It finally happened. The dreaded S-Word, the four letter word that sooner or later in the winter we all face up here in the rigid frigid - S N O W. Yuck! Beginning in the wee hours or early morning it began to gently come down until at around 1100 there was as much as 3-4 cm of it on the ground. If is wet packing snow so the builders of snow forts and snowmen will be very happy but for the rest of us, if it was only a degree or two warmer it would have been rain. Sigh!

We have brought the cardboard and Tupperware boxes in from the storage unit and started packing. Hurrah! Barb and I have both been giving a great deal of thought to another triage on the boat to rid it of stuff that we used to think so essential but have never used in the two years we have been cruising. We thought that we had done the necessary last year but clearly we had not cut close enough to the bone. We have spent far too long cruising with the spare bunks cluttered with stuff that should be stowed somewhere but cannot be because we have other, apparently less urgent stuff put in the cupboards and lockers. I am almost as bad a culprit as there are several tool boxes that have tools in them that I have never used and in fact are nearly empty. I could probably consolidate all the tools from four boxes in one if I really feel that I need them and I probably don't.

Today has been a really lazy day. Even Peri wouldn't go any farther than the end of the driveway for his walk before he was dancing from paw to paw in his exuberance to get back into the warmth of the apartment. The packing has fallen into Barb's ballyhoo and it will be mine to hump everything down to the car, truck or trailer as the case demands; and I spent the day still copying DVDs over onto the hard drive. I have gotten it down to an art by this point and am doing a DVD every 30 minutes or so depending upon how big the files are and how much of it I can do with the software and how much I need to coax over manually. We really do have a lot of movies particularly if you count the 4 or 5 per disk in the collections that we have. We had always intended to watch movies after the sun went down to extend the cruiser's midnight business but so far on our cruises we hadn't gotten around to that. Since this upcoming year is making out to be a much more laid back, smell the coffee sort of cruise perhaps this year we will get around to that. If you like movies and you see us in the anchorage, c'mon over and say, "Hi. Whatcha watchin' tonight?" Bring popcorn. We'll ask you to stay.