Marsia's Diary

Hi Cate and LaMa! Sorry I was out of commission a few days. Caught a bad cold. It definitely isn't Covid, as K's wonderful school provided Covid tests for anyone who wants them before school opened again. They are impossible to get by us plebeians, so I was very grateful. We started looking for an rv (camper) yesterday, and we found something unexpected. The rv we love the most is on back order for 3 years if you order new, but we didn't think to look at a similar model that has been discontinued, and we found one locally by complete luck. The salesman says they are like unicorns they are so rare. So we bought our rv yesterday and can pick it up in a week. We have a friend with a similar model, so he helped us with what to check for and ask. It's 25 foot long (7 1/2 meters), so it's a little longer than those small camper vans that are so popular now. It's really easy to drive and the body is a one piece fiberglass shell, so it's very quiet and nice. And it has hardly been driven, so it's almost new. It even has a shower and toilet and 2 beds that turn into either a sofa or a dinette. So we are already going to start our adventures! It took 5.5 hours to pick out as we looked at every other possible competitor in great detail, so definitely got our steps in yesterday.

I've been doing yoga with K about 3-4 times a week, and we are doing neck exercises every day. It feels so good to be getting flexible again and we'd been taking sunset walks at the beach a lot until we caught this cold. It's very chilly outside lately, but I do want to get into the garden and organize. The raised beds S will get are those galvanized feed troughs, so I don't need to do any work. She hires a "gardener" who is good at doing the heavy lifting stuff, but who really doesn't know much about plants. So I do want to do a lot in the garden to contribute to my plants doing well in the new yard, but I won't go overboard.

I bought guide books on the states we're planning to visit while searching for our new house - the Carolinas and Georgia. I am really excited about traveling and love planning trips so much. I am so looking forward to exploring a new part of the country in our new rv! I also want to buy a national parks pass and just start visiting the ones we haven't seen yet on our coast so we see as much of our area as we can before we leave in a few years. Ok, time to start the day!
 
Sorry I was out of commission a few days. Caught a bad cold.
I hope you´re all well again right now - never worry about leaving for a couple of days when life is hectic.
we found one locally by complete luck. The salesman says they are like unicorns they are so rare.
That´s amazing, congratulations! And to have it almost completely outfitted, too!
I am really excited about traveling and love planning trips so much.
I love going on trips but hate planning for them. Great to hear you enjoy both: looking forward to hearing about your adventures.
 
That sucks about having such a bad cold, but I'm glad you don't have covid. That is really exciting about buying your RV, M. It sounds wonderful! I can't wait to hear about your adventures. It sounds like you will be able to care for your plants while you're there, but that you won't be there for that long anyway. Big adventures coming your way & a new life :)
 
Thanks Cate and LaMa! We are super excited about the new rv. It's good to have a week before our class at the dealership to learn how to work all the parts, so we can research everything and make a good list of questions. I feel like we are already starting the adventure part of life now. Just having the time to go pick out an rv is such a luxury. And being able to slowly unpack and read and research and plan has been so wonderful.

I am almost well now - it's one of those cold/flu things that won't go away, so I am taking it easy. K has the bad part now, so it's good that they have zoom options for her school so she can stay home. I've been making so much nice food because I have all kinds of time to cook. I just experimented and made home made oat milk because J likes a certain brand that is really creamy, so I am trying to replicate it. The little fridge is stuffed with Korean yam noodle chicken and seafood dish, Kare Kare - a peanut butter oxtail Filipino dish, a marinated thinly sliced steak dish with onions and garlic sauce, all kinds of yummy veggies ... It's just wonderful to have time to cook again.

S's raised beds were delivered today. I hope we get to help put them together. Also I got a bench for the entry where you can sit and take off shoes that is like a chest of drawers where you lift up the seat to get inside. That will get a hole in the side for a cat to go in to have a contained litter box that will be out of the way and as far away from living space as possible. I think I am getting the hang of shoe box living. Our space is 4x smaller than our part of the old house, and 8x smaller than the whole old house if you include my mom's part. Plus we had a 2 car garage and huge barn. I think we could live in a tiny house with a big barn where I could have an art studio when we get our retirement home!

