Category: XCRV

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thursday is my last day

Happy Tuesday internet.  It’s gonna be another humdinger for me.

The friend Sharaun had lined-up to watch Keaton and Cohen Monday so I could go into work called Sunday evening to tell me that her own kid was sick.  Fever, up-chucking, the whole nine yards.  Without any time to secure alternate options, I fell on my sword and decided to try and do the whole workday from home with both kids.  This, friends, is not easy – particularly if you have a precious four workdays left before leaving for seven weeks and need every minute to be bursting with productivity.  I did my best, and would say I was about 85% as good as I could’ve been at my desk.

Keaton, bless her, truly bless her, helped me entertain Cohen.  In exchange I delegated her parenting to Disney cartoons, computer time, and coloring.  I felt bad about it, but I had no choice in the matter.  Thankfully she handled it well and really did manage to keep herself busy (and not all of it was in front of the TV, either… she played dollhouse and colored and even spent some time practicing reading).  She can be an absolute angel when she wants to.  With the exception of the thirty minutes between noon and 12:30pm I had meetings all day.  My ears hurt from the earbuds I use to take calls (Bluetooth is terrible; never works and is too much trouble, wired is where it’s at).  Cohen also behaved, napping when I needed to chair meetings and eating well when I could borrow time to feed him.

Around 10am Sharaun called and let me know she missed her flight out of Miami and there was a chance she’d not make it home until Tuesday (today as you read, I know it’s confusing but I write a day in advance).  Luckily that didn’t happen because, man, I couldn’t do another one of these days.  Not to mention, I really couldn’t; I absolutely have to be in the office Tuesday through Thursday.  Thursday – my last day.  Holy crap Thursday, which is three day from now, is my last day for seven weeks.  Seven weeks on the road.  Seven weeks to let my mind wander.  Seven weeks.  Oh man, I am ready.  I am counting down.  Battling the mainspring and winning for once.

Goodnight.

 

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last trim till july

Two Mondays ago I trimmed my beard for the final time before our big trip.  When we get back, it’ll be with some eight weeks of growth hanging off my face.

I don’t mean shaving (or, perhaps “shaping,” better put).  I’ll still shave, both my head and to shape my beard the way I like it – I just won’t go over the whole of the growth with clippers to keep it to a certain length.  So it won’t be entirely unruly, but it will probably be very unattractive.  I don’t grow a good beard; I’m missing the upper-lip and goatee areas… just don’t grow there.  So what I can do is what I can do.  There is something… manly… or primitive, about not shaving (OK about half-shaving, in this case).  There’s a Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young song where David Crosby talks about a hippie guy who’s considering cutting his hair.  In the song, obviously enough called “Almost Cut My Hair,” Crosby says he didn’t cut his hair because he feels “like letting his freedom flag fly.”  I like that.  In my case though I’m more like unfurling my freedom shag (supposed to be a carpet analogy).

I know I will likely look ridiculous, but I believe this is an essential part of this third-life crisis.  Not only will I wear a belt buckle that has a picture of an RV on it (no, really, Sharaun and Keaton bought me one as a gift – it’s the featured image alongside this post) and a leather cowboy hat, I will be sporting an unruly beard to boot.  In my head this is my road persona… some dust-caked nomad tumbling over hill and dale and stopping for club sandwiches in forgotten diners.  Except I’ll be toting my family along with me, a clean and well-manicured suburban unit which’ll no doubt appear mismatched with my shabby disarray.  OK, OK, I admit… the whole “dust caked” and “shabby disarray” thing is only the glam in my head… people will see me as yuppie-Joe hiding under facial hair and affected accoutrement.  But who cares!

Goodnight suckers.  Love you.

 

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days and videos

Hey what’s up internet somehow it got to be Thursday and I need more days before it’s the weekend OK?  How about we make some kind of deal.  You give me a day between today and Friday, or even between Friday and Saturday.  I need this extra day because I still want, and furthermore feel I deserve, two days of weekend yet need another day of work.  We could compromise, call it Tweenday or Foreday or something like that.  Just another eight hours.  But don’t really do it, because I want Friday to be here.  OK thanks.

Tonight I wanted to shoot a practice video to test out both the new point-and-shoot camera as well as the ease-of-use of the new Windows 7 updated Movie Maker software.  Since I’m planning to try upload video content during our trip, specifically a video diary series featuring Keaton’s road-trip commentary, I was hoping that the new version of Movie Maker was as easy to use as the previous one.  Turns out it’s easier and faster, and I threw together a montage in short order.  After uploading to YouTube and linking to Keaton’s webpage, I’m super happy with the results.  You can check it out here.  Best case is we can upload videos like these as our travels bring us to places where we’ll have connectivity (most proper RV places now have wireless, and I’ll be serving IPs from the phone’s connection wherever we have data service, so I feel the chances are good).

