Lighten the Load

Sitting here having a glass of Medoc wine and goat brie cheese on crackers.  Sounds fancy doesn't it.  It isn't our everyday go-to wine or cheese.  DH brought home both, I think his reasoning that a holiday is upcoming and his birthday is next week.  We rarely splurge and I approve that we should occasionally as one can get frugal fatigue.  Our needs are average to below-average and our wants are very minimal.  We have re-educated and re-trained ourselves to what is important and to have minimal needs.  We eliminated gift giving to each other about 10 years ago.  Now we aren't scrooges by any means, we just changed our thinking.  I recall the last year of gift giving of having the epiphany of saying I don't need anything else thus it was born that no more buying something to surprise one another or make grandiose gift buying a show of our love for one another.  What we do now is that Person A might have a hankering for something - one year for me I said I wanted a double kayak - my DH almost broke his jaw by how far it dropped.  One year he wanted a digital camera.  So we save up our wants and get pricing, double check our real need vs want and then go shopping.  We also have a somewhat utilized rule of 'out with the old before new comes in'.  For the digital camera, DH traded all of his bellows camera and gear toward the digital purchase.  With the double kayak, we have used it a lot and we get to spend some great quality time together - also we bought it used up at Lake Tahoe at the end of the season - thanks Val for housing it and transporting it for us!!  Love you!

 

The wants and needs discussion wasn't what I wanted to post today.  I wanted to memorialize much of what has occurred since the last writing.  We have sold and donated all the books - probably 600 to 700 in total.  What the local bookstore won't buy, the balance goes to 'the Friends of the Library' for their quarterly fund raising sale (some of our books are from that sale :).  This is monumental as we carted those books up here from CA along with the bookshelves.  DH has always wanted two things:  a book collection and an art collection.  We have or had both.  I don't even want to say he got the message or got a clue because that isn't the case.  Something clicked and he said - DONE.  Wow.  We haven't gotten much in the way of dollars for the books in the scheme of things based on value of what was paid but that is so unimportant.  We get to unload, they are being used by someone else and the remainder are going to the library for their fundraising.  Perfect storm in my opinion.

 

In addition, over the last few weeks we sold off two bikes (kept two), a rarely used treadmill (are any of them every used?), a home built cat tree and snow shoes (never used thankfully).  Along with some of the sales, a few customers ended up with some of DH's original art that was in the garage as a bonus gift.  I have made one drop to a charitable storefront.  I visited two resale shops to see if some of our items are candidates to get sold or whether not worth the effort.  We are in the mode to eliminate.  I want to have so much less ownership of items and DH is in agreement.  We initially talked about moving ourselves but now we are in unison that a mover of some of our stuff makes sense.  So we are paring down our possessions.  I got busy with consulting work and finishing up an on-line class so I needed to step back from the elimination process to earn some salary and wanted to up my credentials.  After T-day, gloves are coming off and I can't wait.

 

I have given myself permission to not have a job lined up at the other end because we are not sure where that is.  We are leaning toward Santa Rosa Valley area and will visit it soon.  We know it fairly well but not intimately.  It is close to the Bay Area but far enough away.  We should have considered this as our move eight years ago! 

 

Permission has been granted to rest and only look forward to a future time.  I get myself too worked up on worrying about covering our day to day living when actually we are fine, we have the room to allow a breather.  I cannot shake the 'working man' mentality that I have to be working five days a week or it isn't real.  Even after eight years of consulting I still carry a warped sense of job.  I read a multitude of information about alternative lifestyles, wage earning and the like and am part of that evolution but I still can't shake the need to earn based on five days a week for someone else.  So I have granted myself permission to take a reprieve to readjustment my thinking of job, life, what our financial needs are and the balance of all.

 

I need to write it out to make it real, to dissect it.

 

This is my computer screen saver, changed recently.  I want it to reflect what we are going to gain with our move.  Bright blue sky, open oceans and a sense of place - this is home.