Raft-Up: Laundry Day on Don Quixote

White Trash Boating
by toastfloats

"It's not that I don't love them," I muse while shifting roughly a million pounds of stinking, moldy, food encrusted clothing from the hulls into the cockpit. "It's that I would love them more if they did the laundry."

My husband apparently agrees, "They're old enough. Make them."

I am properly incredulous, "Make them." Make them. Wow. That's simple. Make three girls aged 9, 12, and 14, do something smelly, tedious, and hard. Okay. 

"You make them."

Proving that my daughters are not the only children on the boat, "No, you make them." 

I glare at my husband, hands on hip. "I cooked, I cleaned out the refrigerator, AND…" and here is the triumphal feather in my cap, "I rebuilt the starboard head." Firmly and without any hesitation, I consign DrC to hell, "You Make Them." And with that, I metaphorically wash my hands of the dish towels, panties, and shorts and head below to play World of Goo. 

The problem with laundry on a boat is that it's hard. It's laundry without a net. Actually, it's laundry without a washing machine, a dryer, or good quality, environmentally friendly soap. In fact, it's laundry without water since we start with nothing but salt water, a cranky water maker, and an attitude. The problem with laundry on our boat is that we have a lot of it.

I know people who put washing machines on their cruising sail boats. We call them weekenders. Real cruisers use their washing machines to store foulies or mangos or a replacement halyard. The chandleries sell little jokes called washing tumblers which are both too small and waste far too much water to provide a practical solution to the mountains of filthy clothing produced by three active girls and a pirate. 

I, of course, am laundry-less. While cruising, I live in an pair of hi-tech REI shorts (panties built in) and a sports bra, both of which I can wash with a bit of dish soap in a coffee mug and dry by waving them at my husband in a tauntingly sexy fashion. I don't believe there is such a thing as a boat under 100 feet  with a clothes drier. This is, of course, why safety lines were invented. It sure as hell wasn't to prevent you or your expensive boat gear from falling off the boat as we have repeatedly proven.

So. Washing on Don Quixote is an all day affair… at least. Sometimes several days. We pull out several gargantuan plastic buckets. Normal folk in the Real World buy these at WalMart to store things that they don't want but are afraid to throw away. They accumulate like drier lint in the back of closets and in garages and in attics. We fill the buckets about half full of water and a toxic Mexican laundry soap, then jam in every item of clothing we own, an indeterminant number of towels and several pillow cases. 

Then we wait. There is a theory amongst the DQ clan that if we wait long enough, the laundry will wash itself. Sometimes, this works… as in the time that the laundry was taken over by a desperate colony of thirsty bees who sucked the water out. Then there was the time it sat long enough that the smell made us dump the entire lot into the ocean rather than touch it to retrieve our belongings. 

However, mostly, the wait is for an hour or two and then the hard slogging work begins. Using a toilet bowl plunger or bare feet, we stomp the dirt out. It's like making wine the old fashioned way but without the production of palatable beverages. Then in three-man teams, we wring the sludge out using our hand crank Dynajet wringer. Load up some fresh water, repeat the stomp, repeat the wring. And again. And sometimes again because let's face it… we're filthy. 

Drying involves clipping a carabiner to each and every item of clothing. We used to use clothes pins but a 25 knot breeze one evening reduced our underwear stock by roughly 70% and took out my only push-up bra so now we clip everything to the lines in a fashion that would withstand a hurricane. Several hours later, we pull the fresh, hand-washed, line-dried linens off the halyards and sheets, completely faded of all color and with the elastic blown to hell but with the bright smell of chemical lavender.

Laundry Girls
by toastfloats

Only a short while passes while I take on the challenge of moving little balls of electronic, physics challenged goo from one location to another on my laptop, but no sounds of war upstairs is promising. DrC pops his head down into the cabin, and says, "Let's move the boat. We'll go to Bahia El Coyote."

My eyebrows go up, "What about the laundry?"

The pirate smile starts to creep through his beard, eyes dancing he says, "I had an idea." 

Twenty minutes later, we are steaming very slowly south to a new bay. Behind us, the dinghy is full of water, laundry, soap, and children, the mix gently agitating in our steady, bouncy wake. Sitting at the helm while my grinning husband drinks a beer at my side as the girls scream with laughter, I admit, "You're brilliant, you know."

Where the Hell is the Floor?

Smug Captain
Uploaded by toastfloats

“I can’t get it,” I irritably inform my husband.

He retorts with some heat, “It’s right in front you!”

“Yes,” I agree with just the right amount of sarcasm, “I can see that it is right in front of me. And between me and the tool you want are 15 boxes, 5 pieces of plywood, a bag of cat litter, a large pile of dirty laundry, a snarl of rope, three fenders, and an unknown number of unmatched shoes.”

Yesterday, we retrieved the trailer from our friend’s house in Pukekohe and unloaded all the precious gear on to the boat. We’ve decided not to keep the trailer. For the cost of a rental space, we could buy the trailer and everything in it twice year. If it doesn’t fit on the boat, we have to get rid of it. Until then, the girls and DrC dumped all the gear into the cockpit for sorting, analysis, storage, and purging.

I question where my head was last February. Did I really think we were going to have any use for a radiant oil heater? Where the hell did I plan on storing not one but two electric whisks? And all these appliances with New Zealand plugs… what moron saves them for 8 months in a trailer to be used on an American boat?

Like a gopher with ADHD, DrC’s head pops up out of the transom and he points, “There. Walk there. You can get it from that angle.”

What is called for here is a yard sale. Challenging at best given that we have no yard, I think I can get rid of the vast majority of this crap by simply leaving it on the dock. There is a bench, in fact, at the gated entrance to our dock which is used as a sort of freecycle repository. Some of the items can no doubt be sold for cash on trademe. Others should just be taken directly to the trash.

“Can I throw away your old shirts?” I ask my husband, apropos of nothing apparently.

His head bounces up. “The needlenose pliers,” he reminds me.

We are combining two households: our accumulation of land-based goods from our year in Chicken House with the remnants of supplies purchased in Mexico to take us across the Pacific. It occurs to me as I pick past the rough ends of the plywood that we may never again need to buy soap, hand lotion, or bug repellent. I am not sure why the hell I ever thought we would wash our hands while sailing across the Pacific. “Big ones or little ones?” I ask, having finally reached the tool box.

“Both.” Smart man. He may not need it, but he knows there is no chance in hell I’m going to go back to the tool box after the first run.

As I retrace my path back to the 1 foot square clear space in the cockpit, I come to a decision, “Dean, we’re going to sell the children to make room for your tools.”

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.

Penultimate Purge

Prepping for Sale
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

As unbelievable as it seems, we are once again purging our lives of Things. We've done this before. Actually, we've done this several times. In fact, it seems like we have done this so many times that we can't possibly have anything left to get rid of. Yet here we are looking very much as though we vomited the contents of a West Marine warehouse onto the docks and deck.

Historically, every time we go through these radical pruning sessions, we move our family into a smaller space. First, it was a mental dust out which nevertheless resulted in nearly 9 van loads to the dump, Salvation Army or freecycle. Next came the first true scrunching into smaller space when we moved from a 3000 sq. ft. house to an 800 sq. ft. walk out apartment. After six months later, we moved on to the boat as liveaboards, but we were still stuffed to the gills and overflowing on to the docks and into our land cars. Our next hack was considerably more harsh as we dispensed with cars and dock and floated away. Nevertheless, after a few months cruising we elected to trade stuff for speed and threw roughly another 1000 pounds off the boat.

