Blame it on Barry and the bandsaw.

The morning after the kittens were almost born on Charlie’s head, Barry trotted over to Charlie’s trailer and asked to use the bandsaw. When he fired it up, Momma Kitty looked at him askance. Her eyes seemed to say, “What the heck do you think you’re doing? You’re hurting my kittens’ ears!” Never mind the fact that five hours after being born, the kittens’ ears were still stuck flat to their heads.

The next morning, I stopped to see Charlie and the kittens. “We have a kitten crisis,” he told me. “She took one of them away.” We looked at the cat and one remaining kitten sadly. RIP, I thought. Momma Kitty seemed more attached to Charlie and John and Barry and me than to her kitten. “Maybe if you sleep with her tonight, instead of on the boat, she won’t abandon the last one…” I suggested, hesitantly. I hated to ask that of Charlie, but he’s a hero. “I’ll do that,” he said, brightly.

The next morning, I stopped by, and it was deja vu all over again. “We have a kitten crisis,” he said. “She slept with me all night, but she took the other one away this morning. I tried to follow her, but she knew I was tailing her (har, har) and gave me the slip.”

I was a little more successful at tailing her, and I found where she’d stashed the kitten — under the back seat of John’s conversion van, which he’d left open to keep it cool and aired out.

This created a whole new set of problems. In order to buy groceries or do laundry, John needed to drive his van. But it was 100 degrees that day. If he carted the cats to Beaufort and locked his doors, he’d have two roasted cats under the rear seat. And if he did so without Momma Kitty on board, she’d be frantic while he was gone.

Then Barry went back to use the bandsaw. “What was that squeak?” he asked Charlie. I guess he thought one of Charlie’s power tools needed oiling.

Charlie couldn’t think of any power tools that made that sound. So they dug into a huge pile of toolboxes under a bunch of cabinets and found the source — the other kitten!

The family was reunited in John’s van, and then my slippery path to sainthood began. Nancy Bock and I looked all over the boatyard for a place to relocate the cats. But nothing seemed right. Finally, Barry and I decided to cat-nap the three of them and put them on our boat for the time being.

We walked over to John’s van with a large plastic tote, and Barry put on a fleece sweater in case Momma Kitty tried to scratch or bite. But she didn’t. He gently lifted her out, and she sat docilely in his arms as I put her two squeaky kittens in the tote. Then we walked across the boatyard, carried them up the ladder, and put the tote into a cozy, defensible spot in the quarterberth. Momma Kitty did a quick lap of the boat, proclaimed it acceptable, and climbed into the quarterberth to resume nursing.

It’s been a few days, and Momma Kitty now goes by the name, “Buttercup,” because of her sunflower-yellow eyes and her princess status. The two kittens haven’t been named; we call them the wiggle-worms. At one week old, their eyes are not yet open, although they do have ears now.

It’s a happy story, except for one thing — I have two weeks to find a place for them. My attempts to place the little group with a foster family, no-kill animal shelter, or permanent home have been unsuccessful. I have made numerous calls, posted ads, and sent emails. But if you are an animal, Carteret County is not the place for you! The Humane Shelter here is referred to as a “high-kill” facility.

The few volunteers in the area who work to save pets are desperately overloaded. I call their message phones, and most call back from restricted numbers. “We can’t help you,” they say. “We have too many cats already.” If I was the praying sort, I’d be praying for help about now.

So we’ll keep looking, and in the meantime, we’ll enjoy this snuggly, docile kitty and her two wiggle-worms. If you don’t want a pet permanently, let me suggest that you foster a cat or dog, wherever you are! I can’t tell you how rewarding this is. When these kittens open their eyes — tomorrow or the next day, I hope — what will they see first? Momma? Me? Barry? Or the underside of the quarterberth? They’re sure to think that living on a boat is a natural thing, so we’d better get them settled in a house soon, or they’ll be ruined forever. Just like me.

I was puttering around this morning, thinking of our new friend from Ohio, Charlie, and how it might be fun to start a drinking club here for Ohio expats. This may come as a surprise to our Seattle friends, who don’t even know about our Ohio roots. But as one astute friend said, growing up in Columbus, Ohio inspires long-distance travel.

Just then, Barry came back to the boat with a piece of nicely-shaped teak in his hand. He’d been over at Charlie’s trailer, using the bandsaw to shape a new piece of toe rail.

“Remember the cat that was hanging around Charlie’s trailer last night?” he asked. “She had kittens … on Charlie’s bed.” I grabbed the camera and headed over to see.

Charlie showed up last weekend to do some work on his boat, and everything about his rig — truck and trailer — shouted “BUCKEYE!” There were the Ohio license plates, the Columbus address on his trailer, and the bright red folding chairs with “Ohio State” stenciled on them in white 4-inch letters.

Barry and I, on the other hand, own two Ohio State t-shirts that we only use for painting and epoxy work, because we’re embarrassed by them. No other OSU paraphernalia — we’re very reluctant alumni. Sure, it’s a good school, but some people take the team spirit thing too far. When I lived in Columbus, I worked with a woman who dressed in scarlet and gray on Fridays during football season. I remember that this included a jumper with one gray knee sock and one scarlet one, an OSU sweatshirt, and a giant necklace made of buckeyes. And she hadn’t even gone to Ohio State, nor did she have football tickets!

