How they teamed up
That about sums it up.
Boy meets girl. Girl takes boy to corn maze and boy decides he quite likes girl. Boy makes girl the one good meal he knows, causing girl to believe she’s finally found the sensitive and talented chef she had been looking for. Girl is kind of a sucker.
Boy and girl soon begin a sweetly torrid workplace romance punctuated by many nights of good conversations, grand outdoor adventures, and delightful meals – when girl prepares them. Boy and girl become quite a pair and follow each other all around the Pacific Northwest chasing one dream or another, until one day girl LIES and tells a college recruiter that girl and boy are engaged. Girl thinks boy will be ticked off, but boy didn’t think it sounded like such a bad idea.
Who’s they?
Jeff
I grew up in Albany, Oregon, learned how to read good in college, and spent the past 6 years working for a small consulting firm doing environmental regulatory policy and mediation work mostly, living the life of a traveling man, with a sojourn into IT R&D towards the end. I met Harmony while living in Walla Walla, WA, and aside from the demolition derby I found her to be the best thing the town had to offer so I snapped her up.
We moved to Seattle, where the idea first started percolating to buy a boat to “cut down on the rent.” I’d only been sailing once before with some family friends when I was 14, but this was one of many instances where my ignorance worked out in my favor. When I was 20 I was one of the entertainers on a cruise ship, and ever since then I had a nascent dream to revisit the beautiful desolation of the ocean and to be an actual traveler to all those ports I’d only been able to spend a single day skipping across like a stone.
At some point there was also this book about the impending economic collapse of America, and a boat seemed like the best method for distributing depletable non-perishables (e.g., condoms and razor blades) to an appreciative populace. That was before the post-apocalypse became passe, however. Now I’m looking forward to joining the post-post-apocalyptic fleet. An indulgent wife is critical to my future.
So here I am. I’m an amateur craftsman, a frugal mechanic, a poor cook, a lacking planner, and a restless . . something. Let’s do this.
Harmony
I haven’t had to write a bio since I stopped acting in theatrical productions, but I’ll give it a go. I was born at home (are you surprised with a name like Harmony?) in Seattle, WA and spent my formative years in Minneapolis, MN (the land of 10,000 lakes and epic lightening storms). I have a strong allegiance to the Pacific Northwest as well as the Midwest. I love politics and the environment and am interested in anything and everything water-related (which is most things). Water interests me so much that I dedicated two whole years to it in graduate school, and recently graduated with a Master’s degree in water resources policy and management. It’s pretty appropriate, then, that we’ll be living in, on and around water in this next phase of life.
Jeff was an incredibly supportive partner and let me pursue my dream of graduate school, so I thought it only fair that we pursue his dream next. His proposal of exploring the world by sailboat and learning how to get by with less happened to sound pretty awesome and I was fully on-board (literally and figuratively).
Aside from all things water-related, I love puns, cooking, the outdoors, sailing (obviously), singing loudly, attempting to play the guitar, running, backpacking, gardening, writing, reading and photography. I really like the quote “be the change you wish to see in the world” and believe that personal and societal transformation go hand in hand. I’m a dash of hippie (can’t be helped), with a sprinkle of optimist, realist, pessimist, libertarian, socialist, humanist, free-spirited, academic, book-loving, tree-hugging, sociable, introverted, peace-making, over-achieving, perfectionist, cheer-leading, nay-saying, nerd all rolled up into a generally positive, mostly passionate and admittedly (sometimes) intense, disposition. I strive to live by the golden rule (even though sometimes I fail) and hope to leave the world a little better when I leave it.
Tack
Tack’s our cat baby. He’s coming too. We’ll see how that goes. Before you give us too much shit about his name (an obvious boat reference, and cat spelled backwards) we just want to let you know that the original plan involved two cats…one named Tack, the other Clew (two points of the sail). It was going to be awesome…but then we discovered that two cats may be a little much for us to manage on a 29.5′ sailboat. We found Tack (originally named Jack) at the Humane Shelter in Albany, OR. And not to dump on Jeff’s hometown, but the humane shelter was a little lackluster and Tack came home with lots of kitty diseases (respiratory infection, some other viral infection, ear mites, fleas, etc).
I, Harmony, have always been wary of cats (even the Fluffies and Snuggles of the cat world have looked at me with ire). Tack was different. I was reluctant to hold him at first, but when Jeff passed him to me Tack flopped over onto his back and offered up his belly. After a good belly rub he was keen to explore the room from every vantage point (on the floor, on my lap, shoulders, head). He was a curious and vulnerable little guy, and I fell for him almost immediately. I’m thoroughly in love with him now. Jeff has always been a cat person (I refer to him as the cat whisperer). Jeff’s pretty pleased that I’ve come around to realizing just how awesome cats are. I apologize in advance for how much we’ll probably talk about Tack…he’s just so damn cute.