This is a collection of fifty-two of the short stories I've written for the Weekend Write-In challenges.
Each story is exactly five hundred words long, except for two which specified one thousand words. From the beginning, I have taken the challenge...
Well, I guess we'll have to go sailing. Our Vancouver house sold two weeks ago, we gave up possession yesterday and we have now officially moved aboard Sequitur.
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Edi and I flew back to Vancouver earlier this week from the Royal Canadian Numismatic Association Convention, where I handed over my President's gavel and relinquished the last of my official responsibilities. We spent the next few days sorting, selling on Craigslist, trashing, packing and moving the keepers aboard the boat and to the storage lockers.
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Edi has gone over to the house on the Island to go through the sorting, selling, trashing, packing and moving routine, while I continue to sort, organise, juggle and stow onboard. That house has not yet sold — a couple of weeks ago we turned down an offer of 90% of ask — but it's priced well and should go soon. Next week we'll haul the keepers from there to storage here in Vancouver, leaving the house vacant. Then we'll busy ourselves with the final bits of preparation for sailing off over the horizon.
Complicating our departure arrangements is the completion of our pied-a-terre here in Vancouver. A year-and-a-half ago, we bought a new loft in a century-old building in South East False Creek, which was scheduled for occupancy in May 2009. A city hall strike delayed permits and the commencement of construction, pushing our completion into August. No problem, August fit nicely with everything else. However, the huge demand for construction on the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics projects caused August to migrate to October, forcing us to move our keepers to storage for a couple of months. It's a real juggling act moving over four decades of stuff from two houses totalling 5,000 square feet, into an 800 square foot loft and a fifty-foot sailboat. Having to do it through storage adds extra layers to the complexity.
There are still a few things to tweak aboard Sequitur. The watermaker is awaiting a new salinity probe, we still have to fine-tune the ham radio antenna set-up, we still have a problem getting the AIS to talk to the chartplotter, and we are awaiting the modifications to the cockpit canvas necessitated by the addition of the solar panel arch. Then there are the final spares and stores to acquire and stow.
We could have delayed our sail-away until after moving into the loft, but not wanting to be caught by further delays and having to transit the Washington, Oregon and northern California coasts in the storm season beginning in October, we are sticking to our original mid-September departure date. We'll fly back to Vancouver from California to take possession of the loft and move our stuff from storage. That will give us something to do while waiting for the end of the hurricane season down there. By the time we fly back to Sequitur, we'll be able to continue south.
So, three weeks today, on 13 of September we sail out to find the dragons at the edges of the charts.
