Blonde in a Nutshell: April 2006

Fleeting images

These are the after pictures of the room formerly known as dining and the elephants' graveyard, aka Kelsey's room. There is no doubt in my mind that Kelsey's room will always look this way after she returns.

Pride rock

Not only do blondes have more fun, blondes have more fun having fun. If I had woken up and said, “Cary, let’s clean the garage today,” we would have had a tremendous fight and not spoken all day. Instead, I got up and said,”Cary, let’s build a boat today.” Next thing I knew, he was fixing breakfast, directing a work crew (Parker), advising me on how to arrange my new boatbuilding shop (the room formerly known as dining), and bulldozing Kelsey’s room.

Since Kelsey has been out of the country on an exotic adventure since last August, her bedroom has become the elephants’ graveyard at our house. All of the dead elephants are Cary’s. A little birdie (what was his name in the Lion King?) told me that a certain blonde would end up revitalizing Kelsey’s habitat. That turned out to be only partially true. A certain boy blond did half the work, under the direction of the Lion King himself.

I have established my boatbuilding habitat in the dining room. We’ll just have to put all of our fancy dinner parties on hold for a while. This actually works out well because (a) I hate to cook, and (b) instead of having to build or buy sawhorses upon which to set my building jig, I can use the dining room table covered with a protective sheet of plywood. The LP of F (large piece of furniture) formerly known as a china cabinet, even though it has never held a single piece of china and is a rustic P of F from Mexico, now holds an impressive array of hand and power tools.

That little birdie also advised me to be careful not to build a ship in a bottle. Having a fondness for little birdies, I measured the front doorway and the dimensions of the finished boat. Good news: one is bigger than the other. Can you guess which?

Chronicle of a boat foretold

I was a hard nut to crack, but this blossoming of interest in boatbuilding came from my husband. As if the "White men" coincidence is not enough, get this: During the first year that we were married, Cary started to build a boat called the Stuart Little. He didn't get very far on it, but he must have sown the seed that is now sprouting as the Nutshell Pram.

My bedtime reading right now includes a library book called "A unit of water, a unit of time: Joel White's last boat," by Douglas Whynott. Why not, indeed? If you love White men, you must read it.

A tangential coincidence: On the back cover of "A unit of water," there is a two-sentence review by Tracy Kidder. When I got home from the library, among the stack of books I had checked out with "A unit of water" was a book by Tracy Kidder. I've never even heard of him, then twice in one trip to the library, there he was, waving his arms at me.

White men

How is Stuart Little connected to the Nutshell Pram? By blood. The man who designed the boat was a New Englander named Joel White. He was the son of E.B. White, author of the book, Stuart Little. If you are a child of mine, you know that I read Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web to you so many times that I could recite each one in my sleep. You also know that Strunk & White's The Elements of Style is my bible. All I can say is, "Soulwise, these are trying times."

More blonde logic

My genes are showing. I read in a book about boats that the pram originated in Norway. Blondes originated in Norway. I'm a blonde, so I must be from Norway, and therefore I must be related to the prams. The circle of life!