2/20/05
Well, this is my very own page, and I’ll use it to keep you updated on how I’m doing more than where I am. You can read that part on the news page. I’m just stoked to have this website up and running, so I can chronical the whole process of us getting totally off the power tit and on the hook. I’m so excited about this stuff I can hardly stand it. I’ve been having a hard time researching solar panels rather than just getting whatever I can get my hands on!
Anyway, I’ll be putting bulletins up periodically, though I’m not a very regular correspondent. If you want to know when I update this page, send me an email and I’ll put you on a list to get update notices.
Enjoy!
Dena
3/7/05
James takes the nicest pictures of me. This one is in another part of the site as well, but I like seeing me the way he does. Check me out, enjoying a picnic…
Isn’t that nice? Anyway, we had a great time, and thanks, Asia, for the funky plaid-and-plastic picnic set. It worked wonderfully!
I was just trying to make a photo gallery from our photos, but it’s kind of strange. I don’t want to put too much work into something that might go away if I make a new one, but the auto-settings in Photoshop leave a lot of room for improvement. To say the least.
Maybe I’ll just make a very basic one, analyze it, and figure out how to add more to the mix. If you see a photo gallery that’s obviously a template, cut me a little slack, okay?
Yesterday, we worked on the wood parts of our dingy, and they sure did need the attention. I’m thinking we’re fixing it up to sell it, but don’t want to be too hasty. If we can manage to get on the hook in the next few months, we’ll rather desperately need to trusty dingy…we’ll see how that works out.
I’m pretty bent from the work we did. There’s nothing quite like sitting on the ground, leaning over, and scraping and sanding for 10 hours to leave you knowing that you worked. It’s not that it’s so hard, and it’s kinda embarrassing, but next day muscle trouble and a crick in my neck really is where I’m at. I like the one work day, one day off kind of weekend. I guess that’s all I can take.
4/10/2005
Dena-Fin (for now).
4/19/05
I sure do like the way James sees me. He takes the best pictures of me ever! I just happen to be able to say that from fact, because I spent a whole bunch of time recently looking through old stuff. James and I went to Seattle and decided to make a side-jaunt up to Blaine. I wanted to remind myself of what was in my steamer trunk in storage.
When we sailed off and left Blaine, we had two steamer trunks, a strange small metal cabinet, and a radio station in a big touring box. Yipes. There was no way we could take all that stuff with us, and somehow James and John came up with the idea that we would leave the stuff in John’s barn. John said we could leave it up to 25 years and that the only rent they’d ask is a postcard every month. Well, they probably got 5 postcards in 4 years, and when the barn flooded, they didn’t tell us.
Yes, flooded. We got to Blaine this time and I went back to the barn while James and John talked. I couldn’t really get to our stuff because it was piled behind a bunch of other things (makes perfect sense, if we were going to leave it there for 25 years). Just as I was giving up, John came back and started helping me clear things out so we could haul the boxes out. Meanwhile, he tells me that last winter was a strange one, and they had six inches of snow and then the next day was 60 degrees. That’s when it flooded.
As I opened the steamer trunk with my stuff in it, the mold smell was overwhelming, and I could feel my sinuses swell up in my first few breaths. I immediately went into mental-circle-turning mode as I tried to figure out how to handle this, what to say to John, and what to do. I quickly realized that it was only the bottom drawers that looked really bad and decided we’d have to get out what was salvagable. Now.
James came out and started making grief noises, which drove John away. I was glad, because I couldn’t make an honest estimation of the state of things with him there. I tend to want to protect people and make it sound “not so bad”, but I knew we were going to have to throw away a lot of the stuff.
Just to get this straight – this was the last of the last from a few hundred purges of mine, and a fire and a few dozen purges from James. It was the important stuff, and none of it was likely to be easy to trash.
I tried to keep James from actually looking at anything; I wanted this process to go fast and I wanted to actually look through it all later. We through away so much stuff that was just ruined, but more of it was salvageable than I had originally hoped. John offered to take care of what remained – which was nice, since our only other option would have been to rent a U-Haul and take it to the dump. We took the possible keepers to a motel room and dumped it there while we fortified ourselves for the task to come by having wonderful Nikko Sushi in Tsawwassen, B.C.
It took hours upon hours to go through all that stuff, partly because we both kept getting carried away down memory lane. I have a bunch of old photos that I love, and a bunch that I don’t know why I kept. It’s funny – I still haven’t gotten down to the bare-bone basics, even though I throw away more and more each time.
This time, I kept: my autobiography from 3rd grade, a handful of essays that I thought I wrote well, a few binders of writing I admired, a big stack of pictures, and not much else. James still has a bunch of photos, negatives, and slides, and I want to figure out how to get all that on our hard drive (external, 150 gig – why do I have the feeling that will be a tiny number soon?).
Anyway, we’re back to work now, and there will be much more sailing soon, I hope!
