So, one of the unusual challenges I’m going to have in downscaling is finding a home for my rescue chicken, Ms.Thang. You read that right. I have a rescue chicken. I sort of inherited her when I moved into the house I’m renting now.

The short version of the story is she escaped from the Mexican grocer behind my house and I didn’t have the heart to turn her back in. If you want to know the whole, sordid tale, I’ll publish it in a subsequent post.

I just have a sinking feeling that trying to keep a chicken on a floating home qualifies as a Bad Idea. Especially since the marina owner has a policy on no bird feeders because he finds them “messy”. And he questioned me twice on all the particulars about Rumi before he agreed to approve me for a lease at the marina. (“Yes. He’s neutered, no claws, litter box trained, completely indoors…”)

If you have a suggestion about how to find her a home–especially one that won’t cook her for dinner–I’d love to hear it.

I also could use Chicken Tech Support on how to capture and transport her. Somehow I don’t think she’s going to handle being picked up well.

So, I’ve bought a floating home in Portland.

“What?!” you say. “What the hell is a floating home? And why in the world would you do that?”

Well, to start with, a floating home is a house that has been built upon a raft-like system called a “float”. Typically they are docked in a slip-space (or in some cases two adjoining ones) in a marina. Mine is sitting in a marina about 20 minutes outside of downtown Portland in the Columbia River. If you’re familiar with the area, it’s just south of McGuire Island and cycling distance to Blue Lake Regional Park.

My house started its life as a boathouse in the 1960’s. At some point, one of its enterprising owners began to carve out living space from the boat well. It has been remodeled by subsequent owners, each time expanding the living space at the expense of boat space.

Currently the living space is a little over 500 square feet. When I finish filling-in the boat well, it will be roughly 650 square feet. Small, I know. Even by floating home standards, which are still smaller than what’s happening on land.

Honestly, though, it feels perfect for me with where my life is right now. I’ve been on a crusade to simplify things for the last year and this feels like the next, right step. (Hey, it was either this or one of Jay Shafer’s Tumbleweed Tiny Houses, which, at roughly 110 square feet, would have been an even more drastic jump.)

But there’s more to the story of “why the hell are you doing this?” than simply a desire to simplify my life and walk lighter on the planet…

A couple months back, on one of the rare rainy days in Tucson, I was rummaging through my “Ex Box”. For the non-nostalgic amongst you, an “Ex Box” is that container in which you keep love letters, pictures, trinkets, etc. of former loves that you can’t quite bear to get rid of but which are probably a Very Bad Idea to let the current love of your life stumble across. My “Ex Box” also contains a random assortment of things like the pen and ink sketch my best friend from college did of the two of us, old fan letters from when I wrote historical romances, and an Underground pass from the first time I scraped together my pennies and went on pilgrimage to London. I hadn’t looked through my Ex-Box in many years.

Normally, when a relationship ended, I just cracked open the lid, stuffed in the new items, adding a new strata-layer of romantic failure, and quickly slammed the lid back on. But I had slowly been working through ever corner of my office getting rid of things I no longer wanted in my crusade to declutter. The Ex Box was the last Bastion of Stuff to be sorted through before I could feel virtuous about having finished the den. So I bit the bullet and cracked open the box.

While I was sorting through items, I came across something I’d completely forgotten about—a two-paged typed list my 20-year-old self had written of all the things I wanted to do before I died. For someone who feels like most of her life has been a series of serendipitous accidents, I was surprised at home many of them I’d actually accomplished…

Write and publish a novel. Check. Fall madly in love. Check. See Venice. Check. Make a lot of money. Check. Spend a lot of money on pointless material objects that don’t really make me happy. (Well, that’s not exactly how it was worded. But you get the idea.) Double-check.

And, there, on the bottom of page one, was one that I’d half-forgot. At some point in my life I wanted to own a home directly on the water where I could park a sailboat directly alongside.