This has got to be the penultimate purge, however. I say this because I can't see how we can possibly reduce ourselves more than we will in this instance. We are moving to New Zealand with quite literally the clothes on our back and two suitcases each. Our total household goods will amount to 500 pounds, a guitar and a cat. And the cat goes to Seattle.

This round is both easier and harder than any prior purging effort. The easy part is that we don't really care too much about things any more. Except for a few books that DrC and Mera refuse to let go of and all Jaime's jewelry, there is almost nothing left to which we feel emotionally bound. We are also old hands at getting rid of stuff. We have already sold nearly $800 worth of this and that at the swap meet, gave away nearly a truckload of things to the charitable group that raises money for children in the area. The boat is three inches up on the bows, two inches up on the stern which according to the Lagoon figures represents roughly 2,000 pounds of personal and nautical gear. We look around and we still see stuff that we just do not want anymore.

But in other ways, we're finding this process more challenging than prior purges because of the physical constraints of our suitcases. We all have a few things that we've held on to over the years that we hand carried from location to location. DrC looks at all his tools and boat mechanic books. He rearranges them to try to make them look smaller and weigh less, but ultimately they don't get smaller or weigh less. With Jaime and Aeron, the problem is simply one of organization. Those two are like electronics taken out of a box. You can't take them back; They don't stuff back down into the box again. I don't see how we fold them into two suitcases each with out first muzzling them, tying their hands behind their back and chaining them to the salon table.

My problem is -- not atypically -- electronic. Four hard drives, three computers, a wireless router/firewall, two notebook computers, a 24" monitor, a sewing machine, five iPods, an iTouch, an external DVD drive and a printer all beacon to me. They want to go to New Zealand. They really do. Pretty please…

Coyness
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

And then we have Dulcinea. There is not a day that goes by that one of us does not snuggle up to her and get the sniffles. Sending her to Seattle for six months is going to break all our hearts. While she fits in the suitcase, New Zealand is pretty much a complete hairball for importing live animals. So in the end, she is purged… sent to live with a friend until the if/when of getting her paperwork processed.

While Don Quixote still looks like a combination auto parts store and day care center, she's actually emptying out. Peek in the lockers or under the beds and you hear the echoing sounds of a family abandoning ship. One thing is absolutely certain…after her paint job next week, we will finally be able to cruise at 8 knots.

Doing More With Less - Electricity

The boat teaches many lessons in conservation. This is part of an ongoing series of posts about how we boaters do more with considerably less. The tips are valid for land based life as well, though, so hopefully folks can use some of these ideas.

Solar Panel Frame
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

We have to make every erg of electrical energy we use. Not surprisingly, this makes us very stingy consumers of electricity. On a boat, there are five ways to produce electricity:

Hook to shore power - You can buy electrical at a marina. Sometimes it comes with the dock fee, sometimes there is an extra charge. In either case, it costs a lot of money to tie up. We anchor out as much as possible so it does not behoove us to rely too heavily on topping off the batteries on a dock.

Generators and engines - You can use alternators to charge your batteries by burning fossil fuels either in your engines or a generator. In both cases, however, you are engaged in that environmentally icky and incredibly expensive process -- converting dinosaurs to lumens. We prefer to charge our batteries this way only as a by-product of moving the boat. It is depressing how often weather and timing force our sail boat to be a very slow motor boat. When this happens, we call the energy that flows into our batteries “bonus points.”

Solar panels - We have two panels and a solar charge controller. The entire setup, including DrC’s nifty kludge of a mounting panel, cost us roughly two boat bucks. We consistently get about 15 amps an hour during the day. Let’s call it about 100 per day. More panels gets you more power. On a boat, it’s rather challenging figuring out where to put them. The great thing about solar panels is that if you set them up correctly, you can then forget their very existence. They just keep pumping out power.

Wind generator - Many cruising boats travel with a wind generator. We do not, but maybe someday we’ll add it to the boat. The principle advantage of a wind generator is that it can produce energy 24 hours per day. The disadvantages are the noise and that they require a lot of baby sitting. It is a very bad idea to forget you have a wind generator when you are in high winds. Even so, it’s very tempting to add one to the boat.

The final way to generate power is the most important -- don’t use it. Just as on land, the amp you don’t use is the cheapest one to generate. Boaters in general are pretty clever about reducing consumption. I’d like to think on Don Quixote we’re doing a reasonably good job. I’ll start with a list of ways we conserve, but this is one of those times where I would really like people to actively contribute additional suggestions. Other boaters have no doubt developed very creative ways to reduce their use of electricity.

LEDs - An expensive but very efficient way to reduce consumption is to switch all the lights on the boat from incandescent to LED. The masthead light, for example, burns all night to alert boats moving through the anchorage of our location. At 2 amps per hour, that’s roughly 24 amps a day. The LED version consumes roughly 2 amps for the entire night.

Ditch the Power Toys - Some power tools make for a much safer cruise as you can fix your own equipment, sew your own covers, or build your own furniture. Others just take up space and weight and consume a lot of power. Ditch the microwave, bread maker, hair dryer, coffee maker, and blender. Dispense with every power sucker and change your lifestyle. As an example, we use a manual coffee grinder from the Lehman’s catalog. It’s beautiful and slows our consumption considerably.

Guard Against Vampires - Chargers for phones, iPods, laptops, GPS and VHF handhelds, and other such little toys consume energy, even after your device is fully charged. Surprisingly, the amount of energy they draw even fully charged is actually quite substantial. We put all these devices on a single power strip. We control the entire strip with a single button. This enables us to charge everything for a few hours, then cut off the charger vampires in one swift stroke. A side benefit is safety since batteries, battery chargers, and transformers have a well-deserved reputation for periodically setting themselves ablaze.

Change Your Sleeping Habits - Wake with the dawn, go to bed at sunset. There is something satisfying about this from a biorythmical standpoint, and it saves a great deal of juice. Another benefit of going to bed early is you watch a lot less television. We thought we’d watch movies regularly. Instead, we’ve been traveling for seven months and have watched a mere handful.

Plan the Refrigerator - We still haven’t mastered Ninja Refrigerator Stowage, but done correctly you can substantially reduce consumption. Organize the fridge so that the things you need are in the front, easy to get to. Meals are grouped on back shelves. True ninjas can actually restrict opening the fridge to a three times a day activity, once for each meal. We know of one family that has it down to once a day. I dream of this capacity for advanced thinking.

So, now you. Boaters, tell me how to save more power. We had reached that enviable state where we could live on the hook for nearly a week, but as we dropped to warmer latitudes, the increased power to fridge and freeze tipped us over into running the engine every third day. Help me out!

Time For Bed
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Time to Go

Time to Go
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

The shore days grow shorter, and our asset sheet drops accordingly. These last few days have been a rush of going away parties and dinners, last minute errands, and major upheavals.

