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(note: I actually wrote this about 8 days ago, but it disappeared when I tried to post it. I gave up in disgust that night and didn't have internet access for some time after (see next entry). I was about to post today, and a helpful little javascript I never saw before offered to give me my old post back, so here it is, somewhat out of date.)

Patience now has gunwales. I'd originally intended to put them on the boat on Thursday of last week. Instead I found myself doing a number of preliminary things that I'd thought wouldn't take long:

( doesn't she ever shut up about the canoe? )

These ate up all my time till Sunday. I tried to install the gunwales Sunday and got the port set installed, but discovered that I really couldn't drive the slot-headed brass screws reliably; the screwdriver kept twisting out and scarring the heads. So I installed the port set with my philips headed screws and figured I'd pick up the extra 35 philips screws on Monday and do the starboard gunwales. I'd already brushed the first coat of (unthickened) epoxy on the hull side of the starboard inwale before I figured this out, of course. However, it takes 3 days to cure (at 60 degrees) past forming a chemical bond with a new layer of epoxy, so even at 75 degrees 16 hours should be no problem between the unthickened epoxy and the sawdust-enhanced epoxy that goes on in the second layer.

This morning I went and got the rest of the screws, and another 20 latex gloves, and installed the starboard gunwale. It took 2 1/2 hours. Somehow I thought installing the gunwales would be reasonably easy and quick. I don't know where I got that idea.

The whole project has been like this. This is why the boat is called Patience.

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So I just got back from Washington D.C. a couple of days ago: It was amazing. ( brief description )

I wonder if it was a wise decision to put all these irreplaceable national treasures so close to the seat of government. After all, we can always elect another president and congress, and it’s not like the White House hasn’t burned before—but if somebody nuked D.C. we’d loose the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian!

When I came home I went back to work on the canoe. ( sheesh! Not more about the damn canoe! )

And I played Scrabble again Sunday night. This time I 1) got a bingo (and on a double word score square too) 2) broke 300 points (321 to be exact) and 3) (are you sitting down? Sit down.) won the game! I’m so psyched! Luck was on my side, of course; I got to go first, and I drew two blanks in one go (hence the bingo), and I managed to ditch the Q at the last minute (thanks in large part to having studied the “Q without a U” chapter of my Scrabble book), and wound up with five letters that would wrap neatly around an available E, thus ending the game. Still, I think my playing is improving.

BTW—last night I found I’d been playing for several turns with eight tiles instead of seven, presumably because I made some silly subtraction error when figuring out how many tiles to draw. (I discovered this when I laid out a beautiful bingo on a double word square only to discover that it couldn’t be a bingo because it had 8 letters.) Anna has a procedure to deal with this—all 8 tiles are laid on the table face down and pushed around for a bit to mix them up, then the other player takes one tile and returns it to the bag without looking at it. She says she’s never seen any reference for this solution; it’s just the one her family used. It seems logical to me, but I was wondering if other Scrabble players use this solution or if there is a different one.