catlinyemaker | Entries tagged with schtuff

J’s on the final lap of radiation and other therapies this week, and we’re prepping to get back to our regular lifestyle. It’s slow going; the appointments in the middle of the day break up my working time. But the laundry is done and stuff in the RV is slowly getting picked up and put away for travel.

( Two steps forward, one step back... )

We celebrated our 25^th wedding anniversary today. With a good old English fry-up, served in the dining room of our RV. Fried eggs, fried toast, streaky bacon (from Broadbent’s, yum!) baked beans… oh, and a bottle of Roederer Estate’s extra dry champagne from our trip to the Anderson Valley earlier in the year.

With the chemo and all, we’re being low key this year. Our fancy celebration will come at the 25.5 year mark in the Florida Keys, once we’re past the medical foofaraw. But I’m still highly amused, thinking that if anyone had told me this is where I’d be after 25 years of marriage, I would never have believed it.

Here’s to 25-plus more years to come.

J and I are doing well; his treatment is going quite well so far, and I've been quilting like mad and have actually sent a few tops off to the quilters. We've been in one place since the middle of June, which is great for the quilting and the healthcare but not so good for the wanderlust. I think it’s our longest stretch in one venue (including time spent at our house in Pennsylvania) since 2009, when we started to travel seriously with the RV.
( October will be patch-up and prep month, November, we roll again! )

I hope everyone is ready for Fall and enjoying some cooler weather wherever you may be!

I am, perhaps, a little more than normally stressed out because of... reasons, as the intarwebs say. So I've been denned up and reading, heads down in AO3 fanfic. Hoping to move forward and get back on track as things progress. There's more fic and travel blogging to post, just need to get back to writing.

Long time no updates! Sorry for the extended break; I hope to be getting better at communicating this year.

( Big changes are afoot! )

J, who has been up in PA for the past three weeks clearing the house, had to come to FL for work. So I got my husband for Valentine's Day. Best V-day present since the fiver!

We’ve heard from the body shop, and given good (ie, warm) weather, the truck may be ready to go as early as Thursday. If it is too cold for the paint to cure properly overnight, the mechanic is willing to come in on Saturday so we can get the truck then. Either way, it looks like we are a go for the Keys, whether on time for our reservation or just for the fishing trip. This is very good news; there for a while it looked like we’d be scrubbing the Keys trip altogether. That said, I was not prepared to see that this leaves us three days to get ready to go (where did the time go?!?)

Today is dedicated to doing stuff around the house; I am taking down the tree and finishing up kitchen cleaning, looking at our route to the Keys and making tentative hotel plans. With the tighter schedule, MIL and I will drive down together in her van and make our overnight stops at hotels. J will take the trailer and the cats and overnight at rest stops. MIL and I may arrive at the Keys a day before the trailer, so that she can have a non-driving day to rest up before the fishing trip.

Tomorrow and Wednesday will be schlepping stuff out to the trailer and packing, checking everything out so that we’re all set to go whenever we get the green light. I will be very happy once we’re actually in Florida. Sometime in all this I need to look at places to stay after the stay on Kings Key, but we should have 8 to 10 days down there and that can be done once we are on site if need be.

Christmas was actually very nice indeed; we exchanged small gifts, talked to relatives on the phone, and generally relaxed. I let the mail pile up at the forwarding service so we got nearly all our cards at once, and spent a pleasant lunchtime going through them. It was like opening presents. A lot of people commented on our change of address, so clearly I owe some followup correspondence.

Now we start ramping up; the lists have come out and been revised. It will all work out!

We’re back out in our fiver, settled into a pleasant wooded campground right next to the highway in Harrisburg, PA. I was a little nervous setting out and setting up (what if we forget something!) The smooth routines of the spring and summer were noticeably rusty, but eventually we got all settled in a site that is unlevel enough front to back that the trailer is so low on the front legs it looks like it’s kneeling. We’re using all the chocks, that’s for sure. We’ve come out early for the Hershey RV Show, America’s Largest, say the promoters (there are three shows that claim the title, but who’s counting.) This week J will have to go back to near-Philly for a day or two to finish up with a customer. I’ll spend that time putting stuff away in the trailer; when we ‘packed’, we just stacked boxes and bags on every available surface. It’s surprising how much stuff moves in and out of the camper as we do. One of the things that I want to look at is stemming that tide, reducing the ebb and flow of things that see more use in the fifthwheel than in the house.

( more thoughts on stuff )

We’ll be out for three weeks this time: this first week will be in Harrisburg/Hershey, going to the RV show and relaxing. My MIL will join us this coming weekend, we’ll all go see the show with some of J’s coworkers who are interested in RVing, and then on Sunday we’ll head to upstate New York near Cooperstown for a week. MIL’s really gung-ho to see the Baseball Hall of Fame, so we’ll do that and other museums in the area, then head over to the Hudson Valley to tour Hyde Park and its environs. If all goes to plan we’ll be back in PA at the beginning of October.

So, the week before last, J and I got a charming missive from the city about our hedges, which were not up to code. Now, while we were on the road, in the middle of July, my MIL had opened and read to us a notice from the codes office that our hedges needed to be trimmed, the debris from said trimming removed, and we needed to put up house numbers. My MIL kindly went and bought house numbers and installed them, and she told us that the guy who handles our yard work had just been by to do the hedges and they looked fine. I called him and asked him to be sure the twigs were picked up and thought no more about it; the notice must have been in the mail when the hedges were done.

( Alas, no. )

So, I just received the first payment for the books I sent to Cash-for-books, the online merchant that I mentioned in the previous post. That was nice and fast. They sent me an email when they got the package and one when they paid, one day later.

They also informed me that if people come to them via my account, I'll get a small cash payment. Who knew? So, if you've got newer books in good condition to sell, please use this link to get to their website. Thanks in advance!

Cash4books.net

I’ve found an online merchant to buy my used books, and a not-too-distant used bookseller to take the ones that the online seller doesn’t want. Mostly they both want newer books in good to excellent condition. The online bookseller takes about one in five, giving good prices. You enter the ISBN of the book and the website gives you a price (it’s been ranging from a high of four dollars to a low of fifty cents) or a “not buying” message. They pay shipping; for more than five or six books, you can use Fedex which is slightly faster and provides tracking numbers. The bricks and mortar bookseller takes about two out of three books. Older paperbacks get rejected, as does any hardback without a dustcover. They go through the boxes I bring in and quote me a price for the ones they’ll take; it averages out to about fifty cents to a dollar for hardbacks and about twenty cents for paperbacks. I’ve been averaging ten dollars a box.
( More quotidian details.. )

J and I are committed to changing our lifestyle to allow more trips like the one we just finished. To that end, we're planning to downsize to a house which will be less expensive and easier to take care of, easier for Jackie to get around in. The first step on this journey is clearing this house of stuff. After my mother passed, I came home with much more of her goods than I'd planned. And for years, I just couldn't face letting them go. The rest of the house, which at one time had been fairly tidy, also started to slide. Now, I am willing and able to do some tough things for the benefit of living the way I want to live, especially with the example I have just had of that life.

My mother's stuff isn't my mother; I can keep my memories of her without keeping the stuff. I must consider that stuff as mine now; if I'd purchased it in the past would I keep it today?

The goal is to only own things that we love and/or use a lot. Preferably both; I love the bowl that I use for our cats' dry food -- it's a beautiful deep blue. I got rid of the red bowl, which was just 'eh', since I had two bowls and only needed one. The daily goal is to remove at least one bag or box of stuff from the house daily.

Accordingly, there is a ticker (and we'll see how well this works..)