Apologies for the previous blog-rants.  I couldn’t help myself.  But I’ll try to get back to the forest for you………..

Fall has fallen.  Hallowe’en is just around the corner.  Time to clean up and put things away for the winter.  So we are doing that, putting on covers, tying things down, topping up tanks and making sure that things are ship shape. Which brings me to the ship….

Wasabi is a 17′ puke-green 70’s era Campion runabout with a rotten floor and a less-than-perfect derriere. But Wasabi is still pretty neat.  It has a walk-thru windshield which, it turns out, is remarkably useful when disembarking onto rocks and beaches rather than docks.  And it is easily driven and just about the perfect size for our needs.  I like this little boat.

But I didn’t like the seats when I first found it.  They were rotten, torn, soft and ugly (mind you, ‘ugly’ is the main decorative theme for Wasabi, so they fit in a repulsive-themed kind of way).  I tore them out and used the little rotten, torn, soft seats from the back of the boat on the theory that smaller amounts of ugly was, in some way, an aesthetic improvement.  It was.  And it gave us a bit more needed floor space for the ubiquitous totes we use for just about everything.

One of Wasabi’s old seats

But rotten was the operative word and the seats were on the verge of collapsing so I decided – in a minor blip of energy – to build new seats.  On our last town day, we picked up a couple of yards of upholstery vinyl and we salvaged the foam from the old seats.  And yesterday we built new seats.  New plywood.  New vinyl.  Old foam.

Putting these seats on a rotting floor is no easy task.  But I’ll find a way.  The alternative is to rebuild the floor and I don’t intend to do that until I eventually step hard enough to plunge through it.  “If it ain’t broke, wait till it is!”  

New Seat!

That’s a bit silly, of course but, honestly, I have enough to do. The floor can wait until it can’t.  Then I’ll fix it.

On the solar front, we are pretty good.  Lots of overcast days necessitated a single, two-hour genset experience but, for the most part, we are still running full-tilt on solar power.  One thing is clear: we have severely cut back our fuel use.

It is NOT like us to be so unproductive and Sal, despite her lingering cold, is trying to get us back in to gear.  I am resisting passively.  “I am sitting down in solidarity with the Hong Kong student protests! And you are acting like the totalitarian despots in the Central Committee!”  

“I would spray you with water cannons and pepper spray in a minute, you foreign devil!”

“So, in the spirit of the Chinese, what do you say we stop for tea and then compromise on something that allows us both to save face?”

“OK.  But then we get back to our work, Yao?”