PP #5: Progress, as winter looms on the horizon...
Project: Pioneer #5 October 21, 2023 (Saturday 8am)
Giavana says, “You’re finally getting to realize your dream of living in an RV!” OK, some context—while I may have occasionally (narrator: frequently) claimed that if she ever (God forbid) left me or (God forbid) died I’d go live in an RV, I did have an image of palm trees and a beach in mind, not the frozen tundra. Nonetheless, I’m excited. We’re both excited. And inventorying our winter threads. The NOAA winter forecast just came out, and it’s daunting.
Project: Pioneer is the live reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle, just at the start of winter. We cover prepping, politics, spirituality, afterlife, RV life, and personal finance. (Audio at this link, Apple, and Spotify)
I wanted to clarify that when I had the incident in my last post, I downloaded my heart loop monitor data right away and sent it to my cardiologist. I don’t want to be driving if I’m a risk to others! I got the all clear. It must have just been stress and/or exhaustion. The spike shown on my Oura ring graph must have been the adrenaline shot when it happened. Lesson learned.
So, what’s new? We’ve been making some trips to Red House to get everything in order. Water hooked up? Check. Electric hooked up? Check. Furnace, water heater, TV operational? Check. Sewer hooked up? Um, not yet. Bleh. Poop—I’m not a fan. Our RV is about half the size of the other pioneer homes. It sure is small. Our neighbors give us curious looks as they go about setting up their rigs. I may have detected a few head shakes. We’ll show them!
Some stuff we’ve installed so far:
Upgraded thermostat with remote access
Upgraded door locks
Space-saving clothes hangers
Space-saving shoe racks
Small dehumidifier
Heated (dual control!) mattress topper
Heated water hose
Henrik is in the truck hospital being mended, and Giavana is away for a few days on a secret mission as I start this journal entry. I’m trying to get enough done to impress her when she returns. I hooked up the over-the-air antenna for the TV (King Jack mounted on the roof). You can buy something like that for your home, so we receive free TV just like in the old days when we stuck a coat hanger in the hole for the missing antenna. I was shocked at how many channels we got! I thought it would be just 3-4. There’s a bunch, and in high-definition clarity. Why are we paying so much for live TV streaming services? We’re going to be revisiting that question, for sure. The internet should be operational by next week.
Our neighbors seem nice. Country folk. Veterans. Preppers. Travel nurses, teachers, utility workers, retirees, minimalists. They’re all very experienced at this sort of thing, and very helpful. In those Farawayer years I lived in the dregs, and the people there clung together, trying to make it, helping, hustling, dreaming together and not worrying about race, sexual orientation, creed, or color. I only saw that as I moved up in class, from the bottom to the middle, and certainly more and more near the top. Neil Young talked about how his hit Heart of Gold brought him fame and fortune, which he disliked so much he headed back to the ditch. That old community was tough and struggling, so any level of disrespect or hate was met proportionally.
It’s how I imagine the long-ago covered wagon settlers, building up a community together. Or, the modern day Amish we all secretly admire for their simple life and rejection of technology. We’re all out there in our new community, setting up for the winter under God’s watchful eye, under the pretty blue dome above us, fuzzed with cotton, the mountain looming behind us shaded in green turning to red, gold, and brown. The sounds of sawing, hammering, laughter, an occasional cuss ebb and flow throughout the day. The air is crisp and clean, all that plant life soaking up carbon dioxide and producing clean air to breathe. Dogs enjoy leisure and get to know one another, cautiously sniffing their new friends in areas we humans don’t dare. We have lakes with fish, we are outside any potential blast zone.
It strikes me how we can now simply hook Red House up to Henrik, out of necessity or simple desire, and go to any beautiful corner of this incredible continent. The stark beauty of Canada or Alaska (in summer!) or the Navaho hues of the incredible southwest. We won’t have to rush home for doggie boarding or jobs or other responsibilities. We can just…stay. No dangerous, stressful, horrible airports, no filthy expensive hotels. I’m thankful we’re in a position to do this, mostly due to following the FIRE/early retirement advice in Kiss Your Money Hello, The Simple Path to Wealth, and by the folks at Emancipare
In the last post, I got to caught up in the fresh, immediate, shocking savagery of what had just happened in Israel. I don’t want this to be about that. We should never look away, we should always care, and help. We do, we give to causes every month. But I try to focus on the positive, and be mindful. Mindfulness works. My son and son-in-law are Marine combat veterans. They use a gratitude/mindfulness journals like this incredible one to stay focused daily and battle PTSD. I use it too, although the only fighting I did in the service was in the bars of the rural Canadian border during the Cold War. That journal isn’t just for vets, though. Everyone should take that few minutes a day to reflect on what matters most. It’s motivating and a great start or reset to the day.
But, really though—look up at night into the vast universe, so many stars like our sun, surrounded by orbiting planets that may also have life. We are just a tiny speck, here but for the blink of an eye. Now imagine looking through a microscope at a pile of tiny cells that will live only momentary lives, and watching them spend it hating and fighting each other because some look different, act different, or whatever, instead of enjoying every brief moment they’re gifted. Them cells is cray, right? We cray!
The current chaos in government hastens us on this journey. It’s scary. Half our government crippling all of it. We hit the tipping point when the Supreme Court upheld Citizens United, a massive blow to everyday working Americans. It opened the floodgates of incredible amounts of influence money from the uber-wealthy and corporations into our politics, further attracting the wrong kind of people to government service—grifters, con artists, greedy, immoral people. Now, due to that influence, we have the Big Food lobby poisoning our kids, Big Pharma addicting us, Big Insurance ripping us off with sleazy deferred annuity or indexed universal life (IUL) and other “permanent” types of life insurance, Big Oil destroying our planet by sucking the guts out of it, contaminating the surface areas and atmosphere above, while our lawmakers enrich themselves and look away. It’s even reached our Supreme Cout, where incredibly, we now see evidence of influence and corruption. Almost every advertisement I hear is a misleading scam of some sort. Now, here we are. Get mad, get active, your kids are watching, it’s they who will suffer.
We also got a small storage unit. We’re not keeping much, but I don’t want to part with my writing/work desk. It’s a part of me. We each have just a very few things like that. We had better, the storage unit is only 5 feet by 10 feet! We’ll put our disassembled bed in there. We don’t know what’s after this journey. We may remain full-time RVers or we may find some land and build a cabin on it, and use those things. The bonus is that the storage facility is indoor and built like a bomb shelter. It’s another possible place to go if things get crazy. We can keep our large stores of provisions there and hunker down if needed.
It’s trending toward temps in the thirties (Fahrenheit) at night in the ten day forecast. That means I’m going to have to get busy with winterizing. I’ll be cutting insulated foam board and placing it around the perimeter of Red House, held in place with HVAC tape. Hopefully it will be air-tight enough to keep out the various critters that will also seek warmth!
I better get that sewer hooked up before our holding tanks fill up! Poop—not a fan. As I finish this episode, Giavana is back and Henrik is back, so no more moping around, life has life again :-) We’re heading out to Red House today and tomorrow, around Penn State football’s big game with Ohio State today and my beleaguered Packers playing Denver tomorrow. We hope to take a break and go see Killers of the Flower Moon.
What’s next? We’re figuring out what’s involved with breaking our lease, which technically runs until the end of March. We don’t want those huge rent payments anymore! We’ve been making runs out to Red House to set up shop. Giavana is making a home there. We’re thinking we’ll be full-timing there perhaps by end of October, at least in November, and transition out as we sell off the rest of our bigger stuff. That’s the plan, anyway. Man plans, God laughs!
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