Category Archives: RV

A Room with a View

24 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by in Randomness, RV, Serenity, Travel

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On Friday, I left my campground in Vero Beach, with some unexpected regret. I really thought that ten days sitting still, all alone, was going to make me totally stir-crazy, but I was completely peacefully happy there. And the writing went so incredibly well — it was writing like I haven’t experienced since, I think, February 2014, which is an awfully specific date, but it was when Fen was spilling out of me like she was writing A Lonely Magic by herself.

I tried to convince myself to wait until the last minute to leave the campground, but that is just not in my nature. When I know I’m going, I need to go, so I packed up early and hit the road. But since I was on the road, I decided we should have a little adventure. I headed for Captain Forster Hammock Preserve, a dog-friendly park that according to Bring Fido included a pleasant 3/4 mile hike to a beach where dogs were allowed. I got lost on the way there and wound up driving on a dirt road for about forty minutes, through mud puddles galore, but eventually found it and took the dogs for a walk. Not, however, a 3/4 mile hike to the beach.

The post-hurricane mud puddles had turned the trails into slip-and-slides, as well as creating perfect breeding grounds for a mosquito world domination plan. When B sat down and refused to go any farther after about twenty minutes — I think we were getting close to the beach, but I couldn’t say for sure — I decided to take his opinion as law, and we turned and headed back to the van.

I’m one of those people with blood that must taste like mosquito ambrosia and as a result, I’m pretty mosquito tolerant. I’ve claimed before that my secret superpower is the ability to defend other people from mosquitoes, because a mosquito will always go for me if it has the option. I’m usually very good at ignoring them. But not even I could ignore those mosquitoes. They were very, very happy to have discovered me, but so prolific that some were even going after the dogs. Still, the park was beautiful. It felt like walking through a jungle, with palm trees and underbrush, but with nice wide paths.

As we headed back inland, I was thinking about the rest of my plans for the day: grocery store, maybe storage unit clean-up,  hanging out in a parking lot until I could meet up with a friend for dinner, and wishing I could really just write instead. Noah’s being so very, very opinionated. Quick example:

She’d neatly sidestepped his earlier question, returning to ridiculous stories about her brother and other people in the town. He hadn’t wanted to call her a liar, but telepathy? Precognition? Auras? Sure, there were people who believed in those things but people believed in astrology and lucky numbers and the dangers of black cats, too. People could be stupid.

He didn’t think Grace was stupid, though.

As I was thinking that, I drove past a… well, sort of a park, I guess? It was a parking lot. With one pavilion and one picnic table and plenty of room for cars. But it was right by the water. Impulsively, I pulled into it and parked, parallel to the water. I got out my computer, and for the next three hours, I wrote to the sound of ocean waves, the smell of sea, and the feel of a cool breeze coming in through the open windows. It was basically paradise.

verobeachroomwithaviewOne of the absolute best things about Serenity, both as an experience and as an aspect of the make of RV I chose (a Winnebago Travato 59K) are her windows. A lot of RVs, especially the smaller ones, are pretty closed up. The wall space is used for storage and appliances and it feels like you’re sitting inside a box. But the Travato 59K has long windows running along the twin beds. In fact, the 59K basically has windows in every single place it’s possible to put a window. Even the bathroom has windows on the doors. When I was looking at it, I liked it because of the light it let in. I thought living in a box would likely be easier if it was a well-lit box. But now that I’ve lived in her for a while, I love it because of the views. I love lying in the bed at night, turning my head two inches to the left to see the night sky. And I love working in my office (the same bed, switching to a perpendicular position) and looking up from the computer to see trees and leaves and… well, sometimes ocean views. In the future, more ocean views, I hope, because although that was the first time I wrote from a parking lot with a view, it will not be the last. Campgrounds with ocean views are too expensive, but parking lots are a bargain.

In other news, Z and B are both sick. I spent the day at the vet on Saturday, emerging precisely $600 poorer. Ironically — or perhaps in just a not-very-amusing coincidence — that was how much I told my brother it would cost the previous day when I was debating whether I needed to take them. Yes, I can predict vet costs! Not a useful skill, really.

