Decisions, decisions, decisions.....

The process of paring down you sticks & bricks possessions is incredibly daunting! I had hoped to have the house on the market by now. But there is still a lot to finish. My issue right now is one of duality.  Many items in our home need to be sorted. My husband's idea is that it all should be gone. (maybe not ALL, but really close to it) My problem being that I feel overwhelmed being the one that is doing all the sorting, but no one else really seems to be able to accomplish the task either.

What do I really want to do? Pack up Gertrude and move in. If we can't move it in there to live, then it goes. Trying to plan living quarters in one place, while living in another is one of the toughest things I've done to date (when it comes to packing/moving). I'm all on board to downsize and live a more minimalist life. In the past, my little family has lived in 6 different places, two of those being apartments. A new friend on FB that has recently started her RV journey, stated that it is far more difficult to move into an RV from a house and from a house to a house. Man was she right!! When you move into an RV, everything must be deemed useful. There is very little room for decorative items or nick knacks. And then there are papers. What is an important paper? What should be filed? If I'm keeping a printer, what of those papers do I keep?

I've spent so many years working with and helping out the JROTC unit at the high school, that many things I have have been allocated to that purpose. So what will I use? This is the million donation question!! Ugh! I had a medium sized box (like 1.5 ft x 1.5 ft) FILLED with paints...fabric paints, acrylic paints, glitter paint, etc.... I have put all of it into a donation box. This was a bigger step than you realize. I delight in making shirts and decorating things with paint. But this is something I have resigned myself to not need. So do I also ditch the t-shirt transfer papers? Or might I use those in supporting my children's future endeavors? Has the day of the CD or DVD passed us by? I have a whole file filled with CD/DVD adhesive labels...Ugh! How long do you keep Tax records if you've been doing your taxes online for quite some time? Do you keep old bills when many of these same statements can be easily retrieved online, as well?

I believe all of this decision making has started to play fast and loose with my sleeping patterns. More mornings than not, I awaken around 3-4:40 am unable to quiet myself long enough to drift back off to dreamland. Hopefully I am able to get enough work done during the days that these early morning hours can be spent doing a little relaxing. We just got a memory foam mattress for the motorhome, maybe I'll be able to sleep better on there. I am ever hopeful that I will sleep better once moved in, for sure!

T-minus...just a few months

WOW! It truly is hard to believe that we will be moving into Gertrude in a short matter of months!! Less than SIX! AUGHH!!!!! There is still SO much stuff in my sticks and bricks house that I admit it is causing a fair amount of anxiety.

We are thinking about finding my daughter a one bedroom apartment in the area to move into just before graduation. There is a short list of probable folks who could be her roommate if their plans change, but she's kind of looking forward to having a place of her own. Of course, we need to nail down the location before we can figure out which furniture she's going to be able to take with her. She is working now, which is a great relief! She got a job as a receptionist and is really enjoying it so far. =) Yay!!

Gertrude is coming together nicely. She has 4 new tires now and all of her jacks work!! Yippee!!! So the next large trip is the annual Mother's Day weekend camping trip, and this year we'll be able to have the jacks down and be all leveled. No more swaying and fear that I'm going to tip her over. LOL! The stairs seem to be bipolar. Sometimes they work wonderfully, other times...not so much. Ugh!

My entertainment whilst living in a motorhome has taken a step in a positive direction! For my birthday, my husband got me a 4TB external hard drive. I have since been making backup copies of all of our movies/tv show DVDs so that our daughter can take the discs and we can have the digital copies in the RV. This will be a wonderful space saver!! Plus I can watch shows when we don't have WiFi. We will have an internal network so that all of our devices can communicate with one another, but won't necessarily have to be hooked up to the internet/data network. It is going to take almost up to the time we hit the road to get it all done, but I'm diligently making my backups every day. =)

I'm still struggling with the decision of cell phone carriers. We are grandfathered in to an unlimited data plan through Sprint, and that is REALLY a wonderful draw to sticking with them. My daughter is ready for a new phone and she is really wanting to stick with the unlimited data. So I am thinking we'll go ahead and do this. We'll have to get my husband set up on a different network, which I'm pretty sure will be Verizon and we'll couple it with a Millenicom internet connectivity plan.

There is still a lot to do, but I'm getting more and more excited for this next adventure!

Repairs abound

  

In late May, hubby took Gertrude to Rocklahoma and on the way home, found himself with a blowout on one of the dually tires. Luckily our insurance took care of replacing it with a spare, but that meant we had to purchase a new tire. On the way home from said tire replacement, he has a minor fender bender with a light post that was leaning precariously towards the roadway. This mishap left us with a completely broken awning and a broken passenger side mirror. I'm actually fine with no awning for a while, but the mirror needs replacing asap. I think it can be done for less than $200 pretty easily, and I'm working on getting this done this next week.

