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Lifestyle

Rev 2 Aug 2010, improved formatting,
Rev 11 Jul 2010, updated books list, added visit to Bozeman UMC
Rev 16 Feb, 2010, updated books list, added link on worship svcs, gear pages
Rev 07 Oct, 2009 added "worship", updated "reading list" and "clothes"
Rev 2 Sep, 2009, updated "reading list" and "entertainment"

This page is about non-journal issues like how we live, rather than what occurred today. We've picked a few things we thought might help explain our lifestyle framework.

Our lifestyle is still changing, and we'll update this page's content periodically to try and reflect our experiences.





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What do we eat and how do we prepare it?
We only rarely eat out. The two of us enjoy Deb's cooking in our silver home. Eating out is great when we are with others, for example at a seafood restaurant with our local unit during a rally, or with other couples when we want to have a little more room.

Rallies are usually a whole different culinary story. We ate five "provided" meals at a recent rally. Two breakfasts and two suppers and one lunch were included at this especially well-provisioned rally. Our first WBCCI rallies surprised us because of how little food we needed. The fridge and larder were still full when we returned from the rallies. The rally cooks didn't necessarily provide all meals, but we would eat the big provided meal and snack at the socials and end up feeling overfed. Hence, no cooking required.

What do we prefer regarding dining? We eat out once every two-four weeks at medium-low price family restaurants. The other twenty meals per week we prepare simply and on no precise schedule. If we eat out tonight we are likely to entirely skip breakfast tomorrow. A large breakfast today leads to a late or no lunch. We snack very little between meals, sometimes eating 3-6 cheese crackers (Lance toastchees, for example) while on the highway. On a big mileage day (more than 200 miles) we're likely to splurge and have a serving each of jelly beans. Jim eats all the black licorice ones.

Lunches are often fresh homemade sandwiches and Q1 2008 had wonderful Florida tomatoes as a prime ingredient. We like canned soup with or without a sandwich. Freshly steeped sencha or black tea, followed by tap water, filtered through a Brita pitcher filter, is our favorite daytime beverage. We drink 2-4 cups of hot green tea most days, and many days enjoy a pot of Murchie's #10 Blend black tea. We don't, as a rule, drink pop. If we are dining out and pop is offered Jim will rarely indulge. We are happy to try avoiding the empty and expensive soda pop calories otherwise.

Breakfasts are one of three choices: cold cereal (the senior stuff, you know, with lots of fiber) topped with fresh cut fruit, chopped walnuts, and raisins; or hot eggs, grits, and toast; or a hot grain cereal like oatmeal topped with chopped walnuts, raisins, cinnamon, and milk. All choices include orange juice and green tea.

Our dinner meats are almost exclusively wild-caught salmon, chicken breasts, or a lean steak. We frequently enjoy fresh vegetables and salads. For variety we have pasta, or rice and beans, or veggie burgers, or a small casserole, or quesadillas. We started making hamburgers once every week or two in Summer 2009. And sometimes we'll have cheese and crackers and a movie and skip dinner entirely. Not every day do we burn enough calories to warrant eating three meals.

Seven years ago we stopped brewing coffee for ourselves and adopted green tea as our hot beverage. Hot, fresh coffee still appeals to us but we are only social drinkers. Six mornings of seven we'll brew green sencha tea, and have another cup or two or three throughout the day. Less caffeine, less acid, lighter flavor -- we enjoy green tea. Many mornings Jim will make himself a cup of matcha. And, of course, we enjoy Tim Horton's restaurants coffee on travel days in Canada.

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How do we manage clothes for the different seasons with such small closets?
We learned, from backpacking, dressing in layers to make our clothes suit us well for varying weather conditions. And, if we can successfully chase 75 degrees, we shouldn't need heavier clothes. Our closets are large enough for our clothes but, unlike our walk-in closets back home, cannot store all manner of other stuff. And especially we have no space for things we won't need.

The camper has two wardrobes, each with a shelf above the rod and space below the hanging clothes. Jim's wardrobe holds thirty hangers and has two sixteen quart Sterilite boxes below. He has two pairs of jeans, two pairs of khakis, and one pair of nice slacks. He has a gore-tex jacket and a blazer with ties hanging under it. He has eight sport shirts, six flannel shirts, a dress shirt, and a Hawaiian shirt.