And not at all ironically, I was not happy about the results of my visit. Z has been refusing to eat. Not just her kibble but anything. No wet food, no treats, no people food. She rejected rice and roast pork on Friday. The vet ran a bunch of tests, came up with nothing, so sent her home with a bunch of medications and some special food. But since she won’t eat, I couldn’t get her to take either the medications or the food. My big plan for yesterday was to get some chicken and rice and see if she’d take that (nope), and do a bunch more reading about raw diets for dogs. I am somewhat grossed out by the thought of the dogs eating raw chicken in the van — raw chicken, ew! — and I don’t know how I can manage creating the veggie mixes with my tiny fridge, but I think it might be time to try. B, meanwhile, has another ear infection. Yep, life with dogs. Totally worth it, but still frustrating.

And much to my relief, on Monday morning, Z still turned up her nose at the special prescription food, but thought it was definitely time for some of her regular food. Yay! I knew as soon as I woke up that she was better, which was one of those puzzles — how did I know? But I realized after I’d been awake for a while that I knew she was feeling better because she woke me up when she demanded I move the blanket out of the way so that she could come snuggle. That’s the way she generally wakes me up and for the last few days I’d woken up on my own. I would really like not to have to wake up on my own again anytime soon. But I hope I won’t have to.

This week: lots of useful stuff, unfortunately getting in the way of the writing. But seeing some friends, getting a check-up, fixing some stuff that’s wrong with Serenity, spending some time with family — all good stuff. And I hope to squeeze in some more words around the corners.

Ten weeks

03 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by in RV, Serenity, Travel

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In the past ten weeks, I have camped in twenty-two different places. (I think.)

    One state park.
    One Harvest Hosts farm.
    One parking lot.
    One KOA.
    Two independent campgrounds.
    Four Passport America parks.
    Five Thousand Trails.
    Seven driveways.

Those are definitely not in any meaningful order.

I loved the state park — if it had come later in my journey, I would have loved it even more because I would have realized how incredibly nice it was.

The Harvest Hosts farm was amazing, one of the best days, best experiences, of my first ten weeks.

The parking lot was interesting. As parking lots go, it was nice, but I suspect camping in parking lots is not going to be a huge factor in my life. I have never felt more “woman traveling alone” than when I was awake at 3AM with the street lights shining in my windows. I’m not sure I can relax enough to start enjoying your average Walmart parking lot anytime soon. Maybe, though.

The campgrounds — from KOA (pricey) to Thousand Trails (free – $3/night) — were an incredibly mixed bag. Some were lovely. The Onion River Campground in Vermont was so peaceful, such a pleasant place to stay. But the Thousand Trails in upstate NY — the one where I had the hostile neighbors — was the only place in my journey that I’ve been grateful and eager to leave behind.

The seven driveways have been by far my favorite places to stay. I didn’t expect that at all. I thought driveways would be sort of uncomfortable, occasional places to stay. But Serenity has enough solar power that unless I need air-conditioning to keep the dogs comfortable, it’s really easy to stay in a driveway. Also reasonably private, usually pretty quiet, and cozy. And sociable. In fact, I really didn’t expect how sociable moving into a camper would be. I figured I’d be very isolated — plenty of time to do lots of writing — but not so much.

Today I’m in C’s driveway. She gave me a key to her house and told me I should count her driveway as home base while I’m in central Florida — it made me seriously teary. I absolutely love what I’m doing, no question, no uncertainty. But I do have moments when I feel… well, homeless. Floating, untethered, Mary Poppins-like drifting where the wind blows. Sometimes I love that. Sometimes, not so much. I’m not going to move into C’s driveway for a long stay anytime soon — I’ve got lots of places to go — but it feels like safety to know that the option is there.

Practical angst

18 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by in Personal, Pets, Randomness, RV, Serenity, Travel

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I bought my coconut milk in haste at the store the other day and it is vanilla-flavored coconut milk, instead of normal coconut milk. It is, to put it in a nutshell, disgusting. It is making me sad when I drink my coffee and I refuse to contemplate what it might be like on cereal. I ought to throw it away, find myself a new grocery store, and buy myself some new coconut milk, but the last “coconut milk” I bought was half almond milk, half coconut, and it was also disgusting. I did throw it away. Throwing away two almost full half gallons of milk-like substance feels so wasteful.

