frequently asked questions

When I tell someone that I'm selling my house, buying a sailboat, and moving on board I inevitably get a lengthy list of questions. These questions are usually very carefully and politely worded so as to couch the person's true feeling on just how galactically stupid this idea is. In no specific order, here they are:

1. How did you hatch this ridicu- errr... unique idea?
My good friends John and Jess are buying a sailboat to live aboard after they get married. On a whim, I went with him to look at boats. I'm not really sure what happened from there. I walked into the boat thinking "What's a jib?" and walked off the boat thinking "MUST HAVE." My brain's a funny thing. I never really know where it's taking me next.

More here.

2. What will you do with all your stuff?
Give as much of it away to family and friends as I can. Sell what I can. Stick the stuff I want in storage. Any remainder gets swept off to Goodwill.

3. Can you live in that small of a space?
One way to find out.

4. Have you ever lived on a boat?
No.

5. Do you know anything about boats?
No.

6. Do you know how to sail?
Not really. Sorta. Has to do with wind, I think. And jibs.

7. What are you going to do with your cat, Shithead?
Not sure. This is one of two looming problems (see #8) that are as of yet unsolved. I may do a trial run for a month and see how he does onboard. If he can hack it, then Shithead and I will merrily co-exist on a boat. If he's too unhappy, I'll look into finding a good loving home for him.

8. Where are you going to put the boat?
Not sure. I'd prefer Shilshole out in Ballard but Lake Union, Salmon Bay, Portage Bay all have merits and I'd be thrilled to be in any of those places. That being said, moorage is at a premium and I'm not sure how I'm going to get my hands on a slip. Compounding the issue is an anti-liveaboard stance from the local government in Seattle. Liveaboard slips are harder to come by. Some marina's don't allow liveaboards. Others have restriction on how many slips can be designated liveaboard.

9. How do you take a shower?
By standing in the shower and turning the water on.

10. How do you do laundry?
Laundromat, I'm afraid. Or the very good graces of my dear friends with washers and dryers.

11. You're going to be single the rest of your natural life, aren't you?
Oh, ye of little faith.

12. Why are you... what would make you think... just... why? Why?


Mostly, this:


And this:


This comes to mind:

self improvement

(I don't remember where I found this and I don't know anything about the author but the message is grand.)

Self Improvement

Just before she flew off like a swan
to her wealthy parents' summer home,
Bruce's college girlfriend asked him
to improve his expertise at oral sex,
and offered him some technical advice:

Use nothing but his tonguetip
to flick the light switch in his room
on and off a hundred times a day
until he grew fluent at the nuances
of force and latitude.

Imagine him at practice every evening,
more inspired than he ever was at algebra,
beads of sweat sprouting on his brow,
thinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight,
seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind's eye,
the quadratic equation of her climax
yield to the logic
of his simple math.

Maybe he unscrewed
the bulb from his apartment ceiling
so that passersby would not believe
a giant firefly was pulsing
its electric abdomen in 13 B.

Maybe, as he stood
two inches from the wall,
in darkness, fogging the old plaster
with his breath, he visualized the future
as a mansion standing on the shore
that he was rowing to
with his tongue's exhausted oar.

Of course, the girlfriend dumped him:
met someone, après-ski, who,
using nothing but his nose
could identify the vintage of a Cabernet.

Sometimes we are asked
to get good at something we have
no talent for,
or we excel at something we will never
have the opportunity to prove.

Often we ask ourselves
to make absolute sense
out of what just happens,
and in this way, what we are practicing

is suffering,
which everybody practices,
but strangely few of us
grow graceful in.

The climaxes of suffering are complex,
costly, beautiful, but secret.
Bruce never played the light switch again.

So the avenues we walk down,
full of bodies wearing faces,
are full of hidden talent:
enough to make pianos moan,
sidewalks split,
streetlights deliriously flicker.

by Tony Hoagland

indeed

There lots of schools of thought about the amount of personal information on a blog. What if your employer sees it? What if your ex-girlfriend sees it? What if Alanis Morissette runs across it and starts stalking you?

This is all I have to say about that.

changes in latitude

When I was an 18 year old boy, I was an idiot (redundant thought, you say? fair enough). I entered college with plans on becoming an architect only to discover that architecture sucks (apologies to all you architecties out there). Without direction, my academic pursuits crumbled like bad cake. I dropped out of college sans degree and went to work.

I've been working in the software industry for enough years to work myself into a comfortable job with a comfortable salary and a nice office view of Mt. Rainier and Lake Union. I bought a great little townhouse in Ballard right off the water about 3 miles from work. One of the side benefits of this arrangement is the ability to kayak to work. Sometimes, life is good.

But here I am, way too many years later and realizing that I need that bachelors degree. More to the point, I need the knowledge that comes with the degree. I've no interest in doing academic backflips for a pat on the head and a piece of paper. I need to understand computer science at a level that I just don't right now if I'm ever going to advance beyond Reasonably Competent Framework Programmer into Kungfu Software Master.

I put together a rigorous plan that would get me back in school, relieve me of full-time employment* and draw heavily on some saved money to feed the mortgage. It was all very specifically laid out and I'm eight months into the execution part of the plan. I'm working full time still while I knock down the ridonculous amount of pre-requisite math classes in the morning or at night. However, at one class per quarter, graduation and retirement will be racing along side each other, neck and neck. Eventually I need to quit fucking around and step up to full-time student status. Which means zero-time work status. Which means no income. Which means hemorrhaging cash out the bottom of savings account. My mortgage is plenty comfortable with money coming every month. Not so much when the coffers aren't being replenished. However, selling my comfy little townhouse to move into a $1000/month shite apartment holds no appeal. This has been gnawing at me for sometime and I hadn't really come up with any solution other than graduate really fast.

