“You have to buy new shoes,” I flatly inform my eldest as I stare at the wreckage of what used to be a lovely pair of black Keds.
Jaime wails, “Nooooo!! There are only two weeks left...” Her voice trails off at my frown.
“Yes,” I pick up her leg and poke my finger through the gaping hole in the bottom of her shoe. She writhes, struggles, and laughs as I mercilessly tickle her toes. “But these are not even technically shoes any more. The very definition of the word 'shoe' is violated by these objects.”
I'd like everyone reading this blog to now stop and subscribe to Freakonomics Radio, a podcast on the “hidden side of everything.” Stephen Dubner and his co-author Steven Levitt explore how economics so frequently results in unexpected outcomes due to the vagaries of human motivation. Their books Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics are must reads. The “law of unintended consequences” is particularly important in public policy, a hobby for which I actually have a graduate degree. When you craft a rule or law or tax, you want to get a specific outcome. However, strangely enough humans will often thwart the objective through some strange reasoning of their own. An example I'm particularly fond of is football helmets which paradoxically increase the severity of brain injuries in high school players by converting the head into a weapon and conferring a sensation of invulnerability to already immortal teenage youth.
Another story I enjoy is that of the economics professor using his children expermientally. His first attempt to potty train his eldest daughter had mixed results. She quickly learned that every time she could reliably produce an ounce of urine in the potty, she would get a candy. As a result, she developed phenomenally good bladder control to the point where she could pump out an ounce of pee every 20 minutes with clocklike precision. Undaunted by this somewhat dodgy result from his first attempt, the professor engaged the same child in an effort to potty train his son several years later. The reward was a candy every time she could successfully get her brother to use the potty. This time, his eldest was more sophisticated. She immediately mastered the basic concept of “what goes in must come out”.
Based on these anecdotal results, I suppose DrC and I should have predicted Jaime's shoes (and Aeron's stained shirts and Mera's shredded skirts) had we thought out our plans more carefully in the light of the professor's experience. But we didn't. Four years ago, we instituted a Clothing Allowance. We estimated our expenditure on clothes for each child, divided by twelve, and began to deposit the money directly into their personal bank accounts on the first of the month. We simultaneously vowed to never buy another article of clothing for any of the children ever again.
One happy, expected and successful result was a dramatic improvement in our mental well being in the check out line at major retail outlets. No more begging for this cute shirt or that colorful pair of socks as we made our way out of Costco with muffins, meat, and batteries. When a package of Dora panties appeared in the cart, a simple, “Okay, that'll be $9 from your account,” would result in their immediate return to the display counter without even so much as a whimper. I was delighted.
In point of fact, nothing appeared on the check out counter. Ever. The girls started shopping at the Salvation Army and Value Village. They haunted yard sales and descended like vultures on the bags of used clothes that appeared at the homeschool resource center. Aeron benefited from her sisters' hand-me-downs while Jaime started acquisitively eying my footwear and her father's sweats. Months passed, seasons changed, and the girls' attire slowly dissolved while their bank accounts grew.
Finally, one day they announced that they wanted to withdraw major sums of money from their accounts. We were visiting their grandmother in the States at the time, and the girls wanted to visit Costco. Secretly, their father and I were relieved. FINALLY, the girls were ready to replace their now completely destroyed wardrobes. Costco shirts, socks, panties, shorts and shoes would be perfect. If we were clever, we might even talk them into getting a sweat shirt or jacket. I pulled out the cash, passed it around, and piled them into the car inwardly pleased with the results of our economic experiment. The feeling of euphoria, however, was premature and woefully misplaced as two laptops and an iTouch appeared on the counter as we checked out.
“What?...WHAT?!” No clothes? No shoes? No cute little jacket?! I was incredulous.
Mera asked worriedly, “We have enough, right? I did the tax math...” her voice trailed off as I glared at her.
“Yes. You have enough.” Grimly, I waited out transactions. Bitten on the ass by my own cleverness, I marched out of Costco trailed by three children in see-through t-shirts, ragged hems, and holey socks lost in a discussion of what freeware to download first to their new toys.
