Jesse

Aaron and I went to Petco today and each got a fish to put in the two fish bowls Aaron had. I got a goldfish, which I named Jesse after Jessica Watson. She's a pretty little orange fish and seems very happy in her new little home.

Aaron got a dark blue Betta which he said he was just going to call "Fishy," but after I complained that that wasn't a real name, he decided on Midnight, which suits him well. They each have their own little home and I'm pretty excited about it.

Home is the Sailor

I was watching the videos on YouTube of Jessica Watson's homecoming to Sydney in May, and I noticed that her mother, as Jessica stepped off of Ella's Pink Lady, said "Home is the sailor, home from the sea." It was such a perfect line for the moment and I knew I had heard it from a poem before so I had to look it up to refresh my memory of it's origin. Turns out it is from a lovely Robert Lewis Stevenson poem, which I put here:

Requiem

Under the wide and starry sky

Dig the grave and let me lie

Gladly did I live and gladly die

And I laid me down with a will

This be the verse you 'grave for me

"Here he lies where he long'd to be;

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter, home from the hill."

Jessica Watson-Ella's Pink Lady

So I figured I should tell you about my current obsession. Let me start off by saying that I have one of those obsessive personalities. I will find out about a new thing, whatever it may be, and become obsessed with it. I will be 100% focused on it and that will last about two weeks and I will lose all focus and move on to something new. It's great for getting a lot of stuff done in a short amount of time, but anything that requires more time than about two weeks to acomplish, ends up half finished.

So I'm trying to get better about it, and focus my attention for long enough to accomplish things, instead of spending two weeks Googleing something until I get bored.

So anyway, about two weeks ago, I stumbled across YouTube videos of Jessica Watson's video diary. For those of you who don't know who Jessica Watson is, she is a 17-year-old Australian girl who, in May of 2010 became the youngest person to sail solo, non-stop and unassisted around the world. She spend 210 days on her 34 foot sail boat, Ella's Pink Lady, at sea, sailing from Sydney around the world and back to Sydney.

I read her blog and when her book, True Spirit, (which is the number one best seller in Australia right now) came out in the US last week, I read that from start to finish. She is very inspiring, funny and mature for 17. Her story inspired me so much that I started thinking about sailing and how much fun it would be to learn to sail. Of course I live in Seattle, so there's no shortage of sailboats and sailing lessons so I looked in to it, and it looks like an eight hour beginning sailing lesson is going to cost me about 300 dollars. I don't have that kind of money laying around but it's my birthday next week so I'm hoping that a combination of birthday money and some saving over the next month or so should make it possible to take a class here pretty soon.

I don't know if I'll be circumnavigating the globe anytime soon but at least it would be kind of fun to get on the water and see what it's like. And I would also like to highly recommend True Spirit by Jessica Watson. She is a remarkable young woman and her book is amazing and entertaining.