Homes, Homes, and More Homes

I mention a few different “Homes” throughout this blog and there seems to be a bit of confusion around which is which. 

First of all, I only really have one home: Wanda. Wanda is the name that I have given my trailer. 

I tow Wanda around behind my truck (“Treabilla”: named after a character in an unpublished novel of mine.)

The various places or areas that I park Wanda in are what I call my various “Homes.”

This is a play on the concept of the very rich having various homes spread out all over the place. 

Since my home is wherever I park it, wherever I am is home. Yet there are regular places that I park my home in, which have become my “Home”, or neighbourhoods, to me. Here are the top three.

Eastern Home

First, and the Home that I spend most of my time in, is my Eastern Home. 

The company that I work at is located in an industrial park, that industrial park is my Eastern Home. 

When I am in my Eastern Home, I am parking on the street and so there is little comfort here. I don’t have my slide-out out, so space is a bit “cosy”. 

I also don’t put my stabilizer jacks down, so there is a bit of sway as I walk or move. After all, a trailer is a box on springs, on wheels, so it moves and acts as such. .

I park in one spot at night and move to park at another spot during the day. The distance between these two spots is 1KM door to door. 

I do this to never been seen always in one spot and never moving. Never moving is one sure-fire way to attract unwanted attention or otherwise get a ticket, in my opinion.

Western Home

The place that I spend the second most amount in is my Western Home. My Western Home is a “Big Box Store Shopping Area.” 

At least that it the best way to describe it, imagine a neighbourhood made up of “Big Box Retail Stores, and you have an idea of my Western Home. 

One particular Big Box Store, for the most part doesn’t mind people parking there, so this is where I go for the weekend, (most weekends).

I always park in the outskirts of the parking lot and look for places that people are not using anyways. 

I try to be considerate when I am here and be a good neighbour. I also do my weekly grocery shopping in the Big Box Store whose parking lot I am staying in.

Staying in my Western Home is nice because I do have my stabilizer jacks down and my slide-out out. 

So there is space and comfort and I can use Wanda, as she was designed to be used. 

The other thing is that I have a bit of space around me and I don’t have traffic zipping by me, two feet from my window, as I do in my Eastern Home. 

Mountain Home

The last place that I consider a Home of mine is my Mountain Home. I do not spend nearly as much time here, as I would like. 

My Mountain Home is the campground in Banff. I have a particular camping spot that I like as the view is breathtaking. 

I have sometimes called this place my “Very Western Home,” but I have settled on the name of “Mountain Home.”

In addition to enjoying all of the advantages of my Western Home, (apart from the store right there) I also have steady access to electricity. 

I can also dump my tanks and fill my fresh water tanks, in the warm seasons of course. 

This is a place that I like to go to unwind and relax, but each time I go here, I have to be ready to spend $200.00 to do so, in camping fees and extra fuel for the truck.

This is not a place that I can go to every weekend, but I do go as often as I can work it into the budget.

Another Weekend in My Eastern Home

I made it through another weekend in my Eastern Home, all for the final push of savings into payday. 

Again, due to the very cold overnight lows, I didn’t bother to try to keep a charge in Wanda’s batteries.

I walked to a coffee shop that serves breakfast while having “charging stations” at most of the booths. I took advantage of this. 

I ended up buying not only my breakfast but an extra coffee as well, over the time that I was there, for each of the three mornings. 

I walked back to the trailer and bundled up as I played on my laptop. I had to pause regularly and hibernate the laptop as I warmed my hands up.

It’s okay . . . I had time. 

Again, all of this was to economize on the fuel budget so I could possibly put a bit extra into my Mid-Term Savings Account this payday. 

It all seems so silly when next payday (the one on the seventh) I will be taking cash out of my Mid-Term Savings Account to pay for the repairs that will be done next week. 

Again, it is a thing I do, try to save as much as I can, so I can get to that fully-funded Mid-Term Savings Account ASAP.

All in all, it was a quiet weekend, and that was not a bad thing. 

As always: Keep your head up, your attitude positive, and keep moving forward!

A Boring Long Weekend, For Savings

I will be spending the long weekend in my Eastern Home, and not in the mountains. This will be a pattern for some time to come; there is a reason for this. 

I will be getting the repairs done to Wanda later this month, or rather, most of them. 

The last bit I will have to look into doing some other way, the subcontractor is unable to do the repairs in a timely manner. 

All this while, all this year, I have been putting what I can into savings, and in so doing, building for my future. 

Sure, my savings took a bite due to me paying off the few niceties that I bought myself. Yet I am back on track to building those savings. 

Those savings will take a hit when I pay for these repairs, but not as much of one as I had anticipated. As well, they will not clean out my savings.

I am still focussed on building up my Mid-Term Account to the point that it will contain enough cash for me to live for two years. 

After that I will built up my Long-Term Account to the point that I can start to shop for land (after I put my target dollar amount in there).

I will do this, all while paying my current expenses and staying debt free.

