What am I doing?

Okay. So when I first got this blog I had decided that I would write only positive things. Only things I could imagine the whole world reading and going "She has an interesting, positive outlook on life." I mean, how cool would it be to know that out there, somewhere in the world, someone you've never even met is caring for what's going on in your life. That they're caring not because they've met you or talked to you, but because they think you're interesting. I think that's one of the coolest things about technology. You can connect with people ALL over the world and make friends with people that you would have never even have guessed existed or cared in the first place.

I see things like this website. Where people each write what's going on in their life so they can have support from friends and from people they don't know. And get outside opinion. Isn't that what everyone needs in the end? Advice from someone who has no emotional connection t anyone that you're talking about?

I don't know what I'm doing with this blog. Where I'm going to go with it. I want to write. I don't know WHAT I want to write though. We're not traveling at the moment. We're staying here in Florida, waiting for Hurricane season to pass. So I'm stuck here for a while. With nothing really to do. (I got grounded for untold reasons....well...boated. If I was grounded I'd be on land hanging with people. I'm boated though, so I'm stuck on this sweltering hot beast of a boat with no shower. I kind of deserve it though.)

My dad is going to get a job in either Florence, South Carolina, or somewhere here in Florida. It'll be just for Hurricane season. I'm going to have to go with him because I'm in trouble with my parents and they don't trust me anymore. So maybe while I'm there, I'll have adventures and tons of pictures to post up and tell you about what's going on in my life. I feel kind of....bland. Like my blog title shouldn't be "Story of a Teenage Vagabond" when I'm not doing anything. Oh well. Maybe something interesting will come my way.

I went sailing with my sister, father, and some of our friends the other day. On our friends boat. It was so much fun! I remember heeling over on our old Hunter 38, and I remember it being more terrifying. When we heeled over on their boat, it was fun. I didn't freak or anything. It just seemed so natural. We sailed for an hour, out to reef, and there we moored the boat. Everyone jumped off the boat (Except for me and another girl) and had a blast. It was so much fun. We also played Taboo and I kept pressing the buzzer just for the fun of it because it was a large, red button that was just begging to be pushed. Everyone laughed at me and decided they'd keep me away from big, red buttons later on in my life. After that we went to the community park and played Ultimate Frisbee. It was a fun day. The most fun I've had in a while considering I've been grounded.

Sorry there's no picture to go with this entry, but I don't know where my camera is.

Fearing the Future

This bird was just chilling out on our boat, taking a break from it's hectic world.

The world is getting caught up in the land of the future. The world was a much better place before people decided they were going to get the next best thing and spend all of their money on the useless electronics that our country says are the best for them. How can we think that motors that pollute the air with gases and sounds are good for us? How can we think that we need phones when they can cause headaches with the radio waves they send out? As people we spend too much time trying to get the next best thing. Have we ever wondered if maybe the best thing was the last best thing? Not the next best thing? Imagine when all people had were row boats. They would get tired and couldn't go very far. They probably were in very good shape from rowing everywhere, but it's just such an effort to get from place to place. Now think about this. Everyone is rowing around, and suddenly, someone goes past them moving with no effort at all. They're sailing. Suddenly, the world grows larger; people can make it farther without expending so much energy. They're experiencing new things, discovering new places, and getting small beer bellies. Then, someone decides that sailing just isn't fast enough. What do they do? They create a loud, smelly, disruptive thing called a motor. People are turned off by it, but they want to be able to go faster, to discover more before the other people. They want what someone else has. So they get their own. Suddenly everyone has one and they're polluting the air with smells and chemicals. This is the part where the best thing was the last best thing. Not the next best thing.

Last night, I kayaked back to my boat instead of motoring out there. It was quiet, peaceful. I could actually hear myself think. The only sound was the sound of my family in the dinghy, loudly motoring back. But it felt like I was able to breathe. Like I was taking a break from the chaos of my day and am able to just think. You never really realize how amazing that feeling is until you experience it. It's like that moment between waking and sleeping where you think to yourself "Today was a good day". But it was lengthened. It lasted for longer. It was like that moment multiplied, and it relieved my mind.

