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-A couple of years ago I wrote two reviews for Wired. One was about knives and one about knife sharpeners. Despite the best efforts of my editors, both of the reviews have been bothering me for years now.
+We've started telling people about our plans to live full time in the blue bus. 
 
-Not that the I picked the wrong knives or sharpeners. If you're rich and hate helping people, by all means buy the stuff I recommended, it's fantastic stuff. But you could do far better things with your money and that fact has been bothering me for years now.
+<img src="images/2016/bus-joes_2016-06-03_093840.jpg" class="picwide" />
 
-See, [I am a believer in The Worst](http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/the-worst/). 
+After the eyebrows come down and the puzzled frowns flatten out, people start trying to bring up -- usually as politely as they can -- the question they really want to ask: *how can you possibly afford to travel around in an RV? Do you have a trust fund or something?*
 
-What's been bothering me all these years is that I had the incredible privilege of testing all this cool stuff to tell you about and I didn't come out and just say all this stuff is pretty cool, but **you don't need it**. Or at least I don't think you do, you can decide for yourself, but since I wrote those reviews, here's a counter-review of sorts in the spirit of The Worst.
+Never mind that living in an RV is orders of magnitude cheaper than the average American mortgage (including ours). I always want to say, how can you possibly afford a $400k mortgage? Never mind that though, no one really cares how we can afford to travel, what they're really asking is* how come I can't afford to do this too?*
 
-The baseline number I worked with in both those articles is $100. $100 for a knife and another $100 for a sharpener. That's madness. That's enough to outfit an entire kitchen. How? Glad you asked. First go to your local thrift store and find a cheap 6 or 8 inch chef knife. Do not under any circumstances spend more than $10. 
+The answer is the same though. No, there are no trust funds here. We're not even wealthy by American standards. It just so happens that if you get rid of your debts and life doesn't actually cost all that much. 
 
-Now that you have a knife go ahead and drop $10 on the cheapest sharpener you can find. Now follow the directions that came with your cheapo knife sharpener. Congrats, you're all set for knives for the rest of your life. Trust me on this, I have had my $20 Ikea 8 inch chef blade for over 20 years now and it is still razor sharp. I minced garlic with it tonight. You do not need some artisanal handcrafted Japanese purple steel bullshit knife just to slice a tomato. Your piece of shit knife is now sharp and will get the job done. 
+But if you really want to travel full time you need the part that no one wants to hear: you need to be okay with existing outside your comfort zone.  
+
+We're able to do this because we've combined a few traits and made some sacrifices. The bus is 26ft long. We don't have a large home with room for tons of stuff.  I guess we just have a certain sense of not needing much, not being afraid to get outside our comfortable zone, learning to improvise with what you have rather than buying something new and saving most of what you make.
+
+I am also a big believer in the concept of [The Worst](https://moxie.org/blog/the-worst/), which makes it much easier to not worry about stuff. I don't know that we qualify as minimalists, but once you stop needing stuff, particularly The Best stuff, a lot of self-imposed constraints disappear. To understand the rest of what I'm going to say you need to follow that link and read it. 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.
+
+When people ask how we can afford to travel my first thought is usually pretty simple: we can afford to travel because we don't spend all our money on stuff. Perhaps just as important, we don't wait until everything is perfect to go. Nothing will ever be perfect, go when it's good enough.
+
+As a kind of example of how the philosophy of The Worst works I thought I'd deconstruct a couple of product reviews I wrote for Wired a few years back. One was about knives and one about knife sharpeners. Coincidentally, Marlinspike's article is based on forks. Kitchens are apparently a common source of overspending. In my case this is partly written out of guilt. Despite the best efforts of my editors, both of the reviews have been bothering me for years now precisely because they're about The Best, rather than The Worst. What's been bothering me all these years is that I had the incredible privilege of testing all this cool stuff to tell you about and I didn't come out and just say all this stuff is pretty cool, but **you don't need it**. Or at least I don't think you do, you can decide for yourself. But since I wrote those reviews, here's a counter-review of sorts in the spirit of The Worst. 
+
+The internet loves its tips and tricks, so here's the luxagraf guide to outfitting your kitchen for less than $50, which is $150 less than the budget assumed in the Wired pieces. Yes, the budget in the Wired pieces I wrote is $100 for a knife and another $100 for a sharpener. That's probably not even that much money to Wired's audience, but to me spending that much on two tools is madness. 
+
+That's way more than enough to outfit an entire kitchen. How? Glad you asked. 
+
+First go to your local thrift store and find a cheap 6 or 8 inch chef knife. Do not under any circumstances spend more than $10. 
+
+<img src="images/2016/__2016-06-20_140933.jpg" class="picfull caption" />
+
+Now that you have a knife go ahead and drop $10 on the cheapest sharpener you can find. Now follow the directions that came with your cheapo knife sharpener. Congrats, you're all set for knives for the rest of your life. Trust me on this, I have had my $20 Ikea 8 inch chef blade for over 20 years now and it is still razor sharp. I minced garlic with it tonight.  And yeah, I overspent. I was young, didn't know better. The point is you do not need some artisanal handcrafted Japanese purple steel bullshit knife just to slice a tomato. Your piece of shit knife is now sharp and will get the job done. 
 
