Standards

What do I use to measure my standard of living?

That is a question I have been asking myself recently.  Why is what is important to me all that important to me anyway?  I have religious/spiritual motivations.  I have monetary motivations.  I, like 95% of the rest of us, have societal pressures with its varying motivations.  Also, within each of these areas are pressures with varying degrees of relevancy to my life.  How am I supposed to navigate these treacherous waters and determine who will win my heart?

Well, God won first and foremost, but how does that effect what I buy, what I do recreationally, what I eat, and, for the sake of this discussion, where I live?

I need to live on purpose!  It becomes very easy to just live life.  Rather I intend on going through life on purpose.  (this is probably the biggest area in which I need to work).  I have long felt this way, but putting it into action has been hard.  I should be able to answer, without thinking, the question “Why?” anytime it is asked.  Why did I buy that, eat that, do that, or live there should be easily answered questions.  I should have thought about it before I did it.  Frequently, life happens and broken relationships, a misguided career and debt just seem to have come out of nowhere!

When I live on purpose, how I judge my standard of living will be based on what is important to me.  It will not be based on what it says about my standing in society.  It may not even be based on my monetary ability.  It will be based on how effectively it helps me accomplish my goals and the purpose for which I am living.  In no way can I be judged fairly by another’s standard.

Census 2010

I am sure you have heard all the buzz about the census.  Well, what do we do when we have moved three times in the months proceeding the census?  We never received our census forms, we were at the KOA and they do no deliver them there I guess.  In fact, I do not know if any of the people living fulltime at the KOA will be counted, oh well.  Nevertheless, we have been waiting for the day that the census worker would arrive and count us.  We now have a permanent address.

She finally came this weekend.  She knocked on our door and it startled me, we have had little to no uninvited guests.  After asking if she could speak to me briefly, she recited our address and it was so unfamiliar to me that I had to really think about it.

“Where you living here on April 1st?” she asked.

I think so, I thought.  “Yes.”  We had moved in five days before that!

“How many people were living here on April 1st”

“Six.” I said laughing on the inside as I stood in front of our trailer which only measures 29 feet long.  She then asked her list of questions regarding each of us and came to here last question.

“Did anyone else live here on April 1st?”

Really, did you just ask me if there were more than six people living in this 290 square foot trailer? “No” I answered softly while laughing heartily on the inside.

Now we have been counted.  My wife’s grandmother can now rest easy.

Our doubts about being tied down.

On Thursday morning, after spending the night in the casino parking lot, we were ready to sign a lease for the lot.  We signed the lease and proceeded to get utilities set up and this is where it all fell apart.  The lot has been without electricity for over a year and requires an inspection before service can be initiated.  I will spare you all the details.  I was a long day full of phone calls and frustration.  However, we have decided to put the move on hold until March 17th.  By the way, we are at my parents house, again.

This frustration has reinforced a thought that has been festering inside both my wife and I for a few months.  We are itching to be free from so many things in this life.  We feel so bound by life and constrained in various ways that we want to find a way to escape.  The internet has proven a wonderful research tool in finding others with our thoughts.  Others who have broken free and are just living life.  Many of them have adopted a lifestyle of being on the road, traveling, nomadic.  When?   How?  Where?  These are all good questions…and that is what we have to figure out.

We feel like we waste so much in this life and we want to live better.  I am not just referring to the waste of money on commercialized “stuff.”  I am not just referring to the waste of time in hated jobs with too little compensation.  I am not just referring to wasted ministry opportunities because someone is too busy to notice the wounded in arms reach.  I am not just referring to wasted life waiting for the right time to live your dream.  I am not just referring to wasted opportunities to teach my children to appreciate other perspectives on life.  Slowly but surely, we are transitioning to this life.  We will begin watching our possessions, time and energy.  Here goes nothing!

Home is where you park it!

“We are home!” said my oldest son in a very dorky tone.  This was just moments after we pulled into the parking lot of a local resort and casino.  As I said, we had to find a place to park our trailer last night and www.freecampgrounds.com listed several of our local casinos as great places to stay overnight. They were very welcoming to us and invited us inside to “have fun”. 

The campground we were staying in had said we had to be out by March 3.  When asked if there was any grace period and would they be so kind to let us stay one more night as we were trying to leave, they gave a flat “no.”  That was fair enough, but now we were in a hurry.  I had to pack up the kids toys and bikes, change our flat on the trailer, and get the keys out which I had just locked in the truck with no spare (thank you AAA).

When we left, we were on our way to church services and my wife did not feel comfortable taking our home to the church building.  So, we parked at Wal-Mart.  After church, we picked up the trailer and headed to our home for the night.  Several other RV’s were there making us feel quite comfortable to stay.  We settled in to our first night of dry camping in an RV.  It would have been alright if we had water pressure, bright lights and heat.  When we woke up the next morning the thermometer read 49 in the trailer (boy was I freezing).

This camping adventure was quite fun and has reinforced the ideas of traveling much more heavily on a minimal budget.  But today we ignored the budget! I came home for lunch and we enjoyed the buffet.  All six of us ate for $25 with tax and tip.  It was wonderful…, but now, where do we park tonight?

Where do you go when your home is homeless?

That is our question today!  Where are we going to live?

Several weeks ago we got the idea to look into other places we could live to save a little bit more on our costs.  We looked on Craigslist and found a spot for 385, two-hundred less than we currently spend (we would have to pay for electricity, but totally worth it). Well, we looked at this and it was…scary.  We tried to consider if it was just prejudice, but, no it was very scary!

