Oct 4 - the fun is over

Well, that's not completely true. All life is fun if you make it so, but of course some stuff is more fun than other stuff. Yesterday was definitely more fun than I expect today to be.

We dallied in the morning, not wanting to spend another complete day in the sun. I went to Mass first thing of course. When I got back Sandy was just getting up to an empty house because Sheryl, Jimmy and Abby had gone for a walk. They were back shortly thereafter and over the course of the next hours everyone had breakfast ... I had my second breakfast ... Sheryl smoked a couple of cigarettes out the back ... I added all my addenda to the prior day's blog posting etc. etc.

We decided to go boating for noon so I called NCM at 11 and had them get the boat in the water. When we got there it was moored in the fork lift slip. We loaded our stuff and headed south. We explored some of the area south of the yacht club by water, not getting as far as the long stretch of putt putt zone and then went back to the club for lunch. A delicious hamburg later (for Jimmy and me), salads for the ladies (weren't they good ?) and we were back on the water heading north. We went out into the ocean for a bit, just because I like doing that, and then over to the island for a brief walk for us and run for Abby. It was busy with other boats; I presume that many were there for the day. We loaded Abby back on the boat around 3:15. She was clearly reluctant to end her fun so soon but I wanted to be back at NCM before 4pm.

It was busy at the marina. Some people -- Vic was there -- simply rinse their boats in the water and don't bother with motor flushing. I guess that I'm particular about this and perhaps too much so, but we waited while Al forked the boat out of the water and onto a work rack. I flushed the motor, washed the boat and then Jimmy helped me stretch out the boat cover as a test fit. Since we cannot tie the cover down to the rack when it's way up in the air I wanted to see how this might work.

The best that I'm going to be able to do when we're away for an extended period is tie a rope tightly through the tie-down points around the boat and vertically at the motor and the bow. With the work rack under the boat I cannot do any ties around the hull. The fork lift can then load the entire thing up to the rack. I should really have something to support the cover in the middle or water pooling at that point might pull the cover off ... I'd have to fabricate something to do this ... I'm still pondering that one. Perhaps an extensible pole would work but I'd have to have a pad of some sort for front and back and bungees, I guess, to hold in place. Perhaps I can just use one of the cheap $10 lifejackets that I keep in the boat for this purpose ... hmmm. Tomorrow, Tuesday, we intend to go for a short ride and then back at the marina I'll do something that will have to last until mid-November. Most boats don't have any cover on them. Quite frankly I'm not sure which is better -- no, I take that back -- inside is better but that is not an option.

Back at the ranch we showered and relaxed and had a light dinner of salads. We then went back to the SYC for a drink and watched the full moon poke its way out of the clouds. When we arrived at 8:15 there was one table with 6 or 8 people at it; another with 4, another with 2 but they all left within the following 15-20 minutes. We sat at the railing overlooking the water, saw a dolphin in the moonlight, nursed our glass of wine (Sandy), Corona (me), Diet Coke (Jimmy), Diet Pepsi (Sheryl) and then they started to close the place up. They chain all the chairs so that people cannot come with boats and steal them (ridiculous, isn't it) ... but of course this was Sunday night and the Tiki won't be occupied again until next Friday night so perhaps they don't do that Friday or Saturday nights ... perhaps.

It's a lovely spot to sit by the water. As I said to Jimmy and Sheryl on the way back -- since we couldn't afford to buy a place by the water this might turn out to be the next best thing !

So ... onward. Sandy will leave with our visitors sometime this morning, destination Orlando Sanford International Airport which is 45 minutes away. On the way Sheryl and Sandy are going to hit the shoe store in Daytona. As they close the door I'll start ripping out the wall in the bathroom. I'm not looking forward to that dusty dirty job but I might as well get it over with. It's a precursor to doing the one in the master bath which is not much bigger, but that one will wait until November.

I talked to Joe Blanchette the HVAC guy yesterday and as I said to him, unfortunately the A/C is working now ... it's harder to find transient problems. He's going to come over today. He said that sometimes power surges can cause them to go out of whack (my terminology not his) and that it takes a little while for the electronics to reset ... but I said that it must have been running like that for at least 3-4 hours.

