Practicing the Blogging Thing

I've always wanted to share with others my writing, express my thoughts in an authentic way and have them relate to the readers as well as entertain. So I've heard if you can keep the reader's attention through entertainment and truth, you're on the right track!
I long to captivate my readers and hope to share wisdom through my experiences and own a sense of humor when faced with challenges. Sharing these types of moments will show truth, vunerabilty, and hopefully a connection to my audience. I can appreciate a good book, a great blog post or a well written poem. It's how the author opens themselves to the criticism that I respect. Maybe someday I'll have readers appreciating my thoughts, humor and criticisms. Happy writing!

Going To See About A Boat

We've made plans for Nate to visit Nova Scotia in May to check out a sailboat! Nate recently discovered a new blog where the latest post is a "boat for sale"! We've researched all the wonderful and hard work the owner has done to make this boat his own. I think in another life, this guy was either my husband or Nate's best friend! All the work that has been done is what Nate and I would refurb on our own boat. 

It's exciting to find this opportunity and take steps! Nova Scotia is going to be beautiful. Nate's brother will surprisingly also be in Nova Scotia at the same time visiting his girlfriend all the way from Las Vegas. I love when the stars align. Stay tuned!

Word of the Day: Apprehension

Jenn's Word of the Day: Apprehension - a term applied to a model of consciousness in which nothing is affirmed or denied of the object in question, but the mind is merely aware of

This sums up my feelings today. While I am excited about making plans and defining our path, so many fish swim in my head that generate my feelings of apprehension. My apprehension is neither true, false, right or wrong - just something I am merely aware of.  Some things I am merely aware of...

This week our doggie, Wyatt, had surgery to fix his completely torn cruciate ligament (like a human ACL). I've already become impatient with his healing process and I know this isn't the right attitude. Impatience has no room in this space. He is bored, his cone of shame makes him run into walls and beds and he can't do much of anything at the moment. After we adopted Wyatt, five years ago, we shed 25 pounds from his lethargic body and he was running up to 12 miles one year later. He is a happy dog, but seeing him in this static environment just saddens me. I am apprehensive of his complete recovery, but I'm committed to getting him back on the running and hiking trails and letting him find his way onto a sailboat. Those sailing with dogs, what is your number #1 piece of advice to share?

Work is taking a toll on my balance of life. I don't want my job to control me, but it's challenging to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I've had my work challenges as I'm an event planner, so I know the hard work pays off. Trying to stay one step ahead and continue to keep the energy up has been hard. I've been distracted by our future plans, my dog's surgery and the little things that feel "so unmanageable". 

I like to make lists and find satisfaction when I get to cross things off my list! Makes me feel accomplished and "less apprehensive". Sometimes I just want it all to go away. I'm sure I'm not the only one who wishes it "all to go away and sail away". However, this will actually become my reality!

My husband makes me feel less apprehensive, but he is currently in B.C. with his father on a week long back country ski trip. I love that he can do these activities with his dad. Him not being here while I tend to Wyatt among other things, adds to my list, and just builds anxiety and apprehension into my mind. This is a great emotion to be aware of and allows me to show vulnerability, weakness and promise in order to build strength. In the meantime, on to doggie PT!

Some costs of cruising

My brother asked some questions about a post from The Retirement Project that deserve some thought. His questions:

Sounds awesome and I want to see it. I wonder what he gives up there compared to the states, in order to have that utopia. Quality of health care, if not cost? Homogenized/consistent public services? Availability of goods/services? Or not much to speak of?

Good questions, of course, to see what the cost is. Everything has a cost. From my limited experience, I think all of those things he mentioned are true.

The cost of freedom and harmony is often the quality and ubiquity of services. Most islands don't have reliable quantity and quality of products and services. It is a much more self sufficient environment. Insurance is rare. The islands (or towns) that do have reliable quantity and quality goods and services are correlated strongly with tourists (which usually means white people). Whether the chicken or the egg came first is hard to tell.

In St. Georges, Grenada, where we stayed for 2 weeks, there is a cruise ship dock. St. Georges is the largest town on the island, and the capital, with about 35,000 people. There was more pan-handling than in other towns on the island. Well, there was pan-handling, whereas we didn't experience it anywhere else on that island. Then the cruise ship arrived for a day, and 3,000 white people spilled into the town to spend money. Very different place for 24 hours. Great to be a local business owner, and for taxes to be acquired. But a different feel to the town. Even with all the bustle, it felt... bland. People were just doing business, not saying hi and smelling the roses. When the cruise ship left, the town went back to the way it was before: somewhere between a normal town and a cruise ship town.

