Sunday Musings

We must start, of course, with Fred's latest, if only for the elegance of his writing:

If I lived near you, I, too, like your friend Dennis, would want to come over and drink beer and laugh at you--relying on the beer to choke down fat gobbets of envy and the laughter to mask my wistful self-denigrating sobs.

And, of course, after a few beers, I would begin to gush about your gumption and your wherewithal, about you and your boat coming together right before my unbelieving eyes, before staggering home to drunkenly, desperately cobble together some sort of soul-redeeming raft of boards and and twigs and string.


Because, by the looks of your last log posting, you are well on your way to having a boat. If it looks like a boat, it very well might be a boat. Most probably, at the very least, something that will float.

Today I smoothed out my long 6" scarf cuts in the rubrails with sandpaper, applied a liberal layer of glue, and once again weighted them down with a heavy cookbook. I will not look at them again until next weekend. Well, probably Friday. I am going to give them every last chance to succeed.

The big progress today (besides gluing the rails) was a complete cleaning of my basement workbench, which was in such a state of disrepair as to make me embarrassed to even speak to Fred. So, I feel better about that.

I don't think there's anything to be done on the boat before assembly next weekend. So this week, I will lay out the first couple of trips I hope to take in my boat. (I had asked Fred if it was premature to discuss potential trips before the craft is constructed, if that would be considered tempting fate. But he reassured me:

Certainly it is not too early to plan a voyage. Doesn't every boat begin with a particular piece of water in mind?

So, look for that in the next few posts.)