A visit to the garden

Look at the pretty flowers!

Update

Thanks for the update, Kris. Glad your employment opportunities are looking up. Amazing that you & Ann are together. Say hi for me.

We--BJ, my son Nick and I--visited Catherine Napier this summer. She's doing great, tho I think the big house on Long Island may be getting to be difficult for her. She was having problems with basement flooding when we were there. She has a wonderful painting of great-grandfather Napier crossing the finish line in a sailboat race somewhere long ago.

Catherine in front of lavender fields near her home.

BJ, Ted, Catherine, and Nick

I didn't realize how long it had been since we touched base. When we were moved to a newly-created group, my manager at QWEST said to just move to Seattle & by the time the dust settles I'll just be the guy in Seattle. So i did. I drove there over the weekend & showed up at the guard's desk on Monday & asked him if I could look through the directory. I started at "A" & called a friend, David Aho, and asked if he had any empty desks around him. He offered me his--said he always worked from home. So i worked there for 2 years & lived aboard a sailboat on Lake Union. 

At the start of the 2nd winter, I realized I couldn't handle another dark, damp winter & transferred myself to Ft Collins where BJ lived. Then my folks needed help, so i transferred myself to a QWEST service garage in Brainerd, MN & we lived with them up at the lake for the summer, sent them home in the fall & stayed into the winter. One day, when it was 30 below, I got a phone call from my manager offering me a package. I took it. I wasn't pension-eigible anyway, so a year's salary & benefits looked mighty good. That took me to age 64, so i took social insecurity & here I am. We fired up the old '76 motorhome--literally--by lighting 2 charcoal fires under it & drove to Florida. We've been living in it ever since, spending summers at the lake in MN with my folks & winters in Florida. 

I haven't worked--just a little volunteering. My QWEST web development was highly specialized--accessing & linking legacy systems with web tools--so the corporate setting is the only place it could be applied & I'm not going back. So we're living off soc security & savings & trying to live cheap. There was a point at which I might have been able to go back & update one of my apps at QWEST, but they never really offered & i didn't pursue it. At some point I may have to put BJ to work. She's a massage therapist & yoga instructor. We got married on the beach in FL last winter.

We sailed to Haiti this spring with a boat full of relief supplies and a solar system we installed on a school. That was a once-in-a-lifetime trip.

Sailboat in Haiti

The Tranquility crew on the way to Haiti

We head back to FL end of Sept & hope to find a house.

Pet chicken & I in front of our home.

My boys both moved to New York--a real shock! 

Andrew, me, and Nick at republic airport on Long Island

You must know a lot about the banking world--a source of mystery for all of us. Thought about writing a book?

It's only an 8-hour drive from Chicago--come see us before you start work again.

Great to be in touch.

Stilt Home

We'd like to have a home base in Florida. We found the south pretty expensive even in these desperate times. And south Florida is pretty badly scarred by corporate America and haphazard development.

This spring we found the St Johns River and what feels to us like "Old Florida". It's live oaks & Spanish moss, lofty pines and palm trees, ferns and small towns. In Welaka, for example, the closest town to our home in Acosta Creek Marina, there are NO FRANCHISES. The mayor asked Dollar General to take a hike last year--not interested.

And then there's the St Johns River. It's breathtakingly beautiful--130+ miles of navigable waterway that connects with the oceans of the world through Jacksonville. Our boat(s) benefit from living in the far less damaging fresh water, but the Bahamas are still a couple of weeks away.

So it may be 10 degrees colder on average than further south, and there may be less excitement, and it may be a long way from our friends in Bradenton and Loxahatchee, but otherwise it attracts us very strongly.

We found an affordable lot with 100' of canal just off the St Johns. It's less than a quarter acre but feels larger due to the setting. On Craigslist we also found modular classrooms for sale for $8500 installed.

Our first take when we got here last year was that while there were lots of bargain homes in the burbs around all the cities we visited, we'd never be able to buy on the water. That, at least, was my take. Beej just decided we'd live on the water. This may be the way.

So we want to take this modular, put it up on 10' stilts, and have this.

We might end up with something more like this...

But then again, if we keep at it, maybe like this...