Re: info - part 2

Arnie
Did you get both emails????

Well, as for me, I am busy handling my father's estate.  My brother Charles, whom you haven't met is handling most of the business end while I am managing selling the house and organizing the furniture to divide and then auction what is left.  The last two months I've been cleaning out closets and storerooms of junk and trying to find some sort of order to things.
Hopefully my end of the work will be over in three to five months.  If I can get the timing right, I'd like to hop a ride across the Atlantic to Europe, visit a couple of friends and then try a cross land trip to Hong Kong.  And then get back to the boat any way I can from there.

That is my tentative plan, but timing will be key, and timing is too hard to judge right now.

I've enjoyed being home more this time than any time I can remember.  I have a purpose.  I work hard.  And in my free time I help my brother Charles build a 4X4 truck out on the farm.  And last year I started playing guitar.  So I have things to do I enjoy.,  So really all is well enough.  It is very very stressful though.  Last week was one of the hardest of my life.  I've been lonely in some strange way.

But I am engulfed in what I am doing and don't want to be anywhere else for the time.

I read a book that has changed the way I am looking at the future though.  It is called "The Long Emergency" by James Howard Kunstler.  It deals a lot with the effects of Peak Oil on the next thirty years.   Very interesting.  I am thinking I may not sail for the next twenty years like I had wanted to.  Maybe I'll settle down a little sooner.  I want to immigrate to New Zealand and buy a little piece of land there.  Have a garden, some chickens, a couple of goats.  I used to live in a cabin in Montana and I've still never been happier than I was there.  Maybe I'll get back to it sooner than later.

I miss my boat and the life that we've shared at sea together.  But so much has changed for me.  My view on so much has shifted.  I hope sailing still provides the same intensity and direction and meaning that it did not so many days ago.  I miss so many of our friends; I miss our stories--I miss making stories, where now I tire of telling them over and over again.

This is where I need and want to be today.  But I still face the ever-challenging proposition of building a future for myself out of the dreams that now burn in my mind, and not with the residual ashes of the dreams of the past..