…on Sunday, just as I was wrapping up my grammar homework, my friend Sinker called and asked if I wanted to go sailing. This was good timing, since I’d been racing to finish that homework with the goal of making sure to get out and enjoy the beautiful, warm, sunny day, maybe take a walk or something. In fact, I’d been thinking so hard about this walk that, for a moment, the prospect of sailing seemed like a distraction. Then I remembered that it isn’t my boat anymore, and that made all the difference. Back when I bought the thing, I was the only person I knew who owned a boat, which meant that, whenever I went sailing, I was in charge and responsible for avoiding the death and destruction that always feels imminent when you are the captain. But Sinker bought my boat about a year and a half ago, and that makes all the difference. I took off my watch and emptied my pockets of anything that might be ruined if we sank and set off with my brother for the marina with a light heart.
On the drive downtown, I tried to judge the wind conditions by looking at trees and flags, and it looked like we were in for a pretty calm ride. But the breeze was stiffer than it looked, and we spent a lot of the two-hour trip heeled pretty far over. Farther over than I would have been comfortable with back when it was my boat (just because I never really knew what I was doing; Sinker, a professional sailor, had the situation well in hand), but a nice thrill now that I was just along for the ride. Sinker and Kristin’s new dog kept us company, a young golden-colored dog whose breed and name escape me now and who spent much of the ride slumped in the well of the cockpit, sliding limply from one side to the other as we tacked. We weren’t sure if she was seasick or exhausted from a ten-mile she’d taken earlier, accompanying Kristin, who is training for something or other.
I’m glad I got one more sail in before leaving Baltimore. The city is really meant to be seen from the water, and most of my best times here have been on boats.
Yesterday was an average work day, although a manic mood came over me in the morning, gloriously enough, and I was able to make serious progress on a paper I’m editing. At home, my father and I ate a leisurely dinner and talked as the shadows grew long. I moved furniture in preparation for the electrician’s visit today; he’s grounding the upstairs outlets. Then I finally figured out the computer problem that had been bedeviling me since Sunday night. I’d wanted to seize my financial destiny by the horns and so purchased a copy of the financial software Quicken, but then hadn’t been able to get the download to work properly. The Mac legend holds that Macs “just work,” and there isn’t supposed to be all of this messing around trying to get things to function and talk and be compatible the way there is supposed to be with PCs. I must admit that my experience on Sunday had me doubting the legend (forgive me, Steve). But after some exchanges with the support desk, I zeroed in on one thing they’d mentioned, which was turning off popup protection in Firefox. I didn’t bother messing with Firefox, but I opened Safari, which doesn’t have popup protection turned on, and ran the downloads with that.
And, as per the legend, it all “just worked.”
(As for seizing my financial destiny by the horns, I may need to take a class in order to understand exactly what Quicken can do for me. So far, it is very confusing.)
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