Yes, we're wintering in South Florida. But no, every day is not sunshine and beaches. Most days. Not all.

When the sun shines and the wind is light, there are a few sunny day chores that need to be done.

Today, for example, it's laundry day. Two loads of laundy fit into a 55L SeaLine dry bag. We take the dry bag to shore where we can use the marina laundry machines. And then back to the boat.

Sometimes the shore dryers aren't very good. And there's a line. So we take damp laundry back to the boat to use the CA's patented Low-Cost Solar Drying System™ to finish the Solar Drying Process™.

(Interestingly, this is actively discouraged in some areas. Check your neighborhood association or condo rules. Can you hang laundry out to dry? If not, why not?)

Today is also recharge the backup computers day. Rechargable batteries in general don't like extended storage. Without controlled experiments, we can only guess that three months is the limit.

Laptops become particularly grumpy when their batteries go dead: they seem to have trouble rebooting after a sustained period of actually having no power. I know that many computers have clocks that run even when the power is off so that (when you turn it on) it has some vague sense of what day it is. If that clock stops, the laptop turns argumentative. Spinning Beach-Ball of Death.

We recently got a new backup disk. So now we do two backups of the main laptop: one on each disk. This doesn't take much power, so it's done twice a week when I remember.

We worry about the saltwater environment eventually destroying a disk drive. So far, nothing to report, but it's only been a year and a half on the boat.

We really don't need three laptops. The white one is the 4th backup to the chart plotter. If the main Standard Horizon fails, and the iPad fails, and the main MacBook Pro fails, and the backup MacBook Pro fails, we have the white MacBook. It has reasonably current charts and (I think) can connect to the Bluetooth GPS receiver.

(You see, we haven't even tried it to see if it would work.)

Until we ditch that computer, I figure that I can leverage the Florida sunshine via our solar array to keep it charged.

Another periodic job is winding the clock.

We have a nice Wempe clock that has to be wound periodically. I think it's a 2-day kind of thing. I'm trying to be a bit more assiduous about winding it daily instead of noticing that it's stopped and then winding it.

It seems happier and seems to tbe tracking the time much more accurately now that I'm winding it daily.