Some pictures from Saturday. We took advantage of the new green space in between our marina and The Wharf and spread out the main sail. Then we went through looking for rips, tears and wear. It was so exciting afterwards to bend it on (put it on the mast.)

You can see the rest of the photos in the slideshow linked in the post below.

           I feel like Pinocchio. "Look Geppetto, I'm a real boy!" Only it's a real boat now. :) The wonderful folks at Pacific Offshore Rigging are coming back on Monday to finish stuff up and we could possibly be sailing this beautiful boat by next weekend.

The 19 month long mast saga has finally come to end. If you're ever looking at getting work done on your mast, or your wooden boat, feel free to contact us for details on our pretty awful experience with Koehler and our incredibly wonderful experience with Fritz from Pacific Offshore Rigging. We'd be happy to talk to you in detail about both.

To view all the pics from today, check out my Picasa album linked below. The pics look great in full-screen slideshow.

Enjoy and thanks Cindy for the opportunity!

The crew on Ceilydh are currently cruising and it's fun to read up on their adventures. This recent post on how to distinguish between a homeless person and a cruiser made me think of the post I wrote about cute, functional sailing/live aboard clothes for women. As the blog mentions, it is so easy to let yourself go as a cruiser/live aboard.

Cindy writes about her adventures living aboard with her son and husband on Zach Aboard. Eric and I plan to live aboard with our future children, so I'm always fascinated to read about her daily life doing it (the crew of Ceilydh also cruise with their daughter.)  Cindy recently wrote a guest post about cleaning on a sailboat on www.domesticdork.com. If you're interested in yet another view of what it's like to live aboard, I'd suggest checking out her post here.

We bought this little pot two days and I had it resting on the stove top as I baked at pizza at 425 degrees. My eyes almost poppped out when the glass cracked all at once. It would have been funny if I was really angry and it happened, like I had super powers or something.

This gets me thinking. Somewhere deep in the back of my head I know I'll be cruising someday in some very hot areas of the world. There is no way I'm going to want to use this stove or oven while I'm there. During the winter it is wonderful because it makes the boat toasty, but during the summer, it can make it dreadful in the cabin.

Has anyone ever had any luck with a solar oven? I'm wondering if we could attach one to the transom for outdoor cooking in the tropics. Or maybe we won't cook at all. Maybe we'll just live off of gazpacho and melons.

We're taking it one step at the time. We've got forward movement on the mast, we have the soft dinghy up in storage, we reorganized the head, cleaned the floorboards, and we fixed some of the lights in the cabin.  We're slowly coming back into the boat and her many projects.

And this photo? This photo is just a cool shot from the boat. 

Dang it, we're having a down spell. Hence the "meh". We're just feeling meh, and I'll tell you why, it's tough to keep working on something whose reward is far off in distant la la land. 2013 right now seems like a date that will never materialize. I think of it as this magic time when we'll have "accomplished" all we needed to do on the boat and it will be "perfect" and "ready to go" and we'll have "done everything we should have already" to get her ship shape. 

The thing is these dreams of mine won't happen unless we keep doing the dirty work, and there's a lot of dirty work. See? She is looking pretty dirty:

Our biggest issue is, clearly, not having a mast still. It's in the shop folks and the heartache and drama that surrounds why-we-still-don't-have-a-mast is for another post; one which would require several glasses of wine for me to truly tell the tale.  Because of our mast issues we have not sailed our boat in two years. Two stinking years.   :cry:

It's hard to get up on the weekends and work on the boat when everything seems never-ending, when you know that you can't reward yourself with a sail around the bay when you're done with your work. It's demoralizing to hear people say, "Oh you live on a boat? You must take it sailing a lot!" and then you just kinda shrug and nod and decide it's far too long a story to explain that you haven't actually been sailing in a long time.

Now, don't get me wrong. This is not the "meh" post that signaled that we weren't going to continue with our plans and dreams with this here boat. Nope. This is the meh post that is hopefully going to kick my butt in gear (and by default kick Eric's butt in gear too.) This is my comparison post. These pictures are what I'm going to look to over the next several months as I try to get her less meh-ier. I think it's time to focus on getting this little lady looking good. If we can't have a mast for awhile, then we can at least get her real name up on the hull and say "sayonara" to Neverland. We can get the new canvas on order and get the topsides painted something other than that awful vintage cream color. We can even clean up the dinghy and get her looking happy again, and we need to, and we're going to.

No more feeling meh.

I'm going to continue to post about my experiences of living aboard on this blog, but hope you will come over and check out my new one when you get the chance.

More updates to come! www.redcharlotteblog.blogspot.com