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.

THE SUM OF OUR PARTS

"What do you guys DO now?"

"Stow stuff," doesn't really tell the story, but that photo does. Would you just look at that?

Today, we pulled out all the parts we have inherited from the previous owners of Good Company and all the parts we ourselves have accumulated from our previous two boats.

The job at hand went something like this:

1. Divide parts into sensible categories.
2. Find appropriate bins to hold each category.
3. Find an appropriate place to stow each bin.
4. Remember where we put everything.

We started with the easiest category: Sailing hardware. Picking through the mound like gleaners, we slowly pulled out all the shackles, D-rings, blocks and the other little doodads that we sailors love to have in our toy box. Then we snuggled them down nicely in one of the dozen or so fully locking bins purchased for this extravaganza.

The next round we pulled out the electrical paraphernalia, then light bulbs, then adhesives and sealants, category after category, bin after bin.

You know how when you move, the first round of boxes are so organized and focused? Each box has a label like "books" or "photo albums," "kitchen utensils," or "office supplies." Then you come to the end and there's a box with five paper clips, a baseball, two envelopes, a single mitten, a ragged road map, a plastic lid, a thesaurus, a squeegee and a hot pink crayon.

That's how our day ended. We now have one bin with random things like a piece of Lexan, three gas struts, a cabinet latch, four plastic cups that we can't quite identify but are afraid to get rid of them lest we find out, a dozen wooden plugs and other disparate items that defy categorization.

But that, my friends, is a bin for another day.

BAG LADY

We're about to become liveaboards, the bane of society. Just as people who live in houses don't want neighbors who live in cars, people who live near marinas don't want neighbors who live in boats. 

In fact, marinas call the space for people like us, "transient docks."

Our segment of society, "the liveaboards," are infamous for messy housekeeping. We have all kinds of flotsam tied to our decks, like bikes, water cans and surfboards. We're known to do despicable things like hang laundry from the lifelines and steal toilet paper. We are the unkempt, unwashed derelicts, the unshaven vagabonds, the squatters, yes, the undesirables.

Everyone thinks sailors are adventurous. Alas, we're really just trying to find a place to tie up.

The only difference between me and a bag lady is that my bags are expensive -- and waterproof.