Dichroic Reflections

logistics

Re the last entry: commenter who said "I'd love to" without leaving an email or webpage? Um, yeah, not the most helpful thing ever. (Unless you're one of the ones who emailed me, in addition.

I had a long IM conversation with my brother last night - long in terms of time, anyway, which got me thinking about the medium. I'm not convinced IM is the most efficient means of conversation ever. If you want to get things said, phones are faster. If you want to get complex messages across, email is better. It's too slow to feel like real conversation, but not slow in the same convenient ways email is. Where I think it shines in in cases where for some reason you can't talk, during a class or meeting, say; to bring in different people conversing from different areas, as in a chat room; and to keep a desultory background conversation going while you do other things. But not for primary communication, in most cases. I'm likely showing my age, but I'm not sure if it's that I'm old, inflexible, and unable to adapt to this technology or that not being affected by trends, I can take a step back and look at it dispassionately. I'd prefer to think the latter.

We're still looking at the RV-travel thing, though we're also still exploring other avenues (i.e. the ones where we stay with our career path).

The logistics of the travel are a bit forbidding. One thing is that in going fulltime but for a limited period, we'd be doing it the most complicated way, almost. We'd be selling our house, but eventually coming back and buying another, so we have to put our furniture in storage instead of leaving it where it is or selling it off. And then there's the issues we'd have anyway. Phone (easy enough). Internet (not so simple). Life insurance. Health insurance. Disability insurance. Choosing the vehicles. Buying the other things we'd want - two kayaks, probably a new laptop Figuring out the minimum number of books I can stand to live with and choosing them. There would need to be some purchases there, too - a Writer's Market for writeup of the trip, a paperback dictionary so we wouldn't need the big one. Lots of maps and lists of campgrounds and such. Figuring out minimum clothing. Figuring out what we'd need to do to the house before selling it (possibly not much, in the current bubble, but the upstairs carpet is trashed). Listing the places we'd want to go (which is not a choore but a pleasure - we did some of that last night). Figuring a loose itinerary based on it. (A bit harder.)

But the hardest part of all, even harder than choosing books, would be what to do about the cats. If they were kittens, I'd give them to a pet adoption place. If they were nice mellow adult cats, I'd ask all my friends if anyone could give them a home. What they are, though, is old and crochety. And they have their claws. I can't in good conscience give them to anyone with small children, because I don't know how they (the cats) would react, and the possibilities are dire. And at 14 and 16, it's likely they'll be having health issues soon, though they've been extremely healthy so far. (I credit Science Diet.) I think between the two of them they've needed maybe two vet visits, other than for shots, yearly exams, and the exams required before taking them on the plane when we moved here. We've considered taking them - maybe adding a cat flap in the door to the 'garage' area and putting a litter box there. They hate riding in cars, but have always been in carriers. I don't know whether this would seem like a car to them. Another possibility would be seeing if Rudder's parents can take them. Or mine, but mine have made their opinion of cats clear over the years. It's a quandary.