Susan and I were back to work moving me out of my place when one of my neighbors came over and asked; “Aren’t you sad about moving out of your house?”. I’ve been surprised by how many people have asked that same or a very similar question lately. It’s true that my 100-year-old bungalow is a wonderful little house that’s situated in the ever-so-quaint town of Old Wethersfield. At the same time I’m fully aware that I must let go of things, including my lovely house, in order to open the door for other, new and wonderful opportunities. It’s not like I’m moving into a cardboard box. I’m joining a gorgeous and vivacious woman on to beautiful and sweet sailing yacht with which we’ll commence a round the world tour of some of the coolest places on the planet. I don’t see a down side; sailing, adventure, travel and the whole ocean as our backyard. Must be a case of different folks enjoying different strokes. Anyway, the simple answer is; no, I’m not sad, I’m actually way excited and tickled pink about what we’re doing, that is when I’m not feeling a bit overwhelmed with all that we still have to do before our November 1st departure date.
We got two big loads of stuff moved out of my place on Sunday. I was hoping to have reduced all my possessions down to such a level that I could move directly on to Gypsy. I fell short of that goal so I’m moving several vanloads of stuff to Susan’s place to sort and tag sale. She doesn’t close on her home till October 6th, I’ll have to get my act together by then. A surprising thing has happened in and amongst all the activity of late, something so natural that I almost didn’t notice; we’ve moved in together. We’ve been so busy that we didn’t even celebrate and we hardly even noticed but here we are, cohabitating. We’ll have to have a special celebration when Susan’s house closes and we move onto Gypsy fulltime. In the mean time it’s work, work, work…
Speaking of work we had a productive day down on the boat today. I woke up this morning with my enthusiasm for moving waning and feeling the need to get back to Gypsy. The first thing we noticed when we arrived at the boat was that Jim Funk had installed the handles on the side of our dodger and they came out really well. We wanted something to hold on to when the weather gets rough and we have to go up on the fore deck.
Susan applied what we hope is the last coat of varnish, at least for now. I did the last fiberglassing in our cold box and then moved on to the issue of a security grate for our main hatch. For that I made a mock up of our main deck hatch out of rough lumber. I’ve been doing my carpentry on the finger pier, careful not to drop anything.
Here’s the completed project, which I then took over to Mystic Stainless to have them make a security grate for.
I was able to hook up with Charlie just before he left for the day and he seemed to think it would be no problem for him to come up with something. By then the fiberglass in the cold box had set and I was able to sand and paint that. All in all it was a very productive day.
71 days...
