Still Patriotic

It’s risky to ever talk about politics but today here it’s still really cold with us off our boat up here at our little house on the prairie. Out here in Kansas with two-foot snow drifts in our yard and minus 4F last night. Staying in watching the inauguration made me think about people we met traveling and how a lot that have left their home country feel. Lots of expats. A lot of people seem to hate their own country. Their favorite saying you hear with us traveling in 3^rd world countries throughout the Caribbean on our boat is. This is Paradise. (Really?) Hearing this makes me think of what I miss in the US like going and buying what you need when you need it. I don’t think everything is prefect in the US and remember this, there are things in places as we travel where we won’t go back. How long throughout history have people been looking for Paradise? When Pam and I built our boat to go sailing it wasn’t to go looking for paradise or wanting to just leave the US it was, looking for the adventure of traveling on a boat. Living simply and maybe somewhat having more control of our life with what we need there on our boat with how we built it. Hoping we could just leave if we stopped somewhere and didn’t like something there. As I just said, one country we spent time in we won’t go back, and I hear other sailors say the same thing. It’s their politics along with one group of people there. I can hear people reading this saying prejudice. It their prejudice that bothers me. If they over charge you when you buy something they laugh and say it a skin tax. You can feel it and their government officials always try to get more money from you somehow making you feel cheated. Years ago, the place to not miss as you travel on a boat was Venezuela. Now you are crazy to go there. (Politics does changes things.) My granddaddy would say when politicians were changing things. How does this effect you? Inflation hurt us the last 4 years but think about this with inflation and pay scales rising to compensate for it. When Pam and I ran away and got married 60 years ago I was working 6 days a week in a cotton mill and took home 54 dollars after taxes. Try living today on $54 a week. Remember with us being young and living on love looking back it wasn’t all that hard. With a new president all we really have is hope. Vote and then hope but hearing he is not my president you won’t hear from me with all the president we have had in the past. Several I did not vote for, but I still love my country as I strongly disagreed with what they did. With all this I think as we go back to our sailboat the schooner Pamela Ann up a river in the Caribbean in Guatemala.

Pamela Ann in the boat yard in Guatemala.

I think we will be more careful about having our US flag always flying of the stern of our boat and more careful having their courtesy flag flying as they require in respect for both countries. In some way you do feel freer in some of the countries we have traveled to with it up to you if you wear a seat belt in your car or a helmet on you motor bike. No one there stopping you checking your life jackets to see if one on your boat has a small tear in it the kids play with and now you have to pay a fine just for having it on board with them saying. I’m here to protect you. I don’t care how many you have. You have defective equipment on your boat with that one life jacket. As I put in a blog already Pam was hit with rocks flying from a rocket that didn’t get where it should at a Christmas tree lighting. The police here in the US would never let them shoot fireworks that close to where people were standing. Remember it was our chose to stand there. Sometimes I wonder. What is the price of freedom to do as you please. Another thing there was no lawyer coming running to us saying, I think we have a case we can sue. Where we built our sailboat there in the little town of Southport you’re not allowed to have a clothesline in your own back yard. Out here in the rural part of Kansas remember I said rural we can deal with the freedoms we still have.

                                            The Adventure of Life Goes On

Rural Kansas, where you can drive for miles and not see another car or truck. You may see a tractor or a farm ATV.

We still like to fly our American flag.

Pamela Ann docked in Alabama. We hope we will get her back in the USA this year.

 

