Marina Life and a Broken Foot

Living in a boat in a marina has its ups and downs.  We have the daily things to watch living in a basically industrial setting like tugboats towing barges full of shavings down the river (I believe they end up at the paper mill in Port Townsend), rail cars taking a rest on their route from the coal mines of Colorado to the loading dock in Tsawwassen British Columbia (where I expect the coal is shipped to China), oil cars bringing raw crude from the middle of the country to the refinery in Anacortes, and more and more work as the Port of Everett works to change much of the shoreline into a people friendly place after decades of being the industrial hub of the city.  Early this month as part of their project the Port of Everett moved the historic Weyerhaeuser Headquarters Building from out on the main street to its (hopefully) final location (after 2 previous moves) in a park directly across from our slip.

We get gorgeous sunrises and sunsets.

And we get the challenges of living in a non-standard living location. 

Clarice was going down one of the sets of steps on the boat and lost her concentration while calling the dog to bed.  She lost track of where she was and missed a step with the result being two fractured metatarsal bones in her foot.  She has been told NO ("and that means NO!") weight bearing on that foot for at least 6 weeks.  

To make it worse, this happened about 4 days before our daughter and her 3 children were scheduled to make their annual pilgrimage back to the Pacific Northwest from Ontario, Canada.  Whereas Clarice normally looks forward to having "Grandma Time" with the kids playing games, cooking, playing in boats, and playing on the beach but she instead is finding that she needs rest times when she has the children by herself as moving around the boat on knees and crutches is exhausting before adding the challenges of 3 energetic little ones.

On the positive side we have once again been reminded that floating friends are really really good friends.  A quick walk around the dock the evening before I had to go to a 12 hour shift the next day ended up with several promises (which were kept) from fellow boaters that they would entertain the kids while she rested.  I ran into a woman from our yacht club at the local marine hardware who offered to help with housework and / or shopping (Clarice took her up on the shopping offer when we were running out of fruit and milk with 3 hungry kids running around). Today a neighbor stopped in and asked if she needed anything while she was at the store and a loaf of sandwich bread appeared.  

More to come as we are expecting our son -in-law and a niece to arrive the day after tomorrow with a 4  day cruise to the San Juan Islands planned for next week.  One day at a time.