Water We Thinking

We've written before about how many people ask us private things just because we live on a boat. Since our lifestyle is a bit different than most  people there seems to be an idea that we want everyone knowing about our financial lives and personal habits.  Here are some questions we get: How much does it cost? What do you do in the winter? How do you heat/cool the boat? Do you ever leave the marina? Why are you doing this? Do you miss your house? How do you shower? How do you poop? Those last two come up a lot more often than you'd think.  Let's face it, most of us are a bit crude. Kevin has spent a lot of time with "proper" people, businesspersons, met many CEOs of large global companies or other folks you might think are high class.  Most of them turn into 14 year olds after a few cocktails.  That's when the real questions come out.  A lot of people are just curious, and their curiosity can overwhelm their sense of society, privacy, and poli...

It's finally in!  It's amazing, although not on the scale of a double rainbow or manned space flight, but on the scale of the day to day we couldn't be happier.  Many of you know that we've had some plumbing issues on Cygnet since we got her last May and it's been a challenge.  We've even had a couple weeks of "bucket" usage.  Yes it was terrible, but that's not going to be an issue anymore. At the beginning of our season last year we had one toilet that worked just OK and another that didn't really work at all.  We did some maintenance and got both working temporarily but that lasted only a brief time until one day while we had friends aboard the rear head stopped working normally.  It simply wouldn't flush the waste out of the bowl at a rate faster than the new water coming in.  We decided that the front toilet would have to be our first choice in waste elimination.  Well that worked until we realized that the waste line had a hole in i...

We had hoped to write about our entertainment system upgrade by now but the install has gone a little slower than expected.  Hopefully next week we will tell you all about Kevin's new pride and joy. A while back we wrote about our cute little alcohol burning fireplace  that kept us toasty through the very cold months.  We've had a bunch of people asking whether we are getting enough oxygen inside a boat since it's wrapped in glorified Saran.  The fully fueled fireplace burns about three hours and we usually only burn once in a 24 hour period.  We have not noticed any issues with oxygen on board this winter.  We were worried about other gasses like too much CO or CO2.  When we bought Cygnet in May 2014 there were three hardwired CO detectors that we believe to be original to the boat.  A commenter on our blog asked if we were using any other types of CO detectors since the lifespan is about 5 years on these.  It's something we thought about ...

The weather has broken and we are warming up nicely.  It's been a couple weeks since we had frigid temperatures in Chicago and we've even seen one day in the 70s.  If you're reading this in a warm climate and thinking 70 isn't that warm, let me tell you that after a winter in Chicago 70 is amazing! The sun is heating us up quite nicely during the day and the heaters are keeping us toasty at night. The first day we had over 50 was a sunny one and out of habit we left the heaters on when we went to work.  With the warm sun the wrap acted like a greenhouse and got the unheated rear deck up to 105! The interior of the boat was at 100, which we both agreed was a bit high. 1. Outside  2. Rear Deck  3. Engine Room  4. Interior Of course it's a bit early to take the wrap off the boat as the weather has gone back down to more seasonal levels this week.  We shut the heaters off on warm days and leave the zipper door open to the wrap to let in some fresh ai...