air filter goes in. Such tasks go best when the mind can follow a story of some sort. I checked through our movie selection and found nothing that held my interest. I thought back to the early days of boat life, when I had even fewer DVDs to choose from. My entertainment back then was the Morning Stories podcast, which I awaited every week and diligently listened to on Saturday mornings while choosing a daily project. I have long since stopped listening to Morning Stories. It is one of those things that just seems to have slipped out of my life, probably when when Dad got sick and everything changed so quickly. The day I learned of his illness began of the end of my first stint on the boat. Old routines were quickly uprooted, and many have never been found again.

During lunch today I listened to the latest Travel with Rick Steves podcast, leaving me without the storylike background I was looking for during a metal-scrubbing undertaking. Then I remembered that I had an audiobook on my computer that I've never listened to! Oh, what a lucky day! The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is set in northern Wisconsin. The descriptions of the landscape take me right back, and the story is quite good as well. Who can be disappointed with writing that likens an otter floating down the river as, "a self-contained canoe of an animal"?

After scrubbing the air filter holder, there was no better afternoon break than to sit down with a hot cup of tea and listen to a story for a while. For some reason, breaks like that seem easier to take on a boat, especially when it is raining, and a perfectly adequate amount of work has already been finished for the day.