Category Archives: Retirement

Surrealness abounds!

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To catch you up on our story…

I retired the end of last year and our plans are to get the heck out of the state of California.  I am a native born Californian and I cannot stand how this state has changed.  We are going to create a domicile in Texas (initially) and will head there first to register the trailer and get drivers licenses.  Therefore we are prepping our house, truck, and trailer for this transition.

This is Thursday night and our launch date is this Sunday and it is getting really weird around here!  We have just removed our bed from the bedroom and will sleep in the trailer for the next 3 nights.  The bedroom has the headboard, footboard and 2 end tables.  Previously we have moved our armoire, dresser, and chest into our small bedroom.  We are ‘renting’ a climate controlled storage from our son who is renting the entire house from us.  We have a pantry and a few kitchen things to go through.

Roxie has gone through her clothes, as have I, and she leads the race, 2 bins to 1!  It is very weird to go through all of your things and determine its disposition (discard/donate, store at home, take along).  We have gotten rid of numerous items throughout the house, we are lightening up!

Now we just have to now load things into the trailer and the truck.  That should easily take Friday and Saturday.

I have tried to organize the items that are in the bins with a spreadsheet.  The spreadsheet lists the contents with the bin ‘number’.  I hope this makes it easier to find.

Today I went back to my old office for a visit as a coworker also decided to retire and they had his ceremony.  It was a good time to say goodbye to people there.

Although things are surreal now, I think they are going to get moreso.

Solar Install (Part 2)

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This is the next installment on our solar install.

I have put in insulation in the void behind the battery doors and one of the next steps is to caulk the battery doors themselves to make them a bit more water tight.

Before I physically put in the battery pack I had to clean up some wiring first.  Here is what it was:

I moved and reoriented everything on the front wall:

Here are things all cleaned up before putting the couch back in.  The wires on the left are the solar wires Airstream provided but were not large enough for what I wanted to do.  I moved the inverter to the right side and out of the way.

The couch fits just fine and I have more room to put back the subwoofer if I get to that.

Now I have to get the wiring from the couch back to the refrigerator area.  The wiring consists of 2 2Ga wires, an RJ11 connector to drive the IPNPro status device and a battery temperature cable.  These have to be run along the outside edge of the floor, under the dinette and into the refrigerator box.  The controller box is destined for the refrigerator box.

It has been a lot of floor work recently and that is a bit difficult since I still have 1 rib that isn’t quite right.  However, everything has been going along according to plan, for now.  Part 3 is next.