how can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?

I've been remiss with blog updates. Not because of overwhelming school requirements as in the past (I totally quit school AGAIN - but more on that later) but mostly due to future plans that change on the hour. However, Christy relayed a request from her mom that I update my blog with current Christy/Jason happenings and plans. As I haven't yet met Christy's family, it seemed wise to stay on her mom's good side. (Hi Anne!)

"Quit school, you say??" Yep, that's me: two-time college dropout. This is a huge source of embarrassment for me, trust me. But you'll see in just a few sentences why this is not necessarily a bad thing. Unless of course, you're one of those people that highly value education and knowledge and such. Then maybe yeah, bad thing.

Here's the plan as it stands this afternoon. We reserve the right to change it soon and often.

1. Move into Christy's houseboat in the next few weeks.
2. Rent the townhouse.
3. Buy a sailboat and learn how to sail it.
4. In October, move out of houseboat and onto sailboat.
5. Sometime in spring 2009 quit our jobs.
6. June 2009, take off sailing for Alaska. We'll cruise around the PNW for a spell before:
7. August 2009, sail to Mexico to meet up with our good friends, Kim and Fisher, who are sailing down there a few months prior.
8. September 2009, anchor somewhere in the Sea of Cortez.
9. Drink hand made margarita's on deck.
10. Fix stuff on the boat that broke.
11. Go to step 9.

We don't know what we'll do after Mexico, nor do we particularly care at the moment. We'll figure it out when we need to. At this point, we are just focused on getting a hold of the skills we need to pull something like this off without being handed a Darwin award.

As you can see, there is no step in the plan called "graduate". School didn't really make sense if all we were going to do was just get my ass graduated and then hop on a boat and promptly sunburn that knowledge right back out of my head. One of these days, I would sorely love to graduate but school really made so much more sense when I was planning on working after graduating. As it stands, I'll need all the room in my brain for the inordinate amount of knowledge and skill required to keep our boat from settling on the bottom of the Puget Sound.

So to sum up: quit school, moving in with Christy, saving money, quitting work, sailing, margaritas in Mexico.

Any questions?

ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Had you whispered in my ear two years ago that at end of 2007 I'd be selling my house, quitting my job, going back to school, gearing up to sail the world, and oh-by-the-way ass over tea kettle in love, I would have enjoyed a hearty guffaw at your expense. "HA HA HA" I would bellow, holding my belly and pointing at such foolishness. "What a maroon!" I'd chuckle to myself as I slowly shook my head. But as it turns out, you'd be right and I'd owe you an apology. I'm not great at apologies so consider this a sheepish smile and a manly chock on the shoulder and then we shall never speak of it again.

The restlessness showed up sometime in 2006. I started to get the feeling like my life was on railroad tracks and the scenery looked all the same. I'd been working for the same company for going on 7 years. I settled into a pattern of work, friends, and TV. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. I dreaded being asked the standard "What's new?" question because my answer was always the same. I used my weekends to shake up the pattern and that worked for a time. I'd head off on my motorcycle or con some unsuspecting friends into backpacking trails that far exceeded our physical conditioning. Come Monday morning, I'd find myself sore and covered with bugs but right back on the same railroad tracks motoring past the same scenery.

Around this time, I'd ended up with a very few extra ducats in my savings account from selling my condo and the smidgeon of stock options I'd been hanging onto. The financially conservative Jason would have promptly buttoned up that pile of change into mutual funds and CD's and fiscal what-not. But another side of me felt like this was an opportunity to derail. I decided to go back to school and finish the degree I started 17 years ago. That was the good news. The bad news was that during all my fucking around at the University of Oregon 17 years ago, I never got around to taking any sort of math class. Therefore, a large chunk of 2007 was dedicated to suffering the slings and arrows of a year of calculus in preparation for the computer science program at the University of Washington. I'm keeping my job in tact long enough to polish off all the prerequisite classes before going back to school full time this spring.

