I've been keeping a record, titles and authors, of all the books I've read since we moved aboard. This week I totted them all up, and there's over 500 books on the list. The Old Testament is there, for god's sake (ha ha). I am reminded of long mornings and afternoons where I did nothing but read and eat potato chips in the sunshine. I should be enormously fat and knowledgable, but instead I'm scrawny and distracted.

I'm still reading, of course, but the distractions ashore are multitudinous, and I'm popping out of the chair to deal with laundry, load the dishwasher, make cups of tea, check email, tidy, walk around, make lists....Lots of distractions on the boat, too, but I could see them all from where I sat. Just now I don't seem to feel like I've got a grip on the expanded boundaries of home ashore.

If it was just the physical surroundings, okay, I'd have it sorted pretty quick, but currently there's a bit of overload in the brain. Medical appointments. Home repairs screaming for attention. The deck is rotting off the back of the house. Randy is out there now hammering, and there's hundreds of dollars of lumber stacked on the driveway. Money is flying out in all different directions at a great rate. Who knew that there was 28 feet of brake line in our truck, and it all had to be replaced, along with a bunch of other solid gold items. That's just for starters. Then there's the boat and the chunk of brain that is always dedicated to the boat. We've taken to measuring the rum that goes into the glass, because it has to last. How depressing is that?

(I subconsciously feel that we're broke because I'm using too much water. Not true, but still.)

Banking, house insurance, car insurance, life insurance, phone bills, internet, log-ins and passwords, pin numbers - all different!, goods and services tax, income tax, car registration, driver's license address change, cell phones, remote controls, mail, no mail (postal strike), the occasional random ant wandering the countertop, it all makes me ill at ease, and unable to sit still for more than a few minutes at a time. Gotta pop up and feel busy cause there's so much I need to do that I can't do nothing. You can do a lot of putzing around in a house that's about 800 square feet of space. Randy tells me that I tend to pause in the middle of every sentence when I speak to him. I just lose my place. There's too much going on up there, none of it productive.

More semi-senseless adaptive behaviour: I bought an LLBean full-length, brown, down parka at the second-hand store for $6.75. Complete with fur-trimmed hood. I used to have a short brown puffy coat with a hood, years ago, and the kids used to call it "the turd." Well, this current purchase is the uber turd, and makes no sense in June, but I know I'll be very happy to have it when November rolls around and I find myself having to leave the chair beside the fire. With any luck, rum rationing will be over by then.