Simple Living

As I get older, I realize more and more what I heard from my grandparents. They were a great example of this about how different people think. I don’t like talking politics or religion, but you can see it’s there for sure. One thing my granddaddy talked about has been a lesson for me with how people think was the great depression he lived through with people saying how bad it was for everybody. He said, that’s not true that it was bad for everyone living through it as you hear all the time. He said, it was the best time of his life. Is there a lesson in that today with what you hear? He said his farm was paid for and he had a car he owed nothing on. Not new but it run okay. My grandmother was young, really pretty and they had what they needed there on the farm. Said money was in short supply but he had a trade in high demand by accident working as a boy at his daddy’s sawmill. A Steam engine mechanic. Telling me people always want to go back with how they think if things get hard. People coming to him to get steam engines back running again. (How close to the truth is in what people think that just listening to other people anyway?) Is living off the grid a way to protect you from hard times. Maybe not. We put in our blog all the time how we love living simple and somewhat off the grid but think about it this way with us living somewhat of the grid. Living with a generator or solar panels you are still using electricity. Are you really living off the grid? Can you go in the woods find a proper tree cut it and make a spit oak basket, today? That was so necessary for farm life back in the day before the grid stared. I can and most people think they can, but it takes real skill most people today don’t have. Pam’s Granddaddy helped me with this to learn how. He lived a few days short of his 100th birthday. I’m old now and I can do a lot of things people did back then, but can’t I make a modern light bulb. You see what I mean. Can we really get away from the grid we depend on so. If you’re thinking about living off the grid. Maybe think some about why you want to live that way. With Pam and I it’s living simple and having some control of our lives. On our sailboat we have lived on for years living with electricity makes life simple. The downside is I can’t build what runs on electricity or make what will generate electricity. We still have to buy what we need to set up our boat. With having some control of how we live on shore or off. Just think with our boat set up when we are crossing a long stretch in the ocean with solar panels and a wind generator nothing changes as we have all we live with every day. Not much changes with that as we leave land. The big thing now is how much work we don’t have to do with having electricity. Most dreamers don’t think about that. How much the work thing changes if you try to live with electricity. We have an autopilot that runs on electricity, that steers the boat. (12-volt) It doesn’t get sleepy or tired, won’t need to be fed or go the bathroom. Believe me on a long trip that is work you don’t want to do. Steering a boat for days. The zest of all this the way I think is set up your life as simple as you want and don’t ever try to go back. Learning to make something from the past like making farm sausage is just carrying it on. Necessary skills learned back then is good for the sole or good to know if you are ever in a place where you need them.

Our small solar panel. Facing south.

At our little house out on the prairie we live in part time, we have a small solar panel. (remember small) with all the lamps in the house on LED 12-volt and one overhead light in the kitchen. 12-volt TV and car stereo system built in for the radio. “Sounds good.” All the other modern appliances are still on the grid. Remember how much less work you have to do with these appliances. Our house is small (800 square feet) we live simple nothing big and when we’re out here we pay and average of maybe $150US a month in utility bills. Now with our solar system, remember simple and small is “just what we need” we have less than 500 dollars in it including the 12-volt TV and car radio.

Our little 21-inch TV

The DC car radio is installed in the hall with two speakers. We can hear it through most of the house.

It’s been in place for 5 years now. I hope with all this if you’re not just dreaming. Start small and build on it. Again, think what you really want. If it’s just a more simple life maybe you just need to work your way slowly down to where you want to be. Do you really need a TV that covers a whole wall? One more thing. We have an old truck we put back together to drive out here runs good.  It gets 12 miles to the gallon. An old motor bike that gets near 50 MPG if you drive it right. Both paid for when we bought them. Do we really need to buy something newer and pay 2 or 3 times what we paid for our little house out here to save gas. It’s all in how you think. One foot note. Pam and I have never been much on following the herd.

The book we wrote Little Lies is coming out soon in a revised addition.

                                   The Adventure of Life Goes On

 

