I got some excellent feedback over the last couple of days from our readers about PayPal and how it works. Very much appreciate it. As best I can summarize it, PayPal wants to be an international bank without having to go through the Acts of Charter or whatever each country requires of a party that wants to be a real bank. It also doesn’t want to be governed by whatever laws control national and international banking, all of which concern me a small amount. If they can get away with it God bless ‘em, but what does bother me is the amount that they want to charge me for the privilege of helping them get rich. Lulu will send me a cheque every three months for no cost whereas PayPal wants access to my banking information plus charge me a fee. I am barely making any money at all from the sales of our books and I am really loathe to hand a large slice of our small profit over to an electron. So, thanks again to all those folk who steered me towards the necessary sources of information for me to make an informed decision.

I have also discovered part of the reason that my poor old laptop was having challenges doing some of my processing – my hard drive was almost full. One of the little things in the Microsoft operating system for it to operate efficiently is that it needs at least 15% of the hard drive to be blank for the cashe process to work properly and I was down to less than 5! There were two major culprits – number one was Java. Every time that uploaded a newer update for Java the old one stayed behind and since each of them takes almost a fifth of a GByte, they add up, especially when you had ten extras aboard as I did. You’d think that the install software would remove the old versions as part of the process but they don’t. If you go into the Java website, www.java.com and ask the question about how to get rid of older versions they will not only tell you how but tell you which old versions you have installed that you can get rid of. So, BANG, they’re gone. The second culprits were all the photos and videos that I had taken over the years. I didn’t want to lose them so they are on an external drive for storage. As you can imagine, I have spent the last couple of hours yesterday on a witch hunt for software and files of any description that I either don’t use or could better store off line. That’s one of the things about the current state of connectivity that we all live is that it is so easy to add new files to your computer. You need something. You cruise the internet. You find it, and look! Ooooooo! It’s free! Download. Download. Download. Next thing you know you are in my predicament with way too much rubbish on your hard drive.

On another technical note, I think that I have finally discovered why our wifi signal is so intermittent when we haven’t moved an inch. In fact, we have. It’s just that the movement is up and down. In spite of our booster antenna the signal that I was getting wasn’t any better than the one that Barb was getting on her laptop that wasn’t using an antenna and I couldn’t figure out why. The marina has a big conspicuously mounted antenna that should be giving me a gangbuster signal, but it doesn’t. Yesterday I noticed that in between was one of their covered in water boat storage units, covered with tin roofing material so there is a very effective shield in between. For one hour or so every six the tide drops or raises us enough that a larger portion of the signal gets through and the signal strength increases. I guess that’s one more reason that we are looking forward to getting out on the docks and out from behind these covered wharfs.

Another small thing that we did yesterday was bend on the storm sails, or at least we tried to. The storm jib went on easily enough after I stopped trying to raise it upside down as it had been in place every year for the last five years, but when we went to put on the storm trysail we discovered that we couldn’t put it on while the main sail cover was in place. Hmmmm…. I guess we need another small length of sail track to allow us to put the lugs on the track below the main boom and still leave the sail in the bag. No biggy, just something that you’d have thought that I would have noticed before. We have only had the sail for four years, after all. I guess the telling point is that we have never had to use it while we have used the storm jib several times.

Today, Tony the mechanic fellow was working on the rest of the IN-stall, as he puts it, so Barb and I got busy sorting out the forward cabin, deciding what we absolutely had to have aboard and what we could de-IN-stall and take back to Halifax with us. I am motivated by three things: one, I need space to put batteries in for the anchor windlass; two, we need more storage space available on the boat so that; three, we can clear out the cabins and not use every flat surface as a storage area. Barb is motivated by her general Virgo sense of neat freak tidiness. (Barb says, “Yeah, Mike. How come you don’t have it since you are a Virgo too?”). Tony, for his part basically finished up all of the connects including wiring, fuel and water on the engine.

We also took the car into a local garage to get the oil changed and joints greased before I start the trip back home in a couple of weeks. I had a look at the oil levels yesterday and figure I could grow potatoes in there it’s so dirty and while they are at it I got them to check the tire pressure and transmission fluid level as well. The last thing that I want is for the car to give up half way home to Halifax.

I am also on the prowl for a means to get back to the boat after I have dropped off the car. It now seems that my two more comfortable options are a 50 hour trip by train for $300 or a 5 hour trip by air for $450. Given the option of two 2 hour trips by air with an hour layover in either NYC or Philadelphia or 50 hours in coach sitting beside either the fat, smelly, snoring guy, or the blabbermouth who simply won’t shut up, or the religious fundamentalist missionary who feels that it is his calling to convert the heathen and I am the most convenient infidel or the poor woman with five screaming kids, guess which one I am leaning towards?