Days Ten and Eleven

At home near Fort Worth, Texas...

This is really getting old. Yes, I know we have just begun, but the triage of our stuff is perhaps the worst part. We must literally have to look at every single thing we own, even if it's just a piece of paper, and decide what to do with it, knowing that, in many cases, we're probably making the wrong decision. Now that I think of it, only one disposal path of the three (keep-toss-give to the kids) is likely to be the wrong one: It's the things we keep. I know we are doing too much of this one, but we just don't have the stamina to do a deeper purge until the dust settles a bit.

We keep finding stuff from the past that should have made the last purge when we moved from the big house. Look at this old pressure cooker from 1976, smartly showing a popular color of that era:

We've never used it and didn't even know we had it, yet somehow it survived the last holocaust of our stuff. Who thought it was a good idea to have kept it this long?

Here's something else we've had that's been made obsolete by the Internet:

Does anyone not use online dictionaries now?

I was almost glad to take a break to do a little repair on Phannie's shore power cable. Phannie's electrical compartment is on the driver's side of the coach, which is the side nearest the edge of the RV port. The power cable runs along the outside perimeter of the slab, where it plugs into the Phannie's power cord.

Because of all the rain we've had, the receptacle had gotten wet and, since water and electricity don't like each other, the receptacle on the end of the shore power cord shorted out, looking like this when I took it apart:

The grabbers on the end of the hot leads were thoroughly welded to their wires, so I had to cut all of the burned wire lengths off and fit them into a new receptacle. This took a while, since the large-gauge wires were a little difficult to re-dress and snake them into position. I didn't mind, though, as it meant I wasn't having to make a thousand judgments about what to do with our stuff! The new receptacle worked fine after the repair was complete, and I probably saved a hundred bucks by salvaging the cable. From now on, the receptacle will have the protection of a plastic box to keep it dry.   

For those of you who haven't yet had the kind of fun we're having in preparation for fulltiming, although you intend to, we offer these observations:

1. If we had waited much longer to do this, we probably wouldn't have undertaken it. It seems the older we get, the more daunting such a thing becomes. And in the daunting department, our meter is pegged out right now. If you're going to do it, make it sooner, rather than later, if you can.

2. As we have gotten older, material possessions mean much less than they did when we were younger; family and friends become more important, and that makes it easier to let go of your things, including the house. A disinterest in possessions seems to be a common theme with most of our contemporaries so, since you know it's coming, why not start giving some of your excess to those who could use it? The sooner you do that, the more time you will have to make wise choices as to its disposition.

3. No matter how well a house is designed, it demands a lot of expense and a lot of attention--attention that takes away from the things we enjoy doing. We have reached a point where we come home merely because the upkeep of the house demands it, and that doesn't make much sense to us. 

We are going to take a couple of weeks' break from the purge and enjoy Christmas with the kids. The house will be on the market next week, and we'll continue purging and reporting on it after the holidays.

Thank you, Lord, for this wonderful life; please forgive me if I don't appreciate it enough each day.