Day 92 / 273

Saylorville Lake Sunshine 90 Degrees

“Let there be singing from the fruited plains!” Someone I worked with used to say that, much to my amusement, every time he received good news. It still cracks me up. Yesterday when Zack contacted me to tell me he had our AC Compressor Fan motor and would be down today to put it in I couldn’t help  hearing Jim's voice in my head.

Our adventure is going to take a turn beginning the middle of this month. Long story short after 15 years of chronic digestive issues that seem to puzzle the main stream medical community because they can’t fix me with their drugs, I launched into full-blown research mode with a literal fire in my belly, I decided to dive into the world of Paleo eating.  I am a research, plan, execute kind of person, who generally exhausts the people around me when I am in execute mode. What does this have to do with living full-time in the RV? Ironically, the fact that we are full-time makes it kind of cool, since at the root (pun intended) of hunter/ gatherer type eating is locally sourced, in-season foods.  With our nomadic lifestyle, I will enjoy a variety of foods on levels that those who live in-situ miss out on if they engage in this way of eating. I will eat like a modern-day nomadic cave woman!

[caption id="attachment_861" align="alignleft" width="300"] I will miss you![/caption]

I picked June 16^th  to start the initial 30 day meal plan to get the hang of it. "Why?",  you ask? Because my birthday is June 15^th and I want to say a final farewell to my beloved Stout Beer that I will have to give up, since all grains are off-limits. The cool part? I love vegetables and cook almost everything from scratch.  As I researched, I realized, I am already about 70% in compliance with the ideology . Champ is another story, he eats grains by the ton, but has agreed to go along with me for the first 30 days. I can see the righteous fear in his eyes as he listens to me talk about not eating things like Oreos,  bread and macaroni and cheese. With my powers of persuasion fully engaged, I have gently shown him pictures of the prepared meals, pointing out the similarities to what I currently set in front of him at dinner. There is even a way to make dessert for him.   I have shown him some data about why he may be experiencing chronic reflux and enlarged prostate symptoms. He hates taking pills and the thought of being able to possibly get off of both his meds is the proverbial carrot on the end of the stick (yep, another pun it’s that kind of day) that has convinced him to try without too much strong arming from me.

Don’t worry, I won’t muddle my blog with Paleo zeal. It’s just what is on my mind today as I write.  It has occurred to me I could probably launch a whole new blog on this topic, but I don’t have the energy for that. I have never been one to clog my Facebook news feed with pictures of my dinner, so if you get to this through FB don’t worry about that either. Back to my new cookbooks!

Until tomorrow…

Day 91 / 274 Annie & Buster

Saylorville Lake – Cloudy 85 Degrees

After some much-needed rain, we woke up to 67 degrees this morning. The coolest we have been in over 10 days. It will be a muggy 85 today but I’ll take it. The portable AC and two blowers should be pretty effective today. I’m hopeful the central air will be going again by the end of he week.

[caption id="attachment_273" align="alignleft" width="300"] Hanging out by the Arkansas River[/caption]

I haven’t written about the cats in a while. A lot of people ask how they are doing with our AC predicament during this early season heat wave. They’re uncomfortable, just like us but hanging in there. I am glad I have conditioned them to be comfortable being outside on a tether. The RV is at its hottest, which is to say you don’t have to turn on the pan to melt butter for cooking, from about 2pm – 8pm when the sun is high in the sky and beating down on the west side where all the big windows are. Thankfully our patio faces east, so by that time of day it is shaded. We move to the patio with a fan moving things around and the cats lounge in the grass and shade at the back of the lot. Like us they are drinking a lot of water and lying around like slugs but we’re all getting through it just fine.

They travel well these days. They have decided sitting in the stairwell while on the move is their safe place. I put a blanket on the bottom step for them thinking the soft padding would be more comfortable for them and they moved to the next step up! Cats, they’re so damned hard to please. They get their exercise these days running laps back and forth through the motor home at 3:30 in the morning. Like a fan running in the room,  their pre dawn romp is a sound we’ve gotten used to and we don’t usually wake up unless one of them runs across our face or stomach.

