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Enter your caption in the comments area below.

Here’s pictures of the sail down to Key West.

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Nick at the helm and Val riding the stern.

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The swell rolled under us at a leisurely pace, lifting us up and setting us down, occasionally splashing us with a bit of spray.

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Here’s one of those rare moments where Nick is not watching where he’s going.

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Me on the stern, riding the swell.

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As the afternoon wore on, we all got a bit tired. Here’s Val passed out in the cockpit.

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We reached Key West at around 3:30 in the afternoon and anchored near Fleming Island. Here’s our position. The red line shows our path into the harbor.

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Once we tidied up the boat a bit, we had another quick shower on deck and hailed the water taxi to take us ashore for dinner. It’s Spring Break here in Key West, so the mood on shore was festive and light and collegiate. Nick quickly showed he could party with the best of em.

My cousin Chuck (locally known as Chas) lives here so I’m finally getting to hang out with him on his turf. We’ll be here for a few days, enjoying all that Key West has to offer. More later…

On Monday we sailed south to Key Largo, and it was a great sail. This was the first time we’ve really sailed the boat since I joined Nick and Val. We had nice strong steady winds on the beam at 15 to 20 knots and we moved along at close to 7 knots most of the day with no help from the engine. Suddenly 2 months in a hot, dusty boatyard were a distant memory.

We fetched Key Largo around 2:30 in the afternoon, and after some poking around we finally decided to anchor just south of Rodriguez Key. The bottom was very grassy, and we had a hard time getting the anchor, a 60-lb bruce (claw) we picked up in Fort Lauderdale, to set properly. I put on my mask and fins and dove on it, and dug out some of the grass under it so it could get a proper holding.

But even with the anchor set, the anchorage wasn’t very good, as it’s very exposed. Fortunately we had mild weather and only a little swell.

The next day we sailed south to Marathon, where we met our buddy Rich (the retired fireman who helped install the windbugger pole in Fort Lauderdale) who pulled into the harbor just after we set our anchor. We all dingied ashore and had two-dollar tacos, one-dollar beers, and buck-fifty showers at Sombrero Joe’s. I think that’s what it was called.

Here’s some pics from the trip down to Marathon.

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Not long after I started writing this diary, it became clear that my primary function as diary-writer was to make Nick and Val look like rock stars. So here’s Nick, looking like a rock star. Just doing my job.

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Pretty sails. Sails make boat go.

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Even rock stars wear life vests at sea. Life vests are cool.

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Once we got the anchor set near Rodriguez Key we all went for a swim and then we showered on deck. Ah, refreshing!

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I think I just have to take a few more pictures like this and then I will have satisfied the requirements set forth by the Rock Star clause in my contract.

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Out that way, there’s a whole lotta nothing for a long long time.

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Here’s me at the helm on the way down to Marathon. Mostly I make use of my time at the helm by cleaning my ears and other orifices.

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When I wasn’t at the helm, I would practice levitating up on the foredeck.

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As we pulled into Marathon, we received a friendly escort from the local Coast Guard, Marine Mammal Division.

PS. Happy Birthday, Ryan!

Here’s some random photos from the past few days.

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Here’s Nick, Val, and Willow, as we head to shore for one of our daily outings.

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I was told there were a lot of classic cars and palm trees in South Beach. These were the only ones I could find.

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I walked all the way to the beach just to take a picture of my feet. And it cost me 7 bucks to lie on this cot.

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Bettcher Ass.

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I spent a half-hour taking pictures of these skater kids and somehow this was the best shot I came away with. Pathetic, huh? Well, I guess it’s not that bad.

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Every once in a while we get buzzed by this guy who flies around in this single-seater pontoon plane. I call him the Buzzard.

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I walked by this same sign a few days after taking this picture. Sure enough, someone had removed it.

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It’s a bit hot here, so I gave myself another haircut, this time on the aft deck, tossing the clippings into the bay. Some guy came over and touched my lip as this picture was being taken.

I been working on a couple new songs here on the boat. Here’s one called [satellite.mp3,Satellite] which I just started writing tonight.

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After motoring around a bit, we finally settled on this spot near Belle Isle, right in the heart of Miami. It’s a bit strange being anchored here, almost like pitching a tent in the middle of the Las Vegas strip. But it’s actually pretty quiet most of the time, except for the occasional speed boat zooming by. There were quite a few of them yesterday, but they seemed to disappear with the daylight, and there haven’t been many today since it’s a weekday.

