December was both a great month and a bad month. We did a lot on the boat, but then again, we also managed to get the 'Porlamar crud' as well!
We started the month by, while checking our batteries, discovering that several of our battery cables have knicks and a huge amount of corrosion in them. So, we decided to rewire our battery compartment. This took us several days of hard work. Then, out of the blew we both got pretty sick.
Well, that obliterated the first two weeks of December completely. After that, we were gearing up for Christmas and New Years.
On December 21, we went to Gordon's Christmas party. It was a fun time. We met several locals and ex-pats there, and really thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. While we were there, Gordon invited us for Christmas dinner as well. We graciously accepted, but warned him that we were already attending Jak's Christmas potluck as well, so we would probably not be very hungry! But, we figured that Jak's would be at 3:00 PM and Gordon was serving dinner at 9:00 PM it would be ok.
On December 24, we cooked 20 pounds of mashed potatoes for the potluck. You should have seen it, we had every large pot on th boat in use for this endeavour! We arrived at Jak's promptly at 3:00, only to find out that the turkeys would not be done for another hour or more! Uh oh. So much for the best layed plans of mice and men!
Dinner was finally served at 5:30 PM. Everyone was starving including us! This really didn't bode well for Gordon's later on. However, being the troopers we are, we carried on, and had a respectable dinner at Jak's.
Finally, it was time to head over to Gordon's at 7:30 PM, so we hopped a cab and headed over there.
We sat around and talked for a bit while we were waiting for Gordon's other guest to arrive. Elizabeth is a beautiful woman who owns a french restaurant here on Margarita. Her husband is the chef there. About 10:00 PM, We finally gave up waiting on her and had dinner.
As it turns out, her car had been stolen that afternoon by one of her employees! She spent most of the evening at the police station filling out her 72 forms in triplicate to report the car stolen.
We found out a few days later that she did get her car back; however, the Christmas presents she had in the car were gone for good.
For New Years, we celebrated with a quiet party including Jacobyte, and Galadriel who was finally off the hard and anchored in Porlamar. Blind Date was unable to make it because they were a bit under the weather. We wanted to celebrate New Years GMT which meant that we only had to stay up until 8:00 PM AST! We celebrated GMT, then Venezualen, then East Coast, Central and Mountain time zones; however, we couldn't quite make it to Pacific. So much for an early night!