A question is merely the handle by which you reach the answer.
Yesterday saw me talking again with Tom and Dan about Vancouver and it seemed that they were both enjoying the daydreams. Tom thinks it'd be nice to be able to move there too. He figures maybe if he puts in enough experience in the library here he could apply out there for work.
Today I learned a bit about boat electronics. I know, for instance, that power is a huge issue on boats. You pay through the nose for it at the dock or have to generate your own. I know too that solar cells and wind gens and batteries currently still can't support a home theatre, so you need to hook in to the grid still or buy a lot of fuel and run a generator. This also is noisy and stinky, ruining the whole point of getting out there.
I also know that nobody uses their HT systems away from the dock for a 2nd reason, they enjoy the cruising too much to be interested in a screen. Well, that and probably many still can't handle being inside while under way. Staring at a movie would make the boat motion even more nausea inducing than usual! Imagine watching a 3d rollercoaster imax on a big screen tv while the boat moves out of sync.... No maybe don't, I'm already feeling ill.
So yeah, there's a few things that could get in the way but I'm hoping we'll be jazzed enough to suffer through the adjustment long enough to overcome them. It's a learning curve, you know? On the body as well as the mind. It's a second childhood in that sense truly, a rebirth, a new life. Dan's starting to get the "off the grid" bug and comparing with a "cabin in the woods with a trap line" this dream is pretty seductive.
Frankly there's a limited number of ways to get off the treadmill. Get wealthy enough to pay other people to keep it out of your way, get so poor you're living outside in the city surviving on it's gleanings, Go be self sufficient in a remote place, either farming or trapping or such, but without doing business off it. You can still barter with neighbours but you aren't shuffling money from hand to hand! Getting a mobile home, be it plane, train, RV or boat and being mostly self sufficient because you can utilize the waste spaces in the places you want to be. I believe a boat is more flexible because the ocean wraps the land and the water often reaches right to the hinterlands (Great Lakes system?) and there's a place in the big blue where no law commands you at all. If tyranny darkens the land, you can flee with style on a sailboat, or even harry it from it's fringe.
Well, that's from dan's dark view of the future. I used to see it that way. I see how he's getting it, and that there's certainly a danger there, but I really do have faith in ordinary people. I really do think they'll fix it. sometimes, though, it takes a lot of pushing to get empire citizens off their fat little tushies and working again. We westerners have gotten very very soft. Both mentally lazy and phsyically lazy, ill and tired and stressed, it's not going to be easy to move the population into the difficult right path of change. Right now, they're just racing into more violence and threat without a plan, a goal, or anything but incoherent rage and coherent complaints! When they turn to the internet for direction, there's catfish people waiting to suck them in with propaganda, sloganized essays, cut and paste fractured data in videos, stats, and speeches, and impassioned pleas to the audiences' worst fears. As evil as the evil they decry, I clear see the family resemblance. I think maybe getting Dan out on the sea marvelling at wales and rocky shores, dining on self-caught seafood at sunset, maybe that'll get his mind off these nasty people trying to scare him out of his wallet and hard-won earnings.
I really need to start more deeply considering the discomforts and cons of this, though.
No bathtub. I can probably line up a booking with a bed and breakfast type place to rent one, but between times it's really cold sponge baths for me, or hot springs if I can find them. I have done that lifestyle on occasion and after the first week I get pretty homesick for a bathtub.
Wet/damp We will likely rebuild the boat interior when all is said and done. We come from a place with much higher standards of insulation and sealing. Spray foam insulation, for instance, followed by unsealed cedar boards would really help banish condensation. Then we want retrofit windows to stop condensation there too.
Still, mould and damp will need to be fought. I was thinking maybe a water maker machine. It would be a dehumidifier as well as creating pure h2o. If it could run on low power maybe it could use the wind and solar gens on deck.
So but there you are, it's howling gale force rains out there. You can hear the rain whalloping the boat in gusts and waves testing your sealants above. The boat is bouncing a bit too because you're on moor in a harbour, not at dock (who's bright idea was it to save dock fees?). Oh right, they were full up and there was no choice.
Yeah, that'd be uglier than being snowed in at home, yep. Can't run your main electronics and lights because you had to take down the wind gen, it's too dark for solar, and you heard it's a 3 day storm so you have to conserve the batteries. Can't sleep, can't settle down and do hand work because you're moving around. You know, harbours are designed to minimize the tossing around, aren't they? Maybe it's not so bad. I can count on one hand the number of times we had anything close to on our vacations, but that was Great Lakes. Maybe the answer is a 3 mos contract at a marina near Vancouver or Victoria for the winter, and the better seasons running cheap.
Yeah, see, I can't just list the cons without trying to imagine possible solutions. Not my style to quit with the question. A question is merely the handle by which you reach the answer.
