We live here now.

Take control of your recordings with Beyond TV

The bad news came when we ordered a new computer to serve as our home-brew digital video recorder (DVR). We had happily used an old Windows XP machine to do the job, but I wanted a faster machine, better capable of handling the demands of up to four shows recording at once, better capable of compressing GBs of video. I bought an Acer Q6600 and loaded it with 4 GB RAM since, as we all know, more RAM matters more than more CPU speed for most home computer users. Sadly, our TV tuners had a different idea.

After several hours of trial and error and a bit of reading, I discovered that the Hauppauge PVR-150 TV tuners we had used for years wouldn’t work on a 64-bit system with 4 GB RAM installed. Worse, rather than simply refuse to work, the tuners would randomly drop frames and freeze at random instants, making it difficult for me to isolate the problem. It took over six hours.

At that time, I worked around the problem by removing 2 GB RAM from the computer. Bear in mind that I had specifically asked for the RAM upgrade for this computer, and so I had essentially sunk some multiple of $100 into useless RAM and the wasted day getting things to work.

That was over a year ago. My, how times have changed.

Not long ago, I came across a short article that described a potential remedy for the problem. It suggested I configure Windows Vista to voluntarily boot with less RAM. It would never in a million years have occurred to me that Windows would do such a thing. I’d never used an operating system capable of voluntarily using less RAM than available. Before encountering the confluence of 64 bits, Vista and the PVR-150 tuner, it never occurred to me to want or need such a thing. With trepidation and excitement, I tried it.

1. Install the RAM and make sure Windows Vista booted fine. Don’t expect the TV tuners to work.
2. Configure Windows Vista to voluntarily boot to 3712 MB (3-5/8 GB) RAM. Run ‘msconfig’ from the Command Prompt, then choose the Boot tab, then choose Advanced Options…. You’ll find a “Maximum Memory” option you can enable and set the RAM Windows will boot with.
3. Reboot. Even though System Properties reported 4.00 GB RAM, I ran Beyond TV and it worked.

I include this, hoping that it will help you out there. I can’t believe I had to give up 384 MB RAM to make this work. My first five computers could run on 384 MB combined.

We’ve landed safely in Kiev and we’ll be here for such a short time we won’t get a chance to see anything, but I thought I’d briefly post some random experiences from the last 20 hours or so.

- Passport control was a nightmare. There are several booths, but many refused to actually line up. When we arrived, there were just general “crowds” not lines, and people were adding themselves to the peripheral (ie closer to the front, but expanding the crowd outward) rather than lining up. I can’t say whether this is a common occurrence, or the result of the particular people arriving when we did. Props to the Dutch man who had one of these “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore” moments and yelled at the crowd for not respecting lines. We were all thinking it. (Well, those of us trying to stand in lines, anyway.)

- Hubcaps are different here. They must be. I don’t notice very much, and especially when it comes to cars, but I started looking for cars *with* hubcaps because so few seemed to have them. I doubt 90% of the population is driving around without hubcaps, so I am concluding that they do, in fact, have hubcaps but they just look like non-hubcaps to an outsider.

- “Biteamo” is a greeting something like “welcome” but every time I see it I think it says, “Bite Me.” It’s funny when a word elicits the opposite reaction to its intention.

- Nice and helpful don’t always go together. The reception desk was very nice about my request to purchase an internet access card. Took my room number down, said they’d charge it to the room and everything. Didn’t understand my concern when I couldn’t input her friendly attitude into the user name and password field.

- The room is small-ish, but nice. The bathroom is modern and attractive, though it’s a tiny corner shower stall and Joe has resorted to turning off the water to lather, then turning back on to rinse. Strangely, there was only 1 full-sized towel in the room, so for my shower after the flight, I dried off with a hand towel and the provided bathrobe. (I managed to successfully ask for a 2nd larger towel in mime today from the housekeeping staff.)

- The breakfast spread today was huge! Almost too much selection so I’m sure I missed something good because I couldn’t try everything. They even had lemon slices out for tea. We will not go hungry here.