Probably the most dramatic, if not the most traumatic, has been the sale of both of our cars. They went >one< >two< on Thursday and Friday after weeks of preparing them for sale and posting them on Craigslist. We've owned both vehicles since somewhat before the introduction of the VCR, so parting with these machines is akin to selling a family member.

Towards the end, I started referring to the mini-van as She with a friendly - almost sisterly - affection. When She arrived on my door step, I could not have been more unjuiced about any event. A mini-van. A FORD mini-van. Complete with child seats built into the center bench. My god was there any more insulting vehicle for a wild and sassy lady like myself than the absolute prototypical expression of middle class suburban, soccer mom motherhood than that van. Thank you whims of fate that none of my girls ever played soccer. I could never have lived with the shame.

However, She grew on me. She never broke down, carried everything, forgave my children for being filthy heathens, and took care of us through some really crappy situations. Literally crappy, since She made a great hauling vehicle on gardening days. But now she's gone.

So is the Honda. So are all the library books, the kids' WAMU accounts, and the ends of Mera's hair. We also cleaned our teeth at a cost closely approaching a B.O.A.T. unit, remembered to retrieve the solar panels from the garage, and made a last run to the discount fabric store.

We haven't gone on a "stocking" run to the grocery store... we're not going on vacation. We've made plans instead that put us in the neighborhood of an anchorage with a convenient grocery in about a week.

Ladies' Night Out
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Today is a Dock Day. I have a list of tasks that henceforth we will always do on a Dock Day. These include: filling up the water tank, washing the boat down with fresh water, laundry, showers, topping every rechargeable battery on the boat, and making my children run on shore for an hour. But these tasks are not in preparation for leaving... these are just going to be part of all our Dock Days.

So in some indefinable sense, we left yesterday when the Honda drove off leaving us carless here at the marina. Thus far I'm happy to report it's a great trip! We've not made many miles, but we're doing well for supplies.

And if Dr C stops futzing with the engines this afternoon, maybe tomorrow you'll finally see a new placemark on our Google map.

Editor Note: Thank you to all for the many comments and emails wishing us well! Yes, of course we'll be trying very hard to post regularly as we head out. This should prove no great challenge until we head south of the border in November. You can be assured, I'll write chapter and verse about how to blog from a boat.

Doing More With Less - Bathing

The boat teaches many lessons in conservation. This is the third in a series of posts about how we boaters do more with considerably less. The tips are valid for land based life as well, though, so hopefully folks can use some of these ideas.

* * *

Gratuitous Daffodil Shot
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

I'm an American, not some Eurobabe sexpot with long dark hair in all the right places and a godz given right to avoid soap. We Americans fear the smell of sweat. We are terrified of oily skin, lanky hair, and well stewed underarm odor. Our poop don't stink, our breaths are treated with a myriad of pastes, gums, and curiously strong candies, and we have a pathological* need to wash our hands with antibacterial soaps.

Well, I used to be a squeaky clean American. That was then. This is now. Now, I stink.

So do my children.

We don't want to talk about my husband.

You can blame it on the lack of water and soap. That's a good place to start, actually. It provides at least the beginnings of a reason, if not a fine excuse for poor hygiene. But the truth, as is so frequently the case, fails to reflect well on reality. And the reality is that I'm lazy.

With my family and my boat, there are so very many battles I can wage. We can argue about learning stuff, fixing holes in the boat, putting things away, and whether or not Nora Roberts is appropriate reading material for a 9 year old. We have been known to come to blows over where to put stinky shoes and whether or not to wear even wear them. There are screaming fits about mud and sand, dead animals, and the endlessly overflowing boxes of hardware sitting in the cockpit.

So when you get right down to it, I'm too exhausted – too mentally beaten to maternal pulp – to force my husband and children to clean their bodies on a regular basis. As long as the really intimate parts cannot be distinguished from the background smells of diesel, BeanPod candles, and last night's dinner, I figure I'm ahead.

Yet, there is a reason why boaters tend to be a scruffier lot than landlubbers. The reason is quarters. I mentioned this months ago in The Quarter Quandary, but in case you did not understand my profound frustration at the time, let me repeat myself. It costs money to get clean. It costs a lot of money.

In the Northwest, you arrive at a marina with a shower only to find that your $40/night docking fee does not include hot running water unless you dump in two quarters every two minutes. You also learn quickly that the first round... sometimes even the second round... comes out of the tap at approximately the temperature of an orange flavored beverage dropped from a soda machine. Just as the tiniest hint of warmth enters the stream of water, the damn thing shuts off.

This is your cue to soap up. Frantically. Presumably to reduce the growth of mold, fungus, and homeless people, the showers are extraordinarily well ventilated. Read, the shower stalls are wide open at the base, inevitably there are windows at about head level which haven't closed since World War II, and some clever state maintenance project manager has installed an industrial strength fan which automatically turns on with the lights. Every erg of warmth on your skin disappears instantly, leaving you to create soap foam on a ridge line of goose bumps. Male anatomy disappears in protest of the conditions, and little girls start screaming when you attempt to detoxify their hair with shampoo (which admittedly has roughly the texture and temperature of a slushy).

Back On the Water
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Once soaped at great cost to ear drums and health, you add quarters to the machine. However, you can hear the marina or state park supervisor's wicked laugh as the water blasts out at the original, slightly frozen gradient. You are starting over, people. The only way to keep the warmth coming is to keep feeding the damn thing quarters until you've taken out a second mortgage on your boat. Worse, your children are now slippery as eels and pissed off to boot. They are agile, evil little animals with viciously piercing voices and malevolent looks. It requires a towel snapping cattle prod, a firm grasp of advanced middle school vocabulary, and arms of steel to get them under the glacial stream before the two minutes are up.

And for what? Odds are that they'll be covered in sand, shore mud, and indescribable organic smutz within an hour.

So I am taking a stand in defense of the environment here and foregoing bathing for the next five months until we get to Mexico. It's just not worth it.

* True statement. You need to stop washing with that sh*. All you're doing is ensuring the breeding of super bacterial bugs that nothing can kill.

Technical Details

A brief program note: I'm getting towards the bottom of my to do list, believe it or not, and fixing the non-important stuff such as web site and email addresses. Today, I finally shifted the default address of this blog from toastfloats.blogspot.com to:

http://blog.toastfloats.com

This makes sense to those who are familiar with http://toastfloats.com and wondered why I had not done so in the past. Wondered being the polite word among network geeks to describe the basic, "Huh? She's being an idiot or what?" comments I received.

It's All Covered

A Lesson to Us All
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

We owned a house, two cars, a boat, and a medical practice. To participate in the modern U.S. economy as owners and responsible parties for these assets, we had approximately two dozen separate insurance policies. DrC spent the last month attempting to disentangle the mess, replacing it with insurance appropriate for a family of cruising sailors. The entire process produced a sense of befuddled frustration similar to that induced by a shot of whiskey, three beers, and a two-by-four to the back of the head combined in quick succession.

Itemized separately, it felt like death by a thousand cuts. Malpractice, of course, was the single largest expense. I need say little to the average American regarding the absurdity of our legal system and the horror it is wrecking our medical system. While not as bad as Obstetrics, the insurance burden placed on your average eye doctor is considerably more per year than many of his patients earn in the same period of time.