Brought Back to the Past

This one of my dogs, Buddy, looking down the hatch when he wants to come down into the hull of the boat.

This morning, when I was climbing into the dinghy, one of my dogs was standing close to the edge of the boat with his eyes full of hope. What was it he wanted? To go to shore.

We usually don't take our dogs to shore because they have learned to go to the bathroom on the boat. Since we live on a catamaran, the dogs have a large deck space to run around on and the dogs can be quite happy if they want to be.

I had to go to shore in order to do my schoolwork, but I had a while before the marina building would open up. I had time to spare. His eyes are just so hopeful I had to give in. I grabbed his leash and picked him up. I placed him in the dinghy and drove my sister and myself to shore.

Once at shore, I decided that I would take my dog for a walk around the park. He was all excited about being at shore, so he could not sit still. We were walking past the baseball fields when I saw that there was a tennis ball in the field. I decided then that it would be so much fun to play fetch with my dog. I grabbed the tennis ball, walked my dog past the sign that said "No animals allowed on the fields", and began to throw the ball for my dog. He looked so happy. He'd chase after the ball, bring it back to me, and seconds before he actually made it to me, he'd turn and run the other way. It was the cutest thing that I've seen in a while. Once tired, I laid down on the grass and just paused to take a deep breath and he sat down next to me. That's when I realized something. I realized how far I'd come in the past couple of months. How much I've changed. I've become a whole different person, seen new, different things. I'm not the person I used to be, but still I had my best friend. Sitting next to me after making my day.

Maybe that's why God gave us dogs? They're the ones that we can talk to when everything goes wrong and everyone has turned on us? Dogs are the ones who will love us despite who we are. Dogs are the creatures that were made to bring us happiness. I don't know what I'd do without their love and their ability to make me feel loved when I feel like the rest of the world has turned against me.

"CAUTION HANDLE WITH CARE. I'M HOT"

Sorry about the bad image quality. I used my webcam to take this picture.

Or so says the container of my apple pie. It came from McDonalds, the greasy burger joint that America just loves. You never really look for the problems in your life until someone points them out to you. I have a friend who used to live in the USA. When he was twelve or thirteen, he moved out and went to Panama, Mexico, and Columbia. It's been four to five years, he's seventeen now, and he points out all of the flaws in America.

1. Man! Look at that bulldozer! Oh, wait. Never-mind. That's just your fat neighbor, Nick. My bad.

2. Oh right. I forgot we can just walk up to the counter, say what we want to eat, and then have people hand it to us. Pre-made food! Yum. My favorite.

3. All of us Americans like to spend an excessive amount of time on the computer. Then, when finally going out:

Woman: "Does this dress make my butt look big?"
Man: *thinking to himself* It ain't the dress... "No. You look fine."

Okay. So America has its problems. But so does every other country in the world. In Mexico, they cut off a persons head, pull down their pants, and place a sign on the persons lap, stating why it is they killed the person. I think that's kind of worse than people dying of their own free will by eating too much McDonalds. In Somalia there isn't any government at all and people are being killed by pirates every single day. That says something in itself.

I think this post kind of fits into the smaller world as well. We, as individual persons, have our problems too. Some of us are too fat, too lazy, too skinny, too honest, too dishonest, too careful, too careless...the list goes on and on. Each of us have our own problems. The only difference between people and a country is that as people we can fix our mistakes and problems in our own way. We don't have to wait for government and legislature and all of this other stuff to be made in order to fix the problems we're facing. We're free to fix things and to ruin things by using our minds. By attempting to do what WE think is right and seeing if it works out in the end. Trial and Error. A country cannot afford to make a mistake like that. And yet sometimes they attempt it anyway.

Note to the reader: I do NOT spend an excessive amount of time on the computer. I just do my schoolwork and write this blog. Sometimes facebooking. But really. I spend a lot of time outside. Boat people are not computer nerds.

