Beautiful Day but didn't get much work done

Newport enjoyed one of its very very rare nice warm days yesterday.
We weren't here to enjoy it much though because we had to drive over
to the valley (where it was quite hot indeed) to sign the papers
officially turning our house over to Cody. That was pretty cool
except that Cody has the standard "What have I done?" feeling that
happens to most people when they make their first big expensive deal.
She'll be fine.

We did have a nice encounter with a sailor named Charlie on Sunday.
He'd been driving by the yard and noticed that our mast was in the
down position. This piqued his curiosity and he had to stop and check
it out. While shooting the breeze, he noticed our staysail boom
laying on the ground next to the boat. We removed the boom because we
don't like how much of the foredeck it takes up. We're rigging a
loose-footed staysail instead. Charlie, on the other hand, has a
loose-footed staysail on his Alajuela 38 and wants to switch to a self-
tending boomed sail. He was planning to build a boom but wasn't sure
what size to make it. I told him that, if he thought he could use it,
he was welcome to have our boom as I have no other use for it and
wasn't sure how I was going to get rid of it. He was quite happy and
later delivered some Pacfico in appreciation.

Yesterday we left for the valley a little early so we could stop by
and see Charlie's boat. H'e completely gutted it and is doing a very
nice job building it back to his personal preferences. As we're
looking around, you could see a light suddenly go on in his head. He
pointed to the staysail tracks on his cabin top and asked "Can you
guys use these?" Well, you bet we can as we'd have to buy tracks
otherwise. He said he wasn't sure when he'd get them removed but we
can have them when he does. When we got home from Silverton, there
were the tracks sitting next to the ladder at our boat. Sweet. We
both saved some bucks on this transaction. Guess I'll be dropping
some cerveza off at Charlie's boat sometime today.

Today looks like another beautiful day. Lulu has one more round of
Cetol (a varnish-like finish) to put on the caprail and rubrbrail.
Those of you who saw Siempre Sabado with her sad, grey-to-black
woodwork will not believe how pretty she is now. I'm going to install
the windvane today. We ran into a snag with the roller furlers and
won't be able to install them until the end of the week when the new
forestay and inner forestay arrive.

So let's see, what's left?

-Install new aletrnator on engine (it should have come in yesterday
while we were gone)
-paint the bulwarks
-sand and paint the bottom
-install both furlers

Then I think we're ready to go back in the water.

By the way, Siempre Sabado's staysail boom fits Charlie's Alajuela
like it was built for it.