The In and the Out

Living in an RV can be sometimes boiled down to two things, in and out.  Living in around 200 square feet of space with a reported 71 square feet of outside storage, requires that you think twice about what you bring in and be quick about bringing out what you don't need or use.  Other things that come in are food, which we prepare and eat.  We often play music at farmers markets when we travel and are given food and other products for playing. Since we are careful about how much food we can store in the motor home, especially fresh food, we tailor our meal planning to what we get in.  Therefore the turnover of in to out is rapid and space saving.  I might mention however we do have about 5 lbs of whole bean coffee from Cloud Forest Initiatives and about 4 lbs left of our decaf ground from the same folks.  Well we have our priorities.   We like buying the "Fairly Traded With Dignity-Naturally Grown Without Chemicals" coffee from Thomas.

Now, speaking of coffee and in and out, we also have water coming in, either through a connection to a drink safe garden hose and outside spigot (city water) or pumped in and stored in a 43 gallon fresh water tank and supplied with a 12 volt direct current pump from the tank to the shower, kitchen sink, lavatory sink, or toilet.  Right now, because the weather folks are threatening a hard freeze for the next few days, we are disconnected from the water spigot and just getting our water from the fresh tank.  We also have a 6 gallon water heater in this system that operates on lp gas or electricity.

The water from the sinks or shower goes into a 41 gallon gray water tank where it can be stored until "dumped" into a sewer system or a "dump station".  Most RV parks have a sewer drain pipe right at the site so you can just dump the tanks when you need to.  The black water tank or the toilet wastewater tank (as the brochure calls it) or the Xe tank as we call it (named for the former Blackwater Security, guns for hire agency) holds 36 gallons of Xe which I define as a combination of pee, poop and water mixed with a few chemicals (which in our case the latter are safe for the environment.)

So, particularly in this case, you can see the importance of paying attention to the ins and outs.  Usually we can go around a week before we have to dump the two holding tanks.  The guidance is to dump the Xe first then the gray water, that way the gray or cleaner water rinses away the excess Xe. (which any real peace activist would want to do)  We can stretch this a little by using urinals for night soil and then feeding earth somewhere, catching rainwater for washing and flushing when we need to, catching the dish rinse water and giving that to earth, then limiting our shower time.  We know we need to shower when we start noticing funny looks from the next table at the coffee shop.

Having shared all of the above, I'd offer the "paying attention to the ins and outs of life" as a method of spiritual practice in self awareness.  This can also be used as a method of saving money, losing weight, recovering from addictive behaviors, etc.  It's all about ins and outs.  Thanks for reading this far;  I'd love to hear your own stories of the ins and outs.

By the way, we also learned that when living in an RV full time, when you have to get something out or put something in the fridge, do it quickly.  You can do this by memorizing where things are and go and then open grab (or place) and close.  Bye for now!!