Saturday, 5/2/2020 – A beautiful day of sunshine! A little boat work, a little lounging in the sun, soaking up the warmth.

Tuesday, 5/5/2020 – Cinco de Mayo was the first time in a month that we had to set an alarm to get up in the morning. And it was ROUGH! The alarm ringing at 5:30am is not something we miss, one little bit. We hit the road at 6:30 to head back to Central PA for the first time in nearly a month. Our plan? A brief two-day stay in Central PA so that Josh could take care of some in-water scuba training. While Josh was getting wet, my goals were not as exciting – sort through the ridiculous amount of nonsense mail that arrived for us during the last month, monopolize on some lightning fast WiFi to get some things sorted for work I’m doing for a client and visit the super-close Walmart for some provisions before we head back to the boat. While we were in the area, we also borrowed back our sewing machine from my mom, who had given it a home before we left. Josh has a growing sewing to-do list and we plan to see how well our sewing machine can handle the tasks before buying a new one. As expected, the dog didn’t seem phased or interested by our two-day adventure and spent most of the time sleeping snoring. In really exciting news, we used the two-hour drive to start planning our first “big trip” in the boat since we’re anticipating getting the final parts and pieces we need to finish all of our “big projects” within the next few weeks. Wait…the boat’s going to leave the dock?! Good lord, things are moving right along!

Thursday, 5/7/2020 – We had a SUPER productive day with boat work! We’re rapidly crossing things off our “to-do” list and it feels GOOD! The nitty-gritty details of our boat work adventures are over here on our maintenance log, in case you’re interested.

Thursday, 5/14/2020 – Josh had some scuba stuff to take care of in Central PA while the dog and I stayed home. The dog continues to adjust to his life aboard. This evening, he soaked up every single minute of the beautiful golden hour in the cockpit.

Friday, 5/15/2020 – Another testament to how the dog is adjusting to life aboard SV Moxie…

Saturday, 5/16/2020 – Last night was a pretty sleepless night for me. I’ve been struggling with getting comfortable on our 17-year-old mattress to be able to sleep since we moved onboard in March and figured I was just still getting used sleeping on the boat. Last night, I woke up and my toes on my left foot were numb, my legs were sore and my back was killing me. I finally said something to Josh about my discomfort and we agreed that the 17-year-old mattress had to go in favor of a new option. While I want to be comfortable and sleep well at night, I was not at all prepared to spend $1,000 on a Purple or Tuft and Needle mattress. After some research, we settled on a more budget-friendly option: a Zinus 13″ Pressure Relief Euro Top iCoil® Hybrid Queen Mattress. At less than $400 (and 1.5% cash back with Rakuten!) with a 100 night money back promise, we felt good about ordering the mattress and having it shipped to the marina. Worst case scenario, it doesn’t work for us, we send it back and try something else. Best case scenario, we love it and we sleep like ROYALTY! We also decided that we would purchase a Froli Travel Sleep System to install underneath the new mattress to raise the mattress off of the bed platform and keep air circulating around it and give ourselves some additional comfort and luxury. I CANNOT WAIT! While we were at it, we made another purchase. The combination of cockpit cocktails and chatting turned into a pretty costly adventure today!

While we’ve been making preparations to get going on some trips, I’ve been thinking about our trip limiting factors. We installed our solar panels and a new inverter / charger, so, hopefully we’re in good shape as far as power goes. But, we’re still left with limiting factors of how much fresh water we can carry and how much waste holding tank storage we have. We’ve already discussed purchasing and installing a water maker, but at nearly $5,000, we haven’t had the guts to pull the trigger just yet. But, I’m sure we will. As far as the waste holding tank limiting factor, I’ve read alot about cruisers transitioning to composting toilets as a means of eliminating that factor. I’ve been reading up on the different types of composting toilets and had posed the idea to Josh a few weeks ago. After some discussion, we agreed that making the transition may be “solving a problem we don’t have.” My research continued, just in case. 🙂 During cockpit cocktails and chatting, we decided that we’ve been pleased with the proactive approach we’ve taken on some costly projects on the boat so far and it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to go ahead and switch one of the toilets out to a composting toilet. After placing the costly orders, we had a great dinner and played Phase 10. I won and Josh was a poor loser. 🙂

Sunday, 5/17/2020 – We’ve been feasting on fresh, local strawberries from Lowery’s Produce Market for the past few days and we decided it was finally time to make the first strawberry shortcake of the season. It was FABULOUS!

Wednesday, 5/20/2020 – The Froli Travel Sleep System that we ordered just four days ago arrived today! As soon as I got the delivery notification, we ran up to the marina office, scooped up the box and headed back to the boat to get busy doing what amounts to adult Lego’s. Installation went super-smooth, though we were a few pieces short and will need to order an expansion pack with additional pieces to cover the entire queen-size bed platform. We had plenty of pieces to put together the majority of the system so we’ll be able to give sleeping on it a shot this evening. Since we’re still sleeping on the ancient mattress until the new one arrives, maybe it’ll be a little more tolerable…

Friday, 5/22/2020 – Josh had IDC class at West Shore Scuba and then we headed to camp for Memorial Day weekend. Kind of crazy that for the past few years, we’ve been leaving the Central PA mountains for the Chesapeake Bay and this year, when we live on the Chesapeake Bay, we left the Bay for the mountains. It was a nice change from the windy, rainy Bay life that we’ve been living recently and a great opportunity for the dog to stretch his legs and get some good romping time in. I got to check on the geocache that I hid 4 years ago, too, which was long overdue!

Tuesday, 5/26/2020 – An exciting day! Our new Zinus mattress arrived! The best sleep I’ve had since we moved onboard!

Wednesday, 5/27/2020 – Second day in a row of extreme excitement around SV Moxie! Our new Nature’s Head composting toilet arrived. While we’re still a bit skeptical of the composting toilet in actual practice, we’re excited to make the transition to not having our limiting factor be our holding tank.

Friday, 5/29/2020 – Just after waking up this morning, I looked through one of our forward windows and saw this…

I’m still somewhat surprised by some of the things happening around me and exclaimed to Josh, “There’s a big boat and a digger at our boat!” Thankfully, he had some idea what I was talking about, which happens more than I give him credit for. We headed up on deck and spent the next few hours watching as the three-man crew pulled an old, wobbly piling out from the forward port side of our slip and replaced it with a new, much larger, much sturdier post. It was pretty incredible to watch them methodically complete the task.

I guess Josh was feeling inspired by the manual labor going on around here today because shortly after the piling was replaced, he pulled out a hole saw and cut a hole in the boat! And, not just a little hole, either! See Exhibit A for proof of his destructive ways!

Actually, this was a planned hole cutting and not just a spontaneous let’s-cut-a-hole-in-the-side-of-our-boat hole cutting, thankfully. Cutting the hole was part of the final step in finishing the installation of our new composting toilet. A little while later, the project was 100% done and we’re ready to see how it works! Fingers crossed for all going well with the composting toilet…this is NOT a project that I want to have ANY issues with!

Saturday, 5/30/2020 – Josh headed back to Central PA for some more scuba instructor preparations while the dog and I stayed home to get some chores and computer work done. It was a pretty productive day on both fronts, despite me meeting our “new neighbor” while Josh was away…