Ok, other cons, come on Yo. Well dan's fear of the sea is not unfounded. Foolhardiness is quite deadly in fact. There are sometimes even things actively trying to kill you out there. I can't expect my faith in magic to answer his question, nor let it be my only answer. It may fill me with confidence but the answer must be real in the 3d world we occupy! Fortunately, it's very easy to answer "study hard, learn how, do it right." it's being done by whole families the world over and is one of the first types of human life I think we have. I think people occupied seashores far more comfortably than the hinterlands and only war would have driven them there. Rarely is there famine by the sea but it can certainly visit the land easily enough.
So nevermind the scary stuff, there's all kinds of ways to protect against it. Just worry about pirates and stay close to home where your coast guard protects you. They do too.
Smokin' dope and border guards and sailing so close to an international border.
In Ontario they didn't surprise you but they did board your boat. It wasn't like a home where they needed a search warrant, but more like a home visit on your vehicle. They didn't stop you on the water, you were required to report when crossing. They'd meet you at the dock. I suppose they don't molest boats all over the place, just near the border and maybe they have you tracked on radar anyway so know if you're going ashore, stopping near the shore, crossing borders, etc. I'd just hate to be getting my home randomly boarded by officious egos. I can plan for and submit if we're heading to seattle or area to visit family (who'd have to drive in from spokane anyway) but that's about it!
cons: getting the boat I'm picturing will be costly. I also did a quick estimate of our home's value vs our debt and it's not definitely going to clear the debt with leftover for a vessel and appointments. yeah, that keeps discouraging me. That damn debt is big enough to grow itself as fast as we can feed it. it's like trying to wait for a cantankerous parrot to die of old age. He just might outlive you. But another quick calculation revealed that our living costs if we chose carefully could see us with $800 less in costs just from switching to a vancouver area rental home and paying off our debt. That assumed a place with utilities all in, of course. I found a few at $1000/mth and in fact there were some less expensive choices too that I bypassed on principle. Even so, until you've had a nose in the place sniffing you don'tknow yet if it's liveable! Out in that region the nose is the final arbiter as the primary concerns are roaches and mould, both with a distinct aroma. I also keep thinking maybe we could find a big enough boat that still trailers and buy it here and tow it out there after fixing it up and selling the house. it would be really nice to do all it's renovating in the back yard if we could. I doubt we could , the city might object, but not if it doesn't stick too high above the hedge. Hmmm, need to research how big still trailers, and how tall they are with the mast shipped. Then see if they come that big around here and find a cheap one.
Ok, enough writing, I really should get some work done today.
Today I learned a bit about boat electronics. I know, for instance, that power is a huge issue on boats. You pay through the nose for it at the dock or have to generate your own. I know too that solar cells and wind gens and batteries currently still can't support a home theatre, so you need to hook in to the grid still or buy a lot of fuel and run a generator. This also is noisy and stinky, ruining the whole point of getting out there.
I also know that nobody uses their HT systems away from the dock for a 2nd reason, they enjoy the cruising too much to be interested in a screen. Well, that and probably many still can't handle being inside while under way. Staring at a movie would make the boat motion even more nausea inducing than usual! Imagine watching a 3d rollercoaster imax on a big screen tv while the boat moves out of sync.... No maybe don't, I'm already feeling ill.
So yeah, there's a few things that could get in the way but I'm hoping we'll be jazzed enough to suffer through the adjustment long enough to overcome them. It's a learning curve, you know? On the body as well as the mind. It's a second childhood in that sense truly, a rebirth, a new life. Dan's starting to get the "off the grid" bug and comparing with a "cabin in the woods with a trap line" this dream is pretty seductive.
Frankly there's a limited number of ways to get off the treadmill. Get wealthy enough to pay other people to keep it out of your way, get so poor you're living outside in the city surviving on it's gleanings, Go be self sufficient in a remote place, either farming or trapping or such, but without doing business off it. You can still barter with neighbours but you aren't shuffling money from hand to hand! Getting a mobile home, be it plane, train, RV or boat and being mostly self sufficient because you can utilize the waste spaces in the places you want to be. I believe a boat is more flexible because the ocean wraps the land and the water often reaches right to the hinterlands (Great Lakes system?) and there's a place in the big blue where no law commands you at all. If tyranny darkens the land, you can flee with style on a sailboat, or even harry it from it's fringe.