- The elevators require you to use your room card before you can press the button for a floor number. That’s not so unusual. What *is* unusual is that the elevator immediately starts moving once the doors close, whether or not you’ve selected a floor. So, if you got on an elevator going up, it will take you up. It just won’t necessarily let you *out.* Since our room is only on the 4th floor, I don’t think we’ve once successfully swiped our card and pressed 4 before the elevator reached the 4th floor. (Breakfast room is on 2.) So, we usually find ourselves high up before we can actually indicate our preference to be let off on the 4th floor.

That’s about it for now!

Tim Ferriss' "Four-Hour Work Week"

I have started reading The Four-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. When I’d read descriptions and reviews of the book, I formed the opinion that I already intuitively understood many of the principles at work, particularly as regards his steps of elimination and automation. Reading it confirmed what I’d suspected: I had already used these techniques and even counseled others to use them in my work as a classroom trainer and consultant. It sprang to mind a particular success story from my early software career.

I worked as a student-on-call at IBM in Toronto in 1997. I started on the Visual Age for RPG project, which entailed my comparing error messages between the older RPG compiler and the newer Visual Age RPG compiler. While they had automated the test that produced all the error messages they wanted to check, they hadn’t automated checking the messages from the two compilers to each other. Instead, I started doing that. I began with 50-page printouts: a master copy and printouts from each test run. I compared the two copies, then reported a defect when I found an unacceptable difference between the two. It took a few days to learn which differences they could tolerate and which ones they decided warranted a fix. It took me several hours to compare the printouts, and I resented the tedium. After a week, I had the thought that all successful people have: there has to be a better way.

First, I asked whether I could use e-copies of both the master copy and the test runs. They arranged for that with little effort. As I waited for that, I looked for patterns in the text I compared by hand, learning how to extract the messages from the surrounding text and how to describe meaningful and meaningless differences. Once I received e-copies of the master copy and a single test run, I started writing a computer program to load the two files, compare them, then summarize the differences, highlighting the meaningful ones as “almost certainly defects” and the meaningless ones as “probably not defects”. This gave me an opportunity to write my first truly useful programs in C, a language I hadn’t much used before, but one that I imagined would benefit me as a professional programmer. I don’t recall how long it took me, but I don’t remember anyone becoming impatient with me, so the time I spent must not have made me a bottleneck.

The first day, I used my new program to on the next test run, but verified the results by hand. I noticed that my program took about 30 minutes to run: I had an old computer, I didn’t know how to write particularly quick programs, and don’t forget the test runs amounted to 50 printed pages. At first, I looked around the office while my program ran for something to do, as I didn’t have access to the internet on my computer. I flipped through a few manuals, including a C manual that I thought might help me. That day I processed two test runs, the same as any other day, but noticed that my manual checking went quicker, because I could check the meaningful differences first, then the meaningless ones, then double-check the rest of the document to ensure that program didn’t miss any defects. To my delight, it performed more than well enough for me to start trusting it within a week.

Now the time had come to harvest my productivity crop. I collected that day’s test run and a new master copy, loaded them into my program, ran it, then wandered around the building, knowing I had about 30 minutes. I hadn’t realized the size and complexity of the old IBM building in Toronto. I began to understand the need for its intricate room addressing system, right down to numbering hallways, odd numbers running north-south and even numbers running east-west. I walked back to my office after about an hour of wandering to look at my program’s result. I reported two defects, then wondered what to do next. I had to wait for the next test run, and they wouldn’t run one for another couple of hours. I wandered the building some more and stumbled upon something of interest: a dart board in the cafeteria.

I started playing darts.

In less than two weeks, I’d gone from a terrifically tedious job checking two 50-page documents to one another by hand to IBM paying me roughly $150/hour (as a starving undergraduate student!) for about one hour per day, with seven hours of playing darts, reading, or generally relaxing. All this by finding an ineffective work process and streamlining it with a little elimination and a little automation. I had gained some relative mobility, as I only needed to spend about an hour a day in my office, reporting defects or fixing my test program.

