What is your ONE THING?

My friend Dani pointed me to this post on finding the one most important thing in your life, your true focus. In her own blog, Dani decided that her one thing was feeling. Another blogger, Gretchen, quotes Justice Sandra Day O'Connor stating that her one thing was work worth doing.

I thought about my own one thing. What would it be? Water? My whole life is about water - it's the focus of my work as an environmental scientist (water resources), it's the focus of my unusual home life (on a sailboat). My colleague Imogene says this is a congruent life, because I live what I beleive is important. I've often stated that I don't want a balanced life, no matter how much work-life balance seems to be the buzz these days. To me, "balance" means a little good, a little bad; a little up, a little down; no black or white, just gray. Well, I don't want a life that's got some down and some bad and some gray. I want saturated colors, passion, and wonder! Okay, so water's a good candidate for my one thing, but not quite it.

Dan? After 25 years he still completes me and challenges me and we grow together. But, making him my one thing puts an unfair burden on both of us to live up to.

Learning is my one thing, and I realize now, it always has been. Stuff came incredibly easy to me as a kid in school. I like brainteasers and take IQ tests for fun. I remember discussing the sudoku craze with my dad, and we both agreed they're 'boring' - you can plug and chug and use logic to get the right answer, but you don't get that satisfying rush when the pieces fall together and you see the solution and say "Aha!" When I reflected on that conversation after reading Dani's blog, that's when I knew my one thing.

Bye-bye electric bills, hello sunshine!

So. Our plan for last weekend was to have a nice fish dinner Friday evening, then install our solar panels Saturday morning (the clamps arrived in Friday's mail, along with our new netbook computer). The weather was predicted perfect (80s during the day, 60-ish at night, moderate winds) so we'd planned to anchor out in the undeveloped Rhode River where I could do some long-overdue writing.

The weeknd started great. Salmon brushed with some lemon-pepper-garlic oil that Melissa had given us at Xmastime, rice medley with portabello mushrooms and cream (NOT from a Campells soup can, either!) and green beans, and a bottle of wine. But then on Saturday morning, the solar panel installation proved to be more complex logistically than we'd expected. So by 3:00 in the afternoon, we had the first panel up, but no wiring connected.

We decided that finishing the project would be more gratifying than going out for the weekend. And in many ways, staying in our slip is almost as nice as being out. (We're paying the upgrade for a slip directly on the creek, with a great unobstructed view of passing boat traffic - and worth every penny of it!)

To make a long story short, two trips to the marine supply store, a lot of trial and error, a fair dose of self-doubt, and reading and rereading the instructions, plus two different textbooks on boat systems, and by mid-afternoon Sunday .... success!

I'm pretty confident of my calculations for our power use. If the panels live up to their advertising, and we continue to conserve as we've done in the past, we'll be able to make ALL our power needs on sunny days, until we have 3 cloudy days in a row. The only thing we won't be able to provide is air conditioning. For that, we'll still need shore power. Of course, if we're on the water, its cooler and breezier so perhaps we'll need it less often.

Earth Day

So for Earth Day yesterday Dan & I:

• telecommuted and saved gas (okay, I guess I really did that for myself. love working from home!)
• took the stairs instead of the elevator to my doctors appt
• brought reusable bags to the grocery store, where we bought local produce whereever we could
• wiped the hard disk from an ancient laptop, and collected a bunch of used batteries, to bring to the "personal electronics recycling drive" today at work
• hoped to install the solar panels we bought a couple of months ago, but discovered we had the wrong mounting brackets and had to reorder the right size. hopefully they'll be received soon and we can install this weekend.

Yay me!

Reeeally windy today! Something blew our shore power late yesterday afternoon. Hey, we're a sailboat, right? We're supposed to be self-sufficient. We did pretty well - used our 12V car chargers for our cellphones and the boat's diesel heater instead of the electric space heater we usually use. I'm proud of us. The only thing that *didn't* go well was the blender we use to make our morning smoothies. We have a hand-cranked blender from a camping store that's pretty effective, but it's awkward finding a place to mount it - no rocks or downed tree branches here.

Also had a great re-connection from an old friend via Facebook - got a friend request from Dan's old C.O. on his first Navy sail trip. He'd let us know he was going to be in the area and we had a wonderful time reconnecting and discussing future plans. Funny, when we joined we deliberately didn't make ourselves findable to our childhood friends, for example, I didn't include my maiden name. Some people belong in the past. But it's been glorious reconnecting with more recent folks who we've lost touch with unintentionally. (Like A. - I'd called her several times and left messages, but she never returned the calls. How was I to know she'd dropped her phone off the dock?)

April Fool's - Gotcha!

So, with the complicity of my secretary, we sent the boss a "review" of a new highway to be built with stimulus money - paving a 4-land road across the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to Honolulu. He called and asked why he hadn't heard about this before ... and then I asked him if he got to the part about the tsunami that washed a car off the road and it hit an endangered species whale on the head. What? You hadn't heard about that one either?

An ordinary day

Drizzly, stay-at-home kind of day. I like this temperature, its chilly enough that you can tell the difference between indoors and out, a kind of separation, but not painfully chilly. We're so much more aware of weather and nature since moving aboard! All caught up on work, stopped off at the library, now home to settle down with a glossy cookbook, or maybe a trashy novel, and a bowl of warm soup. AND I made some progress on one of my forever goals, to learn how the Internet has changed libraries, I have a contact to interview.

Maybe it better wait till we have better internet connection than some unsecured wireless I'm pirating off of, though. We'll be moving back to our remodeled slip any day now, where our high-speed line is, and that glorious outside slip right on the creek, can't wait!

Heard from two distant friends today, including one who had lost her phone. I had called A. during the winter a couple of times, left messages, and never heard back. I knew her bf had been in a bad accident and I just assumed she needed some space. Then she told me she'd been trying to find us, lost our phone # when she lost her phone, and of course we weren't in our slip because our dock was gone. Looking forward to spending some time with her this summer. The other friends, J. and E., are now cruising their way back North after spending the winter in Florida and we'll see them in a couple of months. Kew-el!