All right, all right. Harmony has shamed me in that sweet way of hers to write a little something. I bow to the master. What can I say? The sailing life has started to reach a comfortable point of regularity, I couldn’t think of a way to purple it up with prose any differently than all the other folks out there, and I didn’t want to waste any of all y’all’s valuable time on anything that wasn’t my best effort.
Thank goodness I’m over that! Here’s some crap about stuff:
- I’m in New Jersey right now. Surprise! For reasons completely unrelated to our trip, I’ve found myself hanging out in the US for a couple weeks while Harmony and Tack hold down the fort in Topolobampo. I felt trepidations about leaving them alone, but classic Harmony has already charmed the entire middle-aged male populace of the port. Mexico has been very hospitable to us, the mainland side most of all, and despite the warnings of the State Department, our experiences have given me full faith in the goodness of regular people everywhere.
- Right now I’m sitting in a coffee shop, down the rabbit hole of actual high speed Internet and listening to college students discuss their passion projects. I’m eating junk like it’s a moral imperative (frozen pizzas and nutty bars, whaaat?), and it’s both comforting to my tastebuds and distressing to my everything else. My laptop sports a fractal tree of open browser tabs and sticky notes and half-finished diagrams. The tap of information and entertainment is wide open, and the floor is flooding.
- By the way, holy Boardwalk Empire! The Game of Thrones premiere? Gimme that dish!
- My plane left the outskirts of Topo and landed in New York City. As we walked to the apartment across from Trump Tower where we’d be staying the weekend, I was struck with the thought that the resources it took to build one block of this city – maybe even one building – surpass the resources available to the entire city I had just come from. The cognitive dissonance is deafening.
- Oh my Lord it feels good to be in an English speaking country! Back in Mexico my most utilized phrases are: a) Como?; b) Lo siento, pero no entiendo; and c) Con permiso, el Internet no he funcionada ahora. I’ve never felt like such an idiot for such a sustained amount of time. Half the time when someone says something that I don’t understand, I just pretend that I’m hard of hearing just so I can attract pity for an assumed disability instead of verified ignorance.
- The worst part about being here is that the trees were still bare. Here I thought I’d actually succeed in leap frogging another gun-metal gray winter entirely. I know, you’re really feeling for me right now.
- When I get back to Mexico next week, we’re going to pull up stakes and bomb down the coast for El Salvador to try and meet our June 6th visa deadline to leave Mexico. We’ll basically be skipping most of the resort ports and staying at sea as long as we can. 1,400 miles in a month and a half. In a weird way we’re looking forward to it. It’ll be a good test for some of the more . . ambitious strategies we’ve begun to consider for how we’re actually going to get home to the PNW.
- This unplanned ‘vacation from vacation’ has left me feeling homesick – for Mexico and our little cabin on the water. I miss my girl. I miss the cat. I miss the horizon. I miss my girl.
Bulleted lists, you know I can’t quit you.