Today was our twentieth wedding anniversary. We started out by bringing the cat to the vet on base to get all of her booster shots -- we're going to board her for a few days to visit Derek's parents, and she has to be immune to everything we can reasonably immunize her against in order to do that. It went better than expected -- she even got into the carrier without too much fuss :-)

Next, we had breakfast at CJ's and went to work/school on the boat. Derek has finished the stairs up into the master bunk except for some aspects of the support blocks, but he's used them to climb into the bunk area successfully. He also was working on plumbing the micro in-line water heater into the boat systems, using the Rube Goldberg collation of plumbing parts I'd brought back from Lowe's -- but it kept leaking -- like a fountain in the galley, under the sink. Sigh. We think he solved the problem late this afternoon with a much simpler arrangement than the stuff I had brought back... he'll try tomorrow morning and you'll be the next to know after the three of us!

I flailed around in Grant's cabin, finishing the headliner. The battens that trimmed the previous headliner now have to screw in through foam, however, and that is going to be a problem -- I tried drilling a guide hole for the first screw and wound up with a semi-hardened mass of foam wrapped around the tip of the drill bit. Derek has a little experience with drilling foam and will try it tomorrow.

Turns out the main settee woodwork and the battens have been stained and - I think - polyurethaned in the past, so I brought a tiny can of stain from Lowe's, the closest in tone to the small piece of batten in my hand. We tried it on a small scrap of teak ply, and it looks pretty convincing. So tomorrow I'll be staining woodwork, most likely.

Grant memorized a poem for reading and did two spelling tests -- a post-test from the previous chapter as well as the pre-test for the next chapter. He got 100% on his post-test... Yay!

And this evening, Derek and I went to the Global Grill for dinner (tapas style), talked about boat stuff and future stuff, and had a good meal and a bottle of pinot noir, and visited the boat again so that I could show Derek his anniversary present... stay tuned...