Saturday, August 15 Two months has passed since our last post on adjusting to “regular” life. Emotionally speaking, Eric is now fully adjusted again, though it is a bit different than last time. In our old life, we had ridiculously busy schedules. Not only did we work a lot, we filled almost all of our non-work time with assorted activities. Most of our friends keep similarly busy schedules. At first, Eric tried to keep the same pace as our friends. He would accept just about every social invitation that sounded like it would be fun. But after several weeks of valiantly trying, Eric has finally accepted that he can’t keep up that pace anymore. He needs a certain amount of downtime, and has started to pass on some of the social invitations, fun as they may be. Also, we realized that we need a certain amount of time alone together (above and beyond Eric’s downtime) to really connect as a couple. Eric has finally figured out a balance that works for him, which wasn’t easy. And, he is still working a lot.

Christi’s attitude about going back to a traditional job has softened considerably. She has realized that being home has been good for our marriage. In retrospect, we see now that in our old life we had little quality time together. In between work and activities, our little bit of alone time was spent taking care of life responsibilities like errands and chores. Now, Christi takes care of that stuff while Eric is at work, so our time together is quality time doing fun activities. We do things like going for leisurely walks in the park or kayak rides around the bay, and we are both usually relaxed and in good moods. She knows that if she goes back to a traditional job, Sundays would be spent cleaning house and paying bills, instead. And, in the little time we would spend alone doing fun stuff, we’d both be stressed out.

Christi has picked up a small part time job writing a weekly column for a website called Parentella . The website is designed to connect educators, parents and the community and her weekly articles focus on educational topics. She is enjoying it and hoping to pick up more freelance writing work in lieu of a traditional job. Meanwhile, she is still working on writing the book, and has been looking into publishing options, as well. She is realizing that the publishing process is quite frustrating. She has not “sped up” at all yet and still living the slow life of our boating days.

We do have a funny story to share. A yacht that looks exactly like a giant Kosmos pulled into our marina. Christi saw one of the crew in the laundry room and asked if the boat was a Nordhavn. The guy was offended and said “No, we aren’t a crappy Nordhavn. Those boats are worthless. Ours is a Dutch builder with a superior design to a Nordhavn”. He then went on a tirade about how great and wonderful his (owner’s) boat is and how terrible Nordhavns are. She sat quietly and listened until he was done. After he explained to her how Nordhavns have no range and can’t go anywhere, are poorly built and can’t withstand big seas, etc. she said. “Oh. Well, my husband and I own a Nordhavn. We just finished a world circumnavigation on it”. He clearly didn’t believe her. After a third degree questioning where he tried to figure out if she was lying or not, he gave her a long lecture about how stupid and irresponsible we were for transiting the Red Sea.

With Eric working so much, he hasn’t had much time or energy for the boat. But, we are proud to report that he finally fixed the transmission cooler o-ring problem. Since he worked on it piece-meal, it took a couple weekend, but he finished it today. Eric devised a way to drain the majority of the coolant without hauling the boat out. He loosened the clamps and started a slow leak which he captured with a plastic bag to make a tiny coolant river into holding containers. He actually had it going for several hours at a time over several days before it was as empty as he could physically get it. Once it was drained, he changed out the rings, which was a fairly simple task. He filled the coolant back up and we think we are good to go now!

Oh, and several weeks ago Eric did do another task, which was change out the timer in the master shower. The timer switch for the fan stopped counting minutes. Normally, you set it to automatically turn off after a certain number of minutes, and leaving it on continually is not an option. But, ours was no longer counting time, so after you turned it on, it stayed on until you manually turned it off. We believe some salt water had corroded the insides of it from water was coming in from the porthole located next to the switch.

We are happy to report that both Olympus and Shurflo replaced our defective products with no questions asked. So, now we have a new camera and a new spare water pump. We love good customer service!

Coming up: More work to Kosmos, Q & A, a trip to Yosemite, the San Diego Maritime Museum, and the Nordhavn Southwest Rendezvous.