Sunday 17th February

Sunday 17^th February

• ·      My beautiful friend Heather’s birthday

• ·      Michael’s long-term friend Nic’s birthday – both born in 1981, one day apart, and both now men in uniform

• ·     Pete's oldest friend Cam (from the womb)’s 70th birthday (from the womb = their mothers were friends from their teens – their mothers are now in their nineties…)

Saturday was very busy.  We had two children overnight – Harry and Lizzie, very polite and well-behaved while their parents had a wonderful tenth wedding anniversary celebration all by themselves in Woodbridge.  As soon as the children, older and younger, and gone – having very cleverly retrieved the stuck Barbie/Thumbelina movie from the upstairs DVD player (oh what fun Harry and Lizzie and I had, tucked up in Pete’s bed watching this oeuvre, while Pete,  missing out on the glory of it all, downstairs, watched ABC NewsTV!!) – Pete and I whizzed over to Prince of Wales Bay to clean out the boat.

I wasn’t feeling on top form, just a bit dopey around the edges, I was, but I rose to the occasion and soon was having a wonderful time heaving big bags of this and that into the skip – one of my favourite features, in this marina.  I LOVE throwing things away…especially when they are festy/mouldy/rusty.  My favourite found-rubbish item was…a large bottle of insect repellent, circa God-knows-when, with nothing inside, just a lot of peeling paper and rust on the outside.  Pete found a festy bottle of skin treatment for mangy dogs…WTF???   And I found many treasures – my wedding ring and the Ruth Waterhouse ring my darling children gave me (I took them off when we started sailing2xXS – rings are DANGEROUS!!)  Also my hardy aluminum spring-loaded walking stick, which would have been very handy on very many occasions on our last trip, had it not been buried beneath two wetsuits, two harnesses, a pair of long johns and a ragbag.  (In this aforementioned ragbag, incidentally, was my very favourite long-lost black t-shirt, which I bought in Maro – Salamanca Place -  in 2002 and have been quietly mourning for several years…It is now busily spinning around, being purified, in the washing machine.  As are a plethora of teatowels, sheets, towels, aprons, thermal underwear – in fact everything washable is being washed and sorted.)