Covid-19 and life on the boat

We have just returned to Taleisin after a 3 week stint on land. Annie’s parents are settling into their new house after they have been living overseas for many years. We went down to help sort out furniture and belongings so that they can downsize. Since we’ve done this ourselves, albeit far more extreme than they would do, we thought that we might be able to offer some support in this area. It’s tough to let go of things and it’s even tougher to decide what to keep. We didn’t plan on spending that long away but it just turned out to be that long. I did manage help Annie’s dad erect a fence.

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Very exciting, we helped to erect this fence.

A post shared by Annie Ryan (@svtaleisin) on Jun 30, 2020 at 4:58pm PDT

I’ve had some fun and games with contractual work, as we’re in need to some funds to keep us going. I thought our concerns would be behind us, but I had to walk away from a contract due to a disagreement with the customer. While it was a real nightmare it all worked out in the end as I’ve got a little bit of work to generate some income again.

It’s been a while since I’ve published anything of substance. There’s multiple reasons for this, but ultimately it was my own doing. Since I’ve added a patreon account into the mix things have been on a steady decline. It’s not that I don’t have anything say, on the contrary I have a lot to say. I’m of the old school thinking that if you’re going to take money from people there should be a value proposition. This lead me to write much longer pieces and that in turn lead to decline in readers.

I didn’t want to be the writer who floods a blog with short entries and charging patreons for the mess, it seems unethical to me so I thought I would deliver more content so there’s a real value proposition. Unfortunately this lead to the regular readers not reading the longer pieces as it consumes too much time.

So what happened to all my writings? Well there’s a manuscript. It covers the last 5 years of our lives with Taleisin. Will it be published? Honestly I cannot say at this point. I completed the rough draft in March. I’ve slowly been editing away at it to turn it into something that might be worth the time to read it. At present it’s around 100,000 words and it’s much too long. I find it much harder to edit my work than I did to write it.

Life in the time of Covid-19

As most of you know we’re in New Zealand. This has been great as New Zealand seems to be a bit more proactive about managing the spread of the virus. The fact that it’s isolated might have something to do with it.

So what is it like living in a Covid-19 world aboard Taleisin? Honestly, it’s not much different than life as usual. While we haven’t moved anchorage in a while, we found life to be much the same during the lock down period. We had a bubble with one other person and we spent our days hanging out and chipping away at chores. It was a slow chip, we didn’t really make a dent in it.

It was rather amusing reading about people losing their minds. They have just had our lifestyle thrust upon them. While it’s technically not identical, there’s a lot of similarities. We understand that it’s one thing to voluntarily do it, but quite another if it’s forced on you. The whole experience has made us realise just how much we have changed and what we value today. Our only issue was that we had a rough time provisioning, but we eventually managed to do it in one giant swoop. Once the provisions was in place we returned to life as normal.

New Zealand is back to normal, or as close to normal as can be expected. The rest of the world is still in pain and this is not lost on us. If you’re suffering due to this I’ll leave you with this simple thought: “This too, shall pass”.