We've been back in our house for almost three months now and it has really proved to us how much easier it is to be living on a sailboat. The first thing that happened was that Bill strained his back by moving all the heavy furniture out of our storage room! We seemed to both be much healthier while we were cruising. We've both gained back any weight we lost while we were cruising!

The house has made it possible to entertain our family and friends though. We are very happy that we've gotten to spend time with a lot of family. We are especially happy that we got to spend some real quality time with three of our five grandchildren (the other two didn't make it to the east coast this summer). The good news is that they haven’t forgotten us which was definitely a worry of mine.

Since we have been home we have taken care of lots of doctors appointments. Bill is working on completing the application for his Captain’s license. He passed the test last fall and only has a few more weeks to finish that up. We have had dinner with some cruising friends and have even been able to help a friend we met in the Bahamas by driving him around to pick things up and allow him to take showers and do his laundry at our house while he was in town. It felt good to be able to do that for another cruiser!

We have gone on an online spending spree since we have an address to ship everything to right now. We have to keep a list to itemize what we've bought so we can make sure we get all of it! Every day when we get home now there is a package waiting at our door. It is very exciting!

I never imagined we would go on the speaker circuit but Bill’s mother asked us to do a presentation at her retirement community about our trip. I wasn't sure how it would go but Bill did a great job of putting a PowerPoint presentation together. About thirty five people came to hear us. We think it was very well received and as far as I could tell only two people fell asleep. One was asleep almost from the beginning though so I don’t think that was our fault!

We've been enjoying our time here but it’s time to get very serious about getting the boat done. We've done some things to make the boat more comfortable and fixed a couple of things that were broken. We added four dorades to bring in some fresh air while we are at sea, upgraded our emergency steering, sent the pump for our watermaker to get repaired and finally fixed the stanchion gate we broke when we came into Nassau last December. We also hired a canvas company to build us an enclosure for the cockpit, and even more exciting to me, to build us new cushions for our settee area. On Monday we are finally getting the boat hauled out of the water. We have a whole other list of things to do then and that will easily take a month or two. In the meantime we are refinishing the interior teak. This would have been impossible if we were living on the boat. You can see in the picture above our dining room is completely full of teak pieces removed from our head. It took a lot of work to get them to the point that we can now start varnishing them again. Unfortunately that is just a small part of the varnish work we have yet to do.

In the meantime we are working on fixing up the few things that need to be done on the house so we can rent it again. Our realtor says we really should be out by October 1st but we aren't sure we can make that deadline.

I will try to do more frequent blog updates now and report on our progress. At the very least there will be an update on Monday after the boat comes out of the water.