The first test complete

We completed our 12 day visit to Wisconsin, living in the RV.   The RV living was easy, and my family was amazing, keeping us entertained and getting us around to do things.    We saw a Madison Mallards game, toured the capitol in Madison, toured a 3000 head dairy farm and a greenhouse.   We spent lots of time visiting and chatting.

The RV survived, but we found a few things that bugged us.   Before we left we had made an appointment to take it in this week, and the Wisconsin trip showed up what needed to be done.   The good news is, they have fixes for the things that bothered us.   The bad news is it is going to take 3 days to get it all fixed.   We have no furniture at our house, so we are living in a hotel.   To complicate things, Erin apparently has Lyme disease and the flu, so she is on antibiotics but having trouble keeping them down.

All this means a lot of the things we were hoping to get done will be on hold for a day or two, and the RV is going to have a big expense.    I'm trying to take this all in stride, but at some point I'd like to hear the phrase "that is going to be cheaper and easier than you thought...."

Hitting the road

So far, our "adventure" has been cleaning houses and living in an RV in our yard and getting rid of stuff that doesn't fit.   I guess that is probably a reasonable literal match to the title of this blog, but it's not really what we had in mind.

But now, we've actually taken our first tiny steps toward the lifestyle we signed up for.   Yesterday, we packed everything up and hit the road and drove to Rice Lake, WI to visit my brother John for a couple days.

We are also starting our home schooling.   We made our first dot on the giant map we bought to track our trip.   And today, we toured a massive dairy farm.   The kids loved it.  Based on that first experience, I think the home schooling thing will work.

Anyway, it's starting to feel like the adventure we signed up for.   I think it will really begin once our house is sold and we are going places where we don't know anyone, but this should be a lovely transition.

Downsizing

We knew that part of moving from a fixed address to a vagabond lifestyle was to get rid of our stuff.   We knew there would be things that were hard to get rid of.   But I don't think there is a way to prepare mentally for this process.   First, there is the problem of attaching meaning to stuff.   "Oh, I bought that when I was doing that fun thing that one time!"   And then I had to remind myself that I could remember those events without that thing that has been sitting in the closet for the last 10 years.

So that's the first hurdle.    I thought that would be the hard one, but it turns out, that is the easy one.   The hard one for me was when the estate people went through the house and moved things into stacks and put a price on it.    Sure, "it's just things", but certainly it has to be worth more than a couple bucks?   That thing from the art fair?   That's only $4?   

And where is my stuff?  Everything is moved.

So this process has been equal parts enlightening and demoralizing.    I've been working to keep a big house to keep all this stuff and to maintain all this stuff, because someday it will be worth something, and it is adding to my life.   But in the end, it's not worth much at all and never will be, and it turns out, it didn't really add much to my life.    Not 40 hours of work per week worth, anyway.

OK.   Well, that part is done.   We are moved into our RV now, and I'm really not missing all that stuff that went away.   We don't have a place for everything yet, so we start a lot of sentences with "what happened to..."    But that's temporary.    All the things we need to live and enjoy are right there, just steps away.   I thought living in a small space would be hard, but that's been the easiest thing.   And I have my days free, instead of working to pay for stuff I only thought I cared about.

Retirement

And just like that, it's done.

I first discovered computer programming in 1977-1978, when a friend and I discovered a computer terminal in the guidance office of our high school.   It didn't have a screen.  Everything you typed was printed on folded tractor-feed computer paper.    To write a program, you typed it in one line at a time, and it printed that line on the paper.   As the program grew and you had to insert lines and move things around, it would get too hard to know what the program was doing -- so you'd just list the whole thing again.   In college, the first time I used a full-screen editor, I felt like I was magic.

I think from the first time, in that little closet, that I wrote a program that worked, it was inevitable that programming would be my career.  It wasn't even much of a thing then; nobody told their kids to go into computers, because the job barely existed.   My actual degree was in math, because my college didn't have a computer science department yet, but most of my classes were computer classes, so it was a CS degree in spirit if not on the diploma.

I worked in defense for the first 16 years of my career, and learned the value of bureaucracy and paperwork.   When I finally got a job that wasn't funded by government dollars, I was shocked to learn that some programmers actually got to spend most of their time writing code.

And now, after 33 years of defining myself as "computer programmer", it's over.    The new definition isn't written yet, but hopefully I can make up a new word and call myself an "experiencer".   I'll be a husband, a dad, a teacher, a driver, a sailor, a hiker; but mostly, I want to leave behind the schedules and the obligations, and just experience life.   I want to have things go hilariously wrong and spectacularly well, to be in the moment, because in the end, there is nowhere else to be.

So, we'll have daily stand-ups to develop action plans for our next experience and how we should feel about it to make sure the synergy of the team... hmm, I may need a few weeks to get used to this retirement thing.

I've worked with so many great people through the years.   Programming has been the perfect job for me, and I suspect I will still do my fair share of it in the future -- I just won't be doing it for corporations pursuing goals that I either don't believe in or, at best, don't care about.   I have a dozen programming projects I could start tomorrow.   Forgive me if I wait a month or two before I start to dip my toe back into those waters, though.

Thanks to everyone who has given me such a wonderful career, filled with highs, lows, challenges and boredom.

Now, on to the next phase...