We would like to thing they are happy traveling with us, like yesterday when Buster narrowly missed catching a bird that made the mistake of landing within his tether radius. That would have made him happy. They act like they still love us, but maybe that’s just because they know they need our coveted thumbs to open their cat food container.

Until tomorrow…

Day 90 / 275 The Happiness Factor

Saylorville Lake - Partly Cloudy 91 Degrees

“It’s an island, babe. If you don’t bring it here, you won’t find it here.” Said Harrison Ford to Anne Heche, with his boyish wry smile in one of my favorite movies, Six Days and Seven Nights. If you’re thinking about doing ‘the full-time thing’ this is actually a very valid statement.

I am naturally curious about other people and spend a lot of time talking to people about their life. What makes them happy, where they come from, what they love, what they don’t. I find most people in this life are generally happy and relaxed. They also loved camping before they started do it full time. I have met a rare few who had never camped and are loving the adventure. I have met some who owned a camper for years before going full-time who seem less that thrilled with life as they know it. The more I talk to people the more I realize, the lifestyle, awesome as it is, isn’t what makes them happy. They already were. This life has a certain hazing period that seems to make or break people in the first year. The outcome seems to have no bearing on whether they were seasoned campers, but entirely affected by whether they were happy in their brick and mortar life.

Case in point. One of the most miserable human beings I have ever met, was a retired school teacher who was in her first year of traveling in her RV and volunteering. She was generally unhappy, difficult for everyone to deal with and generally unsociable. What little I did talk to her in the very beginning she shared she had been through a major life change, was burnt out from a career that she hated and was looking for happiness. No surprise she wasn’t finding it on the island of full-time RV living. I have met several people like this so far.  I read social media and watch people post one complaint after another whether they are part of my new full-time circle or from my old life. There are also the ones who are generally happy and share positive things regularly. Being a full-time RV’er doesn’t mean you’re blissfully happy, anymore than being in the trenches of your career or raising kids means your miserable.

Can living the full-time in your RV make you happy? Of course, it can, if it was your dream and if you already know how to find happiness. If you are a miserable person who thinks life is just one struggle after another and you can never get ahead, then think hard before you sell all your stuff and hit the road. My advice is find your happy place before you hit the road. Don’t expect the road to be a magic trick. Like taking the big vacation to ‘save’ your marriage or buying a nicer house to make you happier at home, this won’t work either. For all my gushing about how much fun we have (even now in a heat wave without AC) we have struggles and arguments, we have crappy days and good days, just like we always have. We’ve met miserable souls in this life and our old life. The island, that is this lifestyle, doesn’t have the answers one can only find in their own heart.

Until tomorrow…

Day 89 / 276

Saylorville Lake Sunny 82 at 9:00 a.m. on the way to 97

[caption id="attachment_852" align="alignright" width="225"] Foil Blanket Insulation for curtains[/caption]

Fifteen years from now I imagine Champ and I sitting here in Volunteer Village with younger volunteers just getting started in this remarkable life and talking about years past. The Memorial Weekend of 2018 is going to be one that we remember for the rest of our lives. I can see us sitting around telling war stories about being full time. We’ll bicker about exactly what year it was, but the story will go something like, the hottest Memorial Day on record and no AC. We’ll wonder how we got through it.

When the central air in the motor home started acting up in Texas we didn’t think too much of it. After all, the real heat in Iowa doesn’t normally show up till late June. We’ll have plenty of time to get it fixed. Hah! We are set to shatter a heat record today that has stood since 1895. A predicted high of 97 with heat indexes approaching 105+ and dew points around 70 we will wave at the 92-degree record by noon today. The hardest thing to believe is just 7 days ago we had the fireplace going to keep warm. Midwest weather was wild mood swings as anyone who has lived here knows all too well.

