Big Boat

{OK, I am rambling here again, I do that quite a bit nowadays. Like I have said before, I am 69 and I will ramble if I want to.

I do that when I am writing about things that happened, funny but I don't seem to ramble as much when I am just writing some crap about something supposed to be sexy.

Why? Hell, I don't know. Maybe because my life sort of rambles?

Nothing erotic here, there are no 38DD breasts, no drooling pussies, no 8" throbbing members because I don't write crap like that.

I write crap like this story instead...lol. Some of you tell me you get a kick out of this writing style, but I don't do it deliberately. It's just the mood I am in when I wake up, kind of depends on if my old back hurts or not.

This is just a story about a cruise we took. Hell, we didn't even get laid, (except by each other) probably could have the way things were going.}

+++

"What in the hell are you doing?" My wife Debs asked me as she was stuffing clothes into her suitcase.

I wasn't paying any attention to what she was packing, I was trying to figure out which rubber worms would work the best where we were headed.

Let's see, I had some lime green ones and some red ones, plus white. Around here where we live the white ones work the best.

The real truth there is it probably depends on if a fish sees it or not.

Fish only have one way to check something out to see if it's good to eat, and that is to bite it.

I remember being over in Eastern Oregon, place called Mud lake. There were Chipmunks around, about half tame, so I grabbed one by the tail when it got too close. You need to be quick because those things have teeth.

Of course, when you do that, the tail comes right off, twitching to distract the predator while the Chipmunk beats a hasty retreat.

I tied that on a big old fish hook and tossed it out into the water, caught me one of those planted Atlantic Salmon, the thing was dang near three feet long!

That lake is "catch and release" of course, darn it.

So we are supposed to catch them and throw them back.

Those things taste great.

Anyway.

Even Google didn't help me with deciding, try "rubber worms Alaska" and see what pops up.

I was doing the same with other stuff, packing. I always pack my own suitcase if we go somewhere.

That way I can actually pick the thing up because when Debs packs, we need a fork lift.

"Packing, why?" I asked when she asked me what I was doing.

"Your fishing pole?" She snorted.

"Well, yea, we are going to be on a boat, and in Alaska. Alaska is full of big fish, no way am I going to spend over 4 grand and miss out on that."

"Do you have any idea how far down to the water it will be?" She giggled at me.

Well, I hadn't thought about that part.

Maybe I should go out to the garage and get my spare spool of fishing line, I thought. The new black braided line is very thin and strong, no problem at all of getting 200 yards onto my salt water reel.

Debs was snickering at me but I stuffed my telescoping rod and reel into my suitcase anyway, she just shook her head.

"Take six pair." She said at one point, dragging some new white cottons out of a paper bag.

"Three is plenty." I retorted. We have had that conversation before, and my suitcase was already getting kind of stuffed since I had the plastic tray of lures, my fishing pole and two reels in there.

"I know you, I will need to burn them if you don't take six pair!" Then she handed me several sets of HER underwear.

"Hey, I barely have room for my own....?" I started to complain. Then I looked, I could see right through them.

Debs was grinning.

She knows me very well.

"Oh, OK!" I gave in, managed to get the top down and locked, barely. Debs was busy packing a second suitcase, why women need to change clothes four times a day is beyond me.

She was still muttering about my fishing pole. I had to go sit on her second one while she latched it.

+++

OK. I have never been on a cruise before, so what?

Besides, it took me almost 20 sales on that auction web site to come up with enough money to buy the new fishing rod.

Nice stout one, bunch of sections that slide into each other, easy to carry when I go out onto the jetty nearby to catch some fish.

I mean the docks.

Debs gripes when I go out onto the jetty, she thinks I will fall in so I don't tell her about it.

Besides, that only happened once, so I have no idea why she gets all fussy about me doing that.

I couldn't afford the $129.95 my new pole cost before I came up with the score I have going on now, which is a lot of danged hard work. There isn't a hell of a lot of money in selling stuff out of your garage that you don't want, because most of the time nobody else wants it either.

I did try having a garage sale right in front of our house, some guy showed up and wanted to buy the damn table I had all my junk piled on. I didn't want to sell my table, I wanted to sell my junk.

