currently in: Santa Rosa Lake State Park, NM

It's Thanksgiving, and I have something to be thankful for: we are finally out of the house and on the road! After a week of sorting, packing, cleaning, arranging, and most importantly figuring out what exactly we will have Bob The Construction Guy do while we're gone, finally everything is sorted, packed, etc., and we are in the Arf-Vee headed south and east.

(For those of you who weren't around last trip:  the Arf-Vee got its name because when we bought it, the exterior was "decorated" with airbrushed paintings of dogs. The former owners were dog trainers; by the time we reached Burlington, VT we got sick of people asking about "our dogs" and painted over the portraits with blue and brown spray paint. Now it's, um, the Modern-Art-Vee, I guess.)

Considering that the RV has been sitting mostly unused for two years, it was a pleasant surprise to discover that most things on it still work. Unsurprisingly, that's "most" and not "all". The fridge doesn't seem to be working on DC power (what we use when underway), and as I write this Britt is trying to modify the sink's water faucets so they have a setting between "off" and "leaking all over." I suppose we should consider this a preview of what most likely awaits us at Windom!

Back when we decided for the first time that yes, we were really going to sell everything and go sailing, we moved from a "dream" to a "plan" by the simple expedient of setting a date. That gave us something to work toward and plan for, and even though we didn't quite hit our schedule to the exact day, we were pretty darn close.

This time, we'd been talking all summer about getting on the boat again, but all we did was talk about it. Apparently "this fall" wasn't enough of a date to kick our planning into gear. So a few weeks ago we set a date:  next Tuesday. Gulp. We may not quite make that deadline, but just having one has set a fire under us, and we've been incredibly busy.

Another necessity for our planning is The List. This is because Britt is a very organized person who likes to have everything laid out for him, and because I am a very disorganized person who will not get anything done unless it's all laid out for me. So we sat down together and wrote up all the things we needed to do before we could leave Durango and head for the boat. Things like restarting our mail service (and arranging to forward from here), getting a new digital camera that can be used underwater, figuring out what remodeling work we want done by the contractor while we're gone -- 56 items in all.

The funny thing is, we've been crossing off items like mad as we've been accomplishing them. But The List is as long as ever! This is because every time we cross something off the list, we think of two more things that we need to do, and add them to the list. It's the Hydra List! Our accomplishments really accelerated last week, though, and we whittled things back "down" to...56 items.

But lately we have been making real inroads on The List. A lot of the remaining items are things we can't do until just before we leave, such as turning off the water heater and cleaning out the kitchen. The number of unchecked items is, finally, dwindling. Hopefully soon we'll get down to the last item, cross it off, and head for the boatyard. Although we've got a lot to do once we get there to get Windom ready for cruising again.

So as soon as we get there we'll make a List...

Yet another test. I suppose I should be pleased that things are working at all, but I can't help wanting the formatting to be exactly absolutely one hundred percent perfect.

Here's the birds-nest in our coiled halyard. Birds tend to like boats - our boom is hollow (for those of you who are non-sailors: the boom is the horizontal spar sticking out of the mast, that holds the bottom of the
mainsail) and we've had to discourage birds from nesting in it!

I changed a few blog settings, so I'm afraid I need to do another test to make sure things haven't got too messed up. Here for your enjoyment is poor Windom sitting in a cow pasture in Florida, as taken by our friends Chris and Edith earlier this year.

Two years on the hard = two hard years. The expensive special tape we got to cover up all the teak has mostly peeled off, leaving the wood to weather. Even so far from the ocean, some of the fittings in the bilge have corroded. Some birds have made a nest in the coiled halyard just under the dodger. (And we have been told that hornets have made a nest in the cabin - when we arrive we'll have to bug-bomb the place pronto!)

The hull looks pretty good in the pictures - we covered it up with a thick coat of wax which is still intact. And even though the dodger and bimini have been degrading in the sun, we left them there on purpose as sort of sacrificial covers. We're having new ones made, which should be ready by the time we get to Florida.

The interior still looks just like our boat-home. I can see the dishes in the partly-open cupboard, the books still on the shelves, the basketwork that we got by trading with the Wareo in Venezuela -- oh, I'm getting all emotional and nostalgic, looking at the pictures. I know it's going to be uncomfortable and strange at first, cramped and disorderly as we move in, with nothing working right, and I'm going to get cranky and yearn for my "real" house, but right now I don't care. I miss my boat!

(test #2, only one photo...)

Apologies to all - this weblog system apparently still has a few bugs in it, so I'm going to have to do a few test posts here and there to make sure it's all working.

The software I'm using to make our current logs is Blogger, which is actually now part of Google. (Anybody else think that Google is seekritly planning to Take Over The World?) It's important I get posting by email working properly, because once we are in the Bahamas, we won't have web access at all. (In fact, web access will be dicey once we're on the boat, unless cell phone modems have vastly improved since 1999. Which they probably have.)

