Project: Pioneer is the live weekly reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle. We cover prepping, politics, spirituality, afterlife, RV life, and personal finance. Half of all subscription/donation money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses. You can listen to the audio podcast version of this journal at Substack, Apple, Spotify, PocketCasts and others.

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Don’t despair—prepare.

T’was the night before Christmas and a lifetime of those memories come flooding back. My childhood excitement, harried parents rushing around in last minute preparation, midnight mass, cookies and milk for Santa, sneaking peaks at Dad downstairs putting together presents he thinks I think Santa has brought. Will I ever get to sleep so the morning can come?

It’s the holiday season, religious holidays, specifically. Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanza, Bodhi Day. It’s not a time for talk of the things that stress us. We won’t be discussing politics, alien landings, pandemics, preparing, or the downfall of humanity today. Let’s focus on hope and giving thanks, and we’ll share with you a little of what our typical pioneer RV life is like, in case you should ever consider such folly. We’ll get back to that other stuff in our next post. There’s a world to save, after all.

Today begins like every other day. We rouse from the soft, warm blankets of the sleep cave, through the sliding barn door that leads to the main cabin area of our pioneer RV home. We crank the furnace up and coffee burbles as it readies for our cups. I pull my jeans off a bathroom hook and don them so Pia and I can take a walk outside in the bitter cold. The new snow covers the bleak greyness of dead things with a pristine white sheet. It’s too early for humans to wreck it with their big truck tires.

Back inside, after she’s devoured her healthy gourmet food, Pia hears me slide back the foil lid on my daily yogurt and steps up. She always gets to lick the underside of that foil clean. The news drones in the background and Giavana mutters and grumbles on the follies of mankind from somewhere inside her plush oversized robe.

Sometimes this tiny home reminds me of those forts we’d build long ago, out in the woods. Often they were just cardboard appliance boxes—tiny but a secret refuge from the horrors of the world outside. A place for quiet. A place for hiding. A place to not be criticized or judged. God and nature and church alone in the woods with the other animals, safe from the adults busy out there wrecking the world in their retched behaviors.

Yesterday it was below zero, and we woke to faucets that yielded no water. Something was frozen, somewhere. We went through a standard process of elimination, switching from the outside well water connection to the backup water tank in the RV underbelly. Bathroom plumbing needs to work early in the morning! That temporary solution worked, meaning our underneath tanks weren’t frozen, whew. Checking the app, we verified the temp down there is holding at 32F, despite it being much, much colder on the outside of the insulating foamboard. Elimination yielded that the vertical pipe coming up through the ground had frozen at the valve. I slid the tall rectangular foamboard cover off of it, grabbed Giavana’s rocket turbo hairdryer, turned it on max, and stuck it inside. A few minutes later, water gushed out, eureka, and now Giavana gets to buy a brand new hair dryer because that one is officially toast.

Today’s adventure came when I went to dump the tanks. Our connection to the ground sewer must have frozen and cracked, as water gushed onto the ground. This is why you always test with the grey water before dumping your black water. A very smelly crisis averted. I’ll wait until Sunday to fix that, when it will be at least tolerably cold.

Back to the warm inside again, I feel the soreness from my surgery a few weeks ago. The freezing cold to raging heat brings out the stiffness and itchiness, as I just had the stitches out yesterday. I had sat in the cardiologist office as he checked things over, making noises as he waved some gizmo over the site where the electronics now bulge out of my upper chest. My body is on Bluetooth, yay. I had thought this was the end of half my serious problems, leaving only the ascending aortic sudden-death bulging balloon aneurysm to fret about. Then he starts his own muttering to the assistant, pointing at the tablet and something disturbing, apparently. The big reveal is that there’s indication of new symptoms that the new device can’t help with, which could lead to stroke. There’s discussion of blood thinners. Great, more big pharma, which I’ve always avoided when possible.

Giavana can tell I’m upset when I arrive home. We go over the news. She goes into loving-comfort-nurse-wife mode, suggesting we bail now, in our second year of pioneer life, and go back to our luxury apartment with nice pool and fitness center and best of all, within crawling distance to a major hospital, emergency room, and medical center. She suggests we also book some winter time near Siesta Key, a nice warm vacation getaway to the beach, which she knows is more alluring, exciting, and comforting than those oxycontin pills they’ve been giving me. It’s Florida though, certainly a cesspool of humanity, at least politics and disease-wise. The warm sand and a day at the beach, relaxing, reading, listening to music, are my crack cocaine.

Did I say at the start we’d focus on being thankful? Despite that news, that’s where I go after I’m done sulking. Giavana has made me feel better with the possibility and hope of those things. She’s good at that, my lovely Giavana. I’m lucky to have her by my side. I’m lucky to have my kids and grandkids, to have and feel that love even when we’re apart. I’m lucky and thankful for the few but good friends I have and my very good life in these many decades on this crazy blue marble we all spin ‘round on—Spaceship Earth.

We’re planning a trip to Italy in March, to check out what life is like in a civilized country where basic healthcare is a human right and children aren’t gunned down at their desks in school in support of NRA profits. We’ll be looking at properties—small villas in the countryside or ecovillages. After living in the Red House and White House, it would feel like a mansion. We have trained ourselves well.

We should all be thankful for what we have, and remember there are so many with far, far less, living in strife and struggle. Giavana and I are blown away every day at the examples of people with immeasurable money who never seem to have enough, never spend much to help others, and aren’t really especially happy. Something very bad happens to people when they get to the point where they have too much money. I’ve seen it too many times to believe otherwise. Check out old Mr. Potter while you’re watching It’s A Wonderful Life on Christmas tomorrow. Prime example. There are exceptions, of course. Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife Mackenzie Scott has given away almost $20 billion to charities in the last few years. Ol’ Jeff just changed his residency from Washington state to Florida in order to save himself $1 billion in taxes and to avoid helping the state and country that gave him such wonderful opportunity, and avoid helping other taxpayers with far less.

What I’ll leave you with on this holiday eve is to ask you to take a moment from the bustle and stress of this week. Think about all you have to be thankful for. There are adults and children starving, living outside in the heat and cold, all around the world, and amazingly, here, in the richest country ever known in history we have our own citizens living under bridges and on sidewalks, in dire need of mental health help. (Narrator: Ol’ illegal immigrant Elon Musk’s net worth is now close to $500 billion, mostly thanks to government subsidies and bailouts). Billionaire and Trump pal Dan Pena just released the most horrific, cruel Christmas video (warning, NSFW, F-bombs). We’ll tal...

Reflections on Mortality