I wish I could say that we did all this super interesting stuff the last 10 days…but I would be fibbing if I said that. Truth is we really haven’t done much at all. Connie’s been working her full 20 hour per week maximum for the past 4 o 5 weeks trying to get all of her students placed. She’s dealing with a total of 3 classes getting scheduled right now and finally has enough spots for all of them but they’re being very slow in getting all of their paperwork requirements completed so that they can go out on clinical.

Beyond that we had Valentines Day dinner out…we went to a place named the Elephant Bar and Grill. This is a chain with about 20 or so locations across the country and we thought it was pretty decent back when we were in our early 30’s in San Diego…but our tastes have changed and the decor, service from the wait staff, and overall vibe just didn’t do it for us. The food was pretty good but overall it was pretty much a bust.

Connie won twice at Bingo in the past week as well. Neil got some new hardware and rehung our sign out front…the original brass plated cup hooks he used rusted away so he replaced them with a pair of stainless screw eyes. We also bought some new solar powered walk lights about a foot high…got six of these to put around our patio and light up our entrance approach a little.

The main data storage drive in our file server died…luckily no data was lost as Neil has lots of backups. It was a 1.5 TB drive and he bought a pair of 3 TB drives to replace it and it’s mirror backup with. He thought he was being smart and just got bare drives with the intention of putting them into the existing cases since bare drives are 80 bucks cheaper each. Got the new drives and discovered that the old cases won’t support a 3 TB drive…so he got an RMA and shipped them back and ordered two new drives with cases. They’ll be here Tuesday or so and we’ll have our IT systems back up to full capability. He also bought a small fan to put up in our overhead storage area (over the fridge) where the drives live to give a little more air flow across them and help keep them cool.

Thursday we decided to head out on a kayak trip; after some discussion we elected to head over to the Jn Ding Darling NWR over on Sanibel Island about 30 miles from Seminole. While the kayaking was pretty decent…the traffic was horrible. When we got over to the entrance to the toll plaza for the causeway over to the island (6 bucks to get over, gotta be rich to live over there I guess) there was a 30 minute backup and then we limped along taking another 30 minutes to get the 2.5 miles out to the NWR parking lot. Had a nice kayak paddle through Tarpon Bay and some of the mangrove marsh areas and headed back only to find out the traffic was even worse. Took an hour to get off the island and then another hour to get home since it was rush hour by that time and we had to deal with commuter traffic. We won’t go over there again, there’s another paddling place a lot closer and easier to get to.

Had dinner at the Elks last night…fish fry night all you can eat for 9 bucks. That and a coupla pitchers of beer (Amber Boch…not great but it’s the darkest brew they have) made a pretty outstanding dinner. Neil took out some lamb chops that he’ll grill tomorrow and then we’ll have leftovers for Monday night since there are 8 in the package.

Sorry, I didn’t get any pictures on the kayak trip…we lost our waterproof camera and have to buy a new one (or else a waterproof iPhone case) for ourselves.

Started working on our post Sevierville travel plans today; we had already figured out from Mar 15 when we leave through the beginning of May and today Connie figured out the plan through mid June when we arrive at Camp Horizons in Junction City. While the rig is getting some work done on it we’re headed off for vacation for 3 weeks. We’re almost completed figuring out what it will be…will post details as soon as they’re finalized. 

Cyas.