Wednesday, April 28, 2021
We have located and packed everything that is going to long term storage (the back of "Papa Bear"). Now we are ready to set up the cargo in the Van. We have all the tubs identified. We are identifying items for "resupply" to go to "Mama Bear." 

We are camping in our house now. It's a bit tricky. I have been removing items from daily life to get us closer to camping (and also to pack up, obviously) and it feels like a game of musical chairs - while the music is playing I remove one chair (the microwave! the graduated bowls with lids! All the other utensils . . . ). Tried to reheat leftovers for lunch today - ended up baking them on foil in the oven. It was about 90 at the time. Such is life - a moving experience.

So Thursday is "Van Day" where we practice filling all the tubs that get to go camping. Everything else is Resupply or NYCC, theoretically. Friday we will be moving to storage everything that is not going camping (some exceptions may apply) and Saturday we move some things to Rocky's, which will be our residence of record. We will be there for a couple days every couple weeks, according to our plan, until the end of October. 
We seem to be having success following our plan and Roxanne and her lovely boyfriend and his relatives are pitching in to do the heavy lifting. I am grateful. Life is good.
​
~ Dr. P-J

Goals:
Simply my life
Make time for writing and other art
Get healthier (more active, better diet)
Learn how to live with the disability of aging
Help Mike reach his personal  goals​
Answer:
Camping

You can learn a lot about a child if you let her choose her own Halloween costume. Aspiration dreams manifest.

My first free-will choice was a gypsy. From the dress-up box I took a beautiful full-circle skirt, black with a design of gold swirling lines, the waist two-times too large for me. Mother helped fix it up with a belt and supplied the rest of the adornments, but the skirt was all. Gypsy girls dance and live in a gypsy caravan in the woods. Gypsy girls read palms and tell fortunes with Tarot cards.

​Mike's choice was a hobo. He got to wear old clothes and his mother dotted an unshaven beard onto his face with an eyebrow pencil. He had a bandana (filled with clean socks? A candy bar? One wonders) tied to the end of the stick. A hobo lives on the road, traveling from place to place, doing odd jobs for strangers, never staying in one place to long. He is not required to bathe.

Saturday, 4/17/21
About two weeks out until May 4th. Some plans have changed. We are not going back to camp at the test site. We learned enough and we will not face the challenge of having no water near our campsite going forward. Also -  the amount of setup required is too much for a two or three night stay - and then to come home and unpack the whole thing so we can get back to moving our stuff to: Rocky's place, one of the three storage units, Good Will, or "the dump" - all in all we decided to cancel our planned three day trip and focus on getting out of here. 
I learned "the best way to pack hangers" on the internet. Talk about easy and fast. Things I wish I had known yesterday, or shall we say over 40 years ago when Mr. Jensen and I first started moving about . . . 5 places in Santa Cruz, one place in San Francisco, another place in Santa Cruz, a place in Scotts Valley, then a house we owned in Santa Cruz, then an apartment there. Then an apartment in Anaheim, a house in Orange, two houses in Lake Elsinore, then out of California to Colorado, his parents basement in Cherry Creek area, a house in Englewood, and then a house back in Cherry Creek area, then back to California to a house in Orange, a house in Chico, an apartment in Chico, then to Oregon, two apartments and a house, and finally to here, in Fredericksburg Virginia. And all that time, I did not know that there is an easy way to pack hangers, using rubber bands. (See photos for details.)
We got a screen porch (no floor) so we can cook in peace. We got a couple more of those cool Coleman tables that come out of a sack in four pieces and go together easily an make a sturdy little table. We got a boatload of "Off!" 
We have a complicated packing plan, since we are preparing for several different scenarios. In scenario one, we weary of camping and give up at the end of October - moving to a small apartment or something. Everything comes out of the warehouses.
Another scenario is the NYCC (New York City Configuration) in which we come in just for the winter, staying in a small cheap apartment for a few months. Then we only retrieve things we have identified for the NYCC - not much. One time, when we lived in Colorado, we spent a summer in Agora Hills, California, in an "executive furnished apartment" that had exactly four every thing you need to set the table, minimal cooking pans and utensils. When everything was dirty there was not enough to justify running the dishwasher. And that worked out just fine. I spent every day at the apartment pool with the girls, Mike worked his brains out all day every day, and in the end, the client ripped him off for the whole bill. Took the work and lied. But let's not go any further down that rabbit hole. The point is that 2 glasses are enough. Wash them if you need a fresh glass. So the NYCC is simple and easy to pack and unpack (in my dream scenario.) Why NYCC? We dream of spending our waning years in a studio apartment in Manhattan. Libby had a great studio apartment in the West Village. How jealous I was of that apartment. Now she lives in Brooklyn with Taylor-Rey. They are married (and changed their last names from Rivera and Jensen to J'Vera). They are expecting River Jacques J'Vera in October. Please note the middle name!
Our favorite scenario is to just keep camping. We think it will make us stronger and healthier. We are building dendrites as we negotiate this new terrain. I am 70 years old now, and Mike will catch up with me in October. We can see how easy it is to settle in and do less. Dick Van Dyke says "If you want to keep moving around, keep moving around." It's really that simple. We want to keep moving around.
So in order to organize for our complex future scenarios, we have three storage units, Papa Bear, Baby Bear, and Mama Bear. The back of Papa Bear is long term storage - things we hope we won't need soon. In front of that is NYCC. Baby Bear is a very nice (small) space for computers, art, and books. Mama Bear was bargain basement special - so cheap Mike grabbed it sight unseen - and wow what a lousy space. LOL. It was originally three spaces the width of a regular door, with the walls torn down between them. It has a trench on the back side and on the right - about 1 foot deep and 1 foot across - that makes that section of the unit unusable, particularly because when it rains - there is standing water in there. I would assume mice and other wildlife can get in there too . . . so this is JUST our speed. Something cheap that no one else wants. We put up some shelves left over from some previous incarnation of our lives and are setting it up to be "resupply" for camping - food, clothes, etc. All of it has to be packed in water tight conditions, so I wrap the contents or the box itself in plastic. No cardboard boxes in Mama Bear. 
​Life is good! I'm going camping!

Well . . . it is really Day 2. Went to bed dog tired. Managed to get the laptop out of its location in the crammed-to-the-brim van and get it into the tent.
So on to Day 2.