For the full history of the Spawn program, browse around on the blog. The event is marked by thrills, spills, no frills, and saltwater crocs. Plus sleep deprivation (for those on the water and for us on shore keeping an eye on them) and a fixation on the weather.

Each boat is equipped with a satelite tracker as well as a cartload of safety gear.

The naturally socially-distanced event selects for mad-scientists and salty mariner types alike. Still, my own Dr. Frankenstein made only a few small adjustments to his program for 2021.

He rewired the water-ballast pumps and beefed up the battery situation. He added hinges and latches to the ports leading to the forward "stateroom."

He rejiggered the storage bags. He shaved a few inches from the rudders and added tent-poles to make roomier camping accommodations.

The race begins at sunrise on Saturday, March 6, 2021.

Click on the map below for a link to the WaterTribe tracking map.  BTW, that site is sometimes overloaded during the event. 

Additionally, I will try to update the Spawn Facebook page with news as the event unfolds over the weekend.  

​Fingers crossed and knocking wood...

Oldgeezering: the tendency of anyone over the age of 20 to start reminiscing about how the world has changed.

​Identify by use of temporal phrases like "when I was a kid," "back in the day," "nowadays."

Also, Proustian locational references: "the video arcade," "my grandfather's farm," "the five-and-dime."

Oldgeezering in practice:

When I was a kid, my dad used to drag us around behind a boat in pretty much anything that floated. Once it was a wide mahogany door: hard to grip –– and there must have been some additional flotation, right? Huh. It's all blur of water up the nose.
    
The safety rules were few but iron-clad: lifejackets for all kids and somebody was charged to act as spotter. NEVER take eyes off your mark. 

I guess I was spotting for cousin B in this picture.

Check out that flex. Daddo looks mighty buff; always with the Ray-Bans, the cigarette (gasoline canisters be danged!) and the bottle of beer.  

Kids these days –– they don't even.  

Can anyone argue that humans come with music and dance already pre-loaded?

Somehow the very idea of work get the stink eye ––  golly, we wouldn't even wish it on our animal friends. The same animal buddies whose stalwart character and skills we've selected for across hundreds of generations.

But did any of us evolve all these years find our joy while melting into the upholstery?  Add a bag of chips and a winning Lotto ticket, et voilá!  The American Dream nirvana!

I don't mean to rant. Or actually I do. I just don't want to glaze anyone's eyes for them. Save the anesthetized stare for the third season of whatever's streaming today. Grrr.

What kind of malarkey are we putting on toast?

I'm not above it, truly. Work can suck.

Carriage horses sometimes die of heat exhaustion. Racehorses twist an elegant ankle and are seen no more on green pastures. 

But can a person deny a horse the joy of running? The snarfling satisfaction of a well-fetched stick? The sweaty pleasure of that last log split and stacked? 

My gardening heros, the Davises from Denver, used to send me homemade jars of rhubarb in exchange for some favor or another.

​I don't remember the chore, but I do remember the treat: that nearly chalky, stringy goop with a sour/sweet flavor that reminds me so much of springtime in the North Country. 

I know, sounds delish, right?  But no, it is.

Consulting my notes, I see that it took me until 2017 to put in rhubarb plants at the Farm. It takes them a couple of years to get their feet under them, but they've done quite well.  Enough for us to have a half dozen or so desserts in the last couple of years. 

But is that really enough Rheum rhababarum? No.

Obviously.

Still, it was an extra surprise bonus that we acquired another patch of rhubarb this past summer.

The nearest small town (pop. 650 people) did earn a mention in a Neil Young song, but frankly, the Would-Be Farm is located somewhere just this side of Beyond. The wild-and-wooly frontier nature of the place is mostly lovely, but it does have the occasional drawback. 

For instance, our former neighbors just to our north...nice folks, perhaps, but considerably more gun-happy than makes us entirely comfortable. Sure, fire your gun at a target, a varmint, dinner. But random gunfire? Combined with a LOT of empty bottles and very loud (and frankly awful) 1970's rock'n'roll? Oh boy.

So for the past couple of years, when these neighbors were in residence, my favorite skipper and I simply avoid the north section of that one field. Discretion being the larger part of not catching a piece of lead. 

It's not generally part of the culture out there near Beyond to call the coppers. Or at least not until things have escalated to the sort transgression that does deliberate physical harm. Holding a hootenanny at midnight on a Tuesday, well that's annoying, but live and let live. Letting your toddlers run loose at night –– well, that goes too far.

Anyhoo. Those lively neighbors with the large supplies of ammo moved along, leaving a "For Sale" sign behind them.

Things sometimes work themselves out.   

