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travelaround said:

A love of solitude is a great strength to have. I also love my alone time. I get much more done, have peace of mind, and it just feels freeing. Then occasional social contacts are precious and memorable instead of stressful.

The Klamath River Valley has turned cold, but will get colder still before long. Right now our days vary between cold and hot with not too much of either.

I'm going to make another attempt at van rearrangement... this time with the intent to create an art studio space for myself and my granddaughter this winter. I'm now her art teacher and if I can get this done, I could include my grandson, though he doesn't know it yet. I do know for certain I don't want the art classes in my trailer... so the van looks like the perfect place.

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Art time with kids is soooo much fun! My favorite time at work is always involving art.

I agree about the lone time. Sometimes being alone is less lonely. TA... you have some lucky grandkids. I tried once to download a picture my granddaughter painted on a chunk of wood. Unbelievable I think for a fourteen yr old. I’ll send her your way... haha! Quite the plan... You are very wise. And Maki2, you also really are wise about it all also. There are a ton of van or whatever lifers I question should be out there. Sure it’s all what Bob W says it is... but many don’t have the means, the love of the land... and all it takes. I see women doing the better job of it in a lot of ways.
But I’m thinking about Linda deciding to hang tight where she is... only, I don’t know what winters are like there. But it’s better then the -30 degree crap I plan on dodging. Friday I find out my options... I won’t stick around to long. And if he mentions surgery as being months away I’m outta here!

The one tank of gas lasting all summer is very doable ….when you have friends and family willing to go to those distant grocery stores and add your shopping list to theirs. Even in Van life we do a bit of that kind of sensible shopping when camped with others.

This last couple of weeks I was hauling some 1 gallon jugs of water back to camp for my friend as I need to go into town more often to drop mail into the system. But as I am camped reasonably close to a mailbox, under 2 miles, I am not burning up much fuel in my 4 cylinder vehicle.

My gas conservation strategy is to go into HC only once a week for errands (including picking up mail as we have no street delivery here). I don't ask my daughter to pick up things for me from Yreka. Instead I shop online and have packages delivered via Fed Ex and UPS.

I'm still recovering from the plantar fasciitis. If it were not for my foot pain issue, I'd walk into town for mail and groceries, bringing things home in a back pack. Town is less than a mile from here via walking path. (Slightly more via van.) So it isn't far. I think if I lived six miles out, the gas wouldn't have lasted all summer. I hope by next summer I can walk again. Right now I'm at the point where it doesn't hurt to walk, but if I walk a lot, it will get worse and be painful again. ::sigh:: . . . . it just takes so long to get over this.

I'm about to spend another $100 on gasoline, and will continue to conserve and stay home.

@NctryBen - Winter here is better than what I experienced in North Idaho. One big difference is that when it snows here it doesn't take long before roads are cleared off. In Idaho the snow remained on the roadways (many of them) and would freeze and be driven on creating ice. In front of my apartment building I saw cars stuck to the ice, cars spinning around, etc. ... and since I was walking I fell a few times thanks to ice... and had to learn to be very careful about that. Here, same problems with snow, but there's less of it usually and roads are safer.

It is now time for the evening, slow parade of vehicles looking for a roosting spot. They wait until the sun is going down. All the spaces close to the main road with obvious easy access are long gone by then.

Yesterday a young woman walked into my camp
Asking if that was my folding chair sitting in the side road entrance into my site. She was in a rental van. Not yet of enough camping experience to understand what a chair means when set out as an this site is occupied indicator. But that is true of a lot of the National park visitors who rent vehicles as well as camping equipment. I guess I need a sign post saying “occupied site” sign made with reflective letters. As I do have a vinyl cutter my only excuse for not having such a sign is that I have been too lazy to order the reflective vinyl material and use the software to make the cutting file.

Fortunately for the late arrivals there is another 30 miles of dispersed camping along this gravel road. But it sure is tough to see those spots at night in a Dark Sky designated zone.

