Yearly Archives: 2009

April 27, 2009 · 8:35 am

It’s a Small World

Everyone, it seems, has a story ending with the words “it’s a small world.”

My roommate, Kevin, ran into someone recently he’d never met before at the Bahia Cabana bar who is best friends with one of his cousins…”it’s a small world.”

I have three small world stories I’d like to pass on.

Story #1

When I was growing up in Orleans out on the elbow of Cape Cod one of the highlights of the summer for us kids was the arrival of the carnival. With it’s bright lights, scary rides and cotton candy it was a three day bacchanal of delight.

I was about 10 the year my dad and I were walking down the midway on the opening night of the carnival when he stopped short and cocked his head and listened to something that caught his ear above the din.

“That sounds like Johnnie LaGasse” he said and we set out to track down the voice like bloodhounds on the scent of a convict escaped from the chain gang. And sure enough, at one of the games the barker we had heard had been bunkmates with my dad on the ship they sailed in together in the Pacific during WWII.

Johnnie wasn’t just running the game, he and his brothers owned the carnival! The great thing for me was that he had a son my age and for the next four years when the carnival set up at the baseball field at the high school I got all the free rides any kid could want.

The game was great, too, though I wasn’t allowed to play it. There was a large square table, probably 10’X10′ on which dozens of Lucky Strike packs had been glued. People would toss nickles, dimes and quarters trying to get them to land completely in the red circle of the pack. There had to be red showing all around the coin in order to win. A nickle got you a pack of cigarettes, a dime got you two and a quarter got you five packs. The secret to winning was that the coin had to come straight down onto the red circle and not at the slightest angle, and to put the winning edge in the house’s favor, the board was lovingly waxed every day. It was, as the farmers in Missouri would say, slicker than snot on a door knob.

Story #2

This one is about how the sequence in which you do something eventually leads up to that small world moment.

One Sunday when I was living  in New Orleans, which was a LOT more fun than the Orleans I grew up in,  I needed to go down to the flea market in the French Quarter to repay a loan to a friend of mine who had a stall down there on the weekends. I had been inhaling some fine mind-altering herb prior to making the decision to go. I hopped on my motor cycle and headed out but after a couple of blocks I decided that riding in my condition wasn’t the smartest move in the world so I took the bike back home. All of which took some time. I rode the St. Charles street car down to Canal Street, instead.

I paid my friend, Roy, the money I owed him and we chatted for a bit. As I started to head back home I ran into a lady friend who enticed me into taking a walk down towards the levee to partake of some of Jamaica’s finest agricultural export. So we took a stroll, sat on the levee watching the shipping passing up and down the river for a while and I headed for home once more.

Well, by now I’d worked up an appetite, as you might imagine, so I had to stop off for a roast beef po’boy sandwich dripping with gravy before I could get on the streetcar.

Normally what I would do was to head up Carondelet Street to the stop at Gravier two blocks before the Canal Street stop. The Canal Street stop is always a bit of a zoo since the street car ride up St. Charles is a big tourist attraction and the closest stop to the French Quarter. The car would fill to capacity in no time. So, by getting on at Gravier I would already be aboard when the herd got off at Canal emptying the varnished wooden seats and I would be assured of getting a seat by a window for my ride home.

Carondelet makes a slight turn to the right as it approaches Canal Street, so you can’t see the stop from the corner. As I was halfway up the block I see that the street car has already gone past my intended stop and since they only ran every half hour on Sundays the only thing for me to do was to go down Common Street and catch the train after it had loaded and started heading uptown on St. Charles.

So, I was standing on the corner of St. Charles and Gravier checking out the others waiting for the street car. Hmmmmmmmmmmm…that’s a good looking girl standing there. Shiny black hair, nice legs, too. Then she looks up at me and says, “Richard?”

“Yes,” I reply cautiously.

“You don’t remember me, do you? My name’s Marie. I used to cut your hair when you lived in Chicago.”

Now, that wouldn’t have happened if anything that preceeded the meeting had been changed.

It’s a small world.

Story #3 (My Best Small World Story)

When I was down in Fronteras, Guatemala,  a small, one-road bump in the road on the way from nowhere in particular to the Mayan ruins of Tikal, the Nirvana Express Bar used to sponsor cruising sailboat races every other Sunday as an excuse to have a party afterwards which would boost their coffers. I didn’t participate in the races but always participated in the parties afterwards.

