surfboard repair 1

Finally had some time today to start the repair of the surfboard. You have my permission to skip this post, its really only meant to document what a nerd I am.

Okay, so the first repairs I attempted were small ones on the underside of the board. See a surfboard is basically a shaped piece of foam, wrapped in fiberglass cloth and enameled with epoxy or resin. So any bonks on rocks or shells or door handles can put a divot into the resin, and allow the board to become waterlogged. Waterlogged boards not only weigh a lot more, handle poorly, and fail to float, they can also smell bad. This board has a ways to go before it is water-tight.

So this first picture shows a previously repaired ding (left) right next to two small holes that I have now covered with fiberglass resin. On my first attempt, I used the resin with an overlay of smooth plastic. Would have worked great, but had bubbles under it that resembled pox upon drying. Not the smooth surface I was going for. So I tried a second time with another batch (this stuff dries in 10 minutes, so I am making only an ounce at a time), and I think I have the holes filled. I did sand it first, and it is really important to do so. In fact, the roughest sandpaper (40 grit) had the best results. The resin just peels off where it wasn't sanded.

This second picture that looks like garbage is what happens when I added pieces of fiberglass cloth (cut up) to the remaining resin to use as a filler. I pushed this sticky hairball into a much bigger crack to fill a hole. This crack went all the way through the board's fiberglass cloth shell right into the foam core, so I needed something to take up space in the hole. The second part of this repair is to sand it down and then use just resin to make it smooth.

An alternate is to wrap a patch of fiberglass cloth (intact) around the side rail of the board and resin it down, but that is not as smooth, and probably not necessary for the three inches of gash that this is.

See, as this third picture shows, sanded down, this same gash is filled very nicely. A layer of resin over the top and it will be smooth as butta'. As a side note, I do! tape off each repair in a little circle around the ding with some painters tape. That way, I can smear the resin around, and don't have to worry too much about it getting where it is not supposed to be. This was especially important for this rail because the resin drips over the side and will form permanant 'drips' on the top, like big zits (also not a look we are going for).

stay tuned for part 2

my aunt and other things

So my aunt is out of the hospital, and my mom is off to visit her this week and help her recover from surgery. The nodes are clear, but unfortunately, not all of the cancer is out. There are some places on the abdominal wall that just could not be removed at this surgery because there was simply too much to take out at one time. So the surgeon wants to go back in in a couple of months. So, not out of the woods yet. I will update more when I hear from my mom when they visit the doctor.
Busy packing for a week in Pennsylvania. Tday is at my sister in law's parents house (soon to be her house!) Should be a fun week! Just have to pack efficiently, and not forget anything important. Like the gifts, and the contact lens solution, and the pan to roast the turkey in, and onand on...
Finished a few projects off (yay) like grouting, now I just need to seal the grout. I still need to paint in the kitchen - behind the fridge. Yeah, I know, its like the last place anybody looks, but it will help to have that done. It doesn't even have to be a good job, but it cannot be left undone.
At some point I have to Kilz the ceiling and paint it too. I just hope I have enough ecru left over from the bathrooms paintjob almost seven years ago.
I haven't been keeping up with much else... I haven't FB'd, I haven't hardly emailed anyone back in an appropriate time span. I feel like I am barely keeping afloat with the paying of bills. And am I going to write christmas cards? I think I will have to do a letter and print it out, or not bother. Maybe photo cards! I feel like every minute must be accounted for, and every minute must be used to do something useful, and I am running out of time. And I perversely waste time even when I know I must not. Its like perversely eating when you are not hungry, but you have some other stupid reason for it like "this will go bad unless I eat it now". Similarly, "I have to reply to my movie club mailing, but lets just see what they have on sale..." and thirty minutes goes by shopping for something I don't need, don't need to spend money on, using time I cannot afford to waste.
Okay, that was a rant!
Now off to something else...

