Tag Archives: Downshifting

It’s Our Anniversary!

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It’s the one year anniversary of our blog! Since our first blog post last October, we’ve posted 90 times, had almost 250,500 views, and increased our traffic to an average of 3000 hits per month. That might not sound like much to people who’ve lived in the blogsphere longer, but to us it represents what can happen if you just keep plugging away. In spite of the fact that I do most of the posting, Mike holds the record for the number of hits on a post in a single day. His post with the photos of Orcas in Commencement Bay got 646 hits. I have yet to forgive him for that (both the record number AND the fact that he was alone on the boat when those Orcas surfaced right by him).

This is still the goal.

As anniversaries are times of reflection, I thought I would do a sort of interview about our progress in the last year.

Question:  How happy are you overall with your blogging experience so far?  What is the easiest thing about blogging? What is the hardest thing? 

Melissa: Well, overall I am surprised at how much I like it and how many ideas I can come up with to write about. I think that’s the easiest thing; coming up with topics. Since not all of them are any good, choosing what to write about can be challenging.  I never thought of myself as a writer, so it’s a whole new world.

The hardest things are keeping the length of the posts down to a mild roar, and also sometimes keeping a light and upbeat tone. I can have some dark days in this process, but no one is going to want to read about that.

Mike: I’m at a 6 out of 10 in terms of happiness. The hardest thing is keeping up with the patches and fixing the bugs. The easiest is writing posts, but I haven’t written that many.

Question: What is the most enjoyable part of blogging?

Melissa: It’s the feedback from readers and making friends with other bloggers, hands down. I know we have a lot more readers than we do commentors. I wish more people would post comments because without them it’s like putting a part of yourself out into a black hole in the universe, never to know where it lands. It sort of like that philosophical question: It a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear it, does it make a sound? I think the answer to that question is, ‘Who cares?’. Same think with writing a blog. If no one reads it or comments on it, then who cares?  I also like the way blogging makes me organize my thoughts. That’s a benefit I would not have predicted.

Mike responds:  Getting nice comments from readers.

Question: What have you not liked about blogging?

Melisssa: Sometimes I can have a pretty twisted sense of humor. When I’m writing, I have a certain tone in my head that sometimes does not get translated well onto the page.  I always assume that people will know when I’m being humorous, but sometimes they don’t. I guess that’s part of the learning process for me. Believe it or not, my sense of humor is nothing compared to my kids’.

Mike: Trouble shooting the site.

Question: Reflect, if you will, on how satisfied you are about your progress in reaching the goal of voyaging. What feels solid to you? What frustrates you?

I’ve given away all of my yearbooks. I don’t miss them one bit since I photographed all the pages that had anything relevant to me. Here I am as a senior in high school, doing actual school work before the invention of the personal computer. Dinosaur days, to be sure.

Melissa: That is a complicated question. This year we have done a good job of paring down our possessions and simplifying how we live in our home and we are still in the process of doing this. We’ve been married for 30 years and raised two kids, so we have a lot of stuff. We’re pretty much normal Americans that way. So there is still much to do.

On the other hand, we will still be living in this house for a few more years and I’m finding myself unwilling to give up everything as though I’m going to live on a boat, when the ‘living on a boat’ part isn’t in sight. I don’t want to live in a house with no furniture or give up all my craft things before I have to. And we got rid of our truck too fast. With the property we own, we need a truck. So now we are going to have to buy another one. That pretty much sucks, if you ask me.

Mike: We are making progress but I am looking out five years and that still feels far away. It would be nice to have the right boat that we could start making ready for our cruising life so that we could be working on and putting money into that boat. Of course, if we decide to cruise on Moonrise, then the money is going to the right place already.  I think our experience and confidence for blue water voyaging is actually pretty good and while finances will always be a little vague, I know that we will be able to make this adventure happen.

Frustration comes from not having certainty about having the right boat and the need to continue working a few more years.

Question: What decisions remain to be made in putting your cunning plan into place? Why have you put these decisions off?