Since I'd swapped out my smallish suburban condo for a more expensive townhouse in downtown Ballard, I had a problem deciding what I was going to do about my mortgage payment after the money stopped coming in. I debated whether to hemorrhage cash out of savings to pay for my townhouse, to get a roommate to stifle the flow, or just sell the place and immerse myself back in the college lifestyle of shag carpeted studio apartments. Eventually, and with the help of a good friend, I arrived at what I find to be a ridiculously elegant solution. The long version of the story is written up here. The shorter version goes something like this: sell the house, buy a sailboat, move on board. And up until about a couple weeks ago, I was charging in that direction. But before I finish that thought, there's another matter to be tended to.

Our first date was the Seattle Boat Show. We walked amongst the boats, laughing and flirting. We had a great time talking over food and beer at a local bar. As evening approached, we decided to sneak back into the boat show after hours to walk among the boats without all the crowds. And that's when I figured out that this girl was different. Christy and I have known each other just a few short months but it feels like years. I'm taken aback at how much we parallel each other. The things we want out of life, the way we see events, that which makes us giddy are all eerily similar.

From very early on, plans of our future just naturally evolved. One day a few months back, we both had crappy days at work and school. We were both cranky and needed a diversion. So we decided that evening we'd plan the Work Sucks Tour aboard the s/v No Tan Lines. I stopped at a book store on the way over to Christy's houseboat and bought a map of the world. We spent an evening pouring over different islands of the world deciding how we were going to sail to each one.

"We should go to Easter Island."

"OK, while we're at it, let's go to Christmas Island. They can't be that far apart right?"

"I'd guess about four months."

As so it was that we forged our plan to set sail. Our destinations are still pretty fuzzy and mostly irrelevant. Life together on board a sailboat at the whims of the weather is what appeals. We're targeting 2010 as the point where we cast off, take a left at the Straight of Juan de Fuca and sail towards azure waters and umbrella drinks. That should give me enough time to finish up school and for us to even work a bit to build up a cruising kitty. Oh, and buy a boat. And learn how to sail it.

The more our lives intertwine, the more they get fragmented between two households, neither one of which ever has enough clean clothes. After lots of discussions about selling houses and buying sailboats and living aboard at the dock, we decided that our life needs one household not two. Since Christy already lives on a bad-to-the-ass houseboat on Lake Union, it became quickly obvious that we could scrunch our two worlds down into the 450 square feet on board her houseboat. At some point in the spring, I'll sell or rent out my house and settle into the houseboat. And then we'll start off on this life together.

I want to take a second to say thanks for stopping by. This blog is mostly a mental exercise for me and secondarily a place for my family and friends to stop by and shake their heads at my goings on. But it means a lot to me that you all stop by every now and again. I hope you have all had a wonderful past year and that you're all healthy and happy and that your life is on an upwards trajectory.

2008 is gonna kick a metric ton of ass.

s/v endless winter

So you remember that entry where I told you JohnL bought a boat and it was a great big Tartan named s/v Adios?

I lied.

Or rather, circumstances changed a bit. The survey came back a bit rough on good ol' Adios so JohnL and Jess bid her adieu. No sooner did they sadly walk away from Adios then they stumbled across this little crumpet of floating luxury:



Say a hearty hello to shortly-to-be-christened s/v Endless Winter and her proud new owners. The inevitable post describing a night of drunken back-slapping aboard this posh vessel, however delayed, will be forthcoming. I promise.

Would I lie to you?

on the one hand

On the one hand sits a nice, shiny production boat. A Jeanneau or maybe a Catalina with all the amenities that come with such boats. A house-sized interior. Great big aft cabin. Shiny wood. Big airy portholes. A swim deck with hot and cold showers. Definitely the choice for the majority of time you spend at anchor or the dock. Lots of room to pass around a pitcher of gin and tonics. This is not however, a boat that likes to be out of sight of land. This is not a boat that welcomes six foot following seas. This boat subscribes to the Tuck Tail And Run school of foul weather management. That's great in the San Juan Islands. Not so much in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

And on the other hand sits a burly bluewater brick shithouse of a boat. Pacific Seacraft. Island Packet. Lots of other names that I can't even afford to type their names in a blog entry, let alone purchase. Beautiful lines. Overhung sterns. Full keels. Skeg-hung rudders. Small sheltered cockpits with high coamings. A tight interior riddled with handholds and lee cloths. This boat subscribes to the Is That All Ya Got? school of foul weather management. Six foot seas feel like home aboard this boat. This is not the boat that holds cocktail parties. You're in the middle of the Atlantic. Who's around to have a cocktail party with anyhow?

