Top 10 Life Changes Since Being Back

Here’s a big change: Walking to school with a puppy who insists on being picked up, then put down, might make us miss the bus. Not all our changes are good. Not all our changes are bad. But our changes are MANY. So here are ten ways “normal” life is different from cruising life.

10. News. Regaining access to the 24-hour news cycle … at the precise moment when impeachment hearings begin.

Both sets of parents and other family are now within easy driving distance, including my godson, Jake, who is one of my favorite people on earth (Hi, Jake!). So, we’re enjoying seeing them all when we can—and it helps that we actually ENJOY seeing them all (if you know what I mean).

8. Dishwasher. NOT. Someone asked Savai what she missed most about being away. She said, “a dishwasher.” Since we’re still living aboard, we STILL hand wash dishes in a sink the size of a dog bowl. But hey, at least we don’t have to use seawater anymore!

The girls went for months without seeing other children, let alone friends, so we are all enjoying catching up with our old peeps and making new friends, too. Then again, no one rows over to our boat with a (semi)cold beer/spare engine part/pamplemousse anymore, and we miss that. (Hi, Tango, PresMo, Whey to Go, Debonair, and all the South Pacific kid boats and other cool folks we met along the way!)

6. Reliable WiFi. Even though we were technically in the U.S. for most of our cruise, internet in Hawai’i and (especially) Alaska was elusive (hence the dearth of Alaskan blog posts; Savai did three (3!) awesome drafts of blogs and kept losing them to the ethers!). Now, we still have to walk up to the pub/coffeeshop/library, but at least the speeds are faster and the connectivity is more reliable.

REDACTION: I take #6 back! I went up to the library to post this; it was closed. I went to the coffeeshop to post this; the WiFi didn’t work. I tried to use my iPhone hotspot; that didn’t work. So now I’m posting from the laundry room at the marina; let’s hope it works! And don’t even get me started about the girls’ textbooks and homework assignments being online now, the school assuming everyone has easy internet access. (A teensy part of why parents’ socioeconomic status is still the number one predictor of student achievement perhaps? But I digress.)

4. School. Particularly the kind that I don’t have to teach. (If you missed my post on the joys and woes of boatschool . . . )

3. Schedules. While cruising requires a lot more time spent on fundamental living tasks that one doesn’t even think about when living in a house (lugging water jugs aboard, emptying sewage tanks, constantly monitoring weather, and doing laundry on deck or pedal-pedal-pedaling to the laundromat), there is one thing that it is blissfully free of: time schedules. On a day-to-day basis, this feels to me like the biggest change; we actually have to BE places at specific times now, whereas, cruising, you can only be where the weather allows you to be.

Things are rolling in the background with my next book—STAY TUNED! In the meantime, I’m re-upping my CDL (commercial driver’s license). I used to drive bus back when I was a teacher, so I’m excited to do it again here on the island. It’s an awesome community of folks (Hi, Mr. Walker!) with a super flexible part-time schedule.

Which brings us to the fact that today is LAUNCH DAY for Graeme’s first product! Graeme is starting an outdoor gear company that keeps people warm in the wilderness called IGNIK Outdoors. Ignik means “of or pertaining to fire” in old English, and simply “fire” in Inupiat, but makes the wordsmith in me think of someone who’s really into (“nik”) igniting things. (Welcome to how my mind works! ;)) Ignik’s first product is called the Gas Growler and it aims to get rid of those single-use “green” propane bottles that fuel your campstove. One fill-up of this reusable tank at your local service station costs the SAME as the bottle you’d throw in the landfill, gives you FIVE times the fuel, and only takes up a little more space. Plus, it looks cool.

You can learn more about the Gas Growler and Ignik here.

So, all in all, I’d say our transition is going pretty well. Especially when you consider this:

(I know.)