Nights

I have worn the same pair of pants every day for three weeks. In that three weeks, I have had one shower and combed my hair twice. I don't know if my face is tan or just dirty. This morning, I used mascara (yes, I brought mascara, and four different shades of lipstick -- one for each pair of shoes, maybe?) to draw a monobrow and a mustache on myself, just to see how they would look. I don't think they were flattering. Jason laughed, Grace was embarrassed for me, and Nora just told me I had something on my face.

l sleep in the bow of the boat. No one else likes it much, although occasionally Nora takes pity on me and sleeps there with me. It's loud -- all that water rushing past makes a lot of noise -- and bumpy -- when the boat comes over the crest of a wave and slams back down, the bow takes the brunt of the impact. Usually, the boat rocks primarily to one side at night, so I sleep in the angle between the mattress and the side of the boat, and sometimes, I can feel the pressure of the water against the side of the boat. I can't understand why no one else likes it.

During the first part of our trip, when conditions were pretty bad and we felt like we were constantly fighting against the elements, Jason spent several nights camping out on deck, so I can't begrudge him a good sleeping spot now. I'd go out to check on him once in a while, but then I'd get to come back inside to my warm sleeping bag in the bow. After things got a little quieter, we changed our watch plan. Instead of someone sitting up for several hours straight, we all just take turns getting up every hour to go out and check on things. We go alphabetically - Grace has the 10pm and 2am checks, Jason 11 and 3, Nora 12 and 4, and I get 1 and 5. We don't actually know what time zone we're in anymore. We've set our watches back one hour, so we're an hour ahead of Seattle time right now. Regardless, the watch plan seems to be working. We haven't run into anything yet. In fact, we haven't seen any other boats in several days.

I can't talk about nights without mentioning the stars. We've had a couple of clear nights, and the stars are absolutely amazing out here. I expected we'd be able to see them clearly, but somehow they also look bigger.

Despite the fact the some people (Matt) find it amusing, I do continue to be pleasantly surprised that we're all getting along pretty well. It doesn't feel like we're just tolerating each other, either, but actually still enjoying each other's company. I really wasn't sure how long that would last. The shower score is 2-1 now, though. I had Nora just go ahead and give us an extra point so that I could tell Jason everything he's done wrong since the beginning of the trip. He was tremendously grateful.

Today was, again, lovely. We had a couple of quick little rain bursts, but otherwise, sunshine all day. Our dinner tonight was sopa seca, pinto beans, and roasted cabbage, and we're expecting another sunset.