Take the advice of then experienced full timers. Find your camping spot before 3 in the afternoon. In this particular situation next to a National Park. Around 10 in the morning, especially a Sunday morning is when the prime spots open up. They pack up, have breakfast and head home or out for the last morning of sightseeing in the park. It is a bit like fishing, you have to figure out what bait is attracting them and what time of day are they biting. The tent campers who are into hiking are the early risers and early morning out of camp into the park by sunrise group.

^^^That’s what happens when your rig looks too nice! Lol!!! Use that vinyl cutter to make a few fake bullet holes in the sign and for your rig, you won’t get many visitors!

Morgana said:

Well I learned a new vocabulary word today. A company I freelance for is revamping how they sort people who work for them into into freelance vs. staff status (important because you can get in trouble under tax and labor law if you don't do that right).

They referred to it as "bucketing." As in, "everybody has been bucketed now."

You'd think they'd realize what that rhymed with.

As a freelancer, I guess that puts me in the "bucket of expendables" I'll be fine in a minute.

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Freelancers can get immense freedom and vastly more pay that way, at least in the health care industry I'm in now. The truly pushed-down and expendable are the in-house staff, who get paid far less and are generally responsible for more ... and more beholden to the institution. Agency medical personnel can make twice as much as we do or more, and quit anytime with no worry or repercussion for their future income stream. So I guess everyone's story regarding full vs. part-time vs temp vs agency can vary tremendously. The expendables where I worked were pretty much kings of the roost.

bullfrog said:

^^^That’s what happens when your rig looks too nice! Lol!!! Use that vinyl cutter to make a few fake bullet holes in the sign and for your rig, you won’t get …

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I have started parking my tow vehicle pretty much crosswise at the entry. That will do until after 10pm when the food joints in the little town have shut down.

This afternoon I I will create a sign out of cardstock with black lettering and hang it on my chair back in the middle of short, straight entry drive section and see how that works tonight.

I did find on Amazon a nice looking aluminum sign with white reflective background and black lettering that says “campsite occupied”. So very polite and official looking. I can’t say anything too tempting to someone with sticky fingers such as “my campsite mates are Smith and Wesson”.

So the client I had to get all the fancy paperwork for (which took three days and several hundred dollars to set up)? They’re probably in the lifetime five worst ever. The project fee sounds good until it gets nibbled to death by high-maintenance ducks. Wrapping up a project is like trying to check out of the Hotel California (“oh btw here’s one more round of rush revisions”). The work itself is ick. And, this is weird, once they finished this big hiring push, they immediately launched a company reorg with one of the goals (yeah they said this out loud) to keep a higher % of the fees for HQ (don’t worry! we won’t pay you less! we’ll just work you harder! than we’re already working you, which is pretty much to the hilt!)

I really stepped in it this time. Live and learn! At least I made back the money I spent upfront, plus topped up the stash a little. Too bad there’s nothing you can do with a lightly used LLC

Anyway I’m sure we’ve all had jobs that svck, thanks for listening to me ’itch about mine. I’ll be glad when this is in the rear-view mirror. (Such a lovely place, such a lovely face, bwaaaaaaa)

Morgana, that is kinda what happened to me when I built chimneys and fireplaces. More my fault, but yeah, lots of add ons and unforeseen stuff all the time. I never really charged enough. At least you are letting go of it quicker... I did it for twenty five years before going to work for a friends company. They treated me like a king! But working in the cities was very tough. Then I got my job here I retired from. Or should I say jobs. I did the maintenance for our township and was a firefighter/ responder. And I hauled canoes/ kayaks/ rowing shells and the like coast to coast. Talk about Hotel California. I tried to quit the township to pursue being on the road hauling more. They would tear up my resignation letters and just say, oh you’ll find people to cover for ya. Haha! That job did get me through a tough time in my life. When my body gave out from all the hard work I wanted to just die. Still boils a guys blood when you could work like I did and now I’m a piece of crap!
Speaking of... today I get to see the surgeon. Having the cast on simulating having my wrist fused was a success. I had nights I slept almost pain free and through the night. It’s been years! So I’m praying I can get this behind me and outta here soon. With winter coming I’m grateful for a mild fall. The rain sucks... then I don’t sleep so hot. But having a few frosty nights has me appreciating the fact I can leave at some point. Kira’s Lymes is kicking in bad again. I’m putting her through another round of antibiotics. But we go west and you hardly know she’s got it.
Happy Friday everyone... I hope everyone is safe from fires, hurricanes and all that’s happening. Grateful for you people that help out others with little or no pay... you guys are the real saints. Especially pirate camp. I watched Doug do so many impossible projects with little or no thanks. Thank goodness for the people who are appreciative. They make it worth while. But some drive off with hardly a thanks. Off to wherever... maybe Mars. Haha. Bob Wells and them get a lot of recognition. Pirate camp takes up the slack with hardly a notice. That’s the kind of people that I respect the most. Makes me wanna tell the surgeon to cut off my hand and toss a hook on there. Fit right in at pirate camp! Haha

