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!!

home for a bit

We've been in Nova Scotia for the Xmas holidays, and everyone has been asking us when we're moving back. For Christmas we received not one but two road atlases for North America, and fold-flat origami-ish dishes to take with us when we're on the road.

More exciting news - we'll have lots of furniture to look forward to when we finally move here. Mark's mom is going to be moving into her new husband's house when they've finished renovating it, and of course two complete sets of home furnishings are not going to fit into his little bungalow - especially since Deb's house is bigger than his to begin with and so could fit more stuff into it! So we'll likely pay her to store her extra stuff for us and grab it when we arrive (unless the new place is not renovated before we get back).

I'll have to make a decision soon about when to quit work. We'll look at our savings and decide if we're close enough yet that I can temp...but perhaps I'll have to work through one last tax season at the accounting firm if I can stand it. The money is better than temping would be, and really there's an end in sight. We'll see.

All of a sudden we can start making concrete preparations. Weird!!

Anyway.

Shameless Griping

What can we do except keep on working, keep on keepin’ on. Our time for change is so close I can taste it, but just far enough away that it’s sort of depressing to think about. I find myself letting little hints drop at work. I’ve printed pictures of cactuses and sombreros on my “in and out” sheet at reception, and I do my Spanish class homework in the office kitchen during my lunch hours. And yesterday, when I got some petty cash for some supplies from James, I jokingly told him “now that I have this thirty dollars, I’m going to run away to Mexico”, which is something I’ve always said, but now it’s sorta true and I felt funny after saying it.

I still don’t know when to quit – this part time schedule has completely screwed me up in terms of the savings plan. I think, if I can stand it, I’ll tell them in like February-ish that I’ll be gone on…hmm…May 11? It’s a Friday, and that gives them almost two weeks after tax season to deal with it. I just have to avoid quitting in the middle of tax season. I could, I suppose, quit very close to the ramp-up for tax season, and what would the consequences be? Not much I suppose, although (mostly just out of habit) I’d like to get a letter of reference outta this place when I go.

I guess it depends on the savings. If we're close enough before the start of tax season, I'll quit then and go temping whenever I feel like it. From looking at the calendar, and the level of tax work coming into the office last year, it looks like things start to ramp up in early March. I'd have to leave before things got busy, or else everyone will be mad at me, so if it's before tax season it'll probably be the end of February. The 28th is a Wednesday. It'll do (if the savings are there by then).

That's four months and one day away. The boss is on vacation most of next month (November), and then we have our vacation to Nova Scotia in December, so really there's just January to get through if I give a month's notice (which would be nice), because then I won't have to pretend to care or keep secrets in February after I give notice. Wowee. Then I'd have a relaxing spring, instead of stressing out of my skull during tax season and being expected to "give my all" for the company. Chumps.

It's just hard pretending to be a person that I'm not, and pretending to have career goals that are really completely opposite from my real goals. And I can't cheat and tell anybody here yet, so I have to act out this boring, irritating act week after week. I DID, however, accidentally tell our dog daycare that we take Arlo to, and both of my bosses also take their own dogs there. Woopsie. I asked them not to mention it to my bosses.

Argh. I know I'm a shameless whiner. Deal with it. I'll be annoyingly happy a year from now, and you'll have to deal with that too. This blog will be a communication tool when we go on our trip, but for now it's my therapy. Leave me alone about it, alright??

Hee hee.

we keep on truckin

Well, I'm not sure what Mark's "office science" posts have to do with our upcoming trip, however amusing they may be. OFF TOPIC! PENALTY!! Just kidding.

Just to make THIS post somewhat on-topic, I can say that I've acquired a new pair of perscription glasses that turn into sunglasses in the sun, and back to regular glasses indoors. Um...I guess it'll help when we're strolling around, lost, on some tiny street in some tiny village in rural Mexico.

Mark: "where are we?"

Julie: "I don't know, but man, that sun sure isn't getting in my eyes right now, thanks to my magic glasses!"

...okay, it's a bit of a stretch, I know. But I seriously did get these new magic glasses with the trip in mind. I'm too lazy to tote around those dorky clip-ons that go over my regular perscription glasses. Also, those things just look bad.

The trip is still a bit more than a year away. Man, I don't know if I can make it. But at least we'll be reaching some goals and enacting some lifestyle changes fairly soon into the new year. So...we're almost through October. November we'll just have to put our heads down and keep on truckin. December, we go to NS for Christmas. That'll be really nice. I'm excited about celebrating Christmas with Debbie and Harvey as a family. So I haven't decided if I'm going to quit my job in January/February or after tax season now, since they've cut my hours and that means that our savings schedule, and thus the date at which we would have our savings goal, is all wonky now. I'm leaving my options open for that. But really, soon things will be moving. After we achieve our savings goal, then the next little goal will be to acquire enough money to 'coast' on while we're still living here. As soon as we have enough for rent & living expenses until the departure date (over and above the base savings goal of course) we don't really have to work. It'll be fun.

That's all I got. I'll try to post again soon.

Office Science: Revisited

Score one for science. I have officially tested the coffee maker for it's skills at brewing me a pot of peppermint tea.

I brought the removable bits from the maker home and cleaned it thoroughly, which if you know me, is surprising enough in itself. So that was step one of the "experimental design".

After that, I ran through a blank pot, using just plain water. Smelling the resulting brew shed a small shadow over the whole process, since it was a little rank -- smelled like extremely stale coffee.

