The times they are a’changing

Yep, that’s right. It is the Monday after the time change. We sprung forward, lost an hour of sleep, but gained an hour of daylight in the evenings! I love long days and the spring weather, it’s good for the soul! Another change here in the near future is our relocation to Loudon TN.  That’s right: I’m moving AGAIN! We have had a wonderful opportunity arise and so we will be packing our things and moving at the beginning of next month.  The place we are in now is packed wall to wall with dressers and furniture and storage boxes, it will be nice to move out this small one bedroom to a bigger place, and did I mention I will have a CLOSET ROOM.  A whole room used for nothing but clothes. It is also on a lot of land, has a mountain view, and we can burn stuff (bonfire house warming party anyone?!).  I  have also changed my diet.  As many of you know I LOVE sugar and have the biggest sweet tooth ever.  So for the past 2 weeks I have reduced my sugar intake to less than 40grams.  This has proven much more difficult than expected because it’s not just sweets that have sugar in them! To compare my daily intake of 40 grams of sugar is equivalent to ONE CAN OF COKE!  This is just a personal goal I set for myself, so I am going to try to make conscious decisions of what I choose to eat (but I totally see a Cadbury Creme filled egg for Easter in my future).  Alsooo … Erik and I have been going steady for a year now, so I would like to thank him for being my reason to believe in dreams.  I am so lucky that I get to call that man mine!

Things with Ragnarok are trucking right along.  Erik has successfully found converters and LED lights that fit our boats lamps.  They are only pulling 2Watts which will be great when we are running off of solar panels (future project).  They are nice and bright and look great, thanks China!  Erik found that the mast was also slightly damp, this was in part to an old “mast boot” (a piece of flexible rubber that seals where the mast comes through the cabin ceiling) so getting it re-fit should fix the problem.  This is something I noticed initially so no surprises here.  Erik will have an entire week off soon where he will be attempting to fix our soft spot with a core repair.  This job is not going to be an easy task, but if I know one thing about my boyfriend it is that he is the king of research.  He has read every thing about the project, watched the videos, participated in the forums, and will be taking this task on by himself (with help from me when requested;).  This is not a beginners job, but I really am glad he is attempting it himself.  Gaining this experience will be so valuable in future repairs.  I’m lucky I have someone who is so hands on instead of calling a pro in to pay double what it will cost him.  And granted he may mess up! But I’m ok with that, we discussed worse possible outcomes, and if he fails he will try again, or if he royally screws up, then we might call in someone who has done a core repair before.  And if when the day comes he doesn’t feel 100% prepared then guess what: we can wait! I think he’s finalizing up his list of materials and hopefully we will have our #1 on our to do list done!

Here is a picture of the top of the cabin.  We have the soft spot taped off.  The rails will need to be removed and re-bedded. Not too big of a spot, should be an interesting learning experience!

And here the interior of cabin ceiling where water leaks. It drips from the wooden handrail on the bottom left corner of this picture, but you can also see the screws also have some damage near them as well.