Barn Pixie

I was remembering a short story about young people living together in cramped housing, being exploited by employers and then oddly abandoned, and resorting to eating the walls of said housing which were (edible) fungi... I can't remember how long ago I read it, I thought it was Marissa Lingen, but a quick scan of her work did not locate it, and since I failed a covid test this morning (I have it, having escaped for nearly 3 years, and I am deeply grateful for all the stabs I've gotten and my astonishing partner who found a pharmacy that was both open on xmas and also had paxlovid) and everything hurts I am feeling sorry for myself as well as dumb.

So I took the boat house apart yesterday afternoon, and then started unbending the sail and putting parts away, and ....

I am an utter walnut - I KNEW the sail was hanging weird, and I didn't measure it or change it or ANYTHING, and yes, in fact, the sail was hung wrong. I didn't get it upside down (a small win overall) but I did get the boom and yard swapped, so the top yard had the wrong hole in it, and it was held up from too far forward at the top (tilting the sail aft from the top), and the down-haul held the boom too far forward at the base, so the sail as a whole was in completely the wrong place.

I am hoping fixing these issues will maybe help with my ability to turn into the wind. I did swap the halyard and down haul to the correct locations, and I took the sail off both the yard and boom to retie later with (very fine) climbing string that should be less slippery, and stay tied better. So I am relieved it sailed at all, and hopeful for better sail handling when I next venture forth. And also kicking myself for not re-measuring everything just to check. It isn't that I didn't read the directions - I fucking PORED over the directions. It is that I got confused getting the sail on, and then didn't double check my results when they were close (the sail IS and WAS the correct way up) but I had doubts (I was fairly certain the down haul needed to be further forward). So on the one hand, I was right. And on the other hand, what a weird way to go off the rails.

After all the thrashing around we did yesterday before leaving, and at the pond, and after coming home, today was super simple.

We remembered the paddles for the kayak shaped pool toy (it is a real kayak, and one of the earliest designs for people who wanted neither river running nor sea kayaking but just to poot about on a pond. It is perfect. I needlessly malign it because I think it is delightful and also hilarious. Now these are almost all of what you see on a pond, and at LL Bean and Walmart even, and this one is so old it is Vintage and I love it.) and the pfds (personal flotation devices, I dunno why we have never called them lifejackets) and all the rigging and claptrap necessary to drive the boat including the replaced and mended parts, and boom - we were on the road.

The wind today was SW swinging S, enough to make little ripples, not enough to be a hazard, and also blowing off the beach, making leaving possible and coming back, erm, tricky. One bystander thought it was an antique boat, anyone who talked to me said very nice things about building it. There were many people there experimenting with fishing, so the beach was full and the pond was also full.

I got everything rigged up the second try, and got turned around and headed out to sea, um, the center of the pond, and proceeded to experiment with angles of sail. It is speedy across and at an angle to dead downwind, trying to head too close to the wind causes the steering to go wonky. I had a lot of trouble tacking - bringing the bow through the wind - so I did a lot of 270 degree turns putting the stern through the wind and heading up onto a new tack. The wind was shaped some by the shape of the pond, so the wind direction was not entirely clear. I think I need a masthead pennant to clarify relative wind direction. The centerboard popped up whenever the boat was flat, but once we had any speed and heeling it was tight and solid.

Because it is small and lightweight, all the forces are manageable with one person and two hands.

Matt was paddling about in the little kayak, chasing me and taking pictures, and cheering me on. It was reassuring to have another person out there, even though I had fair faith I could cope with most things.

I ended up having to beat to windward to get back to the beach, which took a long time, but then just before the beach and docks, the wind was stopped by the trees on shore and actually a very faint tail wind appeared, and bumped me gently right into the dock. I couldn't have done better if I'd tried. I mean, I was trying, but also I was intent on not sweating the details, and instead the details landed neatly at my feet and i looked like a goddam genius.

New KNowledge:

I can definitely sail this boat
I need to learn if I have the sail in the correct place/position, and remedy that if not
I need to build a better tiller, because the one in the kit is inadequate, and should be different
It will be easier when I have some kind of wind indicator at the masthead
It will also be easier in more open water
I feel like I might be able to cope with more wind next time

boat boat boat boat...

The NacMacFeegles sing a deeply deranged version of Row Row Row your boat that is basically everyone shouting "boat BOAT BOAT STREAM BOAT MERRILY BOAT BOAT" each in their own time signature and key.

