Thursday, February 14, 2013 – Ft. Myers:

            Happy Valentines’ Day!

            It is pouring rain here.  Pouring!  So after a Valentine’s Day breakfast of poached eggs with tomato on an English Muffin, we decided to do more laundry (basically just towels).  And the laundry was packed.  Everyone must have had the same idea since it is not very conducive to trekking downtown.  Oh well, you get to meet a lot of people, and one lady was very nice and gave me her place in line because she wanted two machines together.  I think she will wait a long time!  And – when I went to check my clothes in the dryer, another lady told me she had checked them and put in another quarter for me because they weren’t dry.  I paid her a quarter, and thanked her profusely, but the real reason people do that is they want the machine, and if you aren’t around (which is very impolite and not good Laundromat etiquette) someone will finish your clothes for you (maybe) and dump them out on the folding table.  Sometimes they’ll just dump them out even if they aren’t finished.  The competition for a machine is sort of like shoppers at Walmart at midnight on Black Friday.

            So after laundry, I knew I should clean the boat, but am procrastinating as much as possible.  We are playing cards, playing on the computer, playing on the phone, next we’ll have lunch, and then maybe guilt will take over, and I’ll clean the boat.  Actually, as I type this, the sun is trying to come out, so maybe we’ll be able to go into town and visit the Edison House.  Hey – it’s a boat – you can clean it until you are “blue in the face”, turn around and find dust and dirt immediately – right exactly in a spot that you just finished cleaning!

            Yikes!  It is now raining harder than ever!  The sun disappeared completely, the sky turned dark, and I mean dark, and the rain came down like a monsoon!  So I cleaned the boat from stem to stern and don’t feel guilty anymore.  The boat is protesting the weather by rolling around in the slip, and I really don’t like cleaning when the boat is moving around.

            The boat is making a very mysterious sound, and it only seems to do this at night.  It’s a noise like there is something loose, and it is rattling against something.  Try as we might, we have not been able to find out what it is, but it is driving me crazy!  We’ll keep looking, but if anyone has any ideas, please let me know what you think it could be.

            Well, it is still pouring outside.  I can’t take any pictures, we’re sick of playing cards so we have resigned ourselves to TV for the moment.  Aren’t you glad you are not on that cruise ship that is being towed to Mobile?!

            Hopefully, tomorrow, the sun will come out, because we plan on leaving and heading to Captiva.  We are a long way from home!