I mean, lately, I’m not even sure. We have spent the month of November doing extensive house work, yet again. House work? What the.. what? I don’t expect you to follow this without context, but play along.
When I last posted, we were deep into our 2022 refit of Galapagos. We were moist. We were cold. We dripped around; sad that the sun had finally decided to hibernate for the winter. The masts were pulled. The chainplates were pulled. I think I left out the part where we decided to just do the right thing and replace all of those. That will be about 1500$, please. Fine. We’ll just pay it. I cannot be bothered about what is, for this refit, chump change. They’re the last chainplates we’ll replace in this lifetime. The bow pulpit is staged to be reinstalled. We think Mike may have fixed the leaking brand new hatch but we don’t actually know for sure. Because we are not there to monitor the drips. That is, we are in Tennessee. Not Olympia. Keep up, will you?
Having pressed pause on what was a hurried and stressful haul out, we escaped to sunny Tennessee to live the life of digital nomads and help Michael’s mom catch up on some maintenance on her beautiful old house. I swear to all the gods that as we pulled into her driveway, the house breathed a giant sigh of relief and then, almost stealthily, began to allow things to fail; sometimes spectacularly. The dishwasher failed with water all over the floor. A drain pipe in the basement failed with water all over the floor. We saw a mouse in the kitchen…on the floor. (And where there’s one…there’s another upstairs in the closet noshing on one of my protein bars.) Electrical plugs had seen better days and needed replacing. Gutters needed cleaning. A balcony railing upstairs had broken. Electricity to the pond outside had not worked in years, and anyhow the pond pump was kaput and the biological filter was sad. Ivy was systematically destroying parts of the garden and the brick walls along the road. The list was long and we’ve been incredibly busy but we realize that this is just what we do. We work on things. We do projects. We repair things and we maintain things. Maybe it’s something born into us. Our sense of accomplishment is great. We’re actually, I don’t know..really good at this.
But I have to tell you: I am having more and more trouble reconciling all the different lives we seem to lead. There is the ‘everyday working for a living life’, there is the ‘refitting the old boat and spending all the money we’ve made working for a living’ life, there is the ‘we own an old house and like to keep it in good condition so we need to keep working for a living life’, and now there is the ‘we need to go to Tennessee and visit, also work our day jobs, and give Mike’s mom a hand with her really lovely old home so it doesn’t fall apart life’. At one point, we had a cruising life. So many lives. I’m having trouble keeping track of…me.
The transitions are becoming brutal. We had, at one point, a life whereby we went on a vacation in Hawaii and scuba dived with Manta Rays, but I am not sure I was actually the person who did that. If feels too long ago and far away and it may have actually been my doppelgänger, such is the disconnect I feel from the person in those photos I have. Was that just a really good hallucination? It was last March, if my calendar is to be believed. Surely that wasn’t so long ago?
Maybe it was me who took this photo. Maybe not. I’m not sure.
Anyway, transitions are becoming problematic. And not just psychologically. Also inter-dimensionally, even physically. Like I need at least two days to recover the sense of myself and where I fit in the time/space continuum after moving from one timeline to the next. I can’t be rushed. I need a long sleep and lots of psychological rest, or something. I’m not really sure what to call it. But I do tend to get extra cranky if I don’t get the long sleep and the lack of talking to other humans. I am being literal here.
Sometimes we spend time staying at the house in Olympia for one reason or another, like taking care of our grand cat and dog. I sense more of that coming soon since I really do not love the idea of freezing my rear end off on a boat in the middle of winter in the dark/rainy/cold/hideous season we call winter. We haven’t discussed this with with our daughter, who lives in the house, but I feel sure a conversation will arise. Here I am in front of a roaring gas fireplace on a comfy antique couch and all I can think about is how cold the toilet seat is in the boat when I get up in the night. While I’m in this comfortable and beautiful house, I don’t even miss my boat. And I do not mind working on this house. It’s too lovely to mind what is, to me, a small amount of labor to keep it going.
It is not cold in here. This pleases me.
Anyhow, every time I go between the house and the boat I lose things: Electrical cords, shoes, clothing, skin care products. Always there is something that goes to live in the land of between and I am left feeling confused about where my things exist. I guess as long as it’s not my own self getting lost between timelines, then I should be ok with it. It’s not that I’m disorganized. Is it? It’s just that the boat is literally the only place that I know where things go. So when I’m at the house, or here in Tennessee, my stuff just kind of floats around finding its way to me, or not, as the spirit moves it. I’ve tried really hard this trip to keep track of my things. We leave next Friday. We’ll see if all my little life necessities find their way home with me.
I imagine we’ll hit the ground running with boat work, although I do hope to get a couple of days, or maybe a week, of sleeping and hanging around in my pajamas before that happens. Maybe at the house. Not at the boat. No talking, ok? I need peace and quiet in order to find myself again.
A little wildlife excitement from Tennessee. I have not seen one of these in decades.
The mast awaits and we are paying 8$/day just to let it sit there in the boatyard. Expensive real estate, that. The mizzen is at the house, so we aren’t paying for that storage. Currently we are shopping for a rain cover to use while we are in the boatyard during December. All these changes sure make life interesting if I can remember which life I am leading at the moment. My cruiser life feels very far away and in a totally, completely different dimensional space just now. I hope I don’t forget how to do it.
The only sea around here is this sea of cotton growing in the fields. I am sure going to miss that blue sky when I get back to rainy old Washington.
The technical requirements of your cruiser life will pop back into place when called upon. As long as you stay healthy and continue to enjoy those idyllic moments in between those (long) hours of stress!
You folks have a lot on your plates but once you toss the lines I am confident that you will quickly adapt and continue logging your adventures. It’s especially comforting when you are on a well found ship!
That whole ‘staying healthy’ thing is so real, John. Both of us have had some health issues pop up and while we are back in the game and are both fine, it does bring into sharp focus how tenuous life can be. Moving forward with the refit, we will be making difficult decisions about rigging and other things on board to help keep us sailing longer.
I retired in 2022 and would like to go cruising on the West coast, maybe down to Mexico eventually but we have similar responsibilities. So far it seems like a distant fantasy.
I hear you, Kevin. It does get complicated and difficult when there are so many family responsibilities. I encourage you to make a plan and stick to it, however, as you may find that once you leave the dock (the hardest part by far) things begin to fall into place. For instance, most people who sail down the west coast and to Mexico do not spend the entire year away from home and family. They go to Mexico, stay a few months, put the boat away, then go home for a few months. It feels like a lot of transitions and is definitely a lot of work, but it does help when balancing the needs of family back home.