Now I need to confess something: my program did not operate perfectly. Every two weeks or so, I’d notice something my program missed: a difference that my program interpreted as meaningless that I needed to report as a defect. This meant that, every so often, I reported a defect later than I could have. I was performing at far less than 100% efficiency. Funnily enough, it did not matter at all! I didn’t understand the theory at the time, but I experienced it then: the project had a bottleneck somewhere else in the system that moved more slowly than I reported defects, so I could generate no extra value by reporting those defects more efficiently!

Imagine that: producing better results wouldn’t have mattered at all, so it didn’t matter that I produced my results less than perfectly efficiently.

Since I didn’t understand bottlenecks at the time, I felt bad about “cheating” and added more rules to my program to handle these increasingly subtle distinctions between meaningful and meaningless differences. The resulting program did work better and did automate my work even more, allowing me to go from one hour of work per day to closer to 45 minutes; but if I hadn’t been refining a skill I would use later to make a lot of money, then I would have looked back on that as a waste of time. Had I known any better, I might not have bothered at all, and simply played more darts!

Long before I started reading The Four-Hour Work Week, I managed to use some of the principles he describes to turn an $18/hour job into a $150/hour, one-hour-per-day job where I got to play darts, read, and otherwise relax most of the day. I didn’t wait to perfect my time-saving system; I just started using it as soon as I reasonably could, even though it cost me extra time for the first week! Since then, I’ve managed to combine the goal of mobility with the principles of elimination to retire at 34 on passive income streams worth 1.5 times my family’s essential living expenses. You can do it, too, and I recommend The Four-Hour Work Week for beginners to read to help form their vision of a new life, and then to re-read a year or two later to refine your approach to freedom from the tyranny of tedium.

I recently read about voicemail-to-email services and like the idea. I function better when I have fewer inboxes to monitor. I signed up at phonetag.com because they offer a seven-day free trial. They sent me instructions to start using the service the next day, which led me down a small rabbithole.

PhoneTag.com works as you might expect: you forward your unanswered calls to their service, your caller leaves voicemail with them instead of your current phone service, someone or something transcribes the voicemail to text, then they email the text to you and can send you a text message, if you like. It sounds great: no more phoning in to retrieve messages, since they can easily push those messages to me.

Unfortunately, it didn’t go as smoothly as I’d like.

I tried to forward unanswered calls to PhoneTag.com’s phone number. My phone responded with “Request not completed”. After a few attempts, I called Rogers Wireless and they forwarded all my calls for me, which allowed me to test the PhoneTag.com service. It worked. Sadly, the Rogers customer service representative told me that I had to choose between Rogers voicemail and trying out PhoneTag.com. Wait… what?!

As long as I subscribe to Rogers voicemail, I can only forward all calls or none. This means that I cannot forward only unanswered calls to PhoneTag.com unless I first remove the Rogers voicemail service from my account. I imagine eliminating Rogers voicemail will increase (!) my monthly fee, because service packages tend to work that way, and I didn’t want to deal with that possibility at that moment, so I had to abandon my PhoneTag.com experiment for the moment.

If you subscribe to Rogers Wireless and have used or still use PhoneTag.com, then please share your experience with us. I’d like to know whether you find it worthwhile.

I had started to write this post as “Saving money at the Farmer’s Market*.”  But then I realized that I don’t actually believe in saving money at the farmer’s market: if something looks good or we know we need it, we buy it.

We came back from our very first market trip saying, “Well, I didn’t think we were going to need a cheese budget to live here!”  We probably spend between $15 – $25 on cheese alone each week.  If you think this is just another latte factor, then you’ve likely never had applewood smoked cheddar, Le Sieur de Duplessis, organic PEI Gouda from the Cheese Lady or truffle-infused brie.  These aren’t luxuries in our household; they’re essential staples.