Plus, that time, the store didn’t have any regular coconut milk. I’m currently in a place that could be safely described as middle-of-nowhere, and I’m wary of heading out on a drive to a grocery store that might be half an hour away only to discover when I get there that it doesn’t have coconut milk. The obvious solutions occur to me — GPS nearby grocery stores, find their numbers, call them up and ask! — but I currently have no internet, so even that solution means packing up for a drive to find myself some connectivity.

Obviously, by the time you’re reading this, I will have done so, because ha-ha, posting to my blog also requires internet, but at the moment I’m feeling very disinclined to get on the road. It rained last night, gloriously heavy, so that the pounding of drops on the roof of Serenity was like living inside a maraca. And I totally have to google that word, because I’m not sure whether I’ve got the name right, but again… no internet.

So yeah, living inside a maraca, or if that’s not the right word, one of those instruments you play with as a kid, a gourd filled with seeds that you shake like a baby’s rattle. I wasn’t being shaken, but the sound was that fast, heavy rattle. It was lovely. But I had decided when last I looked at the sky that the overcast white wasn’t gray enough to bring real rain, so I left my chair and my towel and my purple-striped Mexican blanket outside.

They are well beyond damp.

I don’t want them inside Serenity.

Honestly, I don’t even want to touch the blanket. I put it down for the dogs because the ground here is hard gravel and dirt, with some puddles of mud, and I didn’t want them — Zelda especially — to choose the mud puddles as the comfiest place to get cozy. Zelda would. Bartleby also likes to roll in the dirt, but not with the same abandon. He’s not a huge fan of baths and he’s much more sensitive about the possibility of scolding. Z likes baths and she’s seldom been scolded so she luxuriates in the dirt, then comes in and goes straight to the tub. With no tub, I don’t know what she’d do, but tracking mud all over my bed has never bothered her, so I’m pretty sure it would involve me needing to do laundry. I guess I’m going to have to do that anyway, since the blanket might never be clean again. But at least after it dries I ought to be able to shake off some of the dirt and fold it up, so it’s out of the way until I manage to find a washer. My sheets, on the other hand… well, sheets are turning out to be a saga of their own.

Dirt in general is turning out to be an interesting aspect of living in a camper. I’m not a dirt-phobe. Good thing, because campgrounds are dirty and dogs track in dirt and living partially outside and otherwise in a very small space means that there is dirt. I was showering yesterday in my cute little bathroom and the floor was muddy. Not just from my dirty feet, but because I have to stash outside stuff on that floor when I’m on the move. The power cords and water hose lie on the ground outside while I’m parked and when I’m putting them away for a drive (“away” being defined as “on the bathroom floor”), I’m not worrying about the fact that they’ve picked up dirt and bits of leaf debris and grass. Generally speaking when I go camping and things get dirty, I think, well, I’ll get it clean when I get home. Except this is home.

I thought my solution would be to wipe them dry with a towel as I rolled them up to stow them away but at the end of that process, I have a dirty towel. And towels — well, towels are causing me almost as much angst as sheets.

Yesterday the radio hosts on a show I was listening to were debating how many times one should use a towel before washing it. There was an actual, honest-to-goodness argument for once. Dry yourself with a towel one time and then wash it. Um, no. I brought five standard towels with me and I’ve jettisoned two of them to take back the storage space they were using. I brought four or five dish towels with me, and that turns out to be not nearly enough. Drying dishes, wiping spills, cleaning hands after cooking, drying hands, wiping off dogs’ feet and bellies after coming in from a walk… at that point, the towel goes in the laundry bag and before I know it, I’m out of dish towels, and nowhere close to needing to do laundry for anything else.

Except maybe sheets. My sheets are causing me some serious angst, but I need to eat breakfast and get moving — and I can’t believe I haven’t written about the more interesting stuff that’s going on! — so more on sheets and sleeping later. And also the interesting stuff.

Walking in a cloud

01 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by in Randomness, RV, Serenity, Travel, Zelda

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Sitting in a parking lot outside the vets. Both dogs are inside, getting looked at. Poor Z was pretty frantic about being left, but B, it turns out, had a goopy ear, which inspired me to ask to have Z’s ears checked, too. And of course they’ll give her an exam, so if her stomach stuff is anything feverish, we’ll find out about it. (Given the circumstances, I’m really not worried that it’s anything more serious. Well, that’s not true. I’m worried, but only in the way that I know it’s probably not a bomb, despite my predilection for worrying about such things.)

This morning’s walk took place in something between a mist and a drizzle. I could hear the rain in the trees, but it felt like a cool damp breeze on my skin. Pretty much like walking in a cloud, I suppose, but a cloud at a temperature that felt lovely, not too warm, not too cold. I walked both dogs around the “block”, so to speak. Is it a loop in a campground? But when we got back to Serenity, Z didn’t want to go inside, so I left B and took her on something more like a hike. We walked up the road and up some more, past campers and trailers and sites more like summer homes than temporary habitations, up and up, and then found a trail through the woods that led back to the front of the campground.

It was exactly like my daydream of a week ago. Except for the bugs and the sticks that kept getting in my shoes and the drizzle. But the joy and the sense of freedom and adventure, those were exactly right.

At the entrance to the campground, we found the enclosed dog park with agility equipment inside. I took Z in and tried to get her to play on the agility equipment, the tunnel, the low fence for jumping, the ramp and slide. I always kind of thought she might love agility games. Ha. She did not understand why I would want her to take the indirect routes and wouldn’t go on a single one of the objects. I’m sure I could get her to do it if I kept her on a leash and gave her treats, but letting her run around off-leash and sniff all the corners made her happy, so I didn’t bother. Maybe later.

Family time and campground days

31 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by in Bartleby, Personal, Pets, Randomness, RV, Serenity, Travel, Zelda

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My Saturday night was an exercise in contrasts.

It started out great. I’d had a really nice day, filled with family time. Hanging out with my niece, working on a jigsaw puzzle from my childhood. Video games with my nephew, including introducing him to World of Warcraft. Running errands with my brother. The farmer’s market, where I bought fresh kombucha and spicy radishes.

We even watched some bike racing at the Velodrome. (I mostly felt sorry for the bicyclists — it was a hot day to be dressed like they were, even without the biking really fast in circles in the sun part. bike race . )

After dinner, the whole family watched Guardians of the Galaxy. And at 10:30, my niece, sister-in-law, and I headed to Barnes & Noble for the big Harry Potter release. My niece, M, was probably one of the youngest kids there, but stayed resolutely awake. I got to sit and color with her at the Ravenclaw table while her mom waited in line.

Such a nice day.

But when I went to bed, Serenity… well, smelled. Bad. Like something had gone wrong with the black tank, where the sewage accumulates. I tossed and turned, worrying and sleepless, making plans. I’d get up, take her to a dump station. Or no, maybe a full hook-up campground would be better. I hadn’t dumped the tanks before, so I wouldn’t want to be figuring it out and maybe messing it up if I had to hurry. Still, how could it have gotten so bad, so fast? Maybe a week in the heat of summer was too much to let accumulate? But (if you’ll excuse the TMI), there wasn’t a lot in the tanks to cause a problem — I’d mostly been using the bathrooms at rest stops and campgrounds and my brother’s house. However, clearly it was enough to get bad because it was bad.

But it shouldn’t be. But it was. So was something wrong? Toss, turn, toss, turn, worry, hold my breath, try to sleep, toss, turn, worry, repeat endlessly. At 4AM, B wanted to go out. Sometime after that, maybe 5ish?, Z wanted the same. I think I finally fell asleep for a while after the sun came up, which meant I missed my chance to go to a coin show with my brother, much to my annoyance when I finally got up around 9.

And, of course, when I did get up, I discovered that the black tank was fine. One of the dogs — or maybe both of them? — had had diarrhea under the bed while I was out. Ugh. So not nice to wake up to. And made even worse by worrying about them, of course. B has been scratching himself into a scabby hairless mess and Z has been refusing to eat her kibble. I honestly think that both of them are going to love this lifestyle eventually, but at the moment, they’re both really stressed out by the change and uncertainty.