Fast forward a year to this afternoon in Pukekohe and Jaime's disgraceful footwear. I am going to lose this argument; Jaime is saving for an iPad. Therefore, I have two choices: I can capitulate to her blackmail and “gift” my eldest daughter with a new pair of shoes, or I can put up with a call from her homeroom teacher every day for two weeks until school gets out. No doubt, in the United States we would be reported to Child Protective Services for child neglect. In New Zealand where shoes are not just optional but in elementary school actually forbidden from the classroom, the phone calls are extent of the harassment.
I drop Jaime's foot with a thud and throw up my hands, “Fine. Fine! I'll turn off my cell phone for two weeks.”
Showing posts with label finances. Show all posts
Showing posts with label finances. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Step 3 - Open a Bank Account
I believe I mentioned that there is a bit of an evil Catch 22 here: You can't open a bank account until you have a place to live. You can't get a place to live until you have a local bank account. So we lied.
This is what good cruisers do when asked questions for which there is no correct -- and perhaps more importantly -- useful answer.
What about pirates? -- There really aren't any in the seas we'll be sailing through.
What about socialization? -- We will seek out other kid boats and spend all our time ensuring our children have others to play with.
What about drug runners? -- We've never seen any.
What about big storms? -- Never seen any of those either.
Heh. After nearly four years routinely lying to our loved ones, the New Zealand banking system stands little chance.We told them we lived at our hotel. Technically, I suppose this isn't a lie so much as a stretching of the truth tantamount to fitting a 280 pound Samoan mama into a size 4 lycra jumpsuit. And it did the trick.
Who is going to be hurt in any case? We immediately moved a bunch of U.S. cash into our account. Then we promptly spent it all. It seems like the bank is winning from all this churn… they are certainly charging us for it. Seems like the New Zealand economy benefits since spending is the Engine of Commerce, or some such economic clap trap. And while our finances are reeling, the fast movement of dollars to dollars converts into a rental home, furniture, and school uniforms which we can actually use. So it's all good.
I love sophistry.
What's great is that with a bank account, suddenly a whole world of To Do's is now open. We can rent property. We can buy groceries. We can … we can buy ANYTHING. The starved crew of Congers are now sitting at a banquet of bourgeois delights ready to indulge in the biggest feast of our lives. We want… we want…
We WANT. Oh my god do we want.
So far we have bought a whole lot of bread and cheese. It appears that what we really want is toast. It is not an exaggeration to say that we have consumed roughly a loaf of toast a day since our arrival. One day we had toast for breakfast, toasted tuna melts for lunch, and toasted cheese with tomato soup for dinner. We toast bagels and english muffins, crumpets, and white bread. We slice up sour dough, crumple croissants into hot cocoa, and sip tea with our scones. I can't help but think we're going carbo crazy.
After toast, our biggest purchases have been personal care items. We got our hairs cut, picked up a few changes of clothing, and invested in some skin care products to protect us from the wildly insane U.V. down here. So far we have exercised restraint on furniture and other worldly goods, primarily because we have no place to put them.*
But just you wait, Hen-ree, Hig-ins. Just you wait.
BTW, they pronounce all those H's down here. Of all places to be teased about our accents, we had a matronly woman at the Auckland Botanical Gardens spend no small amount of effort and emotional energy trying to get us to say hhhhhirb, correctly. Hhhhhirb. Erb. Hrm.
Editor's Note: Hahaha! Okay, I love editing this article a few weeks later. We've now spent oodles on mattresses and bedding. After toast, our priority was to get a good night's sleep for the first time in four years.
This is what good cruisers do when asked questions for which there is no correct -- and perhaps more importantly -- useful answer.
What about pirates? -- There really aren't any in the seas we'll be sailing through.
What about socialization? -- We will seek out other kid boats and spend all our time ensuring our children have others to play with.
What about drug runners? -- We've never seen any.
What about big storms? -- Never seen any of those either.
Heh. After nearly four years routinely lying to our loved ones, the New Zealand banking system stands little chance.We told them we lived at our hotel. Technically, I suppose this isn't a lie so much as a stretching of the truth tantamount to fitting a 280 pound Samoan mama into a size 4 lycra jumpsuit. And it did the trick.
