Clothes Make the Woman?

Posted on January 5, 2017 by Melissa

My first dream of the New Year is a textbook study in letting go of the old self and trying to find the new one. I won’t give you all the gory details, but it involved having no clothes on, bleeding profusely out of my ‘whatever’ after having something surgically removed from my body, and frantically trying to find a place called ‘ Fusion Target’ to buy some clothes so I wouldn’t show up at my post-surgical doctor’s appointment completely naked. Oh, wait, I was wearing a Target bag. But it wasn’t covering much. In these kinds of dreams everything goes wrong and there is a great deal of frustration. In my dream I was also trying to get around on some kind of small sled-like thing that reminds me very much of the cafeteria trays we used to go sledding on in college. Oh, how Carl Jung would have loved to get hold of all those archetypes! Fabulous. I could hardly wait to wake up.

Stunning vases at the museum of glass in Tacoma, right down the street.

This dream came after a pretty wonderful day of ‘fusion’ living that went better than expected. (See what I did there?) We’ve moved out of our house, but we had been helping the kids get settled and prepare for a New Year’s Eve party at their new digs. We have been marveling at the creative way they have used the space. The garage is now an extra living space, complete with a sofa that won’t fit in the house, lights, a table for ping pong (Ok, beer pong. Have it your way.), and a heater. It’s actually pretty awesome. We stopped by in the middle of the day to give our dog some love and say ‘Happy New Year, Enjoy Your Party’. Then we went back to the marina because we had our own plans for celebrating.

Now that we live within walking distance of downtown Tacoma, we’re committed to getting out and about and enjoying what this little city has to offer. It’s part of our ‘live like a cruiser’ identity shift. In this case, in spite of my dream of no clothes, the clothing needs are simple: it’s bloody cold so layers of wool and down are the best options. I’ll remember that in my next ‘identity loss’ dream. Being naked in dreams is right up there with being chased by invisible monsters when it comes to dream discomfort. I’d say, ‘no, thanks’ to all that, but we all have to be reborn sometime. And that generally requires a change of clothing.

Blue footed boobies! Like they have on the Galapagos Islands! Like we have on our boat logo!

Every year Tacoma puts on a big New Year’s celebration called ‘First Night‘. It’s ‘family friendly’, meaning all the acts are appropriate for children and middle aged people who just want to be entertained. There is music, performance art, fire juggling, food, the world’s longest game of musical chairs ‘in Tacoma’, and demonstrations of one kind and another. The Museum of Glass is open for free during the day.

In all the years we’ve lived here, we’ve never attended because things like having to drive in and find parking and be in enormous crowds of people seem to get in our way. We gave up big events in Seattle years ago because the irritation/fun quotient became way out of whack. I mean, we still go to the Boat Show in Seattle, but that’s almost mandatory. I’m not saying we actually enjoy it. Living in the marina, all these good things are within walking distance, even in the cold of winter. We’re practicing being cruisers and saying ‘yes’ to new experiences. So we went. And it was fabulous.

This octopus, from the In the Deep exhibit.

If you haven’t visited Tacoma’s Museum of Glass, you don’t know what you are missing. Right now there is an exhibit called ‘Into the Deep’ where artists have created sea creatures from glass. But the star of this museum is the hot shop, especially when it’s snowing outside. The museum staff artists spend all day every day making beautiful glass art and supporting the work of visiting glass artists from around the world. Watching the artists at work is mesmerizing fun.

After dinner on the boat, we walked up to the theater district in Tacoma to enjoy the festivities. Tacoma has kind of a gritty, dystopian steam-punky vibe that is great fun. The energy of the crowd of about 20,000 people was just right. There were enough people to make the whole thing feel festive, but not so many that it was terrifying/irritating. We strolled from venue to venue, taking in music and art, deciding not to stand in line for over an hour for a donut from the Lakewood House of Donuts, wondering why the protestor for Jesus was advertising hate and fear rather than love, and generally mingling with the natives and having a grand time.