Interesting Bits Of Boater Conversation

Picture of the bow of the boat and Miami, FL

When I meet a new person, a lot of conversations will go like this:

Person 1: "So. How do you like living on the boat?"
Me: "Oh, it's interesting. I love traveling and by boat is a nice way to do so."
Person 1: "That's cool. What's your favorite part about living on the boat?"
Me: "Um....the traveling?"
Person 1: "Cool. Cool."
Me: (to myself) "People these days."

So as interesting as that conversation may seem, it just get so boring after a while.

One conversation that I've only overheard made me kind of feel awesome and...well...a little bit weirded out at the same time:

Person 1: "Is that you're daughter?"
My Dad: "Yeah."
Person 1: "She's so pretty. She's like a mermaid."
My Dad: *chuckles*
Me: (in my head) "A mermaid? ....... cool. Never got that one before."

Then there's the ever common boater conversation:

Person 1: "Yeah, there's a couple of grocery stores down that way." *motions with their hand*
My Dad: "How do we get there?"
Person 1: *gives directions* "So...."
My Dad: *waits*
Person 1: "Do you have a fridge on your boat?"
My Dad: "Oh yeah. We do."
Person 1: "Ooh. What kind?" *gets all excited*
My Dad: *begins to describe the fridge and so the conversation goes*

Yeah. We boaters are a strange breed, but I've discovered that we're a lot more pleasant than some of the people you can meet on land.

My Mom: "Mayday, mayday, mayday. We are a East bound sailing vessel and we're taking on water. We've lost our electronics and need someone to lead us through these shallows."
Person 1: "We'll lead you through."
My Mom: "Thank you so much."
Person 1: "No problem." *attempts to lead us through*
Us: *thud-unk O.O*
My Mom: "We're aground."
My Dad: "Let me take over." *takes the wheel*
Us: *gets ungrounded*
Person 1: *chugs right through the same water*
My Mom: "They're a catamaran." >.< (In case you didn't know, Catamarans can go in shallow waters that mono-hulls cannot.)

So what if they didn't succeed in helping us? At least they attempted to. You know how many people just drive on by even after they see your car has broken down and you're in need of assistance? These people offered to help us and they didn't even know anything about us.

How To Begin?

The picture is of a Dolphin we saw while crossing the Gulf Stream.

Okay, so I'm not really certain where I should actually begin with this blog. I have never really written a blog before. I've written blog posts for my mom, but I have never written a blog myself.

First off, I should probably admit that I may forget about this blog from time to time, coming back to it when I remember I have it.

I just officially decided that I'm going to write whatever it is that's on my mind when I write an entry. That's probably the best way to go about this.

At the moment I'm upset because I don't have any music on my computer. I got a new one the other day and have been too lazy to put all of my music on it. So I've been listening to Pandora.com, which is a free, internet radio. It's a pretty cool thing that has made my life that much more awesome. I know I'd be dead if it weren't for music. Okay, I don't know about that, but it makes my life that much more interesting. That's one of the setbacks of living on a boat: I can't just plug in a radio and listen to music. I can use my ipod or my computer, but as soon as their batteries die, I'm stuck. We have a couple of 12 Volt batteries, but we have to use those to run things like our GPS and our Motor. So I have to live with not being able to listen to music when I want to.

Another bothersome thing about living on a boat is the lack of privacy. If I feel like everyone is just getting too close and I feel like my personal space bubble is shrinking smaller and smaller, I can't get away. There's no place for me to go. I don't even have a door to my v-berth. So I can't just lock out the rest of the world. Even if I did have a door, I wouldn't use. Imagine locking yourself in a toaster, and that's what it would feel like if I closed off my room from the rest of the boat. Way too hot for my liking.

Living on the boat has its upsides too. Like, I have made so many new friends since I've moved onto the boat. (OMG!!!! AN INTERRUPTION!!! There's a dolphin off my boat right now. I tried to get a picture, but it left so quickly. Oh well.)

Now I lost my train of thought. Oh well. I'm just going to try and post up some pictures and then go and hang out with some friends.

Toodaloo.