Category Archives: Living Aboard

Clothes Make the Woman?

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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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We Live Here Now

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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.

Christmas Day window.

Tacoma’s Humpty Dumpty. Yeah, that blue sky was on Christmas Day.

Waiting for dad in Port Townsend.

Kingston lights.

Another cheerful window in Tacoma.

Foss Waterway

 

Comfort and Joy

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Lately I remember the playgrounds of my growing up. Every playground back ‘in the day’ had a teeter totter; one of those long boards with a seat on either end, sitting on a fulcrum. It was a lesson in the laws of physics to play on that thing. Heavier kids moved forward on the fulcrum to keep the fun going with smaller kids on the other end. Or they would lean way out, leaving their tiny counterparts suspended in mid-air until they decided to let them down. Slighter children would team up, seeing if they could cooperate in holding their larger, usually older, playmates up in the air. Occasionally a mean kid would jump off the bottom and the smaller kid would come crashing down. Oh, the tears. Oh, what fun.teeter-totter

The solitary game to play was to stand in the center with one foot on either side of the fulcrum and see if you could get the balance just right so the plank stayed straight across. The goal was to make it look effortless. If one side started to go and it happened fast, you’d get this out of control situation where all you could really do was to keep pumping legs up and down, using brute leg muscle force until you could manage to get the thing in balance again.

That’s a little what it’s feeling like lately around the Little Cunning Plan household. We have one foot planted tenuously in the ‘comfort’ of our long-time family home with all of the physical manifestations of the weavings of our history right here at our fingertips. The bay laurel by the kitchen window that I bought as a tiny sprig when Andrew was just a baby. It brings rich flavor to soups and stews. The fig tree I bought for my father when he was ill and moved twice until it got planted in its current spot. It sprawls there, unloading fragrant figs by the bushel in early summer. The sofa we bought when Claire was a baby; still the most comfortable seat in the house, our first lesson in buying something of quality. My mother’s French Provincial, solid maple buffet that I don’t ever want to give up. Our dog, Skippy, who can live the rest of his days in his own place here with Andrew.   And even the new cat, Boots, who has decided to sit on my lap as I write. There is so much ‘belonging’ here. So much of how I know how to be.

Boots. She likes to bite.

Boots. She likes to bite.

Comfort, used here,  is a word of stillness; a word of warmth and security and sameness. It’s a word that implies a lack of stress, a calm certainty of how to negotiate the chosen way of life. It’s comfortable to feel a connection to the past and to believe that this will also inform the future. Unfortunately, it can also feel a bit, well, boring. I suppose on some level there is nothing more ‘comforting’ than doing the same thing every day for the rest of your life until you get the comfort of a nice, deep grave. Um…no.  That thought certainly brings me right down to earth fast. No thanks. Maybe that mean kid who always jumps off the teeter totter has a purpose. If you play with him, you’ll be living on the edge.

Having never had a permanent home as a child, I have cherished my home as an adult and have put down deep roots in this house, if not this town. Frankly, I don’t really know how to leave a place and know that I will return some day, even if it’s to visit. In my experience, when you leave, that’s it. All leaving is completely permanent.  You never see the place or those people who lived there again. They cease to exist. One day you leave, the world shifts and now you live in a new one. The only thing that is permanent is your immediate family, and some of your belongings.

It’s unsettling to face this as a well-matured adult and know that I have absolutely no idea at all how to negotiate this new emotional terrain. It leaves me more than a little breathless and takes all my will to move this forward. A transition that feels like just another step on the plan to most people feels in some moments like stepping off into the cold void to me; like I’m waiting for the mean kid to leap off the teeter totter leaving me hanging momentarily in space before I come crashing down. Not always, but there are moments. To be honest, I can’t wait until this part is over. Enough already. I want to be in the new world we’re creating for ourselves so I can learn a different way and stop being afraid.  The patterns of childhood are a bitch, I tell you. You can argue with them all day long, but until you deliberately face the experience and record over it, they’re going to get you.

One foot tenuously planted in ‘comfort’, the other foot is planted in the ‘joy’ of moving forward with our plans to cruise, with the excitement of the unknown and the spirit of adventure. The freedom of living on a boat that can go anywhere brings with it a certain feeling of joy even though we are still here in Tacoma, at the dock, even though I get afraid of the void. Joy is a word of movement, of exploration and discovery and sheer happiness. Joy is a word of living out loud and with purpose; of creating new and different things that we cannot yet foresee. I feel excited to be moving forward even as I look with occasional longing at Fred, the huge philodendron I’ve had for decades. If I let it, there’s a certain tenor of excitement that thrums just under my skin, waiting to be let loose. I think that is Joy. It just might be.

Fred

Fred

Today is the longest night of the year. We’ve deliberately chosen this date to move aboard because today the sun is returning. It is the ‘birth of the sun’ we celebrate. With that there is new life percolating invisibly under the surface of the soil, just as the joy thrums just under my skin. The roots of plants are preparing for their burst of energy come spring. They will thrust even more deeply into their patch of earth and find their purpose therein.

The solstice represents spiritual re-birth, the rekindling of the divine fire within. It’s a hopeful time of new beginnings as the sun begins its ascent back into the nascent year. So we move aboard with hope and with purpose, feeling the joy that is present, letting go of the fear that holds us in the past, and knowing there is comfort to come. We will not come crashing to the ground, but land softly and deeply on the fertile soil of our stout S/V Galapagos, our new home. I think it will be like flying.

Merry Christmas to all of you, dear readers who have seen us on this journey so far. And a very rich and lustrous solstice to you. May your creative fires burn brightly.