Paperwork, paperwork, paperwork and inverter!

I think this is the earliest I have ever gotten our tax information to our accountant, due in part to the spreadsheet I created last year (and have ready for next year). I worked on gathering and collating the information over several days - yes, days that I should have been writing. But it had to be done. And since we have two cruises between now and April, I didn't want to wait too long.

Speaking of cruises, we leave on my first (Stu's second) Royal Caribbean cruise the end of this week. We will have a brief visit with family the night before we head to the port - they are much closer to Ft. Lauderdale than we are and we haven't seen them since last winter.

It's a ten day cruise, taking place of the transatlantic we had to cancel last year (or was it the year before?). We've been to all the ports except one so we will keep to our routine. Stu will scuba dive where available and I will be writing. I hope to finish Almost a Touch during the cruise. I'm about 2/3rd done with the first draft.

When we arrive home, we have about ten days before we go on a second cruise on the Carnival Magic. We booked this specifically to see some of the members of the #sixappeal band again. In fact, they asked if we wanted to do an excursion together. We booked zip-lining combined with cave tubing in Belize and three of them are going with us. Should be a blast! They are pretty much the age of our grandkids and we love being around them. Oh, and their music is GREAT!

A week after that cruise we head to our house in Tennessee, stopping along the way for a great car show in Chattanooga. We will stay at the Holiday Travel Park of Chattanooga on Fri and Sat, arriving at the house on Sunday. EXCITED for both events!

Speaking of the house, a HUGE thank you to our good friend (and realtor), Wilma Allen, for removing the forgotten chicken from the refrigerator. Phew, that could have been bad.

Oh, wondering about the inverter? If you have followed our blog for a while, you know our inverter has worked sporadically (VERY sporadically) since we came back from Ecuador. Sometimes clearing the error codes would help but that happened less and less. With the new residential refrigerator, we ended up running the generator while traveling in temps above 70 degrees and we had to stay in campgrounds rather than asphalt parking on our overnights between FL-TN-MD.

Stu finally did some troubleshooting on the issue and found a loose ground wire. That was part of our problem. The other was seven year old AGM batteries that had spent two very cold winters in TN while we were living in Ecuador.

After pricing them out online, we found the same battery for about $269 each. Surprisingly not, that much more expensive than when we got our solar system in 2009. But we found a comparable Duracell battery at Sam's Club for $179 each. So today we picked up four new ones. We currently have six connected but since we no longer do hard core boondocking, we felt four should provide enough power for overnighting when traveling. Tomorrow is the final test - they are charging now. Keeping our fingers crossed!

After that we headed over so I could get a pedicure for the cruise. We tried a new place in Lady Lake, almost across the street from Home Depot (which is beside Sam's Club), Pretty Nails & Spa. I was very pleased and will definitely use them again.

Ciao for now!