Tag Archives: Middle age

Life’s Little Challenges: A Personal Tale

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We’ve been writing this blog now for over 4 years and it’s been a lot of fun for me to record this life transition. Looking back at our earlier posts I am sometimes stunned at all the progress we’ve made in these years and at how much the blog has helped keep us on track.  What started out on October 8, 2011 as a way for me to keep a kind of on-line diary turns out to be something I actually like doing. Except, at times,  for the coming up with ideas part.

Love this photo of Galapagos out on Commencement Bay last April. Photo taken by the good people of S/V Elsa.

Love this photo of Galapagos out on Commencement Bay last April. Photo taken by the good people of S/V Elsa.

Especially when there is nothing cool going on down at Galapagos, I can hit considerable dry spells where life just doesn’t seem interesting enough to write about. If you write, you know what I mean. Real life is just filled with all kinds of what I call ‘beige’; things that are really the neutral backbone of living and bring everything together, and yet they don’t actually get noticed. Most of life is lived in the ‘beige’, and yet we write mostly about the ‘red’ moments, the moments that make everything else go ‘pop!’. (Photos from our cruise last year because how else would I illustrated this post? These are photos of the ‘beige’ parts of cruising.No drama. Just living.)

How we dry our socks aboard Galapagos. Yes, we are careful.

To keep the writing mojo going you kind of have to get ‘creative’ and you need to have a serious supply of ‘butt glue’, a term first revealed to us by a successful published author, years ago. She said this was her secret. You have to glue your butt in the chair, put your fingers on the keys, and compel them to move.  I remember that term every time I sit down in front of the computer and wait for inspiration to hit. It’s a little bit of what I’ve termed ‘Nike Therapy’. You “Just Do It”.

Lately I’ve made space in my life by cutting certain things out of it. I’ve written extensively about all the junk we’ve given away to other junk collectors and to charities. I’ve released my contracts with insurance companies and commercial office spaces in my work and chosen to work as a Life Coach rather than a Psychotherapist, freeing up much needed psychological space and energizing my practice. But nature abhors a vacuum and now I have internal space to fill. It’s like clearing out a room in your home. What will you do with it now that it’s empty? The possibilities are endless.  I’ve decided I need a little more of a challenge for myself in terms of writing. I need to up the ante a bit, and have a little more pressure to bring the blog up a notch. Well, actually, it’s more about bringing my own development up a notch, but if the blog benefits, that’s all to the good.

Getting creative in the forward berth. This will be the ‘rumpus’ room and the guest room.

I religiously read The Cynical Sailor & His Salty Sidekick and also SVCambria.com.  Both these bloggers do what’s called Blog Challenges. The idea is that some alpha-blogger out there in cyberblogland gets a God complex, or maybe they just are gluttons for punishment. Said blogger then sets up some kind of rules about what you blog about, then they hit ‘go’ and a bunch of bloggers sign up to follow their rules and begin writing their little hearts out. Must be a powerful feeling! I mean, you should see the list of blogs from people who want to get on board with being challenged by rules! There are more blogs on that list than there were people in any of my graduating classes. (Note: Little Cunning Plan is number 970 on the list.)  But I have been intrigued. Am I a blogger? Can I be challenged? Do I want to do this? Am I commitment phobic? The answer to all of these questions is yes. I am, I can, I do, but I am.

Ah, commitment. That last one is the biggest hurdle for me.  When Ellen, over at Cynical Sailor, announced she was doing yet another blog challenge, the A to Z Challenge, that little voice that compels me to obey started yammering in my head. “You must do this. This would be great for you. You have plenty of time to devote to this. Just look at all the empty space in your psyche! This is the time. Just do it. Stop procrastinating you lazy female. I don’t want to hear excuses.”  Really, this voice is like every gym teacher I ever had in any school anywhere.  Apparently I needed to get my butt glue out and just do it. Yes, it would mean committing out loud to something that would take time. Yes, Mike and I are traveling to Washington D.C. in early April, the very month of the challenge. Hmmm.

Breakfast. I made these crustless spinach quiches and froze them. No muss. No fuss. Plenty of protein.

Of course, I didn’t go down without a fight. I’m much too willful to simply obey without questioning. I mean, I have never even played a team sport!  And there are many good reasons for that. We should all be grateful I passed those up. I argued and used logic. I put my hands firmly on my hips. I stomped around a lot. I threw that voice more insults than a Republican at a ‘debate-ish’ type of event. But it was like my own arguments didn’t even register on the voice’s little radar. It’s like this voice thought I had nothing better to do. Sure, I actually don’t have anything better to do right now.  But still, I was a whiner and didn’t give in. Until Ellen said Stephanie over at SV Cambria was going to do it, too. Well, crap then. The gauntlet was thrown down. Okay, fine. I’ll do it.

