Newfoundland!

Sweet! I was awarded the Brigus residency! It's 3 weeks from the end of June to mid-July. It comes with a healthy stipend as well. Should be immediately on the heels of my New Brunswick residency! AND the freaking coolest thing is that it's the town in Newfoundland where Capt. Bob Bartlett is from. I'm almost done reading his book about the Karluk shipwreck in the arctic. That man is a freaking badass.

So I'll get to see his house, I think its a museum. Maybe I'll think up some nutty site-specific tribute. That would really be the thing to do. So I became interested in Bob, which led to a serious Newfoundland infatuation, because Bob used to own the schooner Ernestina (then called the Effie Morrissey). He used it for personal arctic trips, taking millionares on wild hunting trips, that sort of thing. Anyways, back in 2001 when I was a grad student at MassArt I went on a sailing trip on the Ernestina. It was for 3-D students, and I'm sure I was the oldest one. I think it was five days. It was the end of the sailing season, October I think. To be sure, the weather was bad. It blew snot and we never even left Buzzards Bay. Almost everybody was badly seasick, really cold, and real buzzkill bummers. One girl was so sick they motored her to shore. Somebody clogged a toilet and the crew tried blasting water through it and basically there was a poopsplosion on deck, which I missed.

I loved every minute of it. Funny thing too, I signed up too late (afraid of the price tag...) so I was on the waiting list in case somebody cancelled. But it was a teacher who cancelled and somehow I never paid a dime for the trip. Lucky me.

As we all know, years later, in 2006 I learned to sail and worked on several schooners, including some volunteer work on Ernestina (of New Bedford), and she's in terrible trouble these days. The fore half of the ship was recently completely rebuilt. Beauty! However the aft half is pretty much rotten. She leaks like a seive. Its a crisis.

So send buttloads of money to her through here: http://www.sailernestina.org/

Yesterday: bun pilates. Some scotch and a bunch of Pino Grigio... gotta have a little fun.

Today: holy cow I went rollerblading! Walk 1 mi incl, run 4 (half at 6 mph!) cooldown = 60min