One Extreme to Another

As I have put in our last blogs Pam, and I have been together over 60 years. This means we have seen a lot together. (Well, here we go again.) Left our sailboat we live on most of the time in the Caribbean and flew back up here to be with our only kid for Christmas in a little house we say we bought by accident. The farmer that had it just wanted it gone. It was so cheap and easy to buy we bought it, a very quaint 4 room house with a full basement and a closed in garage. Truth is this is almost a ghost town out here now that still has dirt streets in town with a few houses out on the Kansas prairie. Only business left here is a grain silo COOP. Go from our house 2 streets and farmlands, fields go over the horizon. Closest town maybe 20 miles away and driving there sometimes you won’t see another car. (Now with the here we go again) I just said, left our boat and a few weeks ago before coming up here with the temp hitting 112F during the day. Now out here we are in a blizzard. Blowing snow and chill factor below minus zero for days. Roads closed. We knew it was coming and being us we were prepared. If you know us are read our blog you know we like living simple. Have most of our lives. We like living the old way when we can. Some of the old ways are gone now and I don’t see them ever, coming back and we are the only people we have seen in years that still live this way. It’s hard to go to grocery stores out here and buy a whole fresh ham but Walmart, 45 miles away sells whole pork shoulders. (If you can’t do what you want to do what you can.) Our first day back we hung one up to cure using the receipt people used before electricity or running water living out on the farm. This goes back a long time before modern times curing ham and meat this way. Another thing we did as soon as we got here was hit the meat markets looking for pork with lots of fat. Mostly marked down because of all the fat in the meat. The more fat the better. Back at the house we made sausage with the old family receipt going back hundreds of years. This is sage sausage. We grow our own sage in a little box garden. Pam likes to plant flowers and maybe a pepper plant just outside the back door when were here. Living simply Pam being a bean counter when she sees something that is cheap not just marked down she buys enough to last for a while. This makes for a nice pantry with her buys more than we need so we don’t have to shop so often. Now living like this we are usually prepared for bad weather and things that come up here or on our boat. After the hurricane Katrina some people were talking about getting hungry. How they couldn’t find anything to eat. I told them you can cook in a truck hub cap are about anything you can build a fire under. Telling them about a simple camping trick we use a lot. You can bring large Lima-beans up to a boil for maybe just ten minutes. Let them cool all the way down then bring them back up maybe boil them ten minutes more and they’re done. The women said, “Where you think you could find them beans with the mess everything was in for days after that hurricane?” I didn’t say anything about how we live and that at in the worst of times least we have beans. If you have ever been in a hurricane, you know people, go crazy emptying the sheaves in grocery stores before the storm hits. Buying thing that are left they wouldn’t normally ever buy. With hurricanes sometimes lasting so long and the boat going crazy it’s sandwiches but as soon as it starts to calm down, we have plenty to cook. The worst after a hurricane is it’s so hot. Now here with the snow stopped it’s how cold it is outside. Complain or see it as just another adventure?

                                           The Adventure of Life Goes On

Looking Forward in 2025

The new year approaches and we all hope we can do better. With Jimmy Carter dying you hear how hard his life was growing up on a farm. I grew up on a farm and I did work, hard but I loved it. I’m old now and have lived a lot and seen a lot. Is living well not having to work. Are people that don’t and won’t work happy than the rest of us. When I was young listening to people that had lived before electricity and running water I never heard them talking about being that unhappy. Being back on the farm when people farmed with mules a young married couple worked together. This working together seemed to make them happy. I know when Pam and I work together I’m happier that running off to jobs some where. We have worked together a lot in our life. Can you really have enough stuff to make you happy. When Pam and I was young remodeling houses working together she had her own 3 yard dump truck. Can a women be any happy that one that has her own dump truck? Never heard her complain about how hard we was working. Our golds have always be different than most I guess. The oldest question in life is what is love and what is happiest? Buy a kid a toy and he is having more fun playing with the box. In our long life together we have had some times when life was a little hard , who hasn’t but I think we have been happy most of the time. Having lot of money has never been our gold. Being young selling our house we bought and building us a log cabin on a lake to live there sleeping under a plastic tarp getting up in the morning to go work on it was never any problem. I don’t know how you can be any happier young working hard together for what we wanted with so little. Building the sailboat we live on now was hard raising the money we needed and all that work but it’s hard to explain how happy we have been at times traveling and living on our boat. I have told before in our blog we ran away and got married young. On our wedding night with all we went through that day to make it happen after we ate supper and was back in our motel room. We laid down together in bed and Pam laying there went to sleep with in minutes holding me. I watched her for a few minutes and decided to rest my eyes and when I open my eyes it was day light. Her saying. Well we made it through our first night together. Even if it was and uneventful wedding night. Her there with me when I open my eyes just 15 years old with us starting our live together I’m sure with times like that I have experienced happiest. You hear young people don’t know what loves is but that morning when I woke up with me just 17 years old with her there with me I think I know today how wrong they are about that.

This picture was made after we had brought the house, just after we had rode our old bike from New Orleans the second time to Kansas.

We are hoping this year the book we have coming out soon an my art will pay off just enough for us to just get by. Let us travel and enjoy what we are doing with our life now. This year I’m sure we will have the repairs we are doing on our sailboat, Pamela Ann, named after her, completed and will be sailing again. We are old but still together and going on. Remember dreams do come true for those that go after their dreams not just set around and dream. With us working on our new dreams after talking to people that have written books and do art, one thing they say is we will be lucky if we make a dime. Never give up so we go on. The other thing they say is we are going to have to self promote. This is going to be hard for me but if you would like to help, and if you like our blog tell your friends and help us build our blog readership. How we are going to promote our book and art coming soon but for now I hope all that read this feel love and happiness this New Year.

                                         The Adventure of Life Goes On