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+We've started telling people about our plans to live full time in the blue bus. 
+
+<figure class="picwide">
+<img src="images/2016/bus-joes_2016-06-03_093840.jpg" class="picwide" />
+<figcaption>Home sweet home.</figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+After the eyebrows come down and the puzzled frowns flatten out, the questions come. Most of them revolve around some form of, but, but but... *what will you do without a house? What will you do when that thing breaks down? What will you do when...*
+
+Rather than answer everyone individually I thought I'd answer all those questions here, as best I can:
+
+***I don't know***.
+
+And I'm not particularly worried about it. I don't know what we'll do without a house, because we have a house. It's just somewhat smaller than the average American dwelling and comes with an engine.
+
+And when it breaks I suspect we'll stop by the side of the road and spend some time sweating, swearing, scratching our heads, failing, asking more experienced people questions, failing some more, sweating some more, maybe taking a near bath in gasoline. And then we might even have to walk somewhere and find someone smarter and more experienced to help us. Then, eventually, we'll probably get it running again. 
+
+Then again it could totally break down into an unfixable hunk of fiberglass and metal that has to towed to the nearest scrapyard. It could burst into flames at a stoplight. It could drop a transmission trying to downshift its way up a hill. A million things could go wrong. 
+
+But a million things can always go wrong, the only thing you get worrying about them is an anxiety attack. I find it more useful to carry a reasonable amount of tools and deal with things as they come. In my experience so far the future is seldom as grim as our fears[^1].
+
+What if though? That's the action-killing nag at the back of all our minds. I have it too. You don't think I worry about these things? I do. I know of a Travco that really did burst into flames at a stoplight. It is what it is though. It's not going to stop me from going on this trip. Because you know what? I know of 328 Travcos that didn't burst into flames. That one is scary, but it's only one. 
+
+A whole lot of houses burst into flames too, yet most of us don't sit around worrying about that. Instead we do what practical things we can, unplug appliances when we're not using them, install new breakers, keep an eye on the candles and so on, and get on with our lives. In the end we manage to ignore the fact that [seven people a day die in house fires](http://www.nfpa.org/news-and-research/news-and-media/press-room/news-releases/2013/seven-people-die-each-day-in-reported-us-home-fires) and just live.
+
+It all comes back to comfort, the ultimate comfort, the little lie we tell ourselves: if I just stay where I am, physically, metaphysically, metaphorically, then I will be safe. It's a nice fiction that helps get all that potential anxiety out of the way, but it's still a fiction.
+
+Clinging to a life of "security" at the expense of living the way you want will fail you twice. Not only are you missing out on the life you want to have, but even the security you think you're getting in exchange for foregoing that life turns out to be an illusion.  The extra irony is that there's never been a safer time to be alive, yet we're all worried about the lion that might be lurking in the grass. Old habits die hard.
+
+Jon Krakauer's <cite>Into the Wild</cite> [quotes](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/511021-nothing-is-more-damaging-to-the-adventurous-spirit-within-a) a letter [Christopher McCandless](http://www.christophermccandless.info/) wrote to a friend in which he says, "nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun." 
+
+Travel is certainly not the only way to have an endlessly changing horizon, at least metaphorically speaking. I'm not suggesting that everyone should sell their house and travel. But I am suggesting that it might be a good time to stop and take a close look at your life and make sure that you're really happy. Make sure that fear isn't holding you back from what you want. I was terrified to have kids. I probably never would have had them if it weren't for my wife assuring me that we could do it. And we did. And it was the best thing I've ever done. Not a single one of my fears turned out to be accurate.
+
+Traveling isn't the only way to live, but it is one way. And for us it's one that's the most immediate and exciting right now. We may not have a house, we may not have much stuff, we may break down, we may get stuck, we may be uncomfortable. That's okay. I believe we'll make it.Somewhere anyway.
+
+[^1]: There are exceptions. Global warming looks to be every bit as grim as we imagine. War, violence in general, also very grim.
+
diff --git a/published/2016-08-20_change-of-ideas-the-worst.txt b/published/2016-08-20_change-of-ideas-the-worst.txt
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+We've postponed our departure three times now. Our original plan was to leave town in March. Then when March sailed right by and the bus wasn't done yet, and the house was in no condition to sell. So we moved things back to June. Then June came and went. It's about to be September, which puts us probably into October. I'm tempted to say that this time I'm reasonably confident we'll do it, but I've said that before.
+
+<img src="images/2016/death_valley_Apr0810_172.jpg" class="picwide caption" />
+
+Some of the delays are a result of things beyond my control, notably clients that didn't pay on time (a perpetual problem for anyone who works for themselves), which meant I couldn't buy things I needed to restore the bus. But there were plenty of things that were in my control.
