Saturday, June 14, 2008

Jan's Paint By Words - Friday the13th, June 2008, 4:20 pm

To blog or not to blog? Ah yes. . . that is the question.
Thank you Dawna and Julie for your e-mails. Julie, I'm glad you figured out how to send it. I'm so happy to hear from you; it made my day!
Sleep! I NEED SLEEP! You'd think that after numerous day naps, I wouldn't be so tired after my night shift. After all, it ends at only 9 pm.
When on watch, I give it my 110% attention and concentration. At the beginning, end, and every 10 minutes during my 3 hours, I scrutinize the horizon line for ships. That's 19 times! (I really, really, really don't want to run into one!) I concentrate on wind angle ( Which is ever changing by 10-20 degrees) and compass heading. In between all that is the really hard work of day (or night) dreaming, star gazing, and reflecting on moon reflections. I wrote a haiku for you Karen:
Night sky, mast head light.
Direction arrow waltzes with the Big Dipper.
Dancing with stars, over ocean.
Is that a haiku?
Oh! I forgot . . . I was going to talk about sleep!
The main salon has a bunk on each side, then a bench on each side. Tina has the starboard bunk. The starboard bench seat has 6 crates of provisions strapped to it. Chuck has the port side bunk and I have the port side bench seat. I like to call it the nauti-sofa. I keep my bed cleaned off during the day (toss stuff up on Chuck's bunk) so anyone can sit on it.
I'd better start talking about sleep now, or I may never get to it.
Every night, when I get off watch, I have to make my bed. Last night, we were heeled to starboard. Just getting down the companion way gave me a whole weeks workout of exercise!
Before I can make the bed, I have to get out of my life jacket and foul weather gear, then stow it. Then, of course, use the head. Remember before? I said to use your imagination in the head and multiply by 5 1/2? Well. . . change that to 25 1/2! I believe that I now qualify for the gymnast Olympics!
Back to making the bed. Well, sorry, I have get ready to go on watch now. I will continue this in my next blog.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Jan,
Oh, when you originally mentioned using the head (on June 10), I thought you were talking about YOUR head (you know, the one that's attached to your neck). NOW, my imagination takes on a whole new direction. OK, so now that I'm trying to wrap my head around this after it finally dawns on me, then you upgrade the imagination factor from 5 1/2 to 25 1/2. Oh well, I'll try not to be too stressed out about it. OK now I REALLY have to laugh when I think back to my response...never mind about having Chuck take any pictures so we can all have a good laugh.
This morning in your honor, I did one of the paint-by-numbers. Well, maybe two of them. OK, three. I was imagining that I was there with you on the boat...good feelings. By the way, have you tried the Hashi on page 28? I enjoyed it, but the 4th one I haven't finished yet (challenging).
Looking forward to hearing the rest of your explanation about sleep. What a complex and gruelling operation! And you haven't even made your bed yet.
To go to a movie or not to go to a movie...that's the question for me. As usual, I'm really loving your blogs, whether you blog or not blog (I almost said "glob").
Love, Dawna

Julie F said...

Happy Father's Day Chuck!!!!!
Can't wait to here all your stories in person. Take a lot of pictures for us.

From: Julie and Josh

Kaleb S said...

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