#2: The Elbow Has a Dream

Thanks to an outpouring of support from our family and friends, we finished building that house (from purchase of property in fall of 2004) in about 12 years. However, to be able to live without debt, we needed to sell our “first baby” and move far away so we wouldn’t get sad. We ended up at the Texas coast so Nick could windsurf and I could paddle board in the fog with loons calling out their magical songs, thinking we’d build a new dream home and settle down.

But still... Nick’s dream of living on a boat continued to whisper to him. And without anything to tie us down, it seemed more feasible to him. All he had to do was take his inner wish seriously and tell me how we could do it and why I would want to be a part of it. As one of my architecture professors would say in his thick Indian accent: Sell me your idea, and I’ll buy it!

Let’s take this blog back to the beginning of the big idea, shall we? Way back to when Nick and I met. Because if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be creating this particular blog about this specific dream that was initially just his: to live on a boat.

So, how did we meet, you ask? Well, technically I just saw his left arm the first time I ever laid eyes on him on December 1, 2001. The rest of him was seated behind a column in the top floor of a house that was turned into business offices in Austin. I had walked up the stairs for my interview with the principal architects so they could use me as their fourth draftsman, where I’d be sitting at the empty desk by the window, within Koosh ball–tossing distance of that elbow that I see (when the architects aren’t around, of course). That would be fun... I wonder what the rest of him looks like? There was no ring on that hand, not that I was really looking, but still...

I got to meet the rest of him shortly thereafter, on my first day of work. I’m pretty sure sparks flew between our hands as we shook in greeting. As the days wore on, we occasionally had lunch next door at the pizzeria, just the two of us. He told me about his ex-girlfriends, past work experiences, his love for windsurfing and snowboarding and mountain biking, how he planned to become an architect, and how he always thought he’d like to live on a boat. I never took the boat idea seriously, so I never asked him to tell me more about it. After all, we lived in Austin and he was going to become an architect and spend the rest of his life designing cool structures. How would there be time for living on a boat?

Well, as it turned out, Nick got tired of sitting at a desk year after year, and since I was married to him by then and just wanted him to be happy, I persuaded him to quit. At the time, we were underway with our first big dream together: designing and building a house in central Austin (when we weren’t at our paying jobs), so if he quit, we could finish the house sooner. I would just load up on more work as a freelance copyeditor (long story) to help pay the bills.