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Here’s our exact location. We’ve been tracking our position using an application called MaxSea, hooked up to our GPS (in addiition to our primary means of navigation, old-fashioned paper charts). I’ll try to post a chart of our location any time it changes significantly.

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Today, after a bit of wrangling, we got the dingy in the water and decided to head for shore. There’s this cool little canal that runs right through the heart of South Beach.

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Nick and I motored up the canal a ways, under a few bridges, and tied up near a Publix grocery store and took a stroll through town.

Looking at this next picture you’d almost think we were in the tropics!

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That is, until you see the bottom of the picture.

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I swear the folks of Miami Beach seem to have really taken a liking to us. It’s been less than 24 hours since we settled into this new anchorage, and they’re already putting up another building in our honor. Just plain kooky!

After fixing the headstay fitting, we said our goodbyes to the kind folks at Summerfield and made our way down the river. I think perhaps they were just a little glad to see us go. Certainly, we were happy to be leaving.

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Here’s Willow and her crew just before leaving Summerfield.

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Goodbye! (And good riddance?)

After a short trip down the New River, we anchored overnight in Lake Sylvia, and got ready for an early trip down to Miami the following day.

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Once we got out of the harbor in Fort Lauderdale, we raised the sails and started south. It was good to see Willow with her canvas up again.

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Here’s Nick relaxing in the cockpit as the autopilot takes us southward.

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Here’s Val doing a bit of the same.

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Along the way we received a brief visit from a little bird who seemed to be taking a short break.

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Before long we reached Miami, and were glad of it. The people of Miami were kind enough to erect these tall buildings along the waterfront in honor of our arrival.

We’ll be here for a few days, awaiting a weather window for the Gulf Stream crossing, which hopefully will come sometime in the next week.

We spent all day today cleaning up the boat, lashing down various things on deck, and stowing everything that’s been lying around in the salon. All in all it was very satisfying, seeing the boat looking more like a boat and less like a construction site.

As the day came to a close, Valerie decided to do a routine check of the rigging. Lo and behold, she found cracks in the staysail and headstay deck fittings, so we decided we’d better get them fixed before heading out to the big blue ocean. Fortunately, the staysail fitting was pretty easy to fix: our buddy Larry ground out the cracks and, finding the core of the fitting to be in good condition, built up some welding where the cracks had been.

The headstay fitting is not going to be so easy, though. It’s set into the deck underneath the two bow rollers where the anchors are housed, so to fix it we’ll have to remove at least one of the bow rollers. Since the weather’s not looking too hospitable for a Gulf Stream crossing, we decided to stay here at Summerfield and make sure the headstay fitting is fixed properly.

I swear we’ll get out of here eventually!

First we’re heading down to Miami, where we’ll probably hole up in No Name Harbor and wait for a good weather window to cross the Gulf Stream. Weather’s not looking so great for the next week or so, but who cares if we have to wait another week? At least we’ll be out of this steenking boat yard! (To all the nice folks at Summerfield: we love it here. Really, we do.)

Since our internet access is going to be sporadic from here on out, I’ve changed the format of my diary a little. The new format (you’re looking at it) will be mostly text-only, just to keep you up to date on where I am and where we’re heading. Whenever possible, I’ll try to add some pictures as well just to keep it interesting.

Stay tuned!

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Ah, but at least we didn’t have to return to this.

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This is Content, a boat from Falmouth, England that was sailed here some 20 years ago. She’s pretty much had it. Her wooden hull is rotting in many places and even where the planking is largely intact there are sizable gaps between the boards. But her owner just doesn’t seem to want to give up on her. He’s there beside her every day but Sunday, working away, sanding, milling new wood, meticulously fitting new pieces of wood into the gaps between the old. He’s launched her from Summerfield twice to check the integrity of the hull, and she sank both times. I’ve heard she sank 4 times at a different yard nearby before they finally kicked him out. But he just doesn’t give up. Never mind that the sails are in tatters, never mind that rigging is a wreck. I guess this guy is bound and determined to sail her again one day. I hope he does. But I don’t think he will.

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One of the cool things at Summerfield is the 70-ton lift which they use to haul boats in and out of the water. It’s an amazing thing to see, and they have a show about every 15 minutes. Click the image above to see the boat go in the water.

