CHAPTER EIGHTY FOUR: SIGNS UP, AIR CONDITIONER DOWN

  CHAPTER EIGHTY FOUR: SIGNS UP, AIR CONDITIONER DOWN

The signs are up! Our neighbor, Jerry, emailed us with the unexpected news that the County had finally sent a crew out to post the no parking signs on our little road. He sent photos too. My cynicism has turned to gratitude, as I penned a “thank you” email to Bryan Flores, Supervisor Potter’s aide, for his help in getting this done. Now the neighborhood can be peaceful and quiet – and safe and clean – again. We can return to our dead-end street status, instead of being an illegal “trailhead” for errant hikers from around the County. You would not believe the number of legitimate trails that exist in our area for hikers. One new trail was just dedicated nearby in the Fort Ord National Monument. And trails abound from the public entrance into Toro Park on Route 68. So take heart, hikers, you still have plenty of oak-studded hills to roam for hours and hours, where there is sufficient parking and you don’t bollix up a small neighborhood on a tiny country road with your over-sized SUVs, unmanaged poopy dogs and forbidden bikes.

On the East Coast front, we still have no air-conditioning. But at the moment we are being “saved” by a mega rainstorm which brings cooler air. At eleven p.m. yesterday, just as the Admiral and Intellicast predicted, the thunderstorm struck and released tons of water upon Slow Motion and the waters around us. The rain continued through the night into this morning. The Admiral is preparing a protein-packed egg and sausage breakfast for us. It’s Thursday, July 11, and we don’t know when we’re leaving the Calvert Marina. K-K-Katie, the Wonder Mechanic, is coming back at 1 p.m. today to troubleshoot our kaput salon air conditioner. This is amazing, given that just yesterday afternoon she had her first shot ever by an anesthesiologist into her spine to calm the painful nerve next to the bulging disk that started bulging when she went out on a sea trial with a battling, bungling, screaming new boat owning couple. Short story: Husband in engine room screams at wife to turn on the engines. Wife pushes throttle to its max and turns on engines, and Katie, also in engine room, gets thrown around. Husband screams again to bring back the throttle, and wife puts boat in reverse, and boat lunges full power backwards, hurtling Katie and her back against hard objects and pulling out two pilings at the Spring Cove dock. Katie can’t stand up straight after this debacle, there are two fewer pilings at Spring Cove, and the couple says: “Hey, let’s get started on that sea trial.” Katie limped off the boat in a stooped position, telling them that the right thing to do was to report the destroyed pilings to Spring Cove immediately. Amazingly, some people, ostensibly adults, really need to be told to do the right thing.

While waiting for the air conditioner repair, I have devised ways to stay cool. On Tuesday, my pal Janie and I went to an air-conditioned restaurant for a long lunch, then to a very cool clothing boutique to browse. By the time I got back to Slow Motion, the worst of the heat had passed. Today, Thursday, the rain in the morning kept it relatively cool. Still, it was supposed to stop in the afternoon and the sun was supposed to be burning again, with high humidity of course. So an air-conditioned movie house seemed the way to go. Janie was up for The Heat, a girl buddy flick with Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy. Despite the moniker, this movie was very cool and it kept my pal in stitches. I really enjoyed it too. There’s an attractive “Girl Power” message, albeit delivered with a lot of F-bombs, a LOT of F-bombs. The two leads, one FBI and the other Boston Police, bond beautifully. There is a plot about drug dealing and a crooked cop, but there are a lot of laughs throughout, even as the dead body count rises. Thumbs up.

After the movie, we ran to the air-conditioned car and then drove to the air-conditioned Solomons Island art gallery of Janie’s friend, Carmen, who happens to be married to the Calvert Marina owner, Matt. Janie fell in love with a painting and its framing and asked Carmen about it. Lo and behold it was one of Carmen’s own works. Janie made Carmen very happy by purchasing the art work. If you see something you love, let this be a lesson to you – get it. Don’t fret about price (within reason). And when what you love is created by a dear friend, definitely do not hesitate. If I were wealthy, I would buy a whole lot more of Karin Rosenthal’s exquisite nude landscape photographs and many more works of Rob Barnes, who does breathtakingly beautiful photography/art compositions of western landscapes and anything else that attracts his imagination. They have both made significant contributions to my well-being, as I have gazed at the photographs and art works of theirs that I have been able to afford and hang on the walls in my home. I hope Janie gets the same rejuvenation and sense of wonder from her new painting by Carmen.

We returned to Slow Motion around 5 p.m. and Katie’s big yellow truck was still there. Katie was due at 1 p.m., so this was not a good sign. Sure enough, as I entered the salon, the Admiral had a worried, worried look on his face. Katie was talking about installing the new unit on Tuesday, and then I knew: Our salon air conditioner was not salvageable, and we had to buy a new one. Break Out Another Thousand – or two or three or four. This is all part of the boating adventure. I told the Admiral how “lucky” we were to have the air conditioner break down while we were in Solomons, where we had a great mechanic to install it. This scenario is certainly preferable to the alternative of cruising all day to an untested, untried marina in a new location in sweltering heat, only to find at the end of a long day on the water that we had no air-conditioning and that there was no boat repair facility within miles of us. If your boat is going to need a major repair, hope that this occurs when you are staying at a modestly priced marina like Calvert, which happens to be serviced by the Wonder Mechanic herself. Yes, the glass is almost always half full in my life.

Tomorrow we begin another journey, a road trip to Pocono Pines, the new home of my brother and his wife, Lois, and their loving puppies, Scout and Hopi. They don’t have air conditioning, but it’s a lot cooler in the mountains. Their fresh water lake, Lake Naomi, makes it seem even cooler in the summer time. So at least for this weekend, goodbye stultifying heat and clamminess, hello crisp mountain air!