But after malpractice, we had employment insurance, unemployment insurance, and a life insurance policy in case DrC became dead and hence unemployed. We also had property insurance for property, business insurance for business, and disability insurance in case someone dropped into the office with a machete and cut off one of the doctor's hands.

For the household, we of course had auto insurance, home owner's insurance, mortgage insurance, more property insurance, and medical insurance. Then we bought the boat and were required to get boat insurance, more mortgage insurance, and more life insurance in case DrC died again. Then there was additional life insurance in case I died, and a bit of liability insurance in case one of our tenants died while frying up a few veggies on the stove upstairs. At one point, it seemed quite reasonable to conclude that the kids would conspire to off their parents as our demise and the immediate liquidation of all these policies would yield about the same as an X Prize without the trouble of inventing a super green car or a moon rover.

Getting rid of all these policies is astonishingly difficult to do. When we signed up for all this crap, all we had to do was prove we had a pulse and a bank account. Sometimes we didn't even have to prove the part about the heart beat. Telling them to turn off the accounts, however, inevitably required a notarized receipt written in a combination of blood and fairy dust to prove we no longer (a) wanted the insurance or (b) had the item that was originally being insured. Since in many cases, the insurance was on DrC himself, it's been difficult to prove we don't have him.

Moreover, whoever originally signed up is the one who has to turn off the spigot. Despite the frighteningly pushy community property laws in Washington state, it is impossible for DrC to close an account I opened or for me to turn off something he opened. Credit card companies, by the way, are even worse than insurance companies. At one point I found myself telling a very nice but incredibly stubborn sales representative that I was never going to allow my husband to open another credit card account again ever so their insistence that they had to speak to him before they shut the account was moot. My volume I fear went up at the part where I told her that her company would never see a g* d* thin dime from my checking account so the entire lot of them could go to hell. And oh by the way send the statements care of /dev/null.

I'd like to say we are free of all this insurance nonsense, but we can not escape entirely. Marinas and Mexico require boat insurance. This is insanely expensive and covers absolutely nothing. Our boat in Canada and Mexico, for example, will run us roughly $3800 next year. What it doesn't cover is a list so much longer than what it does that it took me a good deal of effort to define a scenario in which they would actually ever pay out. It appears valid only if we manage somehow to sink the boat within 10 miles of shore on a calm day with two healthy, sober adults, no other boat within sight, and no wildlife larger than plankton. On the other hand, the policy is oddly enough designed that if we get advance, written permission from Lloyd's, we are covered in the event a terrorist decides to self-immolate on the deck.

One really fine piece of news is that travelers’ insurance is so many light years more reasonable than medical insurance in the United States that I can only fall prey to Michael Moore's assertion that we have the worst “bang for the buck” medical system in the world. As long as you do not get medical or dental care in the U.S., a fairly decent catastrophic plan for a family of 5 runs only $200/month. That's roughly half what we're paying now. And the travelers’ policy has odd but useful little side-bennies: lost luggage allowance, bodies shipped home, and hotel stays if our plane is delayed. Interestingly, travelers’ insurance does pay for property lost to a terrorist attack as long as the attack does not involve nuclear devices. So we need to avoid that.

I'm also thinking that getting advance, written permission to be attacked by a terrorist might be a little challenging. These companies never answer the phone.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' (Electronic) Toys

Cross Between a Ouiji Board and Scrabble
Originally uploaded by sammy baby.

A few weeks ago, the owner of a beautiful Norhaven powerboat in our marina ordered a minion over to dump every personal good onto the dock in the name of a remodel. The worth of this nautical trash was roughly that of the annual GDP of a mid-sized Caribbean island. Fortunately, the minion could not bear to see this haul simply dumped into the garbage and hauled off to a land fill. He asked and received permission to leave the entire lot next to the dumpster for a day to let the seagulls and liveaboards scavenge.

We carted off at least a thousand dollars worth of additional stuff to sink our boat. Among the prizes were a dozen really nice plastic containers, four fishing rods complete with reels, and two Canon Powershot cameras including one underwater case. For the girls, the biggest prize was two Nintendo Gameboys.

To put this treasure in perspective, it is important to note that the girls do not have any game boxes, cubes, computers, or hand helds. Our only computer games are of the Jump Start/Chessmaster variety. It's not that Dr C and I are morally, ethically or religiously opposed to video games. In fact, the girls and I played World of Warcraft for a year with the consistency and dedication of novitiates in a nunnery. While Aeron only managed a level 14 priest, Jaime was up in the 40s hunter and I had a mid-60 shaman before boredom set in.*

We simply do not have the money. We do not have the space. And, it turns out, we do not have the inclination. For two days, the girls did nothing but play with those Gameboys. Actually, they did one other thing – they argued over whose turn it was to play with the Gameboy since we only found two and mathematically it just wasn't working out.

And then the arguing stopped. In fact, the Gameboys stopped. They didn't stop functioning... I actually tested one to make sure. No, they simply stopped using them. One got kicked under a seat, the other was lost in Jaime's capacious purse. No one cared. Now, I'll occasionally see one of them pull out a pair of headphones and start messing around with a controller, but for the most part, the Gameboy phase is officially over.

Which totally justifies my refusal to buy these things. The girls have never grown out of the mode wherein the packaging has more entertainment value than the present.

The behavioral arc with television is roughly the same. The day they show up at their grandparents, it is impossible to extricate them from the TV. They are stuck to it like starfish to a dock piling, all eight arms wrapped around the device with super glue strength. You can pry off one long arm with a wrench and a champagne cork pop only to find all previously detached limbs whipping around the base with renewed force.

So I don't even try. Because after about 48 hours of this, the girls get bored. They drift out of the TV room with glazed eyes and drool on their chins, grab a handful of Oreo cookies, and disappear outside. For the rest of the visit, they may be found watching a Disney channel movie or Nic @ Nite for a few hours before bedtime, but largely the cable industry has lost its hold on my children.

Attack of the Thing
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

The power of electronic toys to take over the intellectual lives of our selves and our children can be broken – and broken permanently. Remove them from your life but do not make them forbidden. Simply don't buy them. Don't bring them into the house. When the kids get access, they will play for awhile with this otherwise inaccessible distraction. But video games, Disney reruns, and the Wii are simply not as fun as play. Nothing, in fact, is as fun as play.

And you can't really play with something that doesn't play back. We don' need no stinkin' electronic toys. Just give us the real thing, two hours of parental neglect, and a handful of like-minded kids. Welcome to the next level.

* Of course, all Horde. I'm surprised you'd have to ask.

What? Again!?

It's time to purge.

This Has Got to Go
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

We've been here before. Most of you remember the Drizzle December 2007 purge during which we sorted everything in the basement into three piles: junk, move to boat, and put into storage. Going back in time, those of my long standing readers might remember the Agonizing April Move during which we ceded our house of many years to renters, and compressed ourselves into the aforementioned basement.

Actually, if you travel back into time, we add layers of stuff in a sort of reverse archaeological dig. Each wave of stuff-evisceration disgorged van loads of toys, appliances, clothes and books. Each time involved several trips to the dump, a full year's tax deduction allowance to Goodwill, and a flurry of freecycling. We purged in November 2006 because I was bored. We did it back in Fall of 2005 because we'd just bought the boat and it seemed like the thing to do. Then there is the mother of all purges following our memorable trip to Whidbey during which we decided we didn't like being rich and normal and would rather be poor and insane.

