A day for random events

The weather station in Port Townsend, across the bay shows gusts to 27 knots, but the wind is out of the north and they are somewhat sheltered by the lay of the peninsula there. The Smith Island station is showing gusts near storm force, 42 knots, and if we're not getting that here in Hadlock, it's gotta be pretty close. Tree limbs and detritus have been smacking the windows all day, and limbs are coming down in the driveway. Apparently they are coming down elsewhere, as well, because a couple hours ago the power went out, and stayed out until just now.

The wind is causing havoc out on the water. I've had the scanner on most of the morning, and now again that I have power for it, and Channel 16 is busy with warnings and calls for assistance. A vessel off Camano Island had the mast come down. As I listen, they have not been able to cut it free, and it's damaging the hull as they creep along toward shore.

Also, just coming across now, another vessel has activated its EPIRB somewhere nearby. No contact has been made; it may have just gone overboard from a boat at anchor. But maybe not.

The Coast Guard has been busy reporting vessels adrift, and the Port Townsend ferry has sat firmly at the dock in town, checking in with passing vessels for conditions in mid-channel from time to time. They haven't heard any reports yet they have been happy with, because there they still sit.

Out front, a vessel that has anchored out all winter here in the bay, a big forty-something footer called the Fram, is dragging down toward the beach. Another, smaller boat is dragging in right along with her, but it started further out and isn't as close in yet. I tried calling the marina nearby, where I think the owner keeps his dinghy, but there was no answer... I suspect the power outage may have done in their phone system. I looked up the boat in the national vessel registry, which has several Frams, but the most likely candidate didn't show a name for the current owner. Finally, I gave in and called Port Angeles, where I got a very harried duty officer who took down what information I had on the vessel but didn't seem too optimistic that they could locate the owner. If she comes ashore, it'll be a much bigger mess than the little 27 footer that washed up in the last storm.

There may be hope, though. The tide is out, and as she comes in shallower, the effective scope on the anchor rode increases, providing more holding power. She has been catching off and on as she drifts, and it may dig in here close enough that the scope provides an effective grip for the wind and wave strength. If that happened at high water, she might still go aground when the tide receded, but if she catches, and if the wind lets up before high tide, then she may just be okay. A lot of ifs... but it's a pretty nasty blow.

Since the power was out when I was doing all this research and calling, I had to tromp up to the shop and get our generator down to charge my phone and get some Internet service back. Back in the woods, if one can put out of one's mind the possibility of being squashed by a falling tree limb for a moment, it's actually quite a pleasant day. The wind is all overhead, the sun is shining brightly, and it's pretty warm out. I didn't linger to sunbathe, however.

My folks will be back soon and so I spent yesterday making sure their bathroom, little used in the back part of the house while they are away, was spic and span. Today I went back there and found some splotches of what look suspiciously like bird poo, blood, and a scattering of very tiny little feathers on the tile. I can't, however, find the culprit, which leads me to believe that somehow, the cat, who is confined to the house and to a very small netted run outside it, somehow contrived to lure in, catch, and eat a bird in the house. That she managed to accomplish this never-before-attempted feat the very day after I clean the part of the house she chose as a dining area is not, I think, coincidence.

The chickens seem to be coping well with the weather, but then, they are chickens; I'm not certain they understand anything that is going on outside the coop. Branches keep clattering down on the roof but they take no notice. They seemed very displeased I didn't have any of their favorite corn feed for them when I stopped in to collect eggs on the way back from the shop.

This morning, the UPS guy stopped by the place for the first time ever. It wasn't for me, but the package was of interest for other reasons, none of which are worth going into here.

And, I found out the my buddy Loyd passed the Washington State bar. He'll be sworn in by next week.

Got a text from another friend I hadn't heard from for almost a year.

So that's it. So far just a bunch of random stuff happening with no real narrative line. Some days are like that.

Planning life

We can't seem to plan for the average week, so life seems a little bit out of reach. The haul-out we have been trying to get to for the last five months is a case in point. December was our goal; finally, this week, I have managed to get it scheduled for early June. What's a delay of seven months or so? Well, the obvious answer is, half a year of our lives.

Not that it matters, because we haven't been able to schedule the rest of our lives with any greater success. We had hoped to take a month or two and head north to Desolation Sound this summer, an area we have passed through but never yet really explored. An early season trip, ahead of the hordes of July and August, seemed to be the best bet. But the haul-out delay, other business bookings, and nothing else getting done this winter as we had expected, have put that idea on the rocks as well. I suppose we're neither the first or last people to notice how life keeps getting in its own way.

Watching what has happened to other people during this recession has only reinforced the point. We don't want to buckle down, work for the next twenty years, and hope we're in good enough shape still to enjoy retirement. We could just as well end up trying to do it in the next recession, or after a bout of serious medical problems, or who knows what? Everything we see screams out at us that every day is important, that you can't count on reaping the rewards at the end of a career. The time to enjoy is now, in whatever capacity one can manage.