Who is going to be hurt in any case? We immediately moved a bunch of U.S. cash into our account. Then we promptly spent it all. It seems like the bank is winning from all this churn… they are certainly charging us for it. Seems like the New Zealand economy benefits since spending is the Engine of Commerce, or some such economic clap trap. And while our finances are reeling, the fast movement of dollars to dollars converts into a rental home, furniture, and school uniforms which we can actually use. So it's all good.
I love sophistry.
What's great is that with a bank account, suddenly a whole world of To Do's is now open. We can rent property. We can buy groceries. We can … we can buy ANYTHING. The starved crew of Congers are now sitting at a banquet of bourgeois delights ready to indulge in the biggest feast of our lives. We want… we want…
We WANT. Oh my god do we want.
So far we have bought a whole lot of bread and cheese. It appears that what we really want is toast. It is not an exaggeration to say that we have consumed roughly a loaf of toast a day since our arrival. One day we had toast for breakfast, toasted tuna melts for lunch, and toasted cheese with tomato soup for dinner. We toast bagels and english muffins, crumpets, and white bread. We slice up sour dough, crumple croissants into hot cocoa, and sip tea with our scones. I can't help but think we're going carbo crazy.
After toast, our biggest purchases have been personal care items. We got our hairs cut, picked up a few changes of clothing, and invested in some skin care products to protect us from the wildly insane U.V. down here. So far we have exercised restraint on furniture and other worldly goods, primarily because we have no place to put them.*
But just you wait, Hen-ree, Hig-ins. Just you wait.
BTW, they pronounce all those H's down here. Of all places to be teased about our accents, we had a matronly woman at the Auckland Botanical Gardens spend no small amount of effort and emotional energy trying to get us to say hhhhhirb, correctly. Hhhhhirb. Erb. Hrm.
Editor's Note: Hahaha! Okay, I love editing this article a few weeks later. We've now spent oodles on mattresses and bedding. After toast, our priority was to get a good night's sleep for the first time in four years.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Step 1 - Get a Phone
[Editor's Note] Better late than never... I'm finally going to post our "Moving to New Zealand" series. It's 8 or 9 steps which I'll publish more or less in sequence over the next month or two though the events that inspired them were smushed more like into three weeks. I'll probably intersperse these with more interesting and personal stuff since the series is rather drier and more practical than is truly my nature. If you want to read the series all together, I'll give them a single "moving" tag.
When we dismantled our lives in Seattle, we were forever astonished by how many strings we left trailing behind. It seemed that for months random charges, irate emails, and miscellaneous to do's appeared out of nowhere like urbanized black magic sprinkled through our days. For those considering dropping out, going for a walk about, or otherwise escaping the Real World, I'd like you to first adventure with me on a little thought exercise.
I want you to pretend for a moment that the companies with whom you routinely do business are actually toddlers -- strong willed, very healthy, robust toddlers dressed in company colors with appropriately logo'd baseball caps. Each company more or less only reaches to your waist. Since very few can jump high enough to grab you in a stranglehold, abandoning them to the wolves in the forest merely requires a hard heart and pair of ear plugs. Sometimes, it's easier if you leave a basket of food behind. For example, you could simply pay a small discontinuation fee on an account or forego getting your money back on a security deposit which distracts the toddler-company long enough for you to get offshore and out of reach.
A few of these toddlers have big brothers who can and will turn you upside and shake until the gold in your fillings drops out of your mouth. To escape, you need to identify these lien holders early on and get them paid off. Make sure you have their assurance in writing that your presence is no longer necessary for their happiness and well being. While we were bobbing on the hook in a wild anchorage of northern Vancouver Island, we had one bank chase us down and try to foreclose on a piece of commercial real estate for the sin of not being physically where they expected us. These people you do not want to screw with. Best to make them go away in advance.
But with persistence and a long knife, you can and will be able to cut nearly all strings that tie you to the daily world of bills, mortgages, payments, subscriptions, auto-transfers, annual fees and the lot. The rest you give to your mommy and say, "Take care of it."
