I hereby declare my intent to win the heck out of LJ Idol this year!


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The Lady Washington that I served aboard is made of tar and iron and fir and oak, but she is not a relic of the 18th century. She's a replica. Most tall ships still sailing these days are: The Lady, the Bounty (All three of them), or the HMS Surprise; all replicas of one sort or another.

The original Lady Washington was built around the 1750s, in ( Read more... )

The tradition of setting coins under the mast of a ship is an old one, older than Rome. A sailor stands a good chance of dying without a grave, of never being buried. Never would a sailor be laid to rest near the graves of his family, with the ritual coin set under his tongue to pay for his passage into the afterlife. The coin under the mast is ( Read more... )

( On board ship in Astoria, or, Here's what you were missing in the foc's'l, Kris. )

This morning, I almost slept through my doctor's appointment. My alarm went off at seven, again at eight, chiming unattended in the silent, sleeping house until eight-twenty, when the right two neurons finally connect in my brain. It's pouring outside.

( Under the cut lies medical stuff. It was scary for me to go through, and I'm not all the way over it yet. Be gentle. )

My dad is a good dad. Not just a good man, but a good dad. When we moved into this house, when I was in second grade, he built us a playhouse. It was a nice big playhouse, though he never quite finished the roof, or mounted a door. The windows were sheets of clear plastic. We dealt with a leaking roof by cutting a hole in the floor for drainage. It ( Read more... )

Go sit inside a minivan. Take the seats out of their places, line them along the sides. Build a counter, a cabinet, a bed in the back. A bathroom the size of a washing machine. Cover the windows with duct-tape, except for narrow spaces at the top. Climb in and out through the sun roof. Now you have a model of the inside of a small sailboat ( Read more... )

I had a good job, in North Carolina. Well, it was a reliable job. It might have become a good job in another three years, four, five. I was being groomed to become assistant manager, given the long shifts, the late shifts, put in charge of the store's yearly Inventory. It was heady responsibility, really ( Read more... )

I nearly chose to abstain entirely from this round. But two people, independently, suggested I write this entry, and a third jumped in with a generous, open hand. I got the hint. It still wasn't easy to write, and it doesn't say everything I wanted to say. My viewpoint is limited, and much of this is opinion, both mine and my friend's, but I make ( Read more... )

The Yellow Dream is my favorite nightmare. My dreams tend towards the cinematic, high-adrenaline blockbusters full of action and narrative and geography. Yellow Dream is abstract, a little art piece, three minutes and ten seconds on youtube.

When I was small, we had four bowls. They were made of plastic, lightweight and thin and so smooth that when ( Read more... )