Aside from work things have been going well. We've made new friends with a family of four who came down from Maine a few weeks ago on their 30 ft Morris Yacht - Hook. They have two delightful girls close to Coleen's age. During those times when I'm not working we've managed a cookout at the beach, a bus trip to Key West for the day, and just lots of time hanging out laughing. Unfortunately for me they are headed to the Bahamas during the next weather window - and it will be hard to see them go.
We had a little storm blow through here on Friday night. It was forecast to have sustained winds of 50+ for an hour or more. I cleared the decks and tied everything down - and put out a 3rd mooring line. We spent the last hours before the storm arrived at the park - enjoying a birthday party. We got back got back to the boat about an hour ahead of the storm and made some homemade pizza - using our toaster oven & generator. Most of the folks in the harbor gather on VHF channel 68 during the storm - which actually kind of nice. The sky looked very menacing as it approached and then we were hit with strong wind that heeled the boat over and some pounding rain. Poor little Coleen was very scared, wearing her life jacket and clutching her stuffed animals. I suggested that we could either stand around and be scared out of our minds, or sit on the floor and finish our Monopoly game -- the outcome of the storm would be the same... So we finished our game (I won) while listening to the chatter on the VHF. Our friends on Hook - even entertained everyone with a song :-)
We had two storms blow through that night which kept the boat rolling around most of the night. The second one sounded worst that the first - and it was 1 a.m..... but thankfully nothing bad happened aside from losing an oar for the dinghy.