Wednesday, January 23, 2013 – Cocoa (starting to believe I can’t believe I’m still here):

            The wind died down during the night, and after breakfast we actually took our coffee up on the flybridge, and watched the pelicans dive bomb into the water for their breakfast.  You would think they would get a bit of a headache when they hit the water.  They do create quite a splash!  It was chilly, but the sun streaming in through the isinglass warmed the space up nicely, and we were quite comfortable.  There is still a “stiff breeze” and even though the thermometer says it’s in the 60’s, it still feels chilly, and we have on warm clothes.

            Bob seems to have a bit of an allergy or maybe just a little cold (he’s sneezing like crazy), so we decided to hang around the boat today and not do anything too ambitious.  I decided to pay bills.  Next time – I’ll just stick needles in my eye.  I may have mentioned this activity before in another blog, but, for me, trying to pay bills on the boat is just one giant pain in the engine room.  It shouldn’t be, except I like to have a hard copy of what I am paying exactly.  I know I can go to the various accounts on line (usually) and get a total amount due – but I like to print a copy of the bill, and printing the darn bill seems to be impossible.  I’m sure it’s just me, but the electric company seems to demand that I have something called “automator work flow” which I have never been able to make work – the credit card bill is relatively easy to print except there is one particular part which will not print and this contains about ten different amounts on it for purchases we have made (I actually match up my receipts to the bill – how anal is that?), but the Verizon (phone) bill was the most frustrating one of all today.  The website kept telling me that I was entering my i.d. and password incorrectly, and finally it told me I had tried too many times and it was therefore “locking” me out!  I tried calling Verizon, but you have to decide if you want residential or wireless, and we have both as most people do, but we have the “one bill” so everything comes on “one” bill, but there doesn’t seem to be anybody in the whole company who can help you with a problem concerning both land lines and wireless together, so you have to keep picking and choosing, and sometimes they say you will have to talk to “tech support”….aaarrrggghghg…I was on the phone with them for over 1 ½ hours.  I never could print a copy of the bill, and I finally thanked them but told them they didn’t seem to be able to help me, and I hung up.  I am now sure our entire phone system will implode any minute now. 

            So I finally decided that I would just get a “total due” amount, and pay the darn bills without a hard copy (and get the hard copy when we actually got our mail in a couple of weeks, make notes and file the bill away at that time).   So then I tried to log on to our banking website and no luck!  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get logged on.  I did not, however, pick up the computer and heave it overboard in a fit of frustration like I really wanted to do.  I decided it would look better if I just calmly put everything away, and tried again tomorrow.  After all, I don’t anticipate doing anything much more interesting anyway.

            It was lunch time by now, so we made sandwiches and tried having lunch up on the flybridge, but as the sun had moved around and was not shining on the boat anymore, it was too cold, so we came back inside, and there we remained for the rest of the day.

            Bob got a great deal on a rental car for the weekend, so we are making lists of things we want to do.  Believe it or not, one of them is to go to the Verizon store on Merritt Island to find out how to get our pictures off the smart phone and into the computer.  I have a card for the phone that we can remove and insert into a special card reader and plug into a USB port, but it doesn’t seem to work.  Probably operator error, but we have no clue.  We tried and tried yesterday to post some pictures that we had taken from the camera phone, but nothing we tried worked.  So I can’t believe we are actually going to the Verizon store, but there you go…

            Dinner tonight will be salmon over pasta with spinach, and unless something really exciting happens between now and then or when we go to bed, that’s it folks!

            It seems as though we are having a really rocky start to the second leg of our journey, and we really need to move on…