How to build community

Our marina community at a recent pirate party.

Community: one of those big words that can mean a lot depending on your vantage point. Tag a few words to it and it gets even bigger.

Community supported agriculture
Community Development Corporation
Community Network Center
Community Room
Facebook community
Church community
Neighborhood community group
Marina community
Boating community

etc.
etc.
etc.

Community changes over the years.

• Babies: They like their moms and dads.
• Preschoolers: They still like their moms and dads but are also figuring out that other kids are fun too.
• Grade-schoolers: Moms and dads, friends too.
• Teenager: Mo- and who? Friends.
• College: Friends and teary calls home asking for a bank deposit.
• Twenties: Friends, and now colleagues.
• Thirties: Friends with kids. Colleagues. Parents and siblings.
• Forties: Ditto.
• Fifties: Friends and colleague.
• Sixties to ??: Friends, siblings, and kids.

The basic: community is people getting together. We all need it. Almost all of us want it. But how do we build it? How do we find community that matters and how do we build that community into a lasting network of people, resources, and support?  Hint: Facebook helps, but you've got to get up off the couch and get out there.

Figure out what you like to do, or what you spend the most time doing, and then find people with similar interests and schedules. And then, here's the key, put yourself out there. Make phone calls. Send emails. Send texts. Invite people over for dinner. Meet at the bar. Meet for lunch. Organize a picnic in the park. Keep inviting,  (but don't turn into a crazy stalker), keep organizing, keep planning. Set up a weekly potluck or drinks hour. A circle of friends will develop around similar interests and before you know it, bam! You'll have community.

Proximity. Spontaneity. Repeat, frequent meetings. These are three elements to making friends, and to making a community.

Social media, like Facebook and Meetup, is awesome for community building. It's easy to create a group: Shuffleboarders of the Greater Boise Area, for example. People can go online, find others with similar interests, "meet" in a non-threatening space (online), and organize activities for anyone to join. Fear of rejection is minimal because you've already been accepted, per se, by virtue of joining the group. Activities are easy to organize and contacts are quickly made.

Get online, then get out there. Make new friends, find new things to do. We all need a tight circle of friends, but then we all need that bigger group of friends and acquaintances to inspire us, encourage us, entertain us, and support us.

Take the stairs!

Two side-by-side stories on NPR yesterday caught my ear.  

The first: Americans’ waistlines haven’t expanded over the past twenty years because of what we eat or how much we eat, but, rather, because of how sedentary we have become. Weight gain, loss, or stability is a simple matter of calories in - calories out. So does this mean I can subsist off a diet of ice cream alone as long as I make sure to put the spoon down for long enough to burn off an equal amount of the calories? Could I live on a diet of Big Macs? Pizza? Chips? And still weigh the same as I do now on my whole foods diet?

I’m starting to feel sick already. Let’s not begin to think about what all that fat would do to a body’s organs, circulation, or brain cells. Not to mention the environmental consequences of an all-McDonald’s diet. 

But, at least according to some experts, it doesn’t really matter what you eat as long as you expend those calories. Calories in - calories out. Move over Atkins, Paleo, Weight Watchers and pass me the chips.

Eat less, move more.

NPR then logically segued to a discussion of exercise. The second story: Using the stairs as a public health initiative. If Americans have gotten fatter over the years because of lack of exercise, then how can we start moving more? Use the stairs. Don’t push the up button for the elevator, but take the stairs instead.

Where are the stairs? I know that in my old office in Washington, DC, the stairs were hidden away and were more like an emergency exit than a useable staircase. That is the design in the majority of public buildings that I’ve been in. It’s hard to take the stairs if you don’t know where they are. Check out this staircase from the TV series Mad Men? Have you ever been in a building where it was that easy and central to walk up one flight of stairs?

Boat living certainly has me running up and down the stairs a lot. Three steps and then a three rung ladder to get up on the boat. Five stairs down to get inside. Two stairs down to get in the galley or the aft cabin. Hauling groceries up and down those stairs every third day. Laundry. Trash. Toys. Etc.  Now I know that the stairs aren’t my main caloric expender; I have made choices in my life that promote health: I travel via bike with the girls, towing them behind me in the bike trailer. We walk to the park. We swim in the pool. They both beg to be carried and held. It’s easy for me to get exercise without even thinking about it - it’s nearly impossible to be sedentary when I’m chasing after two small children every day. 

