Indiscretion, our Nordhavn trawler, has a Maretron onboard computer system which monitors most of the vital components aboard the vessel. From a display at the helm or master stateroom, I can review the wind speed outside, fuel, water and holding tank levels, state of the batteries, engine temperature, rudder angle, water depth, etc. …
Lisa and I attended a training session at Northern Lights in Ballard, the company that manufactured Indiscretion’s engine and generator. This one-day “Captain’s Course” is taught by Bob Senter, a respected authority on practically everything within the engine room of a trawler. …
I spent last weekend in Las Vegas to attend my niece’s Little White Chapel wedding on the Strip. Frequent flier miles paid for our tickets, placing us in the far back of the plane. On the way home to Seattle, my family took the whole row on the port side of the aircraft, while I settled into the opposite aisle seat. A couple soon appeared and clambered into the seats next to mine. They had flown down for the weekend to see Billy Idol perform and were on their way back home. …
See my Quicken 2020 for Mac Review for the most recent review.
I have been using Quicken to manage my finances since 1989, making this my 30th anniversary with the program. Though I started on a Mac, and use a Mac today, the vast majority of my use has been on Windows. A little over two years ago, I switched to the Mac version of Quicken which I wrote about here.
As I wrote then, I had very high expectations for the Mac version under new leadership, independent of Intuit, and the financial benefit of a new subscription-based business model. In this post, I’ll share an update on how it’s gone using the latest version of Quicken, Quicken 2019 for Mac. …
Patrick O’Brian, the author of the Aubrey-Maturin seafaring novels, would have been 104 years old today. Mr. O’Brian passed away in 2000 but left behind a treasure of twenty meticulously researched historical sea novels set in the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. The books center on the friendship and adventures of its two main characters: Jack Aubrey, a British naval officer, and Stephen Maturin, the ship’s surgeon, naturalist, and part-time intelligence agent.
As a sailor, I appreciate the technical portions of driving a tall ship on the open sea. I’ll admit, even with many years of sailing experience, I don’t fully understand all the jargon that describes the maneuvering of these massive ships from 300 years ago, but I do get the gist of it. I delight in sailing along with Captain Aubrey from my comfortable armchair, plowing through hurricanes and typhoons, avoiding icebergs, clawing off a lee shore in a tempest, even fleeing an erupting volcano in the middle of the ocean.
It’s not always foul weather and danger: I revel in the many lovely passages depicting beautiful weather, trade winds pulling the ship along at 12 knots over an easy rolling sea that brings smiles to the officers and crew alike. And of course, there are the gruesome depictions of sea battles, frigates gliding along through thick smoke, cannons blasting huge iron balls through the hulls and rigging of their enemy, spars shattering, men dying instantly in bloody rivers on the deck, or later on the archaic operating table in the ship’s cockpit.
…
Lisa and I have celebrated 22 wedding anniversaries. For at least the past dozen years, we haven’t exchanged gifts beyond small tokens like flowers or chocolates. Instead, we go out to dinner, just the two of us, to celebrate the occasion. This year we celebrated at May’s Kitchen, a Thai restaurant on Vashon that is so good, it is worthy of special occasions like anniversaries. As we were heading out the door on our way to the restaurant, Lisa surprised me with a package.
“Wait, what’s this?” I asked with apprehension. She was breaking tradition. “I didn’t buy you a gift.”
“Don’t worry. It’s for both of us. It’s a marriage saver,” she replied with a cryptic smile. …
After two decades of sailing, we have crossed over to the dark side.
