Crickets Beware

I have recently come to realize that if I want to build a boat that looks more like a boat than the closing half of a parenthesis, I'm going to need to be able to get to the port side.

Two years of boatbuilding and garage-storage has littered the wall of the garage with scrap wood, boat frames from an abandoned project, great loops of rope, a few cardboard boxes filled with smaller cardboard boxes of screws, firewood, a rake, two shovels, 200' of 14-gauge extension cord, and so on.

For the most part I've been able to teeter on a stack of 2x4s (as perilous as it sounds) or reach across from the starboard side, or wiggle in under the building jig (crickets, spiders, and nightmares galore).

But as I now need to dry-fit and install the port chine, well: time to clean!

Last night I opened the garage door, donned what I hoped would be cricket-proof gloves, and pulled out as much detritus as I could. Most of this was scrap wood: little knobs of locust, or strip cutoffs, or things accidentally epoxied to each other. Some of it might have been good firewood, but I gotta boat to build, there's no time for discernment! Into the big plastic trash can it all went, to be sorted through later.

Now that side of the boat is not only accessible, but swept clean of dust and the bones of spider victims. In all of this, I saw not a single cricket.

Which means they have massed themselves somewhere. Probably inside my pillowcase or under my toast or somewhere equally ghastly.