Bootstrapping

Its a long road back but we are (finally) on the mend.  In the end both of us got sick but fortunately we didn’t both hit bottom at the same time. 

Sick or no, we dragged our sorry asses into Victoria for a couple of days over Christmas.  It could have been more enjoyable but it likely did us both good to get away.  We rented a room at the same hotel that Mom & Dad always stayed at – the Embassy Inn which is just west of the BC legislature.  We won’t do that again.  I’m sure it was more than adequate for their purposes but it was nonetheless ……. underwhelming.  Which is what I told the lacklustre guest clerk at checkout when he half-heartedly asked how our stay had been.  He didn’t follow up my response and that was perfectly in character for the whole stay.  They never actually gave enough effort to accomplish “bad” service – just overall underwhelming service.

We did manage to make it to Don Mee’s for Dim Sum on Christmas Day and that was every bit as good as it always is.  Neither of us had much of an appetite but that just meant that our meal was less expensive.  In the afternoon we watched the Hobbit in 3D at a downtown theatre.  Part one was better but then part one is always better.  And part two was good enough to get us back in the door for part three so I guess that’s all they really wanted to accomplish anyway.

Now we are slowly starting to get ahead of the boat projects.  Not that there were all that many but we have created a few along the way.  On Boxing Day we stopped at Costco and came home with an all-in-one computer which is now sitting on the dash.  I have to figure out some way of holding it down in rough seas because it will do double duty as a TV screen and a nav computer.  Its taken a few years off my life getting all the nav software working on Windows 8 – and I’m not 100% certain I’ve got it all working yet.  But its close.  Getting the Canadian charts registered just about did me in.  I was so desperate that I even re-installed Fugawi in order to test whether it was the registration or OpenCPN that was giving me grief.  It turned out to be the registration, I guess – although I’m not 100% sure of that either.  It doesn’t matter – they are working and that’s good enough for me.

We got a burst of sunshine this afternoon and that prompted a flurry of dockside activity.  All along the dock everyone is out bustling around enjoying the sunshine.  I may even get motivated enough to fire up the pressure washer and clean some of the green grunge off the boat.  Marilyn made New Year’s reservations for us at the dinner theatre in Chemainus so I need to get us cleaned up.  It doesn’t take long for the green stuff to grow.  Right now I’m waiting for some glue to set up on the deck box that split open when I started putting it back together.  I had taken one of the boxes back to Buchanan to epoxy coat and varnish.  I guess I got too much epoxy in the screw holes because when  started putting it together I split a couple of rails. 

Marilyn had a somewhat jerky Skype visit with Karla this morning.  She’s back in Guasave for Christmas – I think she said she hadn’t spent Christmas there for 5 years.  Between the flaky wifi here at the marina and the Mexican internet the connection was on again off again and more often “off” than “on” but they managed to get caught up.