I’ve been busy the last few day hanging out with my parents before they have to drive back to Nevada.  It’s hard to believe they’ve already been here so long that it’s time for them to leave! 🙁

We did get a little bit more work done on the boat though… most notably starting to put the engine back together.  We emptied all the oil out and changed the filter, hooked up all of the seawater coolant hoses, finished the exhaust, and installed our shiny new alternator!

The alternator is 170 amps and should pump our Lithium batteries full of juice way faster than our sad old one would.  Since we won’t have a generator on the boat, having a high powered alternator to charge the batteries off of the main engine is pretty important.  The fact that it all looks super cool is just a bonus.

One other little side project of mine is installing a fuel polishing system.  The boat had one when we bought it but it was mickey-moused into the fuel system for the main engine and I wanted the engine to be on its own dedicated loop.  Between what I uninstalled and what I kept when we removed the generator I had a nice little fuel pump and spare large Racor 2 micron fuel filter/water separator.  Clean fuel is really important to diesels, so I’ll set this up to be able to just clean fuel in a loop from the tank whenever I want for however long I want.  It can’t hurt to do it before we fire off the main engine after so many years of sitting around. I decided to put it all in the space left behind by the old generator.  It’s out of the way, not going to be hit by anything, and there’s an access panel in the guest bedroom. Winning!

Aside from all of the above and some general puttering about the boat whining about missing that one important widget that the local Ace Hardware doesn’t stock and now we have to wait a week to get online, we haven’t done much else!

I had a few projects at the apartment though…

When we first cleaned out the boat last fall, we packed all of the things that we kept into 3 large tubs and put them into storage. Now that we’re well into the boat, I have a pretty solid handle on what we do and don’t need and brought one of these tubs home to clean out and organize.  Most of the stuff ended up getting thrown away…figures.

I also decided to clean out the closets again… It’s hard going from a cold and rainy climate to somewhere tropical and not really knowing what you’ll need or want to wear.  I got rid of at least half of our clothes before we moved and I think I cut it in half a second time.  I don’t need 8 pairs of jeans anymore! I narrowed it down to 3 (one nice, one normal, and one for work).  I also realized I have an excessive amount of exercise shirts… I kept a lot of them because they’re cool and will be quick to wash and dry on the boat… but I had like 8 *gray* running shirts alone…

Downsizing is hard.  I still have too many regular T-shirts that I’m keeping because I bought them on vacations and they make me happy. I guess I’ll just wear them on the boat until they get worn out…

In other news… we woke up to rain yesterday morning so Jason made breakfast! …strawberry crepes with homemade whipped cream… 🙂