Nothing new

We are still busy with the house and NO the boat is not fixed up so we have not had any fun on the water. We are now having to accept that we will have to wait until next summer to do any boating on the west coast. At least we have to sail boat to return to and enjoy SE Asia over the winter.

The outside painting and cleaning up of the house has been done and the place is getting to look respectable again. Marian has just about finished off the inside cleaning which has taken over a month to do. Now lots more gardening and logging as things are overgrown. We have  had relatives from Saskatoon and Ireland and have had two of the grandsons with us for a week now. They are 8 and 6 and tend to tire you out. I have had to take up riding a bike with them so lots of fun. They also can help to run the computers and games that they play as well as the TV. It is interesting to see the changes from our generation to theirs. It is a different world that they will inherit.

The sad news is that our friend Steve Southwood (s/v Dignity) lost his battle with cancer this month and set sail for places unknown. He was only 48 so far too young. He will be missed.

August

We are back in our house and not too sure if we are happy about that or not. It is nice to have lots of room and long showers but as you can imagine after seven years of renting, with only being back in the house for a few months between renters, there is a lot of painting and cleaning to do. We have the roofing guys doing a rather major job and the painter doing the soffits and facier boards as well as all the wood windows. We are painting some of the indoor rooms ourselves. Now we could do most all of this but it would take us too much time.  This has kept us very busy and unfortunately not left us any time for boating. I am still waiting on our engine man and friend to come down and lift the engine up into the saloon so we can cut out the old tank and install the two new ones. Hopefully this will happen soon so we can get out sometime this summer??

Our furniture and "stuff" arrived back at the house and it was fun opening boxes and finding long lost bits and pieces of our old life. It is funny now that most of the hard furniture is back in place that  everything feels so normal almost like we never left and that the sailing was just a dream. As I mentioned before it will be great to get back to it and enjoy the challenges that sailing affords us. On the dental front all has been completed and I am good to go so at least no more worries there. In the middle of doing all this stuff we have been managing to see lots of the grand kids and are managing to catch up with old friends. If we ever find a little more time I will post some more interesting news.