Yesterday I decided I had put off doing laundry as long as I could stand it. Before I get to that, I should mention that although nice and sunny there was talk of snow for the evening. I had my mind made up. I asked the harbor master and he said I would have to do it in the shower as it was not allowed outside and when done I could not hang clothes outside either. Hmmm....I will deal with that when I get to it.NEVER DO THAT!!!! I had quite a pile of laundry built up so decided half would be plenty to do. This was the smartest thing I did all day.

I went and got my 5 gallon bucket,washboard,laundry and shower bag. I will take a nice long hot shower when done. Good plan....right?

So it begins. It turns out doing the laundry here was not bad. Nice warm place. A little slow filling the bucket in the shower but acceptable.

Halfway there. All the heavy shirts and sweat pants are done.

All done :-) It does take a bit of effort. But if you remember, this is not about the easy way. I want to recover the health that I lost when I got hurt. I decide the heavier clothes that are harder to wring out should keep dripping while I shower. Then I can wring the bottoms out again before taking them back to Mary lee.

I don't know if anybody else has tried shampoo for shaving. I never heard of it, but I was curious. I had always used barbisol and had gone to the neutrogena on the right. It is a small tube and fits everywhere. You only use a dab about the size of a quarter to shave. It works very well. I ended up using the same amount of the head and shoulders. I could not tell the difference....really. I don't know if all shampoos will work the same. I have this big bottle of head and shoulders that was on Mary Lee when I bought her. Since it was new I just put it aside. There are a lot of shaves in this bottle.

But back to laundry day. I took a long, nice shower. Took my time getting everything picked up and ready to go. Headed out the door and was looking at cold rain and wind. Great. I have a half mile walk to the boat with the little cart full of laundry and shower goodies. Like always when things look trying, I thought for a minute about not doing it :-)  I know the rain has just started and will only get worse. It is a cool and wet walk but hey....I got a 2 mile walk in today overall.

This was in my shower bag and I thought I would share it. It is a piece of leather cut to the basic shape of my hair on the back of my head. When cutting my own hair I realized that the back was near impossible. This is easy. I slide it on with the elastic on my forehead. The ends line up evenly with my ears making it pretty much how I want it in back. I then take the clippers to it. I pull it off, comb hair again and do one more time. That way if there was something I missed I should have got it. I also trim the hair on my neck at the same time. When you take it off,the hair that was mashed down the most also fluffs back up the most and it is sort of a blind mans taper.

When I was hurt the most. I tried everything to make going for a haircut easy as i just couldn't sit up in a regular chair for long. I even made appointments and would end up in a straight backed chair waiting sometimes a half hour or more for a haircut. I finally realized that I had seen enough haircuts to do my own. I got fairly good at it. I mean I had paid for worse than I could do. Eventually I bought a flowbee. That worked beautifully. I could do all but trim the back in about 3 minutes. So back to laundry day.

I got back to the boat. Figured out how to hang all the clothes, decided it was getting cold and nasty enough that I didn't want to dig through the cockpit lockers. Materials for putting together my improved shower sump pump/box can wait. I realized in an hour or so that I was going to have a water condensation problem. I wasn't suure quite how to alleviate it yet so let it go hoping some things would dry a bit.

1:00 am. time to do something about condensation, if I leave it, things will surely get ruined. All clothes that were not dry went into the head/bathroom. I spent some time wiping everything down. Opened a port window for air and fired up the propane burners for a while. I didn't look at the time when I was done but after a while, between the fans and heat, it looked like I could give it a break.

It was sunny,40 degrees and windy in the morning. I had no choice. I needed to open everything up and get Mary Lee dried out. I put on a stocking cap and coat,opened it all up and let the wind do it's job. It took about 3 hours before I was satisfied. At this point I have 3 pair of sweat pants, a towel and 2 heavy shirts that are mostly dry hanging in the head with a little heater going on them.

There was clearly a lesson here :-) I tried to cut corners by piling up my laundry and doing it all at once.  I got bit by doing it the wrong way. The right way. The way I will do it from now on. I will wash the clothes I change out of when I go to shower right then and there. One change of clothes is pretty easy to deal with. That and I really do not have room for a big laundry bag laying around.

So how does this all tie up into a single statement? Murphy's law states "not enough time to do it right... always enough time to do it over". True but I feel it lacks somehow in the definition. Not only does this mean you get to do this at least two times.... BUT, You also get to learn what happens when something you spent time on is wrong. All the disappointments that go with realizing you not only did it wrong but depending on what it is you may get to tear it all back apart, buy new materials and spend even more time this time doing it right. Or you can just cobble everything, hope you get by and leave it for the next person.

I have one last thing that I get to do.

When I opened up the forward hatch the rivets finally broke off on this little rascal. Without this one corner won't latch tight and is going to make the hatch leak next rain. I thought I could just pop the rivets out for now and use screws and a little sealer just to get by. I broke off the head of one of the screws trying to see if the screws I have would go through. Now I get to dig drill and bits out of the cockpit locker so I can drill the proper holes. I guess I will use 5200 to seal it when done because I won't be doing this twice :-)