Down the drain the trial-run went, and next up was the real deal. This step of the experiment had great results. I ended up with a pot of decent-tasting peppermint tea. I'm not sure if a less fragrant tea would have worked well, but peppermint is pretty strong, so it was able to overwhelm the lingering coffee-smell.

Anyways, I highly recommend peppermint tea as a replacement for coffee at the office. It's still quite refreshing, and doesn't mess with your sleep cycle or your appetite.

Not only a victory for science, but killed at least 15 minutes of office-time.

15 down, 172,800 to go.

Edit: I'm taking Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday off, so make that 171,360. I think I can handle that.

The first step (of many)

So the first actual, concrete action has now officially taken place in regards to making our trip happen. We had our first Spanish class today! We'll be having them every Saturday morning for two hours until mid-December. Cool! The school said on their website that they often have indiginous speakers as language instructors so I was really really hoping beforehand that our teacher would be from Mexico. And she was! Her name is...this is so perfect...Maria. She seems very nice and has a cool accent. I think Mark had fun. There were only four people in our class so we all get lots of attention and have to participate lots. We have homework and everything! I never thought there'd come a time when the idea of homework inspired amusement instead of a feeling of resignation.

So that's the first step. It feels good to be able to actually do something - our date of departure still feels very far away. Ah well. We were at a picnic with some friends today and a new (but VERY cool) acquaintance, Robin, said she knew Spanish and was thinking about starting up a conversation group because she is going to Mexico in the new year. I hope she does that - it'll be very helpful for me & Mark.

I guess that's all for now. I'm hoping as we get to know our teacher better we'll be able to grill her about all things Mexican, including the sort of stuff that you just don't find in a book. I'll keep ya posted.

Something to think about

So I'm reading the archives at wherethehellismatt.com , and the dude is ruminating about his trip being nearly done, and starts talking about his cubicle life beforehand. He comes out with this:

"We all live in cages. We don't want to admit it, but a lot of us walk in there voluntarily, cause the stuff outside can be really scary. We have these reasons why we can't do stuff and they limit our options until we're forced into whatever's left. So we sit in there complaining about what we ended up with, and eventually we forget that there's no lock on the door."

Wow. Well said Matt. I found his website when I was looking for blogs about travelling. He's a very entertaining writer and it's just fun to read someone's site who has done something similar to what we are planning on doing. I guess it's not THAT similar - he took planes and stayed in hostels and hotels, and he travelled the world instead of just the one (possibly two) continents we plan on travelling. He also went a lot faster than we plan on going - he mentioned at one point having slept in six different countries six nights in a row.

Come to think of it, do you actually know what we plan on doing? Shall I tell you? Okay.

(drum roll...)

In February-ish 2008, we will be leaving Vancouver Island in our pickup truck with a cute little pickup camper (yet to be procured) on top. We will be heading south at a leisurely pace, and plan on stopping a few times on the way south to WWOOF. For those of you who don't know that term, it means we will be going to organic farms to do organic-y farm-y type work with the farmers. They, in turn, will feed us and give us a bed to sleep in. In this way we'll hopefully learn lots for when we buy our land in Nova Scotia. Buy what, where, you say? More on that later.

There are a few things we'd be interested in seeing on the western coast of the U.S., but we don't really plan on having a rigid travelling schedule, and we DON'T plan on doing a lot of mainstream tourist crap. Disneyworld? Hell no. Los Angeles? Hollywood? The Seattle Space Needle? Um, read about that stuff somewhere else. We want to drive on smaller roads and see the real things. We want to talk to people who haven't been paid to smile at 4 million tourists that day. Big cities are a no-no for the most part.

Anyway, the clever members of the audience will have already figured out that if you keep driving south, from Canada through the U.S., at a leisurely rate, you eventually end up driving south, at a leisurely rate, in MEXICO. Yay!! This is where we're going to take a well-needed break from WWOOFing and loafing around in the States, to settle in to Mexico in a few comfortable locations which have not been chosen in advance. What's the plan? Idunno. If we really really like a spot we might hang out there for a while, but if we feel like going on our merry way we might even make it into South America and all those countries down there. Who knows.

So after a month or so of that, we'll be driving, at a leisurely pace, north. North-east-ish, I guess. More WOOFing up the east coast, more avoidance of diabolical tourist traps (specifically, avoiding that other damned Disneyland or world or whichever that other one is in Seniorland...I mean, Florida).

Eventually, we'll land in Nova Scotia where we can have a big party with all our long-lost friends and relatives. The big land-hunt begins. It will hopefully end with a rural property, treed, with some farmable land and running water somewhere on it - and by running water I do not mean a kitchen sink. Although we'll need one of those eventually. I mean a stream, brook, river, anything that is fresh water and not standing still. We'll be building the most self-sufficient dwelling possible, complete with a grey water system, composting toilet, solar power and our own little version of hydro power (hence the running water need) and perhaps we'll build our dwelling out of cob. Who knows. We'll plant a big garden, find some extra cats, dogs, and probably chickens, and be poor and happy for the rest of our lives.

Got it? Good. That's the plan.

Coffee Maker Experiment Derailed!!!

Alas, I chickened out... one look at the grimy filter and gunk-encrusted pot was enough to make me abort the mission.

Next time I drive to work, I'll bring the important bits home and give them a good cleaning. Then, and only then, will the groundwork be laid for a proper experiment. Repeatable, verifiable, the whole shebang.

I guess I'll have to amuse myself at work some other way.