Anyway, didn't weigh today, but did gain back 3 pounds from having to eat a ton of fruit and smoothies with juice in them. I can now cut out juice and get back to losing weight.
 
K has the bad part now, so it's good that they have zoom options for her school so she can stay home.
I wonder if in the future kids will need two sick notes: one to excuse them from physical presence so they don't infect others and one to excuse them from watching/listening in online if they're too sick to concentrate. The world is changing in unexpected ways.
It's just wonderful to have time to cook again.
And your food sounds delicious! I wish I didn't have my stupid allergies so I could experiment more.
 
I'm so glad that you are loving cooking again & planning fun times. Living in a compact space will really help you pare down even more. I have looked around my house to prepare myself for the day we move & there are not so many things that I couldn't live without. It's quite a good feeling really. I continue decluttering. I am learning a valuable lesson from your mother, you & G's siblings. It will be daunting when the time comes to sell, without having to deal with all the stuff we really don't need. I did another car load yesterday.
 
I wonder if in the future kids will need two sick notes: one to excuse them from physical presence so they don't infect others and one to excuse them from watching/listening in online if they're too sick to concentrate. The world is changing in unexpected ways.
Funny, I was just wondering about that. I just hope with all my might that this virus behaves like many other viruses and soon becomes a mild seasonal flu. I am so relieved that Omicron is less severe symptoms generally than Delta.
And your food sounds delicious! I wish I didn't have my stupid allergies so I could experiment more.
Thanks! I really wish so, too!
I'm so glad that you are loving cooking again & planning fun times. Living in a compact space will really help you pare down even more. I have looked around my house to prepare myself for the day we move & there are not so many things that I couldn't live without. It's quite a good feeling really. I continue decluttering. I am learning a valuable lesson from your mother, you & G's siblings. It will be daunting when the time comes to sell, without having to deal with all the stuff we really don't need. I did another car load yesterday.
Wow, congratulations on so much decluttering! I am actually putting some things back in boxes for storage because we don't need as much as I packed for here, and I plan to give a lot more away once we settle permanently somewhere. It does feel wonderful to get rid of all that stuff that is such a time sink to take care of. That's wonderful my experience helped you, too!

We got one of the raised beds together and it is really nice and big and very well made. And it was fun doing a gardening project with S. Today was a shopping and paperwork day. I picked up some local documentation at city hall and am now trying to figure out how to get paperwork to a closed (due to Covid) federal government office. The instructions online are goblety-gook.

Now that I am feeling better, I am going to get back on track. I got a lot of salad fixings for the week and will make lots of home made dressings. Cate, I made your Tzatziki sauce you posted with the veggie burger recipe with fresh fennel in it, and it was wonderful!
I need to get a lot more aerobic exercise, and think I'll start taking walks without waiting to see if K can come or not. Yoga tonight definitely. I am a lot stronger than I used to be, but also a lot less in shape. Time to change that!
 
Cate, I made your Tzatziki sauce you posted with the veggie burger recipe with fresh fennel in it, and it was wonderful!
That’s serendipity. We just had the veggie burgers & Tzatziki sauce for lunch.
I decided to have day off decluttering & am about to read a book.
 
That’s serendipity. We just had the veggie burgers & Tzatziki sauce for lunch.
I decided to have day off decluttering & am about to read a book.
Happy reading! And I forgot to mention that we had a mushroom and cheese omelet for breakfast. Great stomachs think alike!
 
G is reading a book I read last week & he just said "You know the writer, who's running the classes? She just had a mushroom & cheese omelette". We try to read detective/mystery books somewhere between corny & horror. It's a fine line sometimes. I want to enjoy a book & I do love a good twist.
How high are the garden beds, M?
 