 Now we're going to go high dollar. Take another $30 to your local thrift store and pick up a couple cast iron skillets. Brands don't matter, just avoid rust (Lodge brand are the most common where I live). Buy one 8 inch cast iron skillet and one 10 inch. Follow these directions to season your new skillets. Also grab some mixing bowls, stainless steel if you can find them. Ceramic and glass are also fine. I suggest you get as many 2-4 Qt mixing bowls as you can, but don't spend more than $30 for all this stuff. 
 
-Okay peelers, you need them but they are pretty much unsharpenable so used is a no go. Buy the cheapest you can find new. Don't spend more than $10 for a 3-5 pack (Asian markets are a good source for cheap peelers). 
+Okay peelers, you need them but they can't really be sharpened so used is a no go[^1]. Buy the cheapest you can find new. Don't spend more than $10 for a 3-5 pack (Asian markets are a good source for cheap peelers). 
 
-Okay so we've spent around $50 and we have a knife, a sharpener, 2 skillets, 3-8 mixing bowls and some peelers. We still have about $150 bucks left. You could go back to the thrift store and get a nice enameled cast iron braising pot with part of it (no more than $20). But I suggest you put the money in a savings account, head to the library and check out these books. Just to be clear, do not buy them, check them out from the library.
+Okay so we've spent around $50 and we have a knife, a sharpener, 2 skillets, 3-8 mixing bowls and some peelers. We still have about $150 bucks left. You could go back to the thrift store and get a nice enameled cast iron braising pot with part of it (no more than $20). But I suggest you put the money in a savings account, head to the library and check out these books. Seriously, **do not buy them**, check them out from the library. After you've read them, practiced their recipes and find yourself wanting to refer back to them then consider buying them. Used of course.
 
 For the basics: 
 
@@ -31,10 +51,12 @@ Because they are awesome:
 * The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook
 * The New Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden (Knopf; Revised edition, 2000)
 
-Okay, now, cook. That was the point right?
+Okay, now, cook. That was the point right? Apply The Worst broadly to your life and it will mean no one is going to walk into your kitchen and go, wow, you have such nice stuff, so if you need to impress them -- and if you're human, you do want to impress them on some level -- then you need to do it with really delicious food. Because the reason you have a knife isn't because it's immaculately handcrafted, but because it's a tool that helps you make delicious food.
+
+Now take this philosophy and apply it to the rest of your life. Spend more time in thrift stores, less time in Ikea. Spend more time at the library, less time staring at Amazon.com. Spend more outdoors doing things that are free less time paying someone else to curate your experiences. Keep track of the money you're *not* spending and put it in a savings account. Consider that if you save 50% of your annual spending you can take a year off work every two years. 
 
 The beauty of buying cheap stuff is that it gets out of your way. You don't have to think about it, you don't have to obsess over it and read reviews. You buy it once for a minimal amount of money and you move on to the actual point -- in this case cooking. You simplify not by buying some quality item you think will last forever, but by eliminating the need to think about anything other than the cooking. 
 
-I'll leave you with Marlinspike's words, which I think are good enough to live by:
+I'll leave you with Marlinspike's words, which I think are good enough to live by: "**We don't simplify by getting the very best of everything, we simplify by arranging our lives so that those things don't matter one way or the other."**
 
-> In a sense, the best gives a nod to this by suggesting that getting the very best of everything will somehow make those things invisible to us. That if we can blindly trust them, we won’t have to think about them. But the worst counters that if we’d like to de-emphasize things that we don't want to be the focus of our life, we probably shouldn't start by obsessing over them. That we don't simplify by getting the very best of everything, we simplify by arranging our lives so that those things don't matter one way or the other.
+[^1]: It probably is possible to sharpen peelers, so if you want to one-up me, figure out how to do it and buy the cheapest on you can find. Please email and let me know how I can do the same.