April 15, 2015
I’ve never been what you’d call high-functioning when it comes to the mundane things that society expects – things like taxes, balancing a checking account, registering cars and the like. The cruising life is the answer for me. I’ll never have to register a car again!
Wrong-o-roo Rich. A lot of those mundane things followed us out here. We bought a car and naturally, had to register it. We sold a car and had to report the sale. We had to insure the car. Insure the boat. Insure our health (at least we probably should). The IRS didn’t give us a pass on taxes because we were anchored in a remote bay. We still had to file a return. (Though we’ve found a way to pay no taxes – make no money!) There seem to be just as many of these pain-in-the-ass-tasks out here as there were in “real life.”
Some of the tasks are easier out here, but yet, they feel just as impossible to me as they did back home. Taxes for example. Edie does our taxes. All I had to do was to go online, download a few forms from our banks, email them to Edie, then sign electronically and it was done. Nothing so hard about that, right? But, to me, it felt like someone was asking me to calculate the trajectory of an unidentified asteroid while swimming the English Channel.
Some things are harder out here. Internet isn’t a given. Sometimes, when we need it most (to download those forms), we don’t have it. It took all day to send a FedEx package to the states. During a Skype call to our bank the other day, I was disconnected five times before the business got done.
I think the big problem for me is that I just don’t feel like doing this stuff while cruising. (Yea, yea, I didn’t feel like doing it while living in the real world either!) Out here, having to deal with this tedium just seems like more of an insult now.
If you’re not cruising and you look at our lives with envy, just remember, we have to do all the same crap you do. We just get cocktails in the cockpit at sunset to help us forget. -Rich
