Thoughts and reflections about the past week or so from my own financial independence campaign.
Progress on my goals
Boat life
Water tank IS IN!!!
We’ve dragged ourselves kicking and screaming into the modern era with the convenience of RUNNING WATER in our home!
This may be the happiest I’ve made Lady SierraWhiskyMike in weeks.
It was a feature-length mission that involved cutting holes in bulkheads to feed pipes through, having to create a kind of supportive mat structure out of polypropylene garage/ play mats, adding a gel coat to exposed wood, dry fitting the thing about five times and finally connecting everything back up with the water pump system.
I can confirm that at approximately 1900hrs on Saturday 22 February 2025, we re-gained modern convenience.
As I type this, we’re in the process of flushing the pipes and taps with a chlorox cleaner product to kill off anything that has been left in our plumbing while we had no working water tank.
So tonight, dear readers, we finally ditch the jerry cans we’ve been relying on.
Sweet, sweet success!
Why didn’t you just pay a guy to do it?
Dude, this took days. Even if we’d hired a professional fitter, we were looking at a substantial daily rate. We’d probably have paid another £1,000 easily on just getting fitters in.
We now know – intimately – how conceptually simple (but practically fiddly) boat plumbing actually is. This doesn’t sound like much, but I’d much rather learn this in the safety and convenience of our home port than have to piece it together the hard way in some desolate anchorage miles from help with the wrong spare parts.
Finally: there’s an odd thing in the marine world that no-one treats your boat as well as you do.
Despite what all boat owners will tell you (you’ll hear the description “robbers” used a lot), I think this is because of two things:
- Every boat is different, and you can’t expect any marine tradesman to have worked on every model of every boat marque. With the best of intentions, they can’t know every foible of your particular vessel, so the odd minor mistake sometimes happens.
- Sailors tend to be emotionally attached to their boats and when you’ve lived in something you know all of its character traits and quirks. You can immediately tell if something is even slightly different with your vessel, it’s spooky. So it’s fair to say that your average sailor is a hard-to-please customer.
So, yeah. We built a whole cradle out of supporting mats when we know (having taken the previous tank out) that a boatyard would’ve chanced it by simply sticking blobs of sealant down to hold the tank in place at key points. We didn’t do this because there’s always the possibility that we need to get the tank back out – say, if we got a hull breach at that point and were hauled out for repairs. With our way it’s a faff but it can be done without destroying anything.
Distractions and detours
Amazon removing local downloads for Kindle
There’s a feature on Amazon’s Kindle Store to let you download and save local copies of the books you buy.
In early generations of Kindle, this was how you got books onto the device. You downloaded them, then transferred via USB to the Kindle.
I mean, there was a WiFi mode, but WiFi in 2025 is a lot easier to use and way more commonly understood than WiFi back in 2007. WiFi routers in cafes and pubs weren’t particularly common in 2007 and we were still impressed that a “smart phone” let you do video calling.
Well, Amazon has announced that they’re removing this feature. You will only be able to download to Kindle e-readers and apps books via the Amazon website.
Is this a big deal *today*?
Well, in practice not really. Most books you buy on Kindle Store are protected so that you can’t use them on other brand devices, and quite often they’re limited to just you (unless you add “family sharing” to your account, which you absolutely should if you and your partner both buy books on Kindle Store).
I can’t recall the last time I locally downloaded a Kindle ebook file without just connecting my Kindle to my phone’s tethered WiFi. It’s just faster this way.
Also, lots of people browse Kindle Store directly on the device they want to use as the reader.
So, practically speaking, it’s not a big deal *today*.
It’s the direction of travel I’m more nervous about…
Could this be a bigger deal *tomorrow*?
Well, yes.
When you buy an ebook, you don’t actually buy a book. Nerds and lawyers like me have known this for a long time. You buy a licence to use the ebook content, and that licence comes with contractual limitations.
That’s right: you’re paying for a contract right to read the book in a certain way. You never owned the book, just the rights in the contract.
The licence rights have always been qualified to effectively allow Amazon to do whatever it wants with the main product. This includes removing the licence entirely; limiting what you can read it on; changing the content and so on. You have no real control over it.
Until now, Amazon hasn’t really exercised these rights. This means that customers like me could trust that the rights technically existed, but in practice were only to cover Amazon’s arse if something technically failed. That’s a reasonable thing for them to want to do given that Kindle Store was essentially a new and untested concept.
