Thursday September15: All Play and No Work ....

is sort of starting to get old! We've seen a lot of Baltimore in various treks around the area (sometimes while lost!), found several great places for breakfast and in general haven't done much beyond reading and surfing the internet. Time to get some work done!

It was time to fix the oven which had quit working while Becky was here but somehow it took this long to get around to thinking about fixing it. First place to start: read the instruction booklet that tells you how to change out the lower oven element. It's amazing how informative an instruction book can be! And as we suspected - a broken wire. The nice part was I didn't need to pull the stove out to fix it as it was doable from inside the oven. Job 1: done!

Job 2 wasn't quite as easy. We needed to raise the thru the hull fitting for the main bilge pump so water couldn't siphon back into the boat when the pump had emptied the bilge. It used to be fine but with full fuel and water tanks, the fitting was under the water. This meant the siphon created by the pump running simply reversed itself when the pump shut off and started letting water pour back into the boat! When enough came in, the pump went back on and the cycle repeated itself endlessly - definitely not a good thing when your bilge pump lets water come back into the boat! So first drill a hole in the side of the boat, add a fitting, connect the hose and good to go. Almost all from under the floor of the cabin.

Most satisfying moment of the day? I'm at a red light this morning that has a sign "No turn on red 7am - 10pm", ok? So I'm sitting waiting for the light to change. This guy behind me starts honking and carrying on - wanting me to turn! He continued to berate me so I put the car in park, walked back to his car and told him I wasn't going to turn right on red because of the sign. He agitatedly indicated it was now 10:05. I indicated the sign said 10 PM not AM. He sheepishly apologized. Changing the rednecks of the world one at a time :-)

Steve is feeling better and is now only on Tylenol (instead of Oxycontin which seemed to mess up his whole body). He has a followup appointment tomorrow so hopefully they will do another xray to see how the arm is really healing. Still not a lot of sleep though so in the meantime, we make it a point to get off the boat and drive around at least once a day. Pretty soon he'll feel well enough we can truly do some sightseeing of the area :-)