Then you leave.
Great, but now we're trying to reenter the regular world and are finding it takes nearly as much work to get yourself reestablished as it did to cut the ties to begin with. First, while we have grown and matured during the intervening years, the companies with whom we do business are still whiney, spoiled toddlers. Those who actually remember us from the good ole days are whiney, spoiled, vengeful toddlers. The rest are merely annoying and petulant.
As we reengage with civilization, we discover the world is full of Catch 22 loops such as the following:
* At most New Zealand banks, you can not open a bank account unless you have a permanent address.
* Most New Zealand rental properties will only accept a draft on a New Zealand bank account for your bond and first week rental payment.
Like that? How about this one:
* You can't get a visa until you have a job.
* You can't apply for a job until you have a visa.
Hmm.
Okay, not good enough? Try this one:
In New Zealand, they assume you have -- at some point in your life -- purchased electricity. So when you wish to turn on the lights at your new home, the first question in the online form is your account number without which the form literally will not progress. And what happens when in desperation you call the company... because gee... you don't have an account number? The automated friendly phone voice also prompts you for this same account number without which she dooms you to a virtually unending purgatory of musak until one of the electrical company's three live customer representatives gets back from tea.
The trick is the work around. The work around inevitably costs more money. Budget for your reentry to the world on the assumption that it is going to take more time and cost more than you currently anticipate by at least 10% in both cases.
We discovered that when all is said and done, the first thing you must do to get reintegrated into the regular world is to buy a phone. Without a phone number, you can literally do nothing. There is something about those mystical audio digits that confers "realness" in a way that bank drafts, passports, and work contracts do not. It also turns out that getting a phone number these days is about as dramatic a process as picking up a pair of new shoes. Wander the mall, look at the various models, select one, buy a SIM card, load it up with some money. They don't ask for your phone number (don't laugh! … By the time we arrived at the "buy phone" conclusion, we fully expected the store to require a phone number for us to get a phone number…). They don't even require that you give them your name. Drug dealers must love this.
So in addition to our preference for fast boats, sunny climates, and the avoidance of real work, cruisers have another thing in common with drug dealers… we like unregistered phones. It took us 72 hours to come to the Buy Phone conclusion during which we were quite literally unable to get anything useful done. Now we have a really dodgy piece of Sony Ericsson crap and a cellular phone number with a weird number of digits that make no sense.
Moving on…
When we dismantled our lives in Seattle, we were forever astonished by how many strings we left trailing behind. It seemed that for months random charges, irate emails, and miscellaneous to do's appeared out of nowhere like urbanized black magic sprinkled through our days. For those considering dropping out, going for a walk about, or otherwise escaping the Real World, I'd like you to first adventure with me on a little thought exercise.
I want you to pretend for a moment that the companies with whom you routinely do business are actually toddlers -- strong willed, very healthy, robust toddlers dressed in company colors with appropriately logo'd baseball caps. Each company more or less only reaches to your waist. Since very few can jump high enough to grab you in a stranglehold, abandoning them to the wolves in the forest merely requires a hard heart and pair of ear plugs. Sometimes, it's easier if you leave a basket of food behind. For example, you could simply pay a small discontinuation fee on an account or forego getting your money back on a security deposit which distracts the toddler-company long enough for you to get offshore and out of reach.
A few of these toddlers have big brothers who can and will turn you upside and shake until the gold in your fillings drops out of your mouth. To escape, you need to identify these lien holders early on and get them paid off. Make sure you have their assurance in writing that your presence is no longer necessary for their happiness and well being. While we were bobbing on the hook in a wild anchorage of northern Vancouver Island, we had one bank chase us down and try to foreclose on a piece of commercial real estate for the sin of not being physically where they expected us. These people you do not want to screw with. Best to make them go away in advance.
But with persistence and a long knife, you can and will be able to cut nearly all strings that tie you to the daily world of bills, mortgages, payments, subscriptions, auto-transfers, annual fees and the lot. The rest you give to your mommy and say, "Take care of it."
Then you leave.
