Another week passes and man is it freaking hot here. We're seeing temps in excess of 95 every day with most days having a heat index reading of 105 - 110 degrees. Needless to say, we try and pass the hottest hours of the day hiding inside with the AC units sets to warp factor infinity.
On the boating front, I've finished wiring my little mini tachometers/hour meters and they seem to work as advertised. I've also tried two more times, both unsuccessfully, to get my chart plotter talking to my vhf and radar. Because of the age of my radar unit, I've had to utilize the NMEA 0183 protocol and for some reason I cannot explain, no one device can talk to any other.
I guess I need to dig out my old break out box and do some serious debugging to find out where it's all going wrong.
For what it's worth, I blame those soulless bastards at Raytheon for the problem. Of course, in all fairness, I readily admit that I have an aversion to working with equipment provided by dickless, conch dung nuggets (Raytheon) and this might in fact be affecting my judgement in these matters. Sorry, but there you have it.
{Editor: Oh yeah, he said "dickless, conch dung nuggets". Boo-ya!}
Anyhow, I've spent the last two days in front of my sewing machine fixing the trampolines for a 17 foot Hobie that our soon to be next door neighbor owns. The tramps were in pretty sad shape and it took about 8 hours to get things sorted out. I did the repairs as my part of a 'work for equipment exchange'.
See, Glenn, our neighbor, is building his own house next door to the Buddy Fred's and among other gear, he has a small bulldozer with a back hoe attachment that he is going to lend me to dig a trench out to the dock so I can run permanent power and water as soon as the two week, family vacation period is over. That's his end of the agreement and given the rate it costs to rent one of those babies, I think I'm making out pretty good in the exchange.
Can you imagine me and a back hoe? Kick ass!!!
Of course, this arrangement is dependent on securing the blessing of the Buddy Fred and Fran, which as of date I have not done, but I like to think I've got people working on it. Man is it ever cool to "have people".
Boo-ya again!
In other news, last week I hitched a ride north with the Buddy Fred as he was heading back home to Gettysburg. He dropped me off at my parents house just north of Annapolis where I crashed for the night and then returned to the boat on my motorcycle the next day.
My bike is pretty much the only thing I still own that doesn't fit on the boat and Amy and I decided it would be nice to have it available for the summer; hence my trip north.
It was a long, long, long ride back and I covered the 450 miles in about 8 hours and 4 stops for fuel. My bike's engine is huge (1800 cc twin) and it's gas mileage isn't all that great. I mean it's better than most cars at 45 mpg, but it's not quite as good as say my old bike that got 70 or 80 mpg and so I had to stop every two hours or so to fill up.
In more important news, I have made two great discoveries here in our local community. Both of them involve all day, dollar draft beers, one on Wednesday at M&M's in downtown Oriental, the other on Thursdays at the Silos, just outside of town. The selection at both is limited to Bud, Bud Light or Yuengling, which truthfully, given those choices, I find only Yuengling to be marginally edible, but hey, for a dollar a pint, I am willing to lower my standards.
As an aside, Milo says so is he. Mmmm, beer.
More to follow, end of line.....