All I Need Is About $20,000

I'm going away this weekend. I, along a bunch of my friends, have rented a cabin in the woods for the weekend, starting Friday night and coming home Monday morning. When I say cabin, I don't mean all rustic and stuff. When I say cabin, I mean a 5,000 square foot log home with a 10 person hot tub and 9 person steam shower, a theatre room with a gigantic screen, a massive kitchen and fireplaces every where. This cabin has three massive bedrooms, a dorm room over the garage and an observatory up the hill in a separate, smaller building. But we call it "the cabin".

It's not very often in our lives that we ordinary folk get to live like those who are perhaps a bit better off than we. Most of our lives are spent within the limitations of our abilities, within the financial, social and personal boundaries that frame our daily existence. Our lives are mostly what they are, with the regular routine of work, family, and when possible, play.

My life is different these days. Certainly I work a bit, but not enough to say I "work". Certainly I have things I must do and places I must be. Yet within that framework I find myself more and more looking at the unusual things I want to do. It's not so much a bucket list, but ideas that float past; ideas where I see them and grab them like a child grabbing a candy from the table. I snatch at them, perhaps a little too excitedly, wanting the difference in them to separate my life from that which is ordinary.

The cabin is a good example of this. We started doing this last year, with me booking it well before I was diagnosed. Unfortunately it became a milestone, a marker event for my ALS. Now the cabin celebrates the anniversary of my diagnosis, at least in my mind. Yet even so, it will be a fun weekend. I will spend it with friends, eating and drinking, laughing and talking, playing and resting. It's the kind of weekend that we all need, something different.

For my next adventure, I think a sailing trip on a Tall Ship will work (http://jst.org.uk/). All I will need is time, and about $20,000.