Great, but now we're trying to reenter the regular world and are finding it takes nearly as much work to get yourself reestablished as it did to cut the ties to begin with. First, while we have grown and matured during the intervening years, the companies with whom we do business are still whiney, spoiled toddlers. Those who actually remember us from the good ole days are whiney, spoiled, vengeful toddlers. The rest are merely annoying and petulant.
As we reengage with civilization, we discover the world is full of Catch 22 loops such as the following:
* At most New Zealand banks, you can not open a bank account unless you have a permanent address.
* Most New Zealand rental properties will only accept a draft on a New Zealand bank account for your bond and first week rental payment.
Like that? How about this one:
* You can't get a visa until you have a job.
* You can't apply for a job until you have a visa.
Hmm.
Okay, not good enough? Try this one:
In New Zealand, they assume you have -- at some point in your life -- purchased electricity. So when you wish to turn on the lights at your new home, the first question in the online form is your account number without which the form literally will not progress. And what happens when in desperation you call the company... because gee... you don't have an account number? The automated friendly phone voice also prompts you for this same account number without which she dooms you to a virtually unending purgatory of musak until one of the electrical company's three live customer representatives gets back from tea.
The trick is the work around. The work around inevitably costs more money. Budget for your reentry to the world on the assumption that it is going to take more time and cost more than you currently anticipate by at least 10% in both cases.
We discovered that when all is said and done, the first thing you must do to get reintegrated into the regular world is to buy a phone. Without a phone number, you can literally do nothing. There is something about those mystical audio digits that confers "realness" in a way that bank drafts, passports, and work contracts do not. It also turns out that getting a phone number these days is about as dramatic a process as picking up a pair of new shoes. Wander the mall, look at the various models, select one, buy a SIM card, load it up with some money. They don't ask for your phone number (don't laugh! … By the time we arrived at the "buy phone" conclusion, we fully expected the store to require a phone number for us to get a phone number…). They don't even require that you give them your name. Drug dealers must love this.
So in addition to our preference for fast boats, sunny climates, and the avoidance of real work, cruisers have another thing in common with drug dealers… we like unregistered phones. It took us 72 hours to come to the Buy Phone conclusion during which we were quite literally unable to get anything useful done. Now we have a really dodgy piece of Sony Ericsson crap and a cellular phone number with a weird number of digits that make no sense.
Moving on…
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
The Ultimate Purge
Okay, most of you know that usually I write, let the content percolate, edit, and then after much editing release. But today something really really bad happened and enough of you are "need to know" that it's easier to post it here. My apologies for the lack of professionalism and the time shifting.
To bring you up to date, we found a house we really like in a town we really like south of DrC's work. We've done most of the work to get the kids into school, and we were all set to move in this weekend.
The problem is that the house -- which we call Chicken House because chickens were browsing in the front yard the first time we saw it -- smells like cat piss. In fact, I think the former tenant locked about a dozen cats in the front half of the house for several months without a litter box. It smelled a bit when we visited it, but we thought we could take care of it with cleaning.
Strike One. Cleaning didn't get rid of the smell. Removing the carpets in the affected rooms didn't get rid of the smell. In fact, the hardwood beneath the carpets is so seriously damaged, I'm at a loss what can be done to fix it. So we opened up the windows, left them with their little security latches, and fled the house yesterday.
Strike Two. Today we got back to the house and the smell was worse. This wasn't the terrible part. The terrible part was that the suitcases we had left in the dining room were gone. And the two boxes, my sewing machine, DrC's backpack, Mera's new school back pack, and my sewing kit. Gone. Investigation revealed that someone had broken in through a back window, opened a side door, and rolled off with everything we own.
The nice police man Chris told us that it would have helped if we'd dogged all the windows, but that the job was done by someone watching the house. It was probably a neighbor or the former tenant, we believe.
The nice Victim Support counselor said she could find us some kit, some clothes, some furniture. She also said the house was unlivable with the smell. Good it's not just my opinion.
The nice woman at the broker said she'd get the landlord over there to figure out what to do about the smell and to investigate whether additional locks on the windows or an alarm system might make sense.
