It's Not How Well the Dog Dances
a blog by hewbrocca
And I am spending it in the best way possible: sitting in a micro-architecture security conference that I organized!
Here is a photo of some birthday calamondins. That is all.
(They’re not quite ripe yet… Once they ripen they are the best garnish ever for a Gin and Tonic.)
I was chatting with a friend in the BVI last week who had seen an interview with someone — I don’t recall who, unfortunately — who made the point that there are two kinds of drama to be dealt with in life: Avoidable Drama and Unavoidable Drama. Hurricanes, and interacting with your family, are examples of Unavoidable Drama. There is nothing you can do to mitigate or prevent it, you just have to deal with it as best you can.
Avoidable Drama, on the other hand, can and should be avoided, unless you are a Dramatic Person and thrive on that sort of thing. (Probably worth mentioning that most Dramatic People don’t realize they are inducing Avoidable Drama, rather they believe they are victims of Unavoidable Drama. But that is another blog post.)
Anyway — Avoidable Drama was in full force during our return to The Moorings dock A on Friday afternoon. Total disorganization on the dock was made worse by a few as yet un-dealt-with shipwrecks in the harbor (Unavoidable Drama). This was further aggravated by a whole bunch of catamaran crews with no idea what they were doing (Unavoidable Drama). The combination turned what should have been a straightforward procedure into a stressful interaction with lots of yelling back and forth between us and The Moorings boat handlers that left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth at the end of a really nice trip.
Why was this avoidable, when there are so many unavoidable elements present? Well, all that had to be done to remove the drama and lower everyone’s temperature would have been to tell all the boats coming in to hold in Road Harbor (where there is plenty of sea room) until cleared to enter the marina. This would only have required a single organized person with a radio, a pencil, and a pad of paper. Instead, the standard procedure was to tell every boat that radioed for permission to enter to come to the end of dock A and wait for further instructions. Unfortunately, because of the above-mentioned Unavoidable Drama (shipwrecks), there is only really room for one boat at the end of dock A. Try to put us and 8 clueless catamaran captains there at the same time, and hilarity ensues.
(What did we do when faced with this situation? The only safe thing to do: We entered a random open slip and tied up the boat. We were lambasted by the dock maser for this, but the alternative was crashing into something and endangering people and property, so…)
If there is a moral to this story, it is that the way to avoid Avoidable Drama is by putting a bit of process in place. Of course, if you put too much process, then you create more Drama than you avoid. So be careful…
Since I’ve never been sailing with a dog before I thought I should provide a little documentation. Mixup the Dog, pictured above, belongs to our friend Guy Clothier from Great Camano. Unlike ours, Guy’s house got through Irma in a habitable state, although the hurricane did decide his refrigerator would look better on his front porch.
Mixup and Guy rode out the hurricane in his bathroom. Guy is completely deaf from head injuries he suffered many years ago. He is able to understand speech with help from a cochlear implant (which is amazing in and of itself), but if the external microphone and computer isn’t turned on he can’t hear at all. This of course means he didn’t hear the godawful hurricane sounds that Mixup was hearing. Guy says he just held Mixup there in the bathroom for four hours straight, wrapped in a blanket while he shivered in fear.
Mixup has gotten old since the last time I saw him three years ago — he doesn’t have the island mutt energy he used to. He’s still a sweetheart of a dog, though. It was a lot of fun sailing with him.