Cheryl's Notes:

I admit it, it is all my fault, I have created a monster. I have introduced John to eBay. He now spends most of his day searching for used items for the boat. We spend our evenings sitting in the car catching wifi from the closed recreation center waiting for the closing bids. We have saved a lot of money, but the locals think that we are nuts.

We have had a stretch of really nice weather. It was in the 80's for about five days. I got my first sunburn of the season waxing the topsides of the boat. It took John two days to wax the hull while kneeling and leaning over in the dinghy. I think that his final words were, "Never again". It is a lot easier to wax the hull when it is sitting in a cradle waiting for spring launch. I think that the job will have to wait for the next time we haul the boat for bottom work. We have also seen our first mosquitoes of the season. My legs got so bit up that it looked like I had chiggers. Of course, it is still better than the weather back home.

John's Notes:

It's been a different kind of a couple of weeks for us. The weather changes are just like Minnesota. If you don't like it, just stick around for a couple of hours, it's gonna change.

I have a new job. Well, it's not really a job but the money that I'm saving is just like working. I have discovered eBay. Every time I purchase something, I save money. The more I buy, the more I save. So far I have purchased several chips for our chart plotter. The average price has been about $50.00 and the cost of new ones is about $200.00. At first I thought I was going to have to purchase a new chart plotter to use at the helm because our is now almost 10 years old. It works just fine but the cartography is old. We use Maptech as the ultimate navigation tool but it only works on our laptop and I like having something at the helm. For those of you that are reading this and are not sailors this is just information overload but the rest of you will understand.

We haven't left the dock in over three months but I think this week we will venture out and explore a little. There are lots of anchorages within a short distance. Everyone keeps telling us that we should go here or there. We can only go one place at a time.

Oh, just an observation. All auction items on eBay are listed to expire on Pacific Daylight Time. That means that there are times that bids expire late at night EDT. If we are bidding on something we have to stay up late to catch the last minute action. It seems like you can have an item listed for days and nothing happens until the very, and I mean very last minute. We have won a couple of bids by submitting a bid with just seconds to spare. We have also lost a couple of bids the same way. Someone had an automatic bid that outbid us. It's complicated. See, I told you it was just like working. You have to manage your account.