Despite my reluctance to advertise my Buckeye affiliation, I had to get to know Charlie. We spent a couple of evenings hanging out around his trailer and talking, and discovered that he’s really interesting, and easy to talk to. He’s got a gigantic steel boat that’s trying to rust faster than he can get it in the water. The boat was such a mess, he’d been sleeping in the trailer. But he’s gotten the boat cleaned up, and last night, he said that would be his last one sleeping in the trailer — he was planning to sleep in the boat tonight.

Charlie has a really central location, right by the Travelift. The first time we’d hung out at his trailer, there had been a strange, friendly dog hanging around. Last night, when we stopped to talk, it was a cat, instead. She was orange and white and incredibly thin. She was very snuggly, rubbing against our legs and pushing her head on our hands to be petted. Charlie fed her some tuna, and she followed us back to our boat and we gave her cat food. But Flutterby’s two feral cats made her unwelcome, and there was a bit of yowling and cat-fighting under the boat last night. When I got up this morning, she wasn’t around.

After Barry’s announcement, I found Charlie standing outside his trailer, smoking a cigarette and looking a bit dazed. “I’m a Daddy!” he said.

During the night, the little cat had come into his trailer and climbed up on his head. Charlie likes cats, and has a couple of them at home. But he wasn’t going to have this strange cat sleeping on his head. So he moved her down to his feet and went back to sleep. When he woke, she was still at his feet, nursing two tiny kittens.

Charlie’s got a bit of a dilemma — he and his trailer, and the kittens’ bed, are going back to Ohio next week. In the meantime, he’s going to be sleeping on the boat and wondering what to do with three cats that he didn’t have yesterday.

On a May day between my birthday and Barry’s, we were sitting out in the cockpit, enjoying the shade of our beautiful bimini top and eating a mid-morning snack. As usual, the cockpit was a mess, full of tools and parts, which included a pile of teak scraps on top of the refrigerator. They’d been removed from someone else’s boat, so they all had bolt-holes through them, but the bolts had been taken out.

A little wasp, black with white stripes, flew over and landed on the pile. She looked around, selected one of the holes, and climbed in. A moment later, she flew away.

To my credit, I didn’t scream or jump around or do any of the hysterical things I normally do around insects. I simply picked up the piece of teak and studied the two tiny green caterpillars she’d left, now exposed on top of the fridge. “Nice of her to bring us a little gift, but I don’t think we need these,” I said, flicking them onto the ground and cleaning up the pile of wood. When she came back, she walked around for a while, confused, then left us another couple of caterpillars before leaving for good.

The next gift to arrive was even more remarkable and a lot more tasty.

At his gym in Vero Beach, Florida, my Dad met a retiree named Carlo. The conversation turned to Carlo’s passion, making sausage. “What? You haven’t tried my sausage? I’ll bring you some!” After his retirement, Carlo was at loose ends, so his kids and grandkids talked him into making sausage, something he’d done as a child with his Sicilian grandfather. It was so successful that it turned into a business. Now he makes and sells Carlo’s Lean Sicilian Sausage at the local Saturday market, and he also packs it in dry ice and ships it all over the country.

When the package arrived, the first thing we got excited about was the dry ice! We put chunks of it in water and giggled at the bubbles and the smoking effect, and Barry even put it in a drink. Then we fired up the  barbecue.

This stuff is magic! It’s full of flavor, but so finely ground that it melts in your mouth without the greasy feeling you usually get from sausage. I said it was the best sausage I’ve eaten. Barry said, “Yummy!”

And it was a lot tastier than the caterpillars would have been.

The next day, when Barry woke up on his birthday, he had a whole pile of presents. Being the hard worker he is, he spent the entire day doing electrical work on the boat, and he didn’t open any of them until evening, when Val and John came by for a piece of birthday pie. When he came up the ladder, Val had a big box under his arm and a shit-eating grin.

There’s a little back story to this one. Whenever a bunch of boaters get together, certain exciting topics  always come up in conversation. These include: 1. Cheap places to cruise, 2. Expensive places to cruise, 3. Marine toilets (this always seems to come up during dinner), and 4. Bedding compounds.

Val is a  proponent of 3M 5200, a polyurethane caulk with extremely strong adhesive properties. Barry and I prefer 3M 101, which is a low-adhesion polysulfide caulk, or butyl rubber, which comes on a roll and is also low-adhesion. After a glass of wine aboard Kuhelli one evening, the two of them got into an argument about it, and the fur really flew! Everyone was looking at Val and Barry, wondering if they were going to see a fistfight over bedding compounds.

That night, when Barry and I got home, I commented on the argument. He laughed, and said, “I’m sure Val knows that arguing with an engineer is like wrestling with a pig. Everybody gets dirty, but the pig likes it.”

So when Barry opened his birthday gift from Val, he found a cylindrical object with the following instructions:

FLUTTERBY EMERGENCY KIT
Open in case of a leak from other sealant that gave up. This will happen sooner than you think!!!!
WARNING!!!
This is powerful stuff. Make sure when you use it you line up the pieces correctly, because after it cures, there is no known way to remove it. Why would you remove it if the pieces are perfectly lined up? Not because of a leak. That I am sure.

