Reading on the boat

Reading is one of our enjoyments on the boat. We have been going through novels at an alarming rate. I prefer the intrigue or sci-fi books. My latest readings areas follows:

• THE BRETHREN by John Grisham
• ACT OF TREASON by Vince Flynn
• DEAD WATCH by John Sandford
• LAST LIGHT by Andy McNab
• Several books by Tom Clancy

I am now down to just a few books left unread onboard and I may have to start reading the technical books again.  Diesels Made Simple and Shipboard Electrical Systems make for stimulating reading.    As you can see, I am getting desperate and even writing in my blogs again.

The internet here at the marina is now working again in a very slow fashion and there is insufficient bandwidth to meet the demand.  During the week it is marginally acceptable but the weekends are disaster and you might as well forget the marina internet and go downtown to the coffee shop.  We do this often.

4th & Grandchildren

We are anticipating being on the boat for the 4th of July and this will be a new course charted for us. For 50+ years in the past we have met at the family homestead for a family get together. This has slowly declined over the years as the American Productivity increased: now no one has the extra time for these events.

The Texas grand children are expected to arrive the 6th when we pick them up at Carol’s place of business. A fun packed 4+ days are expected that are oriented around water things. It will be fun for us and hopefully for them too.

Heatwave

Sleeping on the boat for the past couple of days has been taxing. The summer heat finally arrived and this means some pretty hot nights.

We made a planned trip home one evening early because of the heat and this was a blessing in disguise as some needed painting is being done as we write.

The big news is we hired a guy to mow the lawn and this gives us a little more freedom and time to spend on other household chores. Right now he is mowing every 5 days but as the season progresses it will be every 7 days and then every 10 days in the Fall.

Tomorrow Mike and I finish the last remaining hangar that we are maintaining. Yea, now I can get paid the $5/per hr it averages out.

Father’s Day 2009

It is almost a day past. No calls thus far but that is to be expected.

Went sailing with Fred & Karen today. It was a slow and easy cruise for about 3 hours. Lots of sun, a few biting flies and about 5knots of wind out of the NW.

Internet at the marina is dreadful, even worse than before, and we have to go to the Uncommon Grounds coffee shop to get wi-fi. Pain so tonight’s missive will be thankfully short. Bye.

Monday Tuesday Wednesday

Monday we went out sailing but the winds died.  We had to motor back into the river.  The biting flies were out as well so we can chalk Monday up as a bad day.  At least it was warm and dry.

Tuesday we went out again and the wind was really blowing out of the East at 20 kts.  The seas were 1 or less to start and we enjoyed some pretty good runs at hull speed.  I finally heard an unusual noise in the back ground and investigated.  Sure enough up above the reefing points the sail slides were broken and the remnants were tinging against the mast.  I could see the sail was under some stress and since I did not want to chance ripping it we headed into the wind and I took down the main sail and secured it.  I ask SAM to hold a course with the inner staysail but could not so I started the engine and we motored up the river to our slip.  The remainder of the afternoon was spent securing repair parts and performing the repair.  All in all a pretty good day.

Tuesday night late it started to rain and continued throughout the night at a moderate pace – I would guess about an inch of rain – and into Wednesday morning when it abated to a drizzle.  We departed Inspiration about 0930 for the trip to Indiana.  SAM had a real husky sound this AM and appears to be developing a cold – the second this season.  I am suspicious that it might be an allergy  or the cooking oil used last night to fry the egg plant.

The lawn was mowed by 1600 hrs and I had a shower to get all the grass off of my person then I went to the church tonight as is usual.  We had 33 children tonight and the parents brought many as the buses were nearly empty.

Indiana

We are back from the boat to attend Brandon Doty’s graduation tomorrow.  On arrival at the homestead this afternoon I started to mow the hay field that our yard has become.  Soon after it started to rain, lightly at first, and I kept mowing.  The grass was plugging up the mower deck and I was going very slow and watching the great plugs of grass come shooting out onto the lawn.  I finally finished in very heavy rain with the water spitting out the mower.  I came up from the barn and took a hot shower as I was thoroughly chilled and soaked.  By the time I was done with this the sky was brightening up.  Oh well, it was a different type of thing to do that I had never done before.  Now I am trying to catch up on internet related things because we have become internet challenged up at the boat.  Hopefully, this will be resolved in the near future.

We went sailing yesterday and it was great.  Winds were pretty steady at 10 knots out of the NW with periods of gusts of about 14 kts.  We did a lot of tacking for practice and tried a few new techniques to make life easier.  We are starting to raise and lower the sail while still in the river mouth as the winds are usually blanketed and this gives us fairly stable waters with which to be up front.  Also we are removing the sail covers and raising the boom out of the gallows before we depart the dock.  This was SAM can concentrate on piloting the boat while I am up on top getting ready to sail.  All this makes it much more enjoyable and relaxing.

Lunch is coming

We are on the boat and SAM is cooking bacon. Mummmm, love bacon. We do not have it too often but I love the smell, tast and crunchiness.

The day is overcast and rain is to the immediate south about 10 miles. The prospects of going sailing today are not that good as we are “pleasure boaters”.

We did go sailing yesterday for about 5 hours. That was fun and relaxing. The day was sunny, 10kts of wind and about 60 degrees. In short – wonderful sailing.

We will do a lot of reading today as we feel lazy.

Brandon’s Granduation

My nephew Brandon Doty graduated from high school and his party was today.  In August, he is to enter the United States Airforce.  We are really proud of him and his accomplishments.  One of the real good kids.  My brother and sister and their families attended the event and I appreciate the fact that they came from a long way to do this.  SAM helped sister  to perform the miracle of this event.  So nice.

I awoke early to go to the TSA airport work day.  I got there about 15 minutes late and the whole crew was there working away.  I mowed grass for 4 hours.  The crew finished early and the grounds looked much better when we were finished.  Mike B put on a feed after the event and everyone was appreciative.  Everyone thanked everyone – especially the machinery providers.

Airport Duty

Many of the TSA Hangar LLP spent the morning cleaning up the grounds around the airport.  The current FBO is not doing a very good job of keeping this Steuben County asset in pristine shape.  We pulled out a fence and mowed along the road.  We had three full size tractors mowing and pulling the fence out.  All in all it was a fun time.  I mowed about three acres of grass that was over a foot high.

On arriving home I showered to get ready for my nephew’s graduation party.  My brother is supposed to arrive to attend also.  they should have been here by now.  Who knows..

Firefox 3.5 Beta 4

I installed FF3.5 beta 4 last night.  So far I like it and it has some neat features.  One I like is the ability to take any hyperlink and drag it to the tab bar so you can open it a new tab.  No more target=”newpage”.  Another feature, as yet unexplored is the ability to watch movies without flash or codecs: they explain that the codec in FF3.5 is in its infancy and there are some stutter issues.  I am sure these are growing pains and it will go away after a time.  Other than that it looks about the same as before.  I would wait for the full release if I had it to do all over again as there are some minute rendering issues.