Wow, funny about the author of your novel with the mushroom omelette, too! We hardly ever make mushroom and cheese omelettes, so that's extra good serendipity. I used to read Native American detective stories with my Grandma, so I know what you mean. The garden beds are 32" high (.8 meters) so they'll be really big and nice.

Today I went over to the old house and went over all the house manuals and house plans, walked the gardens and showed them the flowers and fruit trees, and walked down to the stream with them and showed them how to scale the tributary waterfall to get to the stream which is in a deep gully with fallen redwoods as massive bridges going across. It was wonderful seeing all my flowers come up in the beds again and see how much the new people love the house. It was so warm when I went there, I didn't bring a sweater, but then talked for 4 hours until it got cold, so zipped home and got warm again. Made nice corned beef and cabbage and new potatoes. Everyone liked how some of the new potatoes were dark purple all the way through - nice variety.

We had a pretty relaxing day today. Just looked online at a gorgeous pristine area of the North Carolina coast with a lot of inexpensive land for sale on rivers that lead out into the ocean. The areas tend to get bad storms, but there are these cylindrical homes we are researching that are built to withstand hurricanes and storm surges. The scenery where we are looking looks like wild, pristine places from 50 years ago when I was a kid and we'd go canoeing through untouched lakes with lots of marshlands full of all sorts of birds and water foul. And J has a friend who is amazing at investing in real estate, so he talked to him and recorded the conversation for me. We are having a good time thinking about how to make a living once J retires as there is no pension for independent contractors, so we'll need another stream of income coming in. So we were dreaming and scheming today. I am helping with homework now, so will visit diaries later if I can stay awake a while longer!

Forgot to say I've been doing Duolingo Spanish for a few weeks now. I really like it!
 
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Sounds like you had a wonderful visit to the old house: it must be so comforting to know you´re leaving it in good hands. Being free to choose a completely new area to settle down in sounds exhilarating - and kind of terrifying.
 
The garden beds are 32" high (.8 meters) so they'll be really big and nice.
They sound perfect. I wish we had made ours higher.
That sounds like a lovely day spent at your old home. I would be afraid to see any changes made to ours down the track, so probably wouldn't want to see it again.
So we were dreaming and scheming today
This whole experience does seem to have brought you closer together :beating:
Forgot to say I've been doing Duolingo Spanish for a few weeks now. I really like it!
I have tried Duolingo Italian & French & abandoned both after a short while. I love the sound of Italian much more but am much better at French. Maybe I should try Spanish, just to keep my brain challenged. I would never get to use it here though.
Hope you have a great night's sleep, M.
 
Sounds like you had a wonderful visit to the old house: it must be so comforting to know you´re leaving it in good hands. Being free to choose a completely new area to settle down in sounds exhilarating - and kind of terrifying.
It actually helps me feel good about moving seeing the new happy family in our old house. The new owner is so nice and we plan to rv camp together, so I'll probably see more of our house in the future.

I feel happy about going on new adventures seeing parts of the US I've never been to. I figure if we don't like where we move to next, we now have enough money to move to another place we do love. It's so good not having everything tied up into a money pit house, I can't tell you what a relief that is. Also I research a lot, and we plan to move to a place that is diverse so we know that people are used to people from all different cultures, especially because Californians are sometimes thought of as too different in very conservative places in the US. And we're all very stereotypically Californian, so have to move where people won't think of us as fruitcakes!
This whole experience does seem to have brought you closer together :beating:
Yes, I am so pleasantly surprised by how much we've grown closer. I think both of us changed for the better from all of the intense change.
I have tried Duolingo Italian & French & abandoned both after a short while. I love the sound of Italian much more but am much better at French. Maybe I should try Spanish, just to keep my brain challenged. I would never get to use it here though.
Hope you have a great night's sleep, M.
I love Italian, and would really love studying that, but so many affordable countries where it is easy to gain citizenship are Spanish speaking countries, so I don't mind studying Spanish if it means moving somewhere really interesting some day. I like Duolingo because listening to a language with no written word to follow just overwhelms my brain, and it shuts down. Seeing the words as they are spoken really helps me immeasurably.

