by Michele | Oct 19, 2012 | Preparation Stage
Our first batch. Those strawberries were delicious!
As you may have figured out by now, I don’t exactly consider myself the “domestic” type. This would certainly include my cooking skills or lack there of. My father-in-law used to joke that my best dish was bagel-bites and that wasn’t really an exaggeration. That is why you will find “Learn to Cook” on our To-Do List page. My best dish is no longer bagel-bites but I do still have a long way to go before I could peruse a Julia Child cookbook with confidence.
At the beginning of the summer, I heard an ad on the radio for a local crop share program which ran once a week from May through October. I figured this would be the perfect way for Dan and I to get a taste of what it might be like to only be able to cook items that are readily available, instead of relying on out of season fruits and vegetables. We know that there may be a lot of new foods in our travels that we haven’t eaten before and so we wanted a little practice with finding new recipes and getting out of our comfort zone.
Well, it sounded good in theory anyway. In the beginning of the season, we were doing pretty well trying out arugula in chicken breast with sauteed radishes. We had some fabulous green beans and spinach, fresh garlic and blue potatoes, corn on the cob and delicious blackberries. However, those were all the things that we had eaten before and already knew that we liked to eat. When we started getting shipments of squash, parsnips, turnips and beets, we were significantly less successful in our enthusiasm. Mostly, we would just drop off our whole box of food at Dan’s parents’ house and go out to eat. Not exactly what we had hoped but I guess that’s life.
I’m not sure if we learned more about cooking or about ourselves in this exercise. We certainly know that we have a long way to go before we could live reasonably on $1000-$1500 a month, which is our eventual goal. Maybe we’ll just start by eating bagel bites and move on from there.
by Michele | Oct 10, 2012 | Preparation Stage
Dan recently took this photo while on his day off with Carter
Recently, I had the opportunity to be part of a leadership seminar through my department at work. There were many excellent points discusses throughout the entire course of the seminar, but the portion on change is what really hit a chord with me. Hmm, I wonder why? The speaker, Chuck Stoner*, spoke specifically about the fact that every change in life comes with a sense of loss and grieving, even when the change is something positive that we are looking forward to.
When change comes, there is always a different path that will never be available to us again. Dan and I are currently standing in that divergence of choices and the other paths that we will be walking away from are so clear to me I can almost physically see them. I can see Carter at his first day of kindergarten, baseball game, and a host of other things that every mom cherishes and it does fill me with a sense of longing for that path. I can see that our grandparents are getting older and know in my heart that there is a very real possibility that being gone for 5-10 years or more means we might not get to see them again before they die. We may miss births of nieces and nephews, friends’ weddings, and a lot more events that we can never get back once they are over. We will be moving away from Dan’s very close-knit family that we spend time with multiple days a week.
All of these things and more impose a real weight to the decisions that we are making. They give more value to the good life that we are leaving behind to follow our dream of cruising. Does that mean that we will regret the choice to leave? I don’t think so. The excitement of moving forward and doing something new is far too great for us to look back wistfully for very long. But it does make me appreciate the time we have left a little more.
Follow your Dreams. Follow the Horizon.
*Dr. Charles Stoner and his speaking partner Tom Bower gave one of the best seminars I have ever attended. If you ever have a chance to go to one, I would highly recommend it. Also, you can find some of Chuck’s books on business and leadership here.
by Michele | Oct 3, 2012 | Preparation Stage
Let me just say that I am not a clean freak. In fact, that is probably waaay understating things. I certainly wouldn’t consider myself a grungy person or think that I live in a cesspool or anything that extreme and you won’t ever see my house on an episode of “Hoarders”, but Mr. Clean and I aren’t exactly best buddies either. My problem is I find myself going to two very different extremes when it comes to house cleaning: either every single speck of dust has to be gone or I’m just not going to bother. That attitude coupled with the fact that I work full-time and have a 1 year old means that the later has been my general philosophy for most of my married life.
Anyone that has sold a house can tell you that the number one thing to get your house ready to sell is to clean and de-clutter like nobody’s business. The “staging professionals” hired by our realtor described it as “clean like your grandmother would clean.” I like to call it June Cleaver Clean. The kind of clean that no house, car, or office of mine has ever experienced before. That is the level of clean that a house should be in before putting it on the market.