A few weeks ago we bought a powerboat, a Nordhavn 43 trawler, that we’ve named Indiscretion. She isn’t a typical go-fast stinkpot kind of powerboat. Her cruising speed of 7 knots isn’t far off from sailing. We won’t win any races. But she’s a stout little ship, with the displacement and hull design to withstand open ocean conditions, and an engine and fuel supply to take us from Seattle to Hawaii on a single tank of diesel. A sistership circumnavigated the world a few years ago. We don’t expect to cross oceans, but we do have plans to go places that require blue water passages, up to Alaska or down to Mexico, and going there in a boat that can handle just about anything provides real peace of mind. …
When I was starting out in public accounting, nearly thirty years ago, I got the chance to work for a new partner who had just joined our firm. His name was Joe Sambataro, an Italian-American from New Jersey, full of blunt honesty and character, and we hit it off right away. He became an important mentor and eventually recruited me to join a small staffing firm in Tacoma as a financial analyst when he joined as CFO. He would later retire, then come back as CEO. Joe is now the Chairman of the Board of this multi-billion publicly traded staffing firm.
Back when I first began working for Joe, he shared three wishes for me: Marriage, Mortgage, and a Boat. In that order. He figured that an employee with a spouse and a mortgage would stick around longer than a single guy with no ties to anything. The boat, he said, was just for fun. Joe liked boating and especially fishing off a boat.
I took Joe’s advice and in short order got married to my beautiful wife Lisa, and signed a mortgage on our Vashon Island home. I soon began looking for a sailboat. …
I’ve taken over 6,000 ferry rides since moving to Vashon Island. Most of these were uneventful passages to work and back. But everyone once in a while, say 1% off the time, or 60 sailings, I’ve been the very first car on the ferry.
Being the first car on the ferry has some unique benefits. Unless an ambulance or police car has priority loading, the first car loads into the first spot of the center lane, perched out on the bow of the boat. The view from this vantage point is unencumbered and fantastic. On summer days, you can roll down the windows and open the sunroof and take in the glory of sun and sea. In winter, you feel the rollers and spray even with the windows up. No reason to go up on deck when you have such a wonderful ringside seat. I almost always put down my book or laptop on these journeys and soak in the raw beauty of the waves usually lost on me back in the bowels of the car deck on other sailings. …
This is the second installment of a multi-part series on journal writing. The first post described the benefits of keeping a journal. Here, I’ll share thoughts on where to keep your journal: paper or digital.
For most of my adult life, I’ve kept a journal. I’ve always felt a calling to record my life, perhaps some homage to my love of books and reading. My earliest journals were blank hardback books, the first of which took nearly a decade of sporadic writing to fill. After I became more convinced of my journal keeping ability, I bought lovely leather-bound books with acid-free paper and a silk ribbon to mark my place. I figured I could splurge on a book that I might carry around with me daily for a year or more. I now have a shelf full of these beautiful books after two decades of near-daily writing. …
Book or Computer? The Best Place to Keep your JournalRead More »
You should keep a journal and ideally write in it every day. You’ve likely heard that advice already. The internet is full of articles and research on why journaling is good for you. I’ve read a lot of these myself.
One memorable take on journaling came from the Asian Efficiency Podcast last year. While I agreed with most of the points made by the hosts and was thankful to learn some new tips to improve my journal process, I chuckled at their youthful exuberance, and frankly, inexperience with journaling. Neither had kept a journal beyond a few short years, so they couldn’t speak with much conviction about the tangible benefits of journaling.
Creating and sustaining a habit of keeping a journal can be difficult, regardless of the benefits, so I thought I might share some tips from someone with more than 30 years of constant journaling. …
An update to this review for Quicken 2019 for Mac is available here.
Personal financial management is important to me. I’ve always tried to be disciplined when it comes to money, and as a CPA and business planner as my chosen vocation, managing my own money comes pretty naturally. Applying finance strategies I’ve used in managing businesses to my personal finances has paid dividends. Like an accounting system at the office, a well-managed home needs its own financial record keeping. In my case, that system has been the venerable software tool Quicken. What follows is a history of how I’ve used Quicken and reactions to the most recent version of Quicken 2018 for Mac. …
While reading books might be waning in today’s mobile phone obsessed, Facebook generation, the tools and technology for reading and remembering books have never been better. I’d call it a Golden Age for those lucky souls willing to invest the time to read.