Other lifestyles, however, aren't as amenable to movement. Living in the suburbs and commuting to an office job via car makes it challenging to find time to exercise every day. But small changes, like taking the stairs, can make a big change to health outcomes across the board.

Perspective

Our happy liveaboard boat family.
(Looks like Freja's practicing her pirate "arrrgh" while Matilda is sporting a pirate-worthy black eye.)

Sometimes a change in perspective is all I need. It’s amazing how seeing the world from a new place completely changes my mood, my plans, my status quo. Remember that scene from Dead Poets Society when Robin Williams has all the students stand on their desks to see the classroom from a new vantage point? That’s how I feel right now.

For the past few months I’ve been itching to move off the boat and onto land. I had 101 different reasons, but space was always #1. We were tripping over each other, literally. Also, I was fed up with our marina in Philadelphia where the docks threatened to split apart and float us down the Delaware River a la Huck Finn. I was fed up with packing a bag full of snacks and diapers and a change of clothes just to take the girls off the boat for an hour or two. I was fed up with showering at the dirty marina showers. I was fed up with not having enough space to keep clothes or shoes or food or playdough. Fed up.

No matter how few toys (clothes, shoes, diapers, non-perhisables) we have, they still take up all available space.
The main cabin (living room) is basically a playroom for the girls. Every shelf and cubby has a kids' book or toy.

Then we cast off the dock lines and motored our floating home south to Jacksonville, Florida. The trip was fun and challenging. There were moments when we were on vacation: dinghying ashore for a seafood dinner and cold beers or finding a deserted beach. There were moments that I swore up and down that the minute we landed in Jacksonville I was going to find an apartment: when the girls were constantly whiney and unhappy and demanding or when the food kept going bad in the fridge because our batteries are not equipped for living aboard at anchor. 

Our first marina in Jacksonville - close to the beach but also located on a busy three-lane road lined with strip malls - was nice. It was a real marina with concrete docks and concrete pilings and clean bathrooms. But it also had a large dry dock facility and the atmosphere was tinged with the constant sound of forklifts moving boats and people who seemed more interested in cleaning and buffing and polishing their boats than actually using their boats. So after clocking in my time on Facebook and Pinterest, I was still spending a fair amount of time on Zillow, dreaming of landlubbing.

Sunrise and sunset over the tidal marshes is pretty awesome.
But the no-see-ums and mosquitos? Yeah, they were also marina residents.

Now we’re at a new marina in a new neighborhood with new neighbors and Zillow is a thing of the past. For the first time in years, boat living is really good. The marina is clean, professional, and safe (gated, key card entry at each dock). It has a pool and clubhouse area that is downright spa-esque. Our neighbors are all active boaters - cruisers, some liveaboards, or people who are storing their boats here for hurricane season. The neighborhood has nice bungalows on tree-lined streets, parks, and a shopping center with a grocery store and West Marine a mere four blocks away. I can’t ask for much more in terms of a marina and its location. Oh and did I forget to mention the internet? Free, fiber optic wifi. Phenomenal. And free parking right at the end of our dock. Seriously, why would we live anywhere else?

The pool, hot tub, and marina as seen from the clubhouse porch.

A nice spot to catch the evening breeze - the clubhouse deck.

And a great place to grill our dinner.

Another big change, and it’s a big one, is Hans’s paycheck. Yup. His paycheck! For the first time in over four years, we’re seeing money come in instead of bleeding money out in the form of student loans. That makes it a little easier to make some livability upgrades on the boat: new air conditioning, a new mattress, proper marine shade curtains, etc. We have a long list and we’ll tackle it little by little, but with our new location and the fiscal ability to improve life aboard, we have a renewed commitment to living aboard. It feels good.

The last leg to Jacksonville

Jacksonville at night from m/v Rhumb Line

Boaters can’t be lazy. We may look lazy. We may look scruffy and unkempt. We may look like we shirk work any chance we get. We may look like loafers, free-loaders, lazy bums. Sure. Maybe we are. But that’s just when we’re tied up to the dock or swinging at anchor. When we’re actually out there, boating, we can’t be lazy.

Oops. The other day, we were lazy. We decided to move our boat to a new marina, one that is much closer to Hans’s work. The trip is about thirty nautical miles in protected waters. No big deal. We estimated it would take us about four hours or so, maybe less if our tide calculations were correct. Just twenty minutes into the trip we watched the temperature on the port engine, our only running engine, steadily climb. And climb. We marked a point on the gauge and said “if the needle hits the “r” then we need to do something.” Well the needle hit the “r.” But then it stayed steady. So we putted along...at a walloping three miles an hour, sometimes we hit four. Big time! 

