Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Trip to Block Island.

I'm back for the the day and then I am off again tomorrow until after Labor Day. I put the pictures in an album because there were just so many of them.

It was a fun week. Barry, dad and myself slept on the boat on Wednesday night and took off the next morning at first light. It was an excellent trip on the ocean and we felt lucky to have blue sky and just a light breeze the entire way. We were anchored in Block Island at 7 P.M. and had a dinner in town. It was a little surreal to be in Block for the first time on 6 years. Our biggest glitch was the dinghy engine wouldn't start. I was confident we would get it fixed but dad felt we needed to go back.

The entire next day we set about fixing things on the boat. First issue was to get the engine on the dinghy to work. I had to walk into town and get new spark plugs. I lso grabbed a can of starting fluid... which did the trick. Only bad thing was I put my back in spasm. It is still sore.

All the repairs got done. I could tell my dad felt a little frustrated at first that these things weren't done already. There was the usual bickering but we got over it. I must say we laughed a little every day.

But it's also really hard sometimes to see my dad struggle. He's had emphesema and then last January we found out he has colon cancer. He is doing far better than we have a right to expect, but he is also looking older every time I see him. He doesn't ever want it to show that he can't do what he's always done, especially to us, his kids. We want to do things for him to make life easier but then that can just cause more friction. So we all search for that middle ground and it's a moving target we look for everyday.

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