Well, that's from dan's dark view of the future. I used to see it that way. I see how he's getting it, and that there's certainly a danger there, but I really do have faith in ordinary people. I really do think they'll fix it. sometimes, though, it takes a lot of pushing to get empire citizens off their fat little tushies and working again. We westerners have gotten very very soft. Both mentally lazy and phsyically lazy, ill and tired and stressed, it's not going to be easy to move the population into the difficult right path of change. Right now, they're just racing into more violence and threat without a plan, a goal, or anything but incoherent rage and coherent complaints! When they turn to the internet for direction, there's catfish people waiting to suck them in with propaganda, sloganized essays, cut and paste fractured data in videos, stats, and speeches, and impassioned pleas to the audiences' worst fears. As evil as the evil they decry, I clear see the family resemblance. I think maybe getting Dan out on the sea marvelling at wales and rocky shores, dining on self-caught seafood at sunset, maybe that'll get his mind off these nasty people trying to scare him out of his wallet and hard-won earnings.
I really need to start more deeply considering the discomforts and cons of this, though.
No bathtub. I can probably line up a booking with a bed and breakfast type place to rent one, but between times it's really cold sponge baths for me, or hot springs if I can find them. I have done that lifestyle on occasion and after the first week I get pretty homesick for a bathtub.
Wet/damp We will likely rebuild the boat interior when all is said and done. We come from a place with much higher standards of insulation and sealing. Spray foam insulation, for instance, followed by unsealed cedar boards would really help banish condensation. Then we want retrofit windows to stop condensation there too.
Still, mould and damp will need to be fought. I was thinking maybe a water maker machine. It would be a dehumidifier as well as creating pure h2o. If it could run on low power maybe it could use the wind and solar gens on deck.
So but there you are, it's howling gale force rains out there. You can hear the rain whalloping the boat in gusts and waves testing your sealants above. The boat is bouncing a bit too because you're on moor in a harbour, not at dock (who's bright idea was it to save dock fees?). Oh right, they were full up and there was no choice.
Yeah, that'd be uglier than being snowed in at home, yep. Can't run your main electronics and lights because you had to take down the wind gen, it's too dark for solar, and you heard it's a 3 day storm so you have to conserve the batteries. Can't sleep, can't settle down and do hand work because you're moving around. You know, harbours are designed to minimize the tossing around, aren't they? Maybe it's not so bad. I can count on one hand the number of times we had anything close to on our vacations, but that was Great Lakes. Maybe the answer is a 3 mos contract at a marina near Vancouver or Victoria for the winter, and the better seasons running cheap.
Yeah, see, I can't just list the cons without trying to imagine possible solutions. Not my style to quit with the question. A question is merely the handle by which you reach the answer.
Ok, other cons, come on Yo. Well dan's fear of the sea is not unfounded. Foolhardiness is quite deadly in fact. There are sometimes even things actively trying to kill you out there. I can't expect my faith in magic to answer his question, nor let it be my only answer. It may fill me with confidence but the answer must be real in the 3d world we occupy! Fortunately, it's very easy to answer "study hard, learn how, do it right." it's being done by whole families the world over and is one of the first types of human life I think we have. I think people occupied seashores far more comfortably than the hinterlands and only war would have driven them there. Rarely is there famine by the sea but it can certainly visit the land easily enough.
So nevermind the scary stuff, there's all kinds of ways to protect against it. Just worry about pirates and stay close to home where your coast guard protects you. They do too.
Smokin' dope and border guards and sailing so close to an international border.
In Ontario they didn't surprise you but they did board your boat. It wasn't like a home where they needed a search warrant, but more like a home visit on your vehicle. They didn't stop you on the water, you were required to report when crossing. They'd meet you at the dock. I suppose they don't molest boats all over the place, just near the border and maybe they have you tracked on radar anyway so know if you're going ashore, stopping near the shore, crossing borders, etc. I'd just hate to be getting my home randomly boarded by officious egos. I can plan for and submit if we're heading to seattle or area to visit family (who'd have to drive in from spokane anyway) but that's about it!
cons: getting the boat I'm picturing will be costly. I also did a quick estimate of our home's value vs our debt and it's not definitely going to clear the debt with leftover for a vessel and appointments. yeah, that keeps discouraging me. That damn debt is big enough to grow itself as fast as we can feed it. it's like trying to wait for a cantankerous parrot to die of old age. He just might outlive you. But another quick calculation revealed that our living costs if we chose carefully could see us with $800 less in costs just from switching to a vancouver area rental home and paying off our debt. That assumed a place with utilities all in, of course. I found a few at $1000/mth and in fact there were some less expensive choices too that I bypassed on principle. Even so, until you've had a nose in the place sniffing you don'tknow yet if it's liveable! Out in that region the nose is the final arbiter as the primary concerns are roaches and mould, both with a distinct aroma. I also keep thinking maybe we could find a big enough boat that still trailers and buy it here and tow it out there after fixing it up and selling the house. it would be really nice to do all it's renovating in the back yard if we could. I doubt we could , the city might object, but not if it doesn't stick too high above the hedge. Hmmm, need to research how big still trailers, and how tall they are with the mast shipped. Then see if they come that big around here and find a cheap one.
Ok, enough writing, I really should get some work done today.