'Tis the Season For Not Making

Hello. My name is Robert and I'm a recovering boat-builder.
I have to repress the need to make lists of things to order.
I have small notepads next to every chair in case I need to draw some solution to a joint or a sub-assembly. They are all clean...so far.
The shed calls me repeatedly, and I wander up there to rearrange some tools, or clean up some remaining off-cuts, but I just come back to the house with an armful of firewood. To-day I mixed some two-stroke fuel, even though I never seem to need much, especially when the weather combines with middle-age to conspire to make sailing intermittent at best.

I am like the worst of us in that having boats doesn't seem to be enough- there needs to be something in the pipeline.
The damn pipeline. I'm trying to act like a non-builder.
There are things proper people do, and I'm going to get me some of those.
Soon.

I'm not worried. Lots of people aren't making a boat at the moment. Why, I can think of seventeen on our road alone that aren't actually making one at the moment. Maybe eighteen if you include teen-agers. Or twenty-three if you include dogs.
I could go shopping.

Or I could just tidy up all the plans that I have accumulated by accident, and make a tidy pile. Or two.
I could roll them up into a nice tube, or flatten them so that they form a nice stack.
I could feel like a publisher and look at the stack and reject them all- maybe even write to the designers and say that I'm grateful for their work, but there really isn't a market for their particular design at the moment, and good luck with the other rejections and my isn't the market tight at the minute you just wonder if anyone reads plans anymore, what with the strength of the dollar and the Chinese you know, they can do it so much cheaper. Oh, my, is that the time?

Or I could just sneak another look at The Maid of Endor, while no-one else is in the house except Billy, but he's a dog, and he doesn't mind.
And he did have quite a nice time lying on the Melonseed skiff plans last week. He looked quite decorative on the off-sets page, with all those lovely numbers in the table by his head.

But going to the Paul Gartside new web page is certainly off-limits. I draw the line at that.
Or I will, after I just make sure that that trailerable double-endered cutter is way too much of a life-style change for a confirmed dinghy man.

And I'm not having a bar of all that talk of a slightly bigger Pilgrim from JW. That would be a bridge too far, with a pair of boats already in the shed. A good capacity there though, purposeful little hull with a juicy stay-sail tucked in there behind the jib. But there'll be none of that sort of thinking, I'm sensible now. Going straight.

Keep it simple. That's the plan.
The house. I'll work on the house and all my blogger friends will be so grateful that I'm thinking about windows and glazing, and getting drawings approved by council. They'll like that, bored with boats and little dreams of pieces of string.