Really hard to imagine that someone somewhere is gloating over the same images of the Boston Marathon bombings that are making me feel ill. Thoughts are with all those helpless innocent victims.

While all that is going on our lives proceed without worries. News like this only invades us at night after the kids are in bed and we have time to go online. We’re fortunate.

We spent our day at the park, playing at home, painting pictures, making imaginary phone calls to other girls in the family, walking around downtown, shopping for fish food in sad little pet stores, drinking the best iced tea in town at our favorite Chinese restaurant, grabbing a hot dog on the street, strolling along the beach, and playing on the boat some more before finally calling it a day.

As for boat work, I finished replacing the front engine mounts, mulled over the rears, and finally decided to give them a pass. I then went about aligning the prop shaft with the engine. It took me an hour of tweaking but I think I finally got the two lined up as close as they’re going to go. I even got to break out the old VW bus valve adjustment feeler gauges to get everything tweaked nice and tight. In the end I tightened the front mounts at least a full inch further than where they had been—meaning that the alignment was way off before. Assuming of course that I actually did things right this time.

I would have fired up the engine and thrown it in gear just to see how things looked, but while I was doing all this work I noticed that the bracket that is used to adjust and tighten the alternator belt had a big crack in it—about three quarters of the way through. It’s a small part, but absolutely critical to the engine. So I brought it into a machine shop today where they’ll fabricate a new one for me in two days for about thirty bucks. At which point I can finish putting everything back together again and we can begin thinking about sailing up to the islands.