Day 341, Year 8: Storage Day, Grandkid Night
Date: Thursday, October 10, 2013
Weather: Partly Sunny and Cool
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts

I won’t say it was fun, but we had a productive day sorting through things in our storage unit. It is always overwhelming, but box by box, we sorted, threw some things away, and found other ‘treasures’ to take to Justin and Jo. When he and Jo packed up and headed west in 2007, they left everything in our storage unit. Little by little, we have sorted through things, and I’m sure we’ll still be doing the same a year or two from now, but we did make progress today. The only problem is that we found so many things that there is no way we can fit it all in the v-berth to take to them in Culebra without sinking Windbird! So we’ll have to make some choices. The really good news is that Justin, Jo, Ziggy, Coco, and the three dogs and two cats landed safely in San Juan yesterday and made the last ferry to Culebra with just 20 minutes to spare. Justin wrote an email that said, “We are here! We lived!” And I read on Jo’s Facebook that they swam and snorkeled today, and started making “house home” by unpacking the first load of 25 parcels that arrived from the PO. Since Puerto Rico is part of the US mail system, they sent things in Priority boxes. They had to send many boxes, but it was a fairly inexpensive way to get lots of things sent to their new island home. Culebra sounds like a magical little island, and we certainly wish them happiness in their new venture.

Mark and I called Heather and offered to pick Sam up from school today and she took us up on the offer. We all met at Ollie’s daycare where the Goldstones were all going to get flu shots. Mark and I thought this was a good idea, so we went to the closest CVS and got ours as well. We then went to the liquor store to buy beer for the trip south. We prefer to drink beer in bottles as long as we are close to shore, so we are stocking up on cases of our brew of choice which is Amstel Light–a compromise that we can both live with. At least we can still compromise. And that is certainly more than I can say for our politicians in Washington. As we were getting ready to leave the liquor store, I got a call from Heather. When we met at Ollie’s daycare, we had made a spur of the moment arrangement for Sam and Jonah to come to Woods Hole after dinner to spend the night. Heather thought they needed to go home to eat dinner and get clothes, etc. But logistically, it made much more sense for them to just go to Woods Hole with us, so Heather called to make this proposal. We met at Kappy’s (the liquor store) and then we headed to Windbird. We decided to fix breakfast for dinner again. We did this the last time the boys stayed onboard, It was quite a hit then and was again tonight. They decided they wanted to see the second episode in the Blue Planet video series, so they started watching while I started cooking. We ate in ‘courses’—fresh raspberries for Jonah (Sam doesn’t eat ‘wet’fruit), then bacon, then sausage for Sam (Jonah says he eats only ‘pig’ and his definition of that is bacon), then French toast for Jonah and scrambled eggs for Sam. By the time they finished eating, we were into episode three of the Blue Planet and they were absolutely stuffed!