My head is spinning from reading David’s last post on our lighting/electrical needs. LOL. I’m very happy with how our Perko lights have been modified by David so that we now have custom LED lights in them. Tom, Mahdee’s previous owner, had picked up about a dozen of these really pretty chrome-over-bronze cast lights with lovely glass diffusers. The high quality is amazing and we learned that they’re no longer available from Perko. The new ones are all plastic. We really didn’t want to use just 12V incandescent bulbs and the only company making the very small/short 12V compact fluorescent bulbs, which would fit the fixture, is in England and they won’t import to USA. The typical LED bulb is situated so it would have been pointing “sideways” to the diffuser–that was all wrong! LOL. Luckily, David discovered a Hong Kong source of LED’s and drivers so he could solder together a circuit that works perfectly for us. David has installed a couple of these on the boat’s overhead and now will have to order more parts to wire the remaining Perko fixtures.

I managed to sprain my ankle badly about a month ago and amazingly, I’m just now getting to the point of being able to do things without pain. The doc had me with foot up in the air, crutches, and no weight (ha!) on it for 2 weeks. Since then I’ve had an ankle support to keep it stable. It has provided excellent excuse for me to ignore a lot of physical activity. I did a bit of sewing but nothing which would involve real physical effort. This was a great excuse to avoid “other” projects here.

Now, onto more projects which require climbing about in high places and exerting oneself…David’s project activities prompt me to consider varnishing the overhead before he installs more fixtures. It presently has a sealant called Woodlife which protects the Alaskan Yellow Cedar without making it shiny or darkening it. However, we need a more permanent sealant. Varnish, oil, shellac, urethane are the choices. The first three are renewable, the last is well … plastic. Easiest is tung oil and that is what I’ve been treating the overhead in the stateroom with. However, even with the Woodlife sealant on the AYC, it really pulls in a lot of oil. It provides a flat sheen which I like but it can pick up dirt so I’m not sure it is the right finish for the galley or main saloon areas anyway. I varnished the AYC on the ceiling elsewhere in the boat and like the warm yellow tone so that is the direction I’m going in now for our overhead.

While we often want to rush through our own projects, David and I each have very high standards for the work of the OTHER person! Such is married life, eh? This means that I want HIS wiring to be perfect and he wants my varnishing to be just so. This means that I opine about neatness of wires and he opines about the right amount of pre-varnish sanding. I detest the dust sanding creates so try to sand as little and un-vigourosly as possible to contain the dust in a small area for cleanup. David is always in a hurry, so his wires are often quite messy with minimal zip ties and holders in use-and little bits of wire ends everywhere scattered. On a good day, our opining results in cheerful banter and on a not-so-good day, it spirals down into snippy remarks with amazing predictability. Snippy remarks or even the “fear of snippy remarks”, FOSR, can bring our projects to a screeching halt. Ah, and that’s where I’ve been for about a month on the varnish-the-overhead-thing. FOSR is a real reason to be immobilized on the project scene. However, I’ve really got to get on with it! It’s too chilly to seriously do my outdoor spring varnish yet (where the wind carries away all offending dust the vac doesn’t get, so nice!) and now is perfect timing to do the inside “varnish the overhead” work as well as to finally paint the deck beams with the lovely Monterrey White color. I couldn’t paint them until I’d actually varnished the overhead adjacent them…but FOSR has kept me from that task for way too long! The deck beams have been simply primed all this time since our rebuild and relaunch. Awaiting my color decision, getting through the FOSR to action.

Onwards.