Mickey Made Me Do It

Since May, 2010 we've gone from a 3700 sq. ft. house with a finished basement to a 45' boat with two storage sheds; one 10' x 12' and the other 5' x 10'.  Over the last few months we've been concentrating on downsizing even more.  The smaller shed was in Upper Marlboro, about 20 minutes away.  We grabbed it to take care of overflow at the last minute when we moved out of the house and realized we had way more stuff than we had planned for.  We've been slowly weeding out what we didn't need and have finally eliminated the smaller shed.  The other one is about 5 minutes from the boat in Deale.  It's a shed in a fenced-in lot but it's bug infested with ticks, fleas and mosquitoes, and now we find we have a problem with mice too.  When it rains the lot becomes a mud bath and the door leaks so all our stuff gets wet.  I don't know which is worse but when combined it convinced us to find something better.

What we found was a really nice temperature controlled storage warehouse in Edgewater, just south of Annapolis.  This place is pretty sweet.  It's three stories high with interior-only access by two large elevators.  Each floor has isle after isle of storage units, all sizes.  When you come in through the gate you punch in your code to open the gate but then have to enter it again at the door to get in the building.  This is because each unit is tied to the front desk and they get an alarm if one gets opened without the code being entered within a certain amount of time.  There's music playing throughout the building, it's clean, secure, high tech and, did I mention clean?  We signed on for their smallest unit, 5' x 10', so now we're pushing again to down-size even more.  What we really want is to have a place to store our out-of-season clothes and a "few" odds and ends such as tools.  And spare parts for the boat.  And Cheri's clown and face painting stuff.  And about 5 suitcases, backpacks and duffel bags.  Oh yeah, all our scuba gear too.  We have two wardrobes for the clothes and some nice modular shelving that we kept from the house.  We're able to store stuff pretty much floor to ceiling and still have a narrow aisle down the middle.  We also keep a small stepladder in there so we can reach the stuff way up there.  This should work for four more years.  Then we'll hafta dump all this stuff too.

Saturday, 10/23, we took a break from playing the storage game and went sailing.  The folks on the boat next to ours have been friendly since we first moved in and we have been trying to get together with them for a sail.  We talked about anchoring out overnight together but ended up just sailing around each other outside of Herring Bay.  We spent about two hours taking pictures of each others boats and it turned out to be a lot of fun.  You don't get many opportunities to have pictures of your boat under sail.  There are photographers who will chase around you in a speed boat and take beautiful pictures but they charge hundreds of dollars.  We got about 90 shots of each boat, did some simple editing and ended up with some really great shots of both boats.  And had fun doing it.  Here's a link (LVD Under Sail) to some of the pictures.  We also got a video of La Vida Dulce coming about (LVD tacking).  It's kinda bumpy because Diane was trying to open a beer while she was shooting the video so you gotta hold on tight while you're watching it.  Those prone to sea-sickness should avoid it all together.  One more thing.....yes, I know the sails are luffing.