Planetary Exloration on Senta II

The cabin sole has been beginning to show some real wear and the companionway door was looking like it should have used a lot more sun screen, so it was time to get ready to varnish.

Nancy rented a studio condo up in the marina complex so we would be able to escape the Epifanes varnish fumes and especially not have to sleep with them. Initially we rented the condo for just two days but we ended up extending that to four days as we decided to also tackle the table in the cabin. We also put some more varnish on the wooden base the windlass is mounted on.

The cabin sole now looks a lot better and we managed to give the cabin sole hatches a good coat too.

Nancy did a great job on the companionway door so it looks much better and should be well protected again. Whenever I look at the door I'm amazed that I managed to do the angles and curves and angled curves to get the fit we have. I did that work in the "fully" equipped garage before we vacated the house and it was still a real challenge. There is no way we could replace it even with the nice tools we have on board so the protective varnish is more than cosmetic.

The table was once again a challenge. For some reason varnish will not flow out on the surface and leaves dry streaks no matter how hard we try. I think I put on about eight to ten frustrating coats before we installed the tabletop on board and I still didn't get one single perfect coat. It was the same problem now, we tried near full strength Epifanes, really thinned Epifanes, sanding, not sanding, foam brushes, bristle brushes, cleaning with water, cleaning with acetone. The surface is very shiny but the varnish is still streaked. At least the table is well sealed.

While staying in the condo we had no WiFi. The managers couldn't find the password and in their and our attempts to get at the password we ended up resetting the WiFi router so it will now have to be re-initialized. Because we had no WiFi we ended up watching television (!!) and reading. Watching television was as bad as we remembered but since we don't speak Spanish well enough it probably seemed a bit better than it actually was because we didn't understand much of what was said ... A blessing.

We thought this would be a great time to watch Firefly or one of our other favorite movies or series. With the MacBook Retina dead we have not been able to watch any of our DVDs even with the external CD/DVD drive but the room had a huge television screen and a DVD player so we were in luck !

Except for the greed of the movie companies and their idiotic region codes !!!

Our DVDs will not play here because of the pirates in Hollywood.

Back to watching broadcast/cable television.

After watching the Miami Open women's semi-final and final we were pretty sure that the miraculous performance of Serena Williams was not all due to genetics and hard work ... it just isn't credible. Some quick image googling on 'Serena Williams steroids' proved our suspicions right beyond any reasonable personal doubt ... the pictures of her looking like Paul Bunion on steroids makes us wonder how she hasn't been exposed yet. The story about how she hid from a drug enforcer because she thought he was "an intruder" just adds comedy to the story. Guess the tennis establishment is making too much money off her to want to do a Lance Armstrong exposure but it really isn't fair to the smaller competitors if they are not cheating.

We also watched the Long Beach electric grand prix. I and my friends on Viking saw what I believe was the first running of the Long Beach Grand Prix back in the late 70s. Nancy and I also went to the LBGP shortly after we got married, so watching it run with electric formula cars promised to be fun. Unfortunately electric cars are too quiet and reliable so the thrill wasn't really there.

The bottom line is that we are not missing television and now we know we shouldn't be.