Plan B

Alrighty, so Sybil is still in the shop and will probably be there until monday, making it a full week without our things. Sybil's electric system is best described as majorly screwed up. Buddy who had it before did his own electrical work, and it seems he's a bit of an idiot. This, my friends, is a lesson learnt. Painfully.

On the upside, so far, looks like having only 2 days worth of clothes with us is just fine, providing there is a laundry within reach. We've decided to park Sybil, once she's sprung from the shop, out on a farm for the winter (where she's got lots of space and playmates in other abandoned vehicles) and when we come back in the spring we shall have a mobile home to do our two month visiting/festival stint in May and June. In theory.

This winter we shall still be on Vancouver Island. In fact, we hope to leave this coming wednesday, with 4 days travel (cats and kids, need lots of breaks) and be there by the weekend. The plan is to find some accommodation for the winter, with our very few possessions (have I mentioned that our car is a two door Neon sport), picking up what is needed in terms of livingware at the Free Store in Port Alberni.

The Free Store? What is that and why does it sound so cool?

Glad you asked! The Free Store is just as it sounds, with a significant portion of the second hand items offered being completely free (just take it!) and the rest being just a dollar or two. Drop off stuff costs a couple of bucks, but they do not refuse anything. The underlying principals are diverting goods from the landfill and encouraging reconsumption (their term) rather than consumption with the buying of the new, resource use heavy, goods. My kind of place, which also happens to be the brainchild of a couple of friends, but I've never been. (Nic, have you?)

This weekend we'll proceed with our scheduled camp trip with The Man's parental units and their parental units out in the Rockies. Smootch has already gone ahead, leaving us a few days early, preferring to spend her time basking under the full attention of two sets of grandparents rather than hang out with her very distracted and busy parents and the brother that bites and hits. (I just can't understand that girl's reasoning?! :D) Of course, we are borrowing a trailer for the camp (mama don't do no tent. Well, except when she does.)

We'll be back for monday, winterize Sybil (if she ever gets out of the shop) and clear up some final details (including the testing within range of our vet office of the kitty dope we're getting to help the cats relax on the car ride - I feel terrible for those critters and hope to do good for them at the end of this ride). Stuff - house, rv, books, games, toys - these are the things that have proven themselves to be the headaches of the past month and a half. I wish to be lighter, so much lighter!

Sybil

Hi. I have some pictures from you, which I am not going to show you now because I can't. Actually, I can't view my own blogs either, since I am on a borrowed computer and apparently my sites contain 'adult content' and are blocked from teenagers (thank god I am not a teenager anymore.) So, just a quick hello, and give you an update on what's happening.

Sybil, aka The Bitch (I don't know how these 'adult content' ideas get started) is not acting like a good RV. Which is too bad, because I had high hopes for her. She's in the shop now, again, after two AMA calls, one tow, a smashed out back window, a need to buy a little gizmo that tells how many volts are in the battery (new battery, btw, and new alternater, that somehow drains WHILE DRIVING), a discovery of leaks in the fresh water that drains into storage areas and the place I happen to put my pots and pans, a discovery we will NEVER have hot water (or at least, without paying a whole 1/4 of what we paid for the whole RV), and learning that goes at 5 miles/gallon.

Five miles per a gallon.

I know RVs have issues, and older ones even more so, but when three different mechancial shops inspect, fix, and charge what has basically doubled our purchase price, all the while they assure us that she's a fabulous buy and runs great (which she does, actually, if you can get her going), not to mention the previous owners assertion that, 'Oh yeah, she runs great, by!' and then you find yourself calling AMA again... well, there is some serious discussion of cutting our losses and dashing to the Island in the car.

Okay, enough complaining (I know my MIL, who we are staying with for a few days, is thinking the same thing). I shall check in again soon. Hope y'all had a great week!

launch... delayed

The u-haul for the sentimentals isn't coming until sunday. But we're only two days behind (not bad, unassembling an entire household with two small and very active children underfoot. We're pretty out the door, just some last details and probably a day of cleaning up the house for the new family.

I keep hearing that we should be worried about our children being too close in the RV. Like we're going to be couped up with a couple of understimulated and hyper active kids. I will miss the 750 or so extra square feet I have in our house. Hmmmm. Maybe, some days. But as of right now, the only place the children give me space is in Sybil. In the house, they climb on me, cling to my skirts and kneecaps (very uncomfortable), and bug me to watch a show.



In the RV, Birdie Boy stations himself at the wheel (no fakey hotwheels dashboard for this boy) and Smootch visits her books in the bedroom and I have an unaccustomed amount of room to move. The novelty will wear off soon, most likely, but that is when I can toss the kids out into the backyard, aka, the whole world.

