Wednesday, 1 April 2015 - After having sent out Episode 9, I headed over to the Seabrook Sailing Club to, perhaps, get in some windsurfing. Well the weather didn't cooperate, but I met some nice sailors. I had hoped to see if I could sell one of my sailboards to someone there, but my hopes were dashed when I discovered that they had bought into the idea that, since they race a lot, they should ALL have exactly the same equipment in order to level the playing field. They all have just one board and one sail each and they are all the same model and brand. I'm not selling any equipment here! Both the boards and sails are huge compared to mine and they sail the same equipment in all conditions, windless or typhoon. It's certainly cheaper that way, but it seems they would be either slogging away in low winds, or hanging on for dear life when the winds really pick up.
                  One of these guys is a real doppelgänger for Tom Hanks; appearance, humor, voice, humor, everything. I thought it might be his younger brother 'til he told me his name, Tom. Quite the talker, very friendly and helpful.
                  Several of us went out for dinner and a margarita (or two). Very small, but just $3 each. It also turned out that one of them lives in Morgan, Utah about 3 months of the year and snowboards at Snow Basin. Small world.
                  We had to give our home buyers a week long extension in order to get financing straightened out in Mexico.
                  I'm parked under the bridge again, but at the other end this time and in Seabrook, across the boat channel from Kemah. We'll see how this goes. I looked up "Boat" in the dictionary and my sailboards qualify, so if they say that I'm parked in an area reserved for vehicles with boat trailers, I have four "boats" in my trailer. That ought to be enough. Most people only have one per trailer. For once in my life I'm over qualified for something.

Thursday, 2 April - I spent most of the day under the bridge trying to figure out what sailboat I might get if I can't find a CSY that is suitable and affordable. About noon a policeman pulled a flatbed truck driver over next to me and spent about 2 hours inspecting the truck, making the fellow "walk the line," etc. Another cop came to assist, but they didn't arrest him. They didn't let him drive away, either. Something tells me they were going to have the vehicle impounded because it remained there after the two cops left and the truck driver wandered away. I guess they just left him to his own devices and he walked somewhere. He didn't go with them. The truck was delivering lubricants from Louisiana.
                  I guess it was alright for me to be there. They never said a word to me.
                  Around 3:00pm I headed back across the bridge to check out what I believe is the last of the marinas on the south side of Clear Lake. There are not as many on the north side of the lake, so I may move down to Galveston fairly soon. The marina that I went to was fairly small, but had one boat that looked interesting to me. The hatch was open on it, so I knocked on the deck and a very pretty lady appeared from below. I had passed her on the dock just a few minutes before, so I hope she didn't think I followed her. I asked about the boat and she said it was a Whitby 42. She and her husband are in their early 50's, I'd guess, and have owned several boats and been around the world in one. They've just bought this one and are fixing it up to head out again. She gave me a tour and the boat has a lot of similarities to the CSY: same vintage, pretty woodwork, lots of storage, etc. This boat, however, was a ketch, and although there are valid arguments for that type of rig, I've about decided I want a cutter; mainsail, jib and staysail rather than main, jib and mizzen. Less deck clutter and perhaps just a little easier to sail. Like I said, it's a toss-up. CSYs come rigged either way. She did mention that the mizzen mast is unsupported on the coach roof of the aft cabin and is starting to make the roof start to flex. They'll need to support it from below somehow. I also found another CSY 37, but it was REALLY in bad shape.
                  This is crawdad (crayfish) season down here and, boy, people are eating a lot of them. Kemah had their "Crawdad Festival" a week or two ago, and I'm parked next to a restaurant that had a portable propane boiler out back this evening. Huge burners and a couple of pots that must have held about 15 gallons each. I don't know how many batches of crawdads they cooked, but it was quite a few. I've seen signs all over town advertising "Crawdads - $5/lb."
                  It looks like we're supposed to get the tail end of a cold front tomorrow that hit Denver today. Night, night.

Friday, 3 April - I realized the first day of taking notes about the boats via a spread sheet that that method was taking way too long, so I started just trying to take random notes on a hand written note pad. That didn't work either, and I just got frustrated and couldn't keep the boats that I saw straight, so I wanted to use a database, but needed to create one. They'll be very slow to learn, but it will pay off in the long run because they can do so much more that spreadsheets and the dropdown menus that I can create will really speed up the input once I get the database created. Well, today I've started on it. I used to use Filemaker Pro on my old Mac and PC, but am not willing to update to the new version for the several hundred price tag on Filemaker. I'm going to have to teach myself how to use OpenOffice and/or LibreOffice. They are based on the same openly shared or open source programming. I've tried to figure Open Office out several times before, but it is so different than FileMaker that I haven't gotten very far; in fact, almost nowhere. I really have to figure this program out.

Saturday - I spent all day Friday trying to figure out OpenOffice and, again, got virtually nowhere.

Sunday - Finally starting to figure this out and have gotten many fields created and am starting to create a form for the boat features database. It's really going slowly. This program is really abysmal compared to FileMakerPro. So many of the features take so many steps to perform where FMP could do the same thing with the pressing of two keys. I really hadn't realized how good FileMaker was until now, having to use another program. Like the song says, "You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." Lots of things in this program seem to work intermittently, too...and the placement of items changes from one view to another. I have to try 10 or 15 times to get one thing to appear as I want it in the final page. Very frustrating. Worked all day on this one page and still have lots of debugging and rearranging to do.

Monday - More work on the database. Parked on a major thoroughfare here in Kemah. Some observations: (1) there are lots of Mustangs in Texas, Fords, that is. (2) there seem to be lots of emergencies here, too. All day the fire department seemed to pass by here going one way or the other about every few minutes. Sometimes they seemed to head off one direction, only to scream by in the other only a few minutes later. I must have seen 20 fire trucks and other emergency vehicles pass by today.

Tuesday, 7 April - I slept in a brightly lit parking area last night. The lights allowed the Boat-tailed Grackles to stay awake virtually all night. I was next to two large trees that must have had several hundred Grackles in each. These are unusual birds, they make about 50 different noises each, never in synch and seemingly not necessarily in answer to each other. It was interesting though, in all those multitudes, there actually seemed to be some very complicated rhythm or cadence in their noise. It was very mesmerizing. If man ever learns to understand animals, I think we may be in for real surprises about their intelligence and communications skills. I didn't stay awake all night to listen, only about 'til midnight, but they were either at it all night or at it again by 6:30am when I awoke. Not only that, but I forgot to turn off my phone when I went to bed and all night long I kept hearing the phone when junk email download. I don't think I slept very well last night.

            Until next time,
                        May blue skies dominate your future.