Dreamstreamr Odyssey Chasing 75 Degrees


	Lifestyle Rev 26 Sep 2010, updated books, diet, music, and added link to NOMADS in clothing paragraph, Rev 16 Feb 2010, updated books list, added link on worship svcs, gear pages 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. Full-timing is often a lot different from our city-living experience. Our lifestyle is still changing, and we'll update this page's content periodically to try and reflect our experiences. Target Issues What about attending worship services? (rev Feb 16, 2010) What are we enjoying reading and watching? (rev Feb 16, 2010) How do we handle books and movies? (rev 26 Sep 2010) What did we not bring and do we miss it? (rev Feb 16, 2010) How do we maintain the website? What about food and nutrition for full-timing? (rev Sep 2, 2009) How do we manage clothes for the different seasons with such small closets? (rev Oct 7, 2009) What do we do for entertainment? (rev Sep 2, 2009) How are our music and movies organized? How much time do we spend together vs apart for separate interests? Is full-timing working out to be less expensive than we thought it would? What's our favorite part of full-timing life? (rev Feb 16, 2010) © dreamstreamr.com 2007-2011 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. But eating out is great when we are with others, for example at a seafood restaurant with our local unit during a rally, or with two couples when we want to have a little more room. Rallies are often 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 unusually 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 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 or Red Vines. Jim eats all the black licorice ones. Lunches are often fresh homemade sandwiches and sometimes have fresh tomatoes as a prime ingredient. We like canned soup with or without a sandwich. Freshly steeped 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 drink pop, we are happy to try avoiding the empty and expensive soda pop calories we can otherwise get from candy and cookies we should be eating. 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 usually only wild-caught salmon or chicken breasts. We frequently enjoy fresh vegetables and salads. For variety we will prepare 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, then started having occasional steaks. 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. Return to top 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 14-20 days 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 7-10 days of dirty clothes. Another nylon bag fits under another bench and holds as many dirty clothes. When both bags are full, we grab the sheets and towels and laundry bags and go to the laundromat. We've been staying in cooler weather frequently the past year and finally addressed it. We repacked three storage bins from the truck to provide us much easier access to cold weather clothes. These warmer clothes had been primarily in the backpacking tote (hardest to reach because it is forward in the truck's bed and cannot be opened without removing from the truck)and in a sweater bin just aft of the backpacking tote. Now, 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 if/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. Clothes we think we won't use, we wash, fold, and donate. A few months ago we were prepared to donate a couple of pairs of khakis, tee shirts, and old sweatshirts. Then we realized we would be crewing for work projects at least twice a year with NOMADS and would need painting, digging, working clothes. Voila! Put these in a plastic bag and store them somewhere in the back of the truck until the next project. Return to top What do we do for entertainment? We think we are really 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. 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 and 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 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. Poor things! We might go to the movies once in one or 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 is 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 simply start over watching them 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! Return to top How are our music and movies organized? Movies are more difficult for us to manage. We still occasionally receive or buy another movie 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. Then we added another storage walled for DVDs. And so on. Not great, although you only have to look three or four or five for a title. And the storage wallets are compact, a very good thing in our small home. We'll figure this out someday, right? Years later than our children, we discovered converting our music to digital format (we can do this for movies someday, right?). 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 camper's Sony radio so we can play any album or group of songs we want throughout the camper. April 2010 our Windows laptop suffered a deadly crash. Lost OS, all apps, almost all data. No problem, though, because we're trained ex-professionals. We have back-ups, right? Wellllll, sort of. We'd been busy. You know how it is, right? Okay the most recent back-up is two months old, that's not too big a problem. Lots of our stuff is web-based, like banking transactions, our web site, our blog, our email, Jim's work data. The problem was our failure to realize we weren't backing up what we thought we were. We had our iTunes album artwork, but not one single song or album backed up. We have eleven gigabytes (days and days and days) of our favorite music we transferred from our CDs onto our laptop and then onto the iPod. Good news #1, the iPod still works. #2, we stored all the CDs. Bad news? The CDs are in storage back east. Our iPod was, essentially, frozen with the current collection of podcasts and music albums. The iTunes on the computer is empty. If we copy one CD or podcast onto it and connect to our iPod, all our iPod albums will disappear. This has to have happened to someone else. Sure enough, you can search the internet and find solutions. One solution is to recopy all the CDs to the laptop over our entire Christmas break. Did that once, don't want to do it for 85 or 90 CDs again. We use iTunes for our podcast and music handling. Spell iTunes backwards and you find the program to restore iPod music to your laptop. Similar programs are available for