One Sunday Eugenio, a young Guatemalan who owned Hacienda Tijax, below,tijax a small eco-resort and marina on the river, won the race. As I entered the bar Eugenio came over to me with a cold Gallo in hand. “Come here,” he said, “I want you to meet my girlfriend.”

We went over to the bar where a blond and a brunette sat with their backs to us.

“Libby, Libby,” Eugenio said, “I’d like you to meet a friend of mine.

The girls turned around to face us and the blond smiled broadly and said, “Hello, Richard. What are you doing here?”

Libby, sitting there in this run-down, third-world bar in the middle of nowhere had been the regular baby-sitter for one of my best friends in Antibes, France, when I lived over there.

It truly is a small world!

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April 26, 2009 · 7:22 am

Living Off The Grid

“Living off the grid” is a phrase heard more and more often.What is the “grid?” I assume, off the top of my mostly empty head, that the “grid” refers to electricity, phone, water, sewage, cable services for television and internet connections. Those things that provide what most of us have come to accept as necessities for our ordinary daily life.

People live off the “grid” (and that’s the last time I’m going to put it in quotation marks) for different reasons. Some do so for political and social reasons. Some do it in an effort to lower their monthly utility bills and others do it because they simply don’t have access to the grid at all because of their location.

I think when I move to Panama and build a shanty boat I’ll be living off the grid for the latter reason. I’ve done it before and came close one other time.

I spent nine months completely off the grid when I took my trip to Mexico, Belize and Guatemala aboard my Nancy Dawson back in 1992. Once I left Fort Lauderdale, and until the day after I returned, I was never connected to shore power electricity. I didn’t have solar panels or a wind-powered generator as so many cruising boats do these days. And I didn’t have a huge battery bank, either. Simply two ordinary car batteries were my sole source of electricity.

My electric usage was tiny, really. My VHF radio while underway and in the mornings on the Rio Dulce to listen to the morning cruiser net. I had a single-sideband receiver and would listen to the BBC World Service in the evenings. I listened to the Presidential debates between George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton from Voice of America. In Belize I listened to Radio Belize “Bringing you news from Belize and around the WOOOORRRRLLLDDD!” I had a boom box that I used sparingly because it gobbled up the amps pretty good, but there were nights when I’d be anchored off some tiny island on the edge of the reef in Belize where I’d crank up the volume and lay out under the stars in a hammock strung between the mast and the fore stay. I didn’t have a television and it was years prior to my owning a computer. I didn’t have a refrigerator or freezer, either, two items that are a real drain on battery power. I had a couple of small lamps on the boat. Most evenings I’d have one on to read by for a while.

One thing that really guzzled amp hours were my running lights. And I have to admit that because they would practically drain my battery bank overnight I broke international law by running dark, like a smuggler, most of the time. If I saw a ship’s lights I would turn my running lights on until any possibility of an encounter passed and then I’d run dark again. Once I’d made the passage from KeyWest to Isla Mujeres it was all day sailing with the exception of five nights; two headed southwards from Cozumel to Belize City and three nights back from the Rio Dulce to Isla Mujeres.

Most boats, power and sail, that didn’t have solar panels, and they were still pretty rare back in ’92, did have engines with alternators. They’d keep their battery banks charged by running the engine for an hour or two every day or so. Since Nancy didn’t have an inboard engine the way I kept my small battery bank charged was with a 1.5 KW Generac generator and a car battery charger. Damn, but that thing was noisy.The only way I could cope with it was to fill the tank half way, start it up, plug in the battery charger to the 110 volt outlet, hop in my dinghy and take off somewhere for a couple of hours. When I’d return to the boat the gas had run out and my batteries would be sufficiently charged to last me for the coming two or three days.

Essentially I learned to live in harmony with nature as trite as that sounds. You get up with the sun and go to bed when it gets dark, with the exception of those couple of hours reading before going to sleep.

When I lived on my shanty boat in Louisiana back in ’84 to ’86 I came close to living off the grid. I didn’t have a telephone hookup at the marina. I probably could have arranged it, but I never did. I did have an apartment-sized refrigerator that I’d been given that came off of a 53 foot sport fishing boat that was being completely refurbished at the boat yard where I was working. The owner gutted the interior of the boat and was installing all new appliances and said I was welcome to the fridge if I could haul it away.

