Don't let the title of this blog mislead you. I have a good job and I work with some great people, it's just that it does bother me that I don't have as much time to put into renovations on the house, and, it occurred to me, I won't have as much time to put into getting Nelleke back in the water when the spring comes. Everything will be compressed into the weekends. Oh well. Maybe it will take a couple or three weekends. Sigh. Every two weeks there is a paycheque......every two weeks there is a paycheque.......every two weeks there is a paycheque. Keep telling myself.

Our friend Jennifer from M/V Close Knit is back in the US. You can check out her blog on her trials and tribulations if you click on their thumbnail which you can find on the right hand side of our main page. It looks like US customs is starting to enforce their rules about how long you can stay in the country as an alien. I guess they have a lot of folks trying to sneak in. We can't complain. Canada has the same restriction. Snowbirds are now restricted to 6 months per year it would appear. That fits in OK with our future plans of spending 6 months in Shelburne and six months aboard, but I know that there are many more people from up here who were planning on spending a fair amount more time than that in the US. I guess if they want to stay in the sunnier climes they will have to leave the states for some of the Carribean isles or Mexico for at least six months. We are quite happy to come back to Canada for that periodas long as it is in the summer. For us the challenge will be to be able to get a cruising permit for Nelleke for longer than the six months. The advice given to us by US customs (most of them are quite friendly and most helpful) is to get a short duration cruising permit the first time that we go into the US, say 2 months; leave the US to another country (Bahamas, DR, BVIs); travel there for three months; then return to the US say in March and ask for a 6 month permit from April to October; put the boat up on the hard in the Chesapeake and come home to Shelburne for the six months returning to the states in September. That will give us until the first of November to get the boat back out to the Bahamas, etc to start the cycle all over again. That should satisfy our needs and US immegration and well as keeping the state tax folks away from the boat. We won't be doing it for a couple of years but when we do we will let you know how it works out.