Why didn’t we panic? Well, here’s where we were lazy: We knew exactly what was wrong. This engine had been running a little warm for the last 100 miles or so of our trip south. Not this hot, but warmer than usual. We knew the impeller needed to be changed but, at the time, Hans didn’t want to the do the job because we were out in the middle of marshland Georgia. But why didn’t we remember this problem before we cast off the dock lines yesterday? We would have saved ourselves a lot of headache and hassle if we had swapped out the impeller when we were at the dock, before embarking on yesterday’s boat trip. 

Don't let your impellers look like the one on the left. Check often!

 We were lazy. Dock living is easy and it’s easy to become complacent. But running a boat isn’t like running a car. You can’t just turn the ignition over and set off down the waterway, which is exactly what we did. We forgot to run down the basic maintenance checklist before leaving, which may have jogged our memories that the impeller was bad. Instead, we just drove the boat out of the slip. And nearly overheated.

So we may be lazy at times, but thank goodness Hans is handy and mechanically-inclined. After a couple hours of hanging upside down in the engine compartment and filing the bilges up with probably a gallon of sweat, he pulled out a shredded, chewed up impeller and replaced it with an intact, brand new one.* We were back on our way south, at a more respectable nine miles an hour.

Pulling into a tight slip at a new marina at ten at night on one engine, however, is no small feat. Hats off to the captain and fellow boaters who got Rhumb Line into our slip safely without bumping anything or anyone.

The reward for anchoring for hours to swap out the impeller is that we motored past the city at sunset.
All cities look romantic and exciting at sunset.

*Smart boaters also know that it is imperative to carry a full arsenal of spares.

Travel or vacation?

I listen to NPR a lot. Turning the radio on is one of the first things I do every morning. I often leave it on for hours, even though it is impossible to hear, never mind listen to the news reports over the laughter, babble, and screams of the girls. But I persist, because I usually can catch at least part of one story every hour or so.

The other day I heard a report on the Rick Steve’s radio show about travel in Albania. He’s dubbing it as the next destination in Europe - a place that has World Heritage sites, a unique culture, and a friendly population that is eager to welcome show tourists their country, as opposed to tourist-weary cities like Prague and Venice. So, naturally, I started dreaming about traveling to Albania. Give me a tiny starting point and I’ll dream about travel.

We’ve only gone on one typical vacation - the kind that you take an allotted week or two vacation from work, book a flight, book a hotel, and pack a small suitcase. We’ve done tons of traveling (I’ll always want to travel more), but it’s always been extended stints. Road trips, cruising on Whisper, car-camping around Europe, our recent cruise down the ICW.

As I was thinking about Albania, I found myself asking: how do you choose where to go on vacation? If you only have a few weeks a year for vacation, a couple of which are invariably eaten up by Christmas and family obligations at home, how do you choose where to spend that one week jaunt? Would I choose to go to Albania? To the untested, uncharted place that would undoubtedly be interesting and new, but perhaps not relaxing and perhaps sometimes frustrating due to the language barrier and preconceived notions and expectations….

My traveling itch says “yes!” But my need for relaxation and ease says, “Culebra is awfully nice. Spain has great serrano ham. And what about the pasta in Italy?”

I suppose there are different types of travel for different times of our lives. Shoestring budget backpacking, the quick getaway weekend, the family rendezvous on a cruise ship, the extended sailing trip (dream, dream, plan), the tried and tested week at a previously visited location.

That’s it. There’s travel and there is vacation.

Travel: when you have time and some resources to go to new places, dig your heels in, explore, make blunders, spend half the day waiting for a bus that never appears, try again the next day.

A nice picture, but the story behind is less than exciting.
We walked for a couple miles in hot Caribbean sun looking for a bar with cold beers only to find the bar closed.
This kind of semi-aimless wandering is only possible when you have time on your hands.

Vacation: when you have a finite period of time to get away from your normal. A finite period of time to be with your family (or chose traveling companion, or self), a finite period of time to unplug, read a good book, disconnect and reconnect.

This is easy living.