Hell, if I sold the table, I wouldn't have any place to pile my junk.

+++

A few months back I called and talked to Max, a guy who works at a warehouse down in Las Vegas I knew and got some brand new parts.

Buying and selling things meant I spent one hell of a lot of time sitting in front of a computer.

Damned if selling new stuff online didn't work, I suddenly had quite a bit of extra money. Debs said I should enjoy it, get out and do whatever I wanted to.

"How about we go on a cruise, I have vacation time coming?" She suggested.

"Neat! Alaska. Big fish up there, I always wanted to go to Alaska." I mumbled mostly to myself. My mind drifted off to us being dropped off at some obscure lake, being left to our own devices out there to rough it.

I have seen the advertisements, big lake, not a wisp of wind, Sun shining, fish jumping everywhere.

That idea had been in my head for decades, I never did get around to doing it.

Log cabin, splitting firewood for the fireplace, sitting around on balmy evenings, eating huge Trout smoked right over an open campfire, living like the good lord intended.

Not a single living soul for miles and miles?

Would that be cool or what?

"Neat! How about a nice cruise on one of those giant ships?" She popped up with again, like I am deaf or something.

I guess I did space out there for a minute.

"A what?" The thought of coming in to a glassy lake in an airplane with pontoons on it, the neat log cabin sitting there waiting for us slid right out of my mind.

"A cruise." Debs grinned.

"But I was thinking....?"

"I know what you were thinking." She said.

Yea, I had suggested my idea to her a few times, got a snort mostly in response. I got that same snort way back when I suggested taking bikes and going camping.

You know. The pedal kind. To a lake in Eastern Oregon? You know, up and over Mount Hood?

Uh huh. Debs put the squash to that idea, just like she did with my remote Alaska cabin idea.

"You are 69 years old. You want to get us left in the wilderness for a whole week, having to chop wood and build a fire to cook on?"

"With wild Bears and Cougars, wolves all around?" She added like maybe that would scare me.

Big wild animals don't scare me one bit, at least not the ones I see on TV.

"No television? No electricity?" She pressed her case, going in for the kill.

Crap.

No TV?

Damn, a man can't rough it out in the woods for a whole week with no TV. Miss "Days of our Lives?"

Not that I care about that stupid show, the old man has been killed off at least 20 times and keeps popping back up.

Stupid show.

The blond has laid everybody at least once, most of them twice.

OK. Cruise it would be, get me to Alaska and I can figure out how to go fishing, I thought to myself.

So I just left the new truck load of product in the garage, let the auction listings run out.

Relax a little bit, enjoy life.

+++

Several grand in profit in just six short months?

That's pretty good, huh? I call the pile of cases stored in our garage my new "product" lines. I even stuck my own brand name on it, yep, "MGM" of course.

Go ahead and laugh, it worked.

Anyway, I am getting long in the tooth but I love fishing, so when Debs mentioned a cruise on one of those big ships I instantly thought of Alaska and great big fish.

I kind of think her idea was maybe Bermuda or someplace down off Mexico, but she just grinned and shrugged when I got all excited at the idea.

Compromises, that's what makes a good marriage work.

Hmmmm. Long ways to the water, she said? Probably right about that, after I saw the pictures of the thing we would be on.

I went out into the garage and grabbed my level wind reel, the big one packed with lots of that new black braided line. I could haul up an engine block with that stuff, by golly. My new pole was nice and stout, too.

I got the suitcase back open, took out the smaller spinning reel and added the big level wind.

Debs looked as I poked that into my suitcase, she just shook her head.

It would be OK, I bubble wrapped it.

+++

The idea to sell new parts out of our house would never have crossed my mind, until I got an email from Max, the guy who used to be a sales rep I knew back in the day when I was buying and selling stuff for a living.

Back then I had a small hobby farm, a few acres and some cows, creek in the pasture. I owned a little store in town, sold car parts and fixed things in the back room.

Back then I ran ads, people drove down and came into my store, it's different now. People find me on a computer and send me money in an email.

I was doing OK before, I can fix about anything.

Then government wanted my land for houses so they finally got me surrounded with houses they hauled in in two chunks with wheels and there was no longer any point in holding out, I retired and moved into town.