The marina didn’t provide electricity in its rental. Each slip had to have an account and meter with the power company. The minimum charge to be hooked up to the grid at that time was $7.00 a month. And that’s usually what I paid. In the two years I lived on the boat I think my biggest hit was around $12.00 the first winter and that was because I used an electric space heater until I bought my “Mr. Sun.” That was a neat device that attached to a standard 20 pound propane bottle and would keep my cabin warm enough to sit around with little more than a tee shirt even on those wretched nights when we’d be hit with a norther and an ice storm. When I was sleeping on those freezing nights it was beneath an electric blanket.

One day I went to the electric company offices to pay my $7.00 monthly bill. I stood in line behind people who were paying $5, 6 and $700, not to pay off the monthly bill but paying just enough to keep their service from being shut off!

When I got up to the counter I jokingly said to the teller, “Gosh, with what the people ahead of me have been paying I’m almost embarassed to give this to you.”

The lady looked at the bill clearly marked “Minimum Payment” and said, “Well you don’t live there.”

“Yes,” I told her, “I do. The only difference is that when I’m not actually home the only thing drawing electricity is my refrigerator. And when I’m home you can add the television or the stereo and at night one light.”

One morning a couple of weeks later I was lying on my couch watching the Phil Donahough Show (I had been laid off at the yard) and I heard a vehicle coming down the shell road that ran along the docks. I heard two doors open and shut. I was curious as to who might be out there and when I looked out the window I was surprised to see it was the power company. Two guys were there testing my meter to make sure it hadn’t been tampered with. The cashier at the power company office couldn’t believe that anyone could exist on the minimum payment each month and pimped me out. Of course there was nothing wrong with the meter at all. I just didn’t use much juice.

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April 25, 2009 · 3:31 pm

Tiny Houses

When I was working as a writer years ago, or as I call it being impalled on my own free lance, I loved going to the library to do research for an article. I would get lost in the card catalog. In looking for books and magazine articles something in the search would trigger something in another direction from the path I was supposed to be on. As a lot of you know surfing the internet is a lot like that, too. You’re reading something and hit a link and off you fly into cyberspace to a totally new world. Somewhere, though, there is a tenuous connection to where you started.

(An aside: People often ask me why I don’t write articles anymore. Well, there’s this blog and I can write about anything that strikes my fancy and the only editor I have to satisfy is myself. The truth of the matter is that when I was working as a writer back in the 60s and 70s the pay for a well written article wasn’t very much. A lot of time it wasn’t worth the effort and,unless you were lucky or talented enough to get into the major publications, your efforts often paid just above minimum wage. The horrible truth is that 40 years after I was getting paid for putting words on paper the pay is almost exactly the same today as it was then. If it wasn’t worth doing then for a pittance then it certainly isn’t worth doing today.)

Having been bitten, once again, with the “I want to live on a houseboat” bug I’ve been zooming around the internet looking for houseboat and shanty boat plans. Sadly there aren’t that many out there and most of the ones I have found aren’t really what I would want to have. Oh, there are one or two but they’d only work with some modification. But what I have found extremely interesting is that there is a whole movement out there of people who build and live in what are called “Tiny Houses.”

There are many reasons they do it. Some are heavily into the “Green” movement and are seeking to reduce their “footprint” on the earth. Others, consciously or not, take up the Thoreau dictum of “Simplify, simplify.”  And as I wrote in a previous post, how much room do you really need, anyway?

One of the nice things about being unemployed, or as I like to say, “retired” is that I have the free time to delve into these blogs and web sites. An interesting one is: http://smalllivingjournal.com/. Small Living Journal. Here they gave a good categorization of living small. Actually the categories were delineated by a web site called Apartment Therapy and goes like this:

  • TEENY-TINY 300 Square Feet and under
  • TINY 600 Square Feet and under (but over 300 Square Feet)
  • LITTLE 900 Square Feet and under (but over 600 Square Feet)
  • SMALL 1,200 Square Feet and under (but over 900 Square Feet)

Here are a couple of youtube vids of teeny-tiny homes

Many of these houses are built on trailer bases and I think it would be easy enough to put them onto a floating platform as well.