And each time, we felt like we had stripped ourselves down to the bare essentials. I raise my hand here and swear to all that is holy that I believed each and every time I had gotten rid of everything. All that was left was the absolute minimum required for comfort and happiness. Yet each successive spasm of reductionism was a new lesson in minimalism. Each time we managed to get rid of more... more!... MORE!! That seems so counterintuitive. How can a family who is trying to do more with less get rid of more? Because there is always more to get rid of even when you stop buying.

I present this as a cautionary tale to those who are considering any form of simplification. Whether you simply seek to organize your closet, undertake a GTD transformation, or you are attempting to wedge yourself on to a boat, my recommendation is to give yourself time. Your ability to reduce your perception of what you need is a gradual process. Each time you lighten your material load, you need to give yourself a few months to adjust. Then do it again. And again. And yet again.

It is not that this process gets easier. In fact, it is challenging each and every time. When you purge, you are truly vomiting up the detritus accumulated over a lifetime. Our relationship with our things is so tightly entwined with our sense of self and self worth that each time involves many hard decisions about priorities, needs, and wants. Moreover, it's a dirty, thankless job that uses muscles you'd forgotten existed and leaves you with broken nails, a short temper, and the desire to smack your spouse.

Yet, during the fifth wave, you will find that items you thought critical to your very existence as a human being during the first purge are now dross in the tidal wave of life, just so much crap filling the forward lockers and sinking the boat. What would have been impossible to dispense with a mere two years ago is now garbage. Absolute garbage. You question whether it's even worth taking to Salvation Army.

I realize that we may have reached something approaching the pinnacle of purging with our most recent efforts. The entire family is more methodical this time. We are, after all, experts at the process now. The girls are dumping roughly the fuel load for a small star in toys, pillows and stuffed animals. DrC actually sorted his tool chests, consolidated into one, and reduced the total weight of his equipment to something less than a compact car but greater than a full water tank. I offloaded books and computer equipment. I can't for the life of me figure out why I thought I'd need four laptops and a box of romance novels.

One satisfying byproduct of purging when you live on a boat is that you get immediate, visual gratification and confirmation of your efforts. We saw two inches of Don Quixote's beautiful sky blue water line this afternoon for the first time since December.

We must be just about ready to go.

The Cheese Stands Alone

A Pile of Goats
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

For Valentine's Day this year, Dr C got me a trip to Chehallis to attend a goat cheese making class. This may not sound particularly romantic, but after 20 years, I'm just glad he routinely remembers these little Hallmarkian niceties. In fact, he must have struggled to out due last year's stellar V-Day gift – a t-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Trophy Wife.”

I started making cheese last fall. We were all desperately seeking ideas for crafts to make for our Solstice gifts, and I stumbled on a cheese making kit. For several weeks, I explored the wonderful world of mozzarella. During my obsession phase, I made over a dozen batches, some of which were quite good. Others not so much.

Cheese making is a cross between cooking, alchemy and an exercise in bacterial faith. As with beer, you start with a startlingly short list of ingredients and straightforward, deceptively easy instructions. Then you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out where you screwed up. Unlike beer, even complete disasters can actually still be referred to as cheese. Cheese is a very forgiving food category.

So on Saturday, I drove down to central Washington to visit the Blue Rose Dairy and extend my fromage-ilogical skills to chévre. Chévre is apparently French for goat and refers to any cheese made out of goat milk. Oddly for the French, this makes no sense whatsoever. Feta would technically be a chévre, while a jack, Gouda or blue would also be a chévre if you used a goat instead of a cow as your teat of choice. However, chévre in stores appears to also refer specifically to a goat milk cheese with a creamy texture and a slightly sour flavor which you mix with herbs or fruit to make spreads. Think of a cross between cream cheese and sour cream with a grainier texture and then add 10% bonus flavor crystals just for the heck of it. This is what we learned how to make.

First, goat milk is not skanky. Bad feta may have made you think that “goat” is a pejorative term for cheese that smells like the inside of an old basketball shoe and tastes worse. Actually, goat milk tastes a lot like cow milk except somehow inexplicably yummier. Second, goats don't smell. This seems impossible, but I stood in a barn full of 100 some odd goats, and it smelled like turned earth and warm milk. The goats were clean, friendly, and basically harmless. I've stood in similarly equipped barns full of cows and debated whether I'd be killed first by the smell or some stupid bovine backing into me and crushing me flat.

Some goat facts:
* Did you know that a goat doe in her prime produces two gallons of milk per day? Holy cripes.
* Goat milk is healthier than cow milk.
* Like human milk, goat milk changes flavor based on what the goat eats. This explains so much.
* Goat meat is yummy.
* Goats make really good pack animals and can carry their weight plus about 10 percent.

Rhonda of Blue Rose Dairy
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

The day was a sterling success, not just because I spent a day without children, a paintbrush, or a tax accountant. The drive was beautiful, the weather glorious, and the creamy chévre we made during class astonishingly good. My favorite taste sensation was smearing it on crackers and drizzling honey over the top.

Today, I made my own batch of chévre. Unfortunately, it looks and tastes a lot more like yogurt. Back to the drawing board.

TechTip: Getting Things Done

GTD Clouds
Original artwork by anabubula.com.

Short Answer: If you're looking to be organized, whether to simplify your life or to get aboard a boat and cruise away, consider investing some time in Getting Things Done.

Long Story: About a year ago, I discovered David Allen and “Getting Things Done.” Basically, he's a productivity-guy, expensive-suit-that-HR-hires, vain-attempt-to-improve-management, guru guy. However, his ideas stand head and shoulders above the rest, and GTD is basically the credo of many in software and hardware development. At some point it seemed like all my friends were doing it, so I had to do it too. Like Facebook except more so. I'm just a follower, what can I say?

The magic of GTD is largely in the concepts of inbox zero and organizing your work into contexts and projects. Briefly, context is where you get something done. Project is a set of things you need to do with a specific, desired outcome. Next actions are tasks that take you incrementally towards completing a project. And inbox zero is the notion that you never have a pile in your life. No junk drawer, no stacked inbox, no long list of email messages. Everything that comes into your life is immediately converted into a project with a list of actions which you will complete in context. Then you stick the entire lot into your trusted system.

A trusted system is where you keep track of all your next actions. It's a to do list on steroids. It goes like this... the moment you think of something you need to do, you dump it into your trusted system. Your trusted system can be a notebook, a spreadsheet, Outlook, a wiki, or bunch of index cards stuck together with a clip (a.k.a. the Hipster PDA). The important thing is that you don't let that little bit of “I need to get this done” in your head. You put it down someplace where you know that thought will not get lost. My trusted system which stores every thought and action in my life is an application called iGTD. If you have a Mac you need to get a copy of this. Now. I'll wait.

So far, it's quite possible that GTD skates perilously close to meeting Ze Frank's criteria for “a small solvable task not identical but related to the thing that's being put off”. Certainly, to do lists are a creative way to get busy and productive without actually completing anything substantive. However, my favorite addictive method of procrastinating is composing pithy posts for this blog.

