It’s the View

Posted on Monday, September 12, 2016 by Dick

The St. John’s Club in Burlington has about the second best view on Lake Champlain because most members love looking at the lake but think it would be more better perfect if they could see the lake and the Green Mountains instead of the newer mountains in the adjoining state.

View of the Broad Lake from the St. John's Club

No matter.

It is indeed one of the great spots to watch the sun set on Lake Champlain and a favored place for weddings and receptions.

Ethan de Seife called the St. John’s Club, a Lakefront Club for the Average Joe and that’s praise indeed. The “social club” was a founded as a men-only laborers’ drinking hall by the Francophone mill workers of the Union St.-Jean-Baptiste about 150 years ago. It has owned its home on the lake since 1964. “Same-sex couples, dancing cheek to cheek, shared the floor with retirees, twenty-somethings, and clients and employees of the Howard Center,” Mr. de Seife wrote. “No single word describes the scene more aptly than ‘unpretentious’.” The club even has Friday karaoke nights, a regular event that welcomes nonmembers.

SWMBO married a couple there Saturday.

One of the guests asked how long she had been doing this. SWMBO counted on her fingers and realized that she’s been a Justice of the Peace for about 18 years; she stands for re-election again this fall.

Vermont’s first governor began his public life as a justice of the peace in Salisbury, Connecticut, before he bought a tract of land along the Onion River in what is now Williston, Vermont.

Today the JP serves as an election official, decides tax appeals, and swears in new voters and may administer other oaths whenever an oath is required. A justice of the peace is a notary public ex officio and may also serve as a magistrate when so commissioned by the Supreme Court. And they can perform marriage ceremonies.

SWMBO lost a close election about a decade ago when eight candidates ended up on the ballot. Fortunately, the governor may fill any vacancy that occurs by resignation, death, or insanity so then-Governor Jim Douglas reappointed her when that did happen.

Most of Vermont was under threat of rain as a frontal boundary approached and brought a pretty good chance of showers for the entire wedding afternoon and through the night. It coalesced into a thin band of rain that sent wind ahead of it and stalled until late that evening. A lightning bolt across the highway woke me about dawn on Sunday but the rain itself had held off until after the reception.

The wind came in early and blew over the arbor. SWMBO caught it. JPs have many mandatory duties.

Kids and grownups, university folk and service people, firemen and contractors, and even a meteorologist, all in ties and long dresses and long pants, as well as the taxi driver in shorts who came in very late attended the festivities.

During the rehearsal, the groom kept asking “Can I kiss her now?”

SWMBO waited until after the readings and a prayer to say to the groom, “Alright, you may now kiss … her hand.”

After the real kiss, the entire wedding party waded out across two sand bars for photos and laughter. Just so you know, I wore the shorts when I arrived to pick up the JP but I also wore my second best blue dress shirt. The bride’s parents invited me to stay.

Nice people, great spot, beautiful day, blessed event.

We love it when a plan comes together.

Obsession

Posted on Monday, August 29, 2016 by Dick

No, not the “perfume.” That crap makes my nose curl.

SWMBO complained that I was obsessing over trailers last night.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s what I do.”

I’m an engineer, not just because I went to school for it but moreso because I need to drill and chew and drill and chew to get the facts, find the data, figure out how something works. I do that with the news that is a staple of this column. I do it daily with the weather.

Weather is important to me, and not just for concerts. I have an old roof in South Puffin and a lot of grass to mow in North Puffin. I drive a car with no top. It also lets us remind ourselves that the modeling that makes the one-day Inaccuweather forecasts so wrong so often uses the same modeling as climatologists have to forecast out one century.

And lately I’ve chewed around the ankles of two different kinds of trailer houses.

Some back story. I don’t like to camp — I live on an island and I summer right on the sixth Great Lake in the middle of tree-filled lawn, so I don’t need a field with trees and ponds and beaches — but I like not having to set up in motel after motel after motel when I travel. Traveling, for me, means visiting, sightseeing, touristy stuff, photography, and working on the road. Photography and working on the road means a fair dinkum load of gear.

