Random thoughts on Christmas, politics, and onboard entertainment

I put the Christmas decorations away with a strange sense of excitement. I wrapped them carefully, used new tissue paper, made sure nothing will break. We will put up a different kind of tree next year. Something smaller and more tropic. Something in the Bahamas perhaps? Maybe lights on the bridge instead of lights on the mantle. Maybe stockings hung with care on the back rail?

We have 175 days left before departure. Every day has a new meaning because next year at this time we will be somewhere else. I had a business trip to Clearwater this week. I could see the Gulf outside my hotel window and knew that next year Kermit and I will view this spot from a different perspective. It will be OUR boat moving slowly on the water or anchored in Tampa Bay. I feel a strong sense of excitement and wonder.

Kermit and I have different political views. I think everyone knows that. I suggested a while ago that we should get our onboard entertainment online from a sevice like Netflix or something like it so we can still see tv shows (we like tv!) but avoid having the 2012 political battle beamed onto our boat. We want to beat the odds and not kill each other with our strong and very different political views.

Well, no such luck. A long visit to Verizon last week confirmed that we can't beam enough bandwidth onto the boat to make it happen. Or at least we can't afford to get enough bandwidth to make it happen if we also want to eat and put gas in the boat. That eliminates Slingbox for everyday use too since it operates through the Internet. So we are back to the drawing board.

It looks like we have three solutions left (not in any particular order): 1) some sort of dish, which means we get politics in the salon, which might be ok, 2) some sort of antennea, which means realistically we will only pick up limited local service when we are in port which might be a political problem, and 3) go to libraries periodically and load up on dvds on our ipods that we can beam up to the tv from the hdmi cable off our computers. I suspect we will end up with the third option. Not so bad really. That means we need to get the big iPod (we kind of knew we needed to do this) and explore libraries when we get to a town (not a bad idea anyway). I'll let you know what we decide.