Thoughts and reflections from the past week or so from my own financial independence campaign.

Progress on my goals

Boat life

Lady SierraWhiskyMike got the sewing machine working and spend a fun few hours stitching up the lazy jack bag.

This is a big blue canvas bag that sits on the boom (the horizontal bit of our mast) and catches the sail when we drop it, so it’s a storage bag and also a fast way to pack sails down – hence the “lazy” part.

The mechanic had been ignoring all our calls and e-mails, so we decided to do the engine checks ourself and make sure she starts. She does, but there’s a leak from the raw water (for you and me, that’s seawater) bleed-off system that suggests there’s an internal valve blockage somewhere. This is a problem because that basically means seawater is trickling into the bilges of the boat when we run the engine.

Balls.

I’m hoping that the engineer comes next week. Fingers crossed.

We could try to fix it ourselves, but the engine is still under warranty if the repairs are done by a Volvo engineer. Marine engines tend to break a lot, so we’re keen to keep the warranty going.

We don’t have the sails up yet and I’m not holding out hope of going sailing any time soon, but it’s one step closer.

It’s disappointing that the boat keeps getting broken, but in her defence a lot of these issues come from living a normal life on a boat, rather than sailing the boat. If she went out more the engine would probably have fewer gunking-up issues. But, if we maximised our sailing, we’d struggle to work and therefore never be able to eat or do anything else, so that’s just a compromise of life.

Start-up work

I’ve become an amateur Python coder and built some cool toys now.

Long term, I’d want a real IT tech. However, short term, I’ve learned to write scripts and edit them, and now we have a monitoring API that spits out wallet balances, a pretty solid SQL database, and I’m building an automated e-mail notifier for when actions are confirmed.

At the moment I use a lot of ChatGPT. It’s pretty crap at designing products, it’s not going to replace the human any time soon, but it’s exceptional at spotting typos and bugs. Typos seem to be the number one issue in the programs I write so I’m getting good value out of it.

I built the API in a modular fashion so I have been able to reuse a lot of the scripts I wrote for the API and throw them at the e-mail notifier.

After this, I’m going to push out to make a PDF-generator that spits out data in a pre-formatted report. That’s going to be useful for a lot of our projects and will save us hours of admin, especially when it comes to invoices.

We’ve been burning hard though and I’m having to take my foot off the gas a little bit. It was important to sprint start, but sprinting isn’t sustainable and we now need to set up as a business.

Still waiting on the regulatory licence and there seems to be some unnecessary delays. Lots of spurious questions that really should have been asked earlier.

We’ve also provisionally identified our office. None of us wanted to actually pay for or work from an office, but we’re needing a controlled space to collaborate in and the lack of that is becoming a drag factor on us setting up.

So I guess my digital nomad dreams will have to wait.

Distractions and detours

Dungeon Crawler Carl

I have to confess that amongst the clearly high-brow reading I do, I’m a big fan of a LitRPG series called Dungeon Crawler Carl.

LitRPG as a genre is bloody awful. I’d say it’s genuinely unreadable. However, author Matt Dinniman’s writing style is so good that you don’t notice the genre parts. Strong blend of comedy, drama and character development.

The story follows Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk. Earth has been harvested and the survivors are being forced to star an AI-powered game show that’s a cross between the Running Man, Fortnite and Takeshi’s Castle.

You wouldn’t think it would work as a premise, and yet…

Anyway, the latest book came out on 12 May and I’m frantically reading it. Lady SierraWhiskyMike is keenly tracking my progress so that she can read it, too, having gotten her work colleagues hooked on it.

Non-FIRE goals

My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)

We’re still tapping away at Sultans of Swing. I get a little better each time, but I still suck. My teacher has told me that we’re moving on next week anyway, but I should expect to need a couple more months to play it sort-of well.

It’s not an easy song.

In the meantime, I haven’t been practicing as much as I’d like to. I keep finding things taking up my time or getting to the end of the day and being unable to face getting the guitar out of the case. That’s not healthy. I know why: it’s because I’ve been sprinting at work.

As soon as I started to think I can’t bring myself to do that today, I started to clock that the sprinting had gone far enough. Time to take my foot off the gas a little.

I did however learn the main parts to Square Hammer by Ghost. Still got the solo to learn, but after plugging away at Sultans I’ve managed to get better at learning other songs, so it’s definitely showing benefits.

Fitness

I’ve been dropping running into my work-from-home days in an attempt to recondition my knee and get some cardio fitness back. I’ve managed three per week for the last two weeks.

Was starting to feel sluggish and doughy, but this is helping.

I’m comfortably up to 5km now but interestingly I’m not doing it at anything like the pace I should be. Well, it’s a heart rate thing. You can tell my cardio has been neglected for a while and my FitBit went berserk on what seemed like a slow pace.

Plan is to get this up to regular 5km jogs, then start adding a 5-miler back in a couple of months and some faster 5km runs.

I’m not military fit anymore (and don’t want to push there right now), so I’m not expecting to get back down to 6-minute miles, but I think 7-8 minutes per mile over 5 miles is a decent baseline for me. I’m… around 8:30-9 minutes per mile at the moment. More work required, which is to be expected after so long off.

Final thoughts

I’ve sprinted work to get to the minimum viable product stage and now we’re basically there, just waiting on a regulator. The bulk of it is good to go and we won’t know how well it works until we get to live testing.

So now I need to learn to step back a bit and do some personal stuff. That’s the lesson here.

It’s irritating that the boat engine is spewing salt water. I know it’s probably an easy thing to fix, it’s almost certainly a valve that’s crusted up with salt and just needs a rinse with warm freshwater, but I want to keep that warranty and now I need an actual Volvo engineer. Bugger. I think the lesson to be learned is that we need to take the boat out more frequently.

My financial independence campaign continues!