Personal Orifices or What the Heck Do Personal Orifices and the Kindle Ebook Have In Common

It’s my secret spot. One that I don’t dare tell anyone about. A mysterious niche undiscovered. A treasure cave unplundered. I must guard it. Protect it. Man will fight to claim it. He would fill it with his tools of manhood. I must be strong! I must withstand his persuasive ways. I must hold on to the final thing that is mine and mine alone.

It’s the last empty drawer on the boat and I’ll be damned if he’s going to put his socket wrenches in it.

I can recall a time when our boat was new and the storage seemed endless. Two hanging lockers for clothes, an extra cabin for guests, deep wells of storage behind the salon cushions and cavernous cockpit lockers would be darn near impossible for us to fill. We carefully planned where everything would go. We even made diagrams and lists of what was where. We divied up our personal space. The galley, of course, was for galley stuff. Pots and pans, dishes, and, hopefully, edible things would reside there. The nav-station was for navigation stuff. Although I thought it was tacky to have a radar screen, numerous radios, and fathoms of cords in my salon, I held my peace as long as they stayed where they belonged. A place for everything and everything in its place.

It was almost unnoticeable at first. The intertwined cords of the nav-station seemed to reproduce overnight and before I knew it they were tumbling with wild abandon out of their cubby holes and onto the shelves of the salon. The tools started to metastasize into the galley. The fenders found their way down the companionway into the aft cabin. The solar panels, dock lines, and boom vang soon followed. I mistakenly let our bread bin go empty one day and returned from the store to find if full of spare oil filters. .

So now the aft cabin has become the garage, whose contents have to be transferred to the salon when any of our guests insist on sleeping there. After three nights of sleeping in the cockpit, they’ve seen enough stars! The wet locker is the storage shed and the hanging lockers have so much junk, excuse me, “crucial boat equipment” in them we can’t get to our clothes. Our cockpit lockers are still cavernous but it takes a major excavation to find anything you need in them.

When I approached the captain about this problem, he agreed wholeheartedly that there is definitely a shortage of storage space. His solution? Get rid of the food! Make sure and keep just enough galley space available for rum and beer. Then get us some good multi-vitamins. They don’t take up much room. Oh yeah, get rid of all the clothes too, he leared.

So much for seeking logical advice from a boat addled mind.

You would think after twelve years, there would be nothing left to take to the boat but it seems year after year we find more offerings that she would appreciate. And of course, my lockers there mirror my closets here in our dirt dwelling. Both of them are full of clothes that I’m going to get back into next year. This year however, I’m being selfish. Don’t worry, I’m planning on doing my part to pay homage to the boat. I’ve bought a sewing machine and bolts of material to recover her salon cushions. The only problem is, I’m going to have to teach myself to sew. I’m sure by the time I’m done with this project it will qualify as a sacrificial bloodletting and when you drive by the boat the person speaking in tongues will be me as I try to wind a bobbin or something as equally perverse to me.
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But back to being selfish. I’ve just got to share with you other feverish readers the treasure I’ve found. It is the Amazon Kindle. It is an ebook device that does so much more. It operates wirelessly through Sprint’s Whispertel network. When you are located in the Whispertel service area you can purchase and download books from the Amazon Kindle store to your Kindle within minutes if not seconds. Best of all, if you are not in an area where Whispertel is available you can download the books to your computer and then transfer it to your Kindle using an USB cord. You do not have to subscribe to Sprint and the wireless delivery is free. You do have to register your Kindle with Amazon and set up an account. You can even subscribe to newspapers and magazines. Best sellers usually go for about half price and, of course, you can shop for less expensive books or go to the internet’s various free ebook sites such as http://www.freekindlebooks.org/ or http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page The books must be in mobi format.

You can also download audio books and music. If you are in a Whispertel location you are able surf the net and send email which is experimental and free at this time.

The device holds about 200 books and once you have purchased a book from Amazon it is always there in your account if you decide you want to download it again. You can save any non-amazon books to a separate memory chip to save storage room on your device

There’s always a downside so… The initial purchase is an expensive $360.00 but I figure it pays for itself in my enjoyment and the amount of time I won’t waste reading books from book swaps that I never would have read unless I was desperate. The backside of that is you can’t share or swap books you like.
Also, you can’t take advantage of free ebooks from your public library because of the format.

I now have about 80 books downloaded and free shelfspace on the boat. I have had no problems with it and a friend on another boat dropped his and they actually sent him on free of charge. The bad thing is that another friend tried to order one and there was a 13 week wait.

Now all I have to do is figure out what to do with all that book space I’ve freed up. Of course, I’ll have to guard it from the cap’n but the good news is Nigel Calder’s books are also in the Kindle format too. Imagine all the space that will provide.Check it out at http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=afimasruofthr-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000FI73MA&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr14 days until the boat