2016 Effigy Basket. Insert hopes and dreams for 2017 here.

This year, for the first time in many, we stayed up to kick the previous year to the curb with relief and welcome in the new baby year. Tacoma artists had built an effigy of 2016 in the form of a basket made of strong paper and sticks. We added our hopes and dreams for 2017 to the basket; written on small cards and placed carefully inside with hundreds of others. In the Chinese Zodiac, 2017 is the year of the Rooster. I’ll let you make what you will of that. But roosters…strutting, crowing, fighting, puffing themselves up to look large…go ahead and run with it. We’re going to Mexico.

During the countdown to midnight, the basket was set fire and all those hundreds of hopes and dreams for the future soared into the night sky straight into the arms of the gods. May they be listening. May they be pleased with us.

Can you guess what we wrote on our cards? I’ll bet you can. And I’ll bet you can also imagine what kinds of clothes I might find in my future dream when this new identity is solidified. Clue: there will be fewer layers.

I’ll leave you with some of my favorite YouTube videos from Tacoma’s First Night 2016. I’m a little partial to the Seattle Rock Orchestra.

And come visit the museum during this cold winter. You can get warmed up in the hot shop, then come by and say hello to us on Galapagos. We’d love to meet you.

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Best of 2016

Posted on December 31, 2016 by Melissa

It’s that time again: time to usher in another Baby New Year with his sagging diapers. Just when I was getting used to writing 2016, along comes usurper 2017. This is the year we plan to leave the dock. If all goes well, (knock on all the wood in sight), we will be cutting our lines sometime in June of this year after a long haulout in Olympia. We’re kind of flexible about the date, but not overly so. You’ll notice we’ve never posted an actual date of departure, in spite of the common wisdom that says ‘if you don’t choose a date you’ll never leave’. We think posting a date is tantamount to throwing a gauntlet of challenge down in front of the gods. No, thanks. We’ll know when the time is right, and you don’t need to worry that we’re the kind that has to have everything perfect. Nothing has ever been perfect in our house or on our boat and that has never stopped us. Safe, yes. Perfect, no.

By way of reflecting on this year, I’ve gone through all the blog posts to see what we’ve accomplished. Here are the highlights from 2016 I like the most and think are worthy of a second look. It was hard to choose because I tell you what: if we didn’t have a blog, I wouldn’t remember 10% of what happened this year. A lot happened.

And another thing: the blog is over 5 years old now and has 351 posts. No one, including me, is ever going to read all of those. Also, if they follow the trajectory of our path to here from there, they will know we are sailors by the way we tack back and forth until we get a good tailwind to push us forward. We’ve accomplished a lot, but we’ve been all over the map sometimes doing it. Life. So it goes.

The Best of 2016

This post gives you my top secret recipe for sugar-free Chai Tea. It’s still a winner and I brought Mike a huge container of it for the boat. Great Cuisine of India is still one of our favorite places to eat. We had dinner there last night after a day of helping the kids move things around back at the ranch (house).

Warm and delicious.

By February I was already well into almost panicking about the house, the plan, the life, the everything. Why? Is it because I don’t want to go sailing? No. Is it because I can’t live on our boat? No. It’s because I have an anxious brain that gets into trouble if I don’t give it something to do. And I had a lot of downtime. Still, I remember that time as one of sometimes stillness and a gentle appreciation of my home and garden. I did spend the last year just loving on our home. Now Andrew and friends are living in the home and keeping Skippy well and happy. Things sometimes work out. I’m glad I have this post for many reasons, not the least of which is the photographs of the hellebores. When they bloom this year, I’ll go over and teach the new generation how to look for them and care for them.

In April I participated in the A to Z Challenge and wrote a post every day. It was pretty brutal but I’m glad I did it. My chosen topic, Anxiety and Sailing, was well received. It’s amazing how many people have to deal with anxiety in this world. If you aren’t sure about the difference between general worry and anxiety, then you can start reading about it here. Better get settled because there are thirty posts about this topic. I made this fun ‘fear-o-meter’ to help teach people about how anxiety builds up to sheer panic. Now what do I do with it? I’ve threatened to take it with us so I can use it to ‘splain to Mike where my brain is at then he tries to anchor too close to rocks.