So, two more days. It seems like forever, but I've waited a long time for this journey already, so I'll just do what I would tell the kids to do: focus on what needs done, take some breaks to have fun, and before I know it, we'll be off.

me me me

A little while ago I was asked to write a guest post for Things Mommies Love blog, which, after some procrastination, I did. It should be appearing August 6th. I’ve also been asked to provide a picture and a small biographical paragraph. No probl… wait. A small autobiographical paragraph is an amazingly difficult task. Sure, I wrote seven thousand words about contemporary women’s relationship with handicrafts - that was fun! - but a hundred or so about me? Ummm… no, thank you.

I have a picture. It’s the only one I could find in recent months where my mouth isn’t beginning to form the sentence, “Don’t you dare take a picture of me!”

Biographical details? Yes, I suppose I could give myself a number of labels. Like mom. Or vegan. And unschooling parent, life long learner, sewer/pattern maker, blogger. I can even add deliberately homeless (or soon to be). But, of course, that says nothing about me really.

I could say something about walking a fairly regular path until about high school, when I decided to get a life instead of a diploma. Since then I’ve done some roaming (sea to sea in Canada), some reading (probably 10 thousand books or more), some formal educating (B of A degree, with distinction, thank you), some socializing (partying), some breeding (two gorgeous kids), and some life partnering (who also did many of these other things with me). All of which, in actual fact, makes me fairly typical (my ego believes otherwise, but I’ve also learnt to not take Ego’s advice very seriously).

You are going to say that I am over thinking this. Just say it plain, Charity, get over yourself. I am a vegan, unschooling mama to a preschooler and a toddler, and a partner to a great man. Hmmmm. Or maybe I am wife, mother, and pattern maker. Or could be that I am a business owner and creative craftsperson, who also happens to have a beautiful family and a 30 foot RV. What can I say that doesn’t make one aspect of myself more important than another?

And now I am feeling rather narcissistic. Not in the clinical sense, but like maybe my time could be better spent getting lunch on for that beautiful family.

Alright. To get it over with, what do you think of this:

Charity Beasley, aka Vegbee, spent too much time deliberating (obsessing) about what to write for her biographical paragraph that she ran out of time and decided you could find out for yourself on her blogs found here and here. If you figure her out, you can help by emailing her at vegbee@littleprintdesigns.com and let her know because she still doesn’t have a clue.

friday

Things are moving along over here!

First, our big news, somebody loves our home enough to buy it! We've accepted an offer and it's all a go, with a possession date of september 1. In addition, we couldn't ask for better buyers - they are a small family we actually know a bit from the public library, with a girl the same age as Smootch (she even has curly hair too ;). They garden and ride bikes and just lovely in so many ways. Ah. Satisfying. They were to be our last viewing before we turned the whole thing over to the realtor (actually, I was giving The Man hell for not pulling our sign earlier since there is no time for viewings when you are downsizing, packing and preparing, so they just squeeked in, with only The Man's good nature getting them in the door.)

The shedding and preparing continues. We are getting to the nitty gritty. How many cookbooks do we take? How many days of clothes to wear before washings? Our home is mostly empty (yet still messy :O).

I should have some pics of Sybil soon, but I think we'll do our big clean up of her first. Her carpets and chairs need cleaning, and the mirrors washed etc. Yesterday we checked all her systems - heat, fridge, water, and they all work just fine. She was in the mechanics shop for a few days getting her spark plugs replaced and some other surprise issues (always something, yes?) She's actually got another appointment on tuesday because somehow the mechanics knocked out her overdrive while in the shop and now she doesn't want to do hills. Considering we have two provinces worth of mountains to get through, not to mention the whole Icefields Parkway to Jasper in a few weeks (the same mountain that killed my first car), we sorta need her to be able to go up faster than 20 km. So, one more trip to the shop.

But then we are out of here.

(yay!)

I will get back to sorting through our clothes, but leave you with some pages I've visited to inspire and help us out a bit as we've been downsizing.

Here is Families on the Road downsizing page. FOTR, btw, is an amazing site. Go there. Read the blogs. Marvel at the different ways families can live and learn.

DeliberateLife.com is my new favorite blog. They are a family on Vancouver Island who are now getting a bus to convert to a living space, but they also have all sorts of lovely thoughts on unschooling, unjobbing, and life in general. I've been trying to stalk them a bit, I mean, make friends, but so far no go :D Here is my favorite resource discovered there (for now).

WhyWork? has given us some food for thought. I know some think I'm nuts but everytime I hear of someone being laid off I think, 'Good for them!' Because being untied from a job is an opportunity (and, yes, maybe a tragedy too. Every situation is different, and with every second that passes are a number of choices, attitudes, and possibilites for personal revolutions... we mustn't put all hopes on the jobs provided by corporations and their shareholders because they will fuck us everytime.)

Cheers all, I'll be back soon!

My stuff has (almost) left the building

My stuff.

