We’ve gotten so caught up in our downsizing projects that it’s been difficult to remember how far we’ve come, and we’ve been so busy for so long that it’s been easy to lose perspective.
Though it frequently seems as though our non-stop downsizing is sucking the life out of us (yes, it’s been brutal lately), we are always pleasantly surprised when we do take a break, look back over the months and realize we’ve actually done something other than pack, sort, write ads, and deal with Craigslist.
In the late fall we took up swimming again in our pool and loved it. We are so going to miss our pool. We’re already missing our hot tub now that the weather is cooler.
For entertainment we spend an evening or two a week looking through Hulu for our favorite shows – we rediscovered Remington Steele from the 1980s – and of course we have our Castle episodes to watch.
Chelsea has been faithful about keeping up with Kindle Nation Daily, so much so that we now have about a hundred seventy unread books, all free, residing happily on our Kindles. She’ll keep going on that till we no longer have wireless or DSL connections. We hope to have an extensive backlog for when we begin riding.
We were excited to take out our warmer clothing again in November, but cold weather has pretty much stayed in the possibilities realm – we’ve been blessed instead with incredibly gorgeous weather for months on end, ranging from the high sixties at night to the low eighties during the day. Even in the dead of January we’ve been riding at five-thirty a.m. in sleeveless jerseys and our Louis Garneau compression shorts.
I have continued to make great progress on my writing of the brain injury book. I have the book outlined, I completed several interviews, collected data, transcribed the interviews, and spend a few long highly focused days sorting all my documents, printing them, and sorting them chronologically into binders. I have so much material that I need to be able to read it and weave the writing into one document rather than go from one document online to another. I’d never be able to keep it all straight!
I’m spending the rest of today and tomorrow doing the same tasks for my book on our time in the Czech Republic, along with notes for several other books in my lineup. What a relief it is to see these projects moving forward significantly, never mind seeing the “clutter” reduced.
Living in the city without a car
I can’t not mention how different it has been living without a car in urban South Florida. We don’t mind the bike riding, though South Florida drivers are legendary in their awfulness. We’re extremely careful and we’re experienced riders. No, that part is okay. What does get to us is finding safe and easy places to lock our bikes, then having to deal with taking everything off the bikes when we lock up to go inside.
Local stores are one thing, where often they’ll turn a blind eye and let us bring our bikes in if we are low-key about it. We can always strip our bikes before we leave home, figuring we’re only a mile or so away, or we can bring a backpack and load everything into the backpack while we go in.
However, we had occasion a few weeks ago to be in the County Courthouse up in West Palm. We couldn’t take our bike tools in with us, nor our phones, so we were totally frustrated. It was a quiet day, so after some discussion between them, the two guards took pity on us and kept our items for us. They were incredibly entertained that we would have ridden our bikes there.
Chelsea and I have entertained ourselves by thinking up wonderful ideas about how to solve these challenges, but we recognize that any real solutions are far in the future. Never mind the need for separate bike lanes and educated drivers, we’ll never get more people out on bikes if it’s so doggone hard to do simple errands.
Back at home, with no car ever in our driveway, combined with the required “for sale” sign we had on our lawn for some months, people apparently think we don’t live here, despite a highly visible notice clearly posted in the front window announcing that the house is currently owner-occupied/no trespassing.
The combination of the for-sale sign and no car led to some amazing incidents. One day we had a car pull up in the driveway. Two women got out of the car, walked around, and then attempted to get in the gate to our backyard! It was childish, I know, but I quickly lifted the curtain on a window overlooking the gate, opened the window suddenly, and called out loudly, “May I help you?” Watching them jump a foot in the air was very rewarding.
Another day I heard a car pull up but no one knocked on the door, so I got up to look out the blinds (I keep them partially opened for privacy). A guy was standing six inches away peering through the blinds at me! I don’t know which of us was more startled, but I’d guess he was, as he got back in his car at record speed and left. Maybe it was his guilty conscience.
One of my favorites was the AT&T guy who calmly pulled up in our driveway in his repair truck and disappeared across the street, after reading the sign in our window. We were expecting some folks to stop by to pick up furniture so we needed the driveway clear, but I thought, hey, no big deal, he’ll be right out. An hour later he appeared, sat in his truck a moment, then got out to head back across the street!
I hotfooted it out the door to catch him, asking him politely to move his truck. He actually had the nerve to be grumpy about it, so I couldn’t resist asking him if he saw the sign in the window. He admitted he had, and said, “Aww, I thought it was just one of those signs…” before his explanation faded out. I congratulated myself for not asking him, “What part of ‘owner-occupied/no trespassing’ do you not understand?”
Our least favorite story was the morning when Chelsea and I were laughing hard looking at something on my computer while listening to music. We heard a car, waited for someone to knock on the door, then headed out to the kitchen to see what was up. We saw a car backed up in the driveway, pulled all the way to within inches of my window, so we started out to talk to the woman standing near her trunk. When she saw us she leaped in her car, slammed the door, and left so fast we were surprised she hadn’t left rubber on the driveway.
We discovered the next day she’d stolen a beautiful pot right from under my window.
I’m happy to report that life has calmed down considerably since we got the for sale sign taken down.