The snow is making us a little nuts

Here it is February 15 and we haven't accomplished much in the way of boat work. If you know us, you're probably as sick of the snow as we are, but we just have to bitch a little.

This is how bad it is: We often fire up our little Acer boat computer and just look at the charts. Today we turned it on so it could suck up the never-ending Windows 7 updates (there were 17) and charge its battery. A couple of weeks ago, we spent a cocktail hour planning a route from Norwich (where we dock in the summer) to New London Ledge Light. We'll probably never use it but at least it had something to do with our boat.

Act Three Boating factoid Number 1: It is 15.3 miles from the turning basin in Norwich to New London Ledge Light and that trip requires 33 course changes if you stay in the channel all the way, which we do. Is this stuff fascinating or what?

The old boarding step is finally finished. We stripped the steps completely, treated them with CPES and put seven coats of Sikkens on the tops of the steps and three on the undersides. We also polished up the aluminum frame and replaced the rubber feet.  It's ready to go back to the boat when we can get to the boat, whenever that is.

We also refinished the cutting board that fits into the top of our electric stove.  Frances uses it mainly to hold her dish-drying rack and we noticed that it had picked up some discoloration that may have been mold. That's also ready to go back aboard.

The next refinishing project can be seen on the right in the photo above. It's our fold-up table that we use a lot for dining in the cockpit. It is really beginning to show wear from being left out in the sun and sometimes rain so Frances is going to take charge of bringing it back to life.

On Saturday, we had to spend some time on home maintenance rather than dive into the boat's plumbing project. Our 1970s era Ariens Snowblower broke its drive belt cleaning up after the last snow storm and from the forecast, we knew we were going to need to get it going again. We went to Lowes for some other stuff we needed and took the opportunity to look through their somewhat disorganized selection of drive belts. After comparing about 25 of their 1/2" belts, we found one that was an exact replacement for the one we needed. Another hour installing it (difficult to do with gloves on) and the old Ariens was ready to go. Just in time, it seems.