Reminiscing About Our History

Well our plan has definitely worked out for the best.  I was laid off from my job and hubby left his job. We saved enough to buy the boat and fix it up, and live for a while, but the kitty is dwindling fast.

The transition of leaving the work grind is interesting, sort of like removing a brainwashing helmet from my head.  Weeks after leaving the job I dreamed about it and the people I worked around.  For months I had this feeling I have to get up and get ready for work and I know when it's a Monday.  Luckily, after 6 months these feelings are starting to fade.

Downsizing stuff in our house has worked nicely too, it has been therapeutic to get rid of stuff we've held onto for many years.  We wondered why we have held onto, stored, and moved these material things for so long, it makes no sense now.  

In my view, pretty much everything has a value, so I always try to sell it first, and if it doesn't sell then I donate it.  My philosophy is to take care of us first, and if we have left-overs then I give to others.

The sentimental stuff is so much harder to downsize.  Our children's art work (the two daughters are young adults) we kept very few, scanned them all, and either gave it to them or tossed. And their pictures we scanned all, and gave to family or tossed them. We scanned away pictures for months, I calculated about 6,000 pictures overall. I have two small boxes stored in the trunk of our car left to go, which we will scan sometime during winter time.

We bought three scanners in preparation for this downsize.  The first Epson stopped working, so we bought a Kodak.  The Kodak feeds the pictures, but has poor picture quality.  The third scanner is another Epson, like the other one it scans 3-5 pictures at a time, having to open the lid each time.  The Epson does have good quality of the scanned pictures.  And we have found a spot for each of them on the boat.

The other part of our transition is preparing to home school our son.  He is pre-school age now so it isn't too difficult.  He is also smart and healthy, so we are pretty blessed with a great beginning in our home school adventure.  I have to say that I am excited about home school with him.  I really do not know what our future holds, except that we want to raise our son instead of paying others to do it.  And we do not want him to attend public school, no offense to all those well meaning teachers out there, however the public school system is just another controlling bureaucracy that we are trying to get away from.

Our pets have transitioned well onto the boat. But they are a lot of work, always something to do with them, walk the dog, clean the cat liter, feed them. Both of them swim, and both have fallen off the dock into the water. Sort of weird that domesticated cats and dogs can swim by instinct at a young age, but humans cannot, puzzling.

Anyhow, our life aboard Harbinger is worth any difficulties we have come across or will cross in our future. We work as a team, hubby and me, outfitting the boat while caring for our son and the pets.