We submitted an offer on the Morgan 382 in Milwaukee… and the seller accepted.

(!!!)

My excitement is on a low simmer. The boat’s not ours…yet. Kirk and I have been through plenty of real estate transactions to know a sale isn’t a sale until everyone has signed on the dotted line. The boat still needs a survey (inspection), then the closing. They whole rigamarole is scheduled to take about a month. Fingers crossed.

We’re ready. Mostly. It feels like life is ramping up now just as we’re about to close on the boat. Kirk’s getting busier with work. Along with several web projects in various stages of implementation, he’s organizing a video shoot that’s happening in Moab, Utah, the first week of May, for which I’ll be freelancing as a photographer. We’re both pretty stoked on the trip, and are planning to fly out early and hike around Arches and Canyonlands NPs.

Jack, the current owner of the boat, will return to Wisconsin mid-May, after spending his winter in Florida. At that point we’ll have about a month, maybe six weeks, to do all the work the boat needs before the marina kicks us out of winter storage and into the water. Jack has offered to finish some of the woodworking projects, and advise us on the additional plumbing projects that still remain.

Neither Kirk nor I know much about boat maintenance. Kirk’s house-handy, but working on boat systems is like working on house systems that have been pretzeled and smooshed into a shoebox. Kirk’s nowhere near taking on any boat project with confidence.

Yet, he’s good at figuring things out. One day, while living in Oceanside, our washing machine nearly went up in smoke. It screeched something horrible during a spin cycle, then shuddered to a stop. Kirk usually can figure out how to fix small appliance-type things, or at least figure out a workable hack. The washing machine was just a bit larger than what he was used to, and without a probable theory for its current defective state, the machine sat.

He just needed to get over his mental hurdle. Just a little push…which ultimately came from my mounting guilt from overusing our friends’ machine. Ours had been broken for four months. “I can’t ask Hadley even one more time,” I told him. “I’m calling a repair guy.”

“No, don’t,” said Kirk. He hates shelling out for things he thinks he can do himself.

And he did. He figured out the machine needed a new motor, ordered one online, and installed it in an afternoon. We turned it on, and the damn thing worked.

“You fixed it!” I said.

“I did, didn’t I.” He grinned.

“See? A boat will be just like this.”

“Ha, right.”

Suppose we’ll find out soon enough.

Fingers crossed.