From marking time to floating in limbo

Well, we are back in Seattle and back on the boat, now for the foreseeable future. I am pretty relieved in some respects; although we are located way out in the Seattle sticks (as much out in the sticks as you can get in Seattle, anyway), it still seems relatively close to everything. We went downtown yesterday to see the new Harry Potter movie. It was great; Seafair weekend is in full swing and we went to the noon showing, right when the Blue Angels are up. The theater was deserted and we got the best seats in the house. It was the first 3D movie Mandy has ever been to. I'm not sure she noticed any difference. But it was fun to get out and do city things finally after so long.

Although we are back in the city, in some ways we are feeling even more disconnected. The problem with the truck turned out to be the head gasket, which is a major problem and opens a whole can of worms with respect to other potential engine problems. I had been hoping to limp back to Seattle with it, but it really seemed to be deteriorating quickly when I started out, so I ended up leaving it up there and we took the bus back. So we are without a vehicle right now. We have pretty much decided just to sell it, rather than putting a bunch of time or money into repairs and even then possibly not having it actually fixed.

I have mixed feelings about this. In our grand plan of getting out and sailing around more, the truck was never in the long-term picture anyway. What's the sense in keeping a vehicle if you are never around to use it? It seems silly now to put more money into it or to go buy something else when the ultimate goal is to not have it anyway.

On the other hand, we weren't quite to that stage where we were going to head out yet, either. We don't even have the boat we plan to take! So that's a year or more, perhaps, of having to make things work out here in the sticks at Shilshole without having wheels of our own. Mandy says she feels increasingly like a hobo. I'm torn on what to do: bite the bullet and buy something else, accepting that spending that money on a car takes it away from buying a new boat, or to try to make do without a vehicle, even as Metro is threatening to cut the only bus line we have out to the marina (a bus that is very nearly useless already, as it runs so seldom).

We're going to try going without for a while and see what happens. We signed up for Zipcar yesterday, a car sharing service that won't really cost us anything if we end up not using it, and which should be pretty inexpensive for those times when we absolutely need a car. The down side is that the closest cars they have are in Ballard. That represents a pretty long walk, which reduces the convenience factor considerably. And while it might be tolerable in the summer, it's got the potential to be untenable this winter, particularly for the sorts of business engagements that we might need to drive to. Mandy isn't going to be looking her best heading to Boeing after slogging through two miles of mud puddles to get to the car. Taking the bus to the Zipcar, if the route even still exists by then, would work, but it's hideously expensive for a short hop. Walking to get the car, bringing it back to the marina, then getting ready and going, would also work, but is a very time-consuming process.

So, I have some trepidation about the situation but the only way to resolve it seems to be just to try it. We will still have the option of buying a car if this doesn't work out. My first instinct is that we can do anything for a while, and that the best way forward is to just accelerate our plans to get another boat and get out sailing again, but I don't have any clear plan for making that happen. There are a lot of little steps in between to be figured out, like selling this boat, finding a place to live temporarily while shopping for the next one, figuring out what to do with the slip in between, and figuring out how to sustain our businesses while we are out sailing. We were on a good path to get most of our income from remote, online work, but earlier this year that fell off a cliff for some reason and now most of our income is back to coming from in-person engagements. We're still making as much, maybe even a little more, but it's a setback for a traveling lifestyle. The state of the global economy also looms darkly. Sometimes I wonder if that's just a pipe dream I've been chasing, making one poor decision after another in pursuit of the unachievable. It's hard to look back over the past few years and see how many situations we have been in where life has handed us lemons, and I have made rancid lemon juice out of them instead of lemonade.

So far, I don't seem to be learning from that experience, which has left me a little confused. You're supposed to take lessons from life and use those to improve your decision-making moving forward, but I look back at all this and even though I see all the poor decisions, the lessons always seem ambiguous or contradictory. I never seem to be able to apply any of them to the next decisions I have to make. I feel a little cheated; where is all the life wisdom supposed to come from?