Even produce can be more expensive at the farmer’s market: cucumbers are $1.50 and a bag of salad greens is between $2.00 and $3.00.  But, we’ve had greens last over two weeks in the fridge (undertaking no special freshness-extending methods) so not buying food to feed the compost bin is a definite financial win.  Not to mention that the delicious salad greens we’ve been able to get have caused us to swear off iceberg lettuce forever!

Every Saturday, during our walk back from the market, we tally up what we’ve spent.  This week, it was about $120.  (We have a house guest coming this week, so we were buying for an extra person, too.) $46 of that went to fish truck guy for salmon, smoked salmon, haddock (Heavenly Halibut was sold out by 9:20 a.m.!) and scallops.  About $35 went to cheese, shitake mushrooms ($11) and a package of German sausage.  $21 was spent on produce (greens of all kinds, onions, herbs, peas, cucumbers).  And rounding out the spoils, $5 for chorizo (our first purchase so far from Pleasant Pork, since we don’t eat a lot of pig) , $5 for eggs and beef from “eggs and beef guy” and $4 for PEI strawberries.

So far it doesn’t sound like we’re much of a financial role model, especially given that we still need to use ValueFoods to supplement with things like milk, cream, butter, flour, rice, snacking fruit (apples, oranges, pears, bananas), lemon and limes, tea and cat treats.  But in many ways, our farmer’s market shopping is completely in tune with our financial philosophy: spend your money on what you value.

Even when we don’t necessarily spend less in absolute dollars, shopping at the farmer’s market significantly ups our value per dollar spent.  Here are just a few of those values we get for our money at the farmer’s market:

1. Quality: How many times have you bought a cucumber or an onion from a store and, totally seduced by the aroma, had to try it right away and then make everyone around you try it.  An onion for crying out loud!  And how many times does the captive audience think, “Oh, I’ll try it to be polite and shut this guy up,” but then exclaim, “Hey, that is pretty awesome!”  When every meal or quick snack of apple and cheese turns out to be a local food love-fest, I’d say you’re doing pretty well.  We value knowing where our food comes from, who produces it and knowing that we never have to eat crap again. (Can you believe we’re worried about the quality of food we’re going to find in Toronto because we’ve been spoiled by PEI?)
2. Quantity, or lack thereof (ie. “enough”): Good food comes in smaller packages, or at least has a higher unit cost.  We naturally, therefore, think more carefully about exactly how much to purchase.  Will we eat this all before it goes bad?  Do I really need this much? Compare that to how many $0.59 heads of cabbage we’ve never fully used.  Waste is waste, and if we’re willing to waste pennies, we’re willing to waste dollars.  Cutting waste by buying products that are too dear to waste has made us carefully and consciously consider how much is enough.
3. Intention: Yes, there are jewelery and craft vendors at the farmer’s market, but honestly, the chances of us walking out with a wooden lighthouse as an impulse purchase are slim.  When we go to the market, we’re there to buy food (specifically the basics) and there are no new shiny kitchen gadgets or snack food sales to steer us off course.  Although $120 for our weekly basics may seem high (and this week we’re expecting company this week so we erred on the side of being over stocked), if we’ve ever walked out of the Superstore paying less than that, and with only food items in our cart, I’d be shocked.  Shopping at the farmer’s market is our equivalent of the “make a list and stick to it” tip.  If we are tempted by something we hadn’t intended to purchase, at least we know it will be quality local food and our money will go to someone in our . . .
4. Community: OK, I know some people are still “eggs and beef” guy or “fish truck guy” in my mind, but at least we recognize each other and enjoy our transactions.  I’ve always said that one of my reasons for eating local was to have a network so that if ever the *&?!%# hit the fan, we’d have a food source.  And in a strange turn of events, while buying the Succulent Shitake this week, Tina confided that she’d never tried them herself and she asked me how we prepared them.  I never thought we’d have the chance to give back to the community anything other than our cash.  But, since I take pictures of everything we make/eat anyway, it might be nice to give the vendors something (a scrapbook page, a recipe?  Sadly I’m not the crafty/creative type) showing how we used and enjoyed their food.  Since we travel too often (as it stands now, anyway) to actually grow anything ourselves, this interaction and participation with our food supply gives us a connection to our food that we enjoy.

