Wednesday, April 29, 2015

The Lifeboat -- Take 2

I finished The Lifeboat in short order.  (It's also a short book.)  It wasn't bad.

I am a fan of books with unreliable narrators.  As this book opens, our heroine is on trial for murder.  Whose murder?  Time will tell.  Grace narrates in a flashback, and you hear the story of her ill-fated trans-Atlantic voyage in the very early days of WWI.  She ends up in -- you guessed it -- a lifeboat with a few dozen others.

As the days pass, Grace's tales become a little bit less reliable.  People in the lifeboat start to die.  Do we believe her when she explains how and why?  I guess you'll have to read for yourself to find out.

I like that I don't really know if her recounting of events was accurate.  I dig that in a book (or movie).  (Related aside: I'm dying to read The Girl on the Train.)  It was a moderately engaging experience.  I think I just didn't like Grace's character all that much.  I found her mix of innocence and entitlement to be irritating.  Although I suppose, in a way, those are the very things that make her a type of narrator I enjoy.  It appears I have a dilemma.

Sunday, April 26, 2015

Goal #17

Goal #17: work out.

I have been a mess lately.  Must get back on the horse.

Recap of goal #16: I did do some cooking this week, mostly in one insane evening early in the week.  It was nice to have healthy food to munch on all week!  Today I stopped by the store again, and I don't have nearly as much time to prep as I did last week, but hopefully I'll have some goodies to get me through to next weekend.

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

What I'm Reading Now -- Pretties

I'm not sure I ever wrote a "Take 2" about Uglies, the first book in this Scott Westerfeld series.  It was okay -- dumb enough for me to want to listen to the second book in the series, Pretties, now that I need something brainless to listen to.

I do not expect to be impressed, just engrossed.  Although so far, I have to say that "annoyed" is a better descriptor.  The dialogue is immensely irritating.

Monday, April 20, 2015

Random Links

Flawless women on the interwebs.

Where do we keep the thing that we use for that thing?

Yay government!  More bad news!

My face does not look like this.  Does yours?

People cried into their teacups.

St. Louis makes the country's best beer.  Thank you, WAPO.

Sunday, April 19, 2015

Goal #16

Goal #16: cook.

I finally made a grocery list based on recipes that I'd like to try, rather than buying random staples and throwing them together at the last minute.  I can't remember when the last time was I planned what I wanted to make before I shopped!  Hopefully I can manage it before my veggies go bad.

Recap of goal #15: no reading was done, except for a few pages of my new favorite magazine, Monocle, while I was sitting at Cafe du Monde having beignets.  I slept like a rock both to and from NOLA on the plane, snoozing before takeoff and only waking up upon landing.  So much for my free drink tickets!

Friday, April 17, 2015

What I'm Reading Now -- The Lifeboat

I don't remember where I heard about The Lifeboat, but I'm in need of some engaging material on audio, and I happen to have this in my iTunes.

I'm a little bit concerned that the book is blurbed on the front cover by Emma Donahue, author of Room, of which I was not a big fan.

We shall see if this one proves better.

Thursday, April 16, 2015

Blood Meridian -- Take 2

At the time that I started reading Blood Meridian, I expected darkness, bleakness, and lots of death.  I got it.

It's set less in the Old West than in the Old Southwest -- you get the wildness of the Old West, plus lots of Indians and desert landscapes.  The story is about a band of men, the exact composition of which changes over the course of the tale, usually because some of them kill others of them, or they are killed by outsiders.  They act essentially as mercenaries -- going out to kill Indians for the prize money or setting about killing other white men just because.

The setting is hard and cold, despite the desert sun.  It's an uninhabitable place, where everyone is an enemy and you can't trust a soul.

If you're looking tired of the post-apocalyptic sci-fi that is everywhere these days but you like a good dark tale, this should fit the bill.

Sunday, April 12, 2015

Goal #15

Goal #15: read.

K, E, and I are still (hopefully) planning to carry on with our postal book club.  Here's my problem though: I'm supposed to send a book on to K at the end of this month.  I'm currently on page 36.

Recap of goal #14: things didn't get back to normal during the week.  The weekend was better.  I worked Saturday, but had a lovely Sunday.  Bike ride, working around the house, dinner at T's, and Game of Thrones is back!

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Sailboats! (The Rest)

Nighttime in Anegada

We were all overly full from our lobster dinner, there was more drinking on the parts of some of our crew, and it was windy as hell.  As I went to bed, I could feel the boat swinging back and forth in the wind. Occasionally it would go so far that the starboard hull, under our cabin, hit the anchor chain.  It was not a quiet sound, quite metallic and echo-ey in the hollow parts of the hull.  Nevertheless, I slept.

Until I didn't.  It was about 1:30 in the morning, and this time the banging noise was different.  Somewhere deep in my brain, I knew that, and I sat bolt upright.  T woke up too.  We sat for a minute, not sure what to do.  Then I looked out and saw the rest of the crew.  It wasn't just us who thought that was something different.

We headed up to the deck.  Sure enough, it was so windy that we had dragged our anchor during the night and hit a coral reef.  Oops.

We spent the next two hours running the motors and trying to get off the reef, deciphering tidal charts, obsessively watching the GPS, and listening to the keel scrape on the reef.  (That's not a good sound.)  Eventually we gave up and went back to bed.  There was nothing to be done.

