The lighter side of life – staying in touch with friends and family by celebrating the ordinary.
Broken Boat (Florida Boating, Post 18)
Tuesday, February 9
Look at the heavy morning dew! You never see anything like that in the desert.
Tuesday was our last day at the resort before heading out on our boat. Monday had been a lot of work, and we envisioned a more relaxing day for Tuesday, hanging out enjoying the resort. We were wrong!
Here’s what the top of the boat looks like where the mast attaches:
This is the plate at the bottom of the mast that attaches to the top of the boat. It’s not supposed to be all bent!
John had to removed it, pound it flat, and reattach it. It looked to me like it would just unscrew, but nope. He had to go to the hardware store, buy a drill and new rivets. He then had to drill out the old rivets in order to get the plate removed. He then banged on it with a hammer for some time out in the parking lot, using our trailer as a surface, until it was sufficiently flat. He then re-riveted it to the mast. It took him all morning, but he got it fixed.
Here’s where I spent most of Monday and Tuesday, sitting at a table in front of our hotel room, with a view of the water in the distance. Here I wrote blog posts, talked on the phone and video with my friends, and caught up with emails.
I also did some coaching on Monday and Tuesday evenings, but I took those calls inside.
On Monday and Tuesday I was thinking about what overall story I am telling on my blog about this trip. It has been a varied trip so far, with amazing parts and challenging parts. What perspective am I taking? I value authenticity, but what is authentic? I could make this trip sound terrible, or I could make it sound wonderful, and be completely truthful either way. How do I want to portray my trip? For that matter, how do I want to portray my life?
It occurred to me that the stories I tell about my life not only influence other people’s opinion of me and my life, but they also influence my own opinion about my life. So should I always keep it positive? No, I don’t think so. I could post gorgeous pictures and tell everyone (and myself) how amazing Florida is, but maybe John and I would actually rather be quietly riding our bikes at home? That’s not as fantastic of a story, but is having a fantastic story the goal?
What if John and end up coming out to Florida every year, imagining that’s what we enjoy doing – but we don’t actually enjoy it during the process of doing it? What if we’ve just convinced ourselves that we enjoyed it because it sounds cool and we get beautiful pictures? On the other hand, maybe that long, long drive was worth a blissful kayak trip or two? Or maybe it doesn’t matter whether we enjoyed this trip at the time, because we will get a lot of future satisfaction out of knowing that yes, we went to Florida and sailed around in a tiny boat?
I decided I would like to portray this trip in a reasonably non-judgmental way. By that I mean I want to stop one step short of declaring things good/bad/wonderful/terrible. I will simply describe the trip in a reasonably authentic manner and you can see what you think.
Is this a wonderful trip or a terrible trip? Interesting or maybe not interesting at all? Worth it or not? I’m going to leave those evaluations to you. Some of you would find this trip a nightmare, others would love to come along.
Stay tuned because I believe it’s going to get more interesting here very soon!
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