One box hold over a dozen tee-shirts including cotton and fast-dry and a couple long-sleeved ones. Another box holds eight pairs of shorts. Two other boxes hang out in storage space under the bed. One holds boxers, the other holds socks. A cotton sweatshirt and a thick fleece jacket store in a large space above the bed.

Laundry every two weeks works well with our stock of clean clothes and our space for dirty clothes. We have a small laundry basket under a bench seat. The basket's mesh bag holds one week of dirty clothes. Another nylon bag fits under another bench and holds one week of dirty clothes. When both bags are full, we grab the sheets and towels and laundry bags and go to the laundromat.

Staying in cooler weather sometimes requires a change of choices. We then rotate clothes from a couple of storage bins from the truck to provide us much easier access to cold weather clothes. The warm clothes we might want (most of what we have, actually) are in a medium-sized tote on the truck's backseat. This will serve us wonderfully for now, and when we hit warmer weather we'll decide what to do with this tote. Happily, we can very easily grab what we need to layer up.

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What do we do for entertainment?
We consider ourselves very easily entertained. Watch a nice sunset. Okay, it only lasts an hour? Sometimes we'll light a campfire and enjoy it for a couple hours. Then we might watch stars becoming brighter as the fire settles to embers and our eyes adjust to the darkness again.

We love to walk in neighborhoods, cities, trails and campgrounds. And we read a lot. We're enjoying more time to read now although it still is challenging keeping up with Time Magazine and our few other periodicals while reading our novels. You can see what we are reading "here". And once or twice a month we watch a movie or two or an episode of Lucille Ball or MASH or Andy Griffith.

We laughed at a statement by Hilary Clinton early in her 2008 primary campaign when she lamented how tough were the sacrifices of the campaign trail. She and Bill had only been out to the movies twice in the past year, she said. We haven't been out to the movies at all in the past two years. Granted, the big screen is special and more dramatic for movies.

But we just don't care about going out to movies. A few years ago we started collecting DVD movies at discount stores, anywhere we could find prices under $5 or $6. Our criteria are simple. Do we think we would want to watch the movie more than once? It may be years before we finish these, and then we'll start over because we won't remember most of them anyway.

Thanks to our friends at Ancient Oaks RV Resort in Okeechobee, FL, we now play a lot of table games. Q1 2009 Peggy and Monroe taught us Hand & Foot, a card game using many decks of cards and enjoyably consuming three or four hours for a match. Wherever we played at Ancient Oaks had slightly different rules, the House Rules, which inexplicably are dissimilar enough to require a small typed sheet explaining them. We met a lot of people in several different houses playing hand and foot.

And other friends, Al & Darlene and Mike & Janet, introduced us to Sequence, Nickels, Rummikube, Farkle, Circles, and Golf. No, not that golf, the other one. This golf involves dealing nine cards to each player and each player turns up three of them. Then the players draw to improve their points to the lowest score they can before the round ends.

We play Rummikube (with dominoe-like tiles) most, often playing four or six games many nights. Al & Darlene gave us Sequence when we visited them in Bay City Q2 2009, and we enjoy playing it a lot. These games reduce our reading time and our television watching time, and increase our interaction with each other. Oh, and they wear us out sometimes!

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How are our music and movies organized?
Years later than our children, we discovered converting our music to digital format. We saved all our CDs onto the computer then bought a used iPod and keep all the music on the iPod. We created a few play lists to suit our music listening moods. The iPod connects to the trailer's Sony radio so we can play any album or group of songs we want throughout the trailer.

The movies are more difficult to manage. We still occasionally add another movie on DVD. We alphabetized the movies by title first word or key word. Then we added another storage wallet for DVDs, and alphabetized it separately, also A-Z. So we can try to insert a new movie in either wallet. Not great, although you only have to look twice for a title. And the storage wallets are compact, a very good thing in our small home.

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How much time do we spend together vs apart for separate interests?
May 2008 we tried to arrange to meet each other somewhere thirty miles from our base. I used the cellphone to call Debbie at her parent's house and asked her to join me at DMV to help with a vehicle re-title issue. As soon as we hung up the DMV representative told me the title application was rejected. I tried to call and stop Debbie but couldn't get through. A friend with me said, "You could have paid for three months of service for an additional cell phone with the money she will waste driving here and back."

He's right, but we are apart so infrequently this is a very rare occurrence. When we're apart we know where we are and when to expect the other. We like doing things together, whether or not it's necessary. We're both licensed amateur radio operators and have two handheld 2 meter radios and don't often use them to keep up with each other. For now, we'll keep sharing a cell phone.

