Active Living – Page 4

Long Overdue Update!

Wow. Three of the craziest, busiest, happiest months of my life. How to compress them into one post? WHY compress them into one post? This seems silly, but I think the best way to re-jumpstart my blogging is to get this all out of the way in one post, and then go back to more regular updates. *sigh*.

At my last major post, I was about to speak at the Open Web Vancouver conference at the Vancouver Conference Center. My talk went pretty well, I guess – I mean, I definitely didn’t win any awards, but nobody walked out either. I met some great new folks and had a good experience overall. I know now that speaking at tech conferences is almost exactly like doing live-pa techno in front of a big audience – the more prepared you are, the easier it is to let go and just be yourself.

Since then, there’s been… God. Seriously, where to start?!

I’ve had repeated, profound musical experiences on the boat, jamming with friends. Picture if you will a mirror-smooth False Creek, with the boat anchored about fifty feet offshore. Dan Ross playing guitar and singing, Chad Taylor playing muted trumpet and providing some percussive backup and myself on mandolin and backup vocals – folks walking past, double-taking and sitting down on the seawall to listen, applauding between songs. Making music on the boat with friends has given me far more joy than I ever imagined it could. Actually, making music on the boat at all – I’ve been spending on average about eight to ten hours per week sitting on my deck, playing my guitar and singing. If there is a greater peace than playing music on the water, I haven’t found it yet.

I’ve gone on three epic sailing adventures, the third of which is still ongoing – as of this writing I am anchored in this lovely little bay, surrounded by million-dollar waterfront houses and a beautiful cliff infested with rock climbers. More on that in future posts – but suffice to say this ongoing solo-sailing adventure is not without its trials and tribulations.

The first of the three epic sailing adventures was with a beautiful woman named Miya who I met at Burning Man in 2008, and who had come to visit me several times over the past year. Her confidence in my sailing ability was appreciated, though perhaps unwarranted, as we left Vancouver and immediately ran into eight-foot breaking swells just off Point Atkinson, enroute to the Sunshine Coast. The sailing got a lot better after the first day, but we still had to spend a few days on Bowen Island with engine trouble – mostly waiting around for a mechanic, until we tackled the problem head-on with the manual and some elbow grease, finally solving it ourselves and getting the engine back up and running. We then cruised up the coast to Secret Cove and Smuggler Cove, where we spent a night before returning to Vancouver. It was an amazing trip; the ocean opened my eyes and put a good fear into me, and the company was exquisite. The parting of ways at the end was wistful to say the least.

Drew and Laurel spinning fire on Tie Fighter — Drew and Laurel spinning fire on the boat at Diversity

The second sailing adventure was with yet another beautiful woman, Carrie, who joined me on a trip to the Diversity Festival on Texada Island. Technically we were supposed to sail with a crew of six, but Vancouver being the city of flailers that it is, the crew slowly called in to cancel until it was just the two of us. The winds were against us the whole way there and back, forcing us to motor around 90% of the tip, so it’s debatable whether or not we actually saved any money travelling by “sailboat”. We did get the sails up once or twice, but not nearly as much as I would have liked. The festival itself was excellent, with us arriving in full pirate regalia to great fanfare, spending a weekend surrounded by beautiful people and great music, and rolling out again on Monday with a grand exit. Sunday was a bit crazy, as the wind suddenly went from 5kn up to 25-30kn, and Tie Fighter danced in four-foot swells for the night – I now have a lot more faith in my anchor than before. Another boat nearby actually did slip their anchor, and came within a few feet of hitting us, but we held steady and Monday was much calmer. Another thing learned: rowing a dinghy in calm waters is one thing, rowing through four-foot waves as they break on the beach is another thing entirely! I made very good use of the drybags my sister gave me for my birthday.

