Day Thirty Six- 2/5/11 Trying to Build a Ship in a Bottle

Day Thirty Six: 2/5/11
New Thing: Trying to build a ship in a bottle   
Inspiration: Connie, Dana
Cost: $0 (The kit cost about $7 on sale, but it was a gift from Connie- Thanks!!)
Time: A little over two hours
Bottom Line: Shipwrecked.

How hard could it be?  Answer: Extremely.

Reflection: When I was about 4 or 5 years old, my father snapped his Achilles tendon during a basketball game. This injury is a very serious one which takes months to recover. During that time, the injured have to keep their foot in a cast and put absolutely no weight on the foot. Now, Dad was and is a very active person who made his living as a forester. This meant that he was accustom to walking miles in the woods everyday as well as participating in all kinds of sports (skiing, hiking, soccer, and, well, basketball for example).

Trying to fight off sea-madness.

To say that this recovery was hard for my father is an understatement--he went a little crazy. Dad is not a very good patient, preferring to "buckle down and push through" (a phrase which should have been put onto our family crest) an injury to rather then recuperate according to what some "doctor" might "prescribe" after "years of study" of "medical science." He once went an entire year with a broken elbow rather than go to the doctor. I remember wondering why it was that he was hiking in a long sleeves in the middle of the summer. When I asked him about it, he rolled up his sleeve to show me what had at one point might have been called an elbow, but by then had swelled to the size of a lemon and was beyond recognition. "It's not that bad," he lied. "What are they going to do, put me in a cast?"

It was particularly bad for him in the winter months of that year when the wet snow made it impossible for him to cheat and try to go to work in the woods. During that time, he tried to take up new hobbies that he could do while trapped in the house. The ultimate moment of this winter-madness was when he built a model ship. He named this proud little dinghy the "Dana" and to this day, I joke that he had hoped that it would sail him away.

The HMS Hillary in all her glory.

Well, today was another wet, cold and icy one and I was feeling a little bit of "winter-madness" myself. So, I decided to follow my father's lead and give ship building a try by employing a "Build a Ship in a Bottle" kit that my mother-in-law Connie recently bought me. I confess that I was lured in by the description which read: "With this handsome kit, you can uncover the pride and pleasure of building your own beautiful ship in a bottle by recreating the oldest commissioned ship afloat in the world: the USS Constitution." The brilliance of this kit, so I thought, is that the ship is made out of paper, so I would not actually have to build a wooden boat. "I can do this," I though. "Just call me Capt. Hillary." And so, I set sail and build the matchless USS Constitution.

Yet, I knew a bad sea was rising when directions were written in nautical terms. I kid you not, this is a line from the directions: "Insert the tab of the spanker into the mizzenmast." What the what?! However, despite the picture above, the little boat did not look too poorly before I tried to put her into the bottle. But, into the bottle, she did go, and that is where she ran afoul. Try as I might, I could not make her sea-worth again, and so she went down in glory to a watery grave.  Here ends the Captain's Log.

Good thing we made room on the mantle for that empty bottle.