Fuel, Skype, Keyboard Problem

While waiting for videos to upload to the blog yesterday morning I went for a stroll and discovered the large restaurant next door.  The woman in charge spoke a bit of English but it turned out that she could understand my Spanish better than my English.  The restaurant opened only at night but she showed me through the premises and we wound up in the Cafe section at the other end.   I asked to see the menu and I noticed something that I had been missing since Argentina: a “hamburguesa completa” which includes a fried egg in it.  Thirty minutes later after completing the internet session I was back and ordered their hamburger with beef, cheese, lettuce, tomato, and a fried egg, along with french fries and a Skol beer.  I ate the lunch under a canvas canopy overlooking the swimming pool to the marina, feeling pretty good about life. 

In the afternoon I put 25 liters of diesel into the tanks and filled them to the brim.  I now have 5 empty containers representing 80 liters but decided that it did not make sense to fill them now, so I will wait until November when I am preparing the boat for the next passage.   By my calculations the engine averaged 2.4 liters per hour, which isn't bad because I was generally running the engine for propulsion rather than battery charging.

In the late afternoon I went to the kiosk for a beer and the bar tender told me that there was a problem with the beer and I thought that I heard him say “twenty minutes”  I sat there watching the Olympics (which I find boring) while I waited, and after a few minutes the woman in the next stool told me that she had cold beers in her refrigerator and would bring me some.  Soon she returned with the beers as promised.  I  took one of the beers, the rest went to the bar tender, and I paid the bar tender who will presumably settle things with her.  Her name is Ursula and she is of German extraction.  She and her husband have an apartment in the adjacent building.  I think that the bar tender is also German.   I introduced myself to him and we both knew that I would never remember his name, so he told me to call him simply “Inch”.  It turns out, by the way, that he speaks pretty good English and for the first 3 days we had been communicating with his Portuguese and my Spanish.

This morning I was up early to try my luck with a Skype call to Australia.  I took the Acer netbook because it seems to be more robust with WiFi and it is lighter.  The only way that I could get 4 bars out of the router was to jam the computer against one particular window across from what I think was the router on the filing cabinet.  Standing up and holding the Acer in one hand I placed a call to  Australia but unfortunately there was nobody home.  But then I went to the bench not far from the entrance to the office and found that the signal was good enough there too, so perhaps I'll be able to do my Skyping from the luxury of a park bench.  The other office routers, by the way, are much stronger, but they are password protected.  It looks like they've allocated their bottom of the line router to marina members.  That's one reason why I have no qualms about taking up 2 of the 3 waiting chairs in the office to do my Internet work.  (So far no visitors have needed these chairs.)

 Then I returned to the boat to compose this blog entry and discovered that I have keyboard trouble with the Toshiba machine.  The keys for R, Y, 3,5,7,8,9,0 are simply not working.  Eventually I brought up a virtual keyboard on the screen so that I could at least enter data by pointing and clicking.  But for the heavy duty work (such as this blog) I have had to resort to composing on the Acer then transferring to the Toshiba.  I must use the Toshiba for the internet sessions because it has a good battery life of several hours, while the Acer gives me only about 30 minutes (just enough for a Skype call.)

If the Toshiba does indeed have a keyboard hardware problem it will go the the USA with me along with the Acer for repairs.  I still intend to purchase a new and fairly powerful laptop in the USA, which means that I would be returning with 3 computers.  Fortunately the Acer is so small that it travels nicely and stealthily in the Toshiba bag.