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Monday, June 20, 2005

On the high seas 

While pulling weeds on Friday, D and I started getting to know the new arrivals. Two girls who recently graduated from a small and quite liberal school in Florida and are out here bumming around for a bit. One of them worked here a couple of years ago for the previous owners.

Yadda yadda yadda. Get to the good stuff already!

Mid-way thru the day B & B left for their weekend get-away/honeymoon. Which means twice now I have been left here 'owning' the place, a scary thought. This is how the four of us came to be in the main house in the early evening hours preparing dinner. I cooked up some pasta and began a sauce. The girls added to the sauce. D made a dessert and I topped off my effort with some garlic bread.

For those who aren't in the know, I am not a bad cook. I enjoy it, and in fact think I am quite adequate in the kitchen. But holy hell did I not prove that Friday night. Dropping 2 bags of pasta into a minimal amount of water resulted in a stratified pot of spaghetti: some over cooked and brown, al dente, soft but not overcooked, and overcooked. Oops. Before the girls could sautee them, the diced garlic passed from my hands into the sauce. And I burnt the garlic bread. A poor showing to say the least.

To defend myself, I shared my beer and wine. This only dimmed the ribbing. I had to offer to cook dinner again Sunday night to prove my culinary ability (which was a rousing success).

Post-dinner festivities took place in the living room (for all my past bluster to B & B about having a party while they are gone, I finally got to make good! Not that it was crazy or anything, but you make do with what you have, ya know?). Saturday was supposed to include a trip out to see some Hawaiian music and stuff, and D was planning to bring a bucket (the big orange kind you can get at Home Depot) to serve as a drum. This was a night for him to practice while the rest of us looked on and giggled.

Overall, not a whole lot happened this night. We finished the beer and wine, listened to a lot of music and ganked 2 bunches of bananas from trees across the street.

The best part of the night was encouraging D and assisting him in choosing a career path. Since his arrival I've worked on relaying the need for travel in one's life (not something he needed to be told), and have been pushing for him to follow thru and head to South America once he leaves here. In the course of this night (based in part on my readings as of late), I came up with the brilliant idea of meeting D in Cuba. Which led to discussions on how to get there. A boat was discussed. From Guatemala. Not a fancy one, a local boat (more fun, ya know?). His sense of adventure is high and he agreed.

Somehow this simple plan blossomed into something strange and demented. The discussions that took place over the next couple/few hours had me (us) laughing harder and longer than I have laughed in a long time.

Let's see if I can explain this without y'all thinking I've (further) lost my mind. D wants to learn how to sail in order to get a job on a boat and work his way to South America. A worthy cause, no doubt. Personally I'd go with a big boat with a engine but that's me. His idea mutated into a dream of becoming a pirate (one of the girls, E, mentioned pirates when I requested a ride to Asia on D's boat). This in turn led to discussions about machetes and swords. Feeling a bit under-armed with only a sword, it was decided that something more was needed to fight the high-tech weaponry used by today's bucaneers ("What happened to the good old days of cannons and swords?" D whined).

A bucket. THE Bucket will be D's companion and backpack in this journey. As he pounded away to the tunes whinged out by Jack Johnson one of the house cats sauntered past. Temporarily blinded by inspiration (and closed eyelids) D stopped mid-pound and expounded on his latest idea. In order to deal with the better equipped real pirates, D needs a low-cost answer. The answer? Cats. With his bucket filled with cats ("Feral! They have to be feral cats!"), D will storm vessels and throw feral cats at his enemies. Dressed in a pirate shirt, eye patch, wooden leg and hideous limp. And a Venezuelan home-made boat.

At other times in the night he was to be a surf-boarding pirate with a bucket filled with feral attack cats. Kevlar vests for the cats (proposed by the animal loving vegan, C [not me]), kittens instead of cats, and roosters also popped up for consideration.

Intermixed with the delusional insanity being bulged out, various bets were made and the results were that D would cook banana/chocolate-chip pancakes the following morning, E would cook lunch, C [not me] would would bfast on Sunday as well as cookies and a bday cake for D (nexst Sunday. Don't forget to wish him a happy nine-freakin'-teen years young). Notice that in there no extra tasks were required by me? That's because I am smart and win my bets (as far as you know).

Hm. Amazingly enough it was hellishly funnier that night than it is re-telling it here. Maybe you gotta know D and the seriousness with which he put forth his ideas and adopted ours.

Hippies

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ABOUT ME
Name: Corey
Location: Portland, Oregon, United States

I'm on a journey with no destination. The path is constantly changing direction but there are always adventures to be had. "Never" and "always" have left my lexicon.

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WWW http:/www.jimspeak.blogspot.com