We’re on a boat!

A month ago I moved onto a houseboat at one of the marinas in my town on the San Francisco Bay. The boat doesn’t go anywhere, but it’s awesome. Moomin and I are now “liveaboards”. Here’s Moomin looking out of the hatch in his bedroom ceiling:

And me sitting on the bow, grinning:

We have two bedrooms, two tiny bathrooms, a living room, kitchen and eating area, and a sort of enclosed quarterdeck that’s like the porch. There’s also what Moomin has labelled the “useless pilothouse” in his cross-sectional diagram of the boat. Useless because the engine isn’t working!

There’s a pair of Western grebes that seems to live here, a grownup night heron, a grown pelican, and a young pelican that never catches any fish. Ducks and cormorants and coots hang out too. We’ve met some of the other people on our dock, but it’s been too cold and rainy to explore very much.

Grand plans are afoot to canoe or motorboat around in a dinghy when the weather’s nicer. We could explore Smith Slough, or try taking Moomin to Marine Science Camp in the summer by motorboat. We might start marking off the low and high tide points with pushpins on the pier outside on our finger dock, or try really fishing. So far though it’s only lounging, setting up house, and birdwatching!

Boats take a lot of maintenance and polishing. Carrying things on and off the boat is also a chore at low tide when the ramp is very steep from the parking lot down to the dock. So I think pretty soon… don’t tell Moomin… he’s going to have to do actual chores.

He just read “The Girl with the Silver Eyes”, a cool book which I highly recommend! Also, we saw Avatar. It had scary parts and there was a lot of horrible battle and death, and a lot of the political message was suspect as far as being a bit warmongering and white-people-go-save-everything colonialist, but was still an amazing movie.

I wrote more about living on a boat on another blog!

Moomin might join me in blogging soon, with his own photos and thoughts on books and movies and school.