Well, our house is on the market…and I’m still working on the clean part. I’m pretty good at getting rid of the junk in the house, probably more so now that I know we can’t take most of it with us anyway. We only have 2 trunks full of stuff that won’t be coming with us that we would like our families to store. Things like my wedding dress and nice china. However, getting rid of all of our junk took a lot longer than I would have thought, even for my house that I like to purge of junk every 6 months or so. Our basement was especially bad, as we never used it for anything other than a giant junk dump. Our garage and laundry room are still not what I would consider up to par, but they are getting close.
That being said, having a house free of junk does not make it June Cleaver Clean. That part came this last weekend, as I took to the bathrooms and wood floors with my arsenal of cleaning products and waged war on grimy corners and scummy walls. It was a long hard fight, but I was victorious! And where was Dan during the War on Grime? He was fighting the good fight at 50 feet below in Mermet Springs. It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.
by Michele | Sep 12, 2012 | Preparation Stage
So, I realized today that’s it has been a good three weeks since our last blog post. Holy cow! I’m sorry we have been such big slackers for the last couple of weeks, it’s been crazy at our house! We fully intend to never go this long without a blog post again, dear reader(s). *Scout’s honor* (ok neither of us was ever a Scout, though I was in Girl Guards for a while.)
Anyway, the biggest thing that’s been happening lately is we are working furiously to prepare our house to sell it. I’ve been sorting through clutter and giving things away to Goodwill for a couple of months now, but over Labor Day weekend we got down to some serious business. I’m talking scrubbing toilets, trimming bushes, repainting doors and trim…serious business. We made appointments for last week with a couple of local realtors, so we wanted the house to be in ship-shape (pun intended) before we had people coming in to determine the value of our house. It was certainly the most laborious Labor Day in my memory.
Finally, the day had come to find out how much our house is worth. Kind of. We had done some of our own market research on our area and similar homes to ours before calling for an outside opinion but it was still nerve wracking. What would we do if the professionals thought we were way over-valuing our home? I actually had a nightmare that all of the realtors came back and told us it was worth less than we owed! It is a rather frightening proposition because we are essentially counting on the sale of our house to fund the purchase of our future boat.
Luckily, the verdict came back very favorably. Two of the realtors (both of whom we had already liked) came back with the exact same recommended list price, which was only about $5,000 less than what we had thought on our own. I think we did pretty well considering how much more training they have in the business than we do. The third realtor was waaay out of the ballpark, suggesting a list price lower than what the house was purchased for in 2003. We actually just laughed at her, especially because we had already written her off after our original meeting with her. She obviously just didn’t know what she was doing.
All-in-all we got some good advice, and have chosen our listing agent for the house. We’ll keep you posted on some of the things we did to spruce up the house for almost no money and what the agent’s home staging specialist has to say as well. The best thing is, we’re finally moving forward and my house has never been cleaner!
by Michele | Aug 15, 2012 | Preparation Stage
Yea, it scares me too.
For those of you following closely, you will know that LASIK eye surgery is on our To-Do List before we leave (aka lose insurance coverage.) Both of us currently wear glasses and contacts and while we understand that people certainly can go cruising with prescription lenses, we would prefer not to. Losing or damaging expensive glasses is an inconvenience when it’s a pair of sunglasses, its a danger when its a prescription that allows you to see anything farther away than the bow of your boat.
The flip side of this coin is the fairly high cost. Eye surgery is considered an elective procedure by most insurance companies and is generally not covered. We’ve been quoted $1000-$2000 per eye depending on the type of lasers used and the warranties included. That’s a total cost for 4 eyes of up to $8000, a cost that will be coming directly out of our cruising kitty. Seeing as how we’ve moved up our planned departure date by a few years, that’s quite a chunk of change that has to be seriously considered.
After a lot of consideration, (and some help from my parents’ insurance plan) we have decided to go through with the surgery. This Friday to be exact. Let me just say that it definitely does make both of us nervous. While LASIK is a very common surgery at this point, there are no true guarantees that something won’t go wrong. It is a little scary when going wrong could mean permanent damage to our vision.
We’ll be heading up to Chicago for our surgery Thursday night for our appointments Friday morning. And if you think of us as you’re getting to work on Friday, send a little prayer our way. Hopefully, we’ll “see” you on the other side!
We are normal (well ok, not so normal) people that have a dream to see the world and live life as it was meant to be. We both have successful careers in the healthcare industry, even in this terrible economy. We want to break free of the current cycle of trading time for dollars and dollars for more and more things we don't need. So, we have decided to forego the fruits of our economic success and "retire" well before we are 30 and set out to see what is over the Horizon.