Melissa: The thorn in my side is setting the date for casting off. We know from more experienced people how important it is to set a date and just go, but so far we have been unable to agree on a date. The problem is that Mike wants to go when he retires, which is in 5 years. I will retire from my practice when Andrew graduates from college, but Mike’s is the ‘big’ retirement. Five years feels like an eternity to me, especially when I think about all of the life events that could easily happen in that amount of time that would inevitably delay our departure: things like family illnesses, grandchildren (however unlikely), or our own health (even though we are both quite healthy now). I feel a bit like a woman who has waited too long to have a baby and is now too old to easily conceive: every month that passes is another month I will never get back.

This time last year I was having fun looking at boats, anticipating selling Moonrise. Now it’s possible we’ll keep her. We aren’t sure anymore.

Believe it or not, I also worry that I will lose interest. It seems impossible now, but there are lots of things I’ve been really into for several years, only to be done with them at a certain point. I remember meeting some people at a local cruising club raft up who just sail around this area because they have lost interest in going  further. They said they don’t want to be hot, or be cold, or be challenged anymore. They just want to relax and have fun. They were in their 60’s. The tone in their comments and glances at each other was that they didn’t think Mike and I would ever go if we waited that long.
That tone fell on the fertile ground of my own fears.  People grow and change throughout their adult lives and interests grow and change along with that. What I do know is if I die before I do something this cool, I am going to be one really pissed off ghost roaming the seas.  I soothe these fears by planning to be reincarnated as a child of a wealthy family who sails around the world as a lifestyle. Maybe the Bumfuzzle children will grow up to be  sailing vagabonds and one of them can be my new parent. They seem to come from good genetic stock, and the Bumfuzzles would probably be fabulous grand parents.  Hey, whatever it takes to get me through the night. Probably the more we get out there and sail together, and I mean sail away from Commencement Bay, which is getting to be a little boring at this point, the more I will remain interested.

 

It’s hard to take care of this yard when we’re on the boat. But it’s harder to walk away from this property when values are so low.

The other decision we haven’t yet made is what to do with our house. Aside from being our family home, it’s the only property investment we have. Mike thinks we should sell it; I’m not so sure. Much will depend on property values when the time comes, I suppose. We are in a great area for rentals and we have a friend who manages rentals to military families. If we could turn the management over to him, we would have someone we trust to keep watch over this property, and maybe we could eventually derive an income from it. I hate to give that up. And yet the possibility of being able to leave with no financial liabilities is very seductive, and it is doubtful that we will come back to live in Lakewood. We can’t really make that decision until we see what the market is going to be like in a few years.

Mike: We will need to know which boat we are going to voyage in within the next two or three years. If we can make Moonrise bluewater-ready, then we will be in pretty good shape. If we decide that another  boat is needed, then we have to adjust our finances to pay it off and get it ready.  Then there is the house. Do we sell or rent? Income during our retirement has to be considered. Which pot do we draw from while we are cruising and still relatively young? These decisions are put off because I have more questions than answers. As usual.

Question: So what’s the next step for you?

Melissa: The next step is to continue honing down our belongings a bit at a time, keeping the goal of voyaging in mind as we do so and simplifying our lives the best we can while still living comfortably in our home. We’ve taken Moonrise off the market for awhile, although we’d sell her to the right buyer. Meanwhile, Mike has been doing a lot of projects on the boat and his skill level with wood working is really improving.

Mike: The next step is to find out if we can make Moonrise the boat we will take. If it is, then I can continue to work on improving her and preparing for the major upgrades (Sails, Windvane, Rigging, Tankage etc) .

 

Last Christmas I cut down on the crazy gift giving. We didn’t miss it. This year I plan to cut back even more. If I put it in writing, I have to do it.

 

The Doldrums of Winter

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When the power is out, there is time to do things like build a Snow Queen.

My usual routine of posting something every few days has been decidedly interrupted by a winter storm that I have determined must be called ‘the doldrums of winter’.  After posting how lovely the place looked with all the snow, I thoughtlessly wished it would stay around for awhile. Never did I realize how my powers of manifestation would be abused!  We entered into a storm cycle that left us literally withOUT power for 4 days, with a large hole in our kitchen window, and a yard that looks like a cyclone thundered through. And the snow did, indeed, linger through all of this.

