Oddly enough one of the most thoughtful, inspiring quotes I have ever heard was at the end of Blow with Johnny Depp:

 "Most peoples lives pass them by while they're making grand plans for it."
I never saw the movie. The comment above came from a poster on a website I visit quite often.

While truer words have never been spoken, I can say they really do not apply to me as much as they do to a whole lot of other people. I can say that I have dedicated much of my life to living my dreams.
Right now as I rapidly approach old age I am still working out a childhood dream through ham radio. I always wanted a small station as a kid and to DX with people overseas and now I am. This is a recent development.

Still, over the years I have simply taken dreams and run with them.

When I bought Karen Lee, my sailboat it was a case of a guy living a dream. I saved up a couple of bucks and went south to the Seattle area, bought her and sailed her home to Kodiak on very short money. All of it was pretty risky, but I did it. The folllowing summer I left Kodiak on her with a load of grub and a very small sum of money to see me by on what became a six-month odyessy of southeast Alaska and western Canada.

When the money ran low, I took odd jobs, fished her for halibut which I sold to a couple of restaurants and then I actually ran a couple of cases of whisky to a dry Indian village somewhere along the line. The classic line of the entire trip was when my crew-of-one saw the ruckus begin and dryly said, "Hey, Cap! Too bad we didn't have a bunch of Henry rifles to go with the whisky!"

The sailboat cruising dream is a pretty common one and a lot of people have it and most of them have grand plans of putting to sea in a 65 foot rig and sailing the seven seas and having adventures in paradise.

A lot of these people were the critics of my plans to cruise the little boat, and just about every one of them told me that they were planning on buying a 65 footer and 'doing it right'.

I'd bet you that of all of the people that told me that when I was putting Karen Lee into cruising shape are still wandering the docks with their little pipe dreams and are no closer to living them then they were 25 years ago when I was busy working on living mine.
Of course, Karen Lee wasn't 65 feet, she was 24'7" in length, but under the circumstances she was close enough because she was all I had.

I found out at an early age that you sometimes have to go with what you have and that is generally not an ideal situation to go with, but that is simply the way it is. You have to go for it when you have the opportunity because opportunity is a fleeting short moment that does not last more than a wink or two.

My fourteen months in a tipi actually came just after I got out of the service and was at ends. I got out in the last part of May and had plans to go back to school the following September. I figured I could either get a job somewhere and save a few bucks or even simply spend little or nothing and save my mustering out pay for school.

When school started, I decided to stay in the tipi as work wasn't too plentiful and without the added expense of rent and utilities I could simply live off of my GI Bill and concentrate on my studies which I did. I did well in school, studying by a gasoline lantern and heated by an open fire. It was a pretty good deal and I stayed there and had a pretty good GPA when all was over and done with.

That proved to be a pretty good deal and it was a childhood dream of living in the woods for a while gotten out of my system.

I left college to follow another pair of childhood dreams. First I wanted to hitch-hike the Alaska highway and secondly I wanted to go hunting and fishing in Alaska. The fact is that I wound up fishing, all right. Commercial fishing and saw more than enough halibut, salmon, and crab to last three lifetimes. I also had a trip up the highway that dreams are made of. I've posted a lot of it here some time back.

I left for Alaska after selling off almost all of my posessions save what fit in a backpack and a tool box and stuffed about $300 in my pocket and stuck my thumb out. It was the trip of a lifetime and I had a ball.

I found work in Anchorage for a while and after some time I hitched to Homer where I rode the ferry to Kodiak and set up shop.

I ought to post that first summer. It was a zoo and looking back on it, it was priceless. Home was where I hung my head and there were a few things I probably ought not post here to keep people from getting ideas.

Still, if I had waited and planned the entire thing out I suppose I would still be in Colorado Springs hanging out telling everyone about my unfulfilled plans to hitch to Alaska and boring everyone to tears.

Johnny Depp's character said something pretty astute and people ought to take it to heart.

Instead of just making grand plans for your life, you'd generally be a whole lot better off just getting out there and doing it. Where there's a will, there's a way. Live your dreams before your life has passed you by and you can't.

my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/