Sunday Afternoon

I woke up this morning at 7:15, after going to bed at 3 AM.  The final party was a big one, and I spent most of it torn between the desire to pour myself another glass of wine and jump onto the dance floor or find a ride home and read my book.  I did neither, really, and instead lost my jacket and spent a long time looking for it, went outside and had a somewhat strange conversation with my friend the ukelele player (who told me I'd been in an R-rated dream he'd had the night before) and an exuberant and drunken Serbian man who'd played an instrumental role in toppling Miloslovic.  I wandered upstairs and watched people dancing from the balcony; I wandered downstairs and ended up in a long conversation about depression with someone who's struggling with it. 

I headed out of town pretty early, because I was supposed to coach some of my sailors at a regatta down in Portland.  But it was too windy to sail, so instead I wound up scrubbing the keel of a Yngling for an upcoming frostbite series I'll be sailing in.  It was tedious work, wet and cold and repetitive, getting rid of the barnacle footings, fingers gripping a 3M scrubby pad and gently but firmly scouring back and forth on the surface of the keel.  Removing hard-stuck growth on a boat is a lot like scrubbing a pan that you've burned food into.  It felt good: the wind on my cheeks, my feet on the ground, my cold fingers on the wet foamy film on the keel, feeling the rough pattern of barnacle footings and hard dried growth as I worked to scrub it out.  All this brain time makes me appreciate the clear immediacy of a physical task like that. 

I'm skipping book group right now.  I only bought Monica Ali's Brick Lane on Friday afternoon, and it was absurd to think I'd read the whole thing while at PopTech.  It's unfinished, in my suitcase.  The dogs are snoring, one on the white dogbed and one on the green one.  There's a chicken carcass and some vegetables simmering in a pot on the stove, for chicken soup.  It's nice to be home. 

Comments

[pjm]

I know I lived in Pennsylvania too long when I see "Yngling" and think "beer." (OK, they spell it differently.)

[Christina]

pjm, I thought that too! (went to college in Philly) Hahaha. I was just thinking about Yuengling yesterday and how I miss it now that I'm back on the West Coast.