Land zoned as exclusive farm use has cheap taxes, land zoned for houses is...well...yikes! My farm became 100' X 100' lots, when I complained the people at county zoning just shrugged.

A young couple bought my store, it's still there but a franchise now, full of chinese made car parts.

Life is OK here, I miss my farm and my cows though.

Anyway.

+++

Max had shiny new parts for older cars that got maybe 10 miles per gallon on a good day going downhill so it was dead on the market stuff, scrap metal.

Max knew that collectors still bought those sometimes, but the warehouse he worked for only sold it in case lots. It was far too expensive to try and sell items one at a time since they had overhead and all of that.

At least when they had to pay their team of Mexicans to count and pack it all.

"I thought of you!" Max told me over the phone.

I knew Max, he would do anything to make a buck and I would bet he called everyone he knew on planet Earth trying to peddle the stuff.

So...I bought some scrap metal, all new stuff. Scrap metal to the warehouse, new collector car parts to me.

I also knew all about the auction sites, having sold maybe $200-300.00 worth of odds and ends already.

Just imagine getting $19.65 for a green bottle with a glass lid that is wired onto it?

I did, plus shipping.

There was a small box of electric wire insulators left over from back when they buried the power lines, I got $10 each for those things!

Really!

Anyway, I was an old hand at that, I even had me 197 positive feedbacks. One neutral, some guy thought the five foot long bait casting rod I sold him for $14.35 looked longer in the photo?

Hell, the headline read, "Five foot long bait casting rod."

I emailed him back and told him five feet was five feet.

He left me a neutral, saying I was "snotty."

Oh well.

I also took the auction website's online sales course, which consisted mostly of making sure I knew that I was supposed to pay them their sales commissions.

In barely six short months I moved almost all of the parts I bought from Max and put $4200 in my bank account. I was getting up at 6 in the morning and leaving the damn PC on all damned day waiting for money to show up.

Which it was, and fairly regular too.

There is this online website where anybody can send money to anybody with an email address, damned if that doesn't work.

It sure is a neat system. It also isn't really money, it's just numbers that can be converted into money, or at least more numbers on a little card.

Some guy buys parts from me, sends the numbers to my email address. The website takes a piece of the action and stores the rest as numbers, then when I type in my own information, they send those numbers on to my credit union.

All imaginary money, just numbers. I can then use the little card they gave me, spend it.

Wherever I spend it takes the imaginary money and puts it in their own imaginary accounts and they use their own little card to spend it.

Nobody has any real money anymore it seems, they just have numbers stored in cyberspace. That makes a person wonder, what happens if the power goes out like on that new TV show?

Is the money really still out there, or did it go somewhere? My bet is that it never left the government, but what do I know?

Money, piles and piles of it just floating around out there in the air?

It used to all be stored inside of wires I think, now they fire it off to one of those satellites, then it gets aimed back down to where ever they want it to go.

That makes me wonder, what happens if they miss the satellite? Maybe miss my credit union too, after all, thats a pretty good shot from way out in outer space.

Cash could be piled up on some dead planet someplace? Or maybe down here in some farmer's hay field?

Beats me, weird the things I find myself thinking about.

I even paid Debs back the money she fronted me to make the original purchase since I didn't have any at the time, plus 20% profit which made her happy.

Her money is hers and mine is mine around our house.

She did go buy me some new underwear.

+++

Debs and I had flown down to Reno to check on the deal, the first trip a year or so ago was Vegas but the company Max worked for had a second warehouse out in the sticks near Reno.

I wrote about that Vegas trip, it was fun and we got naughty. I think I wrote about that, anyway. I write so much now it's getting tough to remember.

Yep, things got naughty while we were there but what the hell. I am 69 now, Debs is 57 or 58 plus, I ain't exactly sure, so nobody gets hurt if we indulge in a little bit of hanky panky.

I can't tell you about the two of us actually getting happy endings like a couple of oversexed kids during a massage in our hotel room at the same time by a pair of strangers, since what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

Jack and Terry were a married couple and they earn their living making tourists happy with very nice rubdowns. That cost us $300 for the hour, not bad for them but sort of rich for my blood.