The more I reflect on it, I think a single cruise ship dock is a good thing for a country like Grenada. It brings in a ton of money for the people and government, but keeps the damage limited to a fat person's walking distance away from the cruise ship. That money then gets spread around the country. The cruise ship dock attracts small boat cruisers like us, who are willing to pay for reliable quality services. Grenada has a good medical school, and many white people go there for training. There is also a fairly large wealthy ex-pat population in Grenada, so many locals have made good money providing services to them.

To get back to the question, I think yes, in general, the reduction in rules does imply a reduction in services. For me, that is an acceptable tradeoff. A few places, such as Grenada and (I've heard) Australia, seem to have found a middle ground with good services but minimal rules.

The Importance of Living

Life always seems to be put into perspective when my day becomes hectic. Are these small nuances like work inboxes, websites and a clean room really all that important? Why do I feel the need to dwell on things out of my control? There are many wonderful opportunities out in the world that I become more aware of when these little reminders enter my subconscious that maybe I can control.

People posting unfortunate posts about loved ones that have passed, saying things like "life is just too damn short". What will it take to change habits, perspectives, achieve dreams and take control? Death? 

Disease? Depression? Stress?

The motivation to live one's dream or change perspective shouldn't come before its too late or before these experiences are met, but when the opportunity presents itself, while we're still young, mobile, and motivated to live a better, more enriched life. We have many to-dos and I'm not really sure where to start, but our motivation is brewing and our control is ours!

Perspective

Had a great visit with Jenn’s great-uncle, and his 2 sons in their 50’s. Got to talk about our plans for the future and, most interestingly, the rationale. It was a wonderful experience to be understood by a WWII vet. It gives me great confidence that this is a good thing we’re doing. We discussed how the country is not heading in a good direction (which every old person says). We talked about how life now is too fast, how there isn’t enough personal responsibility for ones actions. How pocket screens and 60” screens have overpowered parenting. How parents spend so much money on screens and big houses and big cars and toys that they don’t have the time to combat those screens. How there used to be a community that we lived in, now it’s just a group of houses very close to each other, with the residents so exhausted from the rat race that everyone hides inside.

I heard stories of how he had just arrived in the south pacific when the second atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. How the World Trade Center attack felt very much like the Pearl Harbor attack. How rare it was that his father had a car in 1929, and that was because he used it for sales from his bedding store. How he started walking to school at age 7, hand in hand with his parents.

It reminded me of my first time in the Caribbean on a sailboat, talking with the older cruisers. Every person, 100%, said they wished they had gotten out of the rat race earlier. There was audible envy that I was living care-free at age 26. It took several years for that to sink in, back in the rat race. Then several more years to wait out the great recession. Then I found Mr. Money Mustache, who was living purposefully, the way I had accidentally fallen into it. His blog clarified a great deal for me, and pointed out details, such as FIREcalc, that convinced me now was the time to live my life. Then I started convincing Jenn. Undoubtedly the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Nearly gave up on several occasions.

The plan is to move to the coast this summer, perhaps Aug 1! Save up a few more shekels before then, take a few trips (Canada! Alaska!) to spend time with family. I might even be able to tolerate this job that long.

Maybe by then I’ll start writing something that’s fun and happy, not this stuck up crap any more.

What HAVE I been reading lately?

Abundance and Countdown.

These books are about the future. Countdown goes into gory detail (Really. It makes you ill to read most of the book) about the mistakes of the past, especially when we didn’t think they were mistakes.

Abundance acknowledges these challenges, and places all hope in “techno-philanthropists:” the new titans of industry and their Foundations. Countdown screams “if you aren’t outraged, you haven’t been paying attention,” while Abundance wallows in our own hubris: “look how magnificent our capabilities are.”

