Poor old Peri is in a bit of a bad way. It is so warm here in Florida that he has totally lost his appetite. The only time that he will eat is first thing in the AM when the sun hasn't fully come up and started to really cook things and the air is a little cooler. We have made an appointment with a local dog groomer to get some of the shag trimmed off him so that will make him more comfortable, we hope. Saturday is his day with the bow-wow-tician.

I had a telephone conversation with our friend Vince Purcell yesterday evening and interspaced with the normal conversations about family and plans for the holidays, we discussed boat work and its never decreasing quantity. He gave me some great advice - I am supposed to be taking it easy. Relax. Read a book. Hmmmm....advice to slack off. Gotta love it. More important, gotta follow it.

We are having some problems with the wifi here at the marina. The signal is the strongest that we have seen during our trip and the bandwidth is the widest, but after we are signed on and usually after we have typed in a fair amount of work, we lose the connection. I have discussed it with the management and apparently they are having problems with some local hackers that like to use the router for their own work and chew up all the band width. Their consultant comes in on a regular basis and freezes out the hacker's IP address but they just get a new one. Very frustrating for all concerned. I'd love to get their street address and pay them a visit, personally carrying the proverbial blunt object to introduce to their computer hardware; either that or a big permanent magnet.

There is a wonderful walk right adjacent to the marina which is great to take the dog for his daily perambulations. It consists of a shell lined path through a mangrove marsh with dozens of little islands, observation decks, and wildlife - very pleasant place to escort Peri. After we took him on his morning walk, and the air was still easy to work in, Barb and I got busy with boat chores. She scrubbed off the deck and I installed a new ventilation port in the forward cabin. This will help keep the humidity down in that part of the boat. We were also able to clean out the blocked scupper in the anchor roller so that will be easier to keep clean. I need to repair the deck wash down pump so Barb will have an easier time of cleaning off the anchor when we weigh it.

We then took the 15-20 minute walk into the main part of Gulfport with our week's worth of laundry to get cleaned. En route we were again dodging lizards all of who seemed to have a suicidal bent and would run out of the grass across the sidewalk under our feet and into the grass on the other side; rather like the grass is safer on the other side sort of thing. We also found a house with several large cages in the front yard with four different kinds of Amazon parrots plus a sulphur crested cockatoo inside them. We had seen the cages yesterday but nothing was in them so obviously they get put in there during the sunny days and brought inside at night.

We found a really nice Laundromat run by a lady named Cathy called the Gulfport Village Laundry House on Beach Blvd. The machines are all new, are of various sizes and priced according to weight of laundry washed and best of all, they all work really well. The fact that Cathy was on site to ensure everything went well was a key factor in that I'm sure. I also scoped out the dog groomer to ensure that they will take good care of Peri on Saturday and together we selected a restaurant for dinner tonight. We will be dining at Pia's, an Italian Canteena sort of place that looks very nice and was recommended by Cathy from the Laundromat. Our reservations are for six o'clock so we'll let you know tomorrow what we thought. We found a small patisserie called the Moulin Jaune that sells bread, baguettes and croissants as well as small tarts and turnovers. They are about to become larger, but we'll probably have to wait for our next visit to Gulfport for that. We also happened into a gift store that gives kayak lessons and rents out kayaks and the lady there recommended that we go for a paddle in the mangrove marsh just in front of where Nelleke is docked. When Kayt gets here we'll rent another kayak and try that. She and Barb can go in the double that we own or she can take the single that we rent - her call. I think that would be a really great adventure for all of us.

Another fellow with whom I had been communicating electronically for several years, Mike Waller, otherwise know by his nom-de-internet, Armychefmike, and I got in contact. He will be coming to visit Nelleke on Sunday. I am really looking forward to this as he is also the fellow that wrote the introduction to my cookbook, "Son of a Sea Cook".