Wednesday, January 21, 2009

To be… or not to be….. WARM!

So what is all this white stuff? I am told that, technically, it is called snow. However, if I learned anything in elementary school geography I learned that North Carolina is in the south and the only two white things that southerners have much of are cotton and dandruff.DSC00673

Surely this can’t be dandruff on Clifford, can it?!

DSC00663 Seriously, this has been a good test of DakotR’s weather resistance because even though the temperatures have made it into the mid teens outside, we have stayed cozy inside on two 1500 watt electric heaters    and an occasional burst from the two 40k btu LP gas furnaces. DSC00699I am sure that if I turned the electric heaters up just a bit more the furnaces DSC00700would not kick on at all but the furnaces are what keep the basement spaces heated so their use is more for caution than for comfort.

For reference, It’s 5:25am and I just checked and the outside temperature is 19.6 degrees right now with an expected high of 36 today.

Other than having to dump the accumulating snow off of the big awning before it could freeze into ice, we could be in Miami Beach.

On other fronts, Katie, the Poo, DSC00354 was dropped off Tuesday at the NC State Veterinary school hospital for her liver shunt surgery planned for Wednesday morning. She was excited to see these people, again. She gets so spoiled when she goes there that she turns her nose up at us once she returns home and it takes a few days before she stops pacing around looking for the copious handouts, treats and loving she gets from the student vets in training.

Another big step that was taken the past few days was in organizing Merrily’s sister’s apartment contents for disposal. She and Carol Ann spent the better part of two days over there along with Shawna (Randy’s wife). They got about 2/3rds of the contents catalogued and grouped for various destinations. Help from the church has already been engaged for the muscle and transportation when the time is right but we are still waiting to see what Geri’s stroke residuals will dictate in the way of accommodations, personal assistance and functionality after her rehabilitation is completed.

Shawna fixed baked Ziti for dinner in “the big house” for the 6 of us last evening. Merrily and I sure appreciated that as I am sure Christi and Emery did, also. I am going to miss that flow of leftovers when they move out and into their own place in a couple of weeks.

More on a full-timing note, we signed up for the Workamper 101 webinar class that starts 1/24/2009 (Wow! That’s Saturday!). I understand that Jaimie Hall Bruzenak is a real resource for those getting onboard with workamping. We are really looking forward to this class.

As a sidenote, a webinar is a class that one can attend remotely via the internet and a telephone line. Just prior to the start time, one just logs their computer onto the specified website (in this case, delivered by Webex.com) and dials the supplied phone number to give us an easy way to ask questions and make comments in real-time.

I’ll let you know how this first class goes. Even though we are not anticipating workamping this year, a lot of the longer term plans will certainly involve finding jobs here and there to help support our cashflow needs. Knowing how to find and successfully get a satisfactory job will be vital to how we plan our travels. I expect that we will use our initial travel destinations to investigate future job opportunities in areas we are interested in future workamping positions. It is also for this reason that we signed up for the Workamper News and hotline resources a few months back. So far, we have learned a great deal just by investigating the various jobs that are posted daily on their Hotline service.

ttfn

No comments: