“Lacks Discipline, Motivation…”

That title may not be an actual direct quote from one of my high school teachers but it certainly could be a paraphrase from a lot of my progress reports over the years.

I admit it, I sometimes really, really stink at this internet blogging thing.  It requires a discipline that I often lack, especially when I am someplace having fun and have even the faintest excuse for not doing it.  I was never particularly good at staying focused on homework and tasks, and when it starts to feel like “work work” my best skill is rationalizing a way out of it – procrastination as Performance Art.  And sometimes, for a long time, sitting down and sorting and cleaning the pictures and trying to type up something interesting seems like “work work”.  And when you become really far behind starting it all becomes daunting, like trying to start your taxes when you have stack of unopened bills and a check book that hasn’t been balanced since LAST tax season.

And sometimes the mundane-ness of life intrudes.  For example we spent two weeks in Makemo, a delightful atoll in the Tuamotus.  During that two weeks we saw some cool stuff – native dancing, snorkeling, and lots of natural beauty.  We also spent a lot of days doing school work and catching up on boat projects.  So that fourteen days really doesn’t merit fourteen blog entries; you’ve got maybe three or four tops.

Yeah, THESE things. Get up to about five feet long and hang out under the boat waiting for food to fall over and looking to hitch a ride with the unwary.

So when the mundane intrudes, well you don’t need to and probably don’t want to hear about me doing oil changes or scrubbing the bottom unless something particularly interesting happens.  Like scrubbing the bottom while keeping an eye out so the huge remoras in Rangiroa don’t sneak up and attach to my whale- like backside and scare the hell out of me while I am working.

I apologize for this, as we basically dropped off the map in French Polynesia and still haven’t really surfaced.

There is still a lot to share from French Polynesia and new material for here in New Zealand, and I promise to do it all eventually.  Bear with me.

In the mean time I’m going to pick up the narrative around where we are because the backlog is too intimidating.  From time to time I will back fill with some out of sequence posts from the past few months and eventually we’ll get there.