I've identified the ends of spectrum and love them both for what they are. What I don't know how to identify is the middle range. We're not sailing Cape Horn here. But sailing to Mexico is well within reality. Or Hawaii. Bermuda. Europe. And when we get there, I think we'll mix up some gin and tonics and spread out in the cockpit.

Still no closer to knowing what I want to buy.

rabbit hole

I know fuckall about boats.

That's the point that I'm starting from in this little venture. I don't know how to maintain them, fix them, keep them running in the face of insurmountable odds. Oh, I'm sure I'll learn. I'm also sure these lessons will be hard fought and caked with layers of oily bilgewater and cuss words.

Because of that, I've been eyeballing the new-ish end of the used boats spectrum. I don't want to inherit someone else's high blood pressure, mine'll do nicely thanks. In the new-ish end of the used boats spectrum, my budget lands me in the middle of cheap production boat territory. I've been wading through listings of Beneteaus, Jeanneaus, Hunters, and Catalinas trying to distinguish what level of quality I can expect from these boats.

There seems to be alot of poo-pooing out there amongst the saltier crowd about these production boats but I can't ever seem to get an unbiased opinion why. Too slow, not well built, cheap interiors, too slow. After I hear this, nobody follows that up with something that tells me what that means, almost like they're just repeating what they've been told when they bought a boat. I can't figure out how to get an unbiased factual understanding of the sort of differences in quality between these low end production boats and the likes of say Tartan, C&C, Sabre, HR, etc.

I'm starting to broaden my boat searches into boats of finer pedigree but slightly older. I'm finding some beautiful boats (who am I kidding, they all look great to me) but I'm not quite sure how to evaluate an older boat. What does 16 years of saltwater do to a sailboat? What does it do to an engine? Was it maintained? And how in the world do I know if it's been maintained?

I'm crawling down a rabbit hole here. Every piece of information raises more questions than it answers. Anybody have any great advice, drop it in the comments.

one for you, nineteen for me

Now.

Immediately. Post haste. Yesterday. That's when I want my boat. I'm not a patient guy and when I want something, it's usually right bloody now that I'd like it please and thanks. I've found umpteen boats on yachtworld that I must have, can't miss out, need to buy! However, there's this whole capital gains thing that's in my way. I bought my house in May 2006. If you sell a house less than two years after moving into it, you owe the gub'ment taxes on the profit you made. After two years? Free and clear. Before two years? Cornhole'd. So here I sit, waiting until May 13th, 2008 before I can sell my house whilst all these beautiful boats sail past my office window whispering "take me home!".

a boat like gideon brown

I went to a wedding this weekend at Rosario Resort on Orcas Island in the San Juans. One of the attendees showed up in a chartered 28' Camano trawler and spent the weekend on the boat. We had plenty of opportunities to spend time on this fun little boat and I came away super impressed. As per usual, I WANT ONE. (I swear, if they ever let me take the space shuttle for a spin*, I'd sidle up to a NASA guy afterwards and whisper "what do these things run for?")

I was always under the impression that I'm in the wrong tax bracket to afford fuel for a motorboat so I immediately discarded all non-sailboats. However, now I'm learning that the small displacement boats can cruise at a reasonable gallon-per-hour rate. Not terribly fast but likely faster than any comparable sailboat.

Of course, there's all sorts of bluster and huffing to be done on either side of the sailboat v. powerboat debate. I have no interest in this argument. I like boats. They float on water and let me go cool places in a fun way and I think living on one would be bad to the ass.

*In my universe, NASA lets me take space shuttles for test spins. If you don't like my reality, might I suggest an alternate reality?

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:

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.