If a guy held a banana to my head and said that it was my family or the holiday, then the choice would be clear. I’d sadly call my airline to cancel…their seats. And then go on my own and have a great time, leaving them to their slippery banana fate. Because, well, uh, holidays are awesome. Every year I try to push things with work to see how much time they’ll give me off; it’s become our little game, where I’m the only one having fun.
I’d get a note from the doctor, but my stupid local GP refuses to accept that ‘soaking up rays’ qualifies as a medical need. If only I’d been born with some kind of vitamin-D deficiency…lucky jerks. This year I thought I’d actually do something a bit more dramatic, so I’ve signed myself up for Shanty Joe’s School of Seafaring, a long weekend of fun, foam and learning to perform outboard motor repairs, Melbourne style, yeah. I get all the sun I could possibly want, and I’ll be learning something new. A lot of new things, in fact. ALL of the new things. So long as they’re things to do with boats. The syllabus says we have to basically learn to fix everything on the boat by the end, from the bait boards to the winch that hoists up the anchor that I think is called an anchor winch, but that’s going out on a limb.
There’s a whole afternoon on anchor winches, followed by ‘shanty practice’ in the evening and then ‘hoisting the mainsail, yarr’ before we go to bed. So I think I’ll be kept pretty busy, but also, it’s just a silly fun thing so I’m guessing we’ll have plenty of free time to chill and work on tans and such. How hard can all that stuff be? There are outboard motor repair mechanics in Melbourne all the time, and they get by just fine. Maybe they all went to Shanty’s Joe’s. Or maybe they all wish they went to Shanty Joe’s.
-Vivi