Four!

Big day in the fam today - Elias turned four...

Alisa baked the cake yesterday.  Elias helped out.

There was some frosting-induced euphoria.

This morning they decorated the cake.  Elias had picked this cake out of a book that's here in the housesit. 

He was well pleased with how it turned out.  (It's a horse.)

Then we went to the playground.  Elias and his mates had a play, I grilled some snags on the barbie, and then we all ate the cake.

Then we went to the aquatic center.  Elias was over the moon.

We wore out the water slide.

I love the way he goes in with one hand pinching his nose and the other hand over his mouth.

Elias is really comfortable swimming under water - he might even be snorkelling the next time we're in the tropics.

And then, shortly after this pic was taken, everything took a sudden change for the worse... an everday bathroom break went very horribly awry.  I'll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that the neat rashie that he's wearing in these pictures is no more.  I had thought events like that were well behind us... at least he made it out of the pool!

We recovered our equanimity and enjoyed the rest of the day.

The end.

Get Me Rewrite!

Well, I met my self-imposed deadline for finishing the first draft of my manuscript about our trip across the Pacific.  I got it done before Eric was born, even if it did take the fortuitous circumstance of his being born six days after his due date for me to make the deadline.


For a while now I've been mentally setting aside August for the rewrite that will get me from first draft to second draft.  For the last week I've been marking up the first seventy pages or so (see the examples above), and today I actually sat down and started writing.


And...it was kind of fun.  This is a new experience for me and this manuscript.  For the most part, I've found writing it to be about as much fun as drilling a hole in one of my own teeth.


Anyway, I have high hopes that I can knock out a one-month rewrite.  Stay tuned.

Six months, 25 days

I just read The Totorore Voyage, a book describing a fantastic (and utterly nuts) circumnavigation of the earth at high southern latitudes by a Kiwi named Gerry Clark.  Just out of Cape Town, his 32-foot boat was rolled and dismasted.  He managed to limp into Marion Island, a South African possession in the sub-Antarctic, where he dropped off his two crew at a research station.  He then set out grimly, alone, to try to make it to Australia to fix his yacht.  Before him was a beyond-epic solo voyage over thousands of nautical miles of the Southern Ocean, navigating under a jury rig and sails made from a tarpaulin and a bedsheet.  He was capsized again and again, going through something like four or five separate jury rigs in the process.  He repeatedly despaired of ever surviving the experience.  Things got so bad that he contemplated just stepping off the side of his boat to hasten the inevitable.

Finally, against all odds, he limped into Fremantle, Australia, his boat a sodden mess, having performed heroic feats of seamanship to reach port safely and unassisted.

What did the Australian authorities do to greet him?

They brought a sniffer dog down to the boat to make sure he wasn't smuggling drugs.  They put him through entry formalities that lasted for seven hours.

I cannot think of another Anglophone country that would treat a distressed mariner this way.  It turns out that Australia has a spectacular talent, and tolerance, for bureaucracy.  It's a trait that's very surprising given the informal character of the country, but there it is.

This is the part where I mention that we have now been trying to import Pelagic into Australia for 6 months and 25 days.  Until she is imported, we cannot advertise her for sale.

It's not like we've been struggling through the bureaucracy on our own - we've employed two different customs brokers to assist us with the process.  Nor are we involved in some lengthy fight with Customs.  As far as I can tell, it's taken 6 months and 25 days to get us this far in the process...just because.  In addition to the over-developed bureaucratic streak, Australians can also demonstrate an amazing capacity to not get stuff done.  I think those two characteristics have come together to put us on the 7 month boat import plan.

I've learned that calling the customs broker four or five times a week is the only way to keep the process from succumbing to inertia.  And generally, I'm pretty Zen about the whole thing.  The boat will be imported when she is imported.

On the bright side, I've had plenty of time to get the boat ready to sell!