It's certainly been a long time since I've updated this blog. Not that I regret it, necessarily - not having time to update a blog means that I've been busy doing other fun things. Classes have been eating up a lot more of my time this quarter, especially my diplomacy course.
The premise of this course, which is instructed by two Foreign Service Officers, is to simulate the Six Party Talks on the North Korean nuclear weapons program. We are divided into six "delegations" that represent North Korea, the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea, and we're trying to hash out an agreement to denuclearize North Korea. Needless to say, it's been great fun for me so far, but also massively time-consuming and energy-depleting. Plus I'm on the American delegation, so we have to work about three times as hard as everyone else.
The premise of this course, which is instructed by two Foreign Service Officers, is to simulate the Six Party Talks on the North Korean nuclear weapons program. We are divided into six "delegations" that represent North Korea, the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea, and we're trying to hash out an agreement to denuclearize North Korea. Needless to say, it's been great fun for me so far, but also massively time-consuming and energy-depleting. Plus I'm on the American delegation, so we have to work about three times as hard as everyone else.
But now on to camp matters. It was a great work party this weekend, stormy weather notwithstanding. Brian Horch, the camp's volunteer boat-fixer extraordinaire, had come in last weekend and finished the Coronado 15 glass job, so we moved it back to the boat house, and I put all the hardware back on it. The cockpit floor was soft and we worried that it might crack, so Brian and I had reinforced it by laying down another layer of fiberglass. Except for some minor touch-up glass work that I could do myself, it's pretty much ready to go. Camp Parsons now has one more operational sailboat.
Meanwhile, Meredith began building a sailing equipment storage unit in the boat house. This has been on the aquatics to-do list for about a half dozen years, but now it's finally getting done. In just two hours, it went from being a twinkle in our eye to being an almost complete frame, and when Meredith finishes it off, it's going to have crown molding, a cool New England paint scheme (blue-grey with white trim) - the whole works. Most importantly, it's going to have padlocks, so that everything stays where it's supposed to be.
I feel like a lot of things that people have been wanting to do for years are finally getting done now. There's the sailing cabinet and the C-15 project. There's the Hobie 16, which has sat in pieces for years - it's being reassembled, and its frayed shroud is being replaced. One of the two boats that broke last year is patched and ready to go again, while the other one is just one step away from being ready to go. The sails are sorted and labeled, and the torn ones are being re-sewn. Ralph, the camp's volunteer metalworker, reconstructed the brass and aluminum fittings for the C-15. He also welded the gooseneck back onto the boom of the Ranger 20, the old boat that's been sitting on that rusty trailer for three years, and we've diagnosed the Ranger's keel problem as being a relatively simple fiberglass repair. Even I could probably do it - the hard part is tilting the Ranger so that the keel is accessible. And Greg Hammond is sprucing up the four new FJ tillers that he made last summer.
Back in September, I was afraid it might be totally unrealistic to try to repair the entire sailboat fleet before next summer. Well, it's only been five months now, and I'm actually running out of things to do. I've started fixing broken canoes.