both windows and Mac computers. We bought one of these and used it with our Mac -- worked almost perfectly. Every album and podcast transferred. And we had the opportunity (necessity)to create our playlists from scratch. We like these playlists better, actually. Return to top 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 for camp use and we can talk "simplex", or without use of the local community's repeater towers, to each other as needed. This worked great 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. Return to top Is full-timing working out to be less expensive than we thought it would? Yes, for 2008 and 2009. We were under budget in many categories including site rental, food, entertainment, utilities, recreation. We're over budget in auto fuel. Big surprise, right? But this is not so much because of the rise in prices as the excess driving we do. We budget 12,000 towing miles per year. We budget at $3.50/gallon for truck fuel. A one dollar ($1) increase adds one hundred ($100) increase per month or $1,200 per year, to our costs. But excess miles in high gas price years will add even more cost. We are saving a lot by not supporting a house. The big saving is not having costs of home mortgage, insurance, utilities, maintenance, repairs, and upkeep. 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 scrimping when we need to has more impact on our expenses than when we were keeping a sticks and bricks house. Make sense? We're still developing our sense of normal in this flexible lifestyle? Return to top 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. We enjoy seeing 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 is interesting. And we love 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 would your favorite aspect be? How do we maintain the website? We write 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 html 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 has been such for us. We edit and store our photos in Picasa from Google, and use Picasaweb to share the photos. We can't compare how other programs would work for this but have used Picasa and Picasaweb without any problems for over two years 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 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 six months ago. 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 when StartLogic thoroughly turned our website world upside down. We 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! Return to top 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?) last Fall and it worked. We had more than we needed but had room for it all and nothing was really in our way. When we sold the house early 2008 we rid ourselves of 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 and are looking forward to re-examining what gear, clothing, or books we have, what we're missing, 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. How do we handle books and what movies are we watching? Magazines We read 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 We pick up books at laundry rooms and campgrounds through swapping. Read a couple, carry them in and swap one for one. Keeps our library weight and bulk down, provides interesting diversity in title and subject. But sometimes we just can't find a book we've heard about or read a review on. These we put on our Amazon wish or birthday list and hope our families are noticing. Here are some we've recently read: Sally McClain's Navajo Weapon, The Navaho Code Talkers, A very interesting account of the origin of, and historic role played by, the Navajo Code Talkers. The US Marines completely confounded the war-time Japanese intelligence organization through the Navajo's novel and carefully developed dictionary for communicating tactical information. Great story, well told. Agassi's Open, a book we both enjoyed a lot. Jim hesitated at the beginning, it was just so whiney. But got a lot better, enjoyable tennis autobiography. Hillerman's The First Eagle, written for 8 year olds, we think. We enjoy reading about the Navajo and Hopi and Jim Chee and Lt Leaphorn, it's interesting, but there are much better ones by Hillerman. Skip this one. Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club, very enjoyable read, definitely recommended. Grisham's The Partner, does the guy get the money AND the girl AND peace on earth? Read it! Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, very enjoyable for insights into U.S. food industry. Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, a must read for any conscientious omnivore. Burdick's & Wheeler's Fail-Safe, a great read from another era, cold war story published in 1963 became 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. Wonderful writing and story. 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, dystopian perspective on demography. Not one for more than one skimming. Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter, very enjoyable, another to read again soon. Follett's Pillars of the Earth, just the most fantastic book we've read in a long time. I could read it again right now! Kunstler's The Long Emergency, a slow read, some sketchy conclusions, but very interesting overall. Hussein's The Kite Runner, what a sad story but a great and well told one. Hilton's Lost Horizon, (first paperpack ever published?) Mitchener's The Covenant, shorter than the history of the known universe, this is solely African history. Harris' Chocolat, we saw the movie first and loved it. The book is just as tasty. Ayoob's In The Gravest Extreme, should make you even more carefully consider whether and how to carry a weapon for self-defense Wambaugh's Echoes in the Darkness Hilton's Lost Horizon, supposedly the very first paperback book printed? McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, what a great story. A movie now, might be great too. Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude What books 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) 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 every Sunday, 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 do stumble upon churches with ministers and programs we really like. Less often we want to visit a church only once. 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. Return to top Back to Dreamstreamr HOME page Please email your comments to as4822@gmail.com anytime. © dreamstreamr.com 2007-2011