The next weekend after Diversity was the Emrg-N-See Festival just outside of Salem, Oregon. I went to this festival with Trent last year, and it was probably the best festival I’d been to to date – it was as though someone had sent a personal invitation to every single gorgeous, blonde, dreadlocked, dubstep-loving yoga instructor on the west coast. I cannot express how many times I had to stop and shake my head at the sheer beauty surrounding me. This year was similar, though somewhat diluted, as though every guy who went last year went home and explained the situation to every guy he knew. I know I did, which is why I was surprised that the crew going down fron Vancouver was much smaller this year. Regardless, I definitely got my fill of amazing dubstep and bassline music, on very excellent soundsystems. I also got to take a tablespoon of dancefloor dirt out of my nose every morning, which I am choosing to look at as preparation for this year’s Burning Man expedition.

The weekend after Emrg-N-See was Sequential Circus 5, an electronic music event that I guess I’m sort of in charge of. I say that with some reservation, because the show couldn’t happen without every one of the seriously talented and driven people involved – we’ve got the whole thing pretty much down to a science now, and even with six live acts on a small stage, we continue to be efficient and competent, and we still have a good time doing it. This SeqCirc was probably the best music to date, though we were up against some very stiff competition. The capacity of the venue is about 180 people, and we had about 100 people, so while it was never packed, it never felt empty, and nearly everyone who was there at midnight was still there at 3am when we turned the lights on, so I count that as a win. The next Sequential Circus, SeqCircSix, will be in January.

After recovering from SeqCirc, having a few sailing missions out and around English Bay, and basically settling down and focusing on dayjob work for a while, I took off on my first big solo-sailing trip, headed for Victoria…

Adventure!

…where to start?

Wow. Ok. So, I’m typing this from the boat. It’s a gorgeous Friday morning, and my view from the deck is the stunning Vancouver waterline. The feeling of contentment is daunted only by the chill in the air, but after months of living in a basement with no control over the furnace level, it’s not such a bother.

I. HAVE. ARRIVED!

Less than one year after I made my decision to become a technological nomad, I have thrown off the shackles of the office, cut down my consumption until a part-time job covers all of my expenses, moved out of my home, and now I live full-time on a large, sailing trimaran!

Ok – maybe that’s a bit romantic. I now live fulltime on a big, leaky, floating wooden hunting camp older than a few girls I’ve dated in the last year or so. She’s got soul though, and with a little work she’ll last me as long as I care to keep this lifestyle.

To catch up a bit – the most remarkable part of this stage of the adventure is just how much the universe reminds you that it needs to maintain a balance. For every new freedom, there is a new and daunting responsibility, something new and important to learn about.

Let’s start at Saturday – a friend and I went to White Rock on the bus early Saturday morning to pick up the boat. Fortunately water had been turned on at the dock, after being off all winter, so we flushed the antifreeze out of the water tanks and made a few repairs while getting ready to sail her to Vancouver. We talked with the former owner, squeezing as much final information as possible out of him, and then set out.

The first stress was navigating the Nekomekl River, which is a tidal river that gets *very* shallow at times. As the depth sounder showed 7, then 6, then 5… all the way down to *1*, we panicked somewhat and slowed to a crawl… then figured out that the depth sounder is measured in meters. Tie Fighter drafts about 2.5 feet, so we can float just fine in a meter of water.

We had to stand for about an hour waiting for a train bridge to open to allow us through, but then we were off into open water. Unfortunately, the lovely brisk winds of the morning died completely the second we left the river, and we had to motor the entire way. We made about 7kn though, which is very fast for a cruising sailboat – during the cruise we saw dolphins, ducks and sea lions.

As it grew dark and we approached Vancouver Harbour, I had the first scare of the night. I looked over and saw that we had missed a very large bell buoy – large like two stories tall, with a 10m concrete base – by less than 10m! This cemented into my head just how important it is to keep a close watch at night – even with a huge red blinking light on the top, I hadn’t noticed the buoy until we were going past it!