After they put this boat in the water, I was amazed to see that all the dishes were laid out on the dining table on the far end of the boat, and they were completely undisturbed!

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Here’s Nick in the engine room again, poor fellow. Sometimes I think he might be happier if the engine just fell out somehow. Well, maybe not.

One of our bonus projects came about as part of putting new running lights on the bow. We were taking the bow pulpit off so we could weld some new mounts for the lights, when we discovered that some of the stanchion bases at the bottom of the bow pulpit were cracked and bent. So we talked to Larry, the metals guy here at Summerfield, and he recommended building all new ones. So to save money, we decided to polish the stainless steel stock for the new bases ourselves.

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There’s easier ways to do it if you’ve got the gear, but we decided to just use an electric sander and some elbow grease, slowly working the stainless up to a fine shine by using progressively finer grains of sandpaper. Here’s me in my steel-polishing getup.

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Here’s Larry cutting the polished stainless into 3-inch squares for the stanchion bases.

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Valerie’s bonus project was some canvas work she did for one of our neighboring boats. Here’s Val with one of the lee cloths she made. It turned out to be a much more difficult job than Nick and Valerie had expected, but it was a good learning experience and they’re even considering doing more canvas work in the future. Masochists, I swear.

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Here’s Larry welding some braces onto a pole that Nick is putting on the stern of the boat. The new wind generator is gonna go up on that pole any day now.

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Here’s Nick and our buddy Rich, winding some thread onto a pencil using a drill. Rich is a retired Sacramento fireman on a 28-foot Shannon. Probably the prettiest boat that size I’ve ever seen. I think if I was to get a boat, that would be the one.

But hell no, I ain’t getting no goddamn boat, are you crazy?!

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One of best forms of stress-relief came in this wonderful little two-part package called Marsha and Mario Marino. (C’mon, three times fast.) These are the kind folks who sold Willow (nee Serenata) to Nick and Valerie, and they’ve been great friends as well. Whenever we’ve had enough of the boat yard, Marsha and Mario would come to the rescue and invite us away to their paradise villa in Delray Beach. Once away from the drudgery of sanding and painting, we’d be treated to wonderful home-cooked Italian meals and rousing games of tennis, soaks in the hot tub and rounds of mimosas. Ahh, now this is the life!

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Wait, let me back up. Five minutes after we walk in the front door, I’ve knocked a scab loose and my toe is bleeding all over the kitchen tile. Marsha and Mario jump into action, Marsha’s wiping up my blood and here’s Mario with the first aid kit, and I didn’t even see him leave the room. They prop me up and Mario dresses my wound like I was his only child, and he gave me this cute Mickey Mouse band-aid, too. Right away I knew these were good people.

And yes, I can pick things up with my feet.

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We went to Marsha and Mario’s for Nick’s birthday and made a nummy raspberry chocolate cake. As you can tell, Nick made short work of it.

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Here’s Mario trying on Nick’s cool new shades. Sean Connery mixed with Tom Cruise mixed with Papa Smurf.

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We spent a fair amount of time troubleshooting Mario’s computer, until finally we convinced him to buy a Mac. Welcome to the few and the proud, Mario!

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Right near Marsha and Mario’s house is this cool wetland nature walk. Somewhere in this picture you can see a pair of turtles getting it on. Click the picture to zoom in.

Hey, at least they’re using protection! Ba-dum ching!

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Here’s a few shots of Nick trying to converse with one of the local birds. Click the picture to cycle through.

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Mario was the personal photographer to David Rockefeller, and he also took many pictures for Life Magazine and other publications. Here’s me and Mario in front of some of his photos. You might recognize the one of the construction worker balancing on a girder high above the city.

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Marsha was delighted to find that I could keep pace with her in red wine consumption, even when she was constantly putting some kind of food in my mouth. She seemed so happy to have someone in the house who could eat so much, and I was happy to oblige.

Oh my god, it’s been a long time since I did this.

Well I won’t lie to you. The month that has passed since I last wrote in my diary has not been an entirely cheery one. Nick, Valerie, and I have been working on the boat pretty much every day, trying to finish up various projects before we head out to the big blue ocean. As we’d come to a close on one project, we’d discover a whole new one that needed our attention and that must be added to the list. For a while it seemed that the work would never be done, that we would never get out of here, and pretty soon we were all very edgy and snapping at each other over otherwise minor little things. Nick and Valerie have had the added stress of having to pay for each new problem that arises while trying to maintain an intimate relationship in pretty confined quarters. And I’ve had the added stress of getting to hear them trying to maintain their intimate relationship. So it hasn’t been all that fun, at least not all the time. And you know me, I demand fun, all the time.