This year we took a vacation that has become an every other year tradition for our family. We went to Oklahoma and stayed in a houseboat on Lake Eufaula.  This is actually part of a timeshare we purchased about 12 years ago or so. We get a week on a boat every other year. We had wondered how this would still work once we are full-timing, but there is actually an RV campground just up the hill from the docks. Yay! The one we stayed in this year is a 52' houseboat that sleeps 8 (2 bedrooms with full-size beds, 2 twin bunk beds, and a sleeper sofa). It feels like a trailer on pontoons and we love it! We took my parents, our daughter, and 3 of my daughter's friends. We went for the 4th of July week (June 29-July 6) and had a great time the whole week, and luckily no mishaps or repairs needed while we were on the boat.

After we get another tire for Gertrude, so we have 2 new tires on the front, and we get the mirror sitch taken care of...we are hoping to take her out again this month. I'm thinking of trying out Lake Grapevine this time around, so we get a feel for some different places. 

My son comes home for a couple weeks in early August and I can't wait for him to meet Gertrude and us to take her out next month with him. Yay!!

 

The Maiden Voyage

Let me begin by telling you who about Gertrude. She is a 36’ Georgie Boy Cruise Air Motorhome. Every rig needs a name, and Gertrude is hers. Why THAT name you ask? Well, I’ll tell you. Years ago when my daughter was born my mother-in-law decided an appropriate nickname for said child was either Gertrude or Agnes. Neither are in any way a part of her name, nor are they family names. This tended to drive me crazy, but what’s a mother-in-law without a little bit of crazy mixed in. Ha!

We acquired Gertrude on Sunday, 4 May 2014 in Galveston, TX. She was born in 1999 and has had two foster families before us. She’s a strong woman with a v-10 gas powered heart. She’s modestly decorated (I’m sure that’ll change soon enough) with all kinds of bells and whistles (that we’re still discovering). She has a few minor issues that we need to work on, but nothing requiring major surgery.

While I’m at it, let me intrude Gertrude’s traveling companions. First there is Kyle, my husband. He’s a 40something guy from small town Texas. He went to school in Central Texas and graduated from Texas A&M University-College Station in 1995. Whoop!! Gig ‘em, Ags! He works in telecommunications. He enjoys being outside and traveling, namely hunting and hiking, or just relaxing with a cold beverage. I’m Dorsey, an ALMOST 40something gal from Texas also. I grew up around Bryan-College Station and Victoria, TX. I’m a homemaker and currently spend a lot of my time volunteering with a JROTC group in Wylie, TX. Kyle and I got together in 1994. Over the next few years, we had two kiddos, Joshua and Hannah. Joshua is currently in the U.S. Navy and stationed in Jacksonville, FL. Hannah is still in high school and is set to graduate June 2015 and go onto college. She wants to be a teacher/college professor eventually. Our four-legged traveling mate is Daisy Mae. She is a Chihuahua that was born in January of 2001.

Her maiden voyage as a member of the Bell family was taken on 8 May 2014 to Yegua Creek Park on Lake Somerville in Somerville, TX. The night before making camp at Somerville, we slept here with her parked in my uncle’s yard (he kept Gertrude for us until Mother’s Day weekend). We weren’t hooked up to any power or water for the first night. It was a little muggy, but we survived. The morning of the 8^th, I needed to take Daisy out for her morning constitutional. There are a lot of sticker-burs in my uncle’s yard and I couldn’t recall where I’d taken off my shoes the night before. So I just lowered Daisy (clad in her harness) onto the grass and I took a seat on the steps. Sitting there, I realized there was a growing need to free myself from some gas build-up. So I leaned a bit to the left and let ‘er rip. Within a matter of seconds I hear a loud *BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!* Kyle comes from the back bedroom wondering what I’ve done (“Woman, what did you DO?!?!”). I told him, “I don’t know!?!?” Then we realized, I’d set off the Gas Leak Detector located to the right of the steps. We both laughed and shrugged “Well, at least we know it works.” I guess it detects carbon monoxide, propane, AND methane. Ha!!

The grand plan with Gertrude is that when my daughter graduates from high school she is moving into an apartment with roommates. The husband and I are going to sell our sticks & bricks house and move into the motorhome full-time. Over the next 13 months will be spent preparing the house for sale and paring down our belongings to be able to fit into Gertrude. I, honestly, am looking forward to not having 3000 sq. ft. worth of stuff to keep up with/keep clean. There are NO plans to have a storage unit at all, if it won’t fit or one of the kids don’t want it (or can keep it) then it goes to someone else’s home.