Pathfinder is out of cookies!

Anyone who knows the cookie culture in the Wallace/DeSimone household understands that this is a crisis of biblical proportions. Let me fill in the details for everyone else. Warning- this explanation will get technical.

One measure of radioactivity is a value known as “half life.” Half-life applies to other things too. Basically, it is the period of time over which something reduces to half of its original value. The half life of Uranium is 4.5 billion years. Carbon-14 has a much shorter half-life at ~5,700 years. The half-life of household bleach is 5 days in sunlight.

Half-lifes of billions of years; thousands of years; days … often the measure is a relatively long time. The half-life of cookies in the Wallace/DeSimone household is most often measured in minutes. A package of store bought cookies NEVER lasts a full day in our house. There are several (one in particular) sweet tooths in our family. Cookies do not typically stand a chance around us.

Living on a boat in a remote location has, in general, been beneficial for the local cookie population. Believe it or not, we have moderated our cookie consumption. In other words, we have been rationing cookies. OK, who just fainted?

It is quite clear that cookies have a special place in our household given the fact that we have our own pet name for them- “jumpers.” Somehow, some packages of cookies on grocery store shelves are aware of our fondness for them. We call those packages jumpers. As we walk down the isle, they, seamingly of their own volition, jump off the shelves and into our grocery cart. This someone seams to happen when one or the other of us isn’t looking.

There were several packages of jumpers onboard Pathfinder as we sailed for the Bahamas. Those packages were carefully stored away and later re-packaged into daily allocations. Three cookies for Roger and three cookies for Susan. Given that I (Roger) weigh 50% more than Susan, I think this 50/50 ratio was entirely unfair. Susan on the other hand, insists that when it comes to sweets, the only equable division is 50/50. It is time to re-open negotiations.

The fact that we actually rationed cookies is somewhat of a miracle. If a bookie was offering odds on the chance that we could actually do it- the payout would have been something along the lines of 10,000:1. However, even at a paultry six cookies a day (which extended the half-life of cookies from minutes to over 14 days); our cookie stores have been completely depleted. Oh, the horrors!

Now, prudent sailors say to never sail on a schedule and instead, wait for a good weather window. In general, we have been prudent sailors. The lack of jumpers may change that. We are currently making plans to sail to a population center (Georgetown, population ~2,000) to resolve this emergency. Seismographs around the Atlantic basin are already picking up the vibrations of jumpers jostling for position in anticipation of our arrival.