Saturday, August 18, 2012

Houses are overrated anyway, right?

Funny thing about homes is you become attached to them.  Literally.  And most homes are securely attached to the ground.  Honey, they ain't movin'.  And most of the time, neither are you. 

Unless you join the military.  Or work on the mission field.  Or your company moves you.

There are probably other things like being born to a nomad or circus family.  I shudder to think of that lifestyle.  In fact, it makes our current lifestyle sound downright stable.  (And apologies to anyone who lives the nomadic or circus lifestyle...kudos to you.)

Let's see, in the last 2 years-ish, we have lived out of our RV for 19-20 months, total.  As you can imagine, everytime we returned to our secure home (the one without the wheels attached), we hugged the ground.  Well, not really.  But it did seem we got easily lost in there...2,200+ ft of space vs our 200 sq ft of RV space.

Speaking of lost, where was I?  Oh yes, living in a tiny RV for that long can drive one crazy.  Wait, that's the wrong topic for this subject, although it does have it's merits.  I'm fine.  Really.

What I was going to say is, I never realized how flexible one can become when one literally has no home.  Our secure home (the one without wheels and 2,200+sq ft) recently became a rental home.  And in our quest to make the best possible decision on what to do with our furnishings, and data we had accumalated from friends in south Brazil, we sold or gave away 3/4 of what we owned.  On a side note, we now know we will need to take furnishings down in a container b/c it actually costs less.  The cost of living in south Brazil is, interestingly enough, much less than in north Brazil.

Anywho, when we moved out of our real home, our youngest son commented, "We're actually homeless!"  To which I responded, "Not homeless, just houseless."  After all, houses are overrated anyway, right? 

The epitome of our houselessness (there's a mouthful!) came a few days ago when we had to take the RV in to get the transmission fixed.  It created a kind of funny and interesting situation.  What does one do when one's home is "in the shop"?  Imagine trying to explain that to your kids! 

The first night we stayed in a hotel.  But the next day when we were supposed to pick up the RV, we were told they needed another day to fix it.  We really did not want to spend more money on another hotel.  In short, while mentioning our dilema to a group, one lady spoke up and mentioned we could stay in a camper they had.  Very nice.

At the end of that day, Andrew asked, "So, where's our home tonight?"  Now, how many kids do you know (including yours) that wouldn't whine or complain about not having a "real" house to live in?  If nothing else, at least our kids are fine with whatever comes. 

One of the homes we visited in Brazil had chains running from the gutter to the ground.  Bill decided to take a photo and send it to Andrew to tell him that the homes in south Brazil had to be chained to the ground so they wouldn't drop off the earth...  That's just Bill's personality.  Life is never dull.  So, thought I would share that since we've been talking about "secure" houses.


By the way, can you guess what the real purpose of the chains are?  Hint: it has something to do with the gutters when it rains.