One thing that I find disappointing is how much some of the finished tiny houses cost. Tumbleweed Tiny House Company (http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com) gives an estimate for building several of it’s homes, all on wheels, and they range from $36,997.00 for the 65 square feet X-S finished house to $49,997.00 for the Fencl finished house. They give build it yourself costs of between $16,100.00 to $23,000.00 for the same models. I’m sorry, but I don’t find those prices “tiny.” They estimate finished costs of $100 to $200 per square foot which is roughly what it costs to build an regular home.

Now there are ways of reducing the estimated costs given. If you didn’t put the house on a trailer you could knock of anywhere from $2,000.0 to $3,800.00. And, of course, how you want to finish off the house would vary considerably depending on how extravagant you want to get.

I like the looks of the looks of the Lusby model with a build it yourself estimated price of $21,250.00. So let’s see how much that would cost me to build a similar design the way I’d want it finished out. And you have to take into consideration that I’d want it to sort of blend in with the existing architecture of the area.

Somewhere between this:

bocas-del-toro-panama

and this:

bocas-house-nice

Most probably something like this:

bocas-houseboat1

The main difference between what I would build and the picture above is what it would be floating on. I’d go either with pontoons or a barge and I’d have an outboard motor so it would be self propelled.

The Lusby model has nice stainless steel counter tops estimated at $800.00. Mine would be formica over plywood saving about $750.00. The Lusby has beautiful knotty pine interior siding estimated at $900.00. I’d save $900.00 right off the bat since there wouldn’t be any interior siding. Remember, I lived in a shack on pontoons for several years, and since there’s no interior siding there wouldn’t be the estimated $550.00 worth of insulation. No heater, either, so knock off another grand. That $550.00 shower?  Mine would be a five gallon bucket of water on the roof with a sink sprayer attached, so knock off another $545.00. I wouldn’t be paying the estimated $1,500.00 sales tax, either. The $3,800.00 for the trailer would be for the flotation, either barge or pontoon. Wait a minute….that grand for the heater, it would have to go for the outboard, instead. All things considered, though, I could probably put it together for less than half of the cost they project, and maybe even less.

But the whole concept of Tiny Houses is intriguing. Googling “Tiny House Plans” brings up nearly FIVE MILLION HITS.

A couple of interesting ones are:

http://www.townandcountryplans.com/

http://tinyhouseblog.com/tiny-house/tiny-house-plans/

http://www.bcmountainhomes.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=2&zenid=220425befba61abd4a8dae509f5dbe37

http://www.cusatocottages.com/selectaplan.php

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April 25, 2009 · 8:44 am

A Marcia Ball Fix

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April 24, 2009 · 6:02 pm

Living Room

No, I don’t mean that part of your house where you entertain guests.

I mean how much room do you really need to live in. Once upon a time in this vast continent of North America people used to move to less populated places because they needed “living room.”

But how much does a person need? I used to drive for a limousine service offering airport pick up service and I’d take elderly couples to their McMansions and it was like dropping two BBs into a 55 gallon drum. It was ridiculous. In my mind anyway.

No matter how big your house is, you can only be in one place at a time. And if you think about it for a moment, the way most people live is that when they come home from work, if their jobs haven’t been outsourced overseas, they plop down in their favorite chair in front of the TV.  They might even eat their evening meal in the same seat. Perhaps they spend some time on line so they are at a desk and then they go to bed. Easily 99% of their domicile is rarely used. The one concession I would make for large size would be a kitchen with lots of counter space. I love to cook.

I grew up in a house on Cape Cod that was built before the American Revolution.

our-house

There were three small bedrooms on the main floor and my bedroom was under the eaves (the two larger windows on the second floor). The kitchen was in the smaller section of the house you see on the right and where the corner post and the roof eaves met they were joined with wooden pegs made of locust wood. There was my mom and dad, me and my four brothers and we all shared a single small bathroom. A few years ago when my brother Mark and his kids and I were driving around while visiting for our brother Gary’s Memorial Golf Tournament we stopped by the old house. The current owner was mowing the lawn and we stopped and introduced ourselves. The owner was very gracious and invited us inside to show us what they had done with the place. What struck me the most was how small it was for such a large family.

