After the satellite dish, new trac lighting was called for. Once the work was done, we headed out to swim. The doggies have a new ladder, called "Paws Aboard" and they can swim to it and literally walk up onto the boat. Pretty cool!
Then on Sunday... I stepped on the boat from the dock, lost my balance and fell backwards. Hit my head on the concrete dock behind me and fell down the steps, twisting my back.....MAN! did it hurt! needless to say, I spent most of the day inside, lying down.
Saturday afternoon, I noticed that Shadow (my poodle) seemed to be feeling bad. He started vomiting and had diarreah. then on Sunday, he wouldn't eat. So, on Monday, when we got back to town, we went straight to the vet.
After several hundred dollars worth of tests, they figured out he had Pancreatitus!! They immediately checked him in and put him on plasma and a bag of fluids. Three days of antibiotics, injections and fluids....poor baby! I finally got to bring him home on the third afternoon...a little scary.

The first weekend of May, we were at the lake (of course) and it rained and stormed a lot.
We decided to come home on Tuesday (have to work, sometime) only to find that the garage door wouldn't open. No problem, probably a dead battery from a power outage. Then, when we got in.....I turned on the TV in the bedroom and it wouldn't turn on. So, I tried the living room TV, also wouldn't turn on. I walked into the master bathroom and saw several gold colored scorch marks on the mirrors, then I noticed that Jimmy's mirror was broken at the edge and there was a scorch mark on the wall! The house had been hit by lightening!!!I heard a faint whirring sound on the other side of the wall. Jimmy yelled for me from the back bedroom of the house. The treadmill was on and running full blast! I guess it had been on for days because the belt had begun disintgrating and there was a black rubbery powder all over the carpet.
As the days have gone by, we have found that the intercom system, sprinkler system,telephone system, doorbell, oven light stays on,
HDMI ports on another of our TVs, one of the small tvs in the guest room is fried, but the good news is that all the computers in the other end of the house (the home office) are fine. The unusual thing is that all of the electronics were plugged into Monster surge protectors and it still fried everything! Lightening is a bizarre thing.

After the Marathon Rally in Kerrville, we came home for a rather uneventful week, then we took off for the lake for Jimmy's birthday and the Memorial Day weekend.

Jimmy's present was a new "in-motion" satellite dish, that he wants to install on the boat (so we can watch the NASCAR races while we float in the lake!!) So we decided that this would be a "work on the boat" weekend. Jimmy ran the cables through the radar arch, then we took out the old musty smelling carpet and the boards that let you access the motor, etc. (Also added to the smell after they got wet when the boat was sinking, before we rescued it and bought it). He cut new wood panels and we cut fresh carpet that I kept when we re-carpeted my house a couple of years ago.