Time for a change.

When I moved to Hawaii in 1989 I shipped a few big pieces of furniture with me, along with my trusty little yellow Toyota hatchback. The car was gone within a few years but the furniture…. well what year is it now?!

Let me put it this way, my friend Julie called me at least 5 years ago to say that she was writing her Will and was leaving me a bit of brass, but that it came with the following caveat. "If you haven't got rid of that fucking couch by the time I've croaked I've stipulated in the will you have to use that money for a new sofa"!

I’m pretty good at saving money, but spending over a couple of hundred dollars for anything will make me think twice. Hence my home has always been cozy-but in the cold light of day a bit worse for wear. "Life is change. Growth is optional. Choose wisely.”

And so the time has finally come to start anew and all I can say is ‘thank god for Craigslist'! Confession, I didn’t want to have a garage sale because I wondered what the neighbours would think when they came over to check out my shit only to realize that it really was shit! And I didn’t want to put all my crap outside with a ‘free’ sign on it because what if nobody took it-oh the shame! So I’ve discreetly given almost all of it all away courtesy of the ‘free’ section on Craigslist and kept my dignity intact in the process.

So the house has been painted inside and out. The hot tub removed and the deck rebuilt, the carpet picked out and hopefully installed next week, the new art is on it’s way courtesy of my friend Alexis & some simple new furniture is here. The best part however, is that my old comfy crappy sofa is having the last laugh as it remains fully ensconsed until September, when they finally row my new one across the Pacific.

A proposito, the Italian rower Alex Bellini who really is rowing across the Pacific Ocean recently had his first communication with people in four months. The article reads “The communiqué described the rower's moral as excellent and his main concern was his jar of Parmesan cheese was emptying too quickly” Check out alexbellini.it for some amazing photo’s in his personal diary. “We must become the change we want to see.” Mahatma Gandhi.

As an aside and a cautionary warning to others I got a wake up call with all these changes as last week, dinner got cold because we were fiddling with the new flat screen and GP commented “all these stresses because of new stuff”. He’s right - stuff is just stuff and not worth fretting over, so with any luck I’m done for another 19 years!

When you're finished changing, you're finished.” Benjamin Franklin.