I lived on a 26 foot sailboat for almost 6 years.

kaiser-page-2-goodjpeg

People, especially women that I was meeting, would ask how I could live in such a small space. Actually, I never lacked for anything. Living in a marina I had a telephone, cable TV service and internet access. But granted, the actual space in which I lived was, indeed very small.

kaiser-living-space

There were the vee berths forward where I slept. Aft of that on the port side was the head and opposite that was a hanging locker that I converted to a shelved space for storing my clothes. Aft of that section you see there were two berths. In the marina the starboard berth cushion was removed and a small refrigerator and a 9″ color tv sat atop it. I used the port berth as my sofa. An ingenious fold-down table was hung on the bulkhead that separated the cabin from the head and it was where I ate, of course, and also served as my desk when playing around on the computer. Aft of the berths were my galley with a two-burner propane stove to starboard and what had originally been the ice box was now used to store my pots and pans. In dead center was the sink. There was six foot head room from the sink forward to the bulkheads forward of the berths. Since I’m only 5’9″ tall it was comfortable enough. But, discounting the head area where I did have to duck my head a bit and the vee berths which were only used for sleeping, my actual living area was about 56 square feet, and the floor space of the cabin area was only about 22 square feet!

In ruminating about how big a boat I would like to build and live on I’ve run through about a dozen possible plans found on line. Many, are only 16 to 18 feet and though I’ve lived in such a small space I really want something larger than that. The 35 feet of my Louisiana shanty boat is a bit too large, too, simply because of the cost of materials. I’m more inclined to something along the order of the Bolger houseboat and the Evening Song posted earlier. They seem fairly simple to build and roughly 200 square feet of living space.

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April 24, 2009 · 10:21 am

Houseboat vs Shanty Boat vs Floating Home

I love living on the water. I’ve done so on a 65′ motor yacht, an 85′ sailboat a 26′ sailboat and my 35′ houseboat which should more accurately be labeled a “Shanty boat.”

To continue with this theme we need to clarify a few terms: houseboat, shanty boat and floating home.

Let’s start with “floating home.”  In general these are larger living spaces on the water and are minimally mobile other than vertically with the tide. Some of these can be considered “McMansions” on the water and some can be extremely artistically creative. Holland is one of the world’s leaders in floating homes and the Pacific Northwest has a decades-long history of this genre of living on the water.

These are what I would consider to be within the McMansion category:

lake-union-floating-home-6

Here’s a bit smaller floating home on Lake Erie

kristin-camera-182

floatinghomes02

floatinghomes06

In this one below you can see why it would not be easy to move around and would undoubtedly require hiring a commercial tugboat in order to do so which would cost big bucks. But then if you were able to afford such a structure you’d most likely have the wherewithal to hire a tug.

floatinghomes11

In British Columbia there is even a floating home specific community: http://www.floatinghomes.com/floatinghomes.htm

floatinghomes19

On a more sensible scale there is Berklely Engineering’s Cape Codder at 24’X10′ that I think is pretty neat but certainly wouldn’t be buildable on a small budget.

capecodder

capecodderrearview

floating_pod02_800x600

Houseboats, by my definition, are self-propelled craft that are meant to be moved from one location to another. Most often they are used as vacation home and are designed for use in sheltered waters rather than the open ocean or other bodies of water that can get rough. Quite often they simply look like RVs on the water rather than a more conventional boat.

boat3

n1_nomad_exterior

Strictly from an aesthetic point of view I’m not a fan of this type of craft. But not all boats that I would classify as houseboats are cheesy by any means. In Somerset, KY, hometown of my good friend Mark who has made comments on other post in this blog, is the manufacturer of some awesome houseboats, some over 100′ long and many cost more than most houses.