The point is that I have plans and I need, for my own sanity and peace of mind, to build up those savings as soon as I can. 

My real sense of urgency is around fully funding that Mid-Term Account. With that, I can at least relax a bit, knowing that I have a bit of a cushion to land on.

I also, and mainly, just want to get my savings back on target and blowing a few hundred bucks to go to the mountains, when my favourite spot is not available is not worth it.

So, I will stay here, and save as much cash as I can, for my future, and my peace of mind.

As always: Keep your head up, your attitude positive, and keep moving forward!

Half-Way Through February

Here we are on the ides of February, and all is . . . non-hideous. This is important to me, because in my mind, come March, things will start shifting towards the tolerable. 

At least that is the theory in my mind that I am holding to. At the very least, come March, I should have Wanda back and all fixed.

As in I will be able to cook on my stove and run my furnace . . . yay.

What keeps me going is looking to the future and what it will bring. As it is, my life at present is quite boring and cold. 

It is what it is, and it is the way that it is, because it is necessary. Again, I tolerate winter, I get through it, I do not frolic or revel in it.

I will take these silly markers as progress in order to keep me motivated and on track. 

As I said before, I have frozen my tuchus off to pay the banks back their pound of flesh, so I will freeze my tuchus off to build my future.

As always: Keep your head up, your attitude positive, and keep moving forward!

Valentine’s Day . . . Again.

Oh joy, it is that day we celebrate love . . . again. I was going to make a blog entry about love and what I want . . . but my feelings have not changed since last year.

Last Year’s Valentine’s Day Blog Entry

I am in a better place, but I am still in frugal mode, so I am not really in a mindset to date. Yet, I am still open to the possibilities, yet I am not holding my breath.

Again, once I start the Homesteading Phase, and have actually moved onto the land or otherwise I am in some sort of fixed address, sure, I will start looking in earnest. 

As far as how things are now? My focus is on living as cheaply as I can, so I can get out of this phase of my life and on into the next one . . . that aforementioned “Homesteading Phase.”

You know, that part of my life when I actually move onto the land and try to make that patch of raw land: a home, a farm and a town.

As for now I will work on me and just be okay with that, be okay with being alone. I would love to have someone in my life, but I will not change my lifestyle to suit anyone.

That is to say, I will make her comfortable, but I will not move into an apartment or other fixed address, just to make her happy, my life is focussed on savings so I can build for my future. 

As always: Keep your head up, your attitude positive, and keep moving forward!

Breaking With The Bad

I find myself getting worked up over stuff that has no impact on my life, and worse still things that I cannot influence at any rate.

I have a habit, or had a habit rather, that found me checking both a certain social media site and various news sites regularly, throughout the day. 

On one hand, it is good to keep up on things, but on the other, sometimes all they can do is serve to aggravate you. In so doing, that can and will negatively impact your life.

I still hear the news in small bits on the radio, and that’s fine. I am still working on me not yelling back at the radio my opinion.

As far as that certain social media site (or all of them for that matter) I find that just scrolling through it will invariably find numerous things to aggravate me. 

I have realized that many people will have many opinions about many things. Not everyone has to agree with me, and that’s okay. 

I just need to get through this world in the best way I know how and let others do the same. I don’t need to make sure that all people think and speak like I do.

All I ask is that we all “play well with others.”

So, I am seriously reducing the time I spend checking the news and social media. I see little point in aggravating myself for no good reason.

Even in the one day that I have been doing this I have noticed a huge improvement in my overall mood. 

As always: Keep your head up, your attitude positive, and keep moving forward!

I Swiffered My Ceiling

So, there I was, having one of those “why am I doing this?” moments. The weather warmed up to around freezing on Saturday. 

This meant that all of the ice and frost inside the trailer (which had built up on every surface) started to melt. So the dripping started. 

This led me to start to wipe down the ceiling to gather up the water. The rag was frozen long before I finished.

Then, I had to finish the job of removing the water and ice by using my Swiffer to scrub the frost off of the ceiling. 

It was a bit odd but it was needed to be done. 

The other thing that I did this weekend was to do my laundry . . . and organize my clothes storage. 

You see, I have one large overhead cupboard that I use for my clothes storage. It is literally one large rectangular space with two doors in it. 

While it may be okay for those of you whose houses do not move around, it doesn’t work for me. 

Why? Well, what starts out as neat piles in there quickly get knocked over and strewn about after me driving my house down the road. 

So, I came up with this . . . 

   

Those are clear containers that I can just about get in and out of there by lifting them up and angling them in and out. 

I am able to fit eight containers in there with a bit of space behind the containers and above them as well. 

This way my stuff stays where I put them and I can clearly see what I have. This may seem a bit too “retentive” but I don’t have a chest of drawers.

That little plastic bag tucked in the back there is my bag of lonely socks. 

Those are good socks made lonely by the fact that their partner sock wore out and had to be thrown out. 

They are waiting for another sock to be made lonely so they can be a good new pair. My way of reducing waste. 

Always: Keep your head up, your attitude positive, and keep moving forward!