Day 6 -- Anegada (again)

At the lobster dinner prior to our run-in with the coral reef, our Capt. J had spent some time at the bar with his friends in the other crew, and the captain that he had hired for them.  Their captain was female, probably close to my age, and had a bubbly personality.  I didn't hear it, but T reported to me later that Capt. J came back to our table from the bar and mumbled that Liz "was not captain material." 

Well, she came to our rescue the next morning.  Liz called out some friends of hers in their dinghies in our first effort to try to un-beach our boat.  The plan: rope the dinghies to the catamaran and, all together now, rev the engines and try to drag the boat off the reef.  We tried, with me at the helm of our dinghy, but no luck.  Without Liz and her friends, though, we never would have even been able to try.

Plan number 2: we have a secondary anchor.  Run it all the way out as far as we can go, drop it, and try to winch ourselves off the reef.  In the end, that didn't work either, but again, than goodness for Liz's local friend, who had more muscle than all of us put together.

The nuclear option: call Husky Salvage & Towing.  It was going to be a few hours before they could come get us (they were very busy rescuing a sunken passenger ferry), so we listened to war stories while we pondered our options.  Liz regaled us all with her sea tales.  There was the time she lived for a month on half a can of beans a day because they lost their food. There was the time one of her crewmates went into liver failure.  There was the time they had a suicidal captain who tried to ram their ship into every obstacle he could find.  Every time she finished a story, T elbowed me: "'not captain material,' huh?"

Eventually T and I, along with J and R, packed up the vodka and cranberry juice and headed to the beach to spend the rest of the afternoon as one should when in the BVI.  Three hours and a bottle of Grey Goose later, Husky showed up and I hopped back in the dinghy to observe their procedures.

Rescuing a beached boat is a pretty simple process really, if you don't mind risking a limb or two.  One guy drives the tug boat.  The other guy puts on a wetsuit and gets in the water.  Guy #2 takes these giant, uninflated boat life jackets and (this is where the limb risking comes in) swims under and around our hulls jamming the life jackets (and his hands and feet and whatever else) under our boat wherever he can find any space.  Once we are satisfactorily strapped with life jackets, he inflates them, and then his buddy on the tug boat goes to work.  Voila, we are free!

Husky only hung around for a minute.  Apparently a wrecked monohull which was taking on water (we were not) became their highest priority.

We got word from the marina that they wanted us back in port so they could see what kinds of damage we had done.  It was late enough in the day though, and a long enough sail back to Nanny Cay, that we all agreed to wait until tomorrow.  We had a delicious dinner of steak and vegetables on the boat that night, but I turned in fairly early (having also begun my drinking fairly early).

Day 7 -- Anegada to Tortola (Nanny Cay)

It's our last day on the boat, and it's a sad day.  We're headed back to the marina so they can assess the damage we have done.  As if that's not bad enough, we're being babysat by "not captain material" Liz until we get back into the Drake Channel.  At least if we start to go down in the Channel, there are islands all around.  Not so for most of the trip back from Anegada.

We reach the marina and spend a long time waiting to get to our slip, working to clean and unload the boat, waiting for them to put the boat in dry dock, waiting for the hotel to get our rooms figured out.  Waiting, waiting, waiting.  Not like we had anything better to do though. I decided to use the opportunity to finally get into one of the books I had brought along, and I made loads of progress!

We had dinner that nigh at Peg Leg's, which was pretty good, but really I think we were all in our own weird places about what had just happened.  T was ecstatic to be off the boat.  I was said I didn't get to spend more time really learning to sail.  And none of us had any idea where we would be the following night, since the Nanny Cay Resort didn't have rooms for us.

Day 8 -- Nanny Cay to Road Town

We awoke at the Nanny Cay Resort and had breakfast in our rooms.  (We had lots of leftover food from the boat and fridges to keep it in.)  Alas, no worries, we found a hotel!  I don't really remember how we got from Nanny Cay to Road Town, except that it was in a very crowded taxi.  We were dropped at a lovely hotel, Maria's by the Sea, and I stuck my nose in my book while T handled the check-in.

Ahhh, what a relief!  I was sad to be off the boat, but here we were, in a lovely, bright, clean, large! hotel room.  We had a balcony which overlooked the ocean and all the meats, cheeses, and crackers we could eat.  I walked around the shops a bit, and we all met up for dinner at a local restaurant across the way.  I remember enjoying what I had, though I can't remember what it was, other than that it came with friend plantains.  T and I headed a bit further down the road to get some dessert at the Pusser's pub, and then it was bed time.

Day 9 -- Road Town to St. Louis

All good things must come to an end, and this trip did on Valentine's Day.  We reversed course: ferry from Tortola to St. Thomas, lunch in St. Thomas (picture), and flights from STT to Miami and Miami to St. Louis.


We were quite delayed in St. Thomas, but luckily had a long layover in Miami which allowed us to grab dinner even after the late arrival.  By the time I got in bed, it was probably 1:30 in the morning.  Despite all the fun and craziness, it was good to be home.

Sunday, April 5, 2015

Goal #14

Goal #15: get back to normal.

Honestly, my life has been so hectic lately that I'm a little bit tired of these silly goals.  I feel like every one is essentially "remain semi-functional through the week," just in different words.  Do you agree?

Maybe I'll like them better once things are, as I am hoping this week, back to normal.  Or maybe I'll quit doing them, because they seem silly.

Recap of goal #14: well, I survived.  But that's about all I did.