The Live-Aboard Life...and Updates!

We are settled in to the Bay Area!  We paid our LAST rent check to Miami last month and just got the news that we would be getting back most of our deposit, which was surprising because the management company sent us the checklist saying we'd be charged like, $300 for pet cleaning, etc.  And they're only keeping about $85 bucks.  So we're stoked.  We're thrilled not to be paying money for an apartment we're not using anymore and we're stoked that we can catch up on a few things around here, start a couple projects on the boat, and not have $2K a month just going out the window!  It's awesome.  And it's time for an update!  

Kris is digging in at his new job, working with two new hires and settling in with his coworkers, been given a few projects and next week he starts being on-call to monitor the systems after hours from home should any alerts find him.  He's gotten some updates from friends of ours in Lugano who have moved on to better positions and we're so happy to hear some news from there from time to time.  My laptop crashed and had to be rebooted with Ubuntu and hopefully that's the last of that problem.  Kris put not the most current but the more stable version as he's been having issues with the most current version he updated his personal laptop with so we're trying to make sure mine doesn't have the same issues as well, which is nice. :)  He also downgraded himself to a cane after about 7 months on crutches and having to travel with them when he went back for work training in WI for a couple weeks.  His leg has been doing really well even though he's turned into more of a human barometer than me and my knees when a low-pressure front comes through, but that's to be expected.  Otherwise, he's walking pretty well.  We'll eventually go get another set of x-rays to get the official word but considering how many months of his life he's spent on crutches he's got a pretty good idea of when he can start using it more.  We're planning to find a pool so we can both get back to swimming and getting back in shape.

As for me, after seeing a few quotes I've liked lately, and looking around inside the salon of our boat, I've decided that life is terribly uncomplicated when you live on a boat.  The interior/exterior home repairs take the same amount of time, money, and planning.  You have just enough room for the basics, and the basics are all you need, really, and we're doing pretty good getting by with them, for the most part.  I do admit to missing my crock pot but since our fridge isn't big enough to hold all the leftovers that come from cooking in a crock pot, and not to mention I have no clue where I'd store it when not using it, or the amount of power it would suck up, the problem sorted itself out.  Not to worry, I'm still pinning all sorts of delicious sounding crock pot recipes to my Pinterest page for when we eventually do get around to getting a small apartment and cooking for the holidays.  Try as I might, I cannot imagine a turkey stuffed into our little galley oven!  I went to the storage space yesterday to retrieve a handful of things, shorts, bathing suits (as it's getting particularly gorgeous in Alameda) and, more specifically, our big saucepan.  I found it and so I threw out the cheap frying pan we bought when we first landed in Miami in the trash.  It was one of those sets that work in a pinch but that tend to scorch and warp after a long period of use and it served us well, but was too small for homemade spaghetti sauce and barely big enough for a big quesadilla so it needs to go.  It will also replace the current need for a bigger saucepan as we can actually cook more than one serving of pasta in it without boiling over and it will actually fit where the current pan one is residing.  Plus, I really just missed it and I can justify it's presence on the boat over the crock pot.  It's the big non-stick saucepan I bought at Safeway when I first moved out of my parent's house and I've loved it ever since, and it's been serving me well.  That's right, it moved from Monterey to Switzerland to Miami and back home to California.  It's a well-traveled pan.  I don't know too many people who can say that their kitchen utensils have made two ocean crossings.  I'm looking forward to having it back in my arsenal of cooking weapons as I figured out long ago that I can make a whole entree in it, one pot style, depending on the ingredients, and even rice, if I pay attention, so I love it.  