Countdown is, essentially, a call to reduce human population. 400 pages describe all the myriad ways overpopulation and over consumption by a single species has wrought destruction on the earth. He makes the point, and quotes many other folks who agree, that nearly every problem we face would be ameliorated with fewer humans. My take is that density requires regulation. The greater the density, the greater the regulation. I don’t like being told what to do, you don’t like being told what to do, neither does anyone else. The days of the Wild West in America were fun, exciting times (excepting poverty, hunger, animal attacks, etc.) when a man could do as he pleased. Those days are gone. Weisman quotes several of the most prominent scientists in this field as saying roughly 2 billion people is a good human population for the world. Presumably he means those people would have a great standard of life, with high quality food, air, water, dirt, employment, leisure.

Abundance doesn’t argue anything in Countdown. Abundance is a theory that there is plenty for all, the opposite of scarcity. Diamandis hopes that our exponential population growth can be countered (or at least managed) by our exponential computing growth. We have abilities now that were pipe dreams a mere 5 years ago. In Abundance, Diamandis envisions a world where perhaps we can sustainably provide food and water for 7 billion people, maybe even 9!

Both authors make the obvious point that long lifespans lead to increasing population unless birthrates go way down. Both say that low birth and death rates are an indicator of a healthy, prosperous society. A leading indicator and a trailing indicator. Cause and effect, if you will. Both say reducing births is essential for our continued existence as a species.

Diamandis points to the history of wealthy societies that have made the transition from high birth- and death-rates to low birth- and death-rates. He reminds us that many of the world’s poor societies have leapfrogged the wired generation, and went straight from agriculture to wireless. A dirt-poor farmer in Africa or Asia can do their banking faster on a flip-phone than we can in the US. Education, so crucial for health, wealth, women’s rights, etc, can now be had for free or nearly so, wirelessly, anywhere in the world through a variety of sources that didn’t exist 5 years ago. As solar panels plummet in price, an electric pump for water in every village becomes feasible. When girls don’t have to walk 90 minutes each way for water to feed themselves each day, they have time for education. Educated, well fed people are more likely to specialize into doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs, etc. than be stuck on a sandy farm, barefoot and pregnant. When those solar panels can power a small electric stove, forests don’t get harvested for firewood. When you reduce indoor air pollution by eliminating indoor fires, less time and money is spent on healthcare. When health care can be provided by a sensor the size of a cell phone, and connects to your phone, you get access to very highly educated people, with great facilities. When IBM’s Watson (which easily beat all the humans at Jeopardy) can answer your health care questions, the costs can approach zero. When a human genome can be sequenced in seconds, minutes, or hours, you get personalized medical care from Watson, anywhere in the world, in the same day, for practically free. When people aren’t scared of their children dying, they don’t need to have as many.

Weisman suggests that won’t be fast enough to save us. He brings up the specter of Malthusian
population collapse (see how you knee-jerk when I combine the words “specter” and “Malthusian?” Aren’t humans fun?) if we continue on business-as-usual. Fish populations around the world have
crashed, to the tune of 90% losses. The vast majority of dry land is already used for food production, and it is falling in productivity due to chemical overdose by fertilizers and pesticides. Water tables by many major population centers are falling, some dramatically, as sea level rises. And we’re genocidal, causing extinctions at 100-1000 times the rate observed throughout all of fossil history. The only comparable time was when an asteroid killed some big lizards a while back. He mentions ecologists (the people who study the natural world, who probably know something about this) showing that we have already passed several thresholds of the planet’s ability to support human life, and is unsure if ANYTHING we do can pull us back up over the edge.

Weisman also mentions another reason people have many children: religion. Extremist religions want to
increase their numbers to expand their religious influence. Examples include: fundamentalist Mormons,
hardline Catholics, extremist Muslims, and ultra-orthodox Jews. Those are the only populations not
facing abject poverty that are growing.

Weisman didn’t examine the techno-philanthropists. He ends marveling at the beauty of the world, hoping future generations of humans can enjoy it. Diamandis spends his whole treatise describing ways people are actually acting to achieve that. Both are important books, but should not be read in isolation.

Both point out the challenges facing us now are unlike anything we have ever experienced, and that we
need to think differently about many things to make it through this. We need to not be simple animals any more, but think critically about the path our species is taking, and how each individual impacts that. If we can voluntarily change our destiny, we won’t have nature do it for us. Because that would be unpleasant.

So Jenn and I won’t have 5 kids, and are cutting our consumption, from decadent western level, down past Mustachian levels, to beach bum level! I expect it will be a lot more fun. Care to join us somewhere?