Second Draft

It's not completely finished, as Alisa is still helping me proof the last eighty pages or so.  But today I finished all of the substantive edits to the first draft of the book manuscript, which means I now have a completed second draft.

Anyone know a publisher?

To the Polls

Quick, those of you in North America - who's the prime minister of Australia?

Really, someone outside of Australia should know...

Anyway, the answer is Julia Gillard, who is Australia's first female prime minister.  She's also in danger of becoming something of a historical footnote, since she's only been in office since June 24th of this year, and an election was held today that apparently has an even chance of ending her time in office at a smidge past two months.

Turns out these things can happen in a parliamentary system - who knew?

And I voted today - my first participation in an Australian election.  Good fun.  And a good idea, too, since voting is apparently mandatory here, and you can be fined for failing to cast a ballot.  I'm happy to report that while politics here appear to be about as unsavory as you might expect, they're nothing like as messed up as U.S. politics.  No one publicly calls for the center-left candidate to be assassinated.  How civilized.  And, added bonus, there's a quite strong Australian Greens party that you get to vote for...

Peripatetic

Well, our dreamy four-and-a-half month housesit is over.  Here's Alisa over the weekend, in the midst of the final clean-up.

We're now in our third Tasmanian housesit, a two-bedroom flat in West Hobart that a friend of a friend very kindly made available to us while she was away.

We continue to believe that we'll be living on our next boat before we know it.  But meanwhile, this bouncing around between housesits is what we're doing.  I don't particularly love the feeling of being a 42 year old serial housesitter,  dragging the kids and our stuff from place to place like this.  But then we're also not prepared to sign a lease on a place and settle into Hobart for six months.

Luckily Elias seems completely unfazed by all this moving around.  And Eric of course has no idea what's going on.  And Alisa, let me say, is a complete champ about it all.  Few moms with a three month old and a four year old could handle moving around like this so gracefully.

I think it's a sign of how strongly she's committed to continuing the sailing dream, and the inconvenience that she's willing to put up with to make it happen.

Either that...or maybe I'm such a wonderful husband that she's willing to put up with the occasional bout of homelessness just to be with me?