All these nice people just made me cry. Of the 10 cases of personal and household goods we so arduously packed and shlepped from La Paz to New Zealand, we have two left. We have a few items of clothing, the kids most precious dolls and blankies, my laptop, and DrC's iTouch. We don't have hard drives, boat gear, or business clothes. We don't have our Rapid Chef cookware or my collapsible measuring cups, the sewing machine or sewing kit my mother put together for Christmas. We don't have Mera's diaries or the collection of bits and bobs Aeron stowed in the wooden painted chest that we also no longer have. We don't have the files I did for my client last month -- or the backup I put on the hard drives -- or the software disks I use to create the files I build for my clients. We're missing three computers, three external hard drives, a handheld GPS that kept us from running aground countless times, our captain's log for Don Quixote, and all our paperwork for the boat.
A couple things on the positive side. First, all of DrC's credentialing papers and his disks with his grandparents videos are all here at the hotel for no reason we can understand. Also, when we were in Sacramento in August, we made a copy of those external hard drives so all we've potentially lost is Sep 09 to Jan 10 when I got my new laptop. Frankly, the best of it is on this blog or on Flickr. We still have the kids' most precious items they can't live without as well as our guest book from Don Quixote. Finally, the mysterious gremlins of fate tossed my ziplock baggie of precious jewelry on the floor where it lay... completely obvious to anyone looking. There it is... my wedding ring, the jewels DrC gave me when the girls were born, the jade from my grandmother and the fake silver charm bracelet Mera gave me for Christmas this year.
Perhaps the biggest thing on the positive column, however, is my daughters. We all cried at first. Mera lost the most and cried the most. Initially. But after a few hours and on the drive home, they all sort of reluctantly admitted to me that they weren't terribly upset. In fact, the girls are almost over it. Jaime said, "Compared to leaving Isabel and Sam or Don Quixote or Dulci, this doesn't feel so bad." Aeron and Mera agreed pointing out that it was much more upsetting saying good bye to Uncle Glenn or Heather or Pamela or Noey or Carolyn... before the list got us all sobbing again I cut them off.
My girls are so resilient. Isn't that one of the major reasons we decided to do all this? They are so equipped to handle disaster. They are better equipped than their mother who fell apart in front of the nice policy man, the nice victim lady, the broker, my husband, the grocer, my blog audience. They are so strong, so capable, and so unattached to things.
Jaime remarked, "At least I didn't lose my birthday gift... I still remember the sea lion biting my foot."
To which Mera agreed wholeheartedly, "I think that proves we should just keep giving experiences for presents, don't you?"
"Okay, Mom, for my next birthday, I want to go to the Rainbow Park!" chimes in Aeron.
Okay, well, this was one hell of an experience. Whoever gave it to us, I'd like to know the return policy.
To bring you up to date, we found a house we really like in a town we really like south of DrC's work. We've done most of the work to get the kids into school, and we were all set to move in this weekend.
The problem is that the house -- which we call Chicken House because chickens were browsing in the front yard the first time we saw it -- smells like cat piss. In fact, I think the former tenant locked about a dozen cats in the front half of the house for several months without a litter box. It smelled a bit when we visited it, but we thought we could take care of it with cleaning.
Strike One. Cleaning didn't get rid of the smell. Removing the carpets in the affected rooms didn't get rid of the smell. In fact, the hardwood beneath the carpets is so seriously damaged, I'm at a loss what can be done to fix it. So we opened up the windows, left them with their little security latches, and fled the house yesterday.
Strike Two. Today we got back to the house and the smell was worse. This wasn't the terrible part. The terrible part was that the suitcases we had left in the dining room were gone. And the two boxes, my sewing machine, DrC's backpack, Mera's new school back pack, and my sewing kit. Gone. Investigation revealed that someone had broken in through a back window, opened a side door, and rolled off with everything we own.
The nice police man Chris told us that it would have helped if we'd dogged all the windows, but that the job was done by someone watching the house. It was probably a neighbor or the former tenant, we believe.
The nice Victim Support counselor said she could find us some kit, some clothes, some furniture. She also said the house was unlivable with the smell. Good it's not just my opinion.