great news about my aunt

The great news is that none of my aunts lymph nodes were positive for cancer. Zero out of thirteen. That changes everything! Instead of asking the question, "How much time left?" we can ask the questions like, "How long does she have to have chemo for her to be in the clear?" "What does she need to eat to compensate for removal of some bowel, so that she will maintain her bone mass and get enough nutrition for the long-term?"
The whole outlook has changed.
Poor thing, though, I talked to her this morning, and she is still in pain, still nauseous, unable to eat yet, still in the hospital, still anemic and tired, and just plain down in the dumps. Believe me, I know what that is like. But the great news is that it is uphill from here. She will get stronger and she has a very good chance of beating this completely, not just living with it and slowly dying from it.
I have been craving salad, roughage, and healthy foods too! I do not want this happening to me in ten years. What a wake-up call!

I am feeling old

Something about today was making me feel old. Most days, I don't feel that way. Sure, I don't feel young, but I don't usually feel as middle aged as I am. Today, however, wearing my old-lady looking shoes that are very comfortable, shopping for crafts, feeling my back hurt. One of my aunts is visiting my mom as I am this weekend, and she is doing well having had a knee replacement just two months ago. I know my mom will have to undergo another one soon, so I cannot help but think that it will be very likely for me since my knees are my weak link. My other aunt just had surgery to remove colon cancer. She is only 53, so it is quite a shock. We are waiting on the lab reports to know what stage it is and the prognosis. Of course, I wonder if that is my fate in a few decades. Or the fate of more people I am close to. I know it is morbid to think this way, but even halloween skeletons make me think about being a skeleton before too long. I also know it is useless to worry about it, the only thing I can do is stay positive and involved in life, trying to be me at my best.

self control

I read this amazing book in one day. Titled "Precious" or "Push" by Sapphire, it was probably the most gut-wrenching thing I have ever read. Far worse than a gang rape of the different-ethnic-group boy in Afghanistan (ala Kite Runner) because it happened here in these United States, in my time, the late 80's. I don't have the words, just a warning: be prepared to cry, be disgusted, and to be so angry you cannot see straight if you take on the challenge of reading it. But it is ultimately a message of hope. Oh, and don't read it if you can't take swearing like a motherfucker, (of course, if you can't do that, why read my blog)?!
But the book really got me thinking about self control. Because Precious' parents had none. I mean NONE. No self control, no superego reining in the id, no self-aware sense of 'maybe I shouldn't do that,' basically no shame about the horrific things they had done. And then I had to think that the shame and self control really do go hand in hand.
Most people I know and are closest to have good self control up to a point, and then they have areas where it is not so good. I include myself in this group, although I have been less self-controlled in the past (*cough* swearing like a sailor for one thing), I am better than I was.
But if you perceive no shame with a particular action, you just don't have enough motivation to control the impulse to do that thing. Some people only experience shame when they get caught. Then, and only then, do they make the effort to control themselves and inhibit or modify the action that got them in trouble. Others feel shame at the slightest provocation, and go through quite a superhuman effort to squelch any hint of impropriety. There are a few (enlightened souls) who master their destructive impulses for the pure, logical benefit of themselves without being goaded by a sense of shame.
I have a hard time relating to people who are at either extreme of the spectrum. Honestly, how can you not be pathologically ashamed of yourself when you commit a really grotesque act? For example, I was reading a Newsweek blurb about a guy who recently was released from prison, his crime was for gunning down a chaperone who dared to tell him 'please leave my house' when he was roughhousing in it. How could you NOT be crippled by shame and remorse at this act? So stupid and senseless!
Neither do I relate well to those who have such an abundance of self control, who eat perfectly healthy foods all the time, exercise every day, volunteer, never say a bad word or gossip, get all their work done on time, keep a clean house, etc. They freak me out! How does someone have that MUCH self-control?!? Do they have that much self-awareness or self-imposed shame or are they truly one of those enlightened souls? I'm thinking of the Dalai Lama, here.
Maybe we have more self control about the things that are not too difficult to manage. Like, drinking alcohol, for me, is not something I lose control over. I can easily have one or none and stop. Sure, I would feel shame if I got too drunk , but that really isn't what stops me from overindulging. I haven't taken any drugs that might lead to indulgence issues, but what stops me there is a different reason entirely, more like a personal moral that I hold inviolate for myself, and has to do with the uncle I lost when I was young.
But how is it that I have so little self control when it comes to foods, particularly the non-nutritive ones? Its not like I don't feel shame if Ihave eaten too much. Not like I don't feel shame every time my pants are too tight or (God forbid!) I have to buy a larger size. And yet that shame is offset by the pleasure of the act. It doesn't matter how many times I am 'caught', I cannot seem to impose even moderation on myself. Maybe if there were more of a one-to-one correlation with eating and consequences, I could do it. But metabolism can be a tricky wild card. I can eat poorly for three days and not gain an ounce. Or I can eat really well for a week and not lose an ounce. For me, it is not clear what the magic formula is other than hunger. The more hours in a day I experience hunger the more weight I lose. But who can live that hungry?!?