And now I’m excited to get started. Sometimes commitment to is like that. You resist for no good reason except sheer laziness and the feeling of power of getting in your own way, then once the promise is made, it’s all good and that yammering voice simmers down for awhile. So get ready for daily (except Sundays, a day of rest as the good Lord intended) blog posts in the month of April. I’m already writing them in my head and guess what else? There is a theme! The theme will be revealed on March 21, because I’m trying to follow the damn rules, okay?  Should be a fun month.

Enjoying the aft deck after we removed the huge bulk that was the old life raft. Clearing space is good.

 

Life Review

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This week my life flashed before my eyes. Generally when one says that, people respond with “Oh No! Did you have a bad accident? Did you get a terminal diagnosis? Did you have a clairvoyant episode outlining the details of your own death, and if so, do you know the date? (And by the way, can I have that painting I’ve always admired?)” I assure you, hopeful reader, that none of these things is true because none of these things is necessary for me to have my life flash quickly and alarmingly before my very eyes. All that is required is a trip to my attic.

See those dark recesses toward the back? You have no idea how much stuff is there. But I do. This is only one side. The other side is worse, and goes back further.

Long time readers will know that part of our cunning plan is to get rid of most of our stuff and move aboard a sailboat. They will know, as well, that we have been married for 31 years. That we have two adult children, that our home is large and has large grounds. What they might not know is that cloistered in our attic is the considerable remains of that 31 year history. Our house has about 3000 square feet. Our attic covers the entire house. Easily 2/3 of that attic is crammed with boxes big and small. Oy vey. I have spent many hours since this blog’s inception going through ‘things’ in my house and toting them to Goodwill. We have the tax deductions to prove it, thanks be to God. But I have not yet touched the attic. Until now.

Over the years as children have outgrown special toys, graduated to new grades in school, or decided they wanted a room ‘remodel’, things got stuffed into the attic for storage because I’ve lived with kids long enough to know that the minute I get rid of something they intuitively know it and look for it. Likewise when my own mother downsized dramatically, I was the recipient of special things that were hers or my father’s. They currently reside in the attic. Then there are things from my own childhood that I have kept for decades. All in the attic. Mike’s home burned to the ground twice when he was growing up, so he has very little from his childhood. He knows what it’s like to lose everything and then be okay.

Just imagine this, times 2 million.

In our attic is a gazillion dollars worth of Legos, Playmobil, action figures, American Girl dolls and their accouterments, Christmas ornaments, old LP’s, Nancy Drew books, a huge collection of rubber animals (anatomically correct, don’t you know), wedding and baby momentos, dressup clothes… Seems like our kids’ entire childhoods are in that attic, safely tucked away for the grandchildren we may never have. If there were any young children in our lives just now, they would be having an amazing time in our attic if we could get them to put down the Nintendo DS.

Some of you more thrifty and organized readers may be echoing my own superego just about now, giving voice to the general tongue lashing that goes on in my head. You know the words, so sing right along with me:  I am reaping what I sowed because I should have been getting rid of stuff all along and shouldn’t have collected so much stuff to begin with. Sure, you would have a good point because there is a lot of ‘sunk costs’ sitting up there in that space. But, by way of ‘walking a mile in my orthotics’, consider this: I grew up a military child. We moved a couple of times in early childhood, then in kindergarten; then again in grades 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, and 9. We then had three years where I had a stable high school experience, more or less. I’m not complaining, as there are many blessings that come from this kind of upbringing. But I am making the point that the only things that remained stable in our lives were our immediate family, and our stuff. I do not easily get attached to people, but I do get attached to things; the dirty little secret of this vagabond kind of childhood, at least for me.

Home may be where the heart is, but in my upbringing it was defined as where mom hung the portrait of me and my sister over the piano. When the big book cases (which currently grace my family room) were placed, and all the decorator items were in place in the living room, we were ‘home’, for however long it lasted. When the movers brought our stuff to our new digs, it was like Christmas. My brain and my body, and mostly my heart, developed around ‘stuff’ defining our space, and thus defining my feelings of ‘home’. So I guess part of my karmic learning is how to let go of things and still feel whole. I’m getting there but it’s a slow thing.

I’m not quite ready to let go of Andrew’s Playmobil collection. It’s just so cool! And he was so completely adorable with it.