We went to Costco a couple weeks bag and stocked up with our usual snack foods and then soups, pasta sauces, tortillas, Mac and Cheese, canned chicken.  I made the decision a few weeks ago to just go ahead and turn on our fridge, so we've got that handy place for our butter and milk for Mac, cheese for tortillas, refrigeration for when I make chicken salad (honestly, what better way is there of covering up that canned chicken taste than smothering it with mayo and spices?), and the promise of putting a few more fresh veggies back into our meals.  We've been eating WAY too much fast food while resettling in a new city and not having a full kitchen to cook with.  While I love just grabbing a pizza, my stomach has been having an issue with it and we need to cook more at home and have more food options on the boat that aren't all processed or can be be made from a box or can but healthier.  We'd initially worried that it would have too big an effect on the house batteries but after having it up and running for an hour it figured out it's power cycle and everything else we've had plugged in doesn't seem to be bothered by it so I think we're good.  Our neighbor suggested that we could just hit up the ice machine in the laundry room every couple of days and put enough ice in the fridge to keep it cold so we could not turn it on but the thought of taking everything back out to re-do the ice every couple of days honestly makes me lazy.  It's small enough that if we set the bucket of ice on the shelf, it would cut down our refrigeration room by quite a bit so it would have to just be poured into the space under the shelf...thus not wanting to take everything out and put it all back in again all the time when not rearranging for a carton of eggs.  That's all you need, right?  Eggs, quesadilla supplies (all of which, when mixed together give you the most simple of breakfast burritos) and bacon. There's always room for bacon : )  And the occasional six-pack of cider.  I'm pretty sure, to everyone in line with us at the grocery store, we look like college students when we're not re-supplying our fruits and veggies.  Eggs, shredded cheese, Ramen noodles, three bags of chips and alcohol.  Yeah.  I'd look at us funny, too. :)

Weekends when we haven't made any plans we wake up, get bagels for breakfast and sit out in the sun reading away to our hearts content.  We're currently reading the Dresden Files series.  If you've seen the show but not read the books, I'd highly recommend it!  I'm also a serious chunk into the second book of the Game of Thrones series so I'm slightly behind the new season but as Kris says, I read faster than he does.  No worries here.  We've done a couple more sailing runs, in and around the estuary but we need to repair a back-stay so that might have precedence over the next trip out.  Every few weeks we get down to Monterey and see Kirby and my folks.  When Kris was in WI I spent tons of time with my mom, got my hair re-done red and chopped it all off (which I'm happy about now that the sun is out in full force) and saw my brother and his girlfriend for dinner one night with my Dad, which was good.  At Christmas, Dad bought  us all gift certificates to the shooting range and ammo for our particular guns so we need to plan a weekend where we can all meet up and go hunt some pesky clay pigeons.  We're making boat neighbor friends, Chloe's charming everyone and their dogs around the marina and the currently the bathrooms at our gate are going to be shut down for renovation starting Monday.  They're bringing in those trailers with the showers and nicer portable bathrooms and the main gate bathroom will still be open, as they're rotating their renovation schedule, but it's going to make parking fun.  And this just in!  Our friend Carla from Miami is visiting San Fran next month and we look forward to spending some time with her.  Wish we could get back to Miami for a visit but it won't be any time soon, for sure, and so it'll be nice to see her.  And our friend Bethany, from Lugano, is back home and about a half an hour away from us and it's ridiculous that we haven't seen her yet, but we're making plans.  She grew up in the same town as my parents and actually vaguely knows my cousins, as my aunt and uncle are still there, which was a fun thing to learn when we met her halfway around the world in SW.  And the annual Oakland Boat expo and seminars are kicking  off here pretty quickly.  This was were we did the Offshore Sailing seminar a couple years ago and I was told by one our neighbors this morning that there are a handful of free seminars you can sit in on so we might have to go look those up and see what's going on.  

People to catch up with and spaghetti to cook!  (A few recipes I've found including eggs cooked in tomato sauce and served over noodles...Yum!)
What are you catching up on this month?
Happy Plannings!

Enjoy,
Allie H.