So yesterday I was going to be so productive and get so much unpacked, but I was so tired, I took a nap after breakfast and slept until noon, even through J on a speaker-phone call to a client. We did manage to cut a hole in the side of a bench to make a hidden cat litter compartment that doubles as a bench for the entry. It was K's first time using a jig saw, and she did great. I am passing my love of power tools down to her. It's kinda fun figuring out tiny house living and making furniture do double duty.

We got up early and did a little yoga before breakfast, which I would like to make a habit. The house is starting to really come together and I am getting so I like it here. It very much helps that I get to garden. Tomorrow is our class at the rv dealership where we get to learn all about our new rig. I have been looking up all the features of our rv, and we really lucked out at how many nice features it has that I didn't even know about - things like supports that keep the rv from swaying when we are parked. We'll probably take the rv out for a quick away trip at some point on the 3 day weekend and test out what we learned.

I was soo snacky today but mostly ate really good for me stuff. Tomorrow is the start of intensive salad days - time to get seriously back on track!
 
The only Californians I have met I have loved. We have great friends here who used to (pre-covid) spend 6 months in California & the other six months here in Tasmania. They spent most of their time working at music festivals. She is a pocket rocket. They lost their house over there last year in the fires. They are such positive people.
I love that you are forming a real friendship with the woman who has bought your home & I am really glad that you're settling in well to the place you're in now. I think you'll adjust wherever you go as a weight has been lifted from your shoulders. Life should be enjoyable.
I like the way Duolingo works too. I'll give it another go.
 
Wonderful to see that you're settling into the shoe box so well. Please keep us up to date with the rv adventures! Taking it out to test your new skills would be the best way to fix them in your mind.
 
Hi Cate and LaMa! Cate, your CA friend sounds really fun! Sorry to hear about her losing her house to fire. I can't begin to imagine. It's so nice having a friend in our old house. We really lucked out on that one! I am thinking about finding some free children's stories in Spanish on the internet to augment the Duolingo. I like translating really simple stories and trying to write my own.

The shoe box is coming along slowly, LaMa. We are trying to do so much we're a bit scattered at the moment, but a lot of it is fun stuff. I'll definitely post about our adventures in the rv!

So I stepped on the scales today with trepidation because the scales were suddenly way up the other day. Well now they are all the way back up to where I started, so time to haul out the measuring cup and start counting calories again. Darn. I can't buy healthy snacks for J right now - I snack on them all day if I do.

The orientation went well today looking at all the systems on the rv. They filled our propane up for us and in the process turned off the fridge, so J and K are out in the rv trying to figure out how to turn it back on now. When we got home, we bought lightweight plates and bowls for the rv this afternoon and some practical things like a folding dish rack. Got them at the discount store, so I am happy about the price tag and how nice the things we got look. I'm packing up for our maiden voyage now. Wish us luck!
 
Pretty sure new vessels need to be named before their maiden voyage or it's terrible bad luck - might as well eat porpoise for breakfast every day. Enjoy your trip!
 
Thanks LaMa and Cate. We are sitting at a gorgeous cafe down south now. We are in an outdoor courtyard half way between the fountain and the fireplace having a Middle Eastern plate and Matcha tea for breakfast. Spent the first night in a lovely place with a huge eucalyptus grove on both sides of us after seeing the most beautiful sunset off the coast high up on cliffs. We can't figure out some of the van features, so we're roughing it just eating salads and sandwhiches for now. Having a working fridge is so wonderful! Everything has gone so well so far, we even got our breakfast for free this morning because the order got dropped. We are naming our rv Serendipity because she is a rare unicorn who we happened to find by happy chance. And we did name her before the trip! Ok, off to breakfast, will check diaries when we get back. Hope you all are doing great!!
 
Serendipity is a great name! Might the internet offer instruction videos for some of the stuff that's giving you trouble? Your trip sounds magical so far!
 
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