My to-do list currently includes sixteen contexts, one hundred sixty projects and nearly one thousand actions with many of them due in the next two months. It seems like a lot. In fact, I have this niggly suspicion that had I re-purposed the time I used to type in those thousand tasks to instead actually do one, I might be better off. Yet, breaking the list down it starts to look depressingly comprehensive and completely without stuff I could just throw overboard and ignore.

The antidepressants are helping, thank you very much, but the occasional panic attack is surely justified.

Roughly 20% of my tasks have to do with closing down my husband's business and making it go away forever. Another sizable proportion relates to renting the house. Many tasks are bucketed as Academy and constitute the ongoing grind which is keeping the girls busy and steadily progressing forward in their ability to read, write, and speak in soft, reasonable tones to people either older or bigger than themselves.

Then to make matters more interesting, my clients all decided this month that they need work done. Go figure. They couldn't wait until March or April. No, it all has to be done now. So tack on about thirty or forty tasks just get all that crap done. Granted, it builds the cruising kitty, but I'm beginning to really resent working for a living.

“But what about the boat?” you say. Well, I'm glad you asked. Of the total, only 20% get slotted as Boat Projects. Fortunately, I get to ignore most of those until spring. Other than the heater, there is no earthly reason I should care about whether or not the bimini is growing mold or the deck looks like two seagulls fought it out and then vomited crab guts and blackberry juice.

And the rest? Well, those really aren't mine. They belong to Dr C. Turns out that I am HIS trusted system.

Toast iGTD Sample
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Doing More With Less - Soap

The boat teaches many lessons in conservation. This is the second in a series of posts about how we boaters do more with considerably less. The tips are valid for land based life as well, though, so hopefully folks can use some of these ideas.

* * *

Storm Drain Detective
Originally uploaded by City of Lodi.

Have you ever seen a street drain with a little fish painted next to it? The fish tells you that anything you pour down that drain goes directly to a natural, nautical environment, be it creek, river, lake, or ocean. The objective of the fish relief is to make you feel guilty about pouring paint, machine oil, and dish soap down the drain.

I suspect as a public policy, the fish are a failure. It is difficult for the average American to comprehend the connection between his driveway and a river nearly a mile away.

Living on the boat, it is considerably more difficult to ignore the connection between drain and fish. For one thing, every morning you can watch the toothpaste spit emerge from a thru hull and dribble down the side of your boat to float in lily pads of minty fresh goodness. Scrubbing down the boat during an average boring passage produces a wake of cheerfully bobbing soap bubbles while dishwashing at anchor results in a bathtub ring of food particles and bacon grease adhering to your hull like the ghosts of dinners past.

So guilt alone drove the family to consider how we could clean things without killing fish. Ultimately, it comes down to that old saw, “The solution to pollution is dilution.”

Dilute Everything – There is not a single soap product distributed anywhere that is not packaged in solutions that are a minimum of ten times stronger than required to do the job. Now the environmentally friendly packages such as Seventh Generation and Simple Green explicitly tell you this. It turns out, though, that the 1:10 ratio works for everything from window cleaner to hair conditioner.

In fact, there are products you can dilute at an even higher ratio. Ivory dish soap, for example, can be diluted in a ratio of roughly 1:30. We put about a half ounce in the bottom of a small bottle and fill it up with fresh water, returning the “source” to the storage locker.

Use Less – Even diluted, you are still using too much. Whenever you can, don't put the soap in water. Don't put it in a bucket or a sink. Instead, apply the soap directly to either the item being scrubbed or a scrubbing device. That little bottle of diluted dish soap lasts us for nearly two weeks through the simple expedient of never putting the soap on either the dishes or in the sink water. We apply it the sponge and can generally make it through an entire meal's worth of dishes with two small applications.

Use Something Else – Very dilute vinegar is a great cleanser. Salt water is surprisingly cleanifying. Elbow grease and fresh water do wonders.

Warm the Water – I have no idea why, but soaps like warm water. You probably know that dish soap positively FOAMS when it hits hot water. However, the same is true of shampoo, laundry soap, and toothpaste. It's hard to get used to brushing with warm water, but you can get much cleaner teeth with much less paste if you do so. For shampoo, foam it up in your hands with hot water before slapping it on your head.

Make Your Own – For Winter Solstice this year, Dr C made soap for all the ladies in his life. From this exercise, we learned a few very valuable things:

1. Soap is easy to make.
2. Triple the quantity of fragrance you think you need.
3. Homemade soap is better for the environment than the store bought stuff since it's made of essential oil, lye, olive oil, and lard. That's it.
4. The stuff feels absolutely great on the skin.

The fish don't mind a little lye and all the rest is just natural fats which break up quickly with no nasty by-products. This makes homemade soap a great way to bathe in any location where the water circulates regularly (e.g. larger lake, stream, ocean). There are some really good instructions at: down---to---earth: How to make cold pressed soap

Fun With PhotoBooth
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Do Without – There are a lot of things we clean in the Real World which just stay dirty on the boat. It turns out that disinfecting everything is probably doing more harm than good in any case, creating nasty antibiotic- and disinfectant-resistant bacteria. There is no fear of that on our boat. I can't think of a single sanitary item on the entire vessel.

* * *

I think everyone should live for a week watching their every effluent, body fluid, and ounce of waste water float behind their home in sludgy, gray pools. It would take a very hard hearted or extraordinarily stupid person to fail get the hint. Soap is not good; it blows bubbles.

Doing More With Less - Water

Copious Water While Washing Dishes
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

The boat teaches many lessons in conservation. This is the first in a series of posts about how we boaters do more with considerably less. The tips are valid for land based life as well, though, so hopefully folks can use some of these ideas.

* * *

Water, water everywhere but none of it fit to drink. Did you know that the American household consumes roughly 70 gallons of potable water a day? Did you know that our water tank only holds 80 gallons? This is a mathematical conundrum we must solve before we can credibly live aboard for any length of time.

We debated adding a second water tank. On the plus side, it would be nice to have more water. On the down side, water is heavy and catamarans do not do so well with extra weight. Water weighs a lot more than you think. In fact, our full water tank weighs considerably more than a Yanmar engine and slightly less than the family's laundry pile at the end of a particularly busy week. When you stand ashore on a windy day watching the surf flip your dinghy around like plastic toys in a bathtub, the thought of shlepping hundreds of pounds of water from shore to ship is a daunting one.

So while another tank is probably inevitable, we also committed to investing in a water maker. Typically, Dr C doesn't want to just outright buy a water maker. That's way, way too simple. Instead, he's been accumulating the parts for a water maker in the space beneath our bunk like outsized, electronic lint. Sometime over the next year, he and the girls will undertake “Build a Water Maker” as a class project. This is, more or less, an outstanding idea. If you can build it, the water maker costs roughly half as much as store-bought. And when it breaks – as it will inevitably – there will be at least four persons on the boat who know how to fix it.

The problem with water makers is that you are essentially converting fossil fuel (diesel) into water at a 1 to 3 ratio. Some are more efficient, some less. This is probably not the best way to get water on to the boat. It's also not particularly environmentally friendly, and it costs a fortune. Never mind. This alternative is moot for at least a year until Dr C and the students of Don Quixote Academy actually build the thing.

