Life on Valkyr General Forum Forums

So most of you will have noticed that new content has been slow to appear  on the website for the last 6 to 9 months. I have been busy with new family,our daughter kaylin as well as struggling to keep my business afloat. It appears the economy has finally caught up to us here. We had a close brush with hard times in 2009 and were able to pull out of it and now in 2012 it is looking grim again. I fear for the overall economy as I see another round of businesses that seem to be going under.

However a lot of positive has come out of it. As part of our cost cutting measures we have mostly shut the house down and moved onto valkyr. This way we get to keep our boat and the house we hope. As a result though we have actually been getting a lot done on Valkyr. I hope to find the time to write up some of our projects such as

• the new hard dodger frame and later this week fiberglassing the top for it.
• The new bimini that we built using the old soft dodger framework,
•  how we have been re-arranging the boat and figuring out where to store stuff,

1. such as food
2. kitchen utensils
3. tools
4. clothes
5. and everything else that you have a ton of space for in a house and no space at all in a boat.

• We have replaced most of the standing rigging ourselves in the last month with just a few stays left to go,
• installing a isolation transformer,
• Plus many things I can't remember right now.

With my computer business being as slow as it is I have been taking advantage of my skills in electrical and marine electronics as well as basic marlinspike skills to earn money around the marina to help stretch out our finances. I find that if your willing to work there are people willing to hire you to do stuff they don't know how to do or just don't want to do or have time to do. It has actually been fun and quite a change of pace for me to be doing this sort of work instead of huddled behind a computer working on servers and networking. I also seem to have to oportunity to become a distributer for the brand of composting head that we installed on valkyr a couple years ago. It wouldn't earn a huge ammount unless we were able to sell a fair volume but I'm hoping it will contribute to the overall finances. We are pretty excited about it as it is a product that we can really get behind and belive in. So if anyone is interested in going to a composting head then get in touch with me and we can now help you with it. 🙂

Kaylin, our 15 month old loves living on the boat and is all over the place. So far she has been remarkably good about staying within boundaries we have set such as not reaching over the lifelines (now with netting installed on them) or not touching the ac or dc control panels that are at her level (we still plan on building protective covers for them though.  She is pretty patient with having to be connected to the boat with a safety strap if we are working on deck and can't just sit and supervise her. We still watch her like a hawk to make sure she is safe. We have found that sesame street is our friend.. Who knew that sesame street was such a great show.

I have had many people in the past offer to contribute financially toward the website and I have always turned them down as it wasn't necessary and I was happy to provide for the site. With the current trend in our finances I will probably be putting up a paypal donation link. So if you feel that you have gotten a lot of value out of the site or maybe have sold or bought a boat through the boats for sale section of the site then I will accept donations in the future. There will be no changes in peoples access to the site regardless though. All the content is now and will forever remain open both to members and the public. I might try to generate some revenue through advertising on the site but will keep that pretty minimal as I really dislike the sites that have so much advertising that it makes it hard to find or view the content. If things get so bad that I can't afford to pay the hosting etc then we will do some sort of fund raising drive here to raise the money and make sure the site stays up. It's not that bad yet though and hopefully won't become that bad.

If things continue to get worse we will probably shut down our shore side life and just take off and go sailing for a while.:) If that happens I will probably have more time to devote to the site and hopefully a bunch of cool stories to tell as we cruise up and down the east coast  and maybe try out the Caribbean.

I just wanted to give a bit of an update to everyone as I know that it has been noticeable that I haven't been getting much done with the website lately. I still would love for people to send me stories to put up or writeups of projects. Also if some of our members want access to directly post stories on the front page I am open to giving access to them to do so. Just let me know if your intersted.

Scott