TOOLING AROUND

With parts sorted and stowed (except for that one bin), today was tool time. We bought some soft-sided tool bags at Home Depot, forever liberating ourselves from those cumbersome plastic tool boxes that fall apart, or worse, open at inopportune moments. Besides, the soft-sided ones conform better to boat life -- and boat hatches.

The tools worked themselves into fairly obvious categories: wrenches, pliers, screwdrivers, etc., and my favorite category, "McGyver tools." Things like a telescoping magnet, weird grabby tweasers for picking up small objects in hard-to-reach places, a bendy screwdriver and a telescoping mirror for those impossible to see spaces.

Everything went without incident into the three bags leaving us with a short list of items glaringly missing from our arsenal, like flat screwdrivers and wire snippers.

The tiny things went into tackle boxes:

Whew. These lazy days.