Welcome Back

Low Income Ginger Housing
toastfloats on Flickr

I am frequently asked, "How do you write so well? How does one create and maintain a successful blog? Where do the ideas come from? How do you get the words to flow?" This is perhaps the single commonality amongst every writer in the world, regardless of culture, creed, age, gender or language. We are all asked this question. If you write, particularly if you do so with any sort of success whatsoever, people who do not write want to know how you do it. They want the magic PowerPoint bullets which will transform them from a person with great ideas to a person who has written those great ideas down in a form that is entertaining, insightful, or compelling. Consistently, every author interviewed delivers a variation of the same response to this question: writing is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.

Writing -- whether it be scripts, music, blogs, novels, or science papers -- is work. If you do it for a living, you need to work even when the 10% chooses not to show up for the day. The problem is that while you can train diligence, inspiration is fickle. At times, the muse screams like a banshee, and a writer literally can not get the words down fast enough. Personally, I relate strongly with novelists who talk about characters who literally won't shut up, characters that have lives and notions of their own, characters that veer the story in a completely unexpected direction, characters that ruin the plot, characters that take over the book and require sequels ad nausea. In my case, articles oft times spring full grown into my head like Athena emerging from the head of Zeus. Other times, I'll start an article on one topic and an idea sends me spinning orthogonally in an entirely different direction. Good writers let this happen. A writer allows the organic flow of their creative self to take over the process. Editing, self-censorship, second thoughts all come later. The first trick is to let those ideas get out of your head, on to the page or into your music, let the fresh air blow through them and give them time to spread out. The 90% is spent cleaning up the resulting mess, paying bills, and answering fan mail.

Now if I were a professional writer (e.g. if you all PAID for these hundreds of thousands of words I've spilled over nearly six years), I would not have the luxury of failing to write for three weeks. Pretending professionalism, I have in the past queued up articles in advance of major life events just in case I could not or would not be able to post new content. It has been a point of pride, in fact, this ability to consistently deliver new material over an extended duration… A test, as it were, of my ability to masquerade as a columnist rather than as the technical writer and project management consultant I am in the Real World. However, the tumor and extensive plastic surgery required to patch me up derailed me completely. I just couldn't bring myself to do the 90% required to get articles onto the page and into the queue. Maybe my id is secretly both spiteful and incredibly vain and decided to make everyone else suffer while my face was reconstructed. Maybe facing my return to the paid work force, I was taking the first steps towards letting go of the Toast Floats project. Or, maybe I'm just lazy.

I marvel at the self-discipline of columnists and journalists who crank out articles year after year with the full knowledge that sometimes they are writing in complete absence of any interest or inspiration in their own work. The real giants in the field must somehow infuse their writing with freshness even in the presence of complete ennui, just as a Broadway actor must deliver a compelling and genuine performance even on the 100th night. Amateurs bloggers like myself, though, have the luxury of simply stopping when the 10% takes a flier. In my case, Inspiration took one look at the estimates for forehead flap surgery, told me to go to hell, and went on vacation. So lacking any self-discipline or any financial incentive or frankly even the faintest shame or remorse, I stopped.

In any case, yesterday I was at a wine festival with some of the best, warmest people in the world -- Ceilydh's Evan and Diane and Lauren of Pico -- and an article sprung full blown into my head. Another swam through my hind brain as I drifted off to sleep last night. A third smacked me literally between the eyes as my wonderful surgical nurse Susan was cleaning goo and scabs off my second nose this morning. Inspiration started whispering in my ear on the walk to the cafe. She took over as soon as I pulled up TextEdit. I started to write about the wine festival and instead this came out… these words you are reading now, written in a Starbuck's knock off in Remeura with an insanely expensive latte cooling on the table beside me.

Writers are compelled to write. The dirty little secret is that there are no PowerPoint bullets that can help you. If you don't write, you don't have to. If you write, you write because you have no choice.

Toast to Ms. Inspiration: Welcome back, babe. I missed you.

Olympic Windsurfers Sans Wind
toastfloats on Flickr

A Life at Sea

Myke and his photographer visited us a few weeks ago to do a piece for the local Queen Anne and Magnolia Times. We spent a long time chatting. He's an easy person to talk with and his daughters are charmers. The article came out this week entitled "A Life at Sea." It's longish but it does provide more back story about the Congers than I've possibly written about us in the entire two years I've been prattling on this blog. Thank you Myke!

And Another One Hits the Net

Home Page of Our Boat Site
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Because it isn't enough that we have my blog, Toast Floats the web site, Toast Works the other web site, and a berzillion other things for me to track, DrC and the girls insisted they have their own boat site.