My big plan for tomorrow — one week after the house closing, the first of August, the day I had determined was going to involve lots and lots and lots of writing words — is to find a Banfield and take B to the vet. I would take Z, too, but based on my past experience with Z having digestive troubles, they’d want to keep her for observation and right now, I feel like that would be a truly terrible idea. If she’s stressed, the cure is not going to be to make her more stressed. (The first time I took her to the vet for digestive stuff — years ago, now — the vet wanted to keep her until she was eating and going normally again. After two days, they finally said, “We don’t think she’s going to eat while she’s away from you.”) So as long as she’s still enthusiastic about walking (she is!) and giving me happy smiles, I’m going to give her a few days to mellow out. The long car days weren’t good for her but the campground days are.

So yes, campground days! I stuck to my campground plan, in part to empty the tanks and in part because the house electricity in my brother’s driveway was just about enough to run the AC consistently, but not if I did anything else that took power. And it only worked if I was parked in his driveway, close enough to the house for a single cord to reach Serenity, but on a fairly steep slope. The extension cords weren’t capable of handling the load if Serenity was in the street. (I’m learning more about electricity than I ever needed to know before, including that long extension cords are not good.)

Anyway, I’m now parked in a KOA campground about twenty minutes from his house. It’s expensive, but very nice. Lots of families here — there’s mini golf and a swimming pool and a nice playground, plenty of grass and trees. The spot I’m in is huge for Serenity, with a picnic table and fire pit and big tree. We’ve gone for a couple walks, chatted with some of our neighbors, and I ate my dinner — an antipasto plate, basically, with olives, dates, prosciutto, cheese, crackers — outside at the picnic table. The best part, I think, is that Serenity is backed up to a stream. Zelda saw the stream and immediately waded right in. B saw the stream and immediately sat down and refused to move any further. So typical!

The big day

25 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by in House, Personal, RV, Serenity, Travel

≈ 5 Comments

Yesterday was a perfect day. Not just a nice day, not just a good day, but an authentically perfect day.

I’d been dreading it for weeks. My last full day in my house, my last moment to say good-bye. I expected loneliness and sorrow, regret and probably some worry about the future. Instead, I puttered around, moving stuff from one place to another. I went for a walk with a friend, cleaned and swam, saw another friend, ran some errands. Spent half an hour on the phone with R, made a snack sort of lunch, swam some more. Cleaned some more, went out and saw some other friends, made dinner in Serenity — a salad of mixed greens, turkey chunks, pecans, and dried apricots, with a balsamic and peach honey mustard vinaigrette.

And at about 9, when I was tired and ready to sleep, instead I went back into the house and out to the swimming pool and lit the torches and swam by firelight under a starry sky. It was lovely, so beautiful as I floated in the still water, watching the colors of the flames against the backdrop of the green leafy bamboo. The sweet olive tree was even blooming a little again, making the whole backyard smell tropical. It was as magical as I could have imagined, maybe even more so.

The only not quite perfect thing about the day was that poor Zelda was so tired from staying two inches away from me while I wandered around that when I swam she didn’t play with her ball. Instead she slept, as if she was grateful for the chance to get some rest while I was contained. She, of course, doesn’t know that it’s going to be her last chance to play in a pool for a while.

But even that’s okay. I’ve been fighting to keep her ears healthy — drops every morning, cleaning them every day — but I’m pretty sure that I’ve failed and that she’s working on infections, maybe in both. It would be impossible to keep her out of the pool if we were home, but her ears will have a chance to stay dry when we’re on the road. And if I decide in a few days that this is an infection that needs more than Zymox, I can find a Banfield on the road and use her wellness plan to see a vet pretty much anywhere.

And today — well, today’s the big day. I shouldn’t be writing a blog post, I should be finishing cleaning out the house, making last decisions about all the things left inside, dragging the trash out to the curb. Maybe scrubbing the kitchen floor — I did a fairly half-hearted job yesterday. Definitely finishing emptying the fridge and cleaning it out. Checking the laundry situation, maybe making a last run to Goodwill. Oh, and cleaning my bathroom.

I suspect that today is both going to fly by and have long moments where it feels like it’s dragging, but at 2PM, I will sign the papers. One set of dreams will come to an end, but another will begin. I have no idea where I’m going to be spending the night, whether I’ll still be in Florida or have made it to Georgia or South Carolina. For that matter, I have no idea where I’ll be tomorrow night either. How fun!