The nice woman at the broker said she'd get the landlord over there to figure out what to do about the smell and to investigate whether additional locks on the windows or an alarm system might make sense.
All these nice people just made me cry. Of the 10 cases of personal and household goods we so arduously packed and shlepped from La Paz to New Zealand, we have two left. We have a few items of clothing, the kids most precious dolls and blankies, my laptop, and DrC's iTouch. We don't have hard drives, boat gear, or business clothes. We don't have our Rapid Chef cookware or my collapsible measuring cups, the sewing machine or sewing kit my mother put together for Christmas. We don't have Mera's diaries or the collection of bits and bobs Aeron stowed in the wooden painted chest that we also no longer have. We don't have the files I did for my client last month -- or the backup I put on the hard drives -- or the software disks I use to create the files I build for my clients. We're missing three computers, three external hard drives, a handheld GPS that kept us from running aground countless times, our captain's log for Don Quixote, and all our paperwork for the boat.
A couple things on the positive side. First, all of DrC's credentialing papers and his disks with his grandparents videos are all here at the hotel for no reason we can understand. Also, when we were in Sacramento in August, we made a copy of those external hard drives so all we've potentially lost is Sep 09 to Jan 10 when I got my new laptop. Frankly, the best of it is on this blog or on Flickr. We still have the kids' most precious items they can't live without as well as our guest book from Don Quixote. Finally, the mysterious gremlins of fate tossed my ziplock baggie of precious jewelry on the floor where it lay... completely obvious to anyone looking. There it is... my wedding ring, the jewels DrC gave me when the girls were born, the jade from my grandmother and the fake silver charm bracelet Mera gave me for Christmas this year.
Perhaps the biggest thing on the positive column, however, is my daughters. We all cried at first. Mera lost the most and cried the most. Initially. But after a few hours and on the drive home, they all sort of reluctantly admitted to me that they weren't terribly upset. In fact, the girls are almost over it. Jaime said, "Compared to leaving Isabel and Sam or Don Quixote or Dulci, this doesn't feel so bad." Aeron and Mera agreed pointing out that it was much more upsetting saying good bye to Uncle Glenn or Heather or Pamela or Noey or Carolyn... before the list got us all sobbing again I cut them off.
My girls are so resilient. Isn't that one of the major reasons we decided to do all this? They are so equipped to handle disaster. They are better equipped than their mother who fell apart in front of the nice policy man, the nice victim lady, the broker, my husband, the grocer, my blog audience. They are so strong, so capable, and so unattached to things.
Jaime remarked, "At least I didn't lose my birthday gift... I still remember the sea lion biting my foot."
To which Mera agreed wholeheartedly, "I think that proves we should just keep giving experiences for presents, don't you?"
"Okay, Mom, for my next birthday, I want to go to the Rainbow Park!" chimes in Aeron.
Okay, well, this was one hell of an experience. Whoever gave it to us, I'd like to know the return policy.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Affordability
A question often asked or -- by the more polite Canadians simply alluded to -- is, “How can you afford it?”
We can’t. Seriously. By the standards of our modern, economy and society, cruising is an absurd proposition financially. Cruising in your late thirties, early forties with a family is so completely unrealistic that it doesn’t even deserve discussion. The financial bottom line is that cruising costs a lot of money, and while you are doing it, you do not make any. Therefore, you can’t do it.
It’s okay. There’s a lot of things you can’t do.
It is probably true that you can not home school your children and ensure their appropriate socialization to the cultural norms of our society. It is absolutely true that you can’t do it without wanting on occasion to strangle them. In the face of this obstacle, I recommend that you hold your nose, and just go ahead and get started. Kids are surprisingly resilient, and despite complete parental incompetence, they learn anyway.
It is highly improbable that you can learn to live without all the creature comforts that make life worth living. Try to picture a life without broadband Internet, game consoles, coffee shops around the corner, local movie houses, friends available within hours for a dinner or drink. No gym, well stocked organic grocery store, or library. Insane! Not going to happen. Until it’s gone. And then it’s happened and air and food keep going in, carbon dioxide and poop keep coming out, and life goes on.