I’d like to go someplace, set up “camp,” and just visit and look and live there for a few days, then move a couple hundred miles and do it again.

The PTT
I also like to design and build things. Engineer, remember? I have long known that my design skills far exceed anyone who builds RVs for a living so my summer brainstorm is simple. Why not build the “camper” that purely, precisely, perfectly meets my travel needs. That becomes the Perfect Travel Trailer.

The PTT would be 6.5′ wide with a full length, four foot, power slide. That brings its towing width down to about that of the truck. Add a power mechanism to lower the top when it’s time to travel and the frontal area is suddenly no longer an air grabber. Inside the layout can be moderately conventional with about 300 square feet of floor space.

I’ve been working with composite materials all my life but I think I will build the shell in wood. It’s lighter and cheaper than steel and even than aluminum, both important, and can be pretty to look at. It’s also well within the grasp of my shop.

I had a layout ready, of course, when I stumbled upon this thirty-one foot long, 1977 Airstream Sovereign. It is pretty much gutted, ready for my PTT interior.

The Airstream search was a fluke but (maybe) a good one. If I can buy a shell for around the cost of building it, it means not having to source a flatbed trailer, not having to build and finish the shell, and still getting a layout I like. And Airstreams are nice looking. I don’t see much downside, other than fitting the interior through the door, if the fuel economy works out.

“How will you fit your desk and chair and all the stuff you usually carry with you? And SWMBO?” Liz Arden asked.

Number 1 Daughter has the answer. She is gung ho as long as she gets to design it.

“Just hold your horses. Some of these things have to be run past mom also. This is a project.” SWMBO said.

“Yeah, I’m not a fan of the ‘project’ aspect either. And yes, it would be a project that needs to be completely laid out before anything should start,” Number 1 daughter said. “But mommy, my girlfriend and I would love to decorate something for you as a surprise. Wouldn’t you love that, mommy?”

I am envisioning shabby chic here.

The desk’n’stuff will be done the same way I plan it for the PTT: I have in mind to do a Harper-bed (a Murphy bed concept but hinged for the space actually available) and have a shelf in the “bedroom” and a rolling desk chair that can come in there so I have a cave of my own.

Problem. Newbies typically keep their first camper for a year or two while they figure out what they really want.

Hmmm.

Choices
I built a spreadsheet so I could obsess on my 4-1/2 camperish choices:

Rebuild an Airstream
Buy some kind of ready-to-go Travel Trailer
Build the perfect Travel Trailer
Buy a Bus, meaning a Class C or Class A RV.

I suppose I could even add “Build the Perfect Bus” to the list. Nah.

Lots of advantages for each.

I like like the perfect layout and the cachet of the big Airstream but at least a year and more likely two to finish and 11-12 mpg.
I like the instant gratification of buying something ready-to-go but 10-11 mpg.
I like like like perfect layout and the “I did it” gratification of the PTT but at least a year and more likely two to finish. Maybe as much as 15-16 mpg.
I like the cellar space of a Class A as well as the added square footage upstairs but any repairs require a truck facility, it gets lousy mileage, and requires serious insurance.
I like the ability to repair of the Class C in a local garage but I’d need 30′ LOA to fit stuff in.

Then I thought about my To Do list.

If I want to do any travel this year or next, I need to stop thinking and simply buy some kind of ready-to-go Travel Trailer that allows me to crawl in and sleep in a parking lot. Or do a quickie conversion of an enclosed cargo trailer.

“I guess realistically you could ‘camp’ in a relatively bare but roadworthy shell,” SWMBO said. Note the emphasis on the “you.” And she figures it would be primitive… “The mattress-on-the-floor bed isn’t bad but cooking would be limited unless you had a working generator so you could nuke and hot-plate and have a portable propane grill. Working fridge is a must and you really need that to be propane unless you can find a fridge that runs from an inverter and lots of batteries.”

