FEBRUARY 12, 2008

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2008
JL the bloggist here. Greetings, blogees. Just trying to pop in for a wee bit o’ cockney chit chat with me ol’ mates, the blogees. It’s right on that you point out that I haven’t been the most responsible of pen-mates, having not written now since a few whiffens past. Oh dear. It’s been some time now, hasn’t it?

Man, you can tell I’ve been on a boat for a while. I can’t, I mean, I STILL can’t speak properly. Oh well, you’ve never held that against me. Ruth and I are still in Long Island, which is actually about 90 miles long or something. We just got back to anchor by the shore, having gone a few miles south to check out a “blue hole.” A blue hole is basically a deep patch in what is otherwise uniformly shallow water. Generally, where we are, it’s about 2-10 feet, but in this particular spot, there’s a circle a few hundred feet in diameter, where it just drops to maybe forty feet. So, we finally broke out the scuba gear, I don’t know what we’ve been saving it for. I guess because we’ve had fun snorkeling, we didn’t want to use it up on just nothing, but we’re near a refilling station, so we said “what the heck!” Or something like that.
I saw a fish I tried to shoot, but he went in a hole, evading me. I lost my scuba bag, but Ruth found it, and Ruth lost her hair thingy, and so now she’s dolling it all up 80s style. Pretty hot. Wowee! That there’s one fine lookin’ woman. Yeah, I know, I’m living out some prolonged adolescence. Like you had to tell me I was stuck in the 80s.
We’re anchored where we are, because we are going to try once again to go get online and send a blog, because even though we’re just sitting here, eating our lobster in 3 feet of water off the dock of a grocery/furniture store, you all think we’re flopping about in a watery grave. Well, probably not if you read the blog before the Ragged Islands, and took me at my word. But I know you’re all a bunch of worrywarts. Especially that David. He’s the worst. And that Tom Deater. He’s the worst too. I mean, the best.
Anyway, so the idea is to hit up the real estate office, sit on their wall, and usurp their free internet, that wafts out of the crevices of the building. I went the other day, but as soon as I got set up, it shut off, so I don’t know if the secretaries shut me down, or what. We’re just dying to get a word out to all of you guys and say hello, ask how David and Michelle and the new baby to be are, and find out what happened in the primaries. I’m rooting for Barack Obama, as you may know. There’s been disgusting spam going around of the “send this to everyone you know” variety, saying that he’s a fundamentalist Muslim, Black Panther, etc. etc. Probably from the same people trying to get us all worried that the Mexicans are taking over the world, and that we should all be afraid of socialized healthcare, because it will somehow turn us all into slave robots. Anyway, that’s a good man, and I’m excited to see some possibility for a change.
Where was I? Oh yes. Off the soapbox. That’s right.
So let me tell you about Ruth and my anniversary. It started when we were waxing Chris’s boat for a little extra cash, we told him Sunday was our anniversary of our engagement, so we wanted to make sure we were done by then. He ended up giving us a free night in a hotel here he won at a raffle. Pretty awesome. So we left there, went to the dock where we land, and it was dying to rain. So we were headed to the grocery, and thumbed it, and the first truck picked us up, and drove us there. The guy’s name was Craig. We got there, then we went looking for this guy Charlie to find bud. So, we get to his house, and meet his wife Joyce there. She gives us an awesome tour of her gardens, and then drives us to go find Charlie. Charlie is cool, and we hang out with him for a bit, see the house they’re working on, we smoke, and then he says he wants to hit the hardware. We go along, and since we’re looking for an inverter, he drives us to about five different stores till we find one. Once we get back, he gives us some nice bud, then loans us his truck, and just asks that we leave it at his house. We head back with all of our groceries (including $14 in potato chips), inverter, bud, and all of the interesting plant clippings Joyce gave us (including a Corkscrew Croton, which is on our boat in a vase), and decide to drop it at the dingy dock, and then return the truck. We see Roger there, who is Walter’s brother (the guy that drove us ALL around the night we got here) and he offers to drive up to Charlie and Joyce’s so we don’t have to walk back after dropping the truck. We do that, and on the way back, find out that the guy that picked us up and drove us to the grocery was his brother. That means, officially, all three brothers have picked us up and given us rides independently of each other. Out of maybe four car trips. Anyway, once back, he gives us a bag of lobster tails. Seventeen of them. There must be four pounds of tails there. We had five for breakfast and were stuffed.

We couldn’t use the hotel because they don’t have any reservations till the 20th, so we passed it on to Roger, to say thanks for the lobster tails.

Anyway, can these people get any nicer? It’s crazy. It’s like anything you could want just falls out of the sky whenever you want it, or else someone runs out to find it for you, or loans you their car for your search. Reminds me of… nowhere on earth. Except around our families and friends.

From here, we plan to head north, along Long Island, then Northeast to Conception Island, which is supposed to be beautiful, and then up to Cat Island, and then to Eleuthra, Nassau, and homeward. Just so you know. I think I just wrote this recently to you. Déjà vu.

I guess that’s it for now, except to say that my skin has improved somewhat. “Somewhat” meaning probably something that you’d find hideous on your own body, but on my rotten carcass, it’s like the prettiest it’s been in a while. So, maybe it’s all of these so called “chipped potatoes.” Clean living, that’s what it is. No just kidding. I haven’t eaten wheat, preservatives, or alcohol, or anything that didn’t walk or grow in… three days wheat, seven days alcohol, preservatives seven days. Seems like years.