Filling time.

Filling time.

It has been a while. I’m guessing that proper blog writers and readers would be horrified at a four month gap between entries. It seems to me that blogs chronicle some form of progress, reporting and observing at regular intervals. Blogs are the everyday tide of writing. So this is not much of a blog. Sorry.

Sitting in a pub drinking with two of my favorite people, Steve and Serge, I recall a gem of an idea that had to do with time. It was Serge’s. He considered that if someone living a couple of hundred years ago happened upon a modern day airplane, settled into his seat, sat there with all the noise and rumble and peanuts for, say, six hours, and got off in a city he knew to be 3,000 miles away...he would likely think of this thing called an airplane as a remarkable time-traveling machine. After-all, the journey by boat, foot or animal would likely take two or three months. This made me feel better about flight delays and being late for meetings.

We do so much so quickly these days, in our time.

And I guess that is one of the reasons why this boat building thing seems to matter and mean so much. The planning and building and figuring out part of doing it doesn’t fit in the modern day construct of how we experience, and more precisely, accomplish things between sun up and sun down, between new and full moon, from one season to the next.

One last very short story. You will notice from the pictures that some progress has been made in the last four months. The boat now has sides and looks a lot like something that will one day be a boat. I am doing a lot of ‘filleting’ which is pretty much filling in the seams and nooks and crannies with a peanut butter-like paste of epoxy and sawdust...yet another labor that fills time at a very different pace .

You’ll also notice new nautical decor. The regatta flags are courtesy of Paul and Karen, who reside in a postcard of the coastal west country of England, not 10 miles from the home of Sir Francis Drake.

That last story...

My friend Curt came to have a look at the boat. Curt lives 30 paces up the alley and was contributing a heater to the garage that is now boathouse. Curt has this smile that is activated up near his left ear. This happened as he recalled a time he was being shown a house by a realtor. The house was nice. But there was something a little odd. There was a barn out back and it was not empty. There was a half finished boat in that barn. The previous owner had been building it and died before it was done. It came with the house.

The story shakes me. Slow time is good time. But, damn it, I’d better catch my flight!