Our Rumpus Room was one of the projects we completed in anticipation of moving aboard. It’s turned out to be a cozy and comfortable space to watch movies, just the way we planned it. We’ve also been happy with how our fun and functional cockpit mat has continued to make our cockpit cheerful and easy on the feet. This was the year we finally got an Aft Cabin makeover. We sleep like babies in there.I

After living in fear that someone would visit our boat and literally turn their noses up, in September we finally solved the Case of the Mysterious Smell and also discovered we have a ghost aboard the boat. The ghost was not, actually a surprise. The mysterious smellI was a difficult case that turned out to have multiple solutions, the final one an easy but obscure one. Yeah, it’s all easy once you know the answer. And so far, we’ve been smell-free. We’ll see if things stay smelling sweet when the weather warms up.

All the fun of home!

Also in the ‘smell’ department, this was the year I took matters into my own hands and used Science to determine which holding tank treatment was going to work best for our toilet paper of choice. The winner was Zaal NoFlex Digestor. Challenged by some of our readers, I went further and upped my game, using our dogs as donors for the test ‘materials’. It was an interesting project and we are please to report continued good results using the Zaal product. We aim to be informative here. Watch out, Practical Sailor Magazine. We’re coming for you.

We hardly left the dock this year due to boat projects. I guess that’s pretty normal when people still are working for a living and are getting a boat ready to go cruising. The worst part of that was not having a long cruise this summer. Mike is saving his vacation time. We both were sad as the summer wore on and no cruise was in sight. To help, we did take a fun trip down to Jarrell Cove to see our friends. We also joined a race boat crew so we could get out on the water every week. That was a great decision. We made good friends and reminded ourselves why we like sailing. We would be glad to join the crew next season except WE WON”T BE HERE!

On a mooring ball for the first time.

It’s been an odd, emotional year and I’m glad it’s over. It’s nice to finally have made the move aboard so we can get settled and get used to calling this ‘home’. Even though it’s a big adjustment and there are moments when I just grieve to be back in my house, on the whole, things are going well. We have a lot to be grateful for in spite of the growing pains of adjustment to this new lifestyle. Now that the New Year is upon us, Mike will go back to work for a few more months and I will create a routine that includes getting back on track with my ‘lifestyle choices’. Ahem. And I will schedule time each week to go see our Skippy dog and give him lots of pats and love.

We have a considerable galley re-model on the horizon, so stay tuned.

Here’s to a fresh year! Happy New Year to you, wherever you may be.

We Live Here Now

Posted on December 30, 2016 by Melissa

So, how’s it going aboard Galapagos now that we have lived aboard for 9 days? Yes, 9 full days and it seems like so much more. Does time slow down on a boat? Because at the house the weeks fly by so fast we can’t see them with the naked eye. But on board, it feels like a bit of a time warp. Was Christmas just last week? Hmm. Let’s reflect on our first week aboard.

We had a long walk on sunny and bright Christmas Day this year.

The move went off with barely a whimper since we were pretty much physically prepared. We didn’t have much mess for long, things got stowed quickly and we are beginning to form new habits of living. I would say overall it’s been pretty smooth. I’ve only had two crying jags so far. That’s pretty good I think. We’re warm, dry, the water is hot, the beds are comfortable, and thank goodness we already know the boat. All of that goes a long way to making the transition easier. Frankly, I do not know how people just dump everything and move aboard in one fell swoop. I guess that’s just not my style. I sure miss our dog, Skippy. Today we are going home to do laundry and get some Skippy love. Weird.

We’ve gone on long walks, had an overnight trip to Port Townsend to stay in The Old Consulate Inn and pet all the Port Townsend dogs (there are a lot of dogs there), drove to Kingston to see all the fairy lights by the marina, and generally whiled away the time between holidays. Here’s the week, in photos.