Aunt Aggie's Adventures: Percussive Maintenance?

Tour boat came by Aunt Aggie while we were sitting at the pool yesterday.

We loved our stay at Catskill Marina. The downtown area is vibrant but has some vacant buildings hoping to be discovered. The good news is they've kept their old buildings. They just need a few more businesses. I can't imagine how cold and snowy this area is in winter. We are here at the perfect season: sunny during the day and cool at night with no humidity. The air is sweet. No wonder Yankees love summer. It is our spring.

On Saturday three sailboats from Montreal came into the marina. They were full of young, French speaking folks. We gathered that they were in the area to be de-masted. Why? I ventured out today and asked where they are going. They are headed home to Lake Champlain, their home port. However, the bridges between the Hudson and Lake Champlain are too low for sailboats. They wintered in Nassau. Now they are returning home. They built structures to hold the mast. There was lots of hammering and discussion on the docks as each boat completed the task.

See the wooden bracing on the sailboats? Aunt Aggie is the third boat.

We waited for the tide (maybe our last time caring about tide) and left Catskill at 11:30 am for the four hour trip to Albany. We arrived at 3:25 pm, slack current, so we could dock easily. We had a lovely river cruise although there were many fishermen and family boaters out. It was, after all, a sunny Sunday afternoon. Everyone wants to be on the river in the sunshine on Sunday. Happily for us, these boaters were mostly not too large. George did call out one sport fisherman headed to us with a huge wake, and the guy slowed down.

Once we arrived, I did a major clean of the outside of the boat, which was covered in seed pods, tiny flowers, and branches from Friday's storm. George vacuumed inside. Once Aunt Aggie was clean, we were happy and satisfied and could have happy hour featuring nachos to go with our Mexican leftovers.

We needed the microwave to prepare the nachos and heat up the leftovers. Hmm. The microwave did not work the last time we tried it. So depressing to have an appliance that doesn't work. It makes me feel like a failure. I can just hear George's grandmother, Big Mama, saying, "Martha, I thought you wanted nice things." Well, we turned off everything on that battery bank: outlets, water heater, and battery charger. Then we tried the microwave for the nachos. Success!

After our appetizer, we were ready for the main courses, our leftovers. I put one plate in the microwave and it stopped working after two seconds. Oh, no! George got up and banged on the appliance: percussive maintenance. Yes! It worked! We were able to heat both plates. So, now we are believers in using force as needed to heat our food.