So, just like we make a distinction between “retired” and “rich”, we also differentiate between “spending less” and “spending well.”  Our goal isn’t to reduce our spending to the bare minimum.  Reducing our spending at all costs would at times be at odds with our values of purchasing high quality, healthy local products and supporting our community. Our goal is to reduce our wasteful spending to the bare minimum, spending that doesn’t give good value in return.

We’re saving money by not wasting money, and thereby able to feel like we’re living rich even though we’re clearly not. When you can get so much value from purchasing the basic necessities, things you have to buy anyway**, then maybe you’ll be less likely to make impulse or excess purchases that don’t really make you happy.

Do you think it’s crazy to get excited over your particular choice of laundry detergent?  TP? Olive oil?  Toothpaste? Maybe if you allowed yourself to buy the stuff you really liked (or to spend the time on making your own) rather than picking up the cheapest no-name brand or whatever’s on sale this week, then you’d feel more satisfied and less deprived as you navigate the superstores.  Maybe you’d feel a greater connection to a community (”Hey, you use the soap in the bottle covered with crazy, religious rants, too!”) or maybe you’d just feel good every single time you washed the dishes that the suds going down the drain aren’t causing shrinking testicles in frogs.  Maybe you’d be more likely to tell yourself, “I can’t afford this Meatball Grill Basket (thanks, Unclutterer.com!) because I know I spend a little more than the average person on good cheese every week.”

Spending well can lead to spending less.  Take the time to think about what you truly value — and more importantly, what you spend money on that you don’t actually value.  Then, even if your absolute dollars spent figure doesn’t change significantly (though there’s a good chance it will), at least you’ll gradually reallocate your resources to align with your values.  That’s true “retail therapy.”

* It seems like it really should be farmers’ market or maybe even farmers market.  My last choice would be farmer’s market (there’s definitely more than one farmer), but that’s what’s on the sign outside the building, so that’s the phrase I’m using.

** Not everyone needs to buy food, but most of us aren’t farmers.  For us, food shopping is a necessity.  But, everyone has their own list of essential purchases; even our local farmers need to buy TP, I’m guessing!

OK, so enough people have been asking me, “How’s the PEI diet going?” that I should probably publicly reiterate, we’re in the very preliminary stages of evaluating the diet, not going whole hog, so to speak.

I describe our current eating style as the, “Oh hey, if we were only eating PEI food, this would count!” stage of the game.  So, please don’t give us more credit than we deserve!  We may have noble intentions, but we’re only human.

All that being said, the Spring Street Farmer’s market in downtown Summerside has been a lifesaver.  It’s now been I think 4 consecutive weeks that we have not needed to cab it uptown to the Atlantic Superstore because we can buy almost all our weekly grocery needs at the Farmer’s market.  I can’t tell you how thrilled we are about this, and our decision to move here has been completely validated on this fact alone.  (We do need to hit the ValueFoods 1-2 times per week for things like butter, milk, cream, apples and household products.)

Jen and Derek have been our exclusive suppliers of all kinds of interesting salad greens (we couldn’t care less if we never see iceburg lettuce again!) while Emmerdale Eden farms (previously known as “The Cheese Guy”) blessed us with not only portabello but also shitake mushrooms last week, in addition to the most heavenly of cheeses and organic bacon.  (How weird is it to have heard Jedidja say that they were getting p.o’d with one of their pigs… oh, and next week, there will be bacon!?!) I feel bad that I don’t know “egg and beef” guy by name, nor do I know “waffle/sausage vendor who sells us rhubarb jam” nor the “fish truck guy” who give us halibut that doesn’t even taste like fish and the best smoked salmon we’ve ever had.  If I weren’t so shy, I would have struck up a conversation or two.  Heck, I only spoke to our mailman for the first time today and found out he’s from Toronto (Rosedale)! (He noticed our York University alumni magazines.)

