where women glow and men plunder

Some random thoughts on Australia:

1. Not to fret, people of Seattle. You aren't the only ones who've mastered the art of no-eye-contact-no-smiling.

2. Perhaps everyone here is too busy contemplating their architecture to smile. Melbourne is packed with really interesting buildings. No HomeOfficeDepotMax buildings-in-a-box to be found.

3. Public transportation is everywhere. Particularly streetcars. All of their streetcars ("trams" to the locals) are packed with people. Haven't seen many buses to speak of.

4. Everybody walks on the left. Except me.

5. I've completely stopped jaywalking because I have no idea where the cars are going to be coming from. Directly out of the sky for all I know.

6. There's an old tall ship moored across the river from my hotel called Polly Woodside. Ironic: not made of wood. More ironic: made of iron.

7. americano = long black

8. Piles and piles of really cool things to do here that I don't have time for. I should have stayed an extra day. Or week.

9. Melbourne is frickin' beautiful. The promenade along the Yarra River is a fantastic walk, especially at night. Albert Lake sits smack in the middle of South Melbourne surrounded by great green space. St. Kilda beach is just beyond and I may try walking down there tomorrow morning if I wake up at 4:00AM like I did today.

10. Sure, string theory is complicated and all but try figuring out Australian rules football.

on a hippie trail, head full of zombie

I took off from Seattle on Saturday afternoon. I landed in Melbourne, Australia Monday morning. Sunday, April 27th, 2008 never existed. This is only one of the many things I'm still fuzzy on. What day is it? What time is it? What season is it? When I walk across this street, what direction is the car that runs me over going to come from?

I've been here for 10 hours and so far: no kangaroos, dingos haven't eaten my baby, Crocodile Dundee is no where to be found and there isn't one damned shrimp on that barbie. The Australian cliches we Americans are so fond of are woefully disappointing.

on the road again

I'm not a terribly important person in my company. Even in my mind - where I vastly inflate my importance - I still don't warrant business cards. My paychecks show up in the mail addressed to CURRENT RESIDENT. I'm a simple cog in the salt mine, toiling away on the front lines (probably because I mix metaphors and nobody likes that guy). But for some reason that I didn't see coming, I find myself at the center of a maelstrom of work all depending on me and all scattered to the four winds. So my travel schedule looks like so:

now: San Jose, CA

4/26 - 5/3 Melbourne, Australia

5/4 - 5/8 face down on my couch cursing jet lag

5/9 - 5/19 sailboat delivery from Bahamas to NJ

5/26 - 5/30 San Jose, CA

6/2 - 6/6 Denver, CO

So, gentle readers, the pickin's might be a bit sparse round here at Leaving Normal for the foreseeable future. I haven't forgotten about this blog or those of you who are awesome enough to consistently stop by.

It's just that I'm a very important person.

bellingham crealock 37, the sequel

Did we actually lay down in the berth on the Crealock 37 in Bellingham when we visited it the first time? No. No, we didn't. So back we went for another visit. This was also the visit to decide if this is a boat we want to pull the trigger on.

As it turns out, it is. We are going to make an offer for it for a price that I feel is a skosh above market price given the condition of the boat and the amount of use it's seen. But since it's the only Crealock 37 on the west coast and shipping one from the east coast runs about 15 large (I'm so mafia, right?), this boat becomes more and more attractive. That being said, the owner of this particular boat doesn't have a firm grasp on the market value of a 1990 Pacific Seacraft 37 with 2800 hours on the engine. The odds of our offer being accepted parallels survival rates of a hellbound snowball. But nothing ventured, yeah?




What the hell is this thing?


When the dodger's not laying in the berth, it turns out we fit in there pretty well. Since Christy sleeps in the middle of our queen size bed now, the sleeping experience in this berth shouldn't be much different.


Cute.


This is a beautiful Crealock 34 just one dock down from Lively Lady. It had been on sale recently and I was slobbering over it on yachtworld.com for months. It's a supremely well-outfitted and cared for boat. As it turns out, it's also in a charter fleet. So if we can ever run across a free weekend, we're going to charter it over a Saturday and Sunday to give it a test drive. As much as we love (LOVE) the Crealock 37, we've been wondering if we could deal with a 34. There are more for sale on the west coast, newer, and better outfitted for less money. Given the opportunity to sail the boat, and live on it for a weekend will go a long way towards answering that question.

