Australian vernacular continues to provide colorful ways to describe the family situation since Monday. It turns out, according to one of my most dependable linguistic informants, that we are under the pump. Must admit that the image feels completely apt - the metaphorical water gushes over us, cold and bracing, and we keep eyes and mouths closed, waiting for the flow to ease.
Elias is sick with the chest virus that put him in the hospital last time, and therefore not eating. His dressings will be changed again on Monday, and that will be our next chance to find out if he will require a skin graft.
He may also be discharged Monday. And we got the word from a surgeon on the burn team today that medical advice is we take him to a house, and not back to Galactic, when he is discharged.
Today is Saturday in the Antipodes, so that gives us 48 hours, over a weekend, to organize housing. Bob and weave(!), as some of our oldest sailing friends used to say.
~~
Meanwhile, this is a sailing/family blog, so a little boat news might be in order. We've been considering the very good advice we've gotten from sailors who have been to New Zealand that the price of things like new diesel engines is much lower there than it is here, and the standard of workmanship if anything better.
For a while that sounded like very good news - we could take a pass on the wildly over-valued Australian dollar, and also put off the existential misery of repowering until next summer. But then I had a chat with a friend here in Sandy Bay who has actually repowered a couple of boats. He pointed out that it's a job that takes months - and if we did it in New Zealand, we'd be doing it without a car, without any local knowledge, and without the seasonal dock space that we enjoy now. And we'd have to count on blowing half the sailing season, or more, to do the job.
All of this might justify the added expense of repowering here in Tasmania, where we know we'll be based for the next five or six months. So stay tuned on that one - I can't wait until simple problems like that occupy our minds!
thinking of you all LOTS....
ReplyDeletehoping that housing for elias' homecoming pulls together smoothly....
you are an incredible family and your incredible-ness will get you through this! Miss you all...
~zoya
thanks, Z!!
DeleteIt really shouldn't take months to repower your boat unless you are doing something really uh, odd. It took me 1 week to install a Yanmar 27 HP diesel into a hull that didn't even have a propeller shaft. A couple of days to build the beds, a day to get the prop shaft and strut in, a day to get the engine roughly in position and then align, and 3 days for engine systems to get plumbed in (fuel/exhaust/cooling/electrical).
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