It's funny, a few months ago I had a whole house of stuff that was of such importance that I carted it around for decades from home to home, I cleaned it, organized it, stored it, brought it out, and put it away again. I dedicated over a thousand square feet of prime real estate to my stuff, effectively making the cost of stuff storage over a thousand dollars a month. I have loved my stuff. I've kept it warm, dry, and clean. I've protected it and lovingly caressed its surfaces. I've nurtured my stuff.

Today I watched a box of stuff that I once declared I would like buried with my body once I die walk out in the arms of a stranger. I tried really, really hard to care. But I couldn't. I was glad it was leaving. My love affair with my stuff is officially over.

This is a mature point for me, the end of a long, rough journey I've taken cleaning out the house. While we are not quite done, enough has found itself new homes that I'm beginning to feel a bit of a veteran. The first bit was quite hard - crying jags over boxes of random items that just happened to have been abandoned in the basement about the same time that our first child was born. How I could develop an attachment to something that I had previously discarded just because I ditched it at an important time in my life is seriously convoluted, yet there I was. And then I went through the real mementos, many of which needed to go away, no matter how much they mean to me. Going through them it became easier to answer some essential questions: Do I need this now or ever again? Will the person/event I cherish be diminished/damaged/hurt by the passing along of this memento? What's really important here? Does my memory suddenly cease to work without this particular memento?

I've gotten better at keeping it all in perspective, especially with gifts given to me and the children. Gifts are not given in with the expectation that they will hence forth be forever strapped to your person and household and hauled around like a ball and chain. Gifts are about love and that's what we are supposed to carry.

A few days ago I became hardened (or exhilarated with the impending liberation) to the point where I became almost predatory, roaming around my house, spying out stuff that I could get rid of. This is the point where The Man started questioning my decision making but I make no apologises. My point: Can we live without it? Can we make do? Do I need to remind anyone that Birdie Boy flushed our bath plug away more than a month ago and, yet, since baths have been taken almost daily (with bath cloths doing double duty). Yes, it's useful, yes, we use it. But do we need to?

We still have a long way to go. Not just with the house, though we are on the last leg of the decluttering, but with the mental cage we live in when it comes to stuff. I am programmed to buy and acquire. I could say that a little less dramatically, but the truth is that buying, collecting, having, and hoarding are something I instinctively, or if not biologically programmed, then as a knee jerk response to almost any event imaginable. Need something to do? Get some stuff. Got an important event coming up? Get some stuff. Expecting a baby? Get some stuff (actually, a lot of stuff.)

The task now - the harder one I would argue - is to learn how to not acquire more stuff. I know that as we travel more and more makes its way into our lives and living space. And I tend to believe that once stuff makes its way in the door then it becomes like another child to me, a part of me, that needs to find a home within our home, and protected from the cruel world that seeks to seperate us. Don't laugh. I still have a stick - a stick! - that The Man gave to me on the night we met eleven years ago (minus one week).

Letting go and getting comfortable without my stuff armour. That is my challenge now.

Gulp!

We now officially have two homes

Hey, a quick sneak of our new friend:

Not the prettiest of pictures (I think it's the one from the ad I found on our computer), but I will get some better ones soon. Of course, if we are to be living in the silly thing, there will be many MANY pictures anyway :)

I've started calling her Sybil after her shiny new license plate that spells out 'SYB', something I got to look at a lot yesterday as I followed her from pick up to the shop to have her batteries tended. The Man was an absolute god yesterday, between waking up at 4 am with Birdie Boy, then going to work (to quit), and then the running back and forth between towns to get the certified check, then the insurance and registration, then back to get Sybil, and back to the shop. Oh, and then tidied up our completely trashed house for a viewing at 6, then even took us all down for slurpees. Me? I woke up late, went to discovery canyon (outdoor water park) with the kids, did a bit of driving (insisting on a coffee to take along) and then went to the toy store to play. My job description is basically, 'watch the kids.'

Soon, though, I've got to get a bit more involved in the de-stuffing, as I have a ton or two of fabric that needs sorted and adopted. I feel a bit weepy thinking about it actually.

The kids, btw, are loving this whole process. They get to go out all the time now to strange and wonderful places like automotive shops, and there is always something pulled out in the house that is new (and usually not so good for children to play with). They've hardly noticed the slow thinning of their toy stock. We've been explaining and de-stuffing along with the children as much as possible but ultimately they've never been really interested in their stuff before, and seem even less concerned now. Both of them just want to get out of the house and see things. Perhaps our children's curosity with the wider world (and seemingly annoyance at having to be at home at all) makes this whole adventure viable at this point in our lives. By the time they're teenagers I'm sure things will be drastically different - or maybe not. Children never cease to amaze, and as long as they feel a part of the decision making, who knows where their adventurous hearts will take us all?

Can't wait! T minus two weeks!