Provincetown

Race Point

Here we are in P town, one of my favorite spots, freezing our asses off in 20 degrees with a 50 mph wind trying to plow me clean off the jetty I got out about 100 ft before turning back. Still it's absolutely beautiful, it just takes your breath away. The sea is dark blue and wild and frothy with white caps as far as you can see.
We go to Newport for Xmas with Joyce's family and then up to Jackman Me. for some serious snow. This is just the play stuff.

Check this out, CA and LA

muz refilling feeders

muz on phone (monitoring bird feeders)

lorenzo prepares to shovel driveway


newport, saturday a.m.

Typical winter day in New England: wake, eat cookies, wait for snow plow to come by. Lorenzo shovels front steps wearing flipflops. Jas arrives, tries to plow driveway with car. Jas and L resume shoveling car and driveway. Sufficient driveway cleared to drive for COFFEE. Drive slowly to coffee. Drive slowly to market. Return home; snow plow comes while we are blocking driveway. More shoveling ensues. Drive slowly to ymca: bad timing, children in pool. Drive to Marty and Nancy's in Boston, slowly. Nancy outside in snow gear, clearing a parking space for us. All empty spaces are occupied by lawn chairs- ie, no parking signs. Since yesterday around 2 pm, it's never actually stopped snowing.

The cat's solution to winter

Honey, can we leave now?

boat news

So we've gotten a lot done in the past few weeks, mostly repairs on the steel bottom, cutting out portions of the bottom steel that were suspect and welding in new plate. The new keel coolers, 3 inch pipes on the outside of the hull that cool the engines radiator water have been installed and all is ready to be sand blasted down to white metal and primed twice and painted. All of this is being done on a fixed price basis which is far less stressful. Joyce and I have been down in the engine room chipping rust off the steel with pneumatic chisels and needle guns, an incredibly nasty job, but we're just about done. We've just about finished fabricating the new doors and windows and they're ready to be sent out to be glazed. Hopefully when we get back from Boston in early Jan we can put the boat back in the water and move it to it's new spot a couple of hundred yards away and I'll be able to work on it by myself. I'm hoping the guy that sold me the engine will come up and put my engine room together and set up the hydraulics and controls. The list of things to do goes on and on. I keep laughing at myself for thinking I was going to retire from work and just hang out on a boat. We may have to move to a part of the world where you can still buy slaves. I hear the average monthly wage in Cuba is 20 dollars.

New Orleans for Thanksgiving

with David's family in Baton Rouge-


David's sister Louise, with Tracy and Anna


Rhoda, Rose, and Grace


In the Quarter


Art show

Natalie's Clothing and Accessories

Lately I've been obsessed with drawing these windows. There's something about them- the combination of mannequins and shoes, bags, jewelry- I can't explain its pull. All the clothes are super-feminine, things I could never imagine wearing (not sure I even know anyone who could). Maybe that explains their strange fascination.

sos Abby: send more store window pix!

Rainy day in La

Howdy folks, long time no blog. Been in an endless back and forth with the boatyard trying to get fixed pricing for the bottom work so I don't have to go nuts watching these useless dirtbags pick fleas out of their noses on my time. All is good. I've been building the new doors and windows out of aluminum and slowly learning how to weld. I've got dock space lined up at the port of New Iberia for Jan. and they're cool with my working on the boat as long as I don't live on it. Looks like we'll pull out of here in the spring. The weather has cooled down and it's just about perfect, Aug and Sept were impossible. We're going to New Orleans for Thanksgiving, David and Grace are coming down, and plan to go Maine, Mass and RI for Xmass.

Happy Halloween

This week in art class, the kindergarteners drew themselves in their Halloween costumes.

There were some good ones: a doctor with blood dripping on his green scrubs (great idea, Devyn!) a bride in rainbow stripes ("I don't have a white crayon") and a whole lot of monsters, supergirls, and hulks. And their renderings of people are really fun. At this age, they range all the way from blobs with arms coming out of them to full-size people with all the accessories.

Kalyn is holding a pumpkin, and her dressed in a flapper costume (includes Mom).

Art at the New Iberia Library

Last week, I had 2 drawings in an art show at the library- the ladies at the checkout desk gave me an entry form. I think they've seen me surreptitiously drawing library patrons. The artwork was to be based on old photographs in the library collections. There was a reception last Tuesday, where we all got to chat. This was very fun, meeting some local artists. They favor realism. Many of the entries were by children. Mine didn't photograph well, so I'm going to post one of theirs.