Is there an in between? Is there a place in the middle where you can go on vacation but also travel? If you only have a week out of every year to actually go somewhere, do you set off down the overgrown path, where you might end up at shangri la or you might just as easily end up with Lyme disease? Or, do you set off down the paved road where you’re guaranteed a beach chair and a cold margarita, but you might also end up feeling slightly bored and unsatisfied at the end of the week?

goodbye stroller

Our stroller was stolen. Yes, someone stole two little kids’ stroller. Five years of living at a marina in Philadelphia - big, dirty, crime-ridden Philadelphia - and we never had anything stolen. Less than two weeks of living at a marina halfway between Jacksonville and Jacksonville Beach, Florida (for all intents and purposes, the suburbs) and our stroller is swiped. WTF indeed.

That's our stroller, the red Phil & Ted's double that masquerades as a single.
This photo was taken at the zoo when Matilda was only a few weeks old.
You can't see her in the photo, but she's in the bassinet lying under Freja, who is up high in the jump seat.
Being pushed by their Meme and spending time with pals Harvey and Ander.

It’s not like we really need the stroller. Pushing two kids around in 90 degree heat and 90% humidity is not that practical. We’ve talked about selling it and buying something smaller. We’ve talked about how we’re happy with a small umbrella stroller and the Ergo baby carrier. We’ve talked about, and subsequently bought, a bike trailer to tow the girls. But still. 

Someone stole something that is mine. And now I’m doing the cliche things that most victims of theft do: I’m locking everything. I leave the bike and trailer on the dock next to our boat - locked. I leave the boat - locked. We leave the car - locked. (Okay, we have always locked the car when we leave it, but I used to regularly forget to lock our bike at the bike rack at our marina in Philly and we never, never, never locked the boat in Philly.)

So beyond the actual fact that we’re short a nice stroller that was pretty handy to have, I’ve changed my behavior. Not out of choice but out of . . . persuasion, you could say. Maybe that’s not a bad thing. Year after year of not locking up my personal belongings was eventually going to end up in theft. I suppose.

Yet, it was at the marina. I will wax poetic about the tight-knit boating community, and the interdependence and trustworthiness of boaters.  I lament that the social capital that is evident among boaters is sorely missing in the general public. I sing the praises of living at a marina for the neighborly feel. My fondness for marinas and boaters makes this theft that much harder to deal with. Everyone we meet here is nice, friendly, generous, but it’s hard to shake the idea that a stroller (a stroller!) could go missing so easily and so quickly from the marina property.

two weeks

We've been Florida residents for two weeks. I was commenting to Hans and to a friend that my life here isn't obvious, at least not yet. When we first moved to Philadelphia we lived without a car for the first 18 months. We explored the city via foot and public transit.

Jacksonville and surrounding area, on the other hand, is so big and so car-centric that it's hard to know where to go and what to do. The marina where we are staying is close to the beach but also on a busy 3-lane road lined with strip malls and box stores. The neighborhoods are big and appear to be mile after mile of houses. Yep. We're in the suburbs. I can't exactly take the girls out in the 90 degree heat and go aimlessly biking or walking. I've been spending a lot of time on google maps and searching Jacksonville blogs looking for things to do and places to go.

Our second car. Let's go exploring!

Of course the beach is obvious. And fun.

lunchtime

Freja calls this her surf suit.
And this is how she walks from the beach blanket to the shower when it's time to go home.
One cool kid.

Today I found a park with a playground just one mile away. The girls both ran straight for the swings. I'd love to think of them as such hippy kids that they'd shun the playground in favor of wild nature but, nope. They love the playground.

And we've been taking advantage of the public spaces at the marina.

Freja loves the idea of going to school. So the other day we packed her backpack with her school supplies and found a little desk for her at the marina lounge. And she diligently wrote letters and numbers.

We all ate lunch in the "cafeteria."

There's a little wooden ramp that Matilda loves. We call it the ramp game and we have to play every time we walk home from the pool. Up and down the ramp. Yelling and screaming in delight.

And the pool. I think today was the first day we didn't go to the pool.

This kind of unknown and exploration is good for me. I'd gotten into such a routine in Philly with planned activities every day of the week that I often wondered why I was a stay-at-home mom if I was constantly rushing off to go places. On the other hand, I'm a social person, not at all an introvert, and I need that stimulation to keep me energized. I'm excited to see how I can bridge the gap of getting a healthy dose of social interaction while still having a flexible, free-wheeling schedule.