Change

Now that hurricane season here is winding down (it officially ends in November), there are some changes abrew here in our little estuary community.

A lot of people left their boats here and spent the summer in other places.  The Canadians all go home for several months out of the year, something they are apparently required to do if they want to keep their health care or something like that.  A lot of people only cruise part of the year, and leave their boats to go work and get more money for the next season of cruising.  Others just like to see friends and family, while others want to get away from the oppressive heat found here in the tropics in the summer.  So the bottom line is that there have been only six or seven boats here all summer long.  But people are now starting to come back, and our dynamic is shifting.   I am not complaining.  It is fun to see other people again, have more news around the pool at happy hour, and just find our how everyone else is doing.  At the same time, we are saying good-bye to people I have come to feel very close to.  So it is a mixed blessing, so to speak.

Mike and I are awaiting the delivery of two new cameras and their accouterments.  (I hope I spelled that right.)  They were ordered over the internet and mailed to our mail drop in Florida.  The mail drop them had it sent on to us.  Since the mail was sent from Florida on September 10, and two weeks is the minimum amount of time that it seems to take for things to get from there to here, I am anticipating receipt sometime this coming week.  The package will go to customs, and we should get a notice telling us it is there.  Then we head to the customs office, which is located in San Salvador at the main post office.  It will stop in customs because they will want us to pay some duty.  The bummer is that this procedure could take us all day, going from office to office getting stamp after stamp and then returning to where you started in the first place, nothing changed except I now have several additional pieces of stamped paper.  There is not, however, any way to avoid it.  I guess this is one of those "serenity to accept the things I cannot change" things. 

It has been different for me to keep this blog this summer than it was last summer.  Last summer we were cruising in the Sea of Cortez, which meant we were moving around and there were a lot of different things to talk about.  This summer was more just us living in El Salvador, albeit on a boat.  I think we should have done more, and spent less time just laying around here in the estuary.  But then again, we are still learning how to live without having to go to work, how to live on a boat, how to live without TV, how to live at anchor, and how to live in a foreign country and so on.  It is still overwhelming at times, and at other times I have been heartily bored.  Living at a resort is certainly comfortable, but I think at times it has been a little too comfortable.  But I think the hardest part has been dealing with no longer having to go to work every day.

Now I do not miss getting up five days a week and going into the office.  But I do sort of miss being in the game, being part of things, being in my own way a mover and a shaker on a small scale.  I don't know that I am explaining myself very well, and I do not want to sound like a whiner.  But I do miss having people look up to me and respect my knowledge base.  Here, I am not an authority on anything.  So I just assign myself the role of Class Clown (my fallback position in most any situation if I can't be Best Student) when we are in groups and it seems to work fine.  I guess in some ways I just need to find a new identity for myself, an identity that does not revolve around my work.  Or find another sort of work.  I would love to write a book, but I can't seem to get started.  There are a million books of sailing memoirs, many with far better adventures than I have had.  And if I am going to write something, I want it to be something people in general would actually want to read.  It's not like I don't have enough time on my hands to do that.  Hemingway said the way to start is to write one true sentence.  I suppose I could do that.

“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.”   (Simone de Beauvoir)