Today, Jedidja joined us at Dooly’s for beer and pool… so much of the former we mostly forgot we were playing the latter.  We do always go for the PEI brew on tap, and we got so caught up in socializing that we only left just in the nick of time to deliver Joe to bowling, so I have a feeling we’ll be supporting another local business tonight (A-1 Beamer’s Pizza, who have been so, so good to us even in just these few short months) as he didn’t have time to eat first.

Dooly’s had a whole stack of the  Farm Fresh 2009 Directory brochures out, so I snagged one of them.  A happy coincidence as I’d been reading about ideas for both a Food Trading Group and an Online PEI Farmer’s Network just this morning.  So, we are still exploring ways to localize our food and food supply chain, but since we have travel plans for much of the summer and apparently winter takes forethought and planning, we can’t reasonably start anything until next spring.  We are in the idea-gathering stage and simply enjoying the fruits (and veggies, and meat) of the Summerside Spring Street Farmer’s Market to the greatest extent possible.

This morning’s breakfast, for example, was smoked salmon and Jen/Derek greens on homemade biscuits.  Last night’s dinner was a combination of leftover chili (local meat, but canned beans/tomato and grocery store onions, peppers) with pre-cooked farmer’s market potatos (thanks to egg and beef guy) that was leftover from making fish cakes with fish truck fish.  Don’t even get me started on the scrambled eggs w. shitake mushrooms/bacon breakfast we had with Corey last weekend!  So, I think we’re doing quite well with what we have, but we certainly have not forced ourselves into any kind of hardship, or required MacGyver-esque maneuvering to put a complete meal together.

The only things we could possibly complain about (and I use that term loosely), are

• the fact that we really do have to haul our butts out of bed at what seems like a terribly unreasonable time Saturday mornings to ensure that things like mushrooms aren’t sold out.
• we don’t always know who will/won’t be at the market, and what they will/won’t have for sale
• It’s only on Saturdays, and we may return home from a business trip on a Sunday/Monday/Tuesday and be out of luck for that entire week grocery-wise.

Minor quibbles for sure, but enough to make us willing to try to establish better relationships with local food producers/organizations for sure.  For a normal week at home, though, the market has more than provided and I don’t think we’ve ever eaten healthier!

Thank you to the Spring Street Market, and all the vendors, organizers and supporters who make it possible.  You’ve made it pretty difficult to envision life on the road this summer (although our house sitters are in for the time of their lives!), and we’ll make it back to you just as soon as we can.

Related Links:

Jen and Derek’s Farm Fresh Veggies – http://farmfreshveggies.blogspot.com/

Emmerdale Eden Farm - http://www.emmerdaledenfarm.com/

Jedidja’s Blog (New beginnings and continuing adventures in food, fitness, farming, and sustainable living on beautiful Prince Edward Island) – http://newlyplanted.blogspot.com

We’ve been watching the series 100 Mile Challenge on the Food Network and of course, we’ve always tried to eat as much local food as we can.  Remember how we decided to take on a raw food diet a couple of years ago?  (Of course, we were assisted by the fact that our oven was essentially a carpenter’s bench in the middle of the floor at the time)

Well, we’ve been contemplating an all-PEI diet this time as the island is small enough to basically consider that our 100 mile radius.  (Technically, we could even include some areas of other provinces, but the PEI border is much simpler to use.)

So far, we’ve simply started making a list of what we think we’ll have to do without to see whether there are any real snags or non-starters, and of course debating whether PEI roasted coffee counts.  (What do you think?)