I am going to go now.  Give me a break; I did a video.  Goodnight.

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it’s a real thing

I write over and over again how it gets harder to write as work gets busier.  It’s true.

When things heat up at work my brain has less time to wander.  With less time to wander, I have less time for those creative thoughts to stop and take root.  Those thoughts are what fuel my blog.

I wonder how things will be on the road in a month, while we’re out on the RV.  I’m committed to helping keep Keaton’s blog up to date while we’re road-tripping, and I’ll make it a priority to update there. This doesn’t mean I am planning to neglect sounds familiar, well, anymore than I already have been for the past few months, but I do wonder how it’ll be keeping up with both pages.  Maybe since Keaton’s is mostly for video and pictures, it won’t be so bad.

Speaking of the RV trip, here are ten things I’m looking forward to about the coming odyssey:

  • Brewing my own coffee each morning and drinking it behind the wheel
  • Stopping at roadside farmer’s markets for fruit and veggies
  • Playing boardgames with the family around the table in the evenings
  • Doing some really deep listening to the music collection while on the road
  • Driving into a sunset in someplace I’ve never been before
  • That womb-reminiscent feeling of being safe in a self-contained environment amongst the wilderness
  • Spending full days with my son, over and over again, morning to evening
  • Grilling meat outside the front door while Keaton and Sharaun toss a Frisbee
  • Riding bikes around an RV park, saying “hi” to old people
  • Falling into various road-trip routines, the best of which I can’t even daydream about

Some of those may not happen, but in my head I am sure anticipating them.

Goodnight.

 

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carseats in RVs (or, death-baiting)

As I’ve mentioned many times here on sounds familiar, our family is going on massive, cross-country RV odyssey this summer.

As this hopefully amazing trip nears, I’ve been putting the final touches on all manner of planning.  One thing which I wanted to make sure I got right was the question of what we do with little Cohen on the long journey.  He’ll be about eleven months old, and therefore will need to travel in a carseat.  Not knowing where best to install a carseat in an RV, I hit-up Google for some advice.  I was at first a bit dismayed that there didn’t seem to be all that much information out there.

Then I remembered that most sane people wouldn’t choose to drive a baby eight-thousand miles around the USA in an RV and so realized that this lack of information kind of made sense.  I would have to break out my Google kung-fu and find the deep links, search some RV-centric forums, maybe even some carseat-centric ones (yes, there are plenty of both – if it exists, the internet has a forum, or fetish, or both, for it).  After my initial dismay, however, my reaction changed a bit when I actually found some discussion…

Did you know there are carseat nazis?  Well, there are.

Look, before we get started here – I’m not attempting, in any way, to minimize the need for, or obvious safety benefits of, carseats for children and infants.  That would be stupid.  Carseats are great and I’m all for laws compelling their usage.  I am no scofflaw or negligent parent, and neither is my wife – who cut our daughter’s grapes into quarters until she was well past two years old.  I’ll also try to not be too derisive here towards those folks who have made carseat science their religion of choice.

Anyway, there are carseat nazis.

My search above eventually led me to what looked like a series of relevant threads on a carseat forum.  Unfortunately, germane as those threads may be, they were all nearly universally saying there is simply no safe way to transport a baby (or child, by extension) in an RV.  Most of the respondents, in fact, were quite quick to demonize anyone who asked about it or suggested doing so.  Take for example some of the following responses to variations of the question, “What do I do about carseats in RVs?” (all typos left intact, for extra derision):

No way Jose!! That’s asking for a multiple funeral. Car seats cannot be installed on side-facing vehicle seats – RV seats are not crash tested at all.

I would never use the dinette seats. Ever. Safe use requires a chassis-bolted seat belt in a forward-facing seat and most RV seats are only afixed to plywood in the flooring.

There are just so many risks with RVs (top heavy leads to easy roll over, countless projectiles including other passengers, etc.) that my child will never ride in one.  An unrestrained 100lbs person (or someone whose belt is not boldet to the core frame) becomes about 3000lbs of force upon your child in a 30 MPH crash.

RV’s are underpowered and are a nuisciance pest to our highways, due to there slow speeds, difficulty to pass, and lack of driver training required to opperate.

We’d love to RV some day, but we’d never consider putting the kids in a motorized RV – eek, the risks.

Loose or larger items typically transported in RVs during a trip can become deadly projectiles in a crash. For example, during a crash at 30 mph, a case of canned goods or bottled water weighing 20 lbs flying off the counter or out of the kitchenette’s cupboard would be the equivalent of 600 lbs slamming into an RV occupant.  An improperly restrained passenger who weighs 150 lbs would become the equivalent of 4,500 lbs during a crash at 30 mph.

