Changing hats

By Mike Jastrzebski

Those of you who have been reading this blog know that Mary and I were planning to leave last summer at the same time fellow blogger Christine Kling left. It was a hard decision but I had two books in need of rewriting and we decided it was more important to get these books out. Dog River Blues went live in August. Weep No More went live 2 weeks ago. Now it's time to change hats and begin working on the boat.

The first thing I did was redo my writing area. I had my desk set up so that I could use an office chair. This was comfortable but took up a lot of room, so I got rid of the chair and rebuilt the desk so I could still do some writing.

Here's a picture of me writing this blog at the new desk.

Over the next couple of weeks I will be rewiring some instruments, hooking up the ham radio, and tuning the engine. At the same time Mary will be finishing up her copy edit of Christine Kling's new book and sewing a new dodger.

We are shooting to get out of here sometime in February but that depends on whether we can stick to our schedule and whether we can get the engine running.

Mary and I are both finding that as we have aged we've slowed down. We still both work every day, but length of our workday has shortened since we did our rebuild 10 years ago.

As for the engine–it will either start or we'll have to get a mechanic in to look at it. We have an atomic four gas engine that is 30 years old. Every time I've made an effort to start it, it has started, but who knows. If it can't be started we will either have it rebuilt or put in a diesel engine.

I know, everyone will say put in the diesel, but it will cost twice as much as rebuilding the atomic four so we'll see. Hopefully it will start after the tune-up.

Anyway, over the next couple of months I'll be blogging more about working on the boat than writing. Once we get away from the dock I'll mix it up a little with blogs on cruising and blogs on the trials and tribulations of writing on the hook.

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