This is difficult for me to admit, coming from a long history of reading real books. I have a personal library of more than 2,000 books that line the shelves of a small reading place that I consider a sanctuary.
But for the past ten years I’ve read more and more books electronically on my Kindle than I have in paper format. Other than cookbooks or art books, all my reading is now digital. And that isn’t quite true either, since I use the marvelous Paprika app to house all my recipes, with an iPad in the kitchen as I cook. If I find a recipe I like in one of my books, I can’t use it properly until I successfully track it down online to import into my cooking system. …
Batman has his cave; Ironman has his lab; but for me, this place and my books provide such a great comfort – a salve from the trials of life and the boost of energy I need to keep pushing forward. I’ve read so many great books here, and dreamed up hundreds of plans, some limited few of which came to be. The dreaming was the best part. Everyone needs their special place to think and dream; I am so grateful that mine is here in my own home, among my dear bookish friends.
Back in my early thirties, my uncle Jim died unexpectedly. He had a lifelong passion of sailing, particularly the sell-everything-and-sail-off-across the-horizon variety. He had years and years of Cruising World magazines stacked up next to the toilet in his bathroom. I remember him waxing on about his plans to cast off, the destinations he’d visit, the freedom he would feel. He bought a sailboat, a very seaworthy vessel, capable of sailing anywhere in the world, and spent years in the boatyard getting her ready for sea. The conversations changed from if he would go, to when. And then, out of the blue, he passed away. To my knowledge, her keel never floated while Jim lived. He never achieved his dream of casting off and chasing the horizon.
I vividly recall the day I learned of his death. I was shocked. His was the first close death in my life. He was still a young man and I struggled to comprehend the awful fact that he was gone. Living near Puget Sound afforded access to many marinas. I drove to the nearest one and walked the docks thinking of my uncle Jim. I looked at each boat on the dock, most of the boats sadly forlorn, and was miserable at my loss. And then something happened to me, literally on that dock. I was struck by an idea that I must carry on his passion for sailing. …
I’ve always been a big reader and dreamed of having my own private library for as long as I can remember. One of the things that drew me to our house here on Vashon was the book-lined room with views out to the water. We’ve expanded the shelves over the years and now have all my books in easy reach from two antique leather wingback chairs. I’ve spent many a quiet evening reading from one of these chairs in perfect peace, feeling very fortunate to have such a sanctuary.
And then … we got a puppy. Not just any puppy, but a Puggle (mostly Beagle), and my private space quickly became his playground. First, he chewed through a half dozen rare leather-bound books I spent a small fortune to acquire. He then tore through the leather cushion on the starboard wing chair. Later he gnawed through the ancient leather base of the port chair. The kids would avoid me on the nights I would come home to discover another puppy atrocity in the library. I am on a first-name basis with an antique furniture repair place in Tacoma.
We ended up covering the chairs and putting baby gates across all the bookcases to prevent further damage from the little fella. Since then, the damage has stopped, though the charm of the place has lost some of its magic. Yet tonight, as the two of us sit together ruminating on the day, I think it’s become a good place to share after all…
When I was a boy, younger than twelve-year-old Connor is now, I believed all the stories my dear Pop told me. He sailed across oceans, traveled down the Nile, jumped out of planes in the 82nd Airborne, drank with Hemingway, conspired with Castro, along with many other misdeeds and adventures. While my kids are constant skeptics of any tales I tell, even the true ones, I didn’t question the stories I was told. Pop was a great story teller. He would get this gleam in his eye while he drew you in and threw in such vivid details of the surroundings and the things that happened to him that you couldn’t help but believe.
One of Pop’s favorite tales was about his time in Valencia, Spain. I don’t recall why he was there. Maybe the army? It didn’t matter. All I knew is he loved Valencia. Its beaches, women, wine and music. Its history and machismo and bullfighting. This was captivating stuff for a ten year old. …
