in case you were wondering

what i should be doing:













cleaning this mess.


what i am doing:


























playing with my new canon PowerShot SD 1000.




anyway, in case you were wondering, i got my phone back. one of the guys was diving and picked it up for me. unfortunately, after spending the better part of a week submerged in salt water, i'm not holding out much hope for its revival. however, it doesn't matter, because thanks to becca, the curator of dr. pj's cell phone museum featuring an eclectic assortment of verizon phones of past, i have a brilliant motorola flip phone complete with a pink bluetooth called toothy. (thanks again!)

i did also want to say thanks to the outpouring of support of potential cell phone replacements (emily & caroline). and also alisa's helpful idea. although i am still a little afraid of eBay. oh, and as you probably guessed, i am also online now. my internal wireless adapter is still playing hide-and-seek, but i bought a USB one. so you can now reach me via several methods of long distance communication. don't everyone call at once.

Communication Situation Update

Will be coming tomorrow. Actually, I probably won't get around to posting until Friday since tomorrow is Valentine's Day and of course I have plans for the night. Yes, I'm getting together with a couple of my single friends. We're going to sit on the couch in our pajamas eating ice cream, drinking wine, and watching romantic comedies (suitably cheesy: Sleepless in Seattle and actually good: Love Actually). This is the plan Chris came up with for me, him, Greg, and Burke and I think nerdy 30-year-old straight guys embracing the stereotypically overdone single girls response to Valentine's Day is brilliant.

Sinking

I've had better days. Days when I didn't drop my fairly nice, fairly new cell phone on to the dock and watch it bounce and slowly sink past my outstretched fingers. Anyone have an old Verizon phone they're not using that they'd like to donate to the cause? And by cause I mean me not having to pay "retail" (read: ripoff) price for a new phone.

Blue Means Go

My computer has decided to play a fun game, kind of like hide-and-seek only it pretends that it doesn't have an internal wireless adapter. Regardless of whether the switch is on or off, the light remains orange. Orange=bad=no internet for you. I turn the computer on and off. Still orange. And it doesn't show up at all in the device manager. I restart it, put it in standby, turn it back on. Orange. And then sometimes, randomly, blue. Like, as you might guess, right now. So I have to hurry up and post before it changes its mind.

I've looked into this and the good news is that I'm not crazy-- this same exact thing has happened to other Compaq users. The bad news is that, as far as I can gather from the threads, there is no solution to this problem except engaging in a lengthy struggle with customer service "case managers" who never return phone calls and finally sending the laptop to headquarters where they may or may not replace the card, which may or may not work.

I'll keep you updated. In this case, no news is bad news.

Officeboat

So it has been kind of annoying to have to get up early and go down to the boat show and clean (and/or shovel) the same three boats every day for the past week, but not only do I feel like a better person simply for getting up earlier (like it's some sort of accomplishment), I find that the somewhat annoying aspects of my job are balanced out by some amazing perks, like what qualified as a workday for me today.

As you read through the rundown, keep in mind that I was on the clock for all of this and I think that you'll agree.

We went to pick up the houseboat that we're going to use as an office. The crew consisted of the dock staff (me, Dave, Brian, and Scott) and a couple of Dave's liveaboard friends from the marina. (My boss lives on his sailboat a couple of docks down from Windworks.) Since the officeboat was stuck in a slip behind another houseboat, this process took quite some time. We had to float the other houseboat across and raft it to a decrepit tarp-covered wooden tugboat while we moved our houseboat out, tied it to yet another houseboat on the other dock, move neighbor houseboat back, and then finally tie up the chase boat to hip tow it to the yard for haul-out. This involved a lot of running long lines back and forth in the dinghy and tying and untying.

Incidentally, this neighboring houseboat we had to move might have been the cutest thing ever. And I want to live there. While I was serving as a human fender, I spent the entire time gazing into the little windows and imagining myself chilling on the Adirondack chairs on the roof watching the sun set over the Olympics.



Anyway, we finally get the officeboat to the yard without hitting anything despite the 25 knot winds, and as soon as we get onshore we are greeted by Pete, another friendly liveaboard, who has brought us a case of Sierra Nevada. (That's not Pete in the picture--it's one of the boatyard workers, but Pete actually looks like that from the back, too.)


We head to the Nickerson Street Saloon where I eat a carne asada sandwich and chicken curry soup on the company tab (and a shot involving Bailey's that some random (as in no one knew him) drunk fisherman at the bar bought for our entire party of ten). By this time, it's 4 pm, so by the time I get back to work there's only 1.5 hours left, just enough time to finish up the boat I was cleaning.

You can't tell from this picture, but the inside of the officeboat is actually really cute with an amazing hardwood floor.


recap:
-dream house
-boat ride
-beer
-free lunch