We were practically rolling in laughter when Barry pulled out the tube of 5200, which had been further labeled “EMERGENCY USE ONLY ON FLUTTERBY.”

It just didn’t seem like there was any way to top such a perfect birthday gift. But wait, there’s more!

A week before Barry’s birthday, we’d gone to the Beaufort Music Festival and gotten hooked on a new band, an alternative group called Bombadil. Our favorite song is called Jelly Bean Wine, which we’ve been playing over and over (you can hear it on their MySpace page, about the 5th song down). Since I have an interest in wine-label design, I decided to create some Jelly Bean Wine for Barry’s birthday. I picked up a bottle of Arbor Mist, which tastes like this generation’s version of Tickle Pink (don’t ask how I know). They take cheap wine, add corn syrup and kool-aid flavoring, and sell it like real wine with a screw cap. It’s the only wine you can buy in the gas station (don’t ask how I know).

My label involved a photo of jelly beans that I ran through the “spin” filter in Photoshop. Under the photo was the line from the song: “Perfect for a Sunday morning hangover.”

It’s great as a piece of art. I’m not sure what would induce him to drink it. If he ever does, I’ll let you know.

Most people don’t get a that many birthday presents, let alone such creative and thoughtful ones. But all of these presents paled in comparison to the large, flat, mysterious box that came from Columbus, Ohio. We’d been waiting for Barry’s birthday to open it, but his sister told us, “It’s to both of you! Go ahead and open it.”

Inside, we found a Monopoly game. We looked at each other, puzzled. We knew that the Millers, parents and kids, love to play Monopoly, but how did they know we didn’t have the game? And where would we put it?

Then Barry lifted the lid and took out the board and exclaimed something like “Holy buckets!” (Notice that I said *like* “Holy buckets!” because Barry doesn’t actually say “Holy buckets!” it’s just more interesting that “Omigod!” which is probably what he did say. Or maybe he said, “Wow!” and I said, “Omigod, holy buckets!”)

We bent our heads over the most amazing game board we’d ever seen. In the center were caricatures of the two of us, dressed as pirates, superimposed on the name of the game, Meps-n-Barryopoly. Each location on the board is a place we have been to and written about — Arkansas, Crater Lake, North Carolina, Portugal, Brazil, the Bahamas. Instead of going to “jail,” our set says “go to house,” and the two most valuable properties, instead of Boardwalk and Park Place, are Seattle and Burning Man, our favorite places in the world. The game pieces are sculptures of us and our teddy bears, and the cards are completely re-written to reflect our travel adventures. Even the play money is replaced with Bear Bucks, complete with Frankie the Bear’s head on them.

It was the most marvelous thing I had ever seen.

A day later, when we went to play it, though, we discovered one thing absent from the box: The rules. With our friend Dick, we wracked our brains to remember how to play, and finally reverted to the phone. We admitted to Julie that we loved our present, but didn’t know what to do with it! So she put Barry’s nephew Emanuel on the phone, and he gave us detailed instructions as only an 8-year-old can.

It was a marathon game, lasting until almost 3 am, when we all collapsed from exhaustion. Evidently, there are different ways to play Monopoly, and some take longer than others. If you play by the official rules, the game is only supposed to last about 90 minutes!

One day, we’ll get this boat out cruising, and we’ll stop at Vero Beach to meet Carlo, thank my Dad, and play Meps-n-Barryopoly while we drink a toast with Jelly Bean Wine and watch our 5200 cure. But first, maybe another little road trip? We need to go up to Ohio and thank Julie and Cody and Emanuel and Gabriel personally!

(Pictures of the Monopoly set are below. I made ‘em big, so you can read the hilarious cards!)

My apologies for not writing much lately. I have a couple of excuses –

1 – We’ve gotten totally hooked by a podcast and blog at NPR called Planet Money. These guys do a fantastic job of tracking down stories about what’s going on in the economy, and more importantly, why. Last weekend, we were driving down State Route 24 here in North Carolina when I saw a sign that tickled my funny bone: “Free boat! With homesite purchase.”

“We have got to take a picture of that when we come back tomorrow!” I said to Barry. Unfortunately, the following day was drizzly, which made it harder to take photos from the Squid Wagon. Barry managed a U-turn (a feat that requires a road the width of a football field) and we figured out which window could roll down and then (more importantly) roll back up again, stuck the camera out, hit the shutter button, and then said, “Thank God for Photoshop!”

I submitted the photos to the Planet Money blog with a note, where they’ve been publishing images illustrating “Half Built America.” It got published today — check it out!

2 – Speaking of websites, we spent a couple of months swearing at different web browsers, then launched a website for the boatyard we call home, Bock Marine. For those of you who have been complaining about how few photos I’ve published, many of the ones on their site are mine, so you can see where we are. We definitely feel like family here!

That’s it for this week’s excuses. I have a much funnier essay ready for you, but the pictures blew up and have to be re-shot. That part’s not funny.