Yesterday, Sunday, June 5, the year of our Lord 2022, we did not get a Sunday newspaper delivered. We should have known when the Lopez family failed to deliver the slim and damp, plastic-sleeved paper of little worth that we had now shifted timelines. As though our very lives hung at the end of a delivery man’s substantial wrist, carefully tossed from the open window of his dilapidated Dodge Caravan, yesterday was the day that things all started coming together. Perhaps, had we known, we could have been more prepared. Perhaps, had we known, we would have remembered to pack our underwear.
New, bigger settee and new table. We are loving this.
At one point, maybe a couple of months into the last, hectic year, Mike had paid for a 3 month subscription to the Sunday edition of The Olympian newspaper, our local rag. Die hard newspaper readers of old, we had some idea that we could recapture the days of our youth when, armed with mugs of coffee, we would take Sunday as a day of rest and savor each section of the Sunday paper over breakfast. We would refold each section neatly so that each of us could have the experience of cracking the pages open; sniffing the smell of fresh newsprint as it billowed forth. For the inexperienced youth among you, this is almost as delicious a rush as ripping the plastic film off a new album. Almost. Each week we would have a hopeful gleam in our eyes only to have the fire extinguished as we realized, once again, that we had already read all the ‘news’ the paper printed. And the beloved comic section that we used to look forward to each week had become sad. Honestly, it was just too hard to even read them. Some of them (I’m looking at you Doonsebury) have way to many small print words and they aren’t even funny anymore. Plus they STILL publish Family Circus. I mean…come on!
Worse than that, all the adverts in the paper are for elderly people. I have to tell you, I may be getting towards ‘elderly’ but even when my joints didn’t need grease I didn’t laugh at Family Circus. Pickles… maybe. But definitely not Family Circus.
Having learned our lesson, Mike called and cancelled the subscription after it ran out. But the papers kept coming. We never got a bill but the newspapers would appear at front edge of our sidewalk every Sunday, just as though the 1980’s were still current. Mike called the office of The Olympian to be sure they had actually cancelled us and they had. Still, Family Lopez kept delivering. On occasion we’d get a hand written note (!) about making sure that any tips went to them directly because if we added those to our bill, they’d never see a penny. That’s probably true, we thought, so we would make sure to tip in the conveniently enclosed tip envelope. We tipped consistently, but we never paid another bill. Hmmm.
Every week the paper showed up. Until yesterday. No paper was delivered yesterday.
And yesterday was the day we moved back aboard Galapagos. Coincidence? We’ll let you decide.
Things have been in quite the chaotic transition for us lately. (And looking back over the blog, can you actually say that our lives are ever calm? Maybe we’ll work on that.) Last time I posted we were talking about our house on Edison Street and we were thick into the renovations and remodeling necessary to take a 1926 house that had been a rental for literally decades and turn it into a home, and also a different kind of rental. We love that little house and had planned to rent it furnished to travel nurses and their ilk. It was a good plan until our daughter needed a place to move in Olympia. (Olympia, WA: land of zero availability for rental housing, and negative zero for affordable rental housing. Come to think of it, negative zero for affordable housing of ANY kind.)
The timing of that need had us changing our plans for the foreseeable future. It made sense for her to move into our place, leave it furnished, and make it easy on all of us. No worries about property management, no worries about tenants. Long time readers may recall when we moved out of Lucerne House in Lakewood and onto the boat. Our son and his friends took that house off our hands for that trip. Now it’s Claire’s turn. So she is moving in, and we are moving out. And while this transition will last a bit longer, yesterday was our first real day living on board. Last night we slept in our cozy bunks and this morning I remembered why we generally leave a low heat going in the aft cabin when at the dock in Washington State.
In Hawaii, I happened upon our daughter’s name spelled in lava rock. Literally huge expanses of lava, and I am walking across them, far from the road, and then this emerges in my phone camera viewfinder. I had no words. I swear on every religious and non-religious text ever printed or thought of that I did not put those letters there and I am not making this up.
In our family we have a saying that when things begin to fall into place in that strange kind of way that the Universe has about it, we have “switched timelines”; jumped off the track we’re on and onto another track into the future. It’s just our way of giving a nod to the mysterious way events seem to line up when the decision has been made, consciously or not, to embrace a big change. So yesterday, we did not get our paper delivered as we have done for a year now. I hope the Lopez family is OK.
Undaunted by the lack of news in our Sunday lives, we packed the car with more of our daily belongings; computers, medicines, skincare, haircare, some work clothes…just a bunch of stuff we would organize and stow aboard, and set off to the marina. Pulling a packed cart to the gate, we met Jason, our rigger, coming up the walkway.
‘Hey, Jason! Good to see you again! Yes, we are moving aboard today. We need to get on your schedule to get this mast pulled. What does it look like?”
Jason is taking reservations for August. We will get on his schedule and that’s perfect timing for us. We cannot really get to all that before August. We are firmly on the timeline now. (If you are wondering, no there will not be a cruise for us this summer and I am not one bit bitter about that. Not at all. I am not spitting in rage or having regular melt downs of despair or anything. We have some other travel plans in the works and we have a very long and detailed list of boat projects that need doing. It’s not time to have fun yet. If there is a generous God anywhere, please that she will allow us all to live healthily for a few more years so we can get the hell out of here for a bit.)
Hey, we are divers now. Here we are having fun with gentle giants in Hawaii. Incredible!
Hours of unpacking, organizing, cleaning and stowing later, we have dinner and watch some Netflix. Mike has his laptop open and is trying to fix our blog, which has been broken for months. Maybe even a year. I don’t know. I gave up hope. A couple of long time readers contacted us to find out if we were ok because we had not posted in over a year. Yikes! Yeah, we were OK. But the blog remained broken.
We considered starting a new one. That plan felt wrong as we’ve had our blog for over ten years and there is a lot of content there. Mike had tried everything he could find to fix it and yet he could not. He’d do research, get an idea, go for it with hope and dedication, and then come away frustrated. He talked to people in India to no avail. When Mike cannot fix something, it’s broken badly. I tried not to think about starting over.
But yesterday was the day the timeline shifted. Suddenly Mike threw his hands in the air and shouted, “TODAY IS THE DAY EVERYTHING IS HAPPENING!”. And just like that, the blog was fixed. As though he had chanted some kind of magic that unbound the spell, everything started working. (OK, fine. He found some kind of setting buried deeply under layers of other settings that had got yacked up and when he fixed that, a cascade of other fixes happened. You call it computers. I call it magic.)
He has literally been working on fixing this thing for months. It’s been in the foreground of his enormous brain. But somehow today, our first full day and night aboard, it came together and here we are again. So let the writing begin!
PS: I’m still remembering how to do photos, size them, put them in the right place, etc. These photos are terrible. (Lee, I’m doing my best here.) I’m also not happy with the formatting for this post in the preview, but, if I spend time figuring that out I’ll probably yack something up so I’m just going to push this out and be done. But We ARE BACK!
S/V Galapagos, standing by.