Like most difficult situations, when you realize it is going to happen you don’t know how you will cope. But humans are quite resilient. We seem to hunker down and adapt when life deals a blow. On Tuesday evening as Zack walked away with our burnt-up compressor fan motor, I thought to myself “We have three full days before the holiday weekend, there’s a sporting chance we’ll be okay by the time the heat gets bad.” On Friday afternoon I was watching the weather, and my phone, that never resulted in the much wanted call from Zach, saying the motor was ready, and resigning myself to the fact that this was really going to happen. Champs personality is one that will roll with most anything. Mine is to go down swinging. We have filled with big windows with insulated foil wrap, making our home on wheels look  like a space capsule. The portable AC unit that is on my corner table and 2 high velocity blowers are keeping the humidity out and the temp around the same as the outside instead of the 130 degrees it would likely be in here with no intervention. After all we live in a giant car. It is Monday and we’ve endured most of the weekend.  The last few days has been an ongoing layman’s experiment in thermo-dynamics. In retrospect we’ll remember with awe the weather pattern more reminiscent of Iowa State Fair weather in August, than Memorial Day Weekend weather. It will become part of our journey. With the exception of Friday, when I had a hot flash in the heat of the day and Champ agreed the portable AC unit was worth the money (after being on the receiving end of a hormone fueled meltdown) it has been uncomfortable but not, impossible.

Prairie Flower Campground’s power grid went down on Saturday leaving over 300 campers with no electricity for nearly 9 hours beginning mid-afternoon. I thank my lucky starts that we have electricity to run all the appliances that are keeping us from checking into a hotel with the cats, and the means to buy the things we needed to make this little adventure tolerable.

I wonder what tomorrow will bring.

Until then…

Day 87 / 278

Saylorville Lake – Sunny 94 Degrees

The only thing that seems to be pleased with this early season heat wave in Iowa, are the second generation, Texas Blue Bonnets that I grow in a big pot and tote around with me everywhere. They are thriving! These temps typically don’t show up here till late June. When they do it’s generally for one day then it’s back to the 80’s that are normal for May. We’ll have 8-10 days of 90’s by the time this passes. So far the violent weather that tends to accompany early heat is only coming in the form of hail. No tornadoes, yet.

Memorial Day Weekend at Saylorville this year is a bit of a bummer for the visitors. The lake is a major boating destination in central Iowa and has 2 large beaches. This year with record heat occurring, the beaches are filled with debris instead of pasty white Iowans basking on the beach for the first time. They are still closed due to the carnage of recent flooding. The lake peaked at around 30’ above normal pool a couple of weeks ago and is dropping at a rate of around 18 inches a day making boating and swimming dangerous due to debris and submerged breakwaters. Only a couple of boat ramps are accessible. The lake looks inviting from a distance , but it is very hard to access this weekend. The cruel irony is that most Memorial Day Weekends in Iowa are too cool to enjoy the water. After the coldest April on record, we are having the warmest May on record, so the water temp is actually fit for swimming. The quality? Not so much.  Remember that aquarium you had to have once? Remember how it looked after a couple of weeks of neglect? That would be a tropical paradise compared to the muck that is Saylorville right now.

We attended a great nephews graduation today and have a quite weekend ahead to relax. While most are running to multiple graduations, family reunions and other events, we hit a quiet patch and are both happy for it.

When we imagined being full-timers we, like many, had a false notion that we would mostly avoid extreme weather. I’m realizing quickly it’s a myth that lives in the hearts of full-time dreamers. I do realize that we are doing just fine when I couldn’t find and ice scraper this past spring and our wardrobe consists of mostly summer clothes. I think we’re doing just fine.

Until tomorrow…

Day 86 / 279 Feed Your Soul

Saylorville Lake 85 Degrees on the way to 90 – Humid

Still no AC. Motorhome is a crisp 92 degrees now at 3:30 and the hot part of the day won’t arrive till around 7PM. Four fans are doing their best to keep the food from cooking itself in the pantry.

