The Gods, Alignment Of Celestial Bodies, Kissing Toads, Hoop Jumping And The Big Push Forward...........Again!......(Still??). What A Week!

In the romance languages, the farewell phrase is something like "Go with God" . It is the best thing we can say and sums up our trepidation  and angst and mingles them with hope. It is the best wish we can muster to protect in absentia.

​The stars (Sirius, the dog star in the constellation Canis Major.........serious, we're not) that perhaps weave our fate have finally aligned and precipitated the next aspect of this (not so) great adventure of the good ship "Dog". This event has been coming for the past 8 months and was as inevitable as those aforementioned celestial arrangements. Ben has decided to continue on with the rest of his life. He was here only temporarily while he thought things out. What has he learned? Nothing sucks as bad as this and he can do a lot better. It's about the adventure of the unknown, not slogging through epoxy and heartbreak pursuing another's dream that has become tarnished around the edges. He was dragged into the quagmire with the same hope I had, that it would take a year or two. His help was immeasurable.  His absence missed. 

He has much to do. He has to be Ben again, grist ground in the mill of time reinvented as baked goods . This entails the rebuilding of his persona: car, wardrobe, job, life. He has plenty of support, a place to go, shelter, and less stress. He has money for the transition and a clean slate on which to transcribe his own adventure. He decided the best tack to take was to purchase a Texas car, lower on rust than an Ohio car. He spent days car shopping. As we all know, you gotta kiss a lot of toads before you find your prince. This can bum one out, as most toads around here are 50+ miles away and the toad he probably will buy, 5 hours away by car. Ah, Texas: long distance toads down long distance roads. Two weeks of interweb perusal. People that omit the removal of advertisements, misrepresentation of vehicles by smarmy car dealerships, salesmen, unencumbered by ability to listen to you, presenting you with a vehicle that is twice as much as you want to spend, that think the hard sell will get you to buy. Trips of 40, 150, 40 miles one way only to find dashed hopes.  Then there was the loan, applied for several times jumping through one hoop after another to get the process completed. For a brief time, he will be free of all encumbrances, driving across the country in a nice car with no cares, not thinking of anything but his next endeavor. It's about all the freedom anyone gets before we build a new set of cages. Sometime this week he will depart.

​I push on though I know not why. Melancholia is my new frenemy. It is always the same formula: keep moving, think less, keep things light, don't cry, don't be sad.

Kicking the tires: car shopping the millennium way. Many hours, many telephone calls, three different loan applications, powers of attorney, carfaxes, KBB, insurance, bank direct payments. Toads, all toads..........wait.........whats that? A car!............in Houston.............5 hour drive one way...........private individual...............another loan application........ bill of sale....two people on the title, one in Europe for a bit................wait for the check made out to the seller mailed to us by Monday..............Next Thursday!............we drive 5 hours to Houston..........if the car is OK, we hand over the check and drive back 5 hours...............otherwise..........

This guy................ at the Lotta Carlotta used car lot. He said the car was good and we drove the 2½ hour drive one way to look at it. He failed to mention that the previous owner, boy racer, had installed an annoying fart can exhaust system ("upgraded exhaust system", he said), lowered the car 2" so the ride was rougher than a cement truck with a full load, trimmed weight by throwing away unnecessary items such as the spare tire, jack and anything that secured them, and lost the remote fob that, I surmise, was neglected during the repossession. The Carfax looked great! Toad!

We worked on the beam ears. We filleted, coated with epoxy, primed, and painted them. Ben got the paint on today,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, we started on Sunday.

I extended the beam ends to match the ears and reinforced them with some 4 mm plywood. Ben sanded, epoxy coated, primed and painted the beam.

We worked on the center deck. We cut the beams to the final correct length after we......

Reinstalled the motor boxes.

A cross section of the center deck beams,  Note the growth ring pattern, wide on the top, tighter in the center and very tight on the bottom. All to do with the seasons and growing conditions.

I dug out a bunch of doug fir from the pile to evaluate the best usage of the lengths of wood we had for the deck slats.

I marked where the beams sit on the motor boxes athwart ship. I took a slat, cut to length and marked it where each beam center was. I marked it as the master and laid out all the slats and marked the center of each beam on all the slats. Then I marked the center of each slat at the beam marks (the pencil lines on the slats).

I drilled each slat and countersunk the holes. 24 slats, 6 holes/ slat........too many beers to do the math. You do it.

Then I sanded them. That dough fir was sloughing off spikes. I had to sand them. We don't want those splinters in our feet.

While Ben and I were distracted, Budge worked on installing the electrical panels.

In the aft cabin, port side, Budge glued in the reinforcement panel for the heavy inverter.

Ben helped him mount it. Waitaminute..........we forgot to paint the panel........dammit! Now we have to pull it back off and paint it. 

And the shore power plug.

It rained. We didn't cover it. It didn't bubble. The pebbly surface is how the paint went on. It is what it is.

The Music♫: Pete Seeger, "Turn, Turn, Turn"

Co-written by Pete and an unknown Hebrew scribe, 2000 years apart. To everything, there is a season. A time to cast away stones....................Go with God, Ben...............(insert some tacky sad emoticon here).