December?!?

Ah, December. How did you get here so quickly??? That means we’ve now entered our last planned month of temporary stationary living in the Melbourne, FL area.

I tell ya, two months have gone by fast. We could easily talk ourselves into another couple months of still time – we can be so highly productive when we’re plopped down! But alas new adventures call us. And besides, our spot has winter snowbirds taking it over soon.

Since we returned from the cruise, life has been busy.

As Apple announced a bunch of nifty new technology, and we have business year end funds to spend (or we pay all sorts of fun self employment tax on) – we’ve been in a major tech refresh mode. We both have new computers, and have the new iPad Mini. And along with getting all that setup, our parents have also started on some tech upgrades we’ve been helping with.

Chris has definitely been an amazing tech-maestro these past few weeks orchestrating all these projects, including finding new homes for the old tech. (Check out our ‘For Sale’ tab on our Tech Arsenal Page if you’re in the market.)  We’ll update soon on why we made some of the choices we did… some of them even surprised us!

We also spent a solid 2-days getting the next Coverage? map update out… and wowzers, Verizon is rolling out the LTE at a very rapid pace, and AT&T continues churn out the 4G and LTE markets. Hopefully we sufficiently tweaked our first map update using our new creation techniques, and future updates will go much quicker.

I did a quick calculation (since I’m starting to prepare year end financials anyway), and our app sales now account for about 15% of our total income. We’re pretty happy with that, even if they’re still not fully earning their keep in terms of the relative amount of effort they take.

We, along with many other RVing bloggers, were contacted recently by a casting director for a TV pilot being created for TLC (The Learning Channel). While we’ve not talked with them enough to know if we’d be interested, we used the opportunity to create a quick video introduction for the blog – our last one was seriously out-dated.

So I present you, our nomadic story told in under 3 minutes:

But life is not all work for us… we did manage some play too.

We took off in the Mini Cooper over Thanksgiving weekend and spent several days with Chris’ parents in their winter home over in Spring Hill, FL. It was a great low-key holiday weekend… well, at least for me it was. We hardly saw Chris as he was handling OS upgrades for their computers, and getting his dad set up on his new iPhone 5.

Oh, and despite Kiki no longer being a kitten – she still thinks she’s small enough to continue riding on my shoulder in the car. Cute for a few minutes, majorly annoying for a 3+ hour car ride.

We did manage to pry Chris away from the keyboard long enough to catch a viewing of Skyfall – the new James Bond flick. It was pretty good.  This week we also took some time and caught a matinee viewing of Life of Pi, which was amazingly beautiful.  Two movies in theaters in a week, that’s a lot for us!

When we returned to Melbourne, our mail caught up with us.. and aside from even more tech projects to tackle, included was my first ever Juror Summons from our domicile in South Dakota. They put you on-call for an entire year, with a maximum of serving 3 times in that year. Umm… no, that won’t be working for me.

I called the number on the form and told them I’m a full time RVer, and was immediately exempted… so it was good to see that theory put to the test!

And besides, we’ll soon be starting the process of legally moving our domicile to Florida…  we’re here often enough, and have ample connections, that it makes the most sense for us.  One of the big reasons for moving to Florida now is that Chris’ driver’s license in South Dakota just expired (he’s on a 180-day extension)….

…. because we  just celebrated his 40th birthday last weekend!

With South Dakota, you have to return in person every 5 years to renew your license, and we just don’t see that being happening this year for us. My license will also be coming up for renewal this summer when I *gulp* follow Chris over the hill.

It’s pretty cool to consider that we’ve now been on the road long enough to have outgrown the label of being ’30-something nomads.’  We both hit the road when we were 33, and we seldom run into fellow nomads in their 30s.

That means Chris is coming up on 7 years since he hit the road solo full time, my how the time flies when you’re having fun!