There have been some updates happening in my life, but I haven’t had a lot of free time in front of the computer to provide updates. Here is a quick recap of my life in the past month. I’m trying to remember to take more pictures to make my post more dynamic, but I am not good at remembering to do it. I am hoping I get better.

Boat Towing. I had the sail boat towed up to our slip from Herrington Harbour North to Maryland Marina. It was suppose to be a day where Melissa and I were going to hang out on the boat but she got sick :(. The one time we got towed any distance, because our motor stopped working and sail power wasn’t getting us anywhere, we took on water in the galley and a non-trivial amount for about a 30 minute tow. My theory was that we had to much weight in the back and the water was coming though the bilge hole, because of the wake and the weight of us sitting in the back put the bilge hole under the water. However, as a precaution, I wanted to have someone with me to help with the manual bilge if needed. Great news, my theory was correct. I graciously asked Billy to sit in the galley with me while we were being towed and we didn’t have to manually bilge once. It was a long relaxing day on the boat. The tow was semi expensive but every day it was at Herrington Harbour it was costing us money. Money well spent.

4th of July weekend. On the 6th Melissa and I got a date night. We went to the *Melting Pot* and it was a wonderful dinner. When we were done we went and hung out on the boat. We were going to go sailing and watch the Martins State Airport Fireworks on the boat but it was starting to thunder. They decided to do the fireworks early because of the thunderstorm, but it worked out we were able to see everything from our marina. We watched the fireworks with thunder above and behind it. Very interesting and cool. 🙂

The week of the 7th, I was in Boston MA for some meetings at work. The IBM Acquisition closed while I was in the office. The office was a buzz of activity and discussion about what’s next and where things are going and so on… I watched the announcement from the Westford Cafe where we had some of the executives. This is an interesting time in our (Red Hat) history. Let’s keep on keeping on. I chose to come to Red Hat (almost) 5 years ago because I agree with their mission and I believe in the product set. It’s been a company I have been proud to say I work at, and I just hope that continues to be true. All indications are leading to that being truth, but we have to keep on keeping on. I’m proud of my accomplishments and the work I’ve done and will continue to do here. This was also the week I got my new sail. It’s nice. I can already tell the improvement differences. It took some re-working to get it on and it’s rigged differently, but it’s much nicer than the previous one.

Finally, the weekend of the 13th. We had my sister-in-law, brother-in-law, niece, and niece-friend come to MD for a baby shower and vacation. On Friday, after a late start I took them sailing. This was the first time, due to a working engine, we successfully went out on the boat and didn’t require assistance to come back in. YAY!! The engine needed some work and it wasn’t without it’s drama and scares, but it preformed when we needed it too. The first time I can say that in totality being true. It was all of us and the 4 people mentioned above. Running a 10 person boat, on a 24 foot sail boat is quite tight. However, we got up to 5-6 miles per hour multiple times for quite a bit, and that was majorly fun. Every time I take the boat out I learn something new. Our next trip out I’d really like to focus more on relaxing and being able to enjoy everything, rather than the stress of time. I’m hoping that will be this week.

On the 14th, we threw my other sister-in-law a baby shower. Us males were relegated to the basement where we played *Arkham Horror* 3rd edition. I had not played this version it is quite different than the version I own (1st edition I think). This game was brutal to us. We started out ok, but the second round we got smacked pretty hard and the game never let up. I was killed twice, my second character didn’t last 2 rounds. Overall, I don’t really care for the game. For a period of time I really like the version I own, but I don’t think I will purchase this one. It suffers from the biggest problem I have with the version I own, it’s too fiddly. There are so many different pieces and piles of cards and stacks of things. It requires to many steps to complete a round. This makes setup, tear down, and mechanically playing the game to fiddly. You have to do to much that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. If the game were a video game and it handled a lot of it for me, I might change my mind. As it stands, to much of the game is on auto-pilot except you are the pilot. Individual actions on turns can be very inconsequential but things like Mythos phase are not. The game wants to play itself and you are just here for the ride.