Peaceful mornings

23 Saturday Jul 2016

Posted by in Personal, RV, Serenity, Travel

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I slept in the house last night, but this morning I decided to have my first meal in Serenity. I brought my coconut milk, my gluten-free cereal and a nectarine out to the driveway and made myself a cup of coffee while I sliced up the nectarine. I sat on the edge of the van, the sliding door open, coffee on the floor next to me, bowl of cereal in my hand, adoring dogs at my feet.

A bird was flitting in and out of my crepe myrtle tree, which is in full, gorgeous pink bloom, and the sky was the pure blue of early morning with some wispy white clouds floating by. I took a deep breath and thought about how a peaceful morning just sets the tone for the whole day.

And then a dog walked by and Zelda went berserk and I grabbed for her (brand-new) tie-out cord, throwing my cereal into the air. Before we were through, I had nectarine and coconut milk and soggy rice chex in my coffee and on the floor and even on the comforter on the bed next to the door. Yeah, that happened.

I didn’t let either dog lick up the coconut milk and cereal, and I growled at Zelda as I cleaned up the mess. Literally, a low rumble of annoyance.

But now I’m sitting on the bed in Serenity, trying out my new mobile internet solution. I’ve been finalizing one room at a time in the house. My bathroom and bedroom are almost done–cabinets and medicine closet bare, dresser drawers empty. My living room is done, the family room, guest bedroom, Rory’s bedroom and guest bathroom are all complete. Most of my fridge is in Serenity — and the online wisdom that the small fridge is surprisingly big seems to have been accurate, I’ve gotten a lot in there already with plenty of room for more.

If I was really motivated, I could get everything I need out of the house within the next hour, take a load of stuff to the storage unit, and be living in Serenity by noon. But there’s the slight problem of no water supply, plus I do still intend to take as much advantage of the pool as I can in the next two days.

And I don’t feel done. I’ve still got a lot to do in the next couple of days, including the always really boring deep-cleaning done for the benefit of the next inhabitant. Something about scrubbing floors when I know I’m not going to be the one messing them up again makes me clean more sullenly. Still, I’ve got a definite glow of joy going as I sit here. This is going to be so much fun!

More about moving

04 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by in Boring, House, RV

≈ 12 Comments

This morning, while I was sitting out on my lanai, enjoying the early morning breeze (early-ish, it was maybe 7:30), I had a million ideas for blog posts. (<–hyperbole). Two hours later, sitting in my room, having done an assortment of organizational and internet-related tasks, all of those ideas are totally gone. What did I want to write about again? Oh, right, Serenity first.

I picked her up last Wednesday, YAY!, and when I wrote my blog post last Thursday, she was sitting in my driveway, feeling something like an overwhelming Christmas present, needing to be unwrapped but almost too scary to touch. So much to learn, so much to do, so much stuff to move in and organize and…

…that all became irrelevant Thursday evening, when in the midst of a torrential rainstorm, I discovered that it was also raining inside Serenity. I am trying to count this as fortunate in so many ways — it happened while I was here, still with a dry bed to sleep in. It happened in a big way. If the weather hadn’t been so extreme, it might have taken me weeks to realize that a few drips were a symptom of a serious problem. It happened before I’d moved much stuff into her, so she could go back to the dealer without inconveniencing me unduly. All good things. Of course, they’re sort of counter-balanced by the rather bad thing of it raining inside my future home, but hey, glass half-full. It could have been so much worse. I would have been very unhappy to learn that she leaked at 3AM when I was sleeping under the leak.

So, yeah, Serenity is back at the dealer and I’m really, really hoping to get her back sometime this week. Obviously, one of the dumb issues that I’m going to have to figure out how to deal with when my home needs repair is that she’s also my vehicle. I need to find a ride to get back to her, a ride to get home when I drop her off. It’s not so convenient.

