Life on the Road

We are here, in beautiful Anthony, Texas. In a parking lot. OK, it’s a glorified parking lot– we have hookups, after all. But our rig spent 2 days at the local Camping World service center getting a few repairs done, and it’s probably going to be back in the shop all next week. With two major mechanical repairs still waiting because the shop “doesn’t do that.”This is the complicated part about RV ownership. Part of the rig is automotive, part is living quarters. The parts that are automotive might be engine and might be chassis– and a service center that will work on the chassis might not do work on the engine and vice versa.To add to the complexity, some service centers won’t work on diesel engines (ours is diesel). And our hot water heater is a diesel-fueled AquaHot system which stopped working properly last November. Now, there are two water heating systems– one is powered by electricity, and the other is powered by the AquaHot (and there’s a third which heats the water as part of the engine cooling system, sow when we stop after driving for a day, we have lots of hot water). As a result, we have gone for a year with only the engine and electrical hot water systems. With the full system including the diesel, we never run out of hot water. Ever.Many of these repairs we can do ourselves. I defrosted the fridge and John fixed the ice maker using a service bulletin from the manufacturer. He’s been able to fix and replace lights and electrical components all over the place.But some are not so easy. Like the bedroom lights, which mysteriously stopped working after flickering for a while. Replacing the bulbs didn’t work– it seems that the ballasts had gone bad. The problem? Each ballast costs over $80 and has to be special ordered– and we were unable to find them when we took the lamps apart. Yes, it seems like a ripoff to me, too.Every day that the RV is in the service center, we go hole up at a local hotel. We didn’t used to do this, but last year we sat in a service center for 5 hours before they even touched the rig, and then another 3 or 4 while they discovered that replacing the big awning was not a 30 minute job. I was ticked off, but more than that, my cat had been inside his carrier for that whole time, without access to a litter box (and subsequently, he triggered a urinary tract infection), while we were told repeatedly “it’ll just be another 20 minutes.” We have yet to find a service center that will let us leave the cat in the RV until they’re ready to actually get someone in the rig, so now we take the cat and his litter box to a hotel room until all the repairs are done and we’re ready to go home. The hotel has Internet access, so I can work while the cat hides under the bed (or behind the microwave in this case), and we’re generally pretty content with the arrangement.Most people who own motorhomes and have service repairs done are doing so under warranty. When you buy an “as is” RV like we did, you end up paying out of pocket any time something breaks, so a lot of times, you find a way to get by without it. Whether it’s the fuel pump or the shower, entropy does occur and parts do fail eventually. This is true in stationary homes, too– you can buy an old home and spend your life fixing stuff, or you can buy a new home and spend your life fixing stuff. A home is, like a garden, a constant source of activities and chores to do. 

Air travel has to be one of the worst industries in America. I say this with a lot of respect for the airline personnel, who come into contact with the frustrated public every day, and do the best they can with the hand they’ve been given by the airlines.

Take, for example, Northwest. It’s an old adage in customer service that your employees will treat your customers the way they themselves are treated. While I am sure there are many happy Northwest employees, I can also tell that the airline isn’t making their employees happy, nor their customers. Their newest money-grab? Charging for the seat. No, not charging for your ticket. Charging extra if you want an aisle or window or exit row seat.

Personally, I would only pay extra for an exit seat– the only seat worth paying extra for is one where you are legally guaranteed there won’t be a 2 year old child discovering the joys of shrieking squirming on the lap of the person next to you.

After being wedged into an unusually narrow seat in between two ladies who were even larger than me (we were in an extra legroom aisle– these aisles have more legroom but less seat width, and they put three short, round ladies there…. why?!?) I resolved never to fly Northwest again. Ideally, I would like not to fly ever again– John Madden doesn’t fly. Why should I?

In other news, I’ll remind everyone that today is the deadline for the postcard giveaway! I only have a few valid, non-spam entries, so drop a comment or your entrecard today!

Ah, inventory management. I never thought of myself as the kind of person who would enjoy entering, cataloging, and maintaining an inventory, and yet…

There is something infinitely satisfying about pulling up a site like LibraryThing, or opening Delicious Library to see, at a glance, whether or not I have a particular book I’m looking at, or whether I’ve already bought a particular James Bond movie. I use Delicious Library for books, movies, and video games. iTunes for music and audiobooks. And Ravelry for yarn inventory. Because the bulk of my yarn is tucked away in the storage bay beneath the RV, having a site where I can peruse it photographically really helps when I’m thinking about starting a new project and buying a bunch of yarn to support it.

It should come as no surprise tha my husband and I inventory the food in our cabinets before we head out to the grocery store. We don’t fill in a list as we finish things off– doing that means not noticing until you get back from the store if your produce is starting to look a little “iffy.” Instead, we take 20 minutes before heading out to look through the cabinets (there are 4 of them) and the fridge to decide what we need and what we didn’t use last week.