We are getting back on the boat this week after a long separation. Lots of negotiation going on with the boatyard.

Dado's Anniversary

Sugar parade

some photos from the Sugar Cane Parade in September.
we were marching with the Obama people as I took these shots- note the expressions!


Don


Muz reading


Joyce by Meg


Chris

Drawings

Jon, Chris, and Greg

Nancy and Kris

Muz and Elle

Back in New Iberia

We got back from Austin yesterday afternoon, and were relieved to find practically nothing happened around where we live.
All the children were back playing outside, and Natalie next door was entertaining her friends- sort of a post-near-disaster party. It's a bit soggy - a few ceiling tiles fell down - but the power only went out for about 6 hours, so our stash of frozen Parmesan is safe. Lucky break all around.
For those who travel, I recommend Austin enthusiastically- especially if you can stay up late enough for the music. The food is varied, they have museums and (we heard) a university, and there's open water swimming in the park.

Waiting for the bats in Austin

At dusk, a million or so Mexican free-tail bats emerge from under the Congress St. bridge. There is some disagreement about what constitutes 'dusk' here- the bats interpert it as 'almost total darkness', where the humans would like to see them a little earlier. When they finally emerge, it's difficult to see them without a strong light. But there certainly are LOTS of them.

Afterwards we had some great Mexican food- I had one of those complicated dishes with an almond sauce over pork and fruit and spices. Then we heard some good music in a bar- accidentally, it seems, because none of the other venues had anything nearly as good.

Who knows how long this vacation will last? Not the local officials. CNN is on right now: "It will take WEEKS to get power restored to all of those areas."

Evacuees

We're in Austin, listening to news- and calling any Louisiana number stored on my phone- trying to figure out when we can return. Local papers say New Iberia is one of the places still without power. So we missed Mrs. Bobby Jindal's visit to the supermarket parking lot near our house. We did not need her Meals Ready to Eat, though- Austin has a San Francisco-like array of restaurants to choose from, and we are in an eating frenzy! The cats are feasting on the leftovers.

Hurricane Readiness

So instead of sitting out on route 90 with the cats in a box, we're staying put in New Iberia. There is an evacuation order for New Iberia, but we'll see about that!

What Rhode Islanders do for fun

Boat has roof!

Most of one, anyway. The welding should be done this week. Just in time for hurricane season!

week # 561 of the experience

As you can see we continue to frequent various local jam sessions of cajun music. The folks are real friendly and it's pure heaven for someone like me who loves fiddles and accordions and plaintive howling. Joyce quietly sits there and steals their spirits.

The yard took my two guys again to work on another boat, so I went ahead and continued without them with the help of a Lao welder named Sayfon (ci-phone) and we did quite well putting in the framing for the roof plates. John and Randy should be back next week.

We finally got our engine, we had to drive down to Cut Off, Louisiana to personally lay hands on it, so to speak. It's an in frame rebuilt that seems to run well that we got for the price of a core, so I have my fingers crossed. Worse case scenario I send it off to a shop and have it cherried out for another 6k and I still got a great deal.

Joyce is getting ready to fly up to RI. to see family, I stay here with the cats and the boat.

Everyone complains that they can"t post comments on this blog, which seems to be true, so would you send them to us e-mail. We would love to hear from you all, as we are missing our friends, and if you want, we can post your comments from this end no problem.

Musicians in Arnaudville

Boat has windows

so we're getting the cabin walls up and immediately cut the windows out as the temp jumped up 20 degrees. Next week we hope to get the roof on and then we should be able to bake bread. Things are starting to move along a little which cheers me up, this is turning out to be a lot more work than I expected, much like building a house, which I swore I would never do again. As usual, the engine is coming early next week, monday or tuesday, it's been coming now for 6 weeks, but they say they ran it and it "runs real good" and it is just down the road an hour or so. The engine room isn't ready yet to install it, but I need it in front of me to take exact measurements to get things lined up perfectly to hook it up. The deck over the hold is down, it's 2 by 10's in wood which lets me pull it up easily to get in and do stuff. And on it goes, it is a lot of fun and every one enjoys working on it.

Scary Boat!