In other things — my weekend felt bizarrely chaotic and overwhelming. The house is a mess and I’m still needing to get rid of more stuff. I’m definitely at the point where the decisions get harder and harder. I have approximately 50 shirts. This is too many shirts. In so many ways, this is too many shirts! But I’ve already said good-bye to all the ones that I didn’t really like, that didn’t really fit as well as I wanted them to or weren’t as flattering as I thought they’d be. I’ve also gotten rid of all the ones that I loved, but that were showing signs of their age. (Almost all of those, a couple are going to get worn until they’re literal shreds. I have a Lehigh University t-shirt that is probably fifty years old, maybe older, faded, with holes, and I still love it.) So, yeah, hard choices about stuff going on.

Also much trying to plan. The house closes three weeks from today. Where am I going to sleep that night? For that matter, where I am going to sleep the night before that? I will have needed to get the furniture out of the house before closing, because it’s not like I’m sticking it on a truck and moving it to the next place. But Serenity needs power to run the air-conditioner, and the guy who showed me around warned me that house power (i.e., not 30 amp) was not sufficient to run the AC. And in Florida, in July? I need the air-conditioner. I can run it on the generator, but probably shouldn’t all night. So the house closes in three weeks, but I need to be staying elsewhere before then, and elsewhere needs to be close enough that I can conveniently come to the closing. Decisions, decisions.

And yeah, somewhere along the way, I’d really like to get back to writing regularly. I’ve missed too many days in a row, because of the distractions of camper ownership, camper repair, and house chaos. But one day at a time, right?

Today’s goal: well, some words would be nice, but I need to get simpler than that. Email! I don’t know how many emails are stacked up in my inbox right now but far too many of them are real emails that deserved real replies. So today’s goal–clean out my inbox, do some more work on cleaning out my house, and remember to enjoy the moment that I’m in. Also, yoga. It’s been at least three or four days, which is too long to go for something that always makes me feel more settled and joyful.

Happy Fourth of July!

Water

17 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by in House, RV

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Last night, I walked into the kitchen to get a snack and found water on the floor. Not a lot of water. A tiny trail in the cracks between the tiles.

Two years ago, I would have said, “Huh, must have spilled something,” or blamed it on the dogs. I would have wiped it up with a paper towel and forgotten all about it within ten minutes. Not anymore!

I crouched down on the floor and examined that water like it held the secrets to the universe. It didn’t touch the walls, so it couldn’t be coming from a wall, thank goodness. It didn’t touch the refrigerator, which halfway makes sense, since I never hooked up the water to the fridge again after the debacle of July 2014, where a pinprick hole turned into a major remodel, but also ruined my hope that maybe I’d spilled from the filter water without realizing. It did not appear to be connected to the dogs’ bowl, so it probably wasn’t them being messy.

Finally, I opened the cabinet under the sink and damn it, damn it, damn it, everything was wet. My faucet has a flexible head — the kind that you can pull out to spray water, like a shower hose — and I’d noticed before that it had been leaking. Apparently, the head was loose enough that when it was sitting in the stand, water was draining into the faucet and out below. I’d washed a bunch of dishes earlier and the whole time, water had been drip-drip-dripping into the cabinet. Argh!

I pulled everything out, mopped it up, tightened the faucet, watched for drips, (none, whew), and grumbled. But by the time I was done, I felt like it was the universe saying to me, “yes, really–sell the house!” and I felt joyful again.

Over the course of the six days that I’ve been contemplating this idea, I’ve gone from “well, maybe sometime” to “in 2017, I will” to “perhaps by September I’ll be ready to list the house” to “how soon could I have the house ready to put on the market?” At the moment, I think the answer to that question is May: I have some work scheduled to be done in May that should really be done before I try to sell. But May feels awfully far away. I know it’s really not — I’ve got plenty to do between now and then, including finishing writing Grace! And September still probably makes a lot more sense. But I already want to start planning where I’ll be going & how I’ll be living, not keeping a wary eye out for puddles and worrying about whether I need to get a plumber.

Today the realtor comes and this afternoon, if I manage to write some good words, I might take myself off to an RV lot to see if I can test-drive the model I’m thinking about. Good times!

Ten year blogaversary

16 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by in House, Personal, RV

≈ 13 Comments

I mentioned this on Monday, but I started writing this blog ten years ago today.

Time is strange.

Yep, that’s my deep, profound, thoughtful cliche on this anniversary of a decade gone by.