Arrrrgh

So my boss at Client from Hell (same person that recruited me) tends to give really lame, level-1 chat-bot type answers to almost any question I ask … so, I started to wonder “how much does she actually know about this stuff?” … so, I looked her up on LinkedIn and the answer is “not much” — 0 training, .05×pfft experience.

But wait! there’s more! she’s totally erased Client from Hell from her LinkedIn profile and she has another job!

So basically what I was told when I was recruited, about the company and the boss, was either false or about to be false.

Fun Spanish fact: the equivalent of “there’s something fishy” is “there’s a cat locked up in there” (hay gato encerrado) (Bill the Cat maybe in this case).

Meanwhile Boss from Hell is still somehow connected to Client from Hell and still managing us proles out here in the Bucket of Expendables. Somehow, in spite of the mandatory meetings and “you must reread the company manual” etc., they don’t feel a need to mention key facts like this.

Now she’s gone all sloppy on our paychecks.

Client from Hell only allows billing on the last day of the month, and they don’t let you bill till you get a sort of “you are allowed to bill this” memo. So I spent yesterday afternoon trying to chase down Boss from Hell and get the @#$&*# memo. It finally showed up after 7 pm. (This after I literally made myself ill this week meeting their ridiculous deadline for /my/ work.)

Boss blithely assured me that breaking company rules that way wouldn’t jeopardize my paycheck. But I had already reached out to the accountant who promised me a “grace period.”

Pffffffffffffffffffffft.

And here I was all starry-eyed thinking “yay! I’ve finally cracked the corporate code.” Fortunately only about 1/3 of my brain thought that and the other 2/3 said “make them prove it.”

I’m sure this will all seem funny in a year. Actually, it sorta seems funny already. Or will as soon as I get my mitts on that paycheck.

^^^Sounds like what you are doing isn’t much fun. Start looking for a job that you might not mind doing in a place that you really enjoy being at. You know somewhere at a beach, in the forest or maybe a big city but somewhere you can spend the majority of your time enjoying yourself and the rest at least where you are paid without conflict. When I was young there was a TV show about a guy wandering on a motorcycle which he loved to ride. When he got hard up for money he did all sorts of work like cleaning the mortar off old used bricks for a nickel a brick. Took him all day to get enough for a tank of gas but he didn’t care because he was where he wanted to be and tomorrow would be maybe better or maybe worse. Dream world right, but if you develop skills that pay anywhere you go or have skills then use them to get where you want to be. My seasonal job ended a month ago so I’ve been gone traveling but just got back to the area I worked in yesterday. Saw my former boss yesterday at the gas station and asked if she would rehire me next year driving shuttle. She replied “ You can wait tables at the restaurant tonight if you want.” She must be really short staffed to ask me! Lol!!! Anyway don’t loose site of why you work but work somewhere you are at least comfortable with the situation and people or head on out and find it, life is too short!

Bullfrog everything you say makes excellent sense but sadly is mostly stuff I already live by (no way you could know that, and everything you said = worth saying). I truly believed in what I do, and spent far too long thinking that the next job or client would be different. If I had it to do over again I'd pick welder or paramedic or anything outside the paper-pushers-from-hell realm, and I even hoped to chase a smaller version of that dream after (semi)retirement, but alas geezerhood is catching up with me physically.