Then it dawned on me like a brick dawns on a plate glass window.

I live in a city abso-frickin-lutely surrounded with water. I could live on a sailboat cheap. Really cheap. Swap out the equity in my house for a boat. Pay moorage which even in Seattle proper is a fraction of what my mortgage payment is. Weekdays living on the water in the heart of the city, walking to restaurants, campus, coffee shops. Evenings spent sailing Lake Washington. Weekends living off the hook somewhere in the Puget Sound. Summers poking in and out of fjords all the way up Vancouver Island and British Columbia. Grilling salmon off the stern. Beers on deck. Sunning myself on the bow like a walrus. Just dog-damned beautiful.

Now, I need to learn how to sail.


*UPDATE 10.1.2007: it's a long and sordid tale but can be boiled down thusly: my company got bought out by an ogre of a company and I got shafted out of benefits. My boss and his boss swooped in with some heroic action and saved my ass. Big time. Working for folks like this is a rarity and will be much harder to give up than I previously imagined. Boat and school plan is still in motion but quitting entirely is now in flux.

who's afraid?

The previous day I had seen a black fox. I'd never seen one before and in fact, didn't recognize this little guy as a fox for quite a while. He was a beautiful deep charcoal with a shiny full coat and a lighter gray coloring on his face. I pulled my motorcycle over to the side of the road and snapped off a series of stills. A couple miles down the road, I realized I forgot to get some video footage of the critter and would have loved to gotten some for my compilation I'm putting together of my Alaska ride. I had another 400 miles of the Cassiar Highway left so I hoped odds were in my favor of seeing another black fox.

To call the Cassiar Highway (and particularly the northern half) a "highway" is a bit of stretch. It's really just a small ribbon of semi-paved road that runs north-south through the coastal range of British Columbia. There are no real lane markers on the road nor guardrails nor warning signs. It's full of potholes and riddled with stretches that have no pavement at all. The annual thawing and freezing cycle has reduced sections of the road into a cracked and crumpled mess.

And it's absolutely heaven on earth. A majority of north-south travellers opt for the more civilized Alaska highway leaving the Cassiar blissfully free of RV's, Buicks, and all manner of transportational atherosclerosis. I would ride for what seemed like hours on end without coming across another vehicle. Rugged mountain tops and endless acres of forest were so very infrequently interrupted by civilization. And what little civilization there is was in the form of a lone house or campground or diner/gas station seperated by miles of nothing-ness. And everything-ness.

It was just this isolation that I was contemplating when I came around the corner as it straightened out for about a half mile in the distance. Near the end of that distance I saw them. Two black foxes trotting carefree across the road. Happy to have gotten a second chance at filming them, I slowed my motorcycle down to about 5 miles an hour and stood up on the pegs to spot them as they stepped into the brush on the left side of the road. I crept up to where I was sure they would be so as not to scare them off. I contemplated killing the engine, grabbing my camera and sneaking off into the bush to find them but decided against it.

After searching for awhile to no avail, I resigned to the fact that I scared them off and was just about to resume speed. I was swiveling my head back to the road and at about 45 degrees and 10 feet off the side of the road, my gaze froze on two menacing yellow eyes.

Wolf.

I've seen wolves at a distance - on this trip, actually - and growing up in Montana, I've heard lots of wolf stories. But never in my life had I been this close to any sort of predator, let alone a wolf. A huge, black wolf. What I thought were foxes and closer to me, were actually two black wolves much farther down the road. My depth perception fails me at the worst of times.

I was beyond thrilled. Ecstatic. What an incredible opportunity! How many people have been face to face with a wolf out in the wild? I wasn't stupid enough to pull a camera out but I slowed down to savor this encounter. Wolves are skittish creatures that are more afraid of you than you are of them. They do not like to cross paths with humans. And of course, they aren't going to want any part of a human standing up on a a noisy motorcycle that smells of HOLY SHIT HE'S RUNNING RIGHT AT ME!

I did not see that coming.

The reality of this situation was that I wasn't really in any danger. My motorcycle tops out at 120MPH. I don't know how fast wolves run but I'd guess it's less than that. However, staring down the business end of a wolf running right at you is still a true holy shit moment. True holy shit moments strip away all the layers of crap and circumstance, exposing pitted metal. I write software for a living and attend calculus classes at night. I dabble in the outdoors on weekends but always under controlled contexts. My life is holy-shit-moment free. In fact, I could count the number of holy shit moments I've had on exactly, lessee... umm, NO fingers. It would take me no fingers at all to count up the holy shit moments in my life. I would like to think my Montana upbringing combined with my experiences in the outdoors would have hardened me into a steely man of action but truth be told, my grande latte lifestyle has left me as soft and squishy as a newborn baby's head. But this knowledge I will take to my grave: when out in the wilds of Canada alone on a motorcycle with no one else in sight and being run down by a large black wolf, I do NOT scream like a schoolgirl and I do NOT shit my pants. I say this not as any source of pride but rather a deep, engulfing sense of relief. I'm not sure I could bear it if I learned I was that guy.

However, I should disclose that I redline'd that motorcycle balls out for 8 miles before I got the courage to pull over to the side of the road and check my underwear for skid marks.

rolling down the river

My buddy John filmed this last summer after I'd just bought a waterproof camera case for my digital camera. I wanted to see how underwater films came out so we filmed some rollin' rollin' rollin' down the Skykomish River.

how high's the water, mama?

Just playing around in a stream crossing near Winthrop, WA. My co-worker Dave is operating the camera and seemed a bit reluctant to take his BMW through the water. So I offered mine.

matey

Happy International Talk Like A Pirate Day! In case you need to IM like a pirate:

leaving normal

Now I'm leaving Normal and I'm heading for who knows where.

Cowboy Junkies "Leaving Normal"