June 2023

This month's entry may be short because I'm writing it in early August. (Still haven't developed the habit of keeping regular notes!)

I think I forgot to mention it in my May post, but the day of the meeting I purchased Emotional Intelligence and started reading through it. The book is great! It's the book I needed growing up and didn't have.

So, for right now, my focus is really heavily on work. I've stopped trying to optimize everything in my life, because that mental place of always looking for the next optimization pulled my attention away from the number-one driver of our FIRE journey: my day job. It's been really nice to be freed from that mental prison of sorts. I have to be in the office at 8am; I have to be there until 4pm or 5pm. I don't have the freedom to burn the candles at both ends to maximize every moment of my day. That stress is gone. (But, in its place, I do have some stress about being let go from my job despite my best efforts to course-correct, but I don't think that's likely based on the amount of positive feedback and mentorship I'm getting from my direct boss.)

I'd like to reflect on where we've come over the last six months, and show a nice chart with our expenses, but the reality is I just don't have that data right now to present.

This definitely wasn't particularly frugal, but in the middle of the month, my wife sent me on a late Father's Day trip away for a weekend. I stayed in a really neat old Airbnb for a couple nights - I left my laptop at home and only brought books. I read and read. I made coffee and put on a random record on the record player they had, and listened to it from beginning to end. I did it again the next day. I walked to and from the town square. It was a really nice couple days of solitude.

One last major item! For some time, we've been wanting to get a school bus and convert it to a skoolie home. We've been thinking up to now that we'd have to save $50,000 or so to do this. My son, who I hadn't thought had really wrapped his head around a skoolie, randomly prayed the other evening, "God, please help us to get a skoolie at time." "At time" apparently meant "soon." Within a few days, my wife mentioned to me that a coworker of hers has a friend who is selling her stripped-down skoolie. She showed me pictures, and I got on the phone within another day or two to schedule time (in July!) to go see it. Love at first sight! It sounds like it runs extremely well, has had all the seats and everything removed from it, and is in good shape. Not the finished bus we'd envisioned, but it's a beautiful, white, 1983 Bluebird bus. Who knows, we may end up with less than the original $50,000 after all's said and done.