All right, this is enough for a test.

Wow. It's funny how no matter where you are and what you're doing, it quickly seems normal. I remember back in 1999 when we started cruising, it didn't take long at all before it seemed natural, as though it had been our lifestyle forever. And now, sitting in our living room in Durango, Colorado, it's hard to remember cruising.

Which is why, of course, we want to go again. All the good times -cockpit parties, snorkeling on the reefs to catch dinner, exploring cities and museums, hiking on unspoiled dunes - have become hazy memories, and it's time to jolt them a little. (At the same time, the little unpleasantnesses have been conveniently forgotten, and the really awful experiences have lost their emotional gloss and become great stories to tell at parties!) We find ourselves telling these stories to our new friends here, bringing pictures of our travels to slide shows, always choosing the steak in restaurants because our standard for "fresh" fish is "we just caught it half an hour ago."

Planning our second cruise has been very different from our first. Then, we made a clean break, selling nearly everything we owned and leaving the community we'd been a part of. We weren't necessarily planning on living aboard forever, but we were making a wholesale switch from one lifestyle to another. This time, we want to keep one foot in each world. Durango is a great place to live, close to both some of Colorado's most impressively beautiful mountains and the redrock desert of Utah. (By the way, if you'd like to see some of our impressively beautiful mountains, check out these stories and pictures from our recent hikes.) And we've joined some local organizations, and made some friends. There's a great feeling you get when you go to a local event and see people you know, or even just recognize, and we had missed that without realizing it. It's nice to have friends around who aren't going to be heading in the opposite direction from you next week!

Our original plan was to rent out our house while we were gone, but that's not going to happen this time; we're in full throes of remodeling, and I can't imagine anyone would pay to live here. Plan B was to hire a contractor and have the entire place finished while we were gone, which would have been lovely except that we have been too busy to complete our building plans to the point where this could be done. So it looks like we're going to go with Plan C, which is to hire someone (we have someone in mind, fortunately, who has already done some of the work on the house) to complete certain portions of the remodeling. This will mean that at least we'll have someone in the house every so often to make sure things don't explode. But we'll also need to hire a service, I guess, to shovel the walk if it snows (so as not to get fined by the city, or sued if someone slips and breaks a bone), and to do yard work in the spring until we return. (It should be cheap, since we have a postage-stamp yard.)

We still have our mail service from our first cruise; we're "on hiatus" but will start it up again when we leave. Almost all our bills are automagically paid from our bank account, which should make things easier. We'll have to cut our phone service to bare-bones and suspend DSL; suspend our newspaper delivery and have our mail redirected to our mail service; store our pickup truck and arrange for the insurance to be lowered. (By state law we have to keep some insurance on it, even if nobody's using it. I'm not too upset about it, though, because we had to pay more than that to keep Windom insured, even while it was out of the water!) I also need to send more money to the IRS and state DOR to prepay most of our taxes, because I'm planning on filing for an extension so I don't have to worry about the dodgy mail situation from the Bahamas, where we plan to be come tax time.

Speaking of money, I'm sure a lot of you are wondering about our job situation. Thanks to some very nice people at NCAR, where I used to work in Boulder, I have a part-time "casual" telecommuting job. I really enjoy it because I feel like I'm contributing to scientific research again. Best of all, it's okay for me to take off huge hunks of time - like this. Britt is doing web application development on a contract basis with a local company, and is coming to the end of his work there. (Hopefully they'll hire him again when we come back!) He also has put in a proposal to do some work for another company while we're on the boat - the idea is that he can do the development offline on his laptop, and then either mail a CD or upload all at once from a net cafe or Batelco office. I know that working while cruising doesn't sound too vacation-like, but Britt is a type-A who felt the lack of intellectual stimulation on our last cruise, and is looking forward to having 10 hours or so a week of work to do. And we can't deny the money will help, because the part-time cruising lifestyle is significantly more expensive than the full-time one.

The current plan is to try to tie up all these loose ends over the next week or two and then head out. We still have the RV, which was probably a mistake as we haven't used it since we got back to Colorado; we'll try to sell it when we reach Florida and get resettled with the boat. We'll do the minimum necessary to get back in the water at the boatyard, and then go to a marina in Fort Myers and finish re-commissioning there. With luck we'll be in the Keys at the turn of the year, and in the Bahamas not long after.

Thanks for joining us, whether you "came along" on our first voyage or are just discovering our site now.

Test number, um, I think I've lost count. But here's another lovely picture
taken from the "gondola car" of the train as we head up toward Silverton,
with the snow-covered Needle Mountains in the notch of the canyon. Taken
last fall.

Windom Peak from Jagged Mountain, originally uploaded by svwindom.

Another test, to see if I can "blog this" directly from flickr. Trying to diagnose why the post by email didn't work.