Over the past couple of days, as part of the book purge to find space for the books I inherited from my grandmother, I’ve updated my book inventory to reflect what books are in the RV and where they are. I currently have about a dozen books I can’t account for– they’re not in the rig, and they’re labeled as being in “storage.” My stored books are labeled by the box they were stored in, so any book labeled “Storage” is effectively lost.

I’m anxious about those books, but not as much as I am about the 4 lost little books labeled “Uknown” in my inventory. Sure, they’re not terribly crucial. And I’m pretty sure one of them isn’t missing, it just got wedged behind something. But I am not ashamed to admit that, having lost these four in such a haphazard way, my greatest hope is that they accidentally found themselves in a box heading to Goodwill. To think of them lost, truly lost, breaks my heart more than just a little.

The result: 40 books are heading to the Salvation Army today. I am keeping 120 books in the RV, of which about 27 belong to my husband; the rest are mine and include grandma’s books, some music books, and my knitting and writing book collections.

I also updated my catalog of ebooks, including audiobooks, which now weigh in at a whopping 154 books in electronic format. That means my library is half the size and weight it could have been, if I was confined to the limits of a physical book.

Now isn’t that a reason to be glad for the digital age?

I did the Compact last year for 4 months, from January to May. Why only 4 months? Because I knew that moving into an RV was time-consuming and would require things we didn’t already have and couldn’t get otherwise. I like to think that by selling, giving away, and recycling nearly everything else in my house, I was promoting Compact-friendly ways. Other Compacters didn’t necessarily agree, however, and I was lambasted for buying a fuel-consuming home instead of, oh, I don’t know, continuing to rattle around in an enormous 3 bedroom home with 2 bathrooms, washer, drying, dishwasher, hot tub…. you get the idea.

Anyway, aside from a few comic books over the weekend (which are, in fact, for work), I haven’t bought anything new since the first of this month. And I’m thinking maybe I will go back to the “no buying new stuff” thing for the rest of 2008. It was good for me, good for the environment, and I managed to do everything I wanted to do during that time without spending a lot of dough.

I don’t entirely know what the Compact’s total goals are, and I suspect they vary per person. For me, the goals are to get away from impulse-buying (which I’ve mostly done), reduce clutter, reduce waste, and in general streamline my life. Notice that “save the planet” isn’t in that list. That’s because I think “Save the planet,” while an admirable goal, is probably not practical when your home gets 8 miles to the gallon.

At any rate, here are the things I spend my money on the most:

• Yarn.
• Books about knitting.
• Comic books (for work).
• Romance novels.
• Postcards.
• Arts and crafts supplies.
• Online media and services.

Of these, the books, yarn, and arts and crafts are the biggest offenders. A few postcards don’t stop my wheels from turning, and they’re good for giveaways like the one I did last week. I inherited a box of stationary from my grandmother, so I don’t really need any more stationary. Nor do I need any more arts and crafts supplies– I’m full up on glue sticks and I can always cut up stationary if I need to glue some pretty pictures into a scrapbook.

It’s birthday season around here. My mom’s birthday is today, and mine is coming up in a couple of weeks. I look around my little house-on-wheels and think “gee, what do I want for my birthday?”

I know what I don’t want: more stuff! There’s no room for the Stuff we have right now! But, like everyone who has everything they possibly could need, there are still a few things that I want. In no particular order, I bring you a short, handy list of gifts and guidelines for someone who has no space for anything, or who is trying to live a simple life:

•  Make the world a better place. Make a donation in their honor to a charity they care about. Most importantly, though, make this donation over the phone and be extremely explicit in telling the person taking the donation information that you do not want the recipient to receive newsletters, solicitations, ads, or follow-up mailings. If possible, ask to receive the thank you card at your own address and forward it to the recipient. It’s not a good gift if it comes with 3 years of headaches and junk mail.
• Gift the gift of entertainment. Find out what kind of entertainment (be it books, music, movies, or TV) that the recipient enjoys, and give them a gift that is weightless or re-giftable. If they have an iPod and know how to use it, an audiobook download from audible.com is a great one for book lovers with no space.  Only give digital gifts to those who already know how to use them. If you have to spend 30 minutes explaining how to use it, it’s a bad gift.
• Share a legacy. Have a favorite family recipe? Share that with a friend. Have some funny stories from your grandparents? Write them down and give them to your folks. It’s all right to re-gift a family tradition.
• Enjoy some time together. This one’s only useful if you live nearby, but it’s pretty common and acceptable for friends to buy each other a round of drinks or coffee for birthdays. Watching your pennies? Bring a picnic lunch to your friend or host a double date at home. Time with friends reduces stress and increases lifespan. Time well spent leads to more time.
• Give a service. This is an old, old tip from Dear Abby, but it’s still somewhat true today. Now, while Dear Abby suggested gifts for older friends and family that included trips to the hairdresser, the fact is that some people might consider that to be a not-too-subtle “hint” about one’s hygiene. Instead, find out if there’s something your recipient wants or needs– a website, a blog, some writing, a logo, their yard weedwhacked, and offer to do it for them. The problem I’ve always had with this gift is that I love to give my loved ones my time– but only on my terms. So, I’ll happily set up a web site, then spend no time updating it, and of course, the recipient has no idea how to do so, either. Tailor your gift to what the recipient wants, not what you think they need.