An addition to the above experience: June/July 2008 found us in Bozeman MT working separate jobs for the WBCCI International Rally on the Montana State University campus. We were working up to 1/2 mile apart at times, and realized quickly we could use our hand-held amateur radios to keep in touch.

Our WBCCI rallies usually name a frequency (146.430) for camp use and we can talk "simplex", or without use of the local community's repeater towers, to each other as needed. This works well and would actually have been a great help in the above example because the truck, in which Deb drove to meet Jim in Charlotte, has a mobile amateur radio in it too. And amateur radio works, all the time.

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Is full-timing working out to be less expensive than we thought it would?
Yes.

The biggest saving for us is not paying home mortgage, insurance, utilities, maintenance, repairs, and upkeep. We are saving a lot by not supporting a house. This swings the scales in our favor by reducing the fixed costs. So, we have a greater proportion of variable costs to fixed costs. This means we can save more by scrimping when we need to than we could when we were keeping a sticks and bricks house. Make sense?

We started life on the road Aug 2007 and have tracked expenses continuously. Our site rental costs remain at $20/night average for the year. This despite paying $42 per night some nights (in Vancouver, B.C., for example) and in the $30s for some places. We only rarely use Wal-Mart or Cracker Barrel, and average perhaps six weeks benefit from courtesy parking (mostly friends or family).

Health and other insurance costs remain our most expensive category, then fuel, site rentals, and food. We scrimp where we can, but aren't suffering. Please just let our funds last until our last day.

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What's our favorite part of full-timing life?
This is a tough call. Living in the Airstream. Being retired. Sleeping or hanging out in the camper when it's raining outside. Sleeping with the windows open every night, even when it's raining. Having the ability and shared vision to travel North America. Not having a big old house and a lawn to maintain.

Enjoying so many different areas of our tremendous continent while acknowledging there is so so much left still to see. Meeting and getting to know people from almost every corner of the continent. Hitching up the trailer and truck and feeling the wheels rolling under us -- every time we start on another driving day we both get a thrill.

What do you think would be your favorite aspect?



How do we maintain the website?
We write and edit our web pages in CoffeeCup HTML Editor 2008. You can see them at http://www.coffeecup.com. We highly recommend this as a very easy to write and use, inexpensive, and wonderful file organizing editor. We trialed CoffeeCup thirty days in early 2008 after trying several others. We gladly paid for the CoffeeCup program and have enjoyed using it. None of the extras (like a zillion fonts we perhaps should be trying) appealed to us, we wanted a reliable and simple html editor. CoffeeCup suits us.

We edit our photos in Picasa from Google, and use Picasaweb to store the photos. We can't compare how other programs would work for this but have used Picasa and Picasaweb without any problems for almost a year and love it. (You can see ours at http://picasaweb.google.com/dreamstreamr/). Our friends and family use a number of other programs, too many to list here.

We transmit our new and revised pages to the website hosting company's servers using an FTP (file transfer protocol) program named Filezilla. Filezilla is incredibly easy to use, extremely fast, and has been very reliable since we started using it in 2008. Again, this is not the only program out there but is the only one we have used for file transfer. We write or revise our web pages, send them up to the hosting site, and almost instantly can see the changes.

What about the hosting site? We have, since July 2007, been using StartLogic to host our website. A good friend told us about this company and showed us his websites on the same company's servers. Our website has never even almost looked as good as Rodney's websites but he hasn't taught us everything he knows yet either. The monthly fee is reasonable and we have had no problems since February 2008 when StartLogic thoroughly turned our website world upside down.

We then became less naive, more capable and independent, and again ingratiated ourselves further to Rodney. StartLogic changed the rules midstream and would no longer support our website in the form we had been keeping it for almost six months. Rodney showed us how to replace our crashed website and rebuild everything, maintain it more reliably. Thanks, Rodney!

And we depend upon our son-in-law, Stephen, for his computer savvy. He taught Jim basic HTML and how to look up and use helpful strings as needed. Occasionally, too, Stephen has helped get us out of a jam like when we wanted to change the label on one of the screen's hot buttons. How much do we really want to know about programming and the inner workings behind the screen background for our website?

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What's not in the truck/trailer and what do we miss?
This could take a long time to explain but, for now, I'm going to do it in less than 100 words. We planned this adventure for over two years. We are both dedicated researchers and list-makers. A lot of lists exist for traveling and full-timing and Airstreaming. We assiduously assembled and edited from the best we could find. Then we tried it out 9.5 weeks (and 8,500 miles) Fall 2007 and it worked. We had more than we needed but room for it all and nothing really in our way.