So we hate having our lives just slide randomly along this way and we thought we were taking steps to keep all that from happening. We're not so foolish as to imagine we can control all the little ups and downs, but we thought we might structure our lives and livelihoods such that those things need not get in the way of what we really want to do. More than two years ago, I started cutting back on the support side of my business in favor of projects and report-based consulting, to reduce the on-call nature of the job; at the same time, we started building up the web presence for Mandy's business to reduce her dependence on having face time with students. The latter effort has been fairly successful; the former has been a victim of the recession or my own ineptitude, it's hard to say at this point. Last year, we moved out of our house, got it rented out, and moved aboard our boat, dramatically cutting back both expenses and possessions.

As I look back at it all, we mostly did what we set out to do in terms of cutting back. But it hasn't served to cut us loose at all. I'm not sure what went wrong. It's a bunch of small things, I guess. A cold snap, a miscommunication, a sense of professional responsibility, lack of resources, the price of gas, personal matters, money matters. The thing is, it's always the small things. There are always going to be small things. If we can't figure out how to live the way we want to despite the small stuff, how does it ever happen?

I've always thought the answer was basically "don't sweat the small stuff." That's a great thought. But it turns out that a lot of the small stuff matters; in a sense, I suppose, it's actually big stuff. I'm not sure this is as counter-intuitive as it sounds. After all, everyone knows that it's the details that count, whether they are in customer service or boat maintenance. So you shrug all that off at your own peril.

Recognizing that doesn't really provide a tool to help deal with it, though. If anyone else came to me and told me about all this stuff that is making them crazy, the way it is making us crazy, I would tell them to just drop it. Walk away, recognize that what you are accomplishing in dealing with these small things is never going to add up to the big thing you want your life to be. It calls for a fundamental restructuring, I would say, a life lived by taking only the road that leads toward your goals. There are sure to be enough speed bumps on that route already... don't force yourself to deal with the potholes on all the side roads as well. Stay on the highway.

We thought that we had done that, though, and yet here we still are, rambling down the dusty little roads that seem to take us further away from the mountain of our goals, not closer at all. We're not really sure what turn to take, so we keep going, easing off on the accelerator a bit as we watch the mountain recede in the rear-view mirror, but never finding a spot to make a U-turn.

We both know that this is how you give up on dreams, slowly and with small, rational steps. Neither of us want that to happen. But the way we thought we knew to stop it, just didn't work. Now we're sort of at mile one again.

F/V Time Bandit and the Caveman

Sorry, even if the Hillstrand brothers of the Time Bandit, a fishing vessel featured on Discovery Channel's Deadliest Catch, try to convince me to switch to Geiko, I don't plan to do it. Not even if they team up with the Caveman (playing the part of a newly-arrived greenhorn). I just saw their new commercial on Discovery Health channel, and it doesn't seem it has found its way to YouTube yet. So, no easy embed to this blog just yet.

I have to appreciate, though, that the Hillstrands manage to not take life too seriously, even in the midst of a very serious profession. That said, seeing them in a commercial with the Caveman has me scratching my head, and saying, "Huh?"

If only Progressive had gotten to them first. I'd truly think about switching if they got the boys in a commercial with the all-too-funny Progressive lady.

~M



WAIT, don't stop reading yet: Just as I was ready to hit publish to this post, ANOTHER commercial aired, this time with Jonathon sitting in the captain's chair of the boat, giving his signature giggle to the little wad of money with the big eyes. I actually didn't catch the beginning of the commercial, so there may have been more to it. I don't know. Even the bit I saw was better than the Caveman ad.

I still won't switch, though.

What if it's a big hoax?

This, from USA Today Editorial Cartoons (via No Impact Man and Empress of Dirt).

Cheers,
Mandy

5 Hadlock Earth Day Lessons Learned

1. Picking up trash on the beach is better exercise than strolling on the beach (wet trash is heavy trash).

2. It is important to keep in mind the plastic bottle that sprung from your own boat's cockpit during a wind gust last year in order to keep from getting pissed about all the trash on the beach today.

3. Double-bag the plastic grocery bags you're re-using for this trash (again, wet trash is heavy trash)

4. The super-heavy waterlogged Rubbermaid garbage receptacle lid that was too far from home to drag home may mysteriously move itself 50 yards closer to home in the time it takes to walk back home for more bags for the stuff you've already collected that has landed back on the beach (due to the lack of the aforementioned double-bagging) and back again to recollect that trash.

5. Plastic is FOREVER: reduce, reuse, recycle; in that order.

Happy Earth Day everyone!

~Mandy

Apparently the couth and class of participants at the annual Fisheries boater's swap meet (which we were unable to attend this year) has not improved since this depressing episode I experienced a couple years ago.

Marty over at Three Sheets Northwest seems to have had a similarly poor experience this year. Are people just broke and desperate now? Or do events like that just draw out the few jerks in the community?

We've never been aboard in a hail storm before

It's quite noisy!

I walked up to the bathroom only a half hour ago under blue skies. To the south, where the weather is from today, all I saw were more blue skies. Oops.

There's a big blow forecast to come in later today, I guess maybe we're getting the leading edge of it. The pebbles of hail on the cabin top are like a continuous drum roll overhead. Mandy is sure to wake up now, but the only conversations we can have will have to be shouted.