We’ve tried to cut the edge off the dreariness somewhat by taking days off, heading into town for movies (many movies) or by kicking back at the end of the day and watching Friends and having a beer and a good meal. Those are the moments that make the hard stuff a little easier, and now that we can finally see light at the end of the tunnel and the workload finally begins to lighten a bit, the good times are not so few and far between. So I’ve taken some pictures of some of the good moments over the past month, and left out the shitty ones. Hope you enjoy.

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I finally got to go up in the rigging! Here I am up in the bosun’s chair, attaching a sleeve for the man overboard pole to the backstay. Whee!

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Right next door, our friend Anthony was even higher up, having a look at his masthead. Jeeper McCreepers.

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Not too long after we got to Fort Lauderdale, we made the happy discovery that there is a wireless internet service provider with an antenna (their only one in all of Fort Lauderdale) right here in the boat yard! Unfortunately there were a couple big boats and buildings between us and the antenna so reception wasn’t so great. We discovered that reception was best in the vee berth at the forward end of the boat (where I sleep), so we crowded in there for a while and surfed the web.

A week or so later, the folks in the yard asked us to move our boat to another slip, which just happened to be much nearer the antenna with no obstructions. We happily complied.

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We went and bought about 300 feet of new chain for Willow. I laid it all out on the foredeck so i could mark it every 20 feet.

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Here’s a chain’s-eye-view.

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The place where we got the chain was this rigging and wire shop here in Fort Lauderdale. They had lots of posters and calendars with chicks on them. You know, the ones who can’t seem to find a tee shirt that doesn’t reveal the underside of their boobies. Chain chicks, I guess. They also had some nice wood paneling.

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One day we went to the laundry and I saw this empty laundry basket, all lonesome.

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Here’s some of them cold beers I was telling you about. Mmm, makes me wanna drop the sanding block and grab a bottle opener!

Okay, so it’s been a good while since I’ve done a diary entry. Sorry, my dear diary, I shouldn’t neglect you.

We’ve been here at Summerfield in Fort Lauderdale for over a week now, working away on various boat projects before moving on into the wild blue yonder. Here’s the story in pictures.

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I’ve been servicing and rebuilding all the winches in the cockpit and on the mast. These are used to manage the lines which control the sails. When you’re underway, these lines can have a tremendous amount of load on them, so the winches give you a mechanical advantage when bringing the lines in to adjust the trim of the sails. In the cockpit, there are two winches for the jib sheets, two staysail winches, and a mainsheet winch. There are also a few halyard winches on the mast (for hauling the sails up or bringing them down) and a reefing winch on the boom (for reducing sail area). So I’ve been taking them apart, cleaning off all the grit and broken down grease on all the parts, using mineral spirits and a toothbrush, and then putting them back together and lubing them up with new grease. When you’re servicing winches like this it really helps to have a new wave hairstyle.

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My favorite part of the winch mechanism are these little guys called pawls. They are these tiny swiveling arms, set on springs. When the gear turns in one direction, they lock in place and the gear engages, but in the other direction the gear ratchets and doesn’t impart any force. Neato. These are the mechanism by which winches do their magic, especially two speed winches. Crank the winch in one direction and one set of pawls engages, but crank it in the other direction and another set of pawls engages, rotating the drum in the same direction but at a slower speed and with a higher mechanical advantage. This is great when the sail is really loaded up with wind and you have to trim it in a little tighter. Also, the pawls sound really cool when you spin the gear around them, especially when they’ve just been cleaned and they don’t have any grease on them. They really ring out.

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Valerie has also been doing a lot of provisioning for the big voyage since we got here. I call this cabinet the Fun Fun Nummy Cabinet. Click on it to see why.

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Here’s this guy we saw on one of our trips into town. It’s hard to tell but he’s wearing these freaky sunglasses that go over the top of your head instead of over your ears. I guess they’re good for bald guys.

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Here’s Nick studying up on how to replace the impeller on an outboard motor. This is the motor that pushes our dingy around.

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These two guys work at a local dive shop. They found this dead guy in the river and are discussing what to do with him. Alright, actually it’s just a dry suit they inflated to check for leaks.

