There's still a bit to finish up the dory, but she's got a coat of paint on the bottom and I couldn't stand to wait another two weeks to get her in the water—plus, it might be July before we see another day like this. I wanted to see what adjustments needed to be made for the final product so we threw the dory on top of the LandCrusher and drove up to Vancouver Lake to see if she floats.


  


Floats, indeed! Molly took the first turn at the oars and I sat back and ate brie and crackers. Not a bad life.





The boat's named Ellen, after Molly's grandmother who recently passed away. She's quick and very easy to balance: I could stand up without any trouble. Molly wound up perched right at the edge of the seat, so the oarlocks need to move forward a few inches. Other than that, everything seems to be perfect.

After a return to shore to visit the bathroom, we traded places and I took over the propulsion, taking us across the lake to the island. We found a swarm of very large mosquitos there and then we quickly rowed away. The water was a little choppier on the way back, but the dory handled it with no problem—no surprise, considering this is the same kind of boat fishermen used to take out into the ironically-named Pacific.


 


So, now we have a boat! And when summer comes, at long last, we'll spend long hours floating around doing nothing in particular.

Now if only it had a sail..

(I know, I know: two posts in the same week. Don't worry, I won't hurt myself.)

Wikipedia has fallen from grace in my eyes. Of course I know it's full of errors and half the pages are written by anime fanboys and you shouldn't ever believe what you read, but I never thought about all the people with good intentions and poor reading comprehension. It's about asparagus: We ate asparagus the other night and, as often happens after one eats asparagus, the topic of asparagus pee came up. I'd read somewhere that some scientists had discovered that everybody produces asparagus pee but only some people can smell it, or something like that--so I checked Wikipedia to verify that. The asparagus entry reported that, in fact, a study showed that some people produce it and others don't, and some people can smell it and others don't, and there's no correlation between the two. I read this out to Molly in my "isn't that interesting" voice and proudly filed away another piece of useless trivia I can blurt out at an inappropriate moment. Except I started to wonder about that--no correlation? That's certainly odd--and I did what I've never done before: I followed up on the reference. I read the article summarizing not a single study, but two: one examining production of the suspected agents in asparagus pee smell and another, completely different, study looking at detection. Both found variation, and neither had anything to do with the other. (At least, not that the article indicated.) Someone misread the article and added an incorrect summary to the Wikipedia page, leading the innocent reader to believe something totally false. If not for me--ME!--endless generations of mankind would labor under the mistaken impression that there's no correlation between asparagus pee-ers and asparagus pee smellers. The correlation is not known to be zero, it's simply not known.

For the record, I both produce and detect. Molly does not detect, but I know she produces.

With that out of the way, a dory update: I've faired the outside as much as I had the patience for, put a couple coats of primer on, and turned her upside down--er, right side up. Then I made a water level and levelled her out perfectly square and even. Cut and fit the ribs, then worked out a design for a removable center seat so that we can put in a sliding seat later if desired. Glued the ribs, and tonight I put fillets (glue along the seams) on the ribs and seat pieces. Today my package from Duckworks arrived, containing the oarlocks and sockets along with various sailmaking equipment that I won't be using any time soon. To do: bow and stern seats, fair the lumpy inside fillets, sand, sand, sand, rails outside (leaving inside until we know we've got the oarlocks in the right place), bow deck with a handle, cut a handle in the transom, primer, sand, primer, sand, paint all over, and she's ready to float! We might have her in the water weekend after next at this pace. Weather depending, as always.

The Lady Washington web site says they need volunteers for the spring, through the Rose Festival, but their volunteer coordinator told me today that they've got a bunch of Evergreen students on the schedule now--no room for Sailor Dave. Damn Greenies!

Laura told me about the Capital 2K, an open water swim in Town Lake at the beginning of May, right before Molly's birthday. I swam 2500 tonight at a not-so-great pace of somewhere around 1:22 (depending on how far off my count was), which would be 30:37 for the 2K. That actually beats all of the results from last year's Mens 30-39 category, but open water is very different from pool swimming. We'll go down for the swim and for Molly's birthday, and get the hell out of Portland.

I thought winter was the worst part about Portland winters, but it's actually spring. The daylight, the blooming trees, the occasional warm day have done nothing to ease the misery of the Portland winter--if anything it's worse, taunting and teasing us, reminding us that we won't get more than a few sunny days in a row, a week if we're lucky, until July. The winter is cold and dark, but you deal with it. Spring gets your hopes up then drops the rain and sleet and grey clouds all over them.

Neither of us want to face another winter--or spring--like this again, so we'll be migrant workers: we're spending the dark months in Austin next year, maybe March through June. I'm not quite sure how we'll pull it off, but we will. For our sanity, we have to.