Our concerns right now:

• yeast – we make our own bread and can buy local flour at the Spring Street Farmer’s Market, but I don’t know whether we can get local yeast
• rice – we do eat a lot of rice because it’s convenient, but we can always cut it out
• bananas – I’ve heard the kind of bananas we have access to are little more than nature’s junk food anyway, but we do like them for a quick hit of something
• tea (for me, green tea) – I don’t like herbal teas at all, so unfortunately I don’t think any of the crazy alternative melanges will cut it for me.  It will probably have to be just hot water and lemon for me.  “Lemon?” you ask?
• lemon – apparently it’s super easy to grow lemon trees indoors in Canada.  This will happen.  (I’ll just buy the tree before we start any challenge!)
• sugar – I don’t like honey, so this will be interesting
• salt – I’m not a big salt person anyway, and I’m not sure whether Summerside harbour is the best source water for home desalinization.

So, this is very preliminarily stage 1 of the pre-PEI diet challenge.  I spent some time this afternoon reading about the nutritional benefits of potatos, and that will become its own post later.

Right now, though, Joe wants to play pool, where locally-brewed beer is served, so we’re already in compliance!  Well, technically, we’d need to find out whether all their ingredients, especially yeast, are from the island.

This leads us to one of the discussions we’re having – is it good enough to include local products like the coffee and the beer because at least we’re supporting local enterprise?  Or, is that hypocritical because we won’t be supporting the local Chinese restaurants and coffee shops, for example?

We have some details to hash out, and probably will try to read the 100-Mile Diet book for some suggestions.

It’s been a little busy for blogging with the new digs, but I just thought I’d write a quick note to say that things are great. We’re loving the house and the city.

We’ll update more soon!

The Summerside PEI home (more about the house itself later) will be house #10 for us.  Even though we’ll go back down to only owning 9 when we sell the one we currently live in, 10 is a nice little milestone for us.

When we envisioned the Dauphin experiment 5 years ago, we didn’t expect our money would come from real estate.  We just thought that the best way to reduce our living expenses was to own the cheapest house we could find.  Of course, that didn’t mean buy the $24,000 house with the sagging foundation – that ain’t cheap!  It turned out to be a $35,000 structurally sound 625 square foot house being sold by the bank as a foreclosure property.

We purchased that home a good 3 years before we were able to disentangle ourselves from Toronto. (Sidebar: last time it took 3 years to free ourselves up from our lifestyle, finances, commitments etc.  This time, it took about 6 weeks.  Life simplification, FTW!)  For the last 2 of those years, we rented out the house.  It didn’t always go super smoothly, but there was never a shortage of tennants.  So, about a year before moving, we purchased a second home that we believe was quite undervalued.  It, too, was instantly rented and has never been vacant a full month since we’ve owned it.

This demand for rental property combined with sub-$40K houses = great big win.  It was the rental income from these properties that allowed us to retire, even though we’re not rich.  We have no mortgages and a lifestyle that is completely subsidized.  We watch the news about the tanking economy, and know that it doesn’t affect us (until we can’t get the products or services we need).  We have it pretty darn good.  Garth Turner would be proud. So, why move, and especially, why now?

Sometimes I worry we’re being irresponsible, or that this move somehow goes counter to the philosophy that got us where we are today.  The new house costs *over $100,000* not to mention the work we’ll need to do with it and the costs of moving.  (People still laugh, but it’s over 3 times what we paid for the current house, and still causes a few heart palpitations!) When you pride yourself on your achievements in downsizing and minimizing, there’s a certain guilt that comes with moving back up the property ladder.

I think we were proud that we got by with the minimum requirements, moved to the middle of nowhere, lived in essentially a 3 room house (Joe’s office, bathroom, rest of house) and sacrificed the ability to “go out” anywhere, really.  (There was no where to go out.) It was sufficient, and it allowed us both to retire well before our 35th birthdays. We also created this blog about the process, so pushing the envelope with respect to our home life has become a part of our identity.