A tow-behind camper and vehicle with which to tow it is the only safe option. That way everyone stay safely restrained, but you still can camp.

The injuries sustained by kids from wearing lap only belts are horrible- lacerations to organs in the lower abdomen, septic shock from torn intestines, lower spinal fractures and worse. So much so that emergency room surgeons have given the symptoms a name, “Seatbelt Syndrome.” If you can find any other option, including a custom tether anchor, your child would be much safer.

I don’t even know where to start (although I am intrigued about being able to become 3,000lbs of “force,” that sounds kind of awesome).  I think it’s fair (and derisive I suppose, sorry again) to say that carseat-heads probably missed the day Newtonian physics was taught in school… or maybe only half-listened.  Their hearts are in the right place, I can say that much.  I can get this kind of attitude, I think.  We all love our kids and would rather they stay alive than cease living – that’s an easy one.  But something about the above smacks me as self-righteous, loving-to-the-point-of-crippling, overbearing and over-protective.

So I tell you what internet.  Here’s what we’re going to do:  We are going to take Cohen (eleven months) and Keaton (five years) on this amazing, once-in-a-lifetime journey.  We’re going to put the carseats in the dinette location with the latch and bank on #1 – not crashing & #2 – being the winning/bigger object if and when we do.  I’m not going to care if the belts are attached to the frame or the wood or whatever.  I’m also not going to even consider the fact that items in an RV during a crash can become “missiles.”  In fact, I contend that this point is beyond ridiculous.  Anything, in any wreck, can become a deadly projectile.  I can also tell you right now I will probably let my five year old do “reasonable” walking around in the living quarters whilst we drive (no scissors allowed).  You know what that means, I am obviously rooting for the worst.

A car crash is bad; a car crash is never good; the most basic idiot knows this.  I hereby proclaim that unless you never, ever take your child in a vehicle at all, ever, period – you are just death-baiting.  You really gonna sit there and gamble with your kid’s life like that?   You monster, you abject beast.  I only drive if we have to go to the emergency room (when my kid’s peanut allergy acts up) and when I do I keep the child in an inflatable bubble and never go faster than 25mph, beat that.

Pish-tosh internet, pish-tosh.

Goodnight.

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of gas alone

Happy Monday team.  I spent most of Saturday putting the finishing touches on the RV route/itinerary.  Since that’s all I did, it’s what I’m going to write about (again).

An engineer decided to go on a cross-country RV trip.  One of his chores in preparation, most assuredly, would be to create a spreadsheet.  Spreadsheets are great for everything.  Budgeting; planing back-country hikes; cataloging collections of things; and of course charting the miles and stops of a cross-country RV trip.  My spreadsheet does this and more, and is, not to put too fine a point on it, a fantastic achievement of nerddom.  Want to know the minimum speed (miles per hour) you’d have to cruise at to get from A to B in the estimated time?  OK.  Want to know how much you’ll likely pay in sum-total for the horrendous cost of “crisis in the Middle East” gasoline required for the trip?  Sure!  Some of the more interesting figures (and the ones with the most complicated nerd-math behind them) are those which I use as “indicators” for the overall “fun ratio” of the trip.

While I’d imagine there is “fun” to be had while driving on a RV trip: seeing the sights, hugging the curves, waving at other travelers, etc., I’ve decided that the most heavily-weighted predictor of “fun” is actually going to be the amount of “free time” we have.  This is defined as non-driving time, but is more complicated than that.  What I wanted to ensure was that our “usable non-driving” time (I notion I defined for the purpose of this calculation) is by far greater than our “non-usable/driving” time.  I wanted that ratio to favor the usable non-driving time by a lot, more than 2:1 if possible.  In this way, I felt like I’d be giving us the best possible amount of “family time” or “free time” to see sights, hang out, and enjoy the rest and relaxation.

For the record, “usable non-driving” time is defined as any time each day that not sleeping, driving, setup/takedown, or “breaktime.”  For the further record, there are about ~14hrs each day of this type of time (for the adults, that is).  This may sound dumb and overly analytic.  It is.  Oh it really is.  But I wanted a “finer grain” way to conceptualize how much of our time is really our time. My previous method – comparing the number of days with any driving to those with zero driving – is still a valuable statistic, but it’s not detailed enough.  You have to look at both to get the whole picture, see.  No… maybe you don’t see.  Maybe it’s only me who sees like this, who cares like this.  On the off chance not, here are some fun statistics about our coming trip:

