Ordinary and Reflective

I think there’s something unique about returning to your point of origination in your nomadic journey.

While being still for nearly 6 weeks now has been very nourishing for our nomadic souls, it also doesn’t leave a lot of room for posting about exciting travel adventures.

As predicted, our lives have become a bit more ordinary – and most my recent posts have been more on the reflective side. And for now, it’s exactly what we need!  So thanks for hanging in there with us.

Being still though has enabled us to concentrate on changes in other areas of our lives.  Here’s some of what else we’ve been up to lately:

1) Business Restructuring

Aside from wanting to be near my parents as my father’s treatments continue, we’re in the midst of a major restructuring of the business I’ve run with my parents for the past nearly 20 years. There’s re-staffing to be had, turning over the financial side, taking over all of the day-to-day operations, re-contracting with clients and more. It’s been a lot of work, and has taken a lot of our time as of late. We need to transition everything about the business to be entirely mobile now that we won’t have a ‘home office base’. We’re well on track for them to fully retire by Thanksgiving.

2) Full Circle Reflections

That business is actually a continuation of the software business my father started back in the late 70s in Austin, TX. And this weekend we got a nice full-circle reminder of that. John was one of my father’s first employees back then, and a key member of the development team.  I was probably around 5 when I first met him, and he’s always been like a cool uncle to me. For about the past year since he retired, John followed a bit in my footsteps and became a full time RVer. It was fun this past weekend when his travels had him stopping in for a visit with the family to catch up.

3) App Overwhelm

Keeping up with our mobile apps has become a challenge, especially Coverage?. As LTE is rolling out rapidly for all of the carriers, customers are expecting more frequent updates – which takes a lot of time and effort. We used to be able to go 2-3 months between updates before the reviews reflected the maps being outdated, now we’re lucky to be granted 2-3 weeks. We love the 4G we’re soaking up, but it’s coming at an extra price for us.

We’ve been putting a lot of effort behind the scenes to restructure our map creation techniques so it requires less effort. Hopefully we stand a better chance of keeping up.

4) Tech Refresh

Being still seems to be a great time switch out major pieces of our tech arsenal – so lucky for us, Apple announced a whole bunch of new products at just the right time.

Aside from our recent total internet connectivity retooling (which I’m actively poking Chris to take a break and finish writing about this week) – we’re changing out a lot of other stuff. Which for me means, I finally have resources again to resume producing Ramblings videos – I had pretty much run out of hard drive space to work with large video files. And, my mother decided to drink the kool-aid and go Mac too – so we’ve been busy getting her setup with all new tech to her.

We’ll update sometime soon on all our new mobile tech goodies.

5) Re-decorating

Re-decorating efforts inside the bus are also underway!  Eventually we’d like to replace and/or re-upholster the driver’s seat and co-pilot seat. And we’re unsure of what to do with our couch / single bed. Re-cover and re-stuff it a bit?  Or try to get a ‘real’ comfy couch in there?  For now, we think we’ll have the valences recovered in a more finished way (when we did them earlier this year we just did a temporary job with straight pins and a quilting quality fabric that isn’t holding up) – and perhaps have a corner cushion made for the couch that increases the usability.

Aside from that, life has been fairly ordinary by most standards – but we have some very fun stuff coming up soon. You’ll just have to wait to hear about that. *wink*

Our best guess is that we’ll remain in Melbourne, FL until around Christmas, and then relocate over to Arcadia for the Arcadia Bus Rally (one of the largest bus rallies in the country – great opportunity if you’re curious about bus conversions yourself).  We’ll depart from there early to join up with a bunch of our NuRVer friends for a New Years Eve party and month of hanging out in Cedar Key, FL.  We have no clue where we’ll be called towards after that.

Invitation: Technomadia Live Streaming Q&A Session

We had such fun last month hosting a live video chat Q&A on UStream, so we’ll do it again!

Come join us Thursday evening, November 8 at 9pm EST (6pm PST).

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/technomadia

Bring a your favorite tasty beverage, and any questions you have about mobile life, mobile tech & RVing.