Yes, New Engine.

There's the new engine! Fresh in its shipping container and sitting in the back of my van. Unfortunately it looks like I'll probably be driving around with this thing in the back for a couple days.

In the end the company I bought it through "wasn't allowed" to ship engines to my work. Some sort of agreements dealing with competition and whatnot. So I changed the ship-to address to my house, but in the end it worked out and I just picked it up from the freight companies hub. Which, by all means of luck, just happened to be a couple miles down the road from my work anyway. It couldn't have worked out better.

The new work schedule was out yesterday and for some reason I now have Sunday and Monday off, when I was only planning on having Monday off originally. I might get to start tearing into this project this weekend. Hopefully all will go relatively easily, but I'm getting a little anxious about the upcoming challenge.

New Engine?

I've never quite been satisfied with the way the motorhome runs. Don't get me wrong, it fires right up, every time, the first time. But I don't like the way it smokes, or the way it idles until it's fully warmed up, or the way it smells. I realize it's a beast from the late 70's with less strict emissions controls, but still.

So, now I'm leaning heavily towards, and almost ready to take the plunge, ordering a new engine. It's not complete, I will have to take a number of things off of my old one. However, the main guts that I should have had rebuilt last year while I had the heads off will all be redone. I can only hope that after such a purchase I would have a smooth running machine once it's all tuned up.

I look at other motorhomes and whatnot. To be able to get anything that I would feel confident in I'd be spending $5000+. So for less than $2000, and me doing all the labor, I should be able to have a pretty nice running motorhome with a ton of new parts that's pretty easy to work on. Plus I've already customized the inside a lot, I've already added my solar panels, and a ton of other stuff. It's impossible to know what you're getting in a used motorhome too. The engines are put through tremendous stress. Run hard, and then parked for years, and then run hard again.

I feel like throwing a couple thousand at it and a handful of hours will be well worth it at this point. Aside from the looming anxiety of finally making the leap to motorhome life, my main hesitation to doing so is the engine. And the smoke and the smell. I don't want to drive around leaving a cloud of smoke and exhaust stink. Even if a part of me feels like it adds a million points to ramblin' man status. The worse it runs, the more cool you are, right?

My main concern now is where to have it shipped to. I can probably have it shipped to work, which is by far the easiest option. I feel like they'd be a little annoyed by having a competitors engine shipped there. Even though it's the same brand we sell, but I can get a way better price through someone else. It is what it is. I'll probably push for an answer tomorrow on whether or not I can have it shipped to work. If I get the okay, I might even put the order through tomorrow too.

Loving Decluttering

As it turns out, I'm really starting to enjoy decluttering my life. So much, in fact, that my mind starts to wander to business opportunities related to it. Haha. I doubt I'll be cleaning out other people's clutter any time soon though. I have other ideas I'd rather persue first, once I get all of this clutter out of my life and mind.

I find it so, so liberating to open a box in storage, and see that it's all papers that were once considered oh-so-important. When I see that, I can quickly leaf through them and throw the entire box away. These are papers from a very stressful time of my life. Bills and responsibilites through the roof. Throw them in the back of the van and later release them to the dump. Good-bye stress and 'important' responsibilities.

The goal for getting that thing cleared out by the end of July is starting to seem incredibly doable. For some reason I just realized 'end of July' really means July 25th. After that date I'd have to pay for another full month anyway.

I'm beginning to be very thankful that my storage company keeps raising my rates. As of the first of the year they started forcing me to pay a $9/month insurance fee. Which brought my bill up to $97/month. If that wasn't enough, in March they raised my rate $5 to a nice $102/month. I realize this is actually pretty cheap compared to a lot of areas across the country. However, to finally hit that $100 mark really got my brain thinking and realizing how ridiculous it is to keep paying that, and keeping JUNK that I never even look at. When I first started renting my unit I was paying $83/month. Even that is insane if you think logically, but it was reasonable in my mind at the time.

Just looking through it all, I'm shocked I've only been paying $102 since March. It seems like I've been paying that much for longer. It makes me feel even better about myself that I got motivated fairly quickly and said enough is enough.

I just paid my unit up through June 25th. I'm curious to see if that will be the last time I pay that bill, or if I'll have to break down and pay for one more month.

A New Goal

I finally set a goal for myself, gave myself a time frame for something. My new goal is to have my storage unit completely cleaned out by the end of July. If I'm really good then the end of June, but at the very latest the end of July. This weekend is looking very nice for getting some good work done on that front. 3 days off and amazing weather.

I moved the motorhome for the first time since it was parked for the winter the other day. And tomorrow is going to be 80 for the first time since October. Yay.

The car I was hoping to sell did end up selling last week. So that was very nice and some money in my pocket. He didn't end up buying some of the spare parts I have that I was pretty sure he would. Oh well. Great to see that big empty spot in the yard.

Unfortunately, now I have a bunch of spare Falcon parts in the back of my van with no where to really put them, and me wanting to make at least one trip to the dump this weekend. I'll be very honest, at this point I have no interest in trying to sell them anymore. They might end up going to the dump or scrap yard. Is the time, energy, and mental effort worth a few hundred bucks... good case scenario? Not really, especially when I consider I sold some parts (for cheap) worth a lot of money to that guy the other day without a second thought just to get them out of my way.

I need to keep my narrow-minded, "get rid of things", attitude going.

