What a miserable day, weather wise! Looks like Kayt got all the sunshine and Chris and Taunya get Florida's annual quotient of rain for their holidays. At least it's not snow, or that's what we keep telling them.

A suggestion to cruisers in planning - if you are carrying a computer aboard, and most of us do, you might want to consider making sure that the disk drive on it will read both CDs and DVDs. That way you can watch movies after the sun goes down or on rainy days. On Nelleke we have a collection of about 400 movies and we haven't watched nearly a quarter of them. They are contained in three cases, each holding 150 disk. It's not that we went nuts and bought that many DVDs. Rather, we have bought several "collections" - Film Noir, John Wayne, Sherlock Holmes, Alfred Hitchcock, Comedy on Film, etc. If you like old movies as we do these collections are great and kinda kitchy to watch on a rainy day. A laptop doesn't draw too much power even if you have it plugged into an inverter.

Barb and I have decided to replace the fridge that came with the boat. There's nothing really wrong with the one that's here except that it is European and expects to see 240VAC so when it is plugged into shore power in North America it is drawing way too much current to meet the power demands. It has been working, sort of. The 24VDC phase of its operation is fine, but if I should turn off the DC power to it when it is plugged into shore, the AC isn't enough to keep it chilled down and everything defrosts. Plus, we now have a separate freezer on the boat so we are finding the small freezer compartment in the fridge a waste of space. We have found a brand new 12/24VDC 4.5 cubic foot fridge only unit on the internet for about $900US that will fit in the same space as the older unit on the boat. Pricey compared to the fridge in your home but it looks like it would be the answer to our needs. Now we only have to find the $900!

I think that I'm going to have cards made up from my paintings. These will be note cards that we can use to send snail mail notes to folks ashore like my parents who haven't crossed the technology Rubicon yet and considering their stage of life likely ever will. Maybe that's what we'll give to the 10,000 viewer on the blog - a set of the note paper. Perhaps we'll make that one of the options. This reminds me. For you viewers, as the number approaches the 10,000 mark, keep an eye on the counter and if you are the one that trips the counter over the magic number, send Nelleke an e-mail and let us know.

The Nelleke crew visited the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) today and what a place that is! First of all they had one of the Body Works exhibits there. You may have seen them elsewhere or in the literature. They are the displays of actual cadavers carefully preserved and displayed to educate people on body functions and mechanics; they were remarkable to say the least! The exhibits are intended to educate the general population and are constructed so as to present the actual human anatomy in a fashion that is neither grotesque nor sensationalism. They have not been adopted by the medical fraternity for training as yet; believing as they do that one fresh cadaver early in a doctor's career is superior to something like this. Apparently there are four traveling shows all put together by the same fellow in Germany. If one comes to your area it is well worth the admission price for a visit.

MOSI has a section on natural disasters, the weather, magnetism, butterflies and several other areas. Clearly it is intended and indeed used as an educational facility as the place was full of school tours. Very nice to see.

There is an IMAX as part of the complex and we took in a 40 minute show about a group of ordinary folk climbing Kilimanjaro which was very well done. I have never been in a "dome" IMAX and was started at the effect of having the seats positioned in a dome with film projected 180 degrees all around you. If the film was of the subjects at the edge of a cliff and you happened to look down at your feet it was almost as if you were standing at the edge of the cliff yourself.

From there we went to a planetarium which was old hat for me as I had studied astronomy in university and had taken a couple of courses in Celestial Navigation, but I must say they did their presentation very well starting with a video about the Saturn probe Cassini and its ongoing mission to the outer solar gas system giants.

Back in Gulfport we dropped Chris and Taunya off at the Laundromat to get a laundry done while Barb and I came back to Nelleke to walk Peri. While there we had a visit from our buddy Cliff who brought us a little gadget that will allow us to hook a rope shock rode to the chain on our primary anchor and bring the bridle to both of the bow fairleads. It is a U shaped piece of stainless with holes for a shackle on both sides of the U. I just need to rig up the nylon bridles - another job for the next couple of days.