Good news!

Kristen here - Today is Thursday 6/29/09. Good news! My arm did NOT fall off last night or today. When I woke up this morning I couldn't move my right arm. I was seriously worried that I wouldn't be able to work today because of that. After popping a couple of advil I felt much better, and after working a bit I almost felt normal!

The even better news is that when we arrived at the boat yard this morning, the rest of the prop was sitting on the ground under the boat. One of the guys in the yard pulled it off for us. He said it took him 1/2 an hour with the torch and breaker bar. Now I wish I had given up a bit earlier yesterday!

The plan was to do the hull buffing today. Before that we wanted to try wet sanding the metal on our rub rail. This had to be done first because the water from wet sanding would run down the hull and get it dirty. Chris started out the day by re-wiring the solar panels. That project was a huge success. After getting the kids set up with school, I started sanding the rub rails. After a few minutes I realized that the metal would end up looking streaky and awful. But now part of it was done, so the whole thing had to be finished. We decided to unscrew all of the metal strips and heavily sand them while they were off the boat. I couldn't sand them too well while they were on the boat because they were attached to wood that couldn't be touched by the sandpaper. After getting most of the screws out and striping about 5 screws, Chris started sanding the strips that came off. I drilled out the stripped screws, and Chris got to work sanding the rest of the strips. The difference between the tarnished metal and the sanded metal is night and day. I can't wait to finish them up and put them back on the boat!

By the time we finished getting the metal off, we noticed a storm brewing in the distance. It was 5:00 and we didn't feel like getting drenched, so we decided to quit for the day. Right after we cleaned up and got in the car it started to pour out. That was good timing!

On the way home we finally stopped to get Kaitlin's hair cut. The moment had finally come. I'm not sure who was more nervous, Chris or Kaitlin. Chris took a bunch of pictures of Kaitlin with long hair and then he went to WalMart so he didn't have to watch the process. The hairdresser washed and combed Kaitlin's hair and then we put rubber bands below where it would be chopped off. Snip, snip, snip and off came about 8 inches of hair! Casey was snapping pictures the whole time. Kaitlin held a mirror in her hands and watched every move the hairdresser made. We brought a plastic ziplock bag for the hair so we could send it off to Locks for Love. At first I think she was suprised at how different she looked. Now I think she's excited about feeling lighter and cooler and not having big tangles. I know I'm excited about not so many tangles!

Well, hopefully tomorrow we'll be able to start compounding the hull. The workers said they would start the bootstripe tomorrow and once they did that we couldn't compound for 48 hours. I said that would work out great, because then we would be forced to kill that time by going to the tall ship show this weekend! We'll see how everything works out.