Anyway, this attic has been literally hanging over my head for years. It has been the huge elephant in the middle of the living room of my mind. I knew it was there, but I preferred to walk around it rather than try to tame it.  Caught between a rock and a hard place, I have been wondering if this task of ridding ourselves of the stuff would ever end. And if it never ended, surely we would never get to go sailing down the coast to Mexico and beyond. We would never sail around the U.K. We toyed with the idea of renting out our house furnished, locking up the attic as our continued storage space. But on some level, that just felt like a cop out, like not really making a decision.

So this week Claire and I began with the attic. I pulled down as much stuff as I had space on the garage floor. We threw out a huge bag of trash, sent some stuff to Goodwill, put aside a few things for a friend’s garage sale, and packed up a box of treasures for Kitty down in Texas. Then I stared in horror at the collection of dolls, baby clothes, dress-up costumes and other assorted things that I just don’t have the heart to deal with. All I could think was “there are only about 200 more boxes upstairs”.  The word ‘discouraged’ doesn’t even touch my feelings. Just thinking about it makes me want to go lie down in a dark room with a whiskey and soda. Large, please. This took an entire day, and I was not finished yet because it was only the easy part that we had accomplished. Only about 200 more boxes to go, and countless decisions to make. I walked away from it to prepare dinner.

Goodbye cute little paper giraffe Claire made in the first grade. Goodbye hand decorated photo frame with starfish picture that she won a prize for.

I decided that this was just too much work, both physically and emotionally. There had to be another way. So I waited for the epiphany, and then it came:   What if, instead of having to touch each thing and make the decision to keep or get rid of it, I touched only the things that were most important to me? What if I began to look at things in terms of what I would choose to take to a new house in the future? If I were building my dream home today, what would I take with me? What things give me that comfortable feeling of ‘home’? What things tell me that it is I who live here? If I could choose those things, I would hire an estate agent to come in and have a big estate sale and let go of the rest.

I cannot avoid going through the things in the attic forever. But I can let someone else do all the unpacking; laying things out on tables in an orderly way, then giving me the final say about what I will pull out to keep.  Dear Lord, what a concept! I am almost breathless from the freedom of it. The thought of someone else coming in and doing all that work makes me positively giddy. The sale itself would probably feel about like chopping off an arm, but at least it would be fast and then I could get over it and get on with other things. This idea fills me with a sense of relief that is palpable and that makes me know that it’s the right direction to go. If the feeling is of relief, then the soul has spoken.

This display in our living room is filled with family history from both sides of our family. There is just no way I am getting rid of all of these things. Some, but not all.  We will find a way to store them while we are gone.

As the idea began to take shape, I found that removing the emotional and physical burden of the continual exercise in mourning that is stored in our attic allowed other ideas to take root. Selling the house and buying land we could leave to our children, for instance. I have always wanted to leave land for my children.  Perhaps designing and building a small house on that land in the future, a house that would be easy to keep and that would take us safely into our old age when we are finished with the sailing. Removing the burden of the attic gives me room to dream again.

As I began thinking more about it, I discovered that aside from a select few pieces of furniture,  most of the things that bring me comfort in my home are the decorator items that can easily be packed away. My mother’s Cottage Ware teapot, the piece of art pottery Claire brought me from the Scottish Highlands, the small paintings of our boats, the Native American fetishes I collected in the southwest, my father’s lithograph of the seven mortal sins. Specific stones. The cement maple leaf I made. The block print of Skimmers that Mike and I got when we were first married. These are things that will be put away, waiting to be placed in my next house so I can quickly call it ‘home’.

With the burden of constant purging removed I will be able to enjoy the time I have left in our house, this home we’ve created together, with all of the creative energy of our family’s youth still held firmly in its very bones.  I will be able to focus now on what we will take with us from this place into the bold future, turning my face from what we are leaving behind.

I will likely never make another one of these. It took me a year to perfect the formula to make the cement strong yet thin. The casting is of a maple leaf from the tree in our backyard.

 

Uncharacteristic Weather: A Long Dry Spell

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My friend Cidnie over at Our Life with Ceol Mor recently did a really smart thing: she announced to her readers that she was taking a break from posting for a certain period of time. When she announced it, my first thought was ‘what a smart idea’. Unfortunately my thoughts stopped at that moment. Had I followed those thoughts to their logical conclusion I would have realized that by announcing her planned hiatus, she would avoid the guilt over what  I call “failure to post”. When you have a blog that you love, posting things becomes a natural part of your life, so I have discovered. And in spite of the fact that most people do not comment, our stats tell us people do actually at least look at our pages, so I feel a certain illogical responsibility to that audience. What to do when there is really very little to say?