Here’s a photo of the living room of a Somerset houseboat…

models-elite01

This sure isn’t “slumming it”

More difficult to pin down are what would be called “Shanty Boats.” These are mostly home made and strictly intended for use on sheltered waters. My boat, pictured above, was basically a shack on pontoons and though mine was 35′ most shanty boats are on the small side, 16 to 24 feet. Back in the 40s and 50s they were often marketed as inexpensive summer get aways and magazines like Popular Mechanics offered plans for them.

coolwater1coolwater2coolwater3Phil Bolger is a designer of some very original, and many people think ugly boats, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder…

bolger_houseboat

Back in the late 70s one of my favorite boating magazines was Small Boat Journal. This design by Thomas A. MacNaughton caught my attention and has lingered with me all these years. It’s called Evening Song. He had designed and build a nifty 18′ tug boat called Bantam and wrote:

“In our original article on Bantam we casually mentioned toward the end that it would be fun to have a houseboat barge to go with her. We felt it would be a lot of fun to live aboard the barge and push it down the Intracoastal Waterway of the East Coast. We hadn’t thought of this as more than a fun idea but immediately we started getting all sorts of letters demanding plans for the barge! After all, what else do you want to do with a tug so much as push and pull something around? This presented something of a challenge, as we had never known anyone to design a houseboat barge before, per se, so we had to come up with something completely new. The result was Evening Song. The combination of the tug and the barge clearly struck another cord, as we’ve sold a lot of both plans. This time it didn’t surprise us. The image of the tug and barge traveling together in the Intracoastal Waterway, or of the barge anchored in a secluded creek while the tug comes and goes with guests and provisions, is about as idyllic as it gets. Evening Song contains a whole lot of space in a reasonable compromise between camp-like and boat-like accommodations. She comes complete with two “porches” where one can sit with the dog and the shotgun waiting for the ducks, or just watch the world go by.

“There’s also a lot of “roof” space adaptable to lounging, solar panels, rainwater catchment, etc. Construction is about as simple as it could be, being epoxy and plywood throughout, with a lot of right angles mixed in with the curves of the sheer and bottom.”

evenin6

evenin7

Quite frankly I’m a fan of shanty boats both becaue of their funkieness and the fact that they’re usually rather inexpensive to build.

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April 22, 2009 · 11:35 pm

Houseboats

This will be a continuing post added on to as time goes by.

The big question in moving to Panama is “where are you going to live?”

Answer: I don’t have a clue. A friend of mine who has retired to Panama has said, repeatedly, I see you in Bocas del Toro. Well, me, too, sort of.

Of course I had the idea that I’d like to buy a sailboat and sail it down to the Bocas del Toro area. That was when I still had money.

I also had the idea of building a houseboat and even bought plans for a 27 footer that I was looking over again this evening. But I’m not sure that is doable, either.

I ran across a blog the other day, http://sites.google.com/site/cocovivo/ which had a picture of this floating home…

bocas-houseboat

Now that is cheap and doable with what I have.

It wouldn’t be the first houseboat I’ve owned. When I was in Louisiana I bought a 35 foot houseboat which was little more than a shack on pontoons. I bought it for $1,500.00, put about another $500.00 into it mostly to repair the old outboard motor and lived on the boat for a little more than two years and finally sold it for $3,000.00. This is it:

houseboat1

Certainly not a lot to look at, but I enjoyed it. I think I can do something similar in Panama.

When I bought the boat it didn’t look like this. The “house” part was only completed from the aft end through the three small windows in the rear and was sided with a corrugated metal. There was a sort of galley on the starboard side with a long counter and an L-shaped counter. Forward of those windows the framing and the larger windows and the door existed but there was no siding at all. I had found the boat in the Tchefuncte River on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. It took me about a month to have the old 25 hp Johnson outboard tuned up so that it ran and to reinforce the transom with a new 2X8 in order to hold the engine and be capable of pushing the boat.

I had been paying for dock space at the Mississippi Gulf Outlet Marina for those two months even though the boat was nearly 30 miles away. I got a friend of mine, Woody, who was a tug boat captain to agree to help me bring the boat across the lake to the marina. We were both professionals and knew the local weather well and picked a picture perfect day. We left the river bank where the boat had been tied up just as soon as there was enough light to see and headed south. We made good about six or seven miles an hour and got inside the industrial canal on the south side of the lake in the early afternoon before the breeze picked up and finally arrived at the marina about 12 hours after we had cast off.

As we were pulling into the slip the brother of the marina owner got off of his pretty Striker sport fishing boat and came over to tell me “I don’t think we want this thing in here.” I can’t say that I was offended by his statement.