Which is how the Would-Be Farm grew a little over the summer.  We gained an additional 40 or so neglected old apple trees, an open field, and a honking big patch of rhubarb.

Never mind the wonderful world of profanity.

(Profanity as a word, let me remind us, started life as a description of irreligious language. It would mean profaning a deity or a religion. Only as time went by did it come to mean bodily vulgarity.)

So many highly enjoyable ways to express discontent or contempt using those seven or so words...

But as far a favorite words I can use in mixed company, I favor "confabulate."  Indeed I do.

It's a mouthful, this Latinate word that sounds a fabulous convict, but no. It came from "tabula," a tale and a table, joined with "com," which means "together," but which gets changed to "con" for ease of speech.  

In the original Latin (one original Latin, anyhow), it was "confabulari" and it meant to talk about something or another. Like chatting or chattering or burbling. In a rare Oz moment, American slang shortens the word to "confab."  One might say, "We're having a confab, Mom, just leave the snacks at the door."

Then in 1900 or so, the word took up a new job: describing a clinical behavior of making up stuff to fill gaps in memory. A person with dementia is said to confabulate when telling you that he was in the Bolshoi ballet, say, and a spy for the Allies, when you're quite sure he was a dentist in Cincinnati born after the war, with a bum leg to boot. 

Confabulation is a coping mechanism for people with failing memory. It works to help patients make sense of the world; they generally do not even know that they are telling a tale. Unlike a garden-variety lie, which assumes intent, confabulation is not a conscious choice.

It's not just the result of brain injuries, btw. Confabulation comes to play when people are striving to make a correct answer. Which is partly the challenge with eye-witness accounts. As a species, we like to be right. 

How peculiar that thinking about confabulation brings me yet again to Joan Didion. (If you haven't read "We Tell Ourselves Stories To Live," I am sorry for you. Confabulation topic sidebar: What if Joan Didion was THE deity?) 

Okay, egg-heading over. I also like the word "spanakopita," but you don't catch me babbling on about it.

​
Yet more confabulating articles:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01207/full

https://aeon.co/ideas/confabulation-why-telling-ourselves-stories-makes-us-feel-ok

​http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20190527-can-fiction-really-improve-your-mental-health

I snapped a photo of the television while awaiting landfall of Hurricane Eta.  It's not unsurprising that local newscasters, who should certainly know better, position themselves near a body of water and start casting news.

If it's not a weather person suited head to toe in Goretex, announcing that the waves are throwing the yachts around violently (in the background, a tranquil day at a marina, the boats bobbing languidly under an overcast sky), it's some would-be Jim Cantore shouting about the force of the winds when it's, you know, breezy –– but not brutal. 

In this photo, I love the cognitive dissonance: this newscaster was talking about how Tampa Bay residents were battening down their hatches and frantically preparing for the storm, while in the background, the usual cast of fishing characters are lounging on the pier, baiting their hooks and hoping for a good bite.

Come on, man. 

P.S. This is not to say we don't have anything to worry about. People die from hurricanes, and houses are washed into the sea. But hyperbole is flat out unnecessary.

​Tell the story that is, not the story that sounds more exciting. And that's my wish for the new year.

This time of year, you're apt to overhear a lugubrious but truncated version of "Happy Holidays" around our house.  

Not that Andy Williams doesn't already win in those dubious lugubrious stakes, but ugh, I can't stand that song. One of us will start belting it out and then, if it's me, stop and swear briefly.  Every year, the third week of December rolls around and somehow, this annoying song gets onto my internal jukebox.

And because that's how I play, the words of the song get a quick change-up, so I'll unwittingly start singing, "Hippy Hoppodays!"  only to stop, swear briefly, and try to change the channel.

Without resorting to "The Girl from Ipanema," of course.  

​For instance, I might try for a sarcastic version of "Here comes Santa Claus" or a full-on 39-and-a-half-foot-pole version of "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch."  Thurl Ravenscroft rocks. 

Or possibly the most upbeat offering of the season, Bare Naked Ladies' "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen." 

May your winter holidays be joyful and full of good noise.

His reserved "hello" morphs into a grinning, winking welcome. "Oh! If only..." he always ends up sighing. Charming Aunt P makes conquests left and right. 

​I know she had the quarryman and his crew move and readjust rocks over and over and over again until she had her flagstone patio just the way she liked. It's to her credit that the quarryman made it beautiful and remembers her fondly.

​You have to listen to them or learn to live with some half-assed, unbalanced construct. 

What can be more beautiful than an elegant old stone wall?  ​Running mostly straight, like a seam across a landscape -- ooh, ahh.