When I received an email this morning asking if we were still alive since I haven't posted a blog update in about 3 months, it got me thinking about just how fast time marches past. The three weeks we spent in Italy in June, gone. The nearly 3 years it has been since we sailed back to California (ok, motored back but who's keeping score), in now in the history books. The day to day schedules of not enough time combines it all together until it's all just a blur of was-going-to-do and should-have-done.

What marks time for us is change.
So when we motored out of Morro Bay last Saturday and headed for our Port San Luis mooring (what we jokingly call our summer home) we noted that it has been about 2 1/2 years since the boat had been out of Morro Bay. It feels like 2 1/2 months to be honest. Without the change, it was like time was standing still. The comfortable routine of the kids going off to school, Lori heading off to work and me tapping away on the computer and answering client emails and phone calls numbs my sense of time, masking it, hiding it. Routine is the killer of sensing time. The Lotus flowers of comfort and routine have thoroughly sucked us into the trap.
It's not an uncomfortable trap or one we regret being in, but it does feel like a trap especially after a change and realizing, "Wow...how could it be we haven't left Morro Bay for 2 1/2 Years?” Why stray from comfort? If it wasn't for our haul-out for some boat work scheduled for Friday and now pushed back to next week of course, I would just eat another Lotus flower and enjoy the ease and comfort of Morro Bay living.

The next 30-45 days will be a change all right, but they won’t be fun and easy. We will be living aboard in the Port San Luis boat yard up on jack stands with no working shower, head, or kitchen sink, and an 8ft ladder to climb up/down. Then there are the boat projects:
All new through hull fittings
Bottom Paint
Stripping off the deck and repainting the cabin top and applying KiwiGrip
Revarnishing the cabin floor
Redoing the ships fresh water system, IE ripping out the old and installing all new.
Since the Shower is out of commission, we might as well freshen it up with new epoxy based paint.
Then add in any surprised that we find during the haul-out and survey.

The routine will be broken for sure and just when we would want time to go fast, it’s about to slow down to a crawl. That’s called Irony otherwise known as boat ownership.