It's Fall!

This is the first Saturday morning in 3 weeks that I've had to lay in bed as long as I want then troll around with a cup of coffee for as long as I want.  It seems like heaven!  Sure, there are a ton of things we could be doing to fix up Lil'Wheels and Training Wheels.  We could don our weekend warrior masks and tackle the boom remake or sanding the mast.   But, why?  Can't I just sit here and drink coffee? 

There will always be work to do.  But, this is the perfect day for reading Moby Dick!  It is overcast and cool outside.  No reason to rush over to the dock just to get cold and wet through to the bones.  Last month I finished Treasure Island and Mutiny on the Bounty.  I think both books are wonderful and quaint.  They remind me of the boyhood I never had.  Just fun adventures all around.  I was just a serious little girl growning up!  I think that Moby Dick will be more on the serious side!  I'll let you know!

The Mate will play while the Captain is away . . .

Labor Day weekend was really relaxing!  I did everything I wanted to do: went running twice, had dinner and bbq with friends, worked on Lil' Wheels with my marinerette-mate, juiced and cooked vegan, and slept when I felt like it, and read a ton of books! 

The best book I read which warrants mention is:
The Promise of Sleep by William Dement, MD, PhD (not pictured because I already lent it out!)

I cannot say enough about this book!  I think everyone has to read it!  Dr. Dement makes the argument that we are mostly sleep-deprived, or sleep-negligent, individuals who cannot perform optimally due to our sleep debt.  If we treat our real sleep needs like calories then we'd take better care of ourselves.  Through reading this book I have been empowered to give my brain and body the rest that it needs.

I've had three people tell me that I should buy a kindle or nook in the last week.  Do you have one?  Do you like it?

Book Report: Mutiny on the Bounty

So, I finished reading Mutiny on the Bounty. Lots of nautical terms, classical sailor stuff, and swashbuckling jargon!  I dog-eared the pages with passages that I wanted to share with you, my readers. There are too many to share. Here is a small passage to whet your appetite:

Page 31 reads, “I shared with Hayward, Stewart, and Young a berth on the lower deck. In this small space the four of us swung our hammocks at night and had our mess, using a chest for a table and other chests for seats,” and, “For a month or more every man aboard received a gallon of beer each day, and when that was gone, a pint of fiery white mistela wine from Spain—the wine our seamen love and call affectionately ‘Miss Taylor.’ And when the last of the wine was gone we fell back on an ample supply of the sailor’s sheet anchor—grog.”


“As I mused on the Bounty’s sails and ropes, asking myself how this order or that would be given, and wondering how I should go about obeying were I told to furl a royal or lend a hand at one of the braces, I felt something of a spell which even the smallest ship casts over me to this day.”

Mutiny on the Bounty is such a classic tale that one fellow decided to recreate Captain Bligh’s treacherous journey from the Tonga to West Timor! A re-enactment of 4000 miles at sea on a starvation diet!

I am off to the library to get Moby Dick!
Happy Reading!

Here is a list of other great Sailing Books for your reading pleasure!

Novel Sunday

Watching the video of the whale crashing on the sailboat made me want to read Moby Dick!  I've never read this classic novel!  I am ashamed to admit it.  Well, I looked in my bookshelf and confirmed what I suspected to be true: I don't own Moby Dick.  But, I do own Mutiny on the Bounty!

So, I started reading this seft-proclaimed "greatest sea story of all time" after making the pate yesterday.  I am only on page 33 and it has pulled me in!  I am enthralled!  It is the story of a young man from Wales who is recruited on a 90 foot boat with 40 other men to travel to Tahiti and collect breadfruit and write a Tahitian-English dictionary.  The story takes place only a couple years after Captain Cook has made his famous journey to the South Seas. 

I'm rivetted!  This is a whole other level of poetry and depth to the sailor's life....well, to the First Mate's life more precisely!  What book will be next?  Old Man and the Sea?  Robinson Crusoe?  There are so many sailing themed classics worth reading!

It is time to make a pot of coffee on this gloomy Sunday morning and hunker down with my book and the Captain's Star Trek Snuggie!

Is this El Nino?

So, basically, it has rained 8 out of the last 10 days.  But, we have a spot of sun today!  Hallelujah! I am off to the library to get a few books.  I've got a request queue, but only one book has come in. 

Here is my queue:
How to Photograph Water by Heather Angel
The Sweet Life by Mia King
Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway
It takes Two by Patricia Chen
The Motion of the Ocean: 1 Small Boat, 2 Average Lovers, and a Woman's Search for the Meaning of Wife by Janna Cawrse Esarey

The only one that I expect to pick up today is "How to Photograph Water".  But, hopefully, with all the rain, waves, puddles, etc....I will be able to post some great water shots by the end of the weekend!
 
I will take this opportunity to also explain why we haven't posted many actual sailing pictures.  The reason is because the Captain usually goes out on the ocean by himself or with another mate.  He takes a couple one-handed shots with his iphone...and, waalaa.....

Yes, we will definitely be working on this! 

Weekend Roundup

Over the weekend, I plowed through the rest of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See, because I couldn’t wait to read Elizabeth Gilbert’s eagerly anticipated sequel Committed. I was not disappointed!

I have to say that reading these two books so closely together makes an impact! The juxtaposition of the narrative voice of a submissive traditional Chinese female and the modern professional Westernized woman is quite remarkable. I cried while reading one and laughed out loud with the other.

To quote Gilbert (my hero) on the subject of the childless professional woman:

“Moreover, as I aged, I discovered that I loved my work as a writer more and more, and I didn’t want to give up even an hour of that communion. Like Jinny in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, I felt at times ‘a thousand capacities’ spring up in me, and I wanted to chase them all down and make every last one of them manifest. Decades ago, the novelist Katherine Mansfield wrote in one of her youthful diaries, ‘I want to work!’--and her emphasis, the hard-underlined passion of that yearning, still reaches across the decades and puts a crease in my heart. I, too, wanted to work. Uninterruptedly. Joyfully.”

What does this have to do with sailing? Absolutely nothing. Truman ran 17 miles this weekend. I ran 4. I flew to Denver for a Boston Scientific Cadaver Course on pelvic reconstruction products. I made a yummy bulgar-wild rice-cabbage-onion-herbes-de-provence-green pea salad to take to the Super Bowl Party. Packed in some dark beer. Did some No Meat Athlete Blog reading.

Absolutely fantastic! Uninterruptedly! Joyfully!
~Lauren