As always, we'll keep ya posted.

(more pics at our smugmug gallery.)

playing doctor

Christy and I spent the weekend in a Medical Care for Long Distance Sailors and Wilderness First Aid class. It was taught by a local retired vascular surgeon. He was a fantastic teacher and led a brilliant class. He brought in pig bellies, excuse me, porcine models so we could practice slicing and poking and suturing and stapling. Here's a small sample of things we discussed:

• how to insert a chest tube to reinflate a collapsed lung


• how to set a femur back into a hip socket


• how to give injections of local anesthesia


• how to staple a laceration shut (friggin' cool)


• how to deal with a hemmorhoid (not friggin' cool, especially the pictures)

Ask us what we can do with a Foley catheter, hehehe.

Of course, this training only very absotively brushes the surface of what we should know to reasonably take care of someone. But the idea behind the class is that if you're 1800 miles off the coast of Mexico or 22 miles back into the North Cascades, what are ya gonna do? What are ya gonna do?

This class + good first aid kit + good reference books = better than a poke in the eye.


I got to practice my plaster casting skills on Christy's wrist.


Won't somebody think of the children?


A one-legged man in a butt kicking contest.


In case you can't tell, that's a putter that my leg is splinted to.

finally

After several months in her slip with holes drilled in the deck and over a month on the hard in Ballard, White Cloud sails! After Kim's friends Brian and Nan came over to help tune the rigging, we took her out and about the Puget Sound.


"Aye, cap'n."




Some celebration was in order. White Cloud is in the water and under sail!


"Don't mind if I do."




We saw the coolest rainbow that had settled right onto the water up near Richmond Beach. Since there was no wind and we weren't moving, we spent a fair amount of time checking it out.


The winds died out completely and this guy was motoring directly for us so we fired up the engine and motored the rest of the way in.

Fish - congratulations! What a great boat, fast and balanced.

crealock part II

Christy's sister, McKenzie and her significant other Matt graciously agreed to run over to a boat yard in Annapolis to check out a tasty Pacific Seacraft 37 for us. As a side note, anyone looking for remote boat evaluation services should fly McKenzie and Matt to the boat with cameras in hand. They did a ridiculously thorough job photographing every last centimeter of the boat down to pages of the maintenance log. I'm guessing if your looking at boats in Waikiki, the British Virgin Islands or perhaps the Italian Mediterranean coast they'd be especially open to your offer.


She's on the hard in someone's parking lot.


I'm starting to understand the comments about PS37's dated underbody. That's much closer to a full keel than I ever realized.


Protected aperature for the prop.


Looking forward sans bimini and dodger canvas.


Matt striking a PNW pose.


We're speculating on that thing sitting in the quarterberth. My money's on a portable MRI machine. Any takers?


Yay for nav desks. We like nav desks.


Male model not included. McKenzie was pretty clear about that part.


Not really a V-berth. More of a polygonal berth.


Of course, the stanchions must be rigorously tested!

(Dear boat owners: we really don't kick your stanchions. This is an inside joke after reading a passage in Don Casey's Inspecting an Aging Sailboat in which there is an illustration suggesting we employ a martial arts death blow to each stanchion as a test. We don't. Really.)


Love me the bronze hardware, hoo.


Shiny, clean engine.


Matt playing invisible blackjack.

"Hit me."


One of the few, slight differences between this boat and the other Crealock 37 we check out. A wheel. Christy much prefers a tiller as a simpler, more pure steering mechanism. Better feel, more in tune with the boat. I much prefer a wheel because when I'm docking this 16,000 lb beast in a side wind, the last thing I feel like concentrating on is which direction to push the tiller to make the boat go over THERE NOW. Push left to go right. Push right to go left. Except when backing up in a metric country. Or daylight savings time.

The rest of the pictures are here in our smugmug gallery.

escaped!

I finally made it out of LA after getting standby rejection on 3 different flights. That's a fun-filled 7 hours in John Wayne airport. I've got posts coming up on boat buying and actual sailing on Fisher's boat White Cloud. It's an exciting day here at Leaving Normal!

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