In the meantime, we work diligently on reducing our water consumption. The following are my water conservation tips:

Enjoy Dirt – Why do we feel compelled to be so clean? I'm not sure I ever truly bought into the OCD-like insistence on sanitizing and disinfecting everything so prevalent in our country, but now I find it utterly baffling. “God made dirt and dirt don't hurt,” is a phrase to live by on a boat. If you can't get clean by swimming in the ocean or stealing time quarter by quarter in a marine shower, then stay dirty. Swipe a damp blue cloth over the really smelly parts every day or so, and get used to smelling bad. Incense and fragrant candles help.

Use Salt Water First – Just about everything you need to clean, you can clean first with ocean water and reserve fresh water for a last bit of rinse. The notable exception is your teeth.

Use Less Soap – This is actually a post for this series all by itself. There are literally dozens of ways to use less soap. The important issue in water conservation, however, is that the less soap you use, the less water you need to get rid of it.

Catch Rain – We haven't started doing this yet, so I'll hold off relating how successful the technique will prove to be. Our research tells us that it should work pretty well as long as you are someplace that rains. So the strategy will probably work well next spring in the Desolation Wilderness but fail miserably down in Mexico. Also, you need to let it rain long enough to wash the salt off your rain catcher before you start capturing it for rinse and drink water. Otherwise, you might as well be pulling a bucket up from the side.

Okay, we need less of this...
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Drink Beer – We could generalize to wine or rum as well, but calorie for calorie, I think beer is includes more H2O. We've also learned that beer is cheaper than water in many Mexican coastal towns.

* * *

Water is not free. In truth, it never actually was. It always came from somewhere, and taking it out of the water cycle to use on our clothes, cars, and faces on a grand scale didn't do anyone any favors. Our record thus far is ten days on eighty gallons plus one trip to a shore bound laundry mat. Take the Don Quixote challenge and see if you can do the same in your house.

Business as Usual

Arboretum_048
Originally uploaded by brainswax.

We are settling into a routine now, living on the boat in winter. After much angst and gnashing of teeth, DrC finally managed to repair the heater. So the good news is that the Conger family is no longer freezing to death -- literally or figuratively. The bad news is that it is still winter in Seattle on a boat poorly sheltered from the elements on the edge of Elliott Bay.

This transition state -- not the Real World, not the Cruising World -- is a no man's land of compromises and frustrations. Ironically, both the good doctor and I are working harder than ever. Dr C is holding down two jobs working for the practice he's leaving behind and for the surgical clients he hopes to have in the future. I, too, am working for The Man, building a portfolio of clients who willingly hire me even when I refuse to show up for work. There is prepping the house and business for tenants, selling cars and stuff, and throwing away everything else.

But probably our most challenging problem is that the boat is sinking. Literally. In combining the house, practice, and boat lives into one, we dock carted crates of this, boxes of that, bags of the other thing. Then we stuffed them into every crevice and hole. Day after day, week after week, soap bottle after soap bottle, we played a live action game of Tetris with our stuff.

And Don Quixote was so patient with us, so accepting, so BIG. She took it all. Every box and carton, every stuffed animal and Sponge Bob pillow, disappeared into that great maw which is our catamaran. Until the project was finished and we woke up one morning, walked back from the shore head, and we noticed that Don Quixote was sinking.

Catamarans are notorious for this. All the space in the world, but every 1000 pounds you put on a Lagoon equates to one inch on the water line. When we bought her empty, she was floating 4 or 5 inches “into the blue” as we like to say. In other words, at least 4 inches of her hull paint was out of the water. I used to find this offensive. Everything on Don Quixote is either white or aqua except the hull paint which is a nasty bright sky blue. Bah.

Now I would give just about anything to see that lovely bright blue again. We are sunk down to the water line, and when we take her out, it's about as exciting as driving a garbage skow. She's heavy and slow and sleepy. It takes a minimum of 15 knots just to wake her up.

So our New Year's resolution is to put our boat on a diet. Like Congress in a fiscally responsible mood, we must offset everything. If you put it on the boat, you have to take an equal weight item off. Moreover, sometime in the next 4 months, we need to shed at least 2000 pounds. That's a lot of pasta sauce, let me tell you.

I'd be more concerned, but yesterday I calculated that we had roughly 30 pounds of box red aboard. There's only one good way to get that off the boat. It should be a pleasant few months.

Questions from the Class - Material Things

Making a List
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Keet asks, “What are the material things you'll miss? I am thinking I would miss holiday decorations... the Christmas tree... the really big TV.”

Hard to say. I think it will be interesting to compare, though, what I think we will miss to what I'm actually Jonesing for in, say... August of next year after we've cruised British Columbia. And probably we can check in again after a year or so in Mexico.

It's easier to start with what I won't miss -- the TV. I won't miss the big TV. Hard to miss something you've never had. We did have an enormous projection system for DVDs at one point. That was lovely. It was like watching a movie screen in your house. We haven't had cable, however, in nearly five years, and I can't say our quality of life is diminished in any respect.

I won't miss the car. My clothes already suck, so squishing them into the a closet the size of a toolbox, washing them in salt water weekly, and bleaching them on a line in the sun isn't going to cause me any great worry. I won't miss furniture, decorative knick knacks, or glassware. My children already destroyed what I valued pre-birth and a parsimonious nature kept me from replacing them. I don't use hair or skin products – no wise acre comments from the peanut gallery – nor do I use makeup, wear jewelry, or indulge in fine shoes.

Basically, I'm a perfect candidate for a penitentiary.

Books, my friends. Books are the material things I am going to miss.

A few years ago I tried to participate in a support group for The Artist's Way. This is basically a self-help program for people who are trying to connect with their inner artist. I was doing well for the first four weeks till we got to the Week Without Reading. The objective of the week was to go on a complete media diet for one week, foregoing reading utterly. No books, magazines, or newspapers. No browsing the web or diddling around with friends on Facebook. Without the cacophonous din created by the clamoring voices of the Information Age, we could free our minds and allow our creative souls to flower.

I made it 46 hours, 12 minutes, and 15 seconds. It was the worst two weeks of my entire life. I gave up when I found myself reading for the third time a theater ticket stub found stuck on the bottom of my shoe.

I will miss my broadband connection to the Internet.

I work, sleep, eat and play on the net. I play role playing games and read the news. I download roughly 20 hours of podcasts a week and pull down free books, magazine articles, and video content. Taking away my broadband connection is like cutting my hands off at the wrist and poking my eyes out with a stick while playing Barry Manilo at 11 in a bus that never gets to my stop. While up here in the States, I've invested in a Pacific Northwest-wide network of wifi hotspots which stretches from Olympia to Juneau. Once we head south, however, I feel as though I will be entering a form of computer geek hell.

Balsamic vinegar and pine nuts may prove another great loss.

I'm not a fantastic chief by any stretch of the imagination. I make up for it by the creative and liberal use of the four staples of mediocre cooking: olive oil, garlic, balsamic vinegar, and pine nuts. I can get my family to eat absolutely anything that combines those four ingredients in a long, caramelizing sauté. While olive oil and garlic are most likely readily available in just about any major port of call, pine nuts in affordable quantities are available in only one place: Costco.

