Mary Margaret continued her cooking frenzy today. With the A/C going full force to swap out the heat from the oven for the cool refreshing air it produces, she blazed away making her killer lasagna and then followed that up with a double batch of meatloaf. With a portion of the delicious lasagna set aside for dinner tonight, the rest of the lasagna and all of the meat loaf went into the two freezers. After she was done, she declared a well-deserved victory and called an end to all of her cooking. She has calculated that we now have enough meals available for the next 30 days. Wow!

While she was cooking, I chose to defrost the salon freezer and refrigerator. By doing this, I was also able to inventory all of the food that we have in those two appliances. Yesterday, I had inventoried the food that is frozen in our portable freezer which is currently sitting in our forward guest side bathroom. It is in the bathroom that we really do not use and it is out of the way there. Armed with this inventory, we decided that we really do not need any more food besides some fresh veggies and some staples such as nuts, juice, Kleenex and coffee. This will make shopping at the Grand Mache a snap tomorrow.

I also spent the day working on restoring our AIS to working order. AIS stands for Automatic Identification System and it is a device that sends out VHS radio signals from our boat and also receives such signals from other vessels in our area. It allows us and them to track each other for collision avoidance purposes. It is a major part of our safety program while we are passage making. Yesterday, I inadvertently knocked our system offline.

One of the problems I face due to the "itchy butt" syndrome I wrote about yesterday is that while sitting in a location for too long, I start to look for projects to work on to keep me busy. Yesterday, I decided to tune up our AIS. Every now and again, Raymarine makes a software update available for its equipment. I noticed that our AIS software was dated 2012 and Raymarine had an update from 2015 available. Naturally, I just had to go in and try to update our AIS with this newer software. As it turned out, this was a mistake since our AIS was working just fine and by the time I had uploaded and installed the new software, it stopped working. Mary Margaret was not too pleased with me, especially after I called the Raymarine tech support group and the technician suggested that I package the unit up and send it to them to work on. Oh, oh, this was not good, especially since we plan on starting our passage in less than a week.

Before he and I could go through all of the troubleshooting procedures, our internet based call was dropped and before I could reconnect, it was 1700 and they were now closed. Thus, I spent the rest of the evening and part of this morning, Googling for solutions. Before the support group's office opened this morning, I found a possible solution that looked promising (if you are interested to see it, go to: http://raymarine.ning.com/forum/topics/ais-software-update?xg_source=activity). Thus, I spend this morning following the steps that solution suggested. By the time I was done, the AIS unit was back on line and I felt a wave of relief. Whew! Mary Margaret, while pleased with the result, was not happy that I had knocked the unit off-line to begin with but she is used to me doing such stupid things. It seems that I have a history of taking a step backwards before taking two steps forward and this is just too anxiety providing for her. I cannot say that I blame her as I too was sweating bullets until the darn thing was back on-line.