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Valerie and I applied some fairing compound to part of the cabin top behind the coaming. Once it dried we sanded it smooth and soon we’ll paint it to match the rest of the cabin top. I know it doesn’t look like it, but I’m actually having almost as much fun as Valerie is.

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The real nasty job of stiffening up the aft deck is underway. This has been largely Nick’s project, with Val and I assisting, but he’s been doing all of the hard work and most of the worrying about whether it was going to work or not. The problem is that the core of the deck, which is basically a piece of plywood sandwiched between two pretty thick layers of fiberglass, has rotted a bit over the course of 20 years and has delaminated, so that this area of the deck feels a little soft under your feet and flexes under pressure. After much deliberating over how to tackle the problem, Nick finally decided to go the slightly less messy route of drilling a network of holes into the deck and pumping it full of epoxy resin. Here Nick has drilled 135 small holes through the first layer of fiberglass and is injecting the epoxy. Now the job is mostly done and the deck is a lot stiffer.

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Here’s the special booties Nick got to wear during the aft deck repair. Doesn’t he look cute?

When we haven’t been working, we’ve been hanging out with other boat people.

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Here we are about to enjoy dinner with Michael and Alene on their boat Nin. Michael is a hardy German type who knows boats top to bottom. He drops by at least once a day to give Nick advice on how to deal with his problems, and then he comes back later to critique the execution. He used to work here at Summerfield but now he and Alene are preparing to set sail for Cuba themselves.

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Here’s Anthony, who works on a boat that is docked nearby. He works for Julie, an eccentric 72-year-old woman who doesn’t know a thing about sailing boats but owns one nonetheless and she just hires people like Anthony to do all the sailing so she can do all the riding. They’re going to be heading through the Panama Canal and down to Tahiti this spring. Talk about Driving Miss Daisy.

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I think I may have found someone who is a bigger Macintosh nut than me, and his name is George. He looks like a visionary, doesn’t he? George shoots lots of videos on his DV camera, edits them in iMovie, burns them to DVDs with iDVD, and then shows them to his friends. He crows about how great Macs are to anyone who’ll listen. He works at Summerfield and lives at the far end of the dock, on a boat that is permanently moored alongside. His living room is on the dock itself, with a simple roof overhead. Underneath the roof is a large dining room table, with a fridge, washer and dryer, and barbecue nearby, all right there on the dock. He has a TV and a DVD player mounted on one of the pilings, in an aluminum box he built to protect them from the weather. He’s so set up, he even has DSL on the boat!

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We’ve also been hanging out a lot with our good friends John and Amanda who have a boat called Gingi. They are heading to the Bahamas any day now and it looks like we’ll be following them shortly. John is an excellent musician and an accomplished sailor with tons of great advice on just about any topic you could imagine. Amanda is British and a bit of a nutter. She describes John as having three mustaches.

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Here’s what Nick and Val look like when they aren’t working on the boat or arguing over something or fretting about money. Awww.

At long last we are no longer in Vero Beach.

Not that Vero Beach was a bad place to be, but I think we’ve all been getting antsy to move along, especially now that Cuba is on the horizon.

After finishing up some odd jobs in Vero Beach, we took on fuel and water and started heading south again. After a few hours down the Indian River, we anchored on the inside of Fort Pierce inlet and made some last minute preparations before heading out the inlet to sea, for our first overnight passage. We brought the dingy up on deck and lashed everything down, and after some lunch and a review of our course we were all set.

We headed out behind a square-rigged tallship around sunset. We each took three-hour shifts at the helm, with one person assisting the helmsman and the third free to sleep. It was a long night and none of us got much sleep. We did have a funny conversation with another tug captain, who was hauling supplies down to an Al Quaeda prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He said that they were getting “three hots and a cot” which was probably more than they were used to back home. He would talk for like five minutes straight and then instead of saying “over” he would say “c’mon”. I guess all tug captains say “c’mon” a lot. His colorful monologue was a welcome break from the monotony of sailing through the near-total darkness.

As the sun rose, we headed in at Fort Lauderdale and up the New River to Summerfield Boat Works. Once we got settled in we all collapsed into our bunks for a well-deserved nap.