I'm thinking that it might be good to setup a program on the thermostat to leave the temperature at 76-78 during most of the day and 95 (i.e. off) for a couple of hours in the dead of night. That would give the thing a chance to shut-off, if necessary, reset, if necessary, and then resume. This shouldn't be necessary but would be an easy way to handle it. If I'm going to do this I expect that eventually I'll replace the thermostat with one that would allow me to program a "normal" cycle and an "away" cycle, otherwise at some point I'll screw up and it will be set at 90 all the time !

I'm still pondering the boat cover business. Ideally I would have them leave it on a work rack for an hour after I wash it down so that it would dry somewhat and then come back and put the cover on. I'll see if that's a possibility. There are a few boats that are up on the work racks and seem to be there for a while. The other thing that I could do, now that I'm thinking about it, is wash down the inside of the boat while it's still in the water so that it has more chance to dry before they take it out. Dry, I can then apply silicone spray to the stainless steel cleats etc. which is what's recommended ... hmmm ... I don't want to come back in November and find a boat that is a) chaffed at the sides from wind pulling at the cover; b) stained down the sides from some rusting "stainless" steel screw; discolored vinyl seats from heat etc. It will be cooler than it was in my yard because it's under another boat in the rack. It will be drier in the rack than it was close to the ground in my yard.

You know, the trouble with accumulating "things" is that they are then things that you must worry about. Having two houses is a pain - worry about A/C, ants, bats, heat, water intrusion, etc. etc. etc.; everything else quietly rusts and ages -- like us ! Somehow we want our things to stay young while we age !

As I said before ... onward.

The second LCD Samsung wide-screen monitor arrived a couple of days ago and I pressed it into service to ensure that it was working before re-packing it and taking it up north. They are beautiful monitors -- 23" -- and neither have any dead pixels. I'm using settings that fill the wide screen so that looking at pictures makes people look short and fat, but doing email etc. gives lots of working room and large print. I had initially only bought one to replace the dying monitor up north but got used to it and realized that I didn't want to come back to the old CRT here nor did I want to have to find another monitor if this one wasn't in stock a month from now. My video card supports two monitors but I simply hooked up one at a time. I'm not sure if I have enough desk real estate to put the two side by side without a lot of juggling ... and even if I did, I'd be swiveling my head too much to watch both of them. I may play around at some point and see if I can have a Linux window one screen and an XP window on the other, under VMWare which is what I'm still using. I was going to say "I'm not sure that it's worth it ..." but really I'm sure that it's NOT worth it.

Today is pretty well mapped out, as is tomorrow. Wednesday we leave for parts north and cooler weather. I can leave my shorts behind by the looks of the weather in Loring -- rain & showers & cold for the next 10 days. I'm not sure why we're leaving ... but that's the plan and we're sticking to it ! Sandy says that perhaps next year I should go up north by myself to hunt with Alex ... this from a person who a couple of years ago was not sure if she wanted to head south.

We were talking last night about months that we are here and able to go to SYC and I said May ... she said that we wouldn't be leaving here that late ... I said that would depend on the weather up north ... and I didn't get any argument. I could see us being here:

-- a bit of January
-- all of February, March
-- most if not all of April
-- a few days in May
-- perhaps a week in June, depending on travel plans
-- perhaps a time in August, if we come down with Kylie and Lauren
-- a time in September
-- running into the first days of October, unless I do Endless Mountains next year
-- back mid November to mid December

That would imply 6 round trips, 18k miles just for back and forth. Once up north Sandy's car gets more use than the SUV; down here neither car gets many miles. This Christmas season, of course, we'll also do the Loring, Edmonton, Jasper, Revelstoke, Loring loop which will add 5k miles. I hope that Sandy's back holds out because she's having problems sitting in the car that long. She may need to fly south for some of these trips. Abby and I will keep on trucking.

A final note on Endless Mountains -- 22 finishers out of 48 total starters. Ouch.

Onward.