I’m not sure I can explain the reason behind that one in any logical terms. I just know it’s been a dream of mine since the first time I stepped aboard a large sailing craft back at the age of nineteen. Granted, when I originally dreamed it up, I was picturing something like the dockominiums in Traverse City I used to sail past while I was working as a summer intern in MSU’s sailing program.

The dream went that I would become a wildly successful romance writer, sink one of my advances down on a pricey dockominium, and then spend my summers penning my epics aboard my sailboat somewhere out in Lake Michigan.

Well, needless to say, several years and many U-turns later, that’s not exactly how things turned out. However, here I found myself in Tucson, post-divorce with not a lot of ties keeping me where I was at, sitting on a chunk of money I’ve been slowly whittling away at paying rent while I figure out what I want to do next, with my old dream fresh in my mind.

I started poking at for sale listings for houseboats. I found several interesting ones in my price-range. But, to be honest, most of them felt a bit claustrophobic to me with the bulk of their living space being below-deck. And I was nervous about how a houseboat might work with an exceptionally curious Balinese cat who’s never been outside and sinks like a rock when he’s tries to swim. I’d be devastated if I ever lost Rumi. Not to mention, houseboats, by definition, come with motors. Me and motors get along about as well as the fictional wizard Harry Dresden does with anything electronic. (There’s a reason my cars are waranteed to the max.)

Somewhere, about a week into poking at listings, I stumbled over an add for a floating home. A floating home? What’s this? I’d never heard of one but a half-hour of research later, a whole new world had opened to me. The more I read about floating homes, the stronger my conviction grew that this is what I had been looking for. For the price of docking and basic utilities, a floating home allows someone to live directly on the water while having additional space and conveniences compared to what is found on most boats. Moreover, if you’re into boating, you can literally sail/motor your craft right up to your front door.

I’ve been in love with Portland since the first time I visited in my twenties. (Which I’m sure will be the subject of another entry at some point.) After doing a few more days worth of research about the relative cost of floating homes in different parts of the western U.S., I was pretty sure Portland was where I should be looking for a place.

I spent a few more days poking a listings for floating homes that were for sale in Portland. I even went so far as to email a couple of realtors about specific listings. I was surprised that only one of them ever got back to me and she stopped writing to me once I broke it to her I was looking for a place not in the half-million dollar range.

One place in particular kept haunting me. It was this little green and white cottage listed way below expected market value. I knew there had to be a story behind that and it probably wasn’t good. But I kept going back and poking at the pictures on the listing.

After not hearing back from anyone on the place for more than a week, I finally lost patience and picked up the phone. To my surprise, I reached the listing realtor on my first try. Even better still, four days later, on a snowy morning, I met him in person and spent the day touring my very first floating homes. I had a blast. And that first day was also when I saw the little cottage.

The story on the cottage was that the float pretty much needed to be rebuilt. If done right, floats have about a 30-year life span and this one’s was up. To rebuild the float would pretty much double the asking price for the house. But, even with that, the place was still within my price range.

So, endeavoring to do the prudent thing for once in my life, I made myself take some time and think about it. I talked to my boyfriend, Charlie, about it and he, needless to say, wasn’t terribly keen on the idea of me moving halfway across the country from him. However, Charlie and I already live a state apart as it is. (He is in Albuquerque and I have been in Tucson.) And the nature of his job has him traveling a good chunk of the time. The plane trip is longer between Albuquerque and Portland, but it’s no more difficult for him to telecommute from Portland than it is from Tucson. Plus, his company also has a local office in Portland which it doesn’t where I am now.

I bit the bullet, gave up my quasi-retirement of the last few years, and applied for good-paying jobs in the Portland area to better justify and finance a precipitous move from the desert.

I made it to the final round of a job I was really pretty excited about… and then didn’t get it. At that point I realized as much as I was disappointed about the job, I was even more disappointed about the idea of never making it to Portland and owning the little cottage. It was supposed to be mine, dang it.