anxiety

Now that I am older, I find that I am anxious about fewer and fewer things. I don't know if it is just age and experience or if it is my situation...in that I am not in a nine to five job, trying to balance work and home and time crunching the whole time. So many things used to make me very anxious when I was younger, and even envisioning trying to juggle my old job and a new baby was enough to make me break out in nervous hives. However my current life in not filled with anxiety. If money becomes a big issue, I will just go back to work. If things go wrong, I will just figure out how to fix it. It is a more practical mindset, and I enjoy and appreciate having it.
There are some things though that still make my heart race and fill my dreams with dread. Besides roaches, I mean. Even roaches don't inspire the venom in me that I used to emit, but something else does...people. Specifically strangers. I still really worry about meeting new people. I have terrible new person anxiety, and that has not improved much. It came to a head recently because I picked up my surfboard.
I hate making cold phone calls,. I loathe trying to sell anything. I love the anonimity of ebay and online catalogues where you don't have to actually know the person you are buying from. Why? Because people can be so random! You don't know when you might be trying to break the ice by making a little joke only to have it slice into a stranger's sore spot causing pain and humiliation everywhere. And then there are the people you just don't like. The ones you would cross the street to avoid on any given day or never talk to even in you were in the same long line. But now you are thrown together in a situation, and you just don't know how this is going to turn out.
So the surfboard, wisely, is pick-up only. So I have to go meet this person selling it to retrieve it. This brings out all my old anxieties. The only thing I have to go on is some amazingly poorly spelled emails and the sense of dignity one holds by being a buyer who has already paid. I had to go to a flea market to pick up the surfboard. Talk about a nightmare for anyone with stranger anxieties. My dreams had all been about arguments with these unnamed people with whom I must conduct business, ranging from haggling over price to the dreaded phrase "Oh, someone else already came to get it - its gone!" So when the day finally came to perform this errand, I was not very rested or calm.
However, I found the seller without a hitch, and retrieved the board which was the perfect size although not in the perfect condition as i hoped. It is going to need quite a bit of repair work. The good news is, I have all winter to do this! And it is not difficult work, just tedious, to sand all the dings, tape them off, and fill them with epoxy. The nose and the tail of the board are the worst, and I think I will actually have to re-fiberglass them to make them watertight. However, I am hopeful. Thanks to the internet and the knowledge of perfect strangers, I have seen blogs and youtube videos on exactly all the repairs I need to do. Hurray information age!
Now if I can just get out of meeting anybody else... Scratch that! I still have to buy the supplies to do the repairs!
The weird thing is that sometimes the strangers that you most fear are the ones that become your good friends. It is a magical transformation, like falling in love, where suddenly you just connect on a deeper level. You just 'get' each other and suddenly you are not so alone anymore. It is miraculous in my view that all the anxiety can just flush out like releasing a breath.

sneak peek

Here is your sneak peek for Halloween. Too much cuteness!