Maybe I'm just going to miss Costco. Is that technically a material thing? Or is it all material things rolled into one convenient warehouse. In addition to pine nuts, I'm going to miss cheap panties (the dryer eats mine), cheap athletic socks (my girls steal mine), and Ling Ling Potstickers. Oh... and I'm going to miss the $1.50 Polish sausage and medium drink special at the kiosk in front of every Costco like a shrine to the Goddess of Thrift and Obesity.

Just call me a Material Girl!

Christmas Congers
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Moving Day

We the Seagulls
Uploaded by toastfloats

“Get the gate. Get the gate! GET THE GATE!” bellows my husband at my youngest daughter. He’s hauling the boat box from the van and down the ramp towards our catamaran on the near end of L2. So much for a quiet sneak aboard transition to our summer living quarters.

Our marina doesn’t allow live aboards. Frankly, most marinas in the Pacific Northwest prohibit them. It’s a combination of insane insurance rates, Dept of Natural Resource restrictions, and economic self-preseveration that drives this. The problem started a few years ago and grows worse each year as more live aboard boats chase fewer and fewer slips.

So just after the holidays, I approached our harbor master and explained the Great Escape Plan. We lucked out. First, our harbor master at Elliott Bay is a very nice man. Second, our harbor master spent a few years himself kicking around the Sea of Cortez. He’s sympathetic to our plight, and we can basically live aboard this summer. As long as we don’t let the children run wild, he and his staff will support our efforts to prepare ourselves and the boat for the cruising life. We make token forays to our land based basement apartment to make it legitimate.

But that means the last barrier to moving aboard has been removed.

My god, that boat is small. It looked a lot bigger in June of last year when we set the moving date to April 2007. It looked a lot bigger when it was empty. Filled with two van loads of stuff – one entire load consisting of the bedding and stuffed animals the three girls insisted were essential to their very survival – my entire perception of the boat has narrowed to a pin point. I feel like we’re an episode of a serial called Honey, I Think I Shrunk the Boat. It is now just as easy to lose the kids as ever. However, now we lose them in a sea of gadgets, goods, and groceries. Actually, I think I did lose Mera. I haven’t heard from her in hours.

As the van disgorges bags and boxes and books, Jaime and I frantically wrestle them into crevices in the boat in a rapid fire, real-life game of three dimensional Tetris. With one wary eye, I watch Don Quixote’s water line. Interestingly, most of what we’re moving aboard now to change our boat from weekend cabin to primary home is more bulky than it is heavy. I thought the boat boxes would ground us in the slip, but our boat seems made for this sort of clutter and sits in the water just fine.

I can’t say the same for the family temper. Dr C is frazzled and overworked bearing the brunt of the physical labor since I broke my back falling off the boat. Mera keeps escaping the leash to read fantasy novels, and Jaime and Aeron would rather be collecting dead, smelly things on the shore. My former concerns about the lack of convenient galley storage space pale to the reality of trying to find room for even the most essential items in places that do not require reaching under and around someone’s butt in the salon. I caught Dr C stashing the olive oil under Jaime’s bed in the port bow, and I don’t have the heart to ask where the kids have hidden the dish soap.

At the end of the day, we’re aboard. We will spend the next six months in this slip or nearby anchorages trying to figure out how to be boat people. A glance into the kids’ hull yields the horrifying conclusion it will take at least that long to find a place for all their toys. And we ended up getting teriyaki from a place down the street as I couldn’t face the daunting task of filling five plates with wholesome, home cooked food… let alone find the plates.

On the other hand, I did find the salsa, a bag of tortilla chips, and a leftover six pack of cervesa. There is a light breeze filled with the smell of the ocean and the sounds of a guitar played by a cruiser on M dock while the snow on the Olympics turns pink and purple as the sun blazes down to our west through a forest of masts.

I could get used to this.

Adventure in Seattle
Uploaded by toastfloats

Taming the Stuff Beast

Jaime's Cabin or Garbage Can?
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

In January 2005, Dr C and I came to the conclusion that our lives were perfect in every way. Obviously it was time to take a 90-degree turn and do something else. Peace, great jobs, privacy, beautiful home, gorgeous healthy children notwithstanding, we weren’t particularly happy. There just wasn’t enough time in the day to be both rich and sexually satisfied. We can talk about noble aspirations to spend more time with the children, have an adventure, see the world. But what it was really all about is getting more and getting it more frequently.

At least for him.

Okay, for me too.

The first thing that became clear is we had too much Stuff. Having lived for nearly a decade in the same place, we possessed so many things we had filled our house, our garage, Dr C’s business storeroom, and the laundry room. We had things in cupboards and items in drawers. We even had Stuff that had its own stuff, like the vintage Mustang in the garage that had its own set of tools, battery charger, and spare parts inventory.

So we embarked on a furious weekend of purging. Yes, purging. This is the process in which you poke a stick into your house, and it vomits up bags of old clothes and dusty kitchen gear. Out came half packages of diapers (last child potty trained in 2002), toddler bed sheets, and three entire bags of baby toys. We unearthed unmailed Christmas cards from 2003 and a bag of bathroom supplies gathered at the last minute from our house in Philadelphia and stuck in a drawer in the bathroom in Seattle when we moved in ten years ago. Nine mini-vans full of “stuff” went to the dump or the Salvation Army, and I spent two furiously spam-filled weeks during which we freecycled enough junk to fill a yard sale.

Brushing our hands off, we looked around at the newly cleared house smugly, pleased that we had already taken a first, critical step in simplifying our lives. The problem came six months later when we were once again carefully threading our way through the basement, stepping over and around boxes and boxes of Stuff.

There is only one, inescapable conclusion to be drawn from this experience: Your Stuff is alive.

Once you accept this, you can easily accept the corollary: Your Stuff breeds.

Stuff multiplies, it divides and spreads like ooze over the healthy patina of organizational simplicity. It creeps into open drawers and between gaps in the suits in your closet. And like roses harshly pruned in the winter to encourage vibrant new growth in the spring, your Stuff rises to the challenge of the occasional purge. It surges up in a tidal wave of unused kitchen gadgets, boxes of high school memorabilia and unopened cans of refried beans purchased at rock bottom prices from Costco in a mercurial flurry of penny pinching.

If you attack your Stuff, it fights back. This is not a single campaign, mind you. It’s a war, and I am calling on all of you! Rise up and challenge this beast! Do not be fooled by the promises of mercenary soldiers in this war such as California Closet and Ikea, promising a neat and tidy solution. Ultimately, beating back your Stuff is a day-to-day, ground-level encounter that requires constant vigilance and steady nerve. You can’t do it in one weekend. In fact, we simplified our lives in fitful waves as my temper blew at tripping over something for the umpteenth time.

See, Toast? It All Fits
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Our most recent and frantic reduction in worldly goods came as we moved into the basement. We found tenants to take the top and main levels of the house while we consolidated into the bottom floor and on to our boat for the summer. While the basement is roughly twice the square footage of the boat, it is still a very small place. There is no room for Stuff. Everything needed to have at least two, if not four to seven, useful functions or it didn’t survive my latest scrimmage against it.

There are two bits of good news: 1) We fit in on the boat and 2) the total book value of what we donated to tax deductible charities this year will far exceed our annual income. The bad news is that I heard a rustling noise in the laundry room where Dr C has been stashing his “important tools.”

I think the Stuff is organizing for a comeback.