Thursday, Jan 20, 2011

Without this, fish squeak, you know, I said, holding up a container of Fish Oil. The scene was a pharmacy, I was getting some pain medicine, and the kindly woman behind the counter had perfect makeup, immaculate hair, and was smiling that professional smile. But she didn't get it. I was in a great space, enjoying every minute. Fish oil, I said, and paused, repeating, fish squeak if they don't get it. Now she smiled, I had her in my loving hold -and she laughed. When she was giving me my change, I said: you won't forget to tell the other girls, will you? - And the customers, she said.

I have had 2 glasses* with my lunch, 6:00 pm, so if I am a little drunk you will forgive me, or instantly stop reading.

We are back at sea, on a mooring at the RTYC and the sea breeze has been belting in for hours now, and the boat's movement is very lively. To board our supplies was an heroic event.

Australia is a foreign country. Although now we have been loaned a car and have shopped for green grapes, tomatoes, spotty bananas and rat poison, not to mention wine and beer, we are still living our nomadic life, our seafaring life, aboard.

We bought a computer keyboard because our laptop will NOT type an "L". We visited our old home - and although my eyes reported everything is the same - everything is DIFFERENT!!

The tectonic plates of the mental sub-ocean have shifted and it is all different. The two-and-a-half years away have cracked something in the brain - and is that not that for which we travel? Agree/disagree - I couldn't give a stuff, but coming back here I have come back to a different place (still called Hobart) and see people the moment after we left, there being no gap at all. Yet their inch is not my inch, their metre not mine either. How strange! How wonderful!!

How AIW!!! (Alice In Wonderland)

The club inadvertently let out the database of members - the complete list of their email addresses! What a slip! This enables me to contact every damned one of them, to advise them of my mobile phone number and that our yacht is for sale. Can't do any harm.

Doug (American/Australian, lives down the road) helped us move today, from Constitution Dock (a short, delightful cruise) and loaned us the car. He is a driving instructor and the car has a brake and an engine kill switch on the passenger side. He noticed immediately that I put my left foot on the the brake** as I back out of a parking space. It's saved me a couple of times!

A good day. A bloody good day.

* De Bortoli Premium Cabernet Merlot, cask wine.
** Automatic transmission

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Pic: Con Dock lifting bridge, looking back after we left it. See the channel? We have to keep hard a'starb'd as we come out, to avoid tangling with the bridge.