once again i woke to the early morning callithump of naval callisthenics, and owen scratching on this and that. he's got us trained now for the morning. he knows how we love our lovely woodwork so he'll start scratching on one of the locker doors (wood), and then typically pam will yell, "hey! owwwen!," and he'll know she'll be awake enough to jump up on the bunk and cuddle into one of our faces, purr, and begin nibbling on an earlobe or loose neck skin. this morning when i heard him beginning his morning attention system coinciding with the calls of the navy ranks i decided to try to relieve pam of her morning bawl and get up to take owen outside on the deck. so owen and i collected a few blankets, a pillow and my down sleeping bag and headed out into the early morning sunrise, closing the hatch behind us... i ended up getting warm, cozy and snoozy enough to forsake the important task of watching the cadets working their tails off and dropped off to sleep while they were running their "company run," and dreamt of giant centipedes.
after pam finally woke me up from the stern of cricket we took jiminny to city dock. we disposed of our ship's garbage, finally found a place to bring our ship's recycling, and then we took a long walk to an annapolis fire station. we wanted to properly dispose of our old fire extinguishers. the fireman at the firehouse door didn't sound like they typically did this, but kindly took them from us when he'd heard that we walked a ways to do the right thing.
our walked continued, and after a brief stop at a coffee shop we passed a humane society with a sign announcing kittens... who could resist looking at cute kittens, even knowing that you have a slight tendency towards shedding tears in such places?! up the driveway we went, and saw many, many cats and kittens waiting for someone to sweep them off to a loving home. amazingly, that someone was not us. not at this time. i don't know how we kept from completely melting from the warmth of those pleading eyes, but somehow made it out of there without a kitten. (could you please do me a favor and go adopt an orphan kitty today? it would help me feel better. thanks! : ) i said we didn't melt from the cat's eyes, but i didn't say anything about the dogs... when my eyes started to water over looking at the pups, i knew it was time to move on. (could you please do me another favor?) it took a while of walking to dry the ol' lids.
our walk continued. always away from jiminny at the city dock. we finally made it to our destination... west marine store. as captain of jiminny i was tired of dumping gasoline all over him, and into the bay everytime we needed to fill his petite tank, so we decided it would be good to install an external tank. you know, the kind with the long rubber hose with the little hollow rubber ball to squeeze the gasoline to the motor? anyways, we found just the guy (giff) to help us because of two reasons:
1. he'd just gotten back from circumnavigating the world (our ultimate goal in cricket). did we ply him with questions and distract him from his job? you bet we did! and we've got his websight and contact info too.
2. when we didn't know which fitting to buy he gladly drove us to the city dock after he got off work! wow! we tried to pry as much information out of him as we could while we rode on the bench seat of his old pickup truck.
i am pleased to think that jiminny, the sea, and my body will be smelling much less of fossil fuel!
when we'd been deposited once again at the city dock we walked across the street to have a couple pieces of pizza and a couple bottles of ibc root beer. when we were almost finished eating glen (the guy from yesterday) walked by, and we hailed him fully knowing this could be a while. it was. he apologised about the dirty shirt he'd been wearing yesterday. the shirt he was wearing looked ever so slightly cleaner. we told him that was ok (we haven't showered for a couple of weeks now). glen went on to say that he'd been thinking and we probably didn't have to listen to his favorite preacher on the radio anymore because he didn't believe a lot of what he said, and that he would just take the parts he knew were true in his heart, and not worry about the parts he knew weren't. he said he decided not to be stuck on any certain date that Jesus would return. way to go glen! the talk then changed to how cold the winters were in annapolis, and how very, very cold they were in minneapolis (glen will NOT be moving there). he talked about how his old oil burning furnace was a crap shoot as far as it's working this winter. we mentioned to him that we'd been thinking of him while we were visiting the humane society that morning, and that we thought he might have a good time volunteering there giving attention to those cats n kittens. he sounded interested, and asked a few questions about it. well... he said he didn't want to interrupt our dinner, and turned around and walked off down the street. God bless glen!
we then walked to the naval academy, and had a lovely time looking around the grounds at the beautiful historic old buildings, monuments, and trees. we stopped to watch the evening formations. salutes, swords, orders being yelled loudly, marching, drum beats, about faces... all very formal and impressive! paul, you would love it! we sure did.
from there we walked back to jiminny and took him up spa creek, under a draw bridge, past lots of sweet historic houses and boats on docks and moorings and little parks and church steeples, and more houses and boats farther up the creek to a little party on a sailboat. we'd been invited to join them earlier by an employee of the local marine supply store (fawcetts). it was great fun to sit in community with 8-9 folks in the cockpit of a sailboat on a city creek talking about sailing the world and living in this world. good folks. the owner of the boat works for the dock master here, and gave pam and i a couple of tokens for showers here at citydock (a little hint? things were a little tight in that boat). after a little 3 day homemade sauce and spaghetti it was goodbye and back to jiminny.
back up the creek in the faint evening glow, past the house's lit windows, past the drawbridge's green and red lights, past the big boats and fancy restaurants, across the waves and back to cricket's welcoming decks, with owen standing on them, glad to see us return (purr, purr, purr), and back to our warm bunk in the bow.
No comments:
Post a Comment