dec - what happened?

some of you may know this story already - others will be as shocked as i was. i got home on the evening of the 18th of december. i had come in from hawaii (where i'd spent the last 10 days) so time-wise, i was up and looking to get right on top of some of the things i knew i needed to do. only having 10 days before i'd be leaving again, i had to: get up early and get down to the brazilian consulate to turn in my visa application, get my mail, go through it, take care of bills, clean the boat - topside and bottom, see friends and family. and be packed and ready to go on the 28th. i therefore wanted to get anything done that night so i could get up and get going. my car was on blocks in the structure so i wanted to get it off and make sure it was running fine. i walked up into the structure and to the level where i had thought i'd left it and it wasn't there, so i continued up so the next level, not there either. continued on with no luck so i wandered through the structure thinking i may have been mistaken about where i'd left it. after traversing the entire structure i wandered back to the boat perplexed. i got to my phone and called the management, knowing i'd be transfered to the call service. they put me in-touch with the person who was on call. he was unaware of any vehicles having been towed, but did inform me that the sheriffs dept would have a record of any towed vehicle. so i called the sheriffs dept and they had no record of the car being towed. they sent a deputy out to take a report. this took until about 2 a.m. i was up until 5 doing some other things.

once i woke up i called the management office again and they informed me that they had towed my car. someone form the management company saw the blocks and freaked out. rather than people doing a little research they towed the car on oct 10th. i should have informed them, but it had never been a problem in the past. they suddenly decided to start enforcing a rule that had never been strictly enforced. well this made for a rather spendy return (80 days impounded), and blew an entire day to recovering the car and clearing the police record on the car.

aside from that little set back the remainder of week went pretty smoothly; i managed to see those who were in town and available. cleaned the boat topside twice and the bottom once, the birds were having a hay day. i got everything together for the trip (some things like a place to stay actually came together the day before i left) i was able to visit with family also, and even rested some.