Today the clocks got set forward in honour of spring. I don’t care that we get it back in the fall, I always feel that we have been cheated out of time that is rightfully ours. Oh well, I guess we can always curse Sir Sanford Fleming the guy that invented daylight savings time. At any rate, this morning I woke and bounded, well crawled, out of bed to take Peri for his morning walk. He too was moving a little stiffly for a bouncy little dog. I blame that on the fact that we took him out into the dog walk field yesterday and ran the little legs off him. I guess Barb and I are not the only ones who need more exercise.

Last night my sweetie made us home made pizza (slurp) (burp) which we gobbled down while watching some tube. It was definitely yummy but I wish there was some way that we could get a home made thin crust for pizzas done at home. The dough crusts are really good but it fills you up awfully fast.

This morning we went back to the café to do the uploads. I am trying two different approaches to solve the numbering problem: 1. I have forced Word to number each section with the first starting at page 1 the second at page 94, etc. Then we will ask for a print ready copy to see what happens. If that isn’t perfect I have also managed to recreate a whole file, ie all the document together and I’ll upload it and get lulu to do the whole thing. Barb is really keen on getting some copies here to the marina by Friday so we can have them for sale when I do the presentation for spring outfitting that they are having speakers in for. Keep your fingers crossed. As I was saying, this was another morning in the café to get this done. Thing is, the files are so large that I spend a lot of time watching the percentage figures and reading a book. Again, very little gets done on the boat. We are trying to do some concurrent activity with Barb out grocery shopping while I work on the computer, and we did get to do some boat jobs in the afternoon. Just not as many as I wished and we will be getting nothing done tomorrow ourselves since that is the day that the final work should be done on the new engine.

The files did go up fine and I made a print ready copy. Then when I went in for a fast proof read I discovered an extra blank page in the middle of the document that I hadn’t caught originally. So, rather than just accepting that as a small price to pay, etc. I decided to fix it and being in a rush I went in and deleted that section of the original project in order to reload that section again. Trouble is I deleted the wrong section. My Dad used to say “Less haste more speed!” and every once in a while I re-learn how smart a fellow he is. This is one of those occasions. So I slowed down; took a few calming breaths; in through the nose and out through the mouth; went to my mental happy place and thought things through. Then we came back to the boat and repaired the damage, uploaded the corrected segment and called for another print ready copy. This time all went well and we are good to go. Thanks for my sanity, Dad. We have ordered a half dozen of the books and are hoping that they will arrive at the marina in time for the seminar. If they don’t we’ll have some to sell en route.

It’s really interesting the type of people that are out boating down here. There are way, way more than we have at home and I would say that the average level of experience is really erratic. There are a lot of folks that have a lot of water under their keels and some who only go out in the bay for a day sail or to fish. While sitting in the café I was listening to different people talking about their experiences. There are so many more folks down here in the US that are really into boating. Many more so than in Canada and it’s not just a factor of population. I have to assume that a lot of it has to do with the available sailing venues – Long Island Sound, the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays, all of Florida and the Keys, and the Gulf of Mexico all of which provide superb conditions for boaters and encourage participation. You could easily spend a summer gunkholing around in the Chesapeake alone. Small wonder that so many people are into the sport here whether it be sailing or power boating or fishing. That latter is really a big thing here.