It finally occurred to me that I can carry a lot of stuff like the pantry and freezer in the truck that I’d planned to store (somewhere) in the trailer. Modern 60-something quart freezers take 5-6 amps at 12VDC so the truck can power that easily underway and a pair of 50Ah deep cycle house batteries would easily carry the trailer and freezer load overnight. Run the genny only for boondocking.

“Be nice if the bathroom worked,” SWMBO muttered.

Most 50s-60s campers and boats (and 50s-60s-70s-80s-maybe-90s Airstreams) were primitive. The beds were little more than a foam pad on the floor and cooking was limited although my mom did pretty darned well on a propane camp stove on the little boat and a two-burner alcohol stove on the Richardson. Shore power takes care of A/C, frig, nuke, water heater, and heck even an electric cooktop if you want. I will definitely go all-electric in the PTT and probably would do so even in a little tag along.

The Streams
I found a pair of 25′ Airstreams over in New Hampshire.

The first is a 1970. 46 years old. The major systems — converter, water heater, furnace, toilet — appear to work. Road debris shattered the curved, right front window. There is no a/c. All the roof vents are caulked. The seller wasn’t sure about the operation of the gray water tank. Cosmetics are poor. The shell is dull, not bright, aluminum and the plastic parts are brittle. The tambour doors are troublesome. The awning needs replacement.

The second, a 1973, is only 43 years old. Its water heater and furnace appear to work and someone replaced the converter with an inverter but it still doesn’t make 110 from 12v to run the frig. A/C is icy. The shell is nice, bright, aluminum and the rivet joints are sound. The plastic parts are brittle. The tambour doors are troublesome.

On inspection, I found that all aluminum Airstreams have a boatload of steel in them. Every bit of it is on these was well and truly rusted.

These trailers also have a boatload of room and storage, partly because the beds are so small. The bathroom in the ’70 is bigger than mine down south.

I like the ’70 layout better.

All in all, it was a good trip because I didn’t buy either of them. In fact, it would now take special circumstances for me to by a 60s or 70s trailer. Simply too many pieces parts are about to fail after that many years. I reckon I’d be comfortable after a frame-off restoration.

Wot to do, wot to do.

The Not So PTT
Now we get to the challenging part.

I still like to design and build things. Engineer, remember?

I can fit SWMBO and everything I have to carry and even an RV-size washer-dryer into a cargo trailer. There’s room for the three-esses, room to cook, room to sleep, room to poke a ‘puter. There is not room to change your mind.

It’s about a three-week build.

Dixon makes a decent 7×14 Cargo Trailer with windows, torsion axles, and a real plywood floor somewhere down there in Georgia. I’ve been watching the ads up here, though, because I have stuff to haul down from here that would be a lot easier and safer to do with a cargo trailer. In fact, just Saturday, SWMBO saw a nice (used) frig and said, “Don’t you need a refrigerator with a bottom freezer down there?”

The only reason this project works is because I want a cargo trailer because I somehow keep hauling crap around. So. Room for cargo.

Note that I am well aware that either this $5-10,000 solution or the PTT will still take two years to build and cost me twice as much in twice as much gas as just driving, all so I can save $30-40/night on motel rooms and sleep in a Walmart parking lot for free!

Stay tuned.

Boats

Posted on Monday, August 22, 2016 by Dick

I got to reminiscing about our first boat when I was a kid.

My dad worked for Scott Paper all the time I was growing up. His first office was in the Export Sales Department’s little brick building in the parking lot of the Chester plant. He was working there the day he bought a little 21′ cabin cruiser which has about as much cabin space as a walk-in closet and the ambiance of a gym locker. Campers and boats were so much simpler then.

I think of that boat as pretty old but she wasn’t all that old when we got her in about 1956.

Much, much later, we discovered it was a Chris Craft kit boat. The pictured 21′ 1953 Day Cruiser is pretty similar in layout but much nicer in finish. My almost-60-year-old memory is that our boat was all plywood, not planked, and all painted, no brightwork, and I remember her having either a Willys or a Gray Marine 60HP 4-cylinder inboard.