That was the point where I said “Aww, f-ck-it” and put in an offer. It was accepted in under 24 hours. And, now, I find myself the owner of my very own floating home which, if possible, is more beat-up and in need of TLC than me.

So where the heck are you anyway?

This is the rather eclectic blog of a late-thirty-something woman in the process of overhauling her life in the wake of a short-lived and spectacularly disastrous marriage to the “Perfect Guy”.

If you don’t already know me, perhaps the most important thing for you to know, at this point, is that I’m in the process of moving from Tucson to a floating home in Portland. A very small floating home. Like, 600 square feet small. After renovations. (And, man, are there going to have to be some renovations…)

And, just to make life more exciting, I decided to make this shift in the wake of having been married to someone worth millions. Several millions. (It should be noted that with the finalization of our divorce, he’s still worth millions. I am nowhere close.)

Just to be clear, this is not a “Poor Me” tale. The precipitous decline in my net worth had very little directly to do with my decision to relocate and overhaul my entire lifestyle. I’m sure people out there will be skeptical, but my short-time amongst the wealthy was awful on so many levels I don’t know where to begin. I finally had enough and ran screaming. I guess, in some ways, I’m still running as fast as I can through the changes I’m making in my life.

Anyway, my next resting point is a former 1960’s boathouse outside of Portland.

So, I better give you the disclaimer at the outset…

This is in no way intended to be one of your sleekly-packaged, narrowly-focused, terribly-helpful blogs intended to draw lots of advertising dollars for its creator. While I love to browse through those, I’m far too ADD to create one myself.

If you decide to thumb through the pages on my site, you’re going to find a hodgepodge of subjects that are of current interest in my including, but probably not limited to: floating homes, simple-living, the small/tiny home movement, frugality, responsible financial stewardship, and living green.

I also guarantee you find more information than you ever wanted to know about my cat, Rumi, along with periodic commentary about the men in my life, past and present.

I will do my best to categorize entries by subject so you can avoid what doesn’t interest you. But consider yourself duly warned. A wide variety of things interest me and I tend to collect shiny odds and ends in my blogs like a magpie with a cache of trinkets.

Why did I feel compelled to add yet another blog to the multitude that already exist?

Because I’m enamored with the sound of my own voice and tale. I mean, how could there possibly be anything more interesting than me?

Alright. A little less tongue-in-cheek…

I created this blog, in part, so that my friends in Arizona–who are convinced I’ve totally taken leave of my senses—have an easy way to keep tabs on me when I relocate. It is my dearest hope that if I manage to post entries on a semi-regular basis that demonstrate some surviving grasp on reality they will resist the urge to drag me back to the desert and lock me away somewhere disgustingly cheerful with daily macramé classes “for my own good”.

I have also been a storyteller as long as I can remember. I enjoy sharing anecdotes from my life with others. My intention is try to tell some of my journey in the next year or so in an Eat, Pray, Love fashion. (And, if you don’t know what Eat, Pray, Love is you: #1 Probably have a Y chromosome. And #2 Have been nowhere near a bookstore in the last year.)

Moreover, I’m hoping some of the information I have on this site may help others who are traveling along a similar path. As someone who lives and dies by her high-speed internet connection, I was surprised at how little information was online about floating homes when I started trying to learn about them.

And, while there are quite a lot of helpful, how-to articles on how to go about simplifying various aspects of one’s life, I haven’t run across many sites that tell the story from beginning to end, gory failures and all, of someone’s attempts to put all this freely-available, well-intentioned advice to good use.

I can’t speak for anyone else. But I know, for me, I enjoy knowing the details of the unconfident journey, U-turns, dead-ends, diasasters and all. I mean, if one of Lewis and Clark’s men ends up getting eaten by a bear, you better believe I want to know about it. (And, if I’m honest with myself, I suppose my story has the potential to end up a Donner Party kind of tale.)

Either way, here’s one to add to the collection of personal journey travelogues…