Houseboat

I guess what I'm saying is that if you're going to go camping, or houseboating, or whatever, take blakes_7 along. Bill adds a certain Je ne sane pas to the proceedings.

First off, generally speaking, the layout of the boat was much better than the one we rented last year. We had a little engine/generator trouble, but that got us a couple of visits from the repair-boy. So yay for that.

No one got laid. Not even me, and I went so far as to pack my own boyfriend. That's how committed we were to relaxing.

Bitches snored. I'll let Lady Macbeth bear_with_me go into the details, but I'll just mention that nights were not silent aboard the S.S. CPAP.

John and I slept on the roof, all four nights. Metropolitan light pollution makes it impossible for me to see the Milky Way locally, so any opportunity to see it, I take. So we lay under the Milky Way, counting shooting stars until we fell asleep, which was snuggly and romantic and beautiful. And freezing. If we didn't have our sub-zero sleeping bags, we would surely have perished.

Bill spent a few nights up top too, balanced on the folding vinyl jacuzzi cover. That was entertaining. Early the second morning, I looked over at Bill and saw with great delight that he had pupated sometime overnight. He had somehow managed to twist all his covers around himself until he was completely mummified, terminating with a swirling blanket-funnel oxygen-snorkel over his mouth. I lay still, and watched him for breathing, until I realized that bats were flitting around above him. First, one dive-bombed him, and then it was joined by another in a sort of spinning, noctilionine do-si-do. Then there were four of them, just fluttering around.

I thought: How goth is that?

Oh! Oh! This was fun. The first night, as we finally settled in and started to doze off, I heard a scream from the woods. High pitched. Blood-chilling. It sounded like some sort of bird. Could have been a woman, but more likely a bird. After a good fifteen seconds (the time it takes him to whip himself into a decent hallucinatory frenzy,) Bill said, "Did you guys hear that?"

I didn't say anything for a moment, because I was genuinely concerned that if I did, Bill would demand that I crawl out of my toasty warm sleeping bag and go check it out. Shasta Lake is made entirely of shale hillsides. If someone was up there sneaking around in the woods, we would have heard it. If someone was dragging a woman along to murder her, we would have heard it. Speaking personally, I couldn't have walked on those hillsides in daylight without tripping on shale, clocking myself with low hanging branches, and swearing a whole bunch. It's a bird, Bill. Jeez.

I said, "I'm not getting out of bed. Whoever it was, she was asking for it."

Bill said, "That's not funny. That's horrible." I couldn't believe I was about to have the "funny trumps appropriate" conversation. Hello? Sleepy now.

"If she's being murdered in the woods, she needs to articulate her needs better than, 'EEEEEAAAAAUUUGH!'" I said. And then I went to sleep, trying not to think of Kitty Genovese.

The best part of having Bill along, though, was the fact that he's just too damned smart and imaginative for his own good. I've heard that phrase before, but I'd never really seen it in action until Bill joined us playing Catch Phrase. Seriously, play that game with him. He gets all wound up, and when you press him he panics and crumbles, and the payoff is just monumental.

At one point, I was trying to get him to say the phrase "Pittsburgh Pirates", and somehow he got into Pennsylvania Dutch and East Indies and the Spice Routes and all sorts of other crazy shit until the timer ran out.

I asked him, "Do you even hear yourself when you talk?"

He responded, "Eh. I drift in and out."

Which is, of course, the totally perfect answer.