Always Somethin’!

Sunday, I wake up late…9:30 is very late for me. I have a headache despite having not abused myself with the consumption of alcohol the night before. Too much sleep?
I activate my phone to find a text from the night before. I should have left my phone on; having received that text when it was sent would have made my day. And by the time my kids get up just a little later, I have received 4 new text messages wishing me a happy Father’s day from various friends. My kids don’t mention Father’s Day as they begin to stir. Our family dynamics are probably not normal, whatever normal may be.
My plans to revise a ring design early in the day get derailed when my friend calls me with a request for help. The crew who installed the mast on his sailboat had jimmied the windex, the small wind vane that sits atop the mast of most sailboats indicating wind direction. Since he and I climb (rocks) together, he asked me to come out and help by belaying him as he scales the mast to make the repair. It doesn’t take me long to turn off my steam cleaner and ultrasonic; a motorcycle ride to one of our local lakes seems like a more fitting Father’s day Sunday. As I prepare to leave, my 20 yr. old son coyly asks me about my current beer preferences. Did I mention that our family dynamics may be out of the mainstream?
So the plan was to use the mainsail halyard to get a climbing rope up and over the halyard pulley atop the mast. Connecting the two ropes with duct tape and hauling the climbing rope seemed like a good idea until the duct tape separated as the join tried to go through the pulley, leaving both the halyard and the climbing rope in a pile on the deck. This made what was a minor inconvenience into a major catastrophe. Using the jib halyard and winch, we finally got Pat up the mast where he stayed for almost a half hour trying to thread the mainsail halyard back through the pulley.

He sure made a fuss when I jumped off the boat making the mast sway fairly violently side to side. I obviously wasn’t thinking about that effect. And bummer, no luck with the halyard. This situation will now require pulling the boat out of the water and taking the mast down to effect the repair. If it’s not one thing…it’s another. (I think of Gilda Radner and her SNL character Rosanna Rosanna Dana a lot.) Always somethin’!
I remain sorry that we didn’t get Pat’s boat up an sailing that day but the several hours I spent in the sun, the good company of my friends Pat and Marsha and the new guy Tim who wandered over from his nearby boat to help us out, and the motorcycle ride out to the lake and back were pretty fantastic.
Soon after my arrival back home, my headache is gone and my kids are acting pretty weird as they shoo me out of our expansive kitchen. I grab a shower and spend a short time reviewing my newly launched web site. Garydawsondesigns.com is now in the review, upgrade and marketing stage of its development. I note that we have climbed the first few rungs of the search engine ladder. I know Mike and I will be working together on SEO (search engine optimization) tomorrow.
My kids call me up to a surprise dinner of rib eyes grilled to perfection, roasted, herbed potatoes, and salad. My daughter, Chanda gets upset when I take a biscuit, telling me that those are definitely NOT for dinner. Eric and I put the ones we took back on the cooling rack and we wash down our steaks, potatoes and lovely salad with Worker’s Pale Ale from the Walkabout Brewing Company of Central Point, OR and a Red Hook Eisbock 28.

The sender of the previous night’s text message is on the way back from spending the weekend with her own father so we wait dessert until her arrival to use Chandi’s biscuits in fabricating fresh strawberry shortcake…excellent! One food fight and another shower later, we all collapse into a dreamless, restful sleep. Busy day tomorrow will involve getting back to the custom ring design revision for a client in Seattle, moving my photo setup to another room to expand my workshop bench space, and much more SEO work.
Did I mention that our family dynamics are somewhat odd?