(I might have also thrown out a whimsical goal of leaving my job in 4 or 5 months. But nothing set very firmly on that one. I think I need to stick to it though, and throw my sails to the wind.)

Declutter Me

I'm still pretty motivated to get rid of stuff and declutter myself.

I'm hopefully set to get rid of one of my larger objects (a car) within the next day and a half. The guy was supposed to get back to me tonight to lock down a time that he would be able to make it up here. He hasn't, but I'm hoping that it'll still happen. I told him it had to be before Tuesday afternoon because that's when I have to go back to work. He sounds pretty interested in my spare parts too. So on top of the price of the car I plan to try to pawn off ALL of the spare parts I have for a pretty decent price. He's in it to make money, I'm in it free up my life. Win, win.

My storage unit is always an interesting thing. There isn't really enough room to make piles. I might make an effort to target my biggest items to make some room. I really would prefer two trailers there. But that's not possible. One for the dump, one for metal scrap, and then really I need an area for donating and selling too. The deeper I get into this, the less "keep" even feels like an option.

As it is now I need to use my van. A van load, one I can get together in a day or two, usually isn't worth the price of a trip to the dump. Unless I just go throw away crazy. Maybe.

Back to work for 11 days after tomorrow. For now I'll go watch another episode of Hoarders. Haha.

Hello, I'm Drive-by Andy

Hey everyone. Do you remember me? It's been a while.

The snow is finally melted and gone. I'm pretty sure for good for this year.

I haven't exercised in a while. Before I stopped I was to the point where I could run for 28 minutes straight. Pretty crazy. A multitude of things made me stop. Too many people at the gym suddenly. My feet/heels being in pain. Getting home too late. Simply being burnt out. I still have my membership, I'd like to think I'll get back soon.

Through some events at work I've been picking up extra hours on one of my days off every week. I'm also kind-of-maybe-technically the Assistant Manager now. Complicates the issues a bit. Anyway so now every other week I have 3 days off in a row, but the week in between I only end up with one day off. So in a span of 11 days I have one day off, and that's starting to get to me. I end up dreading the next long stretch as soon as the current one is over.

The van is falling apart. The exhaust is horrendously loud. I decided to buy a junkyard transmission for my old car and am in the process of trying to get that swapped in. If everything goes as planned I will be retiring the van when the time comes. I don't think I'm even going to try to sell it, I'll just scrap it.

I watched Hoarders for the the first time the other night. It's on Amazon Prime now. I'm not as bad as the people on the show, but I would say I'm definitely a bit of a hoarder. The show has really opened my eyes to some things. It all came together at the right time for me too. My plan is/was to move into the motorhome soonish. But I still have too much stuff everywhere. My parents house/yard, and storage. Which, by the way, my storage price has gone up $20 in the last 6 months, so now it's a pretty ridiculous amount every month.

I want to get rid of a large majority of it. I always have, but it's difficult for me. I'm starting to though. My standards for 'things to keep' have gone way up. I'm throwing things away that I would normally keep, or that I have kept for years. It feels great.

I've just finally realized that it, ALL OF IT, is the cause of so much in my life. My inability to do anything. My constantly feeling like I should be doing something else with my time. The most successful times in my life were when I didn't have all of this emotional, mental, and physical CLUTTER. If I ever want to move forward, if I ever want to be free and do what I want with life again, I need to let this crap go.

It's still a long road. I have a lot of stuff to sort, because I'm not at the point where I can just throw it all away without even looking at it. But I'm happy with where I am with it. I gave away some chairs to a coworker that I was keeping for sentimental reasons. Now they're being used and my coworker is happy to have them. They took up way too much space in storage. I plan to get rid of my washer and dryer soon. That will be a lot of space freed up. I'm pretty sure I'm ready to throw out my old couch. Lots of sentimental value there.

The weight and financial cost of it all is simply too much finally. That's a good thing.

Have less, do more, be more. All of these things are tethers, keeping me in this place in life when I could be rolling in my motorhome witnessing beautiful landscapes, lives, and moments.

The cost of a life fulfilled, happy, and free. That's worth it.

Go Away, Winter.

With no temperatures even above 20 degrees for the foreseeable future I'm getting a bit bummed. I'm feeling pretty inspired and motivated about so many things in my life right now and then to have this persistent winter that just won't give up is horrible. I've shoveled out the motorhome several times now, but it's still stuck where it's at. I don't think it'll be that hard to get it to get out of the little hole it's in but in reality it's stuck right now. I tried again yesterday and the tires just spin.

It did warm up for about two days last week and that's when I first shoveled all around it so that things would hopefully melt more. I also got out the ladder and uncovered the solar panels again and chipped off the layer of ice on them. Not that there's much sun to be had, but anything is better than nothing.

I'm still going to the gym and working on the C25K program. I'm on week 5 now, which is one of the hardest weeks both physically and definitely mentally. After tomorrow night I will officially be half way through the program and well on my way to being able to run!

During week 3 of the program I did actually start to lose weight. My scale isn't great but probably about 5lbs. Week 4 saw most of that weight come back for whatever reason. Now this morning I weighed myself and I was pretty solidly down the 5lbs again. Like I've said before weight loss isn't really my focus right now, but I'll definitely take what I can get of it.


So yeah! Winter can go away now and other than that things are looking good for 2014.