Home for brief stay!

An update from our land home (5/29/15):  As most of you know we had plans to come home for a brief visit, namely to attend our Godson Rob’s High School graduation.  We flew in from Baltimore yesterday and attended the graduation ceremonies last night, amongst family members for over 650 graduates.  The place was a zoo and Denise was really longing to get back to the quiet solitude of boat-life.

Congratulations Rob, who is bound for FSU in the fall (Yeah!).

WPHS Grad 2015

As with all our adventures, this one too has a story. But this one is not of our travels, but of what happened before we left Maryland.

The executive summary:  Our neighborhood had a power outage for over an hour one day this week, and the battery restart system was unable to restart our main computer.  Although our neighbor tried to help (thanks Kim), it was clear that our very old computer bit the dust in the process.  Fortunately, we have a pretty good back up system and it looks like we will not lose any (relevant) data. However, it has taken Mark all of today to diagnose the issue and come up with the recovery, and we are still not operational yet.  The goal is to be up and running again before Mark leaves on Sunday, and to get a new computer on order so it can be set up for our next visit.  We do have a backup server and will be moving our files to it, but that leaves us vulnerable and we don’t want that long-term.

Also placing a challenge on us was the saga of Denise’s contact lens prescription.  Long story short, the script was written (and contacts purchased) for the wrong script, which unfortunately was not detected until we were already on the trip. So, squeezed into the graduation, haircuts and family events for the short weekend was an eye doctor appointment to get it corrected and acquire sufficient lenses until more can be ordered and picked up on the next home visit.  Issue now solved!

Lastly, our mail.  The USPS has done a fine job of screwing up the forward to Elaine’s (Mark’s mom), who is doing a terrific job of handling it all for us – when she gets it. For example: we had mail post-marked 4/13 that arrived at her house this week. So, Mark went to our PO this morning and talked with the Supervisor who advised him that our mail goes first to Tampa (where the “forwarding center” is) before it gets delivered to Elaine in Oviedo and that can take 3 -5 days each way.  Talk about inefficiency!  No wonder they are going broke!  So, if you sent us something and we haven’t responded it is not that we are rude; its possible we just haven’t received it yet! (Thanks Uncle Jerry for the card and great letter). Don’t worry, eventually we will get it and then we will respond.

It sure seems like there are lots of obstacles trying to pull us away from our adventures…..but we won’t let it get the better of us. We shall overcome this and be back on the boat soon.

Have a great weekend and stay tuned for more!