Winding down

I had always thought I would have a nice long countdown to my last day of work.   I've been at it a very long time, and figured there would be lots of warning for the end.   That didn't work so well.   A few weeks ago, we finally decided that it was time to go, and when I looked at how all the pieces fit together, decided I needed to be done in mid May.   I gave my client seven weeks notice.   After a little back and forth, they said it made more sense to just go now -- a week from Friday.   That was last week.   So basically, I got 7 work days of warning that my official career is ending.    As I write this, it is three days.    That's not much warning after decades of doing the same thing.

A week on a cat

Over the Christmas/New Year week (end of 2015), we chartered a 41 foot Lipari Evolution catamaran for a week, with a captain.   This had several purposes.  The obvious one: a much needed vacation from the Minnesota cold.   Two: a chance to see how we'd do as a family on a catamaran.   Three: a chance to take some more sailing lessons.   This time, it was the ASA catamaran class.

The captain/instructor was, surprisingly, not a fan of catamarans.   He spent much of the time telling us why catamarans were inferior to monohulls.   In the end, that worked out well, I think.  I didn't want a week of someone telling me how wonderful everything will be if we get boat X; I want to know what to watch out for.

The boat was about a year old, and just beautifully designed.   It was very nice, everything was in good shape and well laid out.

We left out of St. Petersburg, FL.   The first day was classroom stuff for the ASA class, and then motoring around the marina, seeing how tight of conditions we could maneuver through.  

Day two was sailing south out of Tampa Bay, down the gulf to Longboat Key, where we anchored just inside the inlet.  

Day three: motoring down the ICW to Venice, where we stayed at Crow's Nest marina.   I hadn't expected any time on the ICW, but it turned out to be a valuable experience, with the traffic, the narrow channels, and the bridges.   We had learned about how to sail in tight quarters in the various classes, but it really only makes sense when you do it.

Day four: motoring in the gulf down to Charlotte Harbor, where we anchored off Cayo Costa State Park, an amazingly beautiful, peaceful place, with dolphins playing nearby.  

Day five: doing some sailing drills for man overboard, then we went back and anchored near the state park again. Then we spent the afternoon at the park, and at the beach, collecting shells and stretching our legs..

Day 6: Motor sailing back to Crow's Nest where we restocked a few supplies and had a nice meal out.

Day 7: Motor to the Manatee River, where we anchored out.   It was a busy place, made busier by some speedboat races that were going by for what seemed like an hour.  

Day 8: Heavy rain for the first half of the day, making a cold, miserable trip back up to St Petersburg. We heard on the radio that a sailboat had sunk in the area and 4 people were in the water.   By the time we could get the exact coordinates, it was clear we were far away, and the people were all rescued safely.

Overall, it was a wonderful time.   The boat did not feel small at all, and we learned a lot about how to sail.

Navigation class

I decided to take the ASA navigation class.   This is frequently considered irrelevant in today's age of GPS and mobile devices.  Many people say about the only time you would use it is in case of a critical failure of all electronics such as, for example, after a lightning strike.   So is it worth it to take a class that you are unlikely to ever "need"?   I wanted to take it because it looked sort of fun, and because I have two young children, so any additional safety is worth it for me.

The class uses paper charts.   Specifically, the class used a 30 year old chart from the Cape Cod area.   Maybe I'm weird, but I really like looking through those charts and seeing all the curious things on them.   There's something about that big sheet of paper with all those tiny confusing symbols that speaks to me, that makes me want to go explore.

If you are considering this class, the first thing you should know is there is a lot of homework.   Make sure you take it sometime when you have a lot of free evenings.   (I tried to do that, but for the first time in decades I had to work overtime during the weeks of the class).     To me, the homework was not difficult, but it was tedious.   You have to measure and mark everything very carefully, because small mistakes at the start multiply into big mistakes at the end of the problem.  I worked hard to understand the fundamental reasoning behind the problems, but struggled to do the steps without some clerical or measurement error.

Before we started, the instructor warned us that this class had the lowest pass rate of any of the ASA classes.   I think only 50%-60% of the people pass.    By the end of the class, I was beginning to think I was about to add to the fail statistics.   I don't think I had made it through any of the problems in the homework without a mistake bad enough to get the question wrong.    Three or four weeks of that is very discouraging.

I spent the last few days before the test studying the terms and symbols, but there was little I could do to study the actual navigation.   I went into the test with almost zero confidence.     I just vowed to double check every answer at the end to catch as many mistakes as possible.    Unfortunately, three and a half hours into the test, when I filled in the last blank, I had lost my mental resolve to go back and check all my answers.   I had decided the whole class is optional, I had learned what I needed, and didn't care about having ASA's approval on my knowledge.

The good news: after all that, I only got one question wrong, for a 98%.   And the one I got wrong, I had gotten the correct answer on my worksheet, I just copied the wrong column to the answer sheet.   It was really rewarding to have all those hours hunched over a chart pay off.

So is the class worth it?  Yes, I think it is.   I think even with electronics to guide you, you need to understand the effects of currents and wind.   You need to know how to read tide and current charts, and know the navigation symbols, and how to plan a route based on all those factors.   Yes, GPS can keep you on track *most* of the time, but how many mistakes do you want to make with your boat, with your family aboard, in a hazardous area?