The second scare came as we motored under the bridges towards my final destination, just beside Science World. The Burrard and Granville bridges, no problem – but as we whipped under the Cambie bridge, I happened to glance up and noticed that we had VERY little clearance. Like, just shy of a foot I would say! As the meaning of this sunk in, we realized that it was currently low tide, but if it had been any higher, we would have dismasted the boat! That would have cost *thousands* of dollars, and might even have been unrepairable – needless to say, I am now acutely aware of the height of my mast, and will be watching carefully from now on!

Anchoring that night took seven or eight attempts, and I slept pretty well, despite the harrowing experiences with the bridge and the buoy. In the morning, I was awoken by a slap-slap-slap-slapping sound on the deck, and poked my head out of the hatch to find two Canada geese standing on the starboard wing, as if to welcome me to the neighborhood. The morning was crisp, sunny and *gorgeous*.

I spent the night on Sunday as well, with no incidents, and Monday morning I returned to my apartment for a day of work. Monday night, on the other hand, a very stiff wind blew up and threatened to pull my boat into the shore – when I arrived at the boat I found that she’d already moved a few feet, so I pulled up the anchor and reset it with another anchor (a delta instead of a CQR), which seemed to hold much better. I spent a fitful night of sleep, the winds howling above the cabin, anxiously watching my GPS to make sure I wasn’t dragging my anchor. The morning was gorgeous, however, easily the nicest day of the year so far, and I played hooky from work, spending the afternoon playing guitar on the deck. What a feeling of well being!

Wednesday afternoon was a lovely brisk breeze, and so I put the word out to a bunch of friends that I’d be going sailing, and invited them to join me. Unfortunately most of them could not, but as it turned out, that wasn’t such a bad thing – as we pulled away from the anchorage and motored under the Granville bridge, the engine made a bit of a funny noise. I brought the throttle down and the noise went away, but it was curious nonetheless – then it did it again, just shy of the Burrard bridge. Directly after that, the engine quit, right in front of Sunset Beach! We quickly tossed an anchor over, which luckily hooked on the first try, and started to try to debug the situation.

The short version is that we ran out of gas. *sigh*. Always the easiest problem – but what made it worse is that running out of diesel is nothing like running out of gasoline, you have to purge the fuel lines of air bubbles which is a complicated and drawn-out process involving three wrenches, a few rags, and a close personal relationship with the engine! We ended up spending the night on the public docks just across from the beach, and a mechanic showed up in the morning to get the engine running and walk me through the steps should it ever happen again. How embarrassing!

Even further to this, he said to leave the engines running for an hour or so, just to charge the batteries back up. No problem, I thought, and he left the boat after getting credit card info and charging me a whopping $150 for the visit. Unfortunately, in the next hour, the tide went out…

I was sitting in the salon when I realized that the boat was heeling a little over to port. This is a bad thing – a trimaran doesn’t heel unless there’s a problem, like one of the amas taking on water. When I went up on deck, the problem was immediately obvious; one of the amas was up in the air, and the main hull was sitting on the bottom of the ocean floor! I watched in growing embarrassment over the next hour as the ama rose higher and higher out of the water, leaving me looking like a toy airplane lying in a puddle. I had to sit there, in full view of the beach and a thousand apartments, waiting for the tide to go back out. Eventually it did, and I motored back to my anchorage with my tail between my legs.

So that’s where we are as of now. It’s now 5:15pm, and I’ve just spent the day actually working from my berth on the boat, getting a reasonable amount of work done while taking breaks every now and again to go up on deck to sit in the sun and play my guitar and sing a bit. Life is pretty great!

…and now I have to bill my office for the work I’ve been doing, so that I’ll actually get paid. 🙂

Always More Work

I spent all day Saturday on the boat, sailing around White Rock. It was eye-opening; a lot of the things that I’ve been taking for granted will need a re-think.