I'm going to go all technical writer on you and define this. A boat site is a small, family web site devoted to the cruising adventures of a single boat and crew. There are many outstanding boat sites and many truly horrid ones. What distinguishes a good one is a combination of appealing and readable layout, interesting content, and up to date posts which go beyond, "We stopped in Punta Big Fish and got a pastry. Then we went swimming." From the crew's perspective, it also must be very easy to update the content or forget it. There are too many more interesting things to do out there then spend a lot of effort prepping, copying and posting.

Does the s/v Don Quixote site meet these criteria? Hard to say. At this point, it's just a destination with content virtually identical to what is already available on toastfloats.com for those who've checked that out. The girls and DrC, however, swear up and down that they plan to blog regularly, take lots of pictures, and fill their links with all kinds of interesting stuff. Here's to the Conger Clan providing hours of excellent browsing pleasure.

A Cold Day in Don Quixote

You Know It's Bad
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

I have learned so much more respect for our pioneer ancestors. It always seemed so implausible to me that you could arrive in the Pacific Northwest and literally freeze to death in the winter. After all, it never freezes here. So how is it done? Well, let me tell you.

One very creative way to freeze to death in the Pacific Northwest in the winter is to move on to a friggin’ sailboat in the middle of winter and bob around in 40-degree water with the wind whipping by at 40 knots. Let us compound the problem by killing the heater. Twice. Since the “fix” costs $300, after the second breakdown we pretty much had to make a decision between freezing and eating.

We chose to freeze.

What I learned this winter is how you can completely and utterly do without traditional heat sources.

Back in the good old days when we were rich and normal, we had a house with central heat. The furnace would kick on in mid-October and grind away until mid-May. We felt oh so self-righteous when we took the Global Challenge and turned our thermostat down to 68 Fahrenheit. It was chilly enough that people remarked on it when they visited the house. But on the whole, 65 to 68 was quite pleasant as long as you wore a sweater – or as is more common in Seattle, a fleece pullover. We would snuggle beneath an Ikea throw on the couch, watching our movies, sipping red wine (box, of course) and munching on microwave popcorn, replete and smug in the knowledge that our thermostatic sacrifice was helping to ensure a future for our children.

Let's contrast this to our current state. When we stepped onto the boat this evening, the gauge read 44 degrees. Through the creative use of halogen lights, a kerosene lantern and baking cookies, we've raised the temperature in the salon to a balmy 59.

Unfortunately, heat rises. This ensures that any heat we generate making dinner and eating it in the light of our own personal sun lamp does not make it down into the cabins. As I type in the master cabin, my breath is frosting and floating to the ceiling to condense on the hatch cover and slide down the walls. The principle source of heat in here is the adapter for my laptop charger. Never have I more appreciated the fact that Apple chargers are roughly hot enough to fry eggs. We're using it as a bed warmer to ward off frostbite.

Yet, we are not actually all that uncomfortable. I think, in fact, that were it not for all the condensation, I could actually live this way pretty much indefinitely. I can assure you unequivocally that our future land-based house will never have a winter temperature setting higher than 60. There are tricks to living in the cold that you learn quickly or run away from this life screaming.

Pretend Like It's Warm – There are lots of ways to make your boat look warm even when it is not. Believe it or not, our mammalian brains are truly stupid enough to buy this nonsense. If you fill the boat with a warm glowing ambiance, your dumb ass brain registers the color and flicker as a radiant camp fire and makes you believe it's warmer than the thermostat actually reads. It helps, by the way, to turn the thermostat around so that you can't see it. Again, the human brain is surprisingly stupid. If you don't know it's 44 degrees, maybe it's 50.
Think positive.

To create that warm radiant glow, I recommend BeanPod candles. Get one with a nice campfire sounding name like Cedar Chest or Evergreen. Put one of these beauties in the center of the table. Then surround yourself in cheap tea candles from Ikea. Put them absolutely everywhere. They do not generate heat. You just think they do.

Cook – Normally, I find cooking on the boat a bit of a chore. There are only two burners, virtually no counter space, and the oven has two temperatures now that Dr C has ditzed with it: off and nuclear. However, cooking generates two absolutely critical byproducts: heat and odor. Your boat is not a very big place, and simmering soup or chili for half an hour, boiling a pot of tea, or baking a lasagna can actually heat the boat all by itself. Also, the aromas of roasting meat, sautéing onions and garlic, and baking chocolate chip cookies do wonders for encouraging the hind brain to think warm and happy thoughts.

Kerosene Lanterns – These are absolutely great on a boat. A kerosene lantern produces a truly astonishing amount of light. It’s also hot. HOT. Our lantern can take the salon from 45 to 55 in 20 minutes. I recommend purchasing these from the Amish catalog. Believe it or not, despite their complete repudiation of electricity, the Amish are served by a fine web site. Okay, this seems totally oxymoronic, but I recognize now that this site must do a really good side business in idiots like us.