My boat is making me nuts. Some of the interior paint developed mold underneath, and needed to be sanded back to primer or wood, or whatever had no mold under it, and now I am having a brisk game of whack-a-spot trying to get epoxy on the bare spots, three coats ultimately, and then it will get primer and several coats of polyurethane paint. I keep missing some spots on my way around the boat, and I also, simultaneously, keep finding places I should have sanded down and started the multiple-coats-of-epoxy game with, so I just walk around the boat in the morning with sand paper and hit the parts I think need it, following up with epoxy and a brush, and I figure now if i keep going for another couple of rounds eventually everything will have at least three coats of stuff. Some may have many more. I don't think that is my problem.

I was staring at the boat this morning thinking "I made so many mistakes with this boat" and then I decided i could also say "I learned so many things working on this boat" - both true, but one far more demoralizing than the other.

Do you remember working on a really big project, and you'd get all the big stuff done and dusted, and then it would be endless endless minutiae to finish? I think I am at that stage.

• I have bent (tied on) the sails to the boom and gaff/yard,
• added the halyard and down haul (lines to keep the sail up, and taut at the bottom) 
• bent on the pulley for the mainsheet (the string that keeps the sail in check and at a reasonable angle to the wind) The elder crow said if cat rescues ever ran out of names they could just start with boat parts - it would keep them going going for a good year.
• screwed two cleats onto the mast (to hold the halyard and down haul)

I have a a tent over me now! I tried to set it up at the end of a very long day and was doing almost alright until I ahd to argue with the tarp, at which point I sat down and cried, and called the Red one for help, and she cancelled her cello lesson (how I know she loves me) and came and said kind things and made it work like a charm. AND put the boat in it when I tripped over the curb and fell over. That was a very long day.

a day later my other brother Matt came out and helped me hang the rudder which honestly did take four hands. He also (engineer) reminded me that the pintles (the pin part of the rudder hinge) had to be parallel or it wouldn't turn properly. So we drilled some more holes, and now the rudder can be mounted, turns with great freedom, AND it comes off again. Massive win. I do still have to putty up the unused holes, but that won't take long.

Anyhow - I think I am creeping up on sea trials. Pond trials. We go up to the DAR state park pond (yes the state park is named after the Daughters of the American Revolution, yes this kind of funny, yes there is also a Daughters of the Mayflower state forest) where the wind blows, if sometimes from unexpected directions, the pond is big enough to practice but small enough to wade out if you get in trouble. I figure if I don't think about it too hard, I can surprise myself with a boat at the pond ready to test out sailing.

The elder crow seems to have rebounded slightly, after I delivered a lot of groceries and accomplished a LOT of laundry. I left them in a tidier house, with their shirts folded (apparently that is the worst part of their laundry process) and instant food on tap. This is win for everyone.

I came home to Al sick with something, but not horribly. On top of burnout, it was a lot for him, and mostly I kept him fed and stayed out of his way. He's better, and getting snarky about things again, so now we are back to just coping with burnout.

I'm fine.

It got muggy and gross again, so I am inside working on reiterating the first (? Maybe, or it could just be the earliest I can think of) of the 3d elevation and bathymetery (ocean depths) models that I built, of Cranes Beach (in Ipswich Massachusetts) - I am hoping the end result is so gorgeous that some stupidly wealthy individual will cheerfully snap it up for $1500 give or take a little, and yield half that for me and the other half for the Trustees of Reservations.

I've been babysitting the laser cutter all this morning, leaving the plexiglass for last because it smells awful. I need another sheet of light green, unless I think I can get away with using the bottle green on both one middle layer and also the very top layer. OR... I could order more light green, like 5 or 6 sheets of it, and have it on hand for future efforts as well. And then I could use the same color for all of the depths.

who knows?

me. I will know, in another hour or two.

I built a boat from a kit back in 2017 - I got the kit from Cheaspeake Light Craft, it came in pieces and I basically stitched it together with little copper wires, and then epoxied the parts together. After some epoxying, and a lot of sanding, and some moderately scary parts (I had to drill a hole in the bottom - that was unnerving - for the centerboard) it was painted and decorated and varnished and sitting on a trailer (that I had also built). I launched it in September that year, and rowed it a couple of times both up at the pond we always use for the first outing of every season and then on the Connecticut River which runs through my territory.