For instance, there was a lot more mildew than I remembered. Mostly this was because there was a lot more *water* than I remembered, due in part to the massive snowfalls of the past two months. I think a lot of the mildew will be easily taken care of with Tilex and some elbow grease, but it’s certainly changed my plans with regards to what can and what can’t immediately move aboard! I’ve packed all my sci-fi novels (well, “all” meaning “those that have survived the massive culling”) into a cardboard box, assuming that I would be moving the books aboard, unpacking them, and getting rid of the cardboard box. As it is, I’ll definitely want to keep the books in some kind of plastic tub for at least the first little while, while I track down and eradicate the leaks in the roof.

Frankly there was a lot more water than I expected – I know, that doesn’t seem like rocket science, but seriously – under one of the bunks there was a good two inches of water pooled up! That’s just not acceptable – at least the water is coming in from the roof, and not from the hull, but with Vancouver’s weather patterns I get to look forward to living in a state of perpetual damp for the next few months. Part of my original plan involved bringing my main synthesizer onto the boat, but now that I’ve seen the reality of the water situation, the synth’s soft nylon travel case seems woefully inadequate.

There’s certainly a lot of little fixes she needs – the fiberglass is cracked in quite a few places on the deck, and each place will need to be ground out and new fiberglass laid in and epoxied into place, then sanded and eventually painted. Bill, the current owner, assures me that the work is easy, just time consuming, and that she’ll be a beautiful vessel once the work is complete.

All that being said, sailing was glorious! She’s a huge boat, but she’s in no way unweildy – she’s fast and agile. I’d go so far as to call her downright nimble! We hit eight knots in just over twelve knots of wind; almost unheard of for a monohull, but no problem for my trimaran. The best part was leaving my coffee cup on the cabin roof while we hit eight knots, with no problem – a monohull would have been heeled over at four knots, spilling the coffee, but she stayed perfectly level the entire day. 😀

Tomorrow it’s back out to White Rock to spend another full day banging away at her; hopefully we’ll get some of the fiberglass repairs attended to, but I’ll be happy just to learn more about her systems and get her better ready to be my new home.

hmm.

Is an office more productive because it’s an environment tailored to (or mentally associated with) working, or is it more productive simply because it’s not home?

Well, judging by the fact that it’s been a month since my last post, combined with the fact that I’m only blogging when I’m working outside the home, it would seem that my quest is not going quite as well as I’d have liked. Turns out it’s actually very difficult to get motivated to leave the house in the morning when you don’t technically have to…

Well – I guess I can’t really count it as a full month, seeing as eight (of a possible 20) working days were spent travelling to, partying in and returning from the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. Burning Man was amazing, as expected – really it was far, far more than that, but as our travelling crew decided on the way home, trying to describe the experience to someone who hasn’t been there is pretty much futile – you come off sounding like a cross between a religious zealot and a Pigeon Park loony. The closest I could come up with was “the universe constantly astounding me with how spectacularly beautiful it can be“. See? Loony.

Returning from my epic adventures, I seem to have slipped into a routine that isn’t at all what I was trying to achieve – in fact, I’m a lot less productive than I was in New Brunswick. This is serving to reinforce my belief that working in an office is better than working at home simply because it’s a different environment. Lately I’ve been getting up in the morning, making breakfast and coffee, and sitting at my desk for the next eight to ten hours, getting perhaps four to six hours of work done. This is wasting both my time and what remains of the beautiful Vancouver summer weather we’ve been having. There’ll be plenty of time to slack at home once the rains set in. So why can’t I seem to get motivated to get out and ride my bike to a coffee shop somewhere?

I guess the question becomes – is an office more productive because it’s an environment tailored to (or mentally associated with) working, or is it more productive simply because it’s not home? I find myself constantly distracted in my home “office”, due in no small part to my being surrounded by my favourite things.

The most productive working environment so far was working in an unused meeting room in my father’s law office in New Brunswick – basically a featureless white room. I mean, there were a few unremarkable paintings on the wall, but apart from that it was a table, a few chairs, and that’s it.

