Aboard Dignity (Lagoon 420) Blog

The Hookah has now arrived.  It is a lot heavier than I imagined but in hindsight I am not surprised.  This we won’t test until November when we pick it up in St Martin.

Every big change in life invariably involves trading away good and bad things to be replaced with some other set of good and bad things.  For us, making the change we are making, the list is long.  While we would not be doing this if the balance were not positive, the goods and the bads don’t happen evenly.

We’re going through the process of ridding ourselves of our home and it’s contents.  We’re gradually saying goodbye to the “bringing up a family” era of our lives.  The latter was always an inevitability but it’s all tied into the emotion of the now.  We’re so busy getting through transition it’s hard to focus on the end state.

So the mental challenge is keeping focussed on the end state and not letting the “sacrifices” of the now feel overwhelming.  July just needs to be survived, August will get better.

We’re going through a whole series of ‘lasts’.  Today saw our last mortgage payment going out.  This is not the first nor the last of our ‘lasts’ but it’s kind of a big one.

One thing we won’t be able to totally escape from is land based mail.  That means we need a long term solution that will enable us to get hold of our mail from time to time.  There is a service called St Brendan’s Isle based in Florida which has been well rated and provides an excellent set of services.

The basic service filters out the rubbish you receive and will package up your mail and send it to locations you specify when and where you want.

In addition they will optically scan your envelopes so you can view them on line.  If anything is particularly important you can request to have the item opened and scanned so you can again read online.  You can also select mail to be shredded thus lowering the number of items that need to be sent on your next drop.  This feature probably allows you to reduce the number of drops sent as you know you’ve read the important stuff.

Finally, the address they provide you is sufficient to establish Florida residency.  Florida has no state income tax so were we to do this we will reduce the tax on the income from our savings.  Chances are we will do this too.  We may need to get Florida driving licenses to make this work so it looks like we’ll have to squeeze in a drive down to Florida on our way to the BVIs in October.

Boy – has this one been touch and go.  After many delays and heart stopping false starts we have finally sold our ski condo.  Onwards and upwards.