A week or two later, my wife and her cousin, who lives four spaces down at the campground, found two trailer spots in a mobile home park right next to each other.  That would be perfect, but her husband would not go for it. So the search went on…where should we live?

Finally we found it.  A small lot in a mobile home park (not so much a park as it is a collection of mobile homes), nevertheless, it is nice.  It is only 280 per month and includes water, sewage and trash.  We have paid, at our current campground, through March 3rd and must be out by then.  So, last week, I submitted an application and had hopes to move our home Monday, March 1st…as of the end of the day on March 2nd, we still have no word.

Tomorrow, we will have no place to put our home.  We are not technically homeless, our home is homeless!

We have considered going to my parents, a relative’s ranch forty miles out of town, or any of a number of casino’s around the area (they will let you stay without hookups in the parking lot, and boy is the food good!).  But seriously, where do we go?  It is 12:30 in the morning on March 3rd and we have given up our search…!?!

It actually is not scary. We can go wherever we want. We can do what we want.  It is our little adventure, but honestly, I do not know where we will park our home tomorrow.

Support and Encouragement

I will try to pick up where I left off in telling our story when I have nothing else to offer.  So…

My wife’s continued story to our children:

Friday July 24th 2009 Burgers and Friends
We enjoyed grilling hamburgers and watching a show with our good friends. When I got there she had pulled up a trailer that she had been looking at on the internet. They were genuinely excited for us. It might not be something that everyone would do themselves, but the support has been refreshing.

Some weeks later, while compiling this story she wrote:

When I read this journal out loud to Daddy, I looked up and he was crying, he said “I soooo want to do this!”

Is this really where God is leading us? We will keep praying. I’ve prayed that if this is not God’s will, our house will not be able to be rented out, even at the lower rent.

And did we ever begin to pray.  We were very excited and looking forward to this life, but we still had the apprehension that any person may as they seek to embark on such a major paradigm shift.  We were moving from the comfortable, normal and predictable life of which we were accustomed and beginning a life very different from anything we or anyone in our immediate circle of influence had ever known.  We are now going to be very, very different and it will be on purpose.

Thankfully, though, we had support from our friends.  Not only was it the kind of support that said, “Sure, drive off that cliff.  I have always wondered what that would be like, so, go for it.”  It was genuine excitement of people who would love to do what we were going to do, but lacked the motivation, courage or even true desire to make this leap.  Nevertheless, we could feel the warmth of their prayers and encouragement.

So, here goes nothing!

One last hurrah!!

We have found something wonderful during the last several months…Sushi!  We have slowly been introduced to it by some of our friends and have now become amazed by the new creations we have recently found.  My wife is currently trying to follow Weight Watchers and has found it to be quite compliant to her diet.  This has also contributed to our enjoyment of this delicacy.  The only problem we have found is that it, like most food, costs money.

We have recently been trying to realign our spending and put ourselves on a budget.  Therefore, we have needed to limit our spending on hamburgers, pizza, sporting events, and raw fish.  This change has taken a lot of prayer and thought, but more difficultly, it has taken much intestinal fortitude (and intestinal want for finer things).  We frequently lack self-control in spending our money and easily find ourselves in a restaurant for dinner just because we had no plan.  So now, we have a plan.

One last hurrah.  We will enjoy one last evening eating sushi at the great little place we just found, but then we will limit our expenditures.  There will only be eating out as our pre-planned budget allows.  This is the line in the sand!

The boys were enjoying the miso soup, California Rolls and tuna rolls.  My wife and I just finished our spicy salmon roll and began on the Chef’s special.  It was a masterpiece, beautifully arranged and quite tasty.  Then, my pocket vibrated, it was my phone.  A call from someone surely trying to interrupt our wonderful meal…no, it was my mother-in-law (same thing, right).

“Your cousin is trying to call you, there is a leak in your trailer.” She said slightly panicked.  I tried to dismiss it because it seems things quite frequently get blown out of proportion.  Then it happened again…my pocket vibrated.  It was the end of our meal.

“Is your trailer unlocked?  There is water pouring out of it!"

All I could imagine was water pouring out the front door and seeping through every seam possible!  As my wife said, “I truly felt homeless!”

What do we do?  I rushed out of the restaurant and left my family there to enjoy what was left of our meal.  The whole way ho,e I was replaying what could have happened.  I left the grey water tank closed and the water pipe had frozen.  Someone left the water on and it filled up.  When full it backed into the bathtub and all over the floor.  That was plausible and I felt very likely.  Our cousin called and my heart sank.

“So, is it bad?”

“Well, they shut the water off and your floors seem dry.”

What?  How could that be?  That was not one of the possibilities.  There must be a mistake.  I am sure they just did not see the water.  I will make a better estimation when I get there.  When I get there, I am nervous and scared as the door opens…dry, dry, dry.  How could that be?  The floor is dry.

A quick inspection of the trailer revealed that the grey water holding tank had actually froze and ruptured.  We accidently left the kitchen sink running while the water lines were frozen and when they thawed, the weight of the filling tank ripped an eighteen inch slit in the bottom of the tank.  Great, now what?  No washing hands, brushing teeth, or washing dishes until that gets fixed!!

I did fix it the next weekend.  Let me just say, working with fiberglass and rosin upside-down, under a trailer with a four and six year old is quite difficult.  However, we can now run the water without all of our neighbors knowing!