Life, I have found, doesn’t give a rodents fart for your carefully laid plans. Case in point, this past month and a bit. Originally I had hoped that by now I’d be insulating the v-birth whereas I’m still trying to get around to attaching the portholes to the hull. So what happened? Let me regale you with a my story.
First up come headaches and a long lasting cold. I get migraines on a fairly frequent basis and one of the triggers (as ridiculous as this sounds) is big changes in weather. So on one hand I have a super power since I can basically predict if the weather is going to change drastically a day or 2 out… But it’s debilitating. Wolverine I am not. The cold on the other hand was whatever flavour of the season that decided to troll its way around Toronto which took me weeks to get over. After that I had to scramble for Christmas presents for the quickly approaching holiday. So that was that shot.
Also during all this we had an incident on the boat. Nothing too terrible but it was a bit scary. A burglar broke into the boat in the early hours of the morning. My wife heard a sound and went to check it out (we have a standing rule that if someone heard or smelled something they have to find it since if the other person can’t hear or smell the thing how are they supposed to locate it?). Which is when I heard her yelling at someone. I charged up and just saw the guy apologize and leave. He didn’t steal anything but he did crack one of our windows. The next day we had the police over to take our statements and to dust for prints (we didn’t call earlier because we weren’t sure if we had locked the door and he just wandered on in or not until the next morning when we found the cracked window and broken lock). The dumb part on my part is that we have security camera’s that weren’t setup or running at that time. So we could have gotten a great photo and caught him… But live and learn I guess. In any case over the holidays I’ve bought more infrared camera’s for the exterior and have plans to install them quickly as well.
One would think that that would be a fairly full December already. But you’d be wrong.
During the holidays we were hoping to get my wife’s Drivers License and OHIP (health insurance) setup which required use to drive into one of the local cities 4 times (the first time the office was closed, second time the computers for OHIP were down, 3rd time the drivers license was open but OHIP was closed, 4th time we finally got it sorted out). During the second trip which was a few days before Christmas we drove on into town without incident, got there and found out that the ice storm that had rolled through the area had apparently also knocked out the computer system for the Ontario Government. So we left. We went to the a grocery store to pick up some stuff for up north but the parking lot was jammed packed. I thought I saw a spot available with a little bit of a snow bank at the front of it. Thinking that the snow bank was soft I decided to try to push the snow a bit with the bumper… Well the soft snow was covering a block of solid ice… So instead I cracked my bumper badly.
Great.
This gave us the added fun of the wind dam vibrating like mad while driving which was just aggravating.
Now while we were at the OHIP office one of the ladies made a comment that the area my parents live in a number of judges in nice houses live nearby. Jeannie was interested because she hadn’t seen nice houses in the area aside from normal country homes. I endeavored to show her some. While driving to that area I missed the road so I decided to pull a U-turn to get back. Wouldn’t you know it… The snow plows had plowed the snow off the sides of the road perfectly level with the road itself making the ditch look like it was part of the road. So the car was then in a ditch. Fortunately we had a number of people just stop and help us out and about an hour later we were out again and off on our way.
Sounds like one heck of a day right? Well it’s not over.
The reason I told the burglar story aside from telling all the stories about what goes on on Pathfinder it also points out that we’re constantly monitoring the ship 24×7 now. So around 1am (we were up late watching a movie) I get a buzz on my phone for some images from the boat (some of the camera’s generate false positive pictures along with the good ones so you need to review all of them basically). And we got a photo of what looked like a face reflected in a window which could only have come from someone inside! I quickly called security to find them a bit unconcerned until I told them where I was, that we had already had a break in, and that if they didn’t act now I was going to call the police. The said that they were already on their way and out only 5 minutes. I called them again after 5 1/2 minutes and they were already near the boat. So I stayed on the phone with them until they had cleared the boat. Turns out it was just a weird trick of light and what not. But given our day we weren’t exactly thinking 100% clearly so fortunately it turned out to be nothing.
With exception to the burglar I mentioned earlier this all happened… in 1 day. So how were YOUR holidays?
P.S. We did catch someone crawling on our boat another day taking photos and now we’re just in the habit of forwarding their pictures straight to the security staff and police if it’s getting ridiculous. So in the future if anyone reads this post don’t come crawling over my home and I won’t report you to the police? Cool? Cool.