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News at Mahdee Web Log

 
Greetings to all, from David and Brenda! This website is for all of you (and you know who YOU are!) who have been asking us for pictures of Mahdee's progress. Since many of you don't sail at all and aren't necessarily familiar with wooden boats, we wanted you to have some background, history, and links to other web resources with information about wooden boats and schooners in particular. As most of you know, with us there's "always a project" and with the sale of our wonderful Washington DC house this summer, we're now focusing on another dream restoration project. So many of you enjoyed our home with us and the Mahdee is really the "boat equivalent" of the 16th Street house for us. More on that thought in a later posting.

Why get a sailboat now? And why an old wooden schooner? Well, we also owe you folks that explanation. A few of you remember "the dream" and "the plan." We remember who snickered back in 1982 as well as who bought us those sailing books and outdoorsy gear as wedding presents! In short, when David and I married 24 years ago, we set a goal that we'd be living our life on a sailboat by the time we'd been married 25 years. When you're only 19 and 21 as we were, 25 years is a long, long, time! About 18 months ago, we realized that if we didn't shake up our lives and try to meet a self-imposed deadline of being out of the house and on a boat by our 25th anniversary, we'd have to set another more "realistic" deadline and we might not meet it either! You may ask--what was not "realistic" about 25 years? And, by the way, when we give ourselves 25 years to make something happen, it's a little embarrassing to admit that it actually did sneak up on us a bit...OK, that's the "why now" part.

As an aside here--we imagine that some other folks will simply stumble across the Mahdee site and may want to know a little about the people involved in the project. Of course, we're also giving this web address out to the wonderful people we've met who are helping us as we progress with this project. For all who come to Mahdee's site who aren't friends, family, and former co-workers who know us all-too-well, we've put together here a few pics and this page of information about us, David and Brenda, the people who are doing this Mahdee project. By education, we are both engineers. Brenda has worked in construction management and mechanical structures; David is also a retired Navy officer. We now own a small technology business that has been operating in a mostly virtual fashion for the past few years.

Our passions are technology, exploration, and historic preservation. We continue to take advantage of our love of technology in our work. We've indulged our desire for "exploration" through work-related moves and international travel, as well as hobbies of wilderness canoeing, backcountry skiing, biking, sailing, and backroad driving. We've engaged in "historic preservation" via professional, volunteer, and personal efforts to conserve and restore the historic elements around us-be it buildings, open space conservation, or restoring the architectural elements of our homes. And that is the answer to "why a 1931 wooden schooner." This is another opportunity to conserve and restore a little piece of America's history.

After our move this summer (2006), we took down our website with pictures of various trips and projects/hobbies. We should have it back up again sometime soon. Hopefully, we'll figure out how to do a real Blog with Mahdee's site soon and the pics will be available here, too. But until then, we've put a couple collages together for you to see. Just click on the pictures at the right for the collages. One is of fun on the water--sailing and canoeing; one is "get-togethers" you may recognize; and one is of the DC-to-Nova Scotia driving trip we did in our 1976 Saab, Buttercup, in 2003. Have fun looking!

Enjoy the Mahdee site. If you have questions or comments, feel free to email (replace the "_at_" with @ and the _dot_ with .

webproject_at_mahdee_dot_com

The Sailing and Canoeing
Backroad Driving
Get-Togethers