Wednesday, January 17, 2007

a year of preparations

Hey y'all!

Well, it's the new year - the year of preparation for us - and we're seemingly off to a fine start. Thanks to last year, which was the year of putting our heads down and doing nothing but saving money, our savings are on schedule. I'm staying at my accounting office job until after tax season is over. By that point we'll definitely have our base savings (the stuff to buy land, build, and live off of for a little while) and we'll be well into building up our "extra" savings (the stuff to live off of here, buy a camper to go on the truck, and cover expenses during the road trip).

Speaking of campers, we're planning on going to the mainland, to the boomtown of Abbotsford to be exact, in a couple of weeks to attend an RV show. I guess we'll have to dye our hair blue and buy some loafers and slacks - it'll be a blue-hair blast!! We are very much aware that we act like a couple of seventy-year olds at times, so just shaddup about it, k? We're going to the RV show so that we can learn a bit about campers, hopefully. There's also a section of the grounds at the show that will be devoted to private sales of campers & motorhomes, so we might even find our very own camper there.

So that's in early February, and in mid-February is a surfing trip to Tofino with all our friends! Yay!! Should be good times.

March/April will be pretty much a bust for me, due to tax season. Boo, work. But then I quit. Yay, freedom.

May to July or August Mark will probably stay at his job, and I will quit permanent work and start temping. There are some cob building workshops being put on in the Victoria area over the summer - we'll definitely attend at least one, but I'm not sure about dates yet.

We've decided to take a little road trip up north before we move away from BC. In maybe August we'll head...well, north. Not sure where. Mark seems to be excited about hitting the Queen Charlotte Islands. Me, I'd really like to go to the Yukon. Maybe even Alaska. We'll see!

After that, my parents mentioned that they want to come out and visit around September-ish. Since we moved last month, our new office is too small to double as a spare room and I'm not entirely certain we could fit the futon in while the computer desk is there. The futon is currently in the room that is our entry/den, and the dog is LOVING it. The futon has always been his favourite place to sleep, but before we moved the spare room was usually out of bounds with a foster cat or some other animal tucked away in there.

Since we've cleared all our moving boxes off the futon, Arlo's been there like ALL THE TIME. He doesn't even wander into our room at 6am any more to sleep on our bed with us. I say good luck to my parents trying to wrestle control of the futon away from him.

So where are we? That took us up to September-ish. By that point we will have started thinking about getting rid of our belongings. That's going to be a big job! Other than that there's not too much in the works for next winter. I think it would be a good time to work on some of our personal projects. Mark's got his guitar and mandolin to practice, and it would be nice if I could get some writing done then. Fun stuff, like that.

K, that's 2007 as it stands now.

Wiz-bang!!