I should be home working on my boat instead of sitting here in my office composing this blog post. Everything needs a coat of paint, the wood trim needs cleaning, and there is an offensive odor emanating from the bilge that may have taken on a life of its own.

My neighbors don't seem to have any trouble keeping their boats in Bristol condition, but then when I am sitting in my red leather recliner reading the latest Donna Leon mystery, they are out on deck, scraping, sanding and keeping busy. The people in the slip behind us have been working fervently for the past month installing new stanchions and lifelines. They are up at O'Dark Thirty and work through the heat of the day (or as hot as it ever gets in South City), and it seems like their project will never end. There is a lot of yelling going on over there. It makes me tired just watching them. Besides, my boat looks pretty good until you get up close.

I have sanded and painted the flying bridge steering station, which is looking very smart. Sweetie replaced the hazed and cracked Eisenglass windows in the dodger last month. New cushions have brightened up that area as well. The only problem is that all of the other areas that I painted when we first bought the boat four years ago are ready for a repaint. Nobody told me that I would have to be a slave to a paintbrush!

It was decided that I was to be in charge of painting after Sweetie drooled epoxy down the companionway doors. Have you ever tried to sand epoxy? Tough stuff, and I still don't know why a coat of hard plastic is necessary as a base coat over wood. The epoxy dried so hard over one of the window frames that it cracked the glass. Now what the heck should I do? My options are to gouge out the entire wooden window frame and replace both the frame and the glass or ignore the crack entirely. The Divine Esther came up with a solution for a cracked window in her CHB trawler: Put a stained glass decal over the window, and be done with it. It gives her privacy and looks nice, too.

Regular boat maintenance is to be expected, but this beautification stuff is maddening. There seems to be no end to it. The hull needs wax, the wood trim is begging to be cleaned, the stainless is spotty, and the decks need a good scrub. In addition, all sorts of detritus seems to accumulate in our small cockpit. Right the Lectrasan is laying in pieces waiting for a part to arrive from Seattle. It's better than having it spread out in the main salon, I suppose.

I vow to clean the teak trim this week, unless my mystery novel takes an unexpected turn...