Halogen Lights – Ironically, everyone on my catamaran list is yackity yacking about how to swap out all these halogen bulbs in all the fixtures on the boat with more efficient LED. The halogens are the second largest consumer of electricity on the Lagoon catamarans. Swapping them for the more parsimonious LED’s makes for more light at considerably less electrical cost. If you live someplace cold, however, don't do it. The halogens easily increase the temperature of the cabins by five degrees.

Ultimately, what it takes to live on a cold boat is the willingness to be cold. It's really that simple. If you stop taking heat for granted and treat it for the incredible and expensive resource it truly is, you will find the nights endurable and the days at the office pure pleasure.

Challenging the Cold
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Subscribe to THIS - The Green Life

Any sailor that is not also a bit of an enviro fantatic is quite literally missing the point. Sailing and the cruising life are probably the most perfect living lesson for how to reduce your environmental footprint yet invented. Did you know the average American uses 200 gallons of fresh water per day? Did you know that Don Quixote's water tank for 5 people for 4 days is only 80 gallons? Tell me you don't learn really quickly how to do more with less when you live on a boat.

Yet, you can always learn more. The conservation movement offers sailors endless ideas for how to make our boat lives simpler and more environmentally sensitive. There are products available to us now thanks to the efforts of the E.U. to reduce carbon use that were not available a mere ten years ago.


To keep up with all these changes and ideas, I subscribe to a daily blog sponsored by the Sierra Club called The Green Life. It mixes proselytizing of The Environmental Movement with generally useful tips on how to decrease water and power use, find less caustic products to clean our stuff and selves, and where to find the latest in green tech. And while some is not applicable to our lives, much we already “do even more with considerably less”, about once a week I get a great tip that I turn around and apply on our boat. Example? This Oct 16 tip on how to replace chemical mothballs with pungent herbs.

Cruising Blog - Dos Gatos

Dos Gatos is the companion blog to the excellent podcast “Podcastaway: the sporadic blog of the cruising catamaran Dos Gatos.” Martin's relaxed style provides an enjoyable window into cruising life in the Pacific. He details ports of call, weather and sea conditions, and goes into some considerable detail on good places to dive. I'll admit that I prefer the podcast, but then I love podcasts in general. The blog, though, supplies more details as well as includes many fine photos to enhance the story of their travels.

Subscribe to THIS - 43folders.com

I have a hero, and his name is Merlin Mann. He's roughly my age. He's not sexy, but I think he's hot. He's not an academic, but I swear he's brilliant. He's not a comic, but his stuff makes me laugh out loud – frequently. Best of all, his stuff is just plan useful.

Merlin's primary web site is 43folders.com. This site caters to the geek in many of us while still offering helpful life hacks and useful productivity tips to the average worker bee. Merlin is something of a cult figure in the world of Getting Things Done and life hacking. His blog routinely yields small insights and ideas to make your life just a bit less frustrating. And if that isn't sufficient incentive, he's a brand new parent. That should make for loads of entertaining tips on surviving babies.

Cruising Blog - Tad-n-Tina

The first summer after Dr C and I decided to dive off the deep end and go on a long cruise with the family, I enrolled in a sailing course with the San Juan Sailing school. As a side note, they do a great job and I highly recommend that school if you live in the Pacific Northwest. On the second weekend, I met a friendly couple - Tad and Tina - who were just learning to sail together. We exhanged stories, and I swear they didn't say anything about becoming cruisers. I think I'd remember that.

Yet, here we are vicariously living through the s/v Imagine as she sails south from Neah Bay to Mexico. It's been delightful previewing the ports of call, weather and provisioning obstacles, and culinary delights we will experience when we head south ourselves next fall. I particularly enjoy Tina's style and her choice of subject matter and photo selection. I'm looking forward to seeing if they kick around the Sea of Cortez or head straight down the coastline. If they say up there, we might actually catch up next year!

Cruising Blog - The Excellent Adventure

My friends tell me I have "monohull" envy. Maybe it's just that there are so many of them, and so few of us. So it was a relief to stumble on The Excellent Adventure, a cruising blog about a family living on a 47' Lagoon catamaran.

Laureen and her family are roughly a year behind Dr C and I in the prep and leave timeline. On the other hand, they don't seem to have any plans on returning, and Laureen is years beyond me in the environmental, spiritual, and zen thing. We're considering combining our blogs sometime in the future into a single site for folks interested in the cruising family life. She's an amazing person, inspiring to me in ways I find difficult to describe.

Laureen also blogs about homeschooling at Life Without School.