April 16, 2012; Pebble Isle, Tennessee River

I have been trying for over  a week to get pictures to come into my blog without success.  It tries but after several minutes I get an error saying "Upload Failed".  This all started when Blogspot updated to their new and easier format-Ha!  Very frustrating.

April 2 through April 6, 2012:  Our deer and turkey came out the day we left to say good-bye! I will miss them.  We had a very nice trip down to Tennessee. After a short visit with our son, it was good to be back on the boat. We had a lot of cleaning to do but we finally have things back to normal; at least the main stuff, now it is just the nit-picky stuff left to do.

April 16, 2012:  We have been here over a week now and starting to get into a routine.  The mornings have been beautiful and we usually go for an hour walk up in the State Park next to the marina.  Everything is so green here!  We went up to Green Turtle Bay this past weekend to their spring boat show.  We saw some really nice boats and it made us think about going bigger (or not!).

I just finished printing out all the charts for the Cumberland River.  We tried to buy them this weekend at the boat show but they can't get any.  They said the Corp of Engineers are in the process redoing the charts so they are only available on line.

CO's comments:  It is good to be back on the boat.

March 9, 2012; Getting ready to start boating again

We haven't had much to write about these past few months but we have been busy getting ready to start our next adventure.  After this month, we will have all our Doctor appointments, etc., out of the way and we are both itching to get back to the boat.  I have all my canning completed.  A lot of work and I am glad it is done.  I did wild turkey, elk, and venison.  We also made up several batches of summer sausage, breakfast sausage, and jerky.

We have had a mild winter with just a few cold days and snow every once in a while, so we can't complain.  Last week we had at least 4 inches of heavy wet snow and the temps were a little cool, but since then it has warmed up and most all of the snow is gone. 

We have had our daily visitors in our yard and it is a lot of fun to watch them (pictures below).  Keith got his Elk mount back and it is a European style and looks good in his trophy room.  With this addition, the room it is now completely full.

Our turkeys come by about twice a day in the winter but soon it will be mating season and we should see them more often.  One of the turkeys is an albino and we have only seen him once.  He is with this group but so far I have not been able to get him in the picture; too much snow for camouflage. 

Our deer come by twice a day also and it is always the same group.  One buck, three doe, and the rest are young ones.  There are 10 in this group.  We also have a lone yearling that mom must have kicked out when the new fawn came along.  So far he hasn't found anyone to hang around with.

 

Keith's newest mount for his trophy room (5x5 Elk).  I really like the European mount.  After he added his turkey mount I thought there wasn't any more room, but with a few adjustments, Keith made room for his Elk.

January 21, 2012-Book Completed

Our blog book came in the mail yesterday.  We just love it.  We used Blog2print to create our book and we got a beautiful, bound, hard cover book.  It was expensive but we think it was worth it as we now have a wonderful keep sake for our boat.  It was a little more difficult creating the book than just pressing a few buttons like the instructions said.   You have to make sure everything is exactly the way you want it before you save your book on Blog2print.  You can; however, view your book before saving it and I must have viewed our book at least 100 times before I was ready to save it. 

My biggest problem was I couldn't change the format of Blog2print.   For instance, I couldn't put in a forced hard page.  Even though captions were part of the pictures when entered on our blog, Blog2print would sometimes separate them.  Then, if I corrected something on say page 8, it would or could change every page after that.  I had to check and recheck to make sure this didn't happen.  Since our book was 356 pages this was very time consuming.  The instructions also said it would spell check but it did not.  We have found several typo's in looking over the book and this is my fault.  You know what they say; "To error is human" and I am very human!  With all this behind us, we are still very happy with our book and would recommend anyone interested in making a book of their blog to use Blog2print.

CO's comments:  I wish I was back on the boat.  It has been -10 degrees all last week and we have had 18 inches of snow.  I had rotator cuff surgery when we got home last October and my shoulder is healing nicely.  I have one more appointment the middle of March and he should OK me to go back to boating.

December 31, 2011, New Year' Eve

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Here's wishing everyone a wonderful 2012.  We hope it is a happy and prosperous year.  We would like to thank all of you who have been following our blog.  Up to this point, we have had 19,645 hits from 14 different countries since starting in June 2010.  We are truly amazed.  We are still working on our "Blog Book" which will cover June 2010 through September 2011 and hope to have it published soon.

We are anxiously awaiting for the end of March so we can get back on the water.  From time to time we will be posting and will start up again on a regular basis when we get back to the boat.

Take Care and Safe boating to you all.

Our front yard on 12-31-2011.  Can you believe it, last year at this time our neighbor said we had more than 3 feet of snow.  Last night we got a trace and the first week of the New Year it is supposed to be in the 50's