Come to think of it, these are good tips for birthdays, holidays, and business proposals as well. I’ll have to keep that in mind this week as I spend some quality time drafting some quality proposals.

Something I notice these days is that we go through “fads” of activity. I was like this before, in the stick house, but it’s even more pronounced now that we have such limited space. I’ll go through phases of hobbies– for a few months, I’ll obsessively knit. Or I’ll want to do nothing but work on my novels. Or I’ll spent a month training the cat (yes, you read that right– my cat does tricks.)

With the cat getting sick last month, and my grandmother’s death this month and all the visiting that’s ensued, at the end of the day, we’ve found ourselves wanting to do little more than curl up with some DVDs on the sofa.

Except that, during the course of hanging out at my grandma’s and playing around on Facebook, and maybe in part as an extension of our recent obsession with Carcassonne, my husband re-discovered video and online games. Now, we’re far from the cutting edge of computer games– we play a couple of things on Facebook, online poker, and solitaire. He also re-installed Angband, which is an ascii-graphics computer game from about 20 years ago. And this morning, he actually pulled out the Playstation 2, a relic from our more acquisitive past.

I will not bore you with the details of the video games he’s into right now. It’s enough that he’s doing something fun and entertaining (and almost entirely free, since we already have the system and several games to play).  This dusting off of old pastimes to re-kindle an interest is a great way to put some controls on the endless rounds of building walls of clutter around us.

How does a recovering collector get by without her collections of “stuff” when pursuing the simple life? Before we divested ourselves of our “stuff,” and went on the road, we had a large collection of shot glasses from various destinations. Now, granted, it wasn’t a collector’s collection, but we had more than we could ever use, even if we threw a whiskey-tasting party.

I’ve also been known, in my life, to collect books, yarn, lapel pins, stuffed animals, post cards, stickers, flamingo-themed items, Muppet memorabilia, and medieval manuscript recreations.

I was recently reminded by my grandmother’s birding notebook that not all collections need to cost money. Grandma was an avid birder and lifelong member of the Audubon Society. She was a pioneer in conservation in her area, heading up commissions to save important habitats from overdevelopment.

She once told me that she had stopped birding because after several decades, she became tired of it. She turned instead to butterflies, but at her age then of 80, butterflies “move around rather fast,” so she switched again to flowers.

Her method of collection was simple. See a flower. Correctly identify it, or observe it well enough to look it up. Write it in a notebook. Move on to another flower.

If you’re the kind of collector who feels an urgent need to have a record of your collection, some physical thing that serves to preserve it, then you might collect the way my father-in-law does, with a camera. Imagine his delight when, frustrated with his flower photos coming out rather fuzzy, he discovered the “flower” setting on his camera. It is, in fact, the macro setting (a common setting on many digital cameras, used for closeup work). He’s now able to take beautiful up-close photos of his beloved cove, which he then shares online with friends and family. No paper, no scrapbooks, just a digital camera and some bytes.

I have another friend whose photo collection contains a sock monkey. Like those of us with “themed” collections, like flamingos, or cardinals, hers is a digital photo series in which her favorite sock monkey always makes an appearance.

Periodically, I take out my sketch book and pencils and go out into the field. I’ve taken a few small classes on the subject of nature sketching, and I follow the blog of a great nature artist named Cathy Johnson. Still, it’s an enjoyment, and something that spends time in a creative endeavor.

As we’ve gone on our travels in the last year, I have started various collections. Pins from the National Monuments, postcards, photos (of course), videos, jams and jellies, books… but the things I cherish are the things that carry memories from one mind to the next. The jams, when eaten, make us reminisce about being in the mountains where we first discovered them. The books, after being read and handed to a friend with a strong recommendation. The postcards, flying through the postal service on their way to someone else, announcing “here! Here is news from someone far away, but not forgotten!”

I don’t know what the purpose of a collection is outside of memory. I know that, for the advertising machines of the world, a collection is a way to sell you stuff, clutter, crap. It’s a way to brand a bunch of cookie-cutter plastic ticky-tack as “Hannah Montana” and pretend it’s a genuine experience. But it’s not. I cherish the photos of me drawing at the Grand Canyon more than I value the drawing, perhaps, but the photo captures my experience better than the drawing does.

