Author: Seth
Picture: Elizabeth wearing everything she owns
Google Earth Location: same

Elizabeth, as most of you know, is a very easy going girl and I love her for this. Her even keel (pardon the pun) attitude toward life and the obstacles that come her way is a very endearing trait. I realized this early on in our relationship when she told me that in order to keep her happy she really only needed two things: 1) to be warm and 2) to not be hungry. If either of these two criteria were to be challenged, she would be grumpy. If both were missing, she would become a fairly difficult person to be with. Everyone has their boundaries, right?

Although not intentionally, I once tested Elizabeth's version of Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs" when I took her back-country camping in Yosemite. As you probably guessed, this did not go over well and a third requirement entered the list: 3) the ability to take a shower once a day.

So, when it comes to living on a sailboat I knew what would be required to keep her (and therefore myself) happy. The boat quite obviously needed to be warm, stocked with food and include a separate shower stall (unlike most boats where the shower head is also the sink spout that you pull over the toilet to shower). Conveniently, our boat has the last two, but as far as I was aware it did not have some magical way of heating the air inside. And besides, who would need heat in a boat sailing to the Caribbean, right?! Air conditioning maybe, but heat?!

Well, as we recently found out, Virginia (although technically considered part of "the South") gets downright cold in late October. Colder and windier, in fact, than San Francisco would ever get in January. And as the past few weeks have gone by, I have been waiting for the lash out...

Thankfully Elizabeth went back to San Francisco a few weeks ago to see friends and "gather some warmer clothing." And in a classic Elizabeth maneuver her "warmer clothing" consisted of loosely knit, cotton, long-sleeve "sweaters," a cropped summer leather jacket and a pair of 3" clogs. Although the sweaters might have been nautically themed, I was expecting her to bring back something closer to skiing gear.

So now, here we were yesterday. Waking up every morning to water dripping off the ceiling as a byproduct of condensation from our breath. The windows fogged over and basically ready to start frosting. And, believe it or not, it still didn't happen. Elizabeth was being a trooper and never said a word. She even wrote and "E + S" in the window one morning! Amazing resilience and patience on her part, I am sure!

So it was really nice of her not to get mad at me when I learned that our boat has a button on our Air-Conditioning unit that says quite plainly: "Heat." And when turned on, actually, magically, heats our boat to whatever tropical degree you desire.

Wow, three weeks of self imposed torture and she wasn't even mad at me. She MUST love me. Or just be really, REALLY happy to have her three needs back...