Starting the new year ...

We've been on extended shore leave for the past six months, and I'm beginning to look forward to getting back on Alizee, if only for a couple of weeks at a time.  During the last week of December as a Christmas gift to myself, I hired my marina friend J.T. to thoroughly clean and polish the hull and topsides.  He did a beautiful job!  Still have to do the stainless and the bigger job of re-varnishing awaits as well, and for the varnish I may get J.T. to help me out a bit.  And, in a week, I'm taking Alizee in for a bottom job at Seven Seas Marina on the ICW.


We had a great Christmas, with Penelope's daughter Erin and her fiance Creig coming out from Castle Rock, Colorado to share the season with us, and Erin's dad David joined us for Christmas dinner as well.  Pen loves to decorate the house, which she did to the hilt, and we both enjoyed having a fire every evening during the cold snap in December.  Santa was good to all of us, perhaps even more than we deserved.  Life is good!  Our health is good!  We are blessed with family and many wonderful friends!

Plans for the coming year are beginning to settle in.  We're going to move Alizee around the Keys to Tampa Bay and spend the rest of the year taking one- to two-week sailing vacations there while keeping our home base in our house in Deland.  Having three cats sort of holds us down for now, but we're thinking we'll enjoy this sort of sailing anyway.  And we've some other trips planned -- to Colorado sometime before summer starts to see Erin and Creig again, perhaps a trip to California in June, one to Glasgow for my annual history of technology symposium in August and, then in late September or early October a week with friends on a boat in the Canal du Midi in southern France and another week in Paris.  I'm already tired thinking about it and I know Pen is as well.


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