Sometimes you just gotta ask for some help

Lance is still hobbling around with a cast and crutches and otherwise doing his best to adhere to doctor's orders and sit very still so his foot can heal properly, and we've reached the point where we need to get serious about selling the Sea Monkey in order to have the cash to buy the RV.  The plan is to have the house on the market in April, we'd like to have the RV purchased and outfitted before then so we have somewhere to go to stay out of the real estate agent's way.  Also it would be nice to do the RV outfitting while we still have a mailing address to receive shipments, and a garage with tools and lighting handy.

The Sea Monkey is our beloved 28' Hunter sailboat, lovely for long weekend trips to Catalina but we'll need something different for the upcoming sailing leg of our journey. Many of these pre-sale projects require two bodies. Some we were able to hire out (the waxing, trim touch-up and some minor fiberglass repairs), some little things will be easier to just do ourselves.

Finally yesterday I did something I rarely do... I asked for help.

And a cousin immediately answered the call.  By mid-morning he was helping me carry all the boat cushions to the car for a deep cleaning, which we may do ourselves or may hire out. Not heavy or hard work but definitely wrangled more easily with two sets of hands.

It leads me to some thoughts on help. I do love to offer it freely, even though folks don't always even ask for, or presumably even really want, help from me. But I almost never ask for any. What is that??! Pride? A fear that someone will see me as "less" somehow because I admitted I need help? Or is it just plain stubbornness going back to childhood when I first uttered the words "I want to do it mySELF"? Yeah, that last one is probably most of it, and it would also go a long ways towards explaining my pathological obsession with good tools and the perfect emergency kit.

Accepting help from someone that cares about me/us was a really cool feeling.  I will try to remember to consider this as a viable option more frequently in the future.

The path not taken

I'm getting a lot more comfortable with sorting and purging my things.

I've learned to quickly disassociate the THING from the WAY I FEEL about the thing.  That helps.

Kitchen gadget duplicates? Gone.

Clothes that don't fit me RIGHT NOW? Gone.

Photos of people that I no longer care to remember? Gone.

Until I discovered my kryptonite.  For lack of a better definition, I'll call it "the path not taken".

My first bout with my own personal kryptonite arrived in the form of a drysuit for scuba diving. I worked my tail off to pay for that drysuit, a year or more as a dive instructor even with the instructor's price discount, custom cut to my exact specifications.  Back when I decided I had to have it, I imagined myself diving in Puget Sound, hanging out on the ocean floor with a really huge octopus.

I haven't made it to Puget Sound yet, and I've yet to really bond with that drysuit, despite multiple dive trips with it.  I'm coming to the conclusion that I need to let it go, because it takes up a whole bunch of real estate, and let's be honest, it hasn't seen water in 5 years or more. But I am still haunted by that mental image of me and the octopus, playing on the ocean floor in the murky waters of North America.