Back home we pay July $60 each to massage us, things cost more in Vegas I guess.

Nice rubdowns was all it was the first time, then that second time Terry had her hands on my stuff under the towel, obvious as hell and I looked over to see Debra watching that.

I mean, July does stuff like that and of course Debs knows about it but she never actually saw that so I wasn't sure of her reaction.

She did blink a couple of times, then a grin crossed her face.

Part of what I love about my wife is she doesn't have a jealous bone in her body. Probably partly due to her being one of those Registered Nurse Practioners, so she has men's dicks in her hand all the time, thus no big deal.

Hell, now some gal we barely knew had her hands on my tally whacker with Debs not only right there in the room but watching?

In some marriages, that might start a fight.

I was about to say something but Debs just gave me a big grin, you would need to know Debs to understand.

To her, sexy stuff is just plain fun, like I said, she doesn't have a single jealous bone in her body.

Then I saw one eyebrow go up, she lay back and closed her own eyes. I saw Jack lean down and say something, Debs just nodded.

That was interesting, terribly naughty. Some guy we barely knew was rubbing and teasing the wife's big boobs while his own wife was working on my stuff?

Getting energetic now, both hands. Then he moved down, I saw his hands go up Debra's thighs until it was completely clear where they were ending up.

He had the towel draped over her but his hands were sure as hell all the way underneath it. I saw Deb's eyelids flutter, just about the time that Terry rolled back my foreskin.

Yea, naughty.

And we allowed that? I mean, I lay there and watched this guy spread shiny lotion all over my wife's big boobs, then on her crotch and found it...interesting?

Back when I was married to my late wife Dotty I would have shit a brick at the idea of some guy touching my old lady, especially like that.

Debs is a completely different type of woman, and after a few years of getting used to her, I guess I changed some myself.

Debra being a Registered Nurse, she knows all about people and what they do, even when they pretend they don't. That plus having men's stuff in her hands dang near every day means her limits are in a different place than most.

Anyway, she seemed to be enjoying it so what the hell. She did do that glance over at me with a questioning look when things went obviously farther than getting the old behind rubbed.

Terry had me at full staff about that time and I wasn't protesting, so Debs just grinned and closed her eyes.

It's not like she was sleeping with him, all Jack was doing was making Debra feel good. Kind of like Terry was doing to me, we were all giggling and laughing, spur of the moment naughty stuff.

He didn't stick his fingers in there or anything like that so it was just touch. If he had, I might have gotten up and smacked him one.

It was sort of like when we have July come over back at our house, she touches and rubs everything too but I have never watched that when she does Debs.

Debra has never watched me get a massage either.

So this was different, plus Jack was a guy and my wife was almost naked? After giving her top a working over, he draped a small towel over her boobs so she wasn't totally nude.

Both of them kept their clothes on also, it was a one way giving deal.

Yea, I know. Married people, they shouldn't do that. Well, we did and it was fun, so there!

After the two of them left Debs and I got to fiddling around, snickering, calling each other perverts.

We are way better perverts with each other than that was, too. One thing we did find out, that oil they use tastes awful, so I got us some warm wet wash cloths and rubbed it all off.

That was fun too, we were giggling and having a ball.

Darn, now I went and broke the "What happens in Vegas...." rule?

Oh well.

+++

"Damn that's a big boat!" I said, as we stood on the dock looking up.

Hell, I wasn't sure I could even make it up that ramp. Some kid in a red uniform that looked to be about eleven years old had grabbed our suitcases, thank God.

It was worth the five bucks I tipped him to not have to drag the thing myself, little wheels on it be damned.

It was warm out and we were dressed light since August in Seattle can be hot. Debs had on shorts and a loose top, I was in one of my ever present T-shirts and blue jeans.

Looking around, I saw nearly everyone else was dressed like us, silver and white hair everywhere. I expected that since this was one of those adult cruises, no kids.

I was pretty sure I knew what "adult" cruises meant, just old folks having fun, no brats under foot.

Old folks, like us.

That was good, I mean I like kids just fine, maybe steamed with some nice butter sauce they would be ok.