Category Archives: Preparing to cruise

(Just Like) Starting Over

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Long time readers will know that sometimes the efforts to bring our cunning plans to fruition can be hard.  It isn’t always Mexican beer and Scrabble games aboard Galapagos.  Especially as our departure date grows ever closer, actions that we once just talked about, we now must do.

This past week I celebrated my twenty year work anniversary at Boeing.  Two days later I told my manager that I would retire at the end of April.

That’s a real diamond folks. A real tiny diamond.

I have been thinking about this day for a long time, maybe three years, and still I was not prepared emotionally to hear those words come out of my mouth.  In fact, I struggled to get the words out and had to excuse myself to go for a little walk. I was overwhelmed and surprised by the intense emotions after having worried about this day for so long. After I got a grip on myself, I returned and we had a longer chat to explain my future plans.  My manager was very kind; disappointed I would be leaving but excited for the cunning plan we have laid out.  I was relieved that she took it so well. It’s hard to tell people you like that you are leaving. There’s always that niggling doubt that you are going to be letting them down in some way. I am grateful that she was so supportive.

Like most people my age, I feel as though I have been working for my entire life. I spent twenty years at Boeing, and the twenty before that working or serving in the military. To say, ‘I no longer have a job.’  really does feel like starting over: Exciting and a little terrifying all at once. If you do the math, you’ll see I’ve been working since I was 16 years old. Practically an entire lifetime.

Melissa and I have been the doing all the responsible grown up things for 35 years now and the plans we have set before ourselves are simply not a part of the typical American narrative. But who said we have to be typical? Where is that written? Youth, it is said, is wasted on the young, but I don’t buy it. Melissa and I have not wasted our youth. We have used it to build a beautiful life for ourselves and our children. And now we get to start over with a new kind of life.  It is a bold move but there is magic in boldness.

When we were young, hip and didn’t know what the hell we were doing. Evanston, Wyoming, 1981.

So we tamp down our fears about what we are giving up and grow excited about what we are taking on.  Living aboard these last few weeks has been lovely, despite the cold weather.  It reminds me our first apartment together in Biloxi, Mississippi. We were newlyweds. I was in tech school for the Air Force. Our apartment was only a little bigger than Galapagos.  It was a time for us to practice being adults and figuring out who we were as a couple.  I think we did okay.

In our first apartment together in Biloxi Mississippi in 1982. Melissa taught me how to sew and I made the Hawaiian shirt I am wearing.

 

The title of today’s post is from a song written by John Lennon.  I  must have a little DJ living in my head that queues up just the right song to capture how I feel.  One day I am sitting at my desk perseverating on the enormity of how our lives are changing and the next thing you know, Lennon is goofing on Elvis while Yoko makes animal noises in the background.  It was a pretty good song from 1980 and the hook just spoke to me. Be warned: this blog is family friendly, but John and Yoko, well, you’ll remember that they were not shy. You might want to close your eyes toward the end of the video.

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Best of 2016

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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.

 

 

 

 

 

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.