Stuff

This afternoon Denny and I started cleaning out Black Beauty so we can clean her up for her next owners.  Can you explain why I have six milkshake sized straws and 2 inches of fast food napkins in the console?  And five pens, a golf pencil, three note pads, Tic Tacs and toothpicks in the overhead storage tray?  Don't get me started on the things that were stashed in the pockets of the front seats and behind and under the rear passenger seats but suffice to say we filled two large boxes with "stuff".  Yes, "stuff".  Remember when we got rid of all of our "stuff" when we sold our house?  It crept back into our lives at some point.

Granted, I used those note pads and pens and napkins and plastic rain ponchos and atlases and hiking boots and golf shoes and whisk brooms and....well, you get the idea.  There was a lot of "stuff" in there.  And now I have to winnow out the extras and the worn outs and the superfluous for our next vehicle which will no doubt have a lot less room for "stuff".  

I realized today that I have become my mother, who was like so many others a child of the Depression era and therefore prone to hoarding extras.  Of everything.  Therefore I am going to work extra hard to change that habit and throw away/recycle/give away all of those "in case" items that have turned into "stuff". 

I also changed purses today; what a horror that was as I kept pulling items out of my very small purse to place into a hobo style bag.  I apparently am a wizard at putting the maximum number of items in a minimal amount of space.  Sadly, one of the first things I did was remove all the grocery store courtesy cards from my keyring; I had twenty-four of them from across the U.S.  Twenty-four grocery courtesy cards.  But I can tell you where all those oddball small town and large town stores are when you flip through that stack of cards.  Which stores carry our favorite brands or some of our hometown foods to enjoy while we were hundreds of miles from what was once home or where we discovered a new local favorite to enjoy.  Memories locked in grocery store cards--who knew?

Right now Denny and I are in a state of stasis; we are waiting on a lot of furniture to arrive but it's a good thing that it's not here because in ten days the painters will arrive to do in one day what would take the two of us several weeks to do.  So boxes of items will remain stored in the closets a while longer to be out of the way when the painters arrive, although I really should go through them again and get rid of the old, the tired, the never-used and the what-was-I-thinking?  And the two of us need to get serious about purchasing a golf cart--I'm going green with electric despite all the naysayers who say gas is the way to go in this ever growing city of seniors.

While we're still working on making that transition between being full time travelers to full time homeowners, Denny and I discovered today that our travels allowed us to recognize locations in the paintings and works of art that were being displayed today at one of the town squares.  It was fun to talk to the artists and compare notes on favorite areas that they had recreated in oils, watercolors, pencil and even as oversized photographs.  And it was nice to get away from all that "stuff", even if just for an afternoon.

Tomorrow?  Once more into the fray.  Linda versus "stuff."

Transitioning

As of this morning, Denny and I have been homeowners for ten days.  To say it's been hectic would certainly be a bit of an understatement.

There have been moments where you grin ruefully, (and this will be TMI for some folks) like when you finish using the toilet and reach out with your foot to hit the flush pedal.  Every darn time for three solid days.  Or when I transferred the food from our four door RV refrigerator to our side by side refrigerator in the house only to find I was out of room for the food I had.  The RV refrigerator is larger.  Same with our RV kitchen cabinets and pantry; what was comfortably stored in our rig now is split between the kitchen and the storage cupboard in the garage of the house.  Wow.  Now I have to admit I don't have everything stacked on top of each other in the cupboards of the house as I did in the RV, so there will have to be some reshuffling and rearranging now that we're getting settled in and that should help but it does tickle me to realize that more space isn't necessarily more storage.  As our RVing friends Don and Vicki, who have also moved into The Villages, are finding out as well.

We've pretty much emptied out The Beast.  A final cleaning and he'll be ready for when his new owners come down to look at him next month.  It is bittersweet to see The Beast empty of those things that made it ours, but I foresee a lot of new adventures for him down the road.

As you can see from the photo above, we're still awaiting furniture.  The leather couch is on loan from the furniture company until our living room furniture is built and delivered.  The house is a bit "echo-y" at the moment due to all the empty space around us, but within a few more weeks the place will look more like a home.  On a minimalist RVer style, of course, with few knick-knacks and gewgaws.

Certainly the transition is expensive.  All an RVer brings to a house is linens, kitchenware, tools and clothing.  The list of things one needs is huge, from furniture for several rooms to bedding for an extra bedroom to multiple trash cans--stuff RVers normally don't worry about because one of everything is more than sufficient.  The more big box stores Denny and I walk into, the more things we see that "we could use."  I'm already working on reining that in for a few months.

Soon the two of us will have to start looking for a car and a golf cart and already my tree hugging self is fighting with my logical self.  The tree hugger wants an ecologically correct electric cart while 80% of the people here have a gasoline powered cart due to the size of The Villages. I'm told that many electric golf carts can be found stranded daily on the cart paths which line the city while stranded gas powered carts are rare.  So I waffle, because at this stage of simply trying to pull the house together I have no clue how much running around I'll do in The Villages attending classes, playing golf (someday), shopping and just joy-riding.  Here in The Villages your golf cart is your primary vehicle and your car is your secondary vehicle.  It is indeed an unusual lifestyle.

That's a glimpse of why posting is still sparse.  This makes post 1993--seven more and I think the RV Vagabonds blog will end as such.  Perhaps the next blog can be Not RV Vagabonds?

Looking Back While Moving Forward

Do you remember your first apartment or house?  When I moved out as soon as I turned twenty-one (because that was the age one became legally an adult back in the dark ages) I started out with very little.  I bought myself a new queen sized bed, I took my little antique student desk as a dresser, I borrowed a daybed and added those big armed pillows to create a sofa and had an inflatable chair to act as my living room furniture.  Borrowed fiberboard end tables completed the look there and my parents loaned me a set of their ice cream tables and chairs from their soda fountain business as my dinette set.  I was good to go!

Now, forty years later I am doing that all over again--starting life in a house with no furniture, just some kitchenware, linens and office stuff.  I have to say, it's a bit intimidating to walk into furniture stores these days--when asked what style I like I have no clue.  I've lived in less than 400 square feet with furniture in various tones of browns, beiges, grays and blacks for the last fifteen years--the idea of color is exhilarating!

Denny is being driven nuts in the meantime, being asked "do you like this?  What do you think of that?  Is this table too big for the space?"  Given his druthers, he'd go for the whole house package deal.  Just give him his electric recliner (on order) and his new, much larger TV and he'll be happy.  For a while, I'll once again be living with a loaner couch (yes, the furniture store that has ordered our living room furniture is providing us with a loaner couch until our stuff can be delivered in another four or five weeks) and a lot of bare space.  We won't be ready for guests for a while yet, but once The Beast and Black Beauty are sold we will be able to finish all the shopping and getting.

Speaking of our RV and truck, we have a wonderful couple interested in the pair of them.  Denny and I met the two of them when we were touring the eastern seaboard a couple of years ago and they were curious to see what a Heartland Landmark Grand Canyon looked like so we had them come by for a look.  Serendipity has thrown us together again and The Beast may soon have new owners.  In the past, I've always wondered where our previous RVs ended up and what kind of adventures the owners were having and if this all works out, I'll be able to follow The Beast's future travels.  How fun is that?

In the meantime, Denny and I close on our new-to-us sticks and bricks on Monday.  Photo story to follow.