Today, the second in the new year, has been an opportunity to re-establish contact with an old friend and his young family. Long before we started the blog we were getting used to Nelleke and one of our regular crew was a fellow named Steve. He was a guy that we could count on to be available to go for an evening or weekend sail and to party up a storm just about every time that we were able to go out. In fact, I think he even came on our maiden voyage to bring Nelleke around to Halifax from South Shore Marine where wee bought her. Then life moved ahead and he met his sweetie and he "swallowed the anchor", set down roots and started a family. With our traveling we had sort of lost contact until the other day when he and Barb communicated and they were kind enough to invite us over to their new house for a lunch. We were expecting a nice sort of light soup and salad sort of thing so you can imagine our surprise when they trotted out lobster! Wow! We are hoping to be able to return the favour in the summer when we are back home with Nelleke and have them out for a dinner aboard. Perhaps we could take them out to McNab's Island for an explore and picnic.

I have bought the CloneDVD software and am in the progress of copying all of our DVDs to the 1.5 TByte hard drive that I bought the other day. It looks like I will be able to do 10 or 15 a day in the evenings and since we have approximately 600, it should take me just about up to when we leave for the boat to get them all over. Progress is being made and we are starting to take down the Christmas decorations in preparation for making the pile of stuff to go back to the boat in the middle of the floor. I am also writing the rental ad for the apartment and making a list and checking it twice for the jobs that I will need to do back aboard the boat when we get there.

Snoodle Time has provided Barb some words of encouragement regarding the weather that we can expect once we are back aboard. Thanks. Much appreciated. I recall being in Norfolk on a staff exchange visit a couple of years ago and the weather was fine as far as I was concerned. The locals were all in sweaters and giving odd looks at the strange fellow wandering around during his down time in shorts and a T-shirt. My only concern would be the affects of the Global Warming that is ongoing. We are having an exceptionally mild winter up here and from the TV I am seeing that the North Eastern US is digging itself out from under one blizzard after another. It almost looks like there is a band of cold that extends from the Great Lakes down through the Appalachians to the Atlantic, bypassing the Maritimes. I sure hope that it is also bypassing the Chesapeake.