Looking in the cabin door in photo #3, you can see a half-wall bulkhead on the starboard side and most of the port v-berth. What you can’t see is the alcohol fueled stove and the 5-gallon water jug abaft the port bunk nor the red, steel-sided Coleman cooler my mom sat on while cooking.

I still have and use that wonderful cooler.

No standing headroom for us and you had to get up to go, since the head was actually a waxed paper bag in a porcelain bucket that lived under the port bunk. That was a fire drill since my folks slept on the bunks and I slept on an air mattress on the deck between them.

Chris Craft claimed that between 1950 and 1958 they shipped 93,000 boat kits (!), in 13 different models from 8-31 feet long.

Ours was the first “MARCHA,” a contraction of my folks’ names, Mary and Chan. Some years later, in the second MARCHA, we met a couple living aboard a boat named “CHAMAR.” That was a contraction of their names, Chan and Mary. Still, she has always been the “little boat” in the family.

This story is less about the boat and more about how little info and how few photos Google was able to find about those wonderful Chris Craft kit boats. If any loyal reader has photos of a 21-foot plywood Chris from about 1953, send them along!

The little boat lived in the Delaware River at a boatyard in Essington because it was close to his office. He could run down there and putter on his lunch break. That was before I had glasses, so I didn’t see much of our travels but I do remember running out of gas in the shipping lane one summer evening. My dad flagged down the Chester-Bridgeport Ferry and they actually towed us in!

She was a good first boat. We kept her for a couple of years until my mom got tired of sitting on the cooler or standing in the companionway to cook. Truth, I figured she was tired of rousting everyone so she could pee in a paper bag.

I hope that little boat fared even better than this project I found on the Interwebs:

I Love It When a Plan Comes Together

Posted on Monday, August 1, 2016 by Dick

Sometimes you just can’t plan for nights like this. Another North Puffin tale.

Jazz mesmerized our North Puffin Town Park last night as we continued the 26th year of free outdoor concerts with Jenni Johnson and the Jazz Junketeers.

The forecast called for a pretty good chance of rain across Vermont last evening. That’s a bad thing for an outdoor concert.

I obsessed over the radar yesterday as I do but we got lucky: it was clear and sunny all day. The rain had gotten only as far north as Ticonderoga by 5 p.m. and was pretty well trapped between Route 2 and Route 4 (the central third of Vermont) for the later afternoon and evening. By the time the concert ended, it was still raining in southern New England but the Vermont rain had pushed across New Hampshire into Maine. I figured there was a small chance we’d get a little from the storms coming up the Adirondacks but we didn’t even get that although there is finally some light rain here as I write this.

That should be enough for a great evening but wait! There’s more!

An international entertainer, Jenni has sung jazz, blues, and funk since her own teen days in New York City. She spent the 1980s on musical projects in Houston and Boston including her own Billie Holiday Story. She launched her Jazz Junketeers in 1989 to sing the jazz and blues standards by her favorite African-American artists. Now she remains an active touring artist who has played more of our Summer Sounds concerts — and picked on me more — than any other performer.

During the first set, I spotted Verne Colburn in the audience. Verne was the longtime director of Bellows Free Academy music, an incredible Jazz pianist, and beloved in northwestern Vermont. He turned 80 in April. I popped onto the stage (we’re very informal here in North Puffin) and asked Jenni to throw a song out to him.

Jenni did what Jenni does. “Verne is in the house,” she sang and she kept doing it until he came up on stage. Turns out he and Jenni’s keyboard player, Kent Baker, are old friends, so Kent turned the keys over and Verne soloed with the band on Fly Me to the Moon.

As an aside, Verne has played for every Cardiac Capers hospital benefit since the beginning and hopes to again this Fall.

Oh. You want more?

Last season, we started introducing the musicians who will create the future of Summer Sounds. These young performers are our opening acts or, as last night, our “middle acts.”

Jaylin Seaman took over the mic for a short set of modern songs as well as a couple of show tunes and wowed the crowd again.

“That girl is headed to Broadway,” Jenni said.