Anyhow – today I’m splitting tasks – I spent a few hours this morning working from my desk in my apartment, then showered, shaved, and responded to an emergency tech support housecall from a girl I’ve been seeing. Sweet! An actual excuse to get off my ass and get out of the house – and you know what? It’s not so bad. I’m writing this from a Blendz coffee shop (note to self: Blendz has free wireless) on Robson Street. Robson isn’t exactly the most calm, quiet street in the city, so it’s been somewhat difficult to maintain focus – but at least I’m out of the house. 🙂

(S|F)orearms

A girl I’ve been seeing is an avid rock climber and has been taking me along climbing lately, several times to the indoor climbing gym and once to Squamish for an amazing day of outdoor climbing. It’s something that I always knew I would enjoy, but I hadn’t ever really had a good excuse to go.

There’s a subset of climbing called “bouldering” that I got to try out for the first time this past Monday, and I learned two things about it:

it’s awesome, and
it hurts!

Indoor rock climbing, if you haven’t been, is a lot of fun. The gym is a three-or-four story building with the floors removed, with simulated rock walls studded with colourful handholds in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Ropes dangle from the top of the wall, and each climb involves two people; one person climbs the wall, while the other handles the rope from the ground, protecting the climber from falling and offering encouragement.

The holds on the wall are each marked with coloured tape to indicate routes, which are rated in difficulty by the experts who run the gym. You choose your route and then climb the wall using only the holds that are marked with the same colour of tape. Simple, right?

Anyway – the first couple of times I ever went climbing I went to the Stronghold in Calgary, a beautiful old brick building that had been gutted and fitted with rock walls. Down in the basement, near the washrooms, was a low-ceilinged room with huge pads covering every square inch of the floor, and the ceiling was a slow sinewave of imitation stone covered with grips. A few male climbers lazed on the mats while one made his way slowly across the ceiling. I distinctly remember having exactly three impressions:

wow, it’s hot down here,
who’d want to climb across the ceiling like that?, and
man those guys are ripped!

Flash forward a few years, and tonnes has changed – for one, I’ve got forty pounds of muscle on Old Drew. For two, I don’t have a pack-a-day cigarette habit, and for three, I’m hanging out with hot girls who are my unquestionable superiors on the rock walls. Still, the initial impressions stuck, and up until Monday of this week I still hadn’t ever bothered trying the bouldering game.

Monday I went climbing, and pushed myself pretty hard, climbing my first 5.10d before being shut down by a 5.11a (just smile and nod). It’s a helluva workout, and my arms were like lead by the time I was done – I could barely grip strongly enough to pick up my backpack! I should have been tipped off right then not to push myself any further, but since I was climbing with a couple of very experienced girls I guess I felt I had to try. On one hand I’m certainly glad that I did, but on the other hand – or forearm anyway – I probably could have taken it a little easier.

After we were each defeated by a wall, one of the girls suggested we boulder for a little while. Wow that’s fun – just like climbing, but more technical and with more arm workout, and without the hassle of ropes and harnesses! The technique is exactly the same – follow the coloured tape – but the wall is almost entirely overhang. I did a few routes, but then my arms basically gave out.

I will definitely go bouldering again. Climbing in the gym is quite expensive, at $18/pop, but when stacked against going for a burger and a couple of pints the choice is pretty clear. As I left the gym though, my forearms began to throb, and my right elbow had a soreness to it that I didn’t recognize – something deep inside the joint, like I’d hyperextended it or something, though I don’t remember doing anything like that.

Tuesday I was fine for most of the day, but the bikeride home from work (North Vancouver to East Van, via the Lions’ Gate Bridge and through the downtown core) really hurt my elbow. It felt as though I’d torn a tendon or something in my elbow, and both my forearms felt swollen and painful. I worried that perhaps it had something to do with my positioning on my bike, and still worry that climbing rocks and riding my track bike might not be compatible sports.

Tonight I will try the same ride again, and cross my fingers that I will not hurt when I get home. I believe in the “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” adage, but that really only applies when you give yourself adequate time to heal between killing attempts!