Perhaps it's always a risky thing to dig around in a teenager's bedroom, but this afternoon when the fog rolled in I needed to get the laundry down from the life lines and hang it in the toasty warm salon near the diesel heater, so I was in the need for some empty clothes hangers. Before anyone asks, yes, we actually have clothes hangers aboard, because swim trunks and t-shirts don't always cut it while interfacing in the dirt dwellers world, so we have to fit the part from time to time. While I was digging around in Jason room, I came across this patched-up hanger. It's amazing what a live aboard can do with a roll of blue tape. What worried me right away is that the hanger is repaired with a broken toothbrush. The question I instantly asked myself:

"if Jason's toothbrush was tapped to this hanger, then what was Jason using to brush his teeth?!?

I've learned not to ask questions that I don't want an answer for, so I just dug into our supply of tooth brushes and put a new blue one in Jason's sundries bag.

When I asked Jason about his clothes hanger repair tonight while we were sitting around the galley table eating dinner, I had his answer before it even came out of his mount, just in the way he looked at me. His look didn’t tell me he was trying to come up with an excuse like he had done something wrong, but that he was trying to figure out what was wrong with his cruiser patch clothes hanger in the first place. Wouldn’t anyone repair a clothes hanger with a broken tooth brush and blue tape? Why would you throw out a broken hanger when it can be fixed! And Bingo, right before my eyes, in that instant a Live Aboard…no Float Aboard Hobo earned his stripes.