Whoever you are, please send me something! Nick and Valerie are really nice but I’m getting really sick of them. Well no not really, but I would love more than anything to get something in the mail from my other friends. So please, a postcard, anything! Oh, the address:

Willow
c/o Summerfield Boat Works
1500 S.W 17th Street
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33312
attn. Pascal

We’ll be tied up here for a couple weeks, doing some work on the aft deck, rebuilding our winches, finishing up the work on the coaming in front of the cockpit, and other miscellaneous stuff. Then we’ll be heading south to the Florida Keys before making the hop over to Cuba.

Here’s some more pictures from the last week or so:

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Nick hops out of the dingy in front of an ominous sky.

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A couple of pretty sky pictures.

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Valerie went up the mast to sew a leather chafe patch on to one of the spreaders.

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We hauled the camera up to her so she could get a few shots from up above. Scary.

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Here’s the jig I set up to route some insets into this board I was using to make a frame against which the jerry cans of spare diesel could be lashed. I also treated myself to a coke that day.

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Here’s the finished product, mounted on the stanchions on the starboard aft deck.

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On our last night in Vero Beach, we took a dingy ride to shore at sunset and the water looked like oil. And the sky was pretty cool too.

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Then we went out to a fancy restaurant where Willow received a Certificate of Achievement from the Tristan Jones Foundation.

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Valerie plays on the bow as we follow a tallship out to sea.

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Nick looks over the charts with the tallship in the background.

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Nick silhouetted against the sunset.

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The sunset through the lifelines. Mmm mmm nummy.

Now the current plan is to spend a few weeks in Fort Lauderdale working on the boat. Then we’ll head down to Key West for a bit, and from there we’ll make the 90-mile hop to Cuba, and cruise around there for a couple months or so. Then we’ll come back to Florida where Nick and Valerie will spend the summer working and I’ll probably fly down to the U.S. Virgin Islands and look for some kind of work there.

For the next few days, we’re gonna sit here in Vero Beach, finishing up some odd jobs. We’re hoping to hop outside the ICW for the passage down to Fort Lauderdale, so we’re also waiting for a good weather window before leaving here.

Last night I had my first head-rebuilding experience. (Head = Marine toilet.) The flap Valve in the bottom of the toilet bowl was a little loose and misaligned, so occasionally when pumping it out it wouldn’t seal properly and toilet water would come squirting upward in a nasty little geyser. Not fun.

Since Nick has had to rebuild both heads in the not-too-distant past, I volunteered to fix this one. So Nick showed me how to close the in and out through-hulls where seawater is pumped in to flush the bowl and waste water is pumped out. Then I disassembled the toilet and removed the flap-Valve and its housing. I took it apart and cleaned all the tasty gunk off of each part. There’s just one screw that holds the flap Valve in place, so I added a lock washer to keep the screw in place and to prevent the Valve from moving around. Finally I reassembled the whole works, opened the through hulls and gave it a few test pumps. Hooray, no more geyser. Then of course I bleached all the invisible crud off my hands.

It probably sounds real complicated, but as head repair projects go it was pretty minor, nothing compared to rebuilding the whole thing.

My next project is to build a frame for strapping the three spare diesel jerry cans to the stanchions on the aft deck. I’ll let you know how it goes.

More pictures:

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Nick and Valerie rummaging through light fixtures at this huge marine surplus warehouse called Marine Connection. Check out the huge blue light special. Only $295.00!

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Valerie was the victim of a toilet geyser. No, actually this is one of those mud mask type things that is good for your face. Valerie is such a hippie.

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The world through Nick’s eyes.

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Our little tender, parked on the beach while we went to lunch.

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Hey there, Lauren. Thanks for giving me your hat. I love you. And you, too.

So it’s New Year’s Eve here in Vero Beach, and I’ve got a bad case of the sniffles. Here’s some more pictures.

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Most mornings here are incredibly calm and the water becomes a huge looking glass. Wait, mirror. The water becomes a huge mirror.

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Here Nick is doing some final touch-up on the base of the aft hatch which we just rebedded.

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Valerie is sanding the coaming which she and Nick built earlier this year in preparation for another coat of epoxy primer.

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Nick is adding some more threads to a 5-inch bolt with his spiffy new tap and die set.

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Here’s the newly-threaded bolt compared with the original. Man, check out them new threads!

So, like I said, I’m a little ill. Nick and Valerie went over to Mandalay for a little New Year’s Eve party. I wanted to go but I’m sick so I guess it’s best that I don’t. Hopefully they will save me a piece of pie.

Happy New Year!