It is this time without electricity, during the darkness and cold of winter, that I am referring to as the ‘doldrums’. Sailors will recognize that term as referring to the areas of low pressure around the equator that are famous for having little to no wind. Sailboats can sit for days, or even weeks, until the wind, their source of power, returns. I’m imagining some sailors have been driven insane by this waiting.

I’m reading Miles Hordern’s book Sailing the Pacific, his story of sailing from New Zealand to Chile and back by himself. In his book, he describes his experience of the doldrums thus:

” There was nothing to do. Or perhaps, I could do nothing. I turned on the radio, but its talk was of a world I no longer knew. A book was hopeless: I could seldom read a sentence before my concentration dissolved. …Again and again I found myself climbing to the deck….Each time I hoped that finally there might be something there…..But each time there was nothing.”

I believe this aptly describes Mike’s behavior during this brief time of living without electricity and internet service while the storm raged on. The word ‘raged’ here means the sound of exploding limbs, falling trees, and continued snow. Mike was actively involved in ‘waiting’, which everyone knows is a verb of action. He waited at the window, watching. He waited outside, until I got just a little upset at him for wandering around underneath the deadly trees and called to him in a rather loud voice to come inside. He talked on the cell phone to our neighbors to coordinate experiences and wonder out loud when the power would be restored, when another limb might hit the house, whether a tree would fall. Would our little enclave of a few houses warrant the attention of the power company? Did they KNOW we were powerless? How long would we have to wait? Days? Weeks? The stillness that was usually my husband was nowhere to be found. Perhaps men are like this when their homes are threatened.

The remains of the birch tree.

I, on the other hand, was the essence of feminine patience. I sat placidly by the window, doing crafts by lamplight, occasionally getting up to stoke the fire. It was as though I was gestating in some way, although what I would be giving birth to is beyond me at this point. I hope I am creating here a dramatic enough picture. The exploding trees interested me in a sad kind of way, but I felt deeply the fact that I had absolutely no power to do anything about the storm. It would do its devilry to our trees and property, and then we would clean up later. My birch tree was snapped in two pieces. I barely batted an eyelash. My smoke trees were smashed to smithereens by huge branches. I will recover.  We were warm, dry, fed, and together. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs had never been better met. It’s true that should a tree land on our house, we could be injured, but worrying about it would not change that. Why this logic generally escapes me when it comes, say, to my children, is beyond me. Still, I sat smugly enjoying the slowness of life.

A hummingbird on my frozen rhododendron. We kept our feeders full during the storm.

In fact, when the electricity came back on yesterday, I was a bit disconcerted at first. And then I felt a little mournful. It’s not that I don’t like having the convenience because, after all, I am not crazy. But I do love those times when life is pretty simple and small. Having a power outage makes life very small and contained, and only the basic things are important. Now that the power is back, we live large again. In some ways, this is unfortunate.

Somewhere underneath these branches are my beautiful mature smoke trees, sacrificed to the god of winter.

 

What’s Your Favorite Color?

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Money Money Money!

Mine is green, the color of sweet, sweet moola. When Mike and I got serious about the cunningness of our little plan, we looked at all the ‘stuff’ we were going to be tossing out and realized just how much money we actually throw away on things we have barely used, not to mention all the crap we bought our kids that THEY hardly used. So up went the Craigslist ads and back onto Ebay I went. We opened a savings account and dedicated all of our funds from the sale of our junk to that account. We don’t even buy a latte with that money.

Thanks to our dogged determination to list things until they sell, and the magic of the interweb, our account is growing. Today we sold a sewing machine and an old ship’s porthole that’s just been sitting around in my yard. We’re getting quite a nice little nest egg started in that account. If I had to spend that money on a boat thing I could buy a sail, or a set of new cushions, or new running rigging, or half of a new autopilot, or radar, or 2/3 of a head sail furler…  Suffice to say that I am easily pleased by any progress we make at this point.

To date, here is what I deeply regret having tossed out: Nothing.

Here is what I marginally regret having tossed out: Nothing.

I believe I am ready for the Great Purge, Part 2. Anyone need an old dresser to refinish? I’m your girl. $125.00. Burled maple. Beveled mirror. Cash only. You pick up in my Lakewood location.

Really great old chest of drawers needs new home. Maybe yours? Because I know you need a project.