Kaimusailing

Tuesday morning is the morning after Pizza Night. I was hungover. I was able to function, albeit slowly. The photos of the night’s sunset were wonderful and we are now under forecast of a big storm and cold weather. I had said maybe we wouldn’t have another Pizza Night like that one.
.
I had to clean up from the mess. Empty beer cans had to be put in recycling, pizza pans, cutting boards, utensils, and bowls had to be dishwashed. Leftover Cento tomato puree was tossed in the trash. Put everything away including anything that would be ruined by rain. It has been dry, at least the rainfall, but now we were going to get it.
.
When the Breezeway was rented out, the boatyard took anything I had there and put it under Kaimu’s crossdeck, which is not a dry place. It was mostly in cardboard boxes and when I investigated I was shocked to see huge cockroaches in the boxes. I threw them into the yard and stomped them when they went running. Now all this stuff that had been in cardboard boxes had to be gathered up and put away, out of the impending rain. I put discards in the boxes and threw them in the dumpster. I took a 5 gallon pail full of paint supplies and relocated them in a plastic bin of paint supplies, then the 5 gallon pail got loaded with any stuff I wanted to save. Put it under cover.
.
The beam cover wood was relocated to the wood shop, even though these days scroungers come and take whatever they want, no respect.
.
The news from Hawaii was that a Kona Storm was hitting there. Normally the wind unvaryingly comes from the Northeast, Northeast Trades. The Southwest sides of the islands are dry, desert. On the Big Island, Hawaii, the desert is called Ka’u. A Kona Storm comes from the opposite direction, and Kona, normally dry, gets whammed by huge rainstorms. Mauna Kea has a snow blizzard. Winds approaching 90 mph hit the upper slopes. The rain amounts are huge. Flooding happens. Flash floods, mudslides, falling rocks, erosion, roads wiped out, but it happens every so often, the residents plan ahead for these events.
.
Ever since tasting roasted beets at Eve the artist’s house I wanted to make borscht, beet soup, but I never used roasted beets before and now I wanted to do that. I shopped at the local Winn-Dixie which is not the most completely stocked grocer in the area, but the nearest. I was using a nice sounding recipe from the Dairy Hollow Inn Bread and Soup cookbook. I was substituting kale for the cabbage in the recipe. On the way back I dropped off the ingredients at the communal kitchen and returned the car to Robert. As I biked back to Kaimu and the communal kitchen I decided to tell Henrick and Mariola that I was making borscht. Oh, what good timing, they said, we have some soup of our own, come aboard. I then had a substantial lunch of a Polish soup, tripe and beef, spiced with marjoram. Then I went along to work on my borscht.
.
First I prepped two onions, diced, three carrots, coarse julienne, five cloves of garlic, minced, one rutabaga, diced and sliced, a large bunch of kale, destemmed and chopped. The stock pot was started with butter, then the onions, then the garlic, then rutabaga, carrot, kale, some fresh dill, an Italian spice mix, and a few bay leaves.
.
The beets were scrubbed, wiped with olive oil, wrapped in aluminum foil, and put in the toaster oven at 400 degrees for an hour. I put 8 cups of boiling water in the stock pot with the vegetables and added three tablespoons of “Better than Bouillon” concentrate. I added a can of diced tomatoes.
.
After the beets came out of the oven and out of their foil wraps they were cooled under running water, peeled, and diced. They were added to the soup turning it bright red. I turned off the heat. The beets will turn brown if they boil.
.
I cleaned up the mess I had made, red beet juice staining all over the place. Then I had a bowl of the soup with a dollop of sour cream in it. It was OK, but not worth the trouble of preparation. I had made better with canned beets and traditional spices. Much easier. Henrick stopped by and took two bowls of soup back to his boat to share with Mariola. They later said it was very good, though I disagreed.
.
The next day I had borscht for breakfast. I went to work on the beam covers, dry assembling them all, then I got the plywood blank for the deck box cover and put it in place, checking the fit. I ripped 3/8” strips of pine to add to the plywood, kind of a lip on the cover. Then I had borscht for late lunch. Borscht, borscht, borscht.
.
I was feeling like I was depressed and although I tried to work, I found ways to cope. Ride the bike around the boatyard, again and again. After a while I realized it was some kind of ailment. My hip was bothering me just like it did last spring after the vaccine shots. I was sore and achy, that’s what kept me up all night a couple nights ago. I had a nice phone call from Cuddily, wish she were nearby, like a bike ride away, no such luck, I’m in the boatyard, the Gulag. It seems I may have caught the same illness that Mariola and Henrick had. Maybe a flu bug.
.
I had received word that my older sister, who took care of me before going to elementary school way back when, was in hospital with triple bypass surgery and on a ventilator. Now, later, things seem to be working out well. Maybe that news was affecting me. My daughter skyped me from England, she would be in Florida to visit her maternal grandmother during the holidays and we could meet up somewhere. One of my favorite photographs was taken a few years ago when we roamed through Shalom Park near Ocala. Maybe that was affecting me.
.
I pondering how I felt, what was really happening. I just sat around playing a stupid game on my phone when Rocky, the owner, manager, and chief crane operator of the boatyard came nearby. Rocky, Webb Chiles says he wants to haul out here in about a month. What kind of boat does he have, a small 24 footer, a Moore 24. That’s a small boat, well no smaller than Ron’s Cape Dory 25. The slings can only come to 12 feet apart, no closer. Well, Webb is a person who prepares beforehand, his boat is probably half the weight of the Cape Dory. We’ll see.
.
I procrastinate. But I can shoot from the hip, and usually after procrastinating and going through hell organizing what I am going to do, I shoot from the hip. That results in an orchestrated mess of things.
.
I need to get my epoxy process going again. What I had worked out in years past, after trial and error, is to put the epoxy parts A and B in separate small containers, clearly marked, but I had no such containers, nor a suitable container to mix epoxy in. Sounds crazy, but true. I had to think about things, am I going crazy, is the pandemic and old age taking me down from my not so lofty perch?
.
I got to ride the bike around the boatyard again, didn’t Rosie Jones, mother of the artist, bring small plastic drink cups to the last Pizza Night? I rode up there to the Breezeway, but no small plastic cups there. Bummer.
.
I went to the communal kitchen, maybe there were some cups there. Someone was donating a bunch of china. I could raid that pile, but it was neat and I couldn’t disrupt it.
I am a messy person, but I don’t like messing something neat. No cups in the kitchen. Take a break, play a game on your phone. Take a break.
.
I used a plastic top from a fiberglass resin kit to mix my epoxy. I had some old condiment glass containers to pour resin and hardener. I had the old Walmart barbecue syringes that were used long ago to portion the epoxy.
.
I also had a product called wet/dry epoxy 700, given to me by a departing catamaran sailor. It’s a great product, can be used underwater, an epoxy paste. So, I was priming the gluing surfaces with unthickened epoxy, then putting the 700 paste on there and then assembling. Seemed to work great.
.
It took another day to finish screwing and gluing the beam covers together. Cuddily sent me a quote from a poem by W. B. Yeats. I googled the phrase and ended up at poetryfoundation.org. More poems by Yeats there. I bookmarked it. The topic we were discussing was Irish melancholy. I texted melon collie as a joke, but the joke was on me, there is actually a painting called melon collie, the image of which is reproduced here. It is available at saatchiart.com, by Peter Marco, as a print.