With the basic boat kit I had also bought a sailing rig - mast and boom and yard, parts for the centerboard and the rudder and the sail and fathoms of rope in different diameters for rigging. I had the straight pieces glued together and sanded and epoxied and varnished and then the directions had me making a (fucking huge??!) hole in the top of the mast and I just -choked- it was a 1" hole in a 2" wide piece of wood and I had SO MANY QUALMS... so I left it there. I rowed the boat, some summers a lot, and I got better at backing a trailer and braver about going fast with the trailer (that was harder than expected) and the rig just waited for me to gain courage or skill or something.

This summer I decided it was time to make the boat (the boat is names Ursa Minor, in case I get a bigger boat at some point - it is important to leave space for growth). Which meant I had to make all the horrifying holes. I drilled a hole into the edge of the rudder earlier this month, and reinforced it with a brass tube, which was not entirely a catastrophe. So today I gathered my tools and started on a hole in the mast.

It went well enough at first. I got a small pilot hole through in a reasonable place, and then I made it bigger, and then I got a big flat bit (maybe called a spade bit? something that is closer to an inch) and had... some issues - the hole was slightly crooked, the spade bit didn't work with the size I had enlarged the pilot hole to, but I got something I thought I could use. Until I decided to use the router to round over the edges. And Failed (big time) to adjust the depth the router went to. And made my hole SO MUCH WORSE. At which point I had to sit down.

I stared at it for a while in deep deep dismay, and finally got back to work. I flipped to the other side, reset the router and made that work right. I took the skill saw and CUT OFF TWO INCHES OF MAST, and started again. And this time everything went well enough. small pilot hole. Big spade bit hole. correctly adjusted router to round over the edges of the hole. And rounded over the top edges of the mast. And then sanded everything, and sanded it again with higher grit and again and applied epoxy to the raw wood and let that soak in, and then
drunk with succes
I drilled four more holes, in the ends of the boom and yard.
And sanded them, and epoxied them,
and that was all the boatbuilding stress I could take for today

pic from launch day, 2017

We are burying him in a sextant box. A box he made for a sextant he refitted with mirrors and caused to function, and gave to me when I graduated high school in 1978. A couple years later, the sextant itself has issues, and on assuring him I was no longer going to need to do celestial navigation, he took it back and used it to repair a couple other sextants that were in use on R/V Westward at SEA. I kept the box, a thing of beauty constructed of mahogany, many many coats of varnish and brass corners, latches and handle. With a special engraved brass plate on top from friends. I just finished polishing all the brass parts, and I need to install the new brass plate that has his name and dates on it. We are headed to South Carolina on Tuesday to bury his ashes next to his sister, and his parents, in the Episcopalian church cemetery.

He died at age 97, after about a decade of increasing dementia. I know, it always increases. For a while he was just forgetful, and then he was confused, and then even more confused, and finally he reached a resting state resembling a placid and venerable house cat. Easy to care for, mostly, spending a lot of time warm and napping on the couch, waking with real enthusiasm for meals, and wandering about the house after dark, sometimes tipping things over. He was at home with his wife (each of their third marriages, this one lasted 35 years, more than both his previous ones combined) until September when he started falling over, and she couldn't get him back upright again. He was also in some pain in his back, which turned out to be cracked vertebra - the third time he fell in a 24 hour period and she couldn't get him up by herself, she sent him to the ER and from there they xrayd him and noticed the vertebra and it was generally decided to send him to rehab. Except with his current levels of dementia, he needed combined rehab and memory care.

I was worried about his wife looking after him for much longer, in part because after spending two days with him I was entirely out of energy and patience and cope. Having him in care was an enormous relief for me, and I think for her. She and I tried to make a point of visiting routinely, but as my husband pointed out, it was more for ourselves than for him. Whenever I came, he was always pleased to see me, no matter who he happened to think I was. I brought my dumb little guitarlele (uke sized, guitar # of strings and tuning) and would play the old folk songs he'd taught me when I was 6 and 7 and 8 years old, when he could play the banjo. The staff there took incredibly kind care of him - when he was night wandering and fretful, they moved him closer to the nurses station so he had people to talk to, and flirt with, when he woke.

Around Thanksgiving he started having odd ...collapses? I'm not sure what else to call them. He'd throw up, and then be unconcious for 12-24 hours, the care center would call us to prepare us for the worst, and then he'd just wake up, a little less there than before, and eat and talk and carry on. This unnerved everyone. And then he caught Covid, in spite of all the precautions staff and everyone else took, and that had him down for a couple days, and he rallied briefly, and then he declined for most of a week and finally died. Of covid? Or old age? or the battery in his pace-maker giving out? I do not know. I know that visiting him while taking covid precautions was extremely difficult - I was gowned and masked and gloved and still trying to play an instrument and sing. And also cry.

