Thoughts and reflections form the past week or so from my own financial independence campaign.
Progress on my goals
Boat plan
We treated ourselves to gale force winds on Sunday night/Monday. Yay, fun!
So funny thing about marinas is that they can’t usually provide 360-degree protection. Well, not often. There’s a way in and out, which is generally facing away from the prevailing wind direction. Otherwise, you’d never get a boat out to sea.
This leaves a perfect vulnerability for the wind to change its direction and blow straight into your marina.
Normally, not a problem. It happens. Unfortunately, this time we had gale force winds blowing directly into this vulnerability.
High tide hit, we were all exposed, and it became possible to surf the pontoons as they flicked about in the waves.
So on the one hand: pretty fun, lots of adventure, we feel like badasses for having survived it. True seasoned sailors.
On the other hand: we haven’t slept and we were up at 0400hrs moving fenders around and adding extra stern spring lines.
They say you have to ride the rough with the smooth, and we definitely rode the rough part.
Distractions and detours
Work trip!
I’m writing this, tired and shortly to collapse, from a nice hotel room during a work trip.
Happy with that.
Unfortunately, this means that I will miss my guitar lesson this week. Sucks, but can’t be helped.
Website redirect?!
My web domain renewed this week and suddenly this site began redirecting to a completely different web address.
I don’t know how or why that happened!
The damage is mostly sorted now, but there are a few stray links I need to chase down and correct. Eurgh, sorry readers, not intentional and no I haven’t been hacked. It’s definitely an error somewhere on my end or the hosting provision.
Non-FIRE goals
My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)
My new strings sound amazing!
I’m meant to be learning Oasis’ Don’t Look Back in Anger but I’m on my travels without a guitar, so that’s going to take a hit this week.
This is a step above what I’d been playing before. I’d actually tried this a few months back, but it had kicked my arse. This time, I managed to keep up with most of it during the lesson.
I’m not even sure how I did it, but I did!
A cool measure of progress and signs that my little-and-often approach to practising is paying off, however slowly.
I think we’re coming up on a year since I started and I’m happy with the progress.
Fitness
I’ve cycled to work five days this week, including cycling into a headwind on Thursday and getting soaked by rain in the process.
Cycling fitness is starting to plateau now that I’ve broken the initial conditioning and I know realistically that I need to fit in an upper body exercise.
Final thoughts
Boat life was tested a little at the end of last week, but we’ve come through it all relatively unscathed.
I’m expecting slow progress this week, but let’s see how things go.
My financial independence campaign continues!