Total miles 8,037
Total days 45
States driven through 28 (+ DC!)
“Zero days” (parked; no driving) 19
Days driving/not-driving (ratio of days with some driving to those with none) 57% / 42%
Hours driving/not-driving (ratio of “usable hours” spent driving vs. spent doing whatever we want) 23% / 77%
Estimated cost of gas alone assuming national average of $3.75/gallon $3,265.42

I love data. I really do. As you can see, I was able to do really well (I’m happy with it, at least) with that “usable hours” ratio – spending less than a quarter of our “free time” driving and the rest of it doing whatever it is we’ll be doing.  I was also happy that I was able to arrange several different “kinds” of RVing: big-rig restort camping, state/national park camping, truck-stop camping, and boondocking.  There were so many “layers” of things I wanted us to be able to do, and my anal data-addiction enabled me to get most of them accounted for.  Let’s hope that it’s worth the planning, right?  To close this trip-narcissistic entry, a compiled list of the places we’re going that I’m most excited about, in-order per our planned route:

Although we’re booked pretty solidly, I’m hoping there’ll also be plenty of “World’s Biggest Ball of Twine” and “96oz Steak Challenge” stops to boot.

OK… I think I got it out of my system for another week at least.  Apologies for the indulgent Monday.

See ya.

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home from oregon, that is

Hey happy Tuesday internet.  Or Wednesday.  Whenever this gets posted.

Spent most of the night working on the blog I setup for Keaton to document the RV trip.  I get pretty silly about making it look and feel just so, and tend to spend way yonder too much time tweaking.  I think, however, that I got it just how I want it.  I also spent time mucking with my cellphone and laptop, getting things just right so we’ll be able to use the cellular signal/network to post from the road when there’s not a proper internet hookup available. I like to think that I’ll have energy and desire to update the page as we travel, but I also have doubts.  And again, yes I am obsessed, quite so.

Flying home yesterday we were the Van Winkle family. Each one of us, from the biggest and strongest down to me took advantage of the snap-quick flight from Portland back home to sunny California.  Cohen napped in Sharaun’s arms and Keaton fought it as long as she could, long enough to get her apple juice – you better believe that.  I was out with my paperback in my lap, I never even cracked the cover, and Sharaun with her head on my shoulder.

Three times on planes now I’ve had a front row seat to a guy having a stroke.  It didn’t happen yesterday or anything, but when I fly now it almost always crosses my mind sometime during the flight.  It’s a horrible sight, the muscled rigor and robotic vomiting and bulging full-of-fear prisoner’s eyes, stuck in a body that’s plain-out short-circuited.   I once watched it happen to a gentlemen just behind me and across the aisle, his wife was seated next to him and was first to notice something was amiss.  I turned to look as I heard her calling his name, at first with simple curiosity and later, by the fourth or fifth time unanswered, with panic ’round the edges.  You know that special “thing” you have with your mate, the “thing” where, with just a glance or maybe even conversation over the phone, you can tell something’s not right.  I imagine this wife having that feeling about as intensely as one can as she began to realize her husband was stroking out.

The poor guy was as stiff as a board, muscles standing out in knots like his whole body was a Charley horse.  His fingers were clutched in claws, and I could see his slacks straining against his clenched thighs.  His teeth were clamped shut but his lips were parted just a little in this confused and pained expression.  And his eyes, maybe that’s why the memory is so clear in my head, I can see his eyes.  I remember at the time, as I stole my quick glance at the poor man and his wife, that there were two likliehoods behind what I saw in those eyes.  One, the man’s eyes were the only part of him still “connected” and outputting the right readings.  Two, his brain had shut down and frozen them as they were, stuck.  Either way, they bulged and just looked terrified.  At the time I could almost read them, “Oh dear God what is happening to me?!  I can’t talk; I can’t move; there’s an electrical storm in my head.”  He vomited copiously through clenched teeth.  All this I saw in the span of one or two quick backwards glances; I didn’t want to treat it like entertainment.

Once in the third grade Sarah Bean had an epileptic seizure in class.  I was off to one side of the room and only heard the commotion, not really seeing the action.  I can remember Mrs. Forinash talking to the aide in the room, hollering about, “Hold her tongue!  She’s choking on her tongue!”  At the time I thought choking on your own tongue seemed about the most impossible notion in the world to me.  Everything turned out OK, however, but it’s another one of those indelible things scored into my gray matter.  Sometime shortly after Sarah’s mom came into the classroom and talked about epilepsy and what a seizure is; I remember being fascinated.  Poor Sarah Bean, whose body had turned against her, just like these unlucky fellows whose relays and synapses revolted on them while we shared a flight together.

I honestly have no idea where this all came from.  Something about flying home from Oregon.  So… maybe I meant to say, “We’re home from Oregon.”

And… we are.  Home from Oregon that is.  Goodnight.