First thing the next morning I was at the marina office when they opened their door. I introduced myself to the owner and explained the situation to him; that I had paid three months rental and still had three weeks to go on the current payment. “I know that this houseboat looks awful at the moment. I see it exactly as you see it sitting at the dock. But I can promise you this…it won’t look like it does now three weeks from now. It certainly won’t be the finest boat in the marina by a long shot, but you’ve got a lot of floating crap here as it is, and when I’m done it will at least be acceptable.”

He took a deep breath, looked out the window of his office at my boat which sat at the far end of the marina. There was a long silence before he said, “Well, you have paid three months rental and haven’t been using the dock so I tell you what. You’ve got until the end of the month to make that piece of shit presentable and then we’ll see if it gets to stay.”

I thanked him and as I was leaving he added, “You work as hard as you want, but at the end of the day I don’t want to see any crap or tools on the dock. If I do, I won’t ask you to leave, I’ll tell you you have to be out the next day.”

“Fair enough,” I told him. “Just so long as I know what the rules are.”

Woody and I spent the next week tearing off the old tin siding and installing T111 siding over the entire boat. We laid down 3/8″ plywood for the roofing and covered it with roll roofing. We worked 12 hours a day almost without a break before Woody had to return to work leaving me to finish the job. As you can see I put up 1X4″ trim around the roof line and then painted the whole thing a pale yellow with white trim. On the first day of the following month I went to the marina office with my $95 rental check and handed it to the marina manager. He took it without a word, stuck it in his shirt pocket and said “Thank you,” and I stayed there on Bayou Bienvenue for the next two and a half years until I left Louisiana.

I enjoyed that boat. I loved being on the water. I lived through the heat of the summer and one horrendous ice storm Super Bowl Sunday of 1985.

Though you can see the boat had a wind0w-shaker air conditioner I never used it. In the worst days of the summer when I’d return home from work the temperature inside the boat would often be over 11o degrees. The way I combated that was to open the window part of the rear door and set up a large box fan on a chair blowing out of the boat. I’d then open the window of the front door to create a good through ventilation and then turn on the lawn sprinkler I had on the roof. You could see the steam rise in the humid late afternoon air. I’d then take my a shower with a setup I’d rigged up on the dock and by the time I’d finished and dried off the temperature would have dropped 25 degrees or so. At least to a point where I was comfortable.

If you do a search on  WordPress.com for the word “houseboat” you come up with 2,005 hits.  The same word on Google brings up 1,540,000 hits. Shantyboats on Google gives you 193,000 hits. “Houseboat” on a Yahoo search brings up  11,100,000 hits and “shantyboat” on Yahoo brings up 17,200.

The idea of a houseboat has been with me for years and in several different forms. One of my early ideas was to make something utilzing pontoons and powered with an outboard motor. I could purchase a camper shell like those used with pickup trucks. The advantage of this would be that the interior would already be built with a galley, living area and sleeping facilities. If it was one of those that have a section that overhangs the cab of the truck, like this:

home_camper

You could set up your helm under the overhang section that would provide you with shade and a little protection should it rain.

As silly as it seems some people have actually done something similar to this idea though this is a bit extreme:

redneck_houseboat1

Of course this idea never got off the ground, or in the water, the idea still simmered away.

In 1980 when I was visiting some friends in Maine they had a National Geographic magazine about a Louisiana couple who were given an old “shotgun” house that needed to be moved to make way for a highway. They purchased a used deck barge, the kind used to transport materials around the bayous and rebuilt the house on the barge and kept it up in the Atchafalaya swamp. I thought that was the essence of “cool.”

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April 21, 2009 · 9:58 am

Divorce on the Cheap

The reason I’m sitting here in Fort Lauderdale writing this is because I’m scheduled to testify at a friend’s divorce hearing this coming Thursday. It keeps being delayed. Sometimes for valid reasons; the courthouse is old and water pipes keep bursting closing the whole place. That’s happened twice. It happened again last Friday but apparently didn’t stop operations though the newspaper reported that lots of civil and family court documents were damaged. Other delays have simply been mysteries.

Like the majority of divorces this one is acrimonious. The wife believes the husband has money and she wants it. She doesn’t work and once told me, “I’m not going to get a job. I’m going to make him support my ass.” That’s a direct quote. Despite the fact that she and her lawyer subpoened thousands of pages of bank records that clearly show that his construction company is in the dumper because of the current economic conditions she insists that he makes over $250,000.00 a year and she wants half. It doesn’t matter one bit that during their $22 year marriage he never came close to making that much.

