Sorting, Prepping and Re-Integrating

April has been a life changing and challenging month for us. The months leading up to it were pretty darn tough and intense too. Between my father and the business turmoil up – we’ve pretty much been in high-alert crisis mode for way too long.

The past few weeks have obviously been focused on everything that has to occur after a loved one passes on. We had a wonderful ‘Celebration of Life’ ceremony for him, and had out of town family in.

Thankfully, some of them were able to stay for a bit, and it was wonderful to get reacquainted to aunts and uncles that I haven’t seen in years, heck, decades.

We’ve been helping my mother sort through my dad’s stuff and start the long purging process. As I get my geek from my dad, he has a lot of tech toys that needs new homes. Going through all his stuff reminded me of this time 6 years ago when I was going through all my stuff to prepare to hit the road full time with Chris.

The purging process, whether your own or you’re going through a loved ones things, is an emotional one – every item brings reminders of why it was kept in the first place. Thankfully, they’re happy and appreciated memories.

And then of course there’s all the paperwork and getting their financial accounts transferred to my mom. We’ve been putting a lot of effort into helping her get her technology life in order, so that we can best support her remotely – my dad was always her geek-on-call. That’ll be our role now, and thank goodness she decided to drink the Apple koolaid to make that easier for us.

Making the decision that we’d like to escape the growing Florida heat before it gets much worse, and drive to Portland, OR for the World Domination Summit in early July has light a fire under our feet to get some bus projects in order. So we’ve also busily been finishing up smaller projects and ticking items off our neverending list.

Included on the completion list recently was installing a new DC master control panel for the electrical system, running the lithium ion batteries through a balancing cycle, installing a cooling fan in my Mac Mini’s cabinet and finishing up the install of our new water pump.

We also splurged and finally ordered a ‘real mattress’ – we’ve been sleeping on memory foam toppers on top of bad RV mattresses for years now, and it’s just simply time.

We’re feeling good that all our systems are set to be hitting the open road, where our amenities will be more variable than we’ve grown used to over the past months of having full hook-ups. We’ll of course be adjusting to no longer having unlimited internet once we fully cut the cord from our cable internet (*cry* – are you sure we can’t take it with us???).

But I think Kiki will have the toughest time of all, as she’s grown spoiled by drinking exclusively from the water filter faucet.  That won’t be happening when we need to conserve water!

But we’ve also been enjoying a return to re-integrating in with some normal life stuff.

We’ve had some fun social time recently.

Our dear friends, and fellow bus technomads, Ben & Karen of DigitalMastery.com were recently in Orlando for Photoshop World – and we got to spend an afternoon being kids together playing mini golf and bowling. It was great fun, and so wonderful to reconnect. It’s hard to believe its been over a year and a half since we last saw them – but how wonderful that it felt like no time had passed at all, despite us all having major life changes since (they got married!!).

We’ve also been reconnecting with local friends that we hadn’t had time to see much of, treated ourselves to a pampering spa day (massages and pedicures!) and went to a Rush concert in Orlando last evening.

We even had time and energy to host a very fun live video chat last week, in which we integrated in our secret recipes for Mandarin Orange Chocolate Guacamole and Becoming a Nomad. It was part cooking show, and part Q&A session about nomadic life. It was a blast, and we are so enjoying this video format.

We created an archive page of our past video chats, check them out if you missed them.

Later this week we intend to pull out of Melbourne and head into the Orlando area for a week or so to attend to some business stuff. And then we’ll start our 2 month roll across country.

Our nomadic itch is definitely flaring up, and we’re very excited to get back out there exploring and letting serendipity be our guide.