Life in the Campground

This blog will probably never get as popular as some other full-timing blogs because I'll probably never be a committed boondocker.

I like campground amenities.

At the Treasure NV resort I'm enjoying the fitness room every day.  I love their stairclimber!  I am committed to losing weight this month, but it's been rough so far.

I also tried out the heated pool for the first time yesterday.  Nice stuff!  Has a waterfall and everything.  This place is pretty swanky for only $377/month.

The campground is mostly empty during the week, and fills during the weekends.

I just had a massive class A RV pull in beside us.  I'm not sure why people come to campgrounds like these on the weekends.  It's not in the wilderness or near water.  Other than swimming in the pool I don't really see what the draw is.

My allergies have been terrible since we got here.  It could be because of the stinky (in a good way) flowers all over this place, or, more likely, the air is getting funky in our tight quarters.  We have three cats in here after all.

So I got some stuff today from Amazon.  First off, an air purifier.



Click the image for the link about it.  If you have Adblocker you can't see it since it's an Amazon link.  I've heard other fulltimers need their purifiers, so I grabbed me one.  It sits in the corner of the dinette on our printer.

Second, a better floor sweeper thing:



This thing is awesome.  I am out of the Dyson camp and have joined team Bissell.  This thing sucks up the cat kibble!  With my old Dyson vac I had to pick up every piece.  It also goes to the edgy edge.  It really got the RV floor clean.  It was so cheap compared to Dyson, too. 

Every day my mother and I have been working out and dieting...except on the day when we got bad news related to the house sale and I got drunk and binged on crap food.  -_-  I gained 8 pounds for my trouble, and have only managed to go down 5 in the days that followed.  Le Sigh.  I wanted to lose at least 30 pounds this month so I could start our RVing adventure less fat.  I'll be lucky if I can lose 10. 

Nothing to Post Today

This is supposed to be a picture of the beautiful mountains.  I don't know how to zoom.

The Mom:  Why don't you have a blog post today?

Me:  Well, nothing really happened today.  It was windy and we kind of stayed inside.  You were out a church all day and I was working and goofing online.  :/  It was just a lazy day.

I don't know what I was trying to photograph here. 

The Mom:  Why don't you blog about how we went bowling.

Me:  It is neat that this RV park has a small bowling alley.

The Mom:  And I beat you.

Me:  -_- I don't feel that needs to be posted.

The Mom:  I'm an old lady who is blind in one eye and has arthritis in her hand and I beat you twice!  I was on fire!

Me:  -_-  Yeah.

The Mom:  Well, everyone should know. 

Adapting to the Full-Time RV Life

I'm in a bit of a pickle because moving into the RV and dealing with the house took time and energy away from my writing.

Here's some of the beautiful landscaping at the Treasure RV resort.

I need to put out a short story or novella every few weeks or my income drops to zero.

The problem with living in the RV is that I'm essentially living in the same room as my mother and cats.  This means we have to synch up our sleep schedules.  I'm a night owl.  She's a morning person.  I usually write until 2am or so and sleep until noon.  She gets up at 8am every day.  Now she has me rolling out of bed at 9am and I'm too tired to stay up late to write.

I need to get into a trance to do my best writing.

I know that sounds nutso, but other writers call it their 'writing zone.'  You have to be in the mind and world of your characters to really get out a good story.  I can't do that on little sleep, or when I have too many distractions.

So I haven't gotten out a story since Mid-March and my 30 day average income has dropped by $1,000.

Yeah.  It's that extreme.

Being a full-time author is not easy, otherwise more people would do it.  It means banging out quality work at a fast clip and regular rate.  When life interferes with that I take catastrophic hits to my income.

Right now the situation is still okay.  I can live on what I would make if my average income stayed the same.  The thing is, it's just going to keep dropping.

I have to put out a new story.

So I'm figuring out how to get my writing done in this new lifestyle.  I'm writing this blog outside the RV in a table I set up.  There are outlets on the outside of the RV I can hook into and I'm still in the range of my hotspot for Internet.

Here we are!  We tow with that Nissan Armada there.

I'm trying to see if I can finish the sequel to last month's short story.  It's tough getting in the zone out here because there are people going by and bugs.  However, a few cups of wine always seem to help.  I'm sacrificing some dinner calories in order to have two cups of merlot now so I can get this story done.

 It's frustrating because when I'm really 'in the zone' I can write an entire story in six hours.  This story goes on to make me $300 in one month, and also revives sales of my older titles.  And yet, I've been struggling with this one short story for WEEKS.  Dang it, Yamila!  Get this shit done!!

Another thing we need to adapt to now is preparing food in the small home.  

The RV is just not suitable for food prep that requires multiple dishes and pans.  My cooking is basically sticking meat and spices in the crock pot (like this pork shoulder) and then serving it for lunch and dinner with salad or canned vegetables.  I'm ashamed to say that we've been using up some paper plates we had from our last camp trip rather than dirtying real plates.  I just need prep and clean up to be easy. 

The Secret Weapon...

In my last post I said April 1 was our first day full-time camping.  I guess technically March 31st was, since we dry camped in front of our house.  That's why I was able to discuss the cat's reactions to the first night of the move.

So here we are in Treasure Nevada RV Park!

I'm surprised to see that there are so many tourists camping here.  License plates are from all over, including Canada.  I made friends with a guy who came in from Kansas City.