This makes the recent action a bit of a change in Amazon’s posture. While I don’t think Amazon is really doing anything other than making the lives of its back-end tech staff a bit easier, this sets the precedent for them exercising their rights in other ways.
Regular readers will understand that I’m not particularly comfortable with that. Philosophically, I believe that ownership is still important, and I’m a little uncomfortable that my digital assets (such as a right to read an ebook) are now seen as something a company is willing to simply change or remove.
But what can we do about this?
The answer is simple: revert to hard copy. Buy books, use your library.
While I do use our library, I can’t really go fully back hard copy books. Well, I sort of can, but there are two problems and both of them are because I live on a boat:
- Books don’t like the humidity but my Kindle Paperwhite is water resistant.
- I don’t have a lot of storage space, so I’ll be getting rid of the book soon after I’ve read it anyway – putting me essentially in a worse position than if I just use the Kindle.
So I guess in my case I’ll have to lump it.
I use my local library a fair bit. “Free to read” trumps “£5.99 on Kindle Store” every time. However, I like the convenience of an e-reader and Lady SierraWhiskyMike bought me a new one at Christmas.
When this one dies off though I’ll have a think about whether or not to replace it with another Kindle or at all.
Writing club!
The February homework went down well. Thinking about the zeitgeist, I wrote a story about a kid who is in a far-right gang that gets brought around after meeting a middle-aged lady with cat ears in a gay pride parade.
Story worked better in real life than it sounds.
Anyway, my goal was to build up tension and make the reader feel uncomfortable and increasingly anxious until the plot twist moment. Seems to have worked!
In other news: if you’re going to read a story aloud, try not to include speaking parts from the far right. I had to warn the club before I started reading that there were several slurs against minority groups and the LGBT+ community in the story, because the main character is literally in the process of trying to get into an extremist hate group.
During the session, we wrote two further writing sprint stories. I wrote a kind of after-the-event chapter to my story from the first writing prompt, then in the second wrote a much more comical story about a woman in the future who has had more rejuvenation surgery than her one-off lover had realised.
Non-FIRE goals
My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)
We took last week off while I travelled around London shilling my business as a corporate lawyer. This week we revised some of the songs we’d already played and got back into the swing of things. I was on fire this week and playing was a complete joy.
OK, “on fire” for me is “picked up a new riff in about three attempts”. I’m neither Satriani nor Vai. It’s good for me.
Fitness
I barely got any time this week to go running. My boss at work high-five handed over a project so that he could go on leave, but his briefing was (a) half-arsed and (b) didn’t include any of the complications that I then found myself in as a result.
Suffice to say I’m looking at other employment options. When you get a call from the board of the client that a whole board meeting has been suspended because you’ve given them documents that are apparently not the deal they thought you were doing, you look like a knob. In this case, it wasn’t even my fault.
Anyway, back in the room.
Today I did my longer distance run and came in with 17ish miles under my legs. I recall the average pace being something like 8mins22 per mile.
I say recall, because although I recorded the run with my FitBit it hasn’t saved all the data and won’t give me the stats like it usually does. I usually get a GPS route and a full recording of total time (etc), but this time it just thinks I travelled 17miles and had a high heart rate, despite telling me all the data as I went along. Apparently the “finish” button wiped its recollection of the last two-and-a-half hours.
Well, whatever. The important point is that I’m very much on track. I reckon that I could sustain a 9-10 minute mile pace after that for the last 9 miles, which would put me within this 4-hour marathon pace I hear talk about.
Obviously you never really know what you’re going to do until you’re doing it, but that’s a comforting thought five weeks out from the event.
Anyway, I’m completely ball bagged now. Need to finish this post and get an early night. Feeling pretty sore and tired.
Final thoughts
Running water is such a huge win. Cooking tonight was so much easier now that I don’t have to juggle around a jerry can with a tap to wash stuff.
We’re now only going to need to fill the water weekly instead of daily, so it takes away a bit of friction from our daily lives.
The marathon training is going strong. All the same, this is tiring, dudes. I think after this one I’m going to keep up the weekend long run habit but 8-12 miles is totally fine for me. Maybe half marathon distance; might enter the odd half marathon race or something.
With that in mind, it’s time to prep for work tomorrow and then get some sleep. It’s only 2109hrs at the time of writing but I’m tapping out. Too much excitement for one day, sleepy now!
My financial independence campaign continues!
