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

Progress on my goals

Boat plan

Finally finished the painting. Unfortunately I bought the wrong anode, but when the right one is fitted we can go back into the water.

I also spent the weekend preparing for the new instruments, which meant looking at this rat’s nest of wiring:

So now I need to rewire the boat because this is a total fire hazard!

We‘re also going to change out the radio. I found it floating (seriously) amongst the sea of wires, completely unattached to anything. Amazing. It wasn’t actually connected to the GPS in any way, which is probably why it had no GPS input. It’s probably not because our GPS isn’t working after all.

It’s technically possible for me to simply repair the connections but the radio cables are fairly worn and those can’t be replaced if they fail due to the age of the device. Lady SierraWhiskyMike is keen to simply replace the whole radio because it’s a lifesaving bit of kit. Makes sense to me!

Distractions and detours

Work trip!

This week my office sent me to Zurich. Love it, great place to do business in. Plus I got paid to travel, which is always cool.

Instead of flying home, I took the train to meet Lady SierraWhiskyMike for our own…

Italy trip!

This post is so late because I’m currently in the Milan area ready to attend a local festival at a friend’s home town.

Which is awesome.

It’s a gnocchi festival. Turn out that the town, Guastalla, has a festival to commemorate a riot against an unjust tax on produce back in the 1800s. They elect a citizen to be the Gnocchi King and make a full weekend of it. I’m typing this a little hungover from the Day 1 party and we’re involved in the parade tomorrow, which I understand to be an even bigger party afterwards. Hard life!

Rogue setback on my travels

I was disappointed to learn that my company has tried to get hold of me through LinkedIn to get me to do work stuff while I’m on leave. Wouldn’t mind if it was actually important stuff but it just isn’t.

Fuck off, guys.

It’s not emergency, it’s just someone faffing.

Non-FIRE goals

My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)

We’re doing Nirvana Smells Like Teen Spirit right now. The basics are easy but the point is to get the whole song including by the solo down and accurate,

I’m pretty stoked that I remembered all the parts first time. That’s a massive amount of progress from when I started, where it took me weeks to learn the first grade 1 and 2 songs.

Being on foreign travels this week, I won’t have much practice time. Fully expecting to need to do a regain next week to recover from a full week off.

Fitness

Mixed bag this week. I managed to get in a decent calisthenics session before I left on my travels, and we’ve been putting in some serious steps, but on the other hand I’ve been eating high calorie foods and drinking beer.

So I reckon on average I will have put some weight on that I’ll want to shift.

Eh, it happens. It’s a fairly short holiday so it shouldn’t be too extreme a shift.

Final thoughts

Travel has been the main theme of this week, first with work and then with a long weekend in Italy. Not keen to return to work on Tuesday given that they’re hounding me over LinkedIn direct messages to get me to do minor admin that can totally wait.

Eh, what can you do.

I’m aware that I’ll need to do a fitness and guitar regain next week too, but for now I’m going to enjoy the sun.

My financial independence campaign continues!