And so, I charge all you seekers and collectors to look around you. I challenge you to replace one of your physical, clutter-making collections with a virtual one. If you have a “pigs” collection, pick one pig (your favorite, or the one your kids made for you) and begin posing it in new and inventive places, then taking a photo of it. Waste no time or money or space on printing these photos– in fact, limit your simple-world collection budget to less than $8 (the cost of a used field guide and a notebook). Let the photo simply be a record that says “I was here, I did this– the pig is just standing in my place.” If you have a postcard obsession, take all your postcards out, write a single sentence on the back, and mail them to a friend. The sentence can even be “I’m getting rid of all my post cards; hope you enjoy this one!” Let fly with your post cards; you will likely get in return a hug, or a smile, or an email saying “thanks for brightening my day.”

If you take up this challenge, come tell me about it. I’d love to hear about it!

We love to shop at local businesses, and we find there are a few niches that are still dominated by non-Walmart big box stores. Of these, two fit some of my favorite hobbies, and there are two good examples here in Norwood, Massachusetts.

Comic book shops: The distribution might have been taken over by a single monopoly, but the locally-owned comic book shop is still king. This week, I visited New England Comics. I stopped in to pick up a few comic books for some research. I wandered the shelves for a little while, then approached the clerk, who had very politely been leaving me to initiate my search on my own (I don’t like hovering shop clerks). I explained what I was looking for, and in minutes he had three recommendations to put into my hands. When more customers came in, a friendly customer took over and helped me find more cool stuff, while the clerk dealt with an unexpected inrush of business. Both the staff and the customers were friendly, polite, and didn’t make me feel like I was intruding on “their club.”

As a woman and a geek, I sometimes find comic book shops intimidating. It’s not that I’m afraid of comics or all the testosterone. It’s that there’s a blend of “Oh my god, it’s a woman!” reaction from the comic book geeks that sometimes puts me off and makes me feel like I’ve just walked into the clubhouse, ignoring the “No GURLZ” sign on the door. I’m very grateful that that was not the case at New England Comics, and if I’m back in the area for a family visit, you can bet I’ll be coming back.

New England Comics
732 Washington St
Norwood, MA
(781) 769-4552

Yarn Shops: The local yarn shop is, for most knitters, a home away from home. When your home this week is not the same as next week, you become very attuned to the ways in which other knitters can cold-shoulder a newcomer. Now, understand, the vast majority of knitting shops are very welcoming to everyone, but every knitter (and especially crocheters!) has run into the rare shopkeeper or store that has a distinct aura of unwelcome. On my last trip to Norwood, I stopped at Fancie Purls , a knitting store not far from the hospital. My first time walking in, the shop owner Ann was friendly, welcoming, and invited me to come back for the knitting days, even though I hadn’t bought any yarn! She gives a discount to newcomers, and the knitting groups were warm and welcomed me into their fold as if I’d been there all along. The knitting groups have different “cultures” themselves– one group is a little more conservative in their project choices, while the other has a more “edgy” sense of humor (you’ll have to ask Ann which one to visit!)

Fancie Purls
848 Washington Street
Norwood, MA 02062-3432
(866) 662-3719

Our motorhome takes diesel fuel and has a 100 gallon tank. It gets, on average, about 8 miles to the gallon. I know, that’s terrible, but when you consider that your home probably gets 0 miles to the gallon…. okay, okay. But the fact is, we drive less now than ever before. We work from home, we go for walks, and we each have a more-or-less-functional bicycle. We try not to move the motorhome more than once a week, and we haven’t moved from our current spot since June 8th.

Diesel is very close to $5/gallon right now. By the time we fuel up next time, it will probably be well over $5/gallon. When we fuel up, we use the truck stops because there’s enough room to maneuver, and we frequently have to either go inside and hand over the credit card, or re-start the fueling every $50 to $100. For those playing along at home, with a 100-gallon tank, that can mean re-starting 4 or 5 or even up to 10 times while fueling. Why? I mean, I understand wanting to keep “drive-offs” to a minimum, but seriously. If I’ve put in my credit card and there’s money available, even if I drive off, you have the credit card. I suspect it’s to prevent drive-offs with stolen cards– limiting the possibility of chargebacks. But the fact is, if I just put my card in a second and third time, I can keep refueling. And if I’m a crook, the credit card is still stolen during all three charges (and potential chargebacks).

People have asked me how we’re coping with the rising price of gas. How do you think? We’re coping the same way you’re coping– by bitching about it and digging into our savings.

Thankfully, people don’t ask me how we cope with the rising price of food. For us, it’s more like the falling price of food– California may produce more food than anywhere else, but they also pay more for it. I think California’s been subsidizing the cost of tomatoes in Iowa.