Sunshine (& Sailing)

Woke up this morning to the sound of no rain, and a very lovely sunny light coming in through the window!  It's been raining pretty much non-stop for the past five days and while I like the rain, I couldn't wait for a break in the weather to shake off the gray and gloomy!  It's been raining here, randomly, all summer long, and it looks like it's going to be a wet winter too...We had a cold snap for a while and it got a little rainy, then managed to hold out for Halloween, and then started pouring down.  Personally I'm hoping it stops all this rain crap and starts in with the snow.  That would be fine with me.  You can still have some nice sunny days during snowfall.  Chloe was down for the break in the rain, too...She's been dressed in her little sweater or in her raincoat every time we've taken her downstairs and today it was her super-light sweater and a walk over to the university lawns with one of her balls so she could run around a bit...she's so not good with bringing back the ball but if you chase her when she's got it, she keeps running.  Hoping the sun keeps up for the rest of the week so we can do a romp every day in between all her normal downstairs trips.  She got a chance to run around in dry grass and I got a chance to collect some of the fall leaves-all the trees around the neighborhood are changing leaf color and dropping them-found some pretty orange and red/yellow combo leaves and thinking of pressing them and sticking them into a journal or something similar.  


Have had an surge of acceleration in writing over the past week-a story I have hopes for has been growing-whereas a week ago I had a few summary notes and a couple pages, there are now fourteen pages.  I love it when progress happens!  I love the pattern of plunking down with my laptop, pondering, changing a word here or there, revising a sentence, stretching, getting up to make more hot water for tea, and getting back to it, all with Chloe hanging out by my side, hoping to nudge her way in the middle of it all for a spot on my lap (which she gets every now and then.)  I've decided to get back into the practice of carrying a small notebook with me to flesh out little ideas-my cell phone has a post-it note app but I can of course write by hand so much faster than I can type on the little digital keyboard : )  I hate thinking of an idea, not writing it out, and then forgetting it the next day.....I've also started reading Game of Thrones and every time I find a word I'm not familiar with, I look it up and if I think I can use it, I jot it down in an ongoing list I have so that I can use it as a writing prompt or try to work it into the appropriate place.  


Kris found a group here that teaches sailing, take trips down to the Mediterranean and other places, teaches technique, navigation, etc, and when we're done with the course, there's a test, and in passing the test you're given an international captain's license.  The course is, of course, in Italian, but we've got a bundle of sailing books here in English that I'm going to start up on, to refresh myself on everything I already know and to learn more,  and I only hope that half of the terminology is the same or very similar in Italian, which would help a whole lot.  The course would supremely boost our Italian language skills and of course, a captain's license for each of us would be the best!  We could go anywhere in the world with it and charter a boat, and of course, when we decide to buy a sailboat and sail the world for ourselves, we'll have the licenses already taken care of.  There's more that will go along with that eventually-at some point I'd like a first aid refresher course, swimming for exercise and skill, etc.  Looking forward to it all!  Will be tough at first, but worth the effort in the end.


Happy Wednesday!
Enjoy,


Allie H. 

Recent reading...and dreaming

Kris and I bought these books last year at an offshore cruising seminar in Oakland-this family packed up and went cruising for two years, planned, then extended it to six years-mother, father, and three boys-did home school at sea while sailing all over the world!  Even if you're not a sail enthusiast, it's an absolutely interesting read.  


We met Mrs. Copeland at the seminar in the convention midway after drooling at all of the beautiful 40+ foot yachts on display in the harbor and conveyed our desire to sail in the Caribbean and eventually around the world and she was so thrilled at our dream for adventure.  We bought her pack of books and she signed each of them for us and wished us well and on our way soon!  


"Just Cruising" -Europe, Caribbean, Galapagos, South Pacific, and to Australia
"Still Cruising" -Australia, Indian Ocean, Cape of Good Hope, back to the US
"Comfortable Cruising" -Around North and Central America


All written by Liza Copeland with maps, pictures, appendices on planning routes, weather, etc, etc, etc-a wealth of information.  Of course, their trip was several years past but still a wealth of fascinating sites to see, wonderful stories of meeting people in every country who were helpful and fellow cruisers who they constantly saw in different ports around the world, who were like their family at sea, and watching even her youngest boy grow up with a totally different life experience than his classmates from home, an understanding of the world from a very hands on, unique perspective.  
http://www.aboutcruising.com/


Since unpacking our books here and going back to our favorites for a couple of months, we've decided to crack open these books and we're happy we did.  They're fabulous and we are now getting antsy to buy a boat of our own and get gone!