Joy Ride

So, one of the things that's been in my mind lately is that our lives, that is to say me, Rachel, and the kids lives, go through bursts of excitement and then settle down into normal, and rather hum drum, circles. (← How's that for an opening sentence? Lol.) For months, sometime years, at a time we're doing the same old, same old without anything happening that's really newsworthy. My job continues along, Rachel's work is what it always is (although she may or may not be about to have a baby at the time), the kids' home school goes through it's phases and everything is very same-ish and not particularity “blog worthy”.

Of course, the fact is that I like it that way. Living a life that runs from one excitement to another would be like eating chocolate cake for every meal. I love chocolate cake, but it's not a meal. There are people that seem to run after excitement, always looking for some new adventure. I can't really say there's anything wrong with that, but it's not the life for me. I freely admit that I found moving our entire family to Dominica for fours months on a shoestring budget very exciting. However, keeping track of seven kids (and then nine) through airports and hotels, up mountains and in oceans, is the kind of excitement I can take a dose at a time. The truth is that I was slap worn out when we came back to the US. I am really looking forward to heading back to Dominica this Winter. However, I already know that when the time comes I'll be looking forward to coming back to the US.

It's not that I miss the US so much as I miss the people here and that we're more established here. That's one of the things I'm going to look into changing once I have more money. That is to say: I want us to get more established in Dominica. By 2016 I want to have a more permanent residence there (or one that we can take with us there, lol). Rachel and I are actually considering getting a boat that we could take down there and live on. Going through the airport with all the children in tow is VERY exciting. But it's not the kind of excitement I look forward to, lol.

Either way, all this has nothing to do with anything. Well, except for the fact that there's not a great deal of local news. Between Rachel and my mother-in-law most of us have bikes now. They've come from yard sales, online posts, and I don't know where all, but we have them now. We ride around the neighborhood a couple of times a day. It's nice and it's good exercise. They also found Libby a Google Chromebook (a laptop) on one of the online sale pages for cheap. So she got it and Abby got her old laptop. That made for some happy girls. In addition to these blessings we got a trampoline. Someone was giving it away in Jackson (where we live). All we had to do was go pick it up. All in all we've gotten a lot of physical blessings here recently.

Here are some pictures:


Worlds of Magic continues to go well. We have a publisher lined up that is willing to give us a substantial advance once we hit Beta. We're supposed to hit that in early July, so it looks like we're on our way. We have had to push things back again, just because there's so much to the game. We're hoping to have it up on Steam's “Early Access” by October. That probably means it's going to end up being a Christmas release. Still, I should have the money I need to get us back down to Dominica by next January, which is my goal. I should even be able to take the first month basically off and try to enjoy it as a vactaion, lol.

That really wraps up the news and pictures part of my post. Now I'll move on to business. Before I go any further I want to say that it was pointed out to me that I seem to have too many plans. Well, what I'm talking about here may take years to actually execute. It's also likely that other people will get involved and spread out the work load. For instance, as we work on setting up our farms other industrious individuals may work on starting a local feed company. If we can already buy local feed we certainly won't bother starting our own company over it. Either way, first comes theory, then plan, then business. This is the theory part of the process. All we're doing here is considering what could be. So, now that we have all this food production in place the question is: What's next?

Well, you may remember from my Wealth Creation posts that wealth starts out with necessities. At this point we've helped Dominica provide some of it's own necessities and created a small exports business. The result of all this is that our employees have more money than they used to and the entire population can get slightly cheaper food (which means they have a bit more money as well). As their necessities are met they're going to want other things. What we want to do is provide them.

Here I have to step out on a limb. I can say with confidence that many, if not most, Dominicans would like cheaper chicken. However, I didn't live with them long enough to know what tier 2 luxury items they would want that we could make locally. Still, I have a few ideas I can throw out here as we're just talking theory. In real life we'll want to be finding the answers to those questions as we're building up our tier 1 businesses. Either way, I'll give you a few examples whether or not they're true to life.

Fiberglass boats: Fiberglass is a material that people still often work by hand. There are a lot of small time operators that make everything from surf boards to sail boats to storage tanks. We could very easily put together a small crew, order a few molds to get the ball rolling, and start cranking out little fiberglass boats. We could make fishing boats, sail boats, pontoon boats, etc, etc, etc. These could be for local sale as well as export. A little marina in Roseau full of low-cost sail boats could probably clean up during the tourist season. (Especially if we could find a way to deliver them to the US and/or Europe.) We could also tie this directly into the island's tourist business. We could provide boats for fishing charters, scuba diving, day sailing, etc. Now, there may already be a number of people doing this, but even so, we could provide them with boats. We could also easily expand this into other areas of fiberglass work.

Gas powered golf carts: OK, so this may seem out of Dominica's reach, but what we're really talking about is assembly and maintenance. We can buy engines, transmissions, tires, brakes, lights, etc, from outside the island. Then make the frames in our own welding shop and have the bodies made over at our fiberglass facility. They would just be low horsepower personal vehicles, but we could make them affordable enough that the locals could get them. They wouldn't be something the local bus drivers would need to worry about, but they would be the kind of thing you could run up town in to pick up a few groceries, or go for a nice Sunday drive with. Really we could also make nice little scooters for people who wanted to get from point A to point B without riding the bus. This is something I would have certainly been interested in. Of course, I'm not really sure the locals would be, lol.

The real point is that we would need to look at what the people of Dominica want and couple that with what they can make. The idea is to produce as much wealth as possible locally. That's the long and short of it. I've talked a good deal about this subject over the last few weeks and I may touch on it once more before I change the subject. However, it's getting close to time to wrap it up. I have a lot of theory. I plan to start making some of it “plan” next year.

This post has run on more than long enough. So, once again, good night from South Carolina.