Boyinks4Adventure

Begins by purging records.

One problem that comes from both having a basement and ready access to low-cost file storage (W. MI being home to 3 major office furniture companies) is that we’ve kept records.

A lot of records.

College transcripts and papers.  Check stubs from jobs so old the companies haven’t been around for 10 years.  Receipts for stuff I hardly remember buying.

It’s just been easier to store it out of the way down in the basement than deal with it.

However - with deciding to take our trip we want to leave as little stuff in the house as possible while we’re gone - especially potentially sensitive records.  So - tonight we began the long and tedious process of purging the paper.  While at first I thought we would shred it all ourselves, 5 minutes into the job our little lightweight paper shredder decided it’d had quite enough, thank you - so next week I’ll look into dropping off our purged pile at a shredding service.

In the meantime, my kids are having fun reading my attempts at fiction and poetry back in college….

Thought this would be good to keep in mind when looking at the costs of campsites.

While working on end of year financials, I calculated that we spend an average of $206 per month for utilities (electric, water/sewer, gas, garbage). 

This works out to about $6.75 per day (using a 30 day month).

This just came up on Twitter - http://www.backblaze.com/ is a solution for online/remote backups.  I was going to look into this at some point - while I plan to outfit the RV with multiple computers and mirrored drives I also wanted a way to backup remotely.  While my current approach is fine while we are stationary, putting all our eggs into a basket on wheels doesn’t make as much sense.

In our family discussions about the trip the topic of purging & reducing has come up often - especially since we are in the Christmas season when so much new stuff comes into the house.  It’s understandably hard for kids to conceive of not only giving up their own private rooms but also many of their possessions.

At the same time - I’ve been looking at my own “toys” and trying to figure out where they figure in this whole equation.  Today finally I made a decision that I’ve been bumping into for weeks now.

MsBoyink and the kids worked on purging books today - being homeschoolers and all of us readers we had quite a collection going in the basement.  There are now several boxes in the back of the car waiting to get dropped off at a resale shop. 

And the books prompted a larger discussion: what to do with all of our stuff.