Year 1 Day 99 Getting Antsy

Year 1 Day 99 Getting Antsy

As you may know, whenever we stay in one place for very long, I start getting antsy. I call it my “itchy butt” syndrome. I rarely had this when we lived on the land. My guess the reason for that was I was still working back then. I typically put in over 60 hours a week. Plus, we lived on a bluff overlooking the ocean. This meant every morning before starting work (Mary Margaret and I worked at home) that I was able to go down to the beach and walk three miles to get my exercise. Between the long walks and working so much I was never bored and seldom got the notorious “itchy butt” syndrome.

Once I retired, Mary Margaret and I moved onto our wonderful sailboat, Leu Cat, and spent the next 10 years sailing around the world. During that time, if we did drop anchor and stayed in a place more than a few days, the “itch” would start up and I knew it was getting to be that time when we should move on to the next anchorage.

Now that we have sold Leu Cat and moved into LeuC, that darn “itch” has stayed with me. While it may sound funny, it is something that does worry me. After all, when our nomad days come to an end and we settle down into a house and become “normal” people once more, what am I going to do about this “itch”?

Mary Margaret has suggested that I look into a number of different things to do and a number of them are very noble but, quite frankly, none of them stirs my heart.

I think my “itch” comes from my dad. He was first a professor and then a Dean of Education at a couple of universities before he retired. When he did retire, he did some consulting and then donated his time to the State of Washington, advising the governor and a couple of educational boards regarding school development and education. Plus, he always got his three games of golf in each week.

I can see this “itchy butt” syndrome in each of my two living siblings. My older brother, Don, is also in education, being a professor and sitting in a Distinguished Chair at the University of Connecticut. Despite having a massive heart attack about 5 years ago, he is still working full time at the age of 70. He loves his job and has become world renown in his specialty of using the Internet in education. He does threaten to retire every now and then but we are still waiting to see when that will happen. I am curious to see what he will do to scratch this “itch” when it rears its ugly head. I am hoping I can learn from him.

My youngest sibling, Del, is still years away from retiring but he too has shown the symptoms of “itchy butt”. The way he has dealt with it has been just to quit work, hop into his pickup truck, and take months to a year off from work and travel around the US and Canada, living out of the covered back of the truck. Not my idea of the “great life” but still extremely adventuresome. To do this just exudes great confidence in his ability to find work wherever he is and whenever he needs the cash. He is a cartographer and planner by profession and must be highly regarded to live this lifestyle. However, he has no intention of retiring anytime soon so I will not be able to look to him for ideas of how to address this “itchy butt” problem.

I am writing about all of this today because the “itch” was really bad today and poor Mary Margaret just could not understand what was going on with me. When it got this bad on our sailboat, I would just hunker down and work on a number of boat projects that were always on my “to do” list. Unfortunately, LeuC is such a complex and sophisticated electronics marvel, there are few things that I am capable of working on. Thus, instead, I go in and out of her, in search of things to do, always being frustrated that she is just too complex for me to work on. Oh my…what a dilemma!