But, just like the $24K house with the unstable foundation isn’t really cheaper than the structurally-sound $35K house, the house in Dauphin costs us a LOT in travel time, money and energy that should be greatly reduced after the move.  The tiny commuter airline to and from Winnipeg only runs twice a day on weekdays (makes it difficult to arrive at a client site on Sunday or return home from a work week on Friday) and the train only runs 2 – 3 times per week.  Consequently, we end up spending more weekends in Winnipeg than anyone should have to, and we also end up bundling our travel together so that we minimize the Dauphin-Winnipeg legs taken.  This means leaving the cats alone for long stretches of time (don’t worry, friends check in daily on them!) and most recently left us the victims of a home robbery.  (We narrowed down the time frame, and the burglars came during the weekend we were stuck in Winnipeg waiting for us to get home, not while we were away on the trip itself!)

Without meaning to slag Dauphin, there’s another hidden cost we’ve incurred – people just didn’t want to come visit us.  All of the sudden, we tell people we’re moving to PEI and now *everyone* wants to come!  And, we’ve allowed ourselves to purchase a home with room for them to do so.  What’s the point of moving somewhere “different” (I wanted to say “exotic” but somehow it didn’t seem quite appropriate for Dauphin) if you can’t share it with people and use it to inspire them?  For the first year or so, I was really excited about Dauphin because of what it offered us.  But, we were always met with, “I could never move there,” or “You’re so brave/disciplined/resolved,” which I know was meant to be a compliment but just further emphasized that our choice wasn’t somehow “desirable” and that we needed to be commended for surviving/sticking it out.  And especially since finding willing house sitters is integral to our travel strategy, living in a desirable location goes a long way to allowing us to travel for extended periods of time.

So, we’ve decided that this move doesn’t run counter to our initial ideals.  Rather, we’re simply opting for the next version of the $35K house strategy.  The potential closure of the bowling alley in the next few years, the increased time and expense traveling, the unwillingness of friends and family to come visit (and no where for them to stay in the house, even if they did) is simply too shaky of a foundation on which to continue.  It’s a completely responsible choice to purchase the more expensive house (that is well within our cash budget to avoid a mortgage) in order to avoid dealing with these “structural” issues.

I’ll sure miss my cork floors, though!

Not to say that we didn’t research the move to Summerside fully before taking the plunge, but now that we’ve decided to go for it, here’s just some of what else we’ve learned about our new town that makes us super excited to move:

• Island Fair Trade Coffee Co. – On the off chance we can’t find our Kicking Horse “Grizzly Claw” or “Pacific Pipeline” locally, at least there’s gourmet fair trade coffee roasted right on PEI!
• Bunny Trails Pet Ranch – An exotic pet farm, ranch, breeder, store… I guess we’ll just have to see it to know what it is.  Maybe they can help us fulfill our dream of a backyard of bunnies safe from predators and the winters.  Check out the Rabbit Page to see some of the breeds with upcoming litters.  Never seen a Lionhead Rabbit?  They’re adorable!  Grrr… so tough…. not!

• 102.1 SpudFM – “Everything Classic” (with Saturday a.m. 80s) and online streaming!  We’ve already been listening for a couple of weeks, and dreaming of that -5C weather!
• Spring Street Times Farmer’s Market – They don’t have their own website, but Amber Phillips of Rayner Creek Photography publishes their newsletter.  This market looks absolutely awesome and we can’t wait to walk down there every Saturday morning.  (Amber tells me there’s already a line by 9am for the fresh veggies.  We’ll sharpen our elbows!)
• Dooly’s - OK, I think the decision was solidified for Joe when we learned there’s a billiard hall within stumbling distance of the house.  After 500 hours of pool, you earn a “500 Club” jacket.  So, shall we start the pool going as to how long it takes Joe to get one?

• Credit Union Place (click on “Things To Do”) – Of course, the all-important bowling alley.  But it’s also a full sports and entertainment complex with a swimming pool, hockey rink and concert venue.  Also walking distance from the house.
• Cows Ice Cream – A former student exclaimed, “Oh, I’m so jealous you’re going to be near cows!”  Now, given that this is actually a vet student (and she didn’t capitalize! ) I actually thought she meant moo moo cows.  Apparently, though, Cows is a PEI company making natural ice cream.  Who can argue with that?

So, the obvious question is, when are you coming to visit?!