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?

crickets

I'm having altogether no fun right now so no updates to the blog. I figured the interwebs don't really want to read about how much fun I'm not having.

This quarter is drawing to close and calculus is on its way out of my life. Which means more time for sailing and general shenanigans which usually end up on here.

stupid isaac newton

Dear calculus,

Please die in a fire.

Sincerely,

Jason


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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.