People I meet who dream of going full-time sometimes say, “I could never give up….” (activity) When you are thinking about going full-time a big consideration is how you will spend your time. Most of us have at least one hobby or passion. Mine is gardening. Champ’s is repair, modifying, fabricating building most anything. He gave up his shop and I gave up my yard and gardens. We talked at length about how we would continue to enjoy those activities. The solution for us was to seek out work camp jobs that allowed us to use those skills or engage in our favorite past times.

I get all kinds of gardening time these days. I have my little plots here at our summer digs at Saylorville and I grow a windshield full of potted plants, some of them food in the winter when we go south. Champ is constantly modifying something on the motor home or doing little jobs for people we know or whatever agency we’re volunteering for.

[caption id="attachment_842" align="alignleft" width="225"] Fixing a broken hose reel[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_843" align="alignright" width="225"] Planting Day at Joyce's[/caption]

Today is a perfect example of you we still ‘piddle around’ as Champ says it. My friend Joyce had a landscape designer come up with a plan for a portion of her yard. Joyce invited me along last week to meet with her, see the plan and purchase some of the plants that will go in over the season. Today after working on my own little plots here, we went out to her place.  I helped her start to bring the plan to life. You could easily say, my gardener’s soul is living vicariously through Joyce’s yard this summer. Champ went along and was presented with a honey-do list that he gladly worked on while we planted. I have plans to help my daughter with her yard on Sunday as well. I think it’s safe to say Neither Champ nor I miss our hobbies all that much.  Problem solved.

Think about your hobbies and imagine how you can do it, maybe on a smaller scale. We met a gentleman last winter who had a small woodworking shop set up in an enclosed trailer that he took with him. He built things for craft shows and made a little money on the side.  One of the more inventive ones I’ve seen, is a woman who is an avid quilter,  who bought a toy hauler simply to have a sewing room. Her toys are her sewing machines and big quilting tables. Now, that’s thinking outside the box if you ask me.

Where there’s a will there’s a way, as they say. Get creative and think about it, I’ll bet you’ll come up with something.

Until tomorrow…

Day 85 / 280

Saylorville Lake 85 Degrees Sunny

The down side of living in an RV is they aren’t insulated like a house. If the furnace quits you can start up the fireplace or put space heaters out. If the AC goes out, your screwed. There’s no polite way to say it. We are living one of those, “how bad could it get” scenarios. While we wait for a compressor fan motor to be rebuilt, (since the motor is a special order, nothing is easy with RV parts) we roast in our fiberglass and plastic box with only an inch of insulation and black glass windows on the west side. This is one of those days when I recall my childhood. Not that we were dirt poor or anything, but in the 70’s Air Conditioning was still considered something of a luxury. I grew up in a house equipped with air conditioning but my parents chose to spend their dollars on other things instead of cooling the house. I can count the number of times they actually turned it on, on one hand. As an adult my responce to that unpleasant memory has been to cool my home in the summer no matter what else I had to give up. I like summer and hot weather, but I like it a lot more when I can go inside, when I’ve had enough, and sit in my preferred 75 degree air. Don’t get me wrong 85 outside and 96 inside, as it is today, could be a lot worse in Iowa. It could be July and 105 degrees and god knows how hot inside with heat indexes overnight hovering in the upper 80’s. I’ve written before about liking the outdoors. It’s a good thing. We are spending most of our days and evenings outside in the shade. The saving grace is, it is getting into the 60’sat night so we start out each day about 70 inside.

[caption id="attachment_838" align="alignleft" width="200"] Judy and Bridget having a planting party with me[/caption]

I focus my thoughts on the fact that I love to be outside and it is quite comfortable here as I write. My other joy is that I spent yesterday morning planting my adopted bed in the Butterfly Garden at Saylorville and got to spend good time with a fellow volunteer Judy, who loves gardening as much as I do. After I finished my bed I helped her the rest of the morning working on other beds in the garden. Over two dozen, some adopted by local volunteers, some not. At any rate my green thumb is happy when I’m here in the summer and need to nurture my spirit growing beautiful things like flowers and witness the butterflies arrive and thrive in the gardens for the season.

Life is hot today, but it is good. It’s all a matter of attitude.

Until tomorrow…