We lion-shaved Scrappy and Sultan. She's like a kitten again! So happy to be free of her fur nest.

Why the heck would these people want to come to Pahrump?

Well...it's probably Death Valley that's drawing them here, however I saw people 'hiking' in the open scrub brush next to the RV Park.  Yes, there are beautiful mountains all around, but to me it is hot dry desert full of those nasty sage bushes that I was constantly tearing out of my yard.  Hiking here?  Yuck!

If you must come to Pahrump you couldn't pick a better park!  The Fitness Center here actually sells memberships to the locals.  It's so nice!  I did 20 minutes on the Step Mill and 10 minutes on a bike.  Then I got on my skates and skated around the park.

When I say I skated...um...I skate while holding on to a three-wheeled walker.  I'm clumsy and I just can't keep my balance--but I love to skate!  I also have on more protective gear than a roller derby babe.  I've broken bones for my skating desires in the past.

Tomorrow I might venture into the pool...but I'm worried about getting sunburned.

Precious finally came out from the hiding place!  Here she is on my bed.

Anyway, the title of the post is 'the secret weapon.'  When we got into the park a gentleman led us to our space in a golf cart (this place thinks of everything--there's even trash pickup!).  I was able to convince this same gentleman to back the RV into our spot for me.

I can't back our RV up to save my life.  I've tried.  LORD HOW I'VE TRIED.  I have a learning disability in the backing up RV department.  I accept this limitation, but I'm determined to full-time!  There won't always be someone to help.  What do I do then?

I got a Park-it 360 tow dolly.  That's my answer.  I keep it in the back seat of the SUV ready to go for emergency back-ins!   I hope I won't have to use it that often, because it takes a while to set up and is a bear to lug in and out.  But in an emergency I'll be able to use it to get the RV in a tight spot.

My RV was too close to a palm tree next to us, so today I whipped it out and put it to use for the first time.  I'm happy to see it worked great.  My only problem is the tire hitting the bottom of our front leveler thing.  If I can move it into the right spot I should have enough room.  So...here's the secret weapon in action.

It's powered by the house battery.  I have the leads permanently connected so I can hook up fast.  It worked.  I got the RV away from the palm tree after a small fuss that attracted onlookers.

I'm happy I didn't waste my money on this thing!

Full-Time RVing - DAY ONE

It's happened people...

We moved into our RV full-time!

I'm writing this from the Treasure RV resort in Pahrump, NV, where we're staying for the month of April.  The official reason is to finish up with the sale of our house, which closes in nine days.  The unofficial reason is to treat this place and its awesome fitness center like a weightloss resort and drop some major pounds before beginning our adventure in earnest.

Yesterday we moved all our belongings from our house into the RV.  Many more items were discarded, but still more will go.  We need to go back to the house to clean and once that house is in order we need to put the new house in order.

Things aren't really functional in the RV yet.

My 'Bedroom' Oh the humanity!

I want to get things to where I don't have to move three things to get to what I need.  I almost didn't put bay leaves in my slow-cooker tonight because I knew how deep it was buried in the cupboard.  But why bring stuff at all if it's so buried you never go through the trouble of digging it out?  I want to organize the heck out of this place and get things running smoothly.

The cats each reacted to the move differently.  Sultan was a PEACH. 

Our elder male cat was perfectly content in the new home, since he'd explored in here many times.  He is very happy that I no longer have a door on my 'bedroom' that I can use to lock him out.  We slept in spoons position last night.  He purred quite ecstatically.

Scrappy was a freaking pain in the ass. 

Scrappy on my mother's bed. Yeah, we don't make our beds. F the Police.

The thing about Scrappy is that she is a whiner and she HOWLS.  When something is bugging her she will not shut up.  She was howling until 4am.  We would console her with petting and that would get her quiet for a while, but eventually she'd start howling again.  Ugh.  It was a rough night.

Precious (not pictured because she's hiding now) usually just hides for a day and then starts coming out little by little to explore and get comfortable again.  We made sure there was space under the dinette for her to hide in.

Cat's hiding place, safely enclosed so they can't get into the slide mechanism.

Well this time she just let Scrappy egg her on.  She came out of the hidey hole the first hour and shrieked with panic all night.  Again, we consoled her and got her to quiet down, but when Scrappy started up, Precious joined in the chorus. 

All the cats have settled down now and gotten into their normal routines.  For Sultan that means cuddling with me at every opportunity.  For Precious that means hiding most of the time.  And for Scrappy that means sleeping on my mother's aching hip and ensuring she never gets a good night sleep.  She also wakes her up once or twice a night to howl until my mother pets her. 

I set up the RV very meticulously since we're going to be here a month.  I put out a table and chairs, put down the levelers, put out all my small kitchen appliances.  :) 

Once we finish our chores in the old house we can get this place neat, organized, and convenient (within reason).  Right now I have an extension cord duct taped to the floor to give outlets to the dinnette so both me and my mom can use our computers on this side of the RV.  It looks like crap.  I want to find a more aesthetically pleasing way to get things under control.

One thing that I think is set is our cat litter situation.  My mother has a covered cat litter beside her bed.  A second cat litter lives in our bathtub.

This way we can just lean over when we're on the toilet and scoop the kitty's business while we're doing ours.  Genius.