Now I know you can’t quit your job. You’re indispensable! You can’t leave your family | friends | church | club; How would they get along without you!? Sell the house, the car, the furniture, the dog, the cat, and the basketball hoop on the garage. It’s all too much! You can’t untangle yourself from all that. Now that’s true, but once you start, the whole freecycle, craigslist, I Quit! process is surprisingly liberating. Once they are gone, you might find yourself chanting quietly and compulsively, “Never again. Never again. Never again.”
The cruising kitty -- the pot of gold which enables the cruiser dream -- is impossible to build, always too small, and dwindles too rapidly once you cut the lines. So the way you afford your cruising dream is you go broke. You put it all on the table and roll the dice. The bet is the scramble you know with its security of things and money versus the unknown benefit gleaned from living life off the grid and out of the race, orthogonal to modern life. You mortgage a reasonably certain, secure future, for a present rich in experience and self-discovery. The stakes are extraordinarily high. The upside is potentially enormous, but the downside looms in words like bankruptcy, joblessness, and homelessness.
It is quite possible we won’t have enough money to put the kids through college. It is also highly probably that Dr C and I will need to work many years past 65 to pay for our retirement. For us, however, the gamble is already paying off.
I had not thought I was a big fan of live-now-for-tomorrow-you-may-die nihilism, yet here I am leading precisely that life. Today, we live large, spending our retirement and our children’s future to gain precious moments of now. In a few short years, we will have nothing but the clothes on our back, the boat we are on, and the vault of our memories.
I’m okay with that.
We can’t. Seriously. By the standards of our modern, economy and society, cruising is an absurd proposition financially. Cruising in your late thirties, early forties with a family is so completely unrealistic that it doesn’t even deserve discussion. The financial bottom line is that cruising costs a lot of money, and while you are doing it, you do not make any. Therefore, you can’t do it.
It’s okay. There’s a lot of things you can’t do.
It is probably true that you can not home school your children and ensure their appropriate socialization to the cultural norms of our society. It is absolutely true that you can’t do it without wanting on occasion to strangle them. In the face of this obstacle, I recommend that you hold your nose, and just go ahead and get started. Kids are surprisingly resilient, and despite complete parental incompetence, they learn anyway.
It is highly improbable that you can learn to live without all the creature comforts that make life worth living. Try to picture a life without broadband Internet, game consoles, coffee shops around the corner, local movie houses, friends available within hours for a dinner or drink. No gym, well stocked organic grocery store, or library. Insane! Not going to happen. Until it’s gone. And then it’s happened and air and food keep going in, carbon dioxide and poop keep coming out, and life goes on.
Now I know you can’t quit your job. You’re indispensable! You can’t leave your family | friends | church | club; How would they get along without you!? Sell the house, the car, the furniture, the dog, the cat, and the basketball hoop on the garage. It’s all too much! You can’t untangle yourself from all that. Now that’s true, but once you start, the whole freecycle, craigslist, I Quit! process is surprisingly liberating. Once they are gone, you might find yourself chanting quietly and compulsively, “Never again. Never again. Never again.”
The cruising kitty -- the pot of gold which enables the cruiser dream -- is impossible to build, always too small, and dwindles too rapidly once you cut the lines. So the way you afford your cruising dream is you go broke. You put it all on the table and roll the dice. The bet is the scramble you know with its security of things and money versus the unknown benefit gleaned from living life off the grid and out of the race, orthogonal to modern life. You mortgage a reasonably certain, secure future, for a present rich in experience and self-discovery. The stakes are extraordinarily high. The upside is potentially enormous, but the downside looms in words like bankruptcy, joblessness, and homelessness.
It is quite possible we won’t have enough money to put the kids through college. It is also highly probably that Dr C and I will need to work many years past 65 to pay for our retirement. For us, however, the gamble is already paying off.
I had not thought I was a big fan of live-now-for-tomorrow-you-may-die nihilism, yet here I am leading precisely that life. Today, we live large, spending our retirement and our children’s future to gain precious moments of now. In a few short years, we will have nothing but the clothes on our back, the boat we are on, and the vault of our memories.
I’m okay with that.
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