We sold, in 2008, the house and all the furniture and almost everything else we wouldn't need in this lifestyle. Still we loaded a couple of boxes of stuff to go through while living in our camper. We've eliminated those boxes. Twice annually we methodically re-examine everything in the trailer and the truck to consider what we can dump as unnecessary. We've created several lists you may want to view to gain a sense of what we're carrying and what we wish we had or can dump.


What books are we reading and movies are we watching?
Magazines
Every issue, cover to cover, of Time Magazine, AARP, Airstream Life, QST (Amateur Radio), Appalachian Trail Conference, Carolina Alumni Review, Blue Beret (Airstream owners association) and Readers Digest.

Books
Brown's Digital Fortress, an extremely quick read, very fast-paced and easy to follow.
Burke's Crusader's Cross, slow-starting, moves just quicker than mud yet is thoroughly enjoyable for the Cajun flavor of its Southern murder mystery.
Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, He is garrulous, grouchy, but seems clearly in love with lonely life in the desert. A nice reader for early mornings on the patio, a cup of matcha, meditative reading. Appropriate reading while we were in the U.S. southwest exploring some of the same areas he discusses.
Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, very enjoyable for insights into U.S. food industry and suggestions for improving what we consume. Who knew corn had so much fun?
Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, a must read for any conscientious omnivore. Thoroughly cured us of any desire for fast food.
Burdick's & Wheeler's Fail-Safe, a great read from another era, cold war story published in 1963 became a movie in 1964.
Burns' Cold Sassy Tree, good Southern tale about growing up in rural Georgia in early 1900s.
Shelley's Frankenstein, if you haven't read it, you should.
Puzo's The Fourth K, skip this one, it wasn't worth the time.
Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, dark, difficult, and pedantic perspective on demography
Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter, very enjoyable, nice story
Follett's Pillars of the Earth, just the most fantastic book we've read in a long time. He's released a "sequel" we're afraid to start -- how can it be as good?
Kunstler's The Long Emergency, a slow read, a few sketchy conclusions, but very interesting overall. Does make us consider more carefully our carbon footprint, our preparedness, our potential investments in energy hog housing.
Hussein's The Kite Runner, what a sad story but a great and well told one. A movie would break our hearts.
Sams' Run with the Horsemen
Hilton's Lost Horizon, (first paperpack ever published?)
Forsyth's Icon
Mitchener's The Covenant
Harris' Chocolat
Ayoob's In The Gravest Extreme
Wambaugh's Echoes in the Darkness
McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, what a great fantasy, fantastically told.
Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude


What books/movies are on our list?

Ian McDonald's River of Gods
Husain Haddawy's translation of The Arabian Nights with Robert Irwin's The Arabian Nights, a Companion
William P Young's The Shack
Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties
Murray's The Invisible War: The Untold Secret Story of Number One Canadian Special Wireless Group


How do we attend worship services when we're not "back home"? (added Oct 7, 2009; rev Aug 2, 2010)

We've written anecdotes about some of our church visits in the past year or two and thought we would briefly address here how we worship "on the road". First, not by a long stretch are we on the road all the time. We're not exactly in one place, either. It's fun to look for a church wherever we visit.

We spent several weeks in Madison, Wi, Summer 2009 and enjoyed the wonderful Methodist Church downtown so much we attended all three weeks we were there. We were less than a week in LaCrosse, Wi, and would have loved to stay longer to visit again Wesley Methodist Church. This happens often -- we don't always but frequently stumble upon churches with ministers and programs we really like.

Less often we might not like so much the church we visit. We will, if we are in the same town the following Sunday or not near any church, listen to a recent sermon from Bozeman United Methodist Church. We enjoyed visiting BUMC several times last year during our Bozeman, Mt, visit and will look forward to worshipping there again. Pastor Dave McConnell is a great storyteller and, fortunately, his sermons are available as MP3 files. We keep several recent ones on our laptop and IPod.

And, summer of 2010, we found ourselves in Cody, WY, within easy reach of Bozeman, MT, again. Our route was generally toward southwestern Canada, and Bozeman is definitely "on the way". So we again visited Bozeman United Methodist. Listening to Pastor Dave McConnell in person is better even than listening to his sermons on podcast.

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