I would not have expected this day to be particularly meaningful to me. My blog has always really been more of a way for me to save my memories and talk to myself than any sort of grand project. I’ve never made any money on it, never intended or tried to, and I don’t pay much attention to whether people are reading it, except for trying to make sure I say hi when people say hi to me. For a long, long time my only reader was me, and when a couple of you started reading regularly, it took me a while to wrap my head around the fact that you were there at all. (Hi, Judy! Hi, Carol! Hi, Barbara! Hi, Other More Anonymous Readers!)

It’s sort of like remembering the anniversary of buying a journal, or maybe buying a kitchen appliance. Like, “Whoa, this is the ten year anniversary of my electric kettle — I sure have made a lot of tea over the years.” I will not notice the ten year anniversary of my electric kettle and I honestly have no idea why I remembered this anniversary, except that I noticed the archive list last month and realized March 2006 was the earliest date in it.

But ten years is actually a remarkable amount of life. Ten years ago, I lived in Santa Cruz, with no intention of moving. I am fairly sure that we were living in a run-down, mold-ridden, rental house where my bedroom window was permanently cracked to let an electric cord through (to the sump pump under the house), and if we weren’t living there, we were about to be.

Ten years ago, my son had recently been diagnosed as having severe, even profound, learning disabilities. Ten years ago, I had a job that paid me well for work that I was very good at and very stifled by. Ten years ago, I had an adorable puppy who I already loved with all my heart.

If you had said to me ten years ago, “What’s your life going to be like in ten years?” and then, “What do you want your life to be like in ten years?”, I would have answered with, “I have no idea,” followed by “I have no idea.”

But if you had said to me back then that in ten years, I would be living in a cute three-bedroom house in Florida with a window seat and French doors to a patio with a swimming pool; that my son would be in college, with multiple scholarships, on the verge of presenting at his second academic conference; that I would be eking out a precarious living by writing fiction; and that the adorable puppy would still be as adorable and would have an adorable companion, I would have laughed at you. That set of fantasies would have seemed as unrealistic as they come, with the second dog pushing the whole thing over the edge into haha, ridiculous.

And yet… here we are. Here I am. That is my reality, or at least a little window on it. For some reason, it makes me want to cry. I wish I could go back to that self, who was always tired, and often depressed, being made sick, sick, sicker by the mold in that horrible house, and tell her what the future would bring. Not that it didn’t bring plenty of bad along with the good — these ten years have held more grief and loss than I could have handled knowing about back then. But it is amazing to me to look around at my life, to think about the friends that I hadn’t even met yet, the knowledge that I didn’t have, and realize how far I’ve come, how much I’ve changed.

But the thing about looking back on ten years is that it also inspires me to look forward. Where do I want to be ten years from now? What do I want out of the next ten years of my life?

I got here by taking chances. By doing things that seemed impulsive and scary. Moving to Florida was huge, quitting my job even bigger, dropping out of graduate school terrifying (and yet still the right call, I think). What terrifying things do I want to do in the next ten years?

Five days ago, I thought, “Maybe I should sell the house and buy an RV. It could be my tiny, mobile house. I could live in it with the dogs, write just the way I do here, cook in my tiny kitchen, and drive around the country looking for beautiful sunsets.”

Four days ago, I started telling people — my dad, my brother, my friend Tim — that I was thinking about it.

Three days ago, I started researching RVs.

Two days ago, I stared cleaning out my garage and closets.

Yesterday, I called a realtor.

Today, I’m making it real. I’ve decided. I’m going to embark on the biggest adventure of my life. It’s exciting and terrifying and exciting again. Getting rid of all of my things is going to be hard and painful and take forever; selling the house is going to simultaneously be enormously freeing and agonizing; the process of buying an RV frightens me like nothing I’ve done since buying a house; and it will be ever so strange when Rory has a school break and I offer him a tent to sleep in, not to mention holidays.

But ten years from now, I want to look back and think, “Wow, you might have been crazy, but you sure were brave.”

Meanwhile, of course, I’m going to finish writing Grace. And even before that, I’m going to walk the dog who’s been gazing at me ever-so-plaintively for the last thirty minutes.