+
+I have a very particular vision of how the bus is going to look. I want it to be perfect. I want it to be The Best. But that old saying that "perfect is the enemy of good enough" turns out to be very true. I started out needing to have everything perfect, but that's cost us at least a month of time on the road. 
+
+I'm about done with perfect. I just want to go.
+
+I've been thinking about an old post on Moxie Marlinspike's blog about something he calls "[The Worst](https://moxie.org/blog/the-worst/)." To understand the rest of what I'm going to say you need to follow that link and read it, but here's a brief quote to illustrate the difference between The Best and The Worst:
+
+>The basic premise of the worst is that both ideas and material possessions should be tools that serve us, rather than things we live in service to. When that relationship with material possessions is inverted, such that we end up living in service to them, the result is consumerism. When that relationship with ideas is inverted, the result is ideology or religion.
+
+I'm not cutting corners on the bus. I still plan to adhere to my original vision. To me The Worst doesn't mean half-ass, it means being okay with incomplete, it means figuring it out as you go, perfecting things based on actual experience. I've started to incorporate that idea of having the bus be in service to us rather than me in service to it more. We're ready to go and the bus isn't done. And that's okay. We'll figure out the rest as we go. That's part of the adventure.
+
+Currently there's no floor, no water tank, no propane, no solar power, and all the seats still need to be recovered. Of those though only two will likely get done before we leave. We'll recover the seats and we'll put in a floor. Everything else can be done as we go. 
+
+Everything has costs. In this case it's money and time. If you have to have a water tank before you leave it's going to cost you money, which in turn is going to cost you time. Or you could grab a huge water jug for $5 from Home Depot and make do until you can get a proper water tank. In some case not only does embracing "good enough for now" get you on the road faster, it can also save you money.
+
+A lot of the expense of a water tank is the shipping. The tank we want is only about $400, but it costs another $250 to ship it to us. If you're willing to hit the road without a water tank you can drive to the water tank production facility and pick it up yourself. This is also true of awnings, windows and paint jobs, all of which we long ago decided we'd do as we go.
+
+Because if you have to have everything perfect you're never going to go. 
+
+And deep down I suspect that my need for perfect is a kind of excuse to not go. A way of avoiding all the fear that comes with leaving. Fear that if it's not perfect it won't work. Fear that something will go wrong. Whatever. Something will go wrong anyway. And you know what? A lot of times it's the things that go wrong that turn out to be the most fun. Maybe not at the time, but later.
+
+It's impossible to overcome that fear of discomfort. It's natural. You can't "get past it"; you have to learn to live with it. 
+
+It helps that, at this point in the evolution of our culture, I think those of us in the privileged position of being able to do this in the first place could all use a bit of discomfort. Countless people all over the world are living in situations that make our worst moments seem like the petty, insignificant discomforts they are. It helps to put things in perspective, and no matter how you frame it, we're incredibly lucky to be in the position we're in. We didn't even earn most of the privilege we enjoy in this counttry. Our comfort and possibilities are largely accidents of birth. 
+
+Even in comparison to our very recent ancestors we have it easy. My great grandmother raised eight children alone in a one bedroom 800 square foot house with no air condition in Tucson AZ. My wife's mother picked cotton from the time she was a little girl. 
+
+We are soft. We don't even know what discomfort is, let alone the host of horrors visited upon innocent people all over the world every day. 
+
+We are incredibly thankful to be able to embrace whatever discomfort we might encounter. To chose to be uncomfortable is a luxury, perhaps the greatest luxury. I'm pretty sure my great grandmother would have taken a 4000 ft home with central air if someone had given it to her, and I suspect my mother-in-law would just as soon have not spent her childhood picking cotton. They weren't choosing discomfort, it was just life. I'm less sure that either would have exchanged the experience though.
+
+There's a line in that piece I linked to earlier, "the best moments of my life, I never want to live again." I have feeling my great grandmother would agree. It goes on say:
+
+> The best means waiting, planning, researching, and saving until one can acquire the perfect equipment for a given task. Partisans of the best will probably never end up accidentally riding a freight train 1000 miles in the wrong direction, or making a new life-long friend while panhandling after losing everything in Transnistria, or surreptitiously living under a desk in an office long after their internship has run out — simply because optimizing for the best probably does not leave enough room for those mistakes. Even if the most stalwart advocates of the worst would never actually recommend choosing to put oneself in those situations intentionally, they probably wouldn't give them up either.
+
+If you have the luxury of being able to embrace discomfort, take it. Forget perfect and just go, even if "go" is purely metaphorical. You'll figure it out along the way.