I was really lucky in my dad. He made sure I knew he loved me, and that he was proud of me. Honestly I think he was proud of almost everyone who tried things, a crucial part of the he mellowed as he aged. A friend came over to play cello for him this past summer, along with my older kid playing bassoon - he was delighted. He was pleased to have music entirely for himself, and sadi learning both of those instruments was hard - he was proud of them for putting the effort into it.

In a lot of ways I have been missing him for years. We emptied out our garage and installed his machine shop - these big working machines older than me: a South Bend lathe circa 1949, a Bridgeport milling machine circa 1952, several drill presses, a band saw, a truly terrifying table saw - but being in it made him more anxious than it was worth. Sometimes he could wander through it patting his old friends, but sometimes he'd lose a tool or a name for the tool he wanted and would get more and more agitated looking for the thing in his memory and in the shop itself. These machines are also my friends - I learned to use them when I was small, like 9 or 10 years old - but I do not have the facility with them that he did, nor do I have the projects he would use them on - building test beds for for engineering projects that I did not ever completely understand. By the time he'd moved down here, he didn't have the projects to use them either, a different thing that made him anxious - that we'd changed our lives around to install this array of tonnes of machinery, and it was not paying for itself somehow.

I miss talking about boats we sailed on together. I put together a short list of the ones I could remember, and was looking for pictures of ones like them online, they were some classic wooden boats of the late 1950s, designed by Names, but I finally realized that wouldn't help him, it was more a thing I was invested in.

I missed him knowing his grand kids as they got older. He was amused and affectionate when they were small, and captivated by their cuteness which he worked hard to get on film. But he missed out on them as conversationalists, having strong opinions about politics or economics. Aerin is musical and mathematical, and even in their current non-binary shape, they could have talked about a lot of things, or even at one point played music together. I am sorry that couldn't happen. Although they did have a hilarious (to me) conversation about shaving. Aerin is working on a hideous(affectionate) beard, and he asked what they used to shave, and allowed as how he had a thing he called the hedge trimmers. Aerin agreed that those worked, but they couldn't stand the vibrations and stuck with a safety razor. It just caught me Right in the feels. Alice could have argued the existence of economics as an actual thing or that money is made up, and he would be so proud of her off on one of the big WHOI ships as a scientist.

I'm not sure why I am writing all this down. Unlike the Muppets, it is not plot exposition. But it has to go somewhere, and I want someone lese to know these things.

Please think a good thought or light a candle for a friend of mine who is struggling with depression and fighting off suicide right now, because we all need help.

full fathom five thy father lies
buried in his memories,
of his bones are coral made
his past life is naught but smoke
these are pearls that were his eyes
turned to see what no one sees
nothing of him that doth fade
future thoughts have gone astray
but doth suffer some sea change
fully brought, but disarranged
into something rich and strange
and fade again to rearrange


There is some kind of song there, or a parallel set of thoughts
my da is buried in his head,
it is filled with ghosts, and loose pieces of his past
interleaved
his connections to the current place and time are gone
his reference points for navigation
are the answers to the questions he asks,
and those whirl away again as soon as he hears the answer
lost in the current of things he doesn't understand right now
and he has to ask again
for reassurance
for anchoring
catching at wisps of memories
and losing them again, and again, and again

That has to be a hard place for someone whose life was engineering - designing the details, understanding the tolerances, down to thousandths of an inch

I just get so impressed when the wind blows, and it feels like it has been windy this year. Yesterday the NWS said it was blowing 25 knots from the west, with gusts to 44, and the numbers aren't huge until you remember that on the Beaufort scale that is a six:

It felt like if we had installed one more solar panel, the entire house would have lifted off the foundation and taken off downwind. I was thinking what was downwind of us. Due east - the relevant direction when considering a wind from the west - 100 miles gets us close to Boston, and then 25  more to Cape Cod Bay and another 25 or 30 to Provincetown, and beyond that, the open Atlantic. If I thought I we'd float, I wouldn't be that averse to landing on (over) George's Bank, but I do not have a lot of faith on the hydrodynamic stability of the house. Also we are signally lacking a sail or engine, so maybe not.

When I thought it was blowing from south of west, I was thinking we'd end up somewhere in Vermont or New Hampshire, perched in the tops of a copse of trees, tossing madly until the wind died down.

I know, in real life, the house would just tip over and everything would be horrifying and a hideous mess, scary and depressing and miserable. This is a pure flight of fancy. Like dreaming about flying.

it fcking WIMDY