Water, bridge. Now I try to do paycheck work as little as possible and be as picky as possible about what I take on. And thank God it IS a portable job (I work from home), so I can go to fun places (at least fun cheap places .

So yeah, this little episode is only one piece of life not the whole story thank God. I'm as much laughing as crying about what high hopes I had for it and how it blew up. How people can live this way I do not understand! But I suspect I'm taking them way too seriously.

PS thank you for listening!

bullfrog said:

^^^Sounds like what you are doing isn’t much fun. Start looking for a job that you might not mind doing in a place that you really enjoy being at. You know somewhere at a beach, in the forest or maybe a big city but somewhere you can spend the majority of your time enjoying yourself and the rest at least where you are paid without conflict. When I was young there was a TV show about a guy wandering on a motorcycle which he loved to ride. When he got hard up for money he did all sorts of work like cleaning the mortar off old used bricks for a nickel a brick. Took him all day to get enough for a tank of gas but he didn’t care because he was where he wanted to be and tomorrow would be maybe better or maybe worse. Dream world right, but if you develop skills that pay anywhere you go or have skills then use them to get where you want to be. My seasonal job ended a month ago so I’ve been gone traveling but just got back to the area I worked in yesterday. Saw my former boss yesterday at the gas station and asked if she would rehire me next year driving shuttle. She replied “ You can wait tables at the restaurant tonight if you want.” She must be really short staffed to ask me! Lol!!! Anyway don’t loose site of why you work but work somewhere you are at least comfortable with the situation and people or head on out and find it, life is too short!

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Excellent advice!

Nctryben, I still think about you and B & C’s kindness of threading in those rear spring helpers on my car. Despite pain in your hands and pain in Brian’s knees you two took on a job I did not have enough hand strength to do.

I have made good progress this last year with reducing my osteoarthritis, wear and tear, pain issues which is great news for my physical comfort in this lifestyle. Turning back the clock to a younger me is lovely. I much prefer to be lazy by choice rather than by necessity.

Still enjoying my solitude time. My Etsy seasonal holiday orders are starting to pick up a bit so I am spending more time on cutting kits. Summer really is over now. But I will soon be moving into warmer temperatures so I suppose endless summer will return for a while longer.

A very rainy day. The Seattle kind of rain that goes on for hours and hours without being a major heavy downpour. But it is unlike thatSeattle rain as it is it is from thunderstorm clouds. There are very few thunderstorms in Seattle.

Not going to be much solar input this morning. Not going to be very warm either so time to get on my layers of warm clothes. I will no doubt be wiping condensation off my window glass. I suspect I might need to get out my generator to put some amps into my house battery for the night time use after the rain stops later this afternoon. That would be the first time I have done that in 2022 as I have always before been at 100% battery by 9:00am, even on the overcast mornings in northern Arizona.

Sun will be shining tomorrow. That idea is cheering me up! I am not stuck in rainy Seattle for another 9 months.

maki2 said:

A very rainy day. The Seattle kind of rain that goes on for hours and hours without being a major heavy downpour. But it is unlike thatSeattle rain as it is it is from thunderstorm clouds. There are very few thunderstorms in Seattle.

Not going to be much solar input this morning. Not going to be very warm either so time to get on my layers of warm clothes. I will no doubt be wiping condensation off my window glass. I suspect I might need to get out my generator to put some amps into my house battery for the night time use after the rain stops later this afternoon. That would be the first time I have done that in 2022 as I have always before been at 100% battery by 9:00am, even on the overcast mornings in northern Arizona.

Sun will be shining tomorrow. That idea is cheering me up! I am not stuck in rainy Seattle for another 9 months.

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Seattle was 80 yesterday and expected to be warmer today. Also, we have been dry for 3 months.

well I do know the “dry for 3 months” in Seattle was very close to being true this year

I also know that overcast everyday for 3 months straight in Seattle was also pretty much true. I experienced that one winter and the news media was all over that story with a running total of how many days.