I’m testifying because I served as my friend’s office manager from the day he started the company and as signatory to all the company’s bank accounts I’m the only one who can corroborate the absolute fact that not only is the company in trouble but my friend is broke. So broke, in fact, that he doesn’t have the money to hire a lawyer himself.

My own divorce, way back in 1972 was completely different than almost any other I’ve ever heard of.

My ex wife and I met in college and the primary reason we got married wasn’t so much that we were the “love of our life” for each other as it was that we simply wanted to live together. Had we done that both of families would have disowned us.

After six years we decided to call it quits. We were moving in different directions with our lives and just wanted to go our separate ways. We had no children and no property. Division went sort of like this: You take that dresser, I’ll take this one. You can have the T.V. I want the stereo. Since your parents financed the car it’s yours…

We had been partners in several successful dinner-theaters here in south Florida for several years and naturally went to the company’s lawyer to do the divorce. He told us, that as a “favor” for all the business we had thrown him in the previous four years it would only cost us $300.00 for a no-fault divorce.

We were appalled. “You mean to tell us that you want $300.00 to have your secretary type our names in the blank spaces of some forms? You’ve got to be out of your mind. I’ll do it myself,” I told him.

“If you buy one of those divorce kits,” he said, “you’ll be sorry.”

“I don’t need a ‘kit’,” I told him. I’ve been around you for four years and I know for a fact that I’m smarter than you are. If YOU can do it, so can I.”

I then went to the courthouse law library and asked the librarian to show me the forms for a n0-fault divorce. She pulled them out for me and I made copies. Next I went to a stationery store and bought a package of legal size paper. I went home, put the paper in my typewriter and copied everything putting our respective names in the proper blanks just as the lawyer’s secretary would have.

Next, I went to the Clerk of the Court’s offices, spread out all the papers and said, “What do you need to have to start this?”

The clerk picked out two or three of the forms.

“What happens now?” I asked.

“You’ll get a notice and your wife will, too. If she want’s to contest it her letter will tell her how. If she doesn’t want to contest it she doesn’t have to do anything.”

When I got back to my apartment I called my soon-to-be ex and told her that the process had begun and all she had to do was to let it play out.

I had to go to the Clerk of the Court twice more to turn over additional papers and finally a date was set for my appearance with a judge. I had to bring someone with me to testify that I had lived in Broward County for at least six months before filing for divorce. As it happened the only person I could get to go with me was the receptionist at the dinner cruise boat company I was working for at the time. Twyla was six feet tall, had flaming red hair and taa taas out too here. When the judge entered the chambers he looked at Twyla, looked at me and then spent quite a while checking out those amazing assets of hers.

“No, your honor,” I said. “She has nothing to do with this other than that she can testify to my resident’s status.”

The judge asked what the problem with the marriage was and I simply told him we were going in different directions with our lives and we wanted to end it before we ended up hating each other.

That was enough for him and he signed the divorce decree. I then went to the Clerk of the Court one final time where I had the papers notarized and paid a fee of $32.50.

I left the courthouse and went to the dinner theater where my wife, the stage manager for the troupe, was in rehearsal.

“Well, Brenda,” I said, “it’s official. We’re not married any more.”

“How much did it cost?”

“Thirty two fifty,” I said. Brenda got her purse, handed me $16.25 and that was the end of our marriage.

They should all be as simple as that.


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April 17, 2009 · 9:31 am

Maya Nut Movie

I caught a quick glimpse of this on CNN this morning and it sparked my interest. Perhaps it will do the same with you.

There are two shorter videos on the CNN site, but even following the embed codes they don’t take here but you can find them on the CNN site story.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/04/16/cnnheroes.erika.vohman/index.html?iref=24hours

If this interests you, go to their site: http://www.theequilibriumfund.org/


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April 16, 2009 · 11:33 am

Three Piano Greats

Now you’ve seen, hopefully you’ve been paying attention, three of New Orleans piano greats, Fess, Tuts and Allen. Now here they are together. It’s it’s not often you get to see more than one pianist at a time since there’s rarely more than one piano anywhere.

This was a rehearsal for a public television special but it was never presented since the Fess died before the performance…

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