Yeppers. Jaylin plays Helen in Dream at the Spotlight Black Box Theater starting next week. Based on Shakespear’s romantic comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Dream is a magical musical retelling but set in present day Central Park, New York City. It features Broadway’s Robi Hager and members of the Vermont Musical Theater Academy.

Local community groups host our concerts with a social that usually includes munchies, grilled foods, or desserts. Last night Taylor Hall led an MVUHS group raising funds for a school trip to the presidential inauguration. They had a new table of actual food. I smartly extracted a promise that they would take no tomatoes to Washington, though.

Two of Jenni’s “Junkettes” closed the show with Jenni on Mustang Sally. The Junkettes are four of Highgate’s own young people who have grown up dancing and singing to Jenni’s performances here. Here they are in 2009.

Now they’re all growed up and in college.

Nope. Can’t plan for a night like that.

Love Affairs Gone Bad

Posted on Monday, June 27, 2016 by Dick

Welcome to this week’s Puffin Tales Advice to the Lovelorn column.

BOOTY CALL
Live Science tells us that, “In firefly mating rituals, the males cruise by, flying around and flashing their signals to let the ladies know that they are looking for love.”

The male lightning bugs fly about three-four feet off the ground while the ladies recline on a grass boudoir. Out here in the country, there are a lot of flashing green lights, in part as the horny males ramp up their offerings but also to mark territory and push of the competition. Once a lady sees the best male’s light, flashes just once. Once the male sees the response, he wastes no time dive-bombing the bower of bliss.

Last night, a male lightning bug outside my study window was fighting off the green light on the router for the affection of the pretty female lightning bugs on the ground.

I don’t know who won.

MIRROR CALL
The house in North Puffin is in the middle of a dinosaur preserve and I’m convinced that dinosaurs were the most annoying critters to walk the earth. Until they evolved into mocking birds.

Did you know the Northern Mockingbird is the direct descendent of T-Rex? Fact. “The Northern Mockingrex is a medium-sized noisemaker, a bit more slender than a thrush and with a longer tail. Mockingbirds have small heads, a long, thin bill with a hint of a downward curve, and long legs. Their wings are short, rounded, and broad [much like their predecessor’s arms], making the tail seem particularly long in flight,” according to allaboutbirds.org

The mini-rex “enjoys making its presence known. It usually sits conspicuously on high vegetation, fences, eaves, or telephone wires, or runs and hops along the ground. Found alone or in pairs throughout the year, mockingbirds aggressively chase off intruders on their territory.”

We have a small army of them in South Puffin; the numbers are far greater than a squad or platoon and may approach brigade strength. Some of them have fallen in love with the mirrors on my truck.

Sadly, mockingbird love is abusive.

All of these birds land on the mirrors and peck at them, over and over and over.

I can only be glad that the mockingrex is so much smaller than the original. Those mirrors are expensive to replace.

COOLER CALL
A little skunk with its tail in the air fell in lurve with my big, Styrofoam, Omaha Steaks cooler on the porch in North Puffin.

Don’t get me wrong. An Omaha Steaks is a joy — the best cooler I own for taking frozen food back and forth between the Puffins — so the skunk had good taste.

The cooler was empty and washed out.

The skunk was beating and biting and scratching away on the lower outside corner of the cooler. Moved that cooler all around the porch and made a heck of a racket. I heard it all the way in the study where I was watching lightning bugs.

I turned the porch light on. Skunk kept killing the cooler. I flashed and waggled the flashlight. Skunk kept bouncing the cooler. I opened the door and barked. Skunk kept eating the cooler.

I won, though. I opened the door and pulled the cooler into the house.

The skunk ran off between the trash cans but I don’t know how he got on or off the porch. Unrequited love is bad enough but it’s worse when the object of your affection gets snatched by a noisy, woofing giant.

No Puffin Perspective™

Most excellent shines and whines

Category Archives: Puffin Tales

It’s the View

Obsession

Boats

I Love It When a Plan Comes Together

Love Affairs Gone Bad