All dressed up and ready to go

Bottom painted (thanks Deb!) and ready for launch.

I had two sort of distressing conversations this weekend (three if you count a conversation with Rammstein the German Sailor Man which consisted of racism, sexual perversion, a highly inappropriate reference to concentration camps, and assorted other inanity...all in the space of five minutes).

The first conversation was with a person who owns a wonderful Bill Garden designed sloop which is built like a tank, draws 7 feet (!) and was built by a yard that specializes in Puget Sound / Northern Pacific fishing trawlers. Her name is Penguin and she's built like a tank. She also needs cosmetics. I was talking with the owner and he told me that the work on Wolf was a real inspiration and that he hoped he could get Penguin looking half as good. "Your boat and her" he said, pointing to a completely restored Triton belongs in an art museum, "are the finest yachts here. I hope I can get there someday."

I found that sort of distressing because I've always been more of a practical sailor type than a person who's constantly staining/varnishing/cleaning/freaking-out-over-a-scratch sort of boat owner.

The second conversation I found disturbing? I was taking my insulin and the boat owner next to me shot me a quizzical look."Insulin, not heroin!" I told her, "Gotta inject it with every meal."

At which point she told me that was odd, because clearly I'm not fat,see, so she doesn't understand how I could've eaten myself into diabetes like her overweight and non-exercising Aunt Carol.

"No, no, " I corrected her, "it's type one, the type that kids get. Only I got it as an adult.It's an immune disorder, see, where your body reacts to a virus or a something in the wrong way and winds up killing part of your pancreas."

"Oh!", she said, "it's like chicken pox. It's not really bad, then."

The ignorance, it burns. I wish there was a shot I could take for THAT.