I notice that some bloggers post something every day. Frankly, I can never be that blogger. I cannot imagine a time when I would have something interesting to share every day.  I don’t need to be in people’s consciousness that much.  Most days are lived in ‘the beige’ of life: they are neither high nor low, but form the background and tie all the other days together. Time drifts by. What’s so great about that? No, I fear that posting every day at this point is just not going to be my style. So if there are long periods of time between posts, know that we are living in the beige just then and have nothing of interest to report in terms of progress. No one wants to read about how many hours I spent laying on the couch doing nothing or working out to my cardio boxing game. Here’s a brief wrap up of what we’ve accomplished toward the plan so far this year:20130212_1

We’ve bought a truck. True, we’ve added a vehicle, and, against common wisdom,  this has given us a profound sense of relief because we deperately need a truck with the property we live on. Now we can do dump runs, take furniture to Goodwill, get mulch and bark for the yard, and all the good things only trucks do. Then there is the issue of transporting things like kayaks and Puddler, our dinghy. We got this truck for only 1500$ so it didn’t set us back much.

Mike has made it his goal in life to clear the yard of unused items that, while hidden from sight, still must be dealt with should we ever dig ourselves out of here. Old wheelbarrow? Gone. Useless garden hose reel? Vamoose. Lawn vac? (yeah, I know.) Finished. Next to go are my old cement mixer (yes, I owned my own), a big pile of treated wood from Andrew’s old tree house, a lot of firewood, and a big stack of cement roofing tiles leftover from a garden edging project. You begin to see why a truck is a necessity.

I have cleaned up the work area behind the greenhouse to enable a leaner operation, offer a good place for storing garden tools all in one place (yeah, like that’s going to happen once gardening season begins), and allow Mike to build a structure for things that need cover, like the lawn mower. I am willing to share that area  because the days of my starting a hundred kinds of seeds in one season and acting like I own a nursery are over for now.

Just as people have to get boats ready to go, homeowners have to get their home ready to either sell or rent, and we’ve been doing that. Mike has created a great workshop area in the garage. There is room for it now that we’ve dumped so much stuff at Goodwill. Plus room for the car. Who knew? He’s replaced a toilet and I notice that he has bought a supply of molding to finish off a couple of areas. We have a door standing by to replace another door that is hideous. Anyone who complains that boats are a lot of work has never owned a home. Their cries fall on deaf ears around here.

Anyone notice how often I’ve typed the word ‘Mike’? That’s right. He is basically driving this train right now. I am the caboose, being pulled along in the same direction, and thankful for it. My focus is on my work and my health. It’s enough for me presently. I am back to working out, which feels great, (and many thanks to Nintendo for creating the Wii because I hate going to a gym). I am back on my diet to take off the pounds of holiday excess and fight my British genetic love of all things carbohydrate. I am infusing energy into my work by planning to teach some classes. All to the good. In my line of business, sitting back and coasting isn’t really an option if you give a crap about work quality. And I do.

Moonrise remains on the market and we have continued to do little projects that don’t warrant their own post, such as bringing home the canvas cover for the wheel and giving it a good wash, and cleaning the outside of her. Boats in the Puget Sound area look just awful in the winter. They have a tendency to grow a green algae everywhere. We can’t let that stand. Mike is refinishing the teak cockpit table, as the canvas doesn’t quite cover the end of it and it was badly weathered. We’ve had some interest in Moonrise but it is now a waiting game. I am of the mind that we need to set a date by which, if she is still ours, we decide to keep her and move on. I grow weary and discouraged over having my heart broken about other boats. Who knows? Maybe it wouldn’t be that uncomfortable sailing the Pacific on Moonrise. Who am I kidding? It would be terrible. But I would probably go anyhow.

So we exist in a slow moving wave just now, a time of introspection and waiting as we have just passed the mid-winter mark. The snowdrops are blooming, I’ve cut back the old leaves of the hellebores to unveil their blossoms. The chickens are busy keeping weeds at bay and generally running amok. Some shrubs appear to believe we’ll have an early spring around here. We’ve had a blessedly easy winter this year but we aren’t out of the woods yet. I’ll do a garden post soon, as it begins to look interesting out there. Meanwhile, we surf the wave slowly but surely.

Skippy standing guard over the winter garden.

Skippy standing guard over the winter garden.