This is it. As of Monday we are officially live-aboards. To me that means that, starting on Monday, I will come home to the boat, sleep on the boat and wake up on the boat every day for the foreseeable future. This is deeply comforting to me. To Vick it means a week (only a week) of final push to sell everything that we own that doesn’t fit this new life, or doesn’t fit in the boat/manvan/storage unit. Monday is not deeply comforting to Vick.
This morning Vick made the brilliant and unexpected decision to call our good friend Katherine in for some professional organizing help. Katherine arrived late in the afternoon and the two of them lit into the piles of stuff that we’ve accumulated over the years and reduced it to a tidy stack of boxes and neatly organized piles. They made it through two rooms. Tomorrow Vick will be flying solo, but she’s already significantly more optimistic.
Ruby seems genuinely overjoyed with the prospect of moving onto a sailboat. I think she’s even given it significant and rational consideration. She knows that she’ll have next to no toys for example, but seems to think that is a good compromise for being close to each other and eventually spending much more time as a family.
Miles—I believe— is just along for the ride. His good nature and relative flexibility are a godsend right now. He knows we are moving, and sometimes jokes about going early or not at all. I’m pretty sure he’s gauging our reaction, but we just play it cool.
The house is of course a disaster. There’s nothing like a good comprehensive purge to reduce a seemingly orderly life to smoldering piles of Cerberean effluence. The upside to all this chaos is that there is almost certainly a phoenix* of simple living in our near future. I have read a bit about this kind of purging, and don’t recall anyone speaking of any kind of effluence, so I felt it important to add that note to the record.
On the boat there will be quite literally no place for disorder. At least not if we want to sail, and oh how I want to sail. Our stated goal is to keep the boat ready to sail within one hour. From what I gather, this is not a reasonable goal, but its ours and we’re sticking to it… for now 
- please pardon the mixed metaphor
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I think it’s completely reasonable to want to sail within an hour of doing clean up. You may need some time though, once you’ve moved aboard, to get to that. The first few weeks are soooo hectic. You’ll spend a lot of time just re-organizing and re-placing things. We’ll have lived aboard for three years in July and we’re STILL finding better places to put things!
Good luck with the purging. It is NOT easy but can be done!
Good for you guys. Go, Bradfords, go!
So it’s been a month. How’s that one-hour sail goal coming along?
I find that the longer we go without sailing, the longer it takes to be ready to go sailing. And there’s always that debate about “do we sail, or do we work on the boat?”.