It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

...It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

--Charles Dickens

That's about how I feel about where we are right now.  For me, it's a lot of sitting and waiting in the Oriental harbor.  By which I mean, going stir-crazy.  Of course I have little projects to occupy my time, but my feet are begging to wander someplace new.  That, and it's been a long week.

Let's start with Monday.  We spent the majority of our day in New Bern at the Emergency Room, because Kyle lost a battle with Daisy the Diesel.  He managed to scrape his hand along just about everything sharp located near the alternator in attempt to fix our battery problem.  The problem was that the batteries were not charging, and we sort of rely on the power the batteries supply.  We couldn't take the boat out for a day of motoring to charge them, because we were pretty hemmed in by this sandbar friend of ours who has pretty much held us hostage for the past couple weeks.  But I digress.

So Kyle ended up with six stitches in one finger, and another finger didn't have enough skin left on it to stitch together - he had a hole about the size of a nickel that went down nearly to the bone.  So I went and got some Subway while he was waiting to be seen, and when I got back they had already taken him back to a room.  I was pretty hungry so I ate my half of the sub then went back and watched him get stitched back together.  Lesson learned, no food before injuries.  My iron stomach did pretty okay.  Oh, and Kyle is fine.

Well, with Kyle's dominant hand out of commission, we lost another crucial system for being anchored - the pump in the head stopped pumping.  At 10 pm I had to row in to go pee.  Sigh.  At that point, there wasn't really much else to do other than take a beach day.  We were both pretty exhausted and just sick of everything.  Back to Morehead City/Beaufort! We found the beach to be far too crowded with holiday-makers and spring-breakers, however.  Oh well.  We were wary of getting sand in Kyle's bandages anyway, so we decided to walk around Beaufort again.

Of Beaufort I have nothing notable to say except that I like the painting on the bricks at the ice company, and we stopped at the Coastal Community Market and found a great deal on some asiago cheese as well as a sprout mix that is going to really spruce up our salads.

But, back at the boat, things were still as bad as when we left.  Kyle did fix the head pump (yay), but we discovered that our isolator (directs power from the alternator to the battery banks) was bad.  In addition, our batteries are so drained that it will take a long time to recharge them.  Oh, and early in the week the cell phone went for a swim so we've had to work around being sans phone as well.

Lastly, the wind has been formidable.  It just won't stop.  I am starting to feel like Laura Ingalls Wilder, sitting on the prairie (except I'm in the water).  One night, I was sitting in the cockpit reading and the wind was cold and blowing my pages in the way.  I was fed up.  So I decided to put up the side curtain for the bimini to see if I could block some of the wind.  Kyle and I had just gotten it zipped on when we realized the bimini zipper was basically disintegrating as we zipped it - the curtain was hanging on by sheer terror.  So now that's something else to fix, and without a sewing machine it's going to take HOURS.

But all is not dark!  I couldn't use the Dickens quote without having some incredible joy to share as well.  First of all, I got the comments working again!  It was apparently a really easy fix (yay) that took hours to find (boo).  Thanks to all of you who failed to tell me they weren't working; my apologies for not noticing.

And more importantly, we decided to spend the weekend at Kyle's dad's house.  One of the neighbors had a birthday, and a rockin' awesome surprise party to go along with it.  We got to see all our friends from this area, in finest form (haha, love you guys!).  Also, we went for a boat ride where neither of us were responsible for anything but socialization.  It's been great.  Plus, we are taking full advantage of all the luxuries a house has to offer.  First of all, bacon.  Yum.  Second, an oven.  I made three loaves of French bread.  Third, a REAL BED.  Glorious.  Fourth, the freezer.  I bought ice cream :)  Fifth, free, unlimited internet.  Since most of this is revolving around food, I'm going to share one of my favorite boat meals, my gourmet chili (it's gourmet because of the saltine garnishes).

So, once again I've written a small novel instead of a blog post.  In my defense, it's been a LONG time since I've written, because lately all my online time has been allocated firstly to email and other necessities, and second I've been trying to fix the comment problem.  Now that it's solved, I can do frivolous things like whine about my life but at the same time make you envious of how great things are going.  Oh, and right now, I'm going for another boat ride where all I have to do is sit in the sun and look pretty.