July 11, 2019

 

Meet Ken and Chris!  Ken is Dale’s 1^st cousin on his father’s side, i.e. Dale’s father and Ken’s father were brothers.  Chris is, in her own words “if Mary Kay were the military, I’d be a general.”  I loved that line!

Ken and Chris were taking a cruise through the western side of the Caribbean and flew into Ft. Lauderdale to hop aboard one of those “big boys” that we try desperately to avoid getting in the way of for fear that they might run right over us and barely feel the bump.  We met at their hotel for our first meet and greet.  Unfortunately for us, Ken’s father was one of the oldest in a family of 13 children and Dale’s father was one of the youngest, so Ken doesn’t remember ever meeting Dale’s father and if he ever did, he was quite young.  However, he did say that his older brother keeps up with the far flung members of the family and may be able to help us locate a photograph that we could pass down to our children and grandchildren.  Again, its one of those situations where his brother is an ex-pat living in Thailand and we’ll have to wait for his next visit to learn of any possible sleuthing he could do on our behalf.  Still we were happy to make a great connection with that side of the family. 

On the boating front, while we were in the Ft. Lauderdale area, Dale was able to locate some barrel bolts to finish putting a door frame back together.  Some of the original bolts disintegrated when they were removed for me to “monkey fur” that particular wall.  Monkey fur is boat speak for carpeting for the walls.  So now all that is left to complete in the forward stateroom is the overhead.  We had hired a cabinet maker to add some cabinetry to that room which necessitates redesigning the overhead (think of it as a suspended ceiling). 

As luck would have it, to trim down the overhead Dale had to access his table saw in the garage.  However, when he moved it from its storage area, he found a trickle of water coming from the water softener.  Do you see the one step forward, two steps back, scenario beginning?  Well it did.  He turned off the water to the house but when he disconnected the water softener from the water supply, he took a spontaneous shower.  Apparently (because everything is located behind walls and the only things visible are the pvc pipes sticking straight out of the walls) the water supply goes into the water softener before it goes into the house.  So he needed to locate the water turn-off outside the house, in the bushes, buried beneath layers of muck, mud, and stuff you don’t want to think about (I’m not sure how he even found it).  Needless to say, I eventually was recruited to drive to the nearest hardware store to obtain a couple of washers, not because that’s what he thought the issue was but because since he had to tear it apart, you might as well replace those too. 

Thus begins the 2^nd part of the “two steps back”.  Nope!  In spite of having 4  2’x 6’ sliding walls of neatly labeled 3”x 6” drawers containing every washer, o-ring, and cone shaped whatevers in the State of Florida, none were the right size.  To make a long story short, I went back to pick him up and we spent the next couple of hours going to various stores trying to locate said washers.  Which of course, we never did find.   So he elected to put it all back together using the same washers to see if his original theory of a failed o-ring (which he already had in his own stash of bits in the garage) would take care of the problem.  So far, its holding.  BUT,

There’s a red light blinking on our solar hot water heater.  He turned it off and back on.  The red light went away but he doesn’t think its working properly. 

 And so it begins.