Swerve in the road

 As things always seem to go, there was a flurry of phone calls from home right at watch change. You know, watch change, when you're supposed to start winding down in preparation for blessed rest? 

 Yeah. Always, big things happen at home either when I want to sleep, when I want to use the bathroom or when I have only 20 minutes to cook my only hot meal of the day. 

  At any rate, my plans for my time home (a week from tomorrow!) just got changed utterly. Not in a bad way. Or in a good way, really. Just... life intervened. 

 I'm being deliberately vague, yes. Not a big deal, just a private one... and anyhow, as I tend to do a little more these days now that I don't do social media, I'm looking at the positives as much as possible. 

 So, suddenly, I have a whole week that I no longer have commitments made. That's awesome. In exchange for a bunch of logistical legwork for me to do today, to undo a long-term planned process, I will have 6 days that were originally planned to be busy doing something else. Hot damn. I'm annoyed at the last-minute nature of the changes, but dang, I have time to do something. 

     Now, being, well, me, I don't like last minute changes to long-lead projects and plans. But who does, really? I guess I just dwell and ruminate over such things more than I should. What's the word? Hidebound? Yes. I am hidebound perhaps more than I should be. 

 Well, annoyance aside, what to do with my time? I'm going to have more time with my wife and kid, and my son and I will surely go to the gun range. Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife is mulling getting a Concealed Carry permit, I think more in a show of solidarity with her adopted culture and also to be a nine-days' wonder among her 100+ cousins and their insane online community. But that might be fun, and now we have time maybe to knock that out. 

I REALLY want to build a ladder-style planter for an indoor herb garden that she also wants, but I don't want to have to take out a mortgage for the 4 2x4's and sheet of 3/4" plywood it would require. And for the first time in years, almost decades, I'm performing daily exercise and eating healthy on a daily basis, so days of swimming, drinking booze and eating comfort food, AKA my weekends, are also no longer an option. 

     I have an idea in my head for a little wooden rowboat. I think I have a sheet of 1/8" plywood somewhere. I might work on that, see if I can make something without a plan, try to work by eye, like the old school skiff builders when I was a kid.