Day 117, Year 5: One of THOSE Days
Date: Saturday, February 20, 2010
Weather: Sunny, but Hazy; Temps Near 90 degrees F
Location: Bolgatty Hotel Anchorage, Cochin (Kochi), India

The good news today is that our compressor has arrived in India, but it arrived in Chennai which is on the east coast. It was shipped via DHL and when we got online this morning we saw that it had arrived in Chennai and but had a clearance delay. We called a number for DHL India and got a wonderful woman named Gracie took our phone number and email address and assured us someone would contact us. Mid-day, we were called and told that there was no invoice with the package. So we emailed the invoice that we had received as an email attachment and it now looks like either clearance will happen on Monday or Tuesday or we will receive it on Monday or Tuesday. That part was not clear. So we will just have to wait and see.

The real bummer of the day is that we realized that there is something wrong with my computer. My little IBM ThinkPad is like a best friend. It is small enough and has been tough enough that I can take it into the cockpit and write even when the weather is wicked. I have two batteries for it and between the two, in the past I have been able to work for four hours without recharging. Lately, the batteries hold no charge at all, so I have had to be plugged in constantly. And today we realized that my little computer is using more power than everything else on the boat combined. So I spent the afternoon backing up everything in the eventuality that it should fail completely. Mark thinks the fan is not working and that we might find someone here to fix it. We will certainly give that a try, but in the meantime I’m without my best friend.

In between working on backing up the computer, I baked bread, banana bread, and granola. Mark worked on finishing up the filling of screw holes on deck with Epoxy and he worked on the spinnaker pole. It is old and hard to use and he was trying to loosen up some of the connections. We also went over to Bolgatty Island to see if any of the packages that we are expecting have arrived, but they have not. We are expecting books from Amazon, a toilet repair kit from West Marine, and a package from our daughter Heather. All should be here by now, but Indian mail is notoriously slow and unreliable. I guess we’ll be lucky if we receive these things.

So I’m looking forward to a better day tomorrow. Maybe it’s time to just relax for a day and then start in again on Monday.