Fun in the garage wasn’t limited to just vehicles.  I’ve also made tandem bikes, a quadcycle, and a small junkyard sculpture.

Since coming back from our trip I’ve found myself restless and antsy - especially when the evening hours roll around and I’m done with the days work, am tired of looking at screens and don’t want to read a book.  I think I was driving the family nuts with my frustrated pacing and desire for something to go do.

I was missing an offline hobby.

I’ll talk about the practicalities involved in prepping for the trip, the realities of working from the road, the difficulties of coming back off the road, and how we’re planning to ditch our house and become full time technomads. 

The talk will be geared towards other IT workers, and our hope is to inspire you to realize you have the skillset to consider your own location-independent adventure.

The saddest part of the experience for me was that, due to our plans for an extended family RV roadtrip for 2011 we wouldn’t be around for the event.

We have a website that cannot be completed by the current developers….is this something you would like to work on?

Over the years I’ve responded differently, from simple one-line “no thanks” to more involved responses declining the work.  I thought I’d write up a more detailed blog post both to record my thought process in responding and as way to have a link to send out in the future when these requests come in.

Oops, I did it again.

The site design is by Grand Rapids, Michigan based Visual Hero and the front-end code was done by Andy of Ford Interactive out of the Sacramento, California area.

This is something new for me.  I don’t think over the ten-odd years I have been blogging I have ever blogged about clothes.  But over the last couple of months clothes have been a large topic of thinking and conversation between MsBoyink and I.  We’ve been focusing so much on clothes because we’re tired of thinking about what to wear.

My grandparents were all still alive and able to attend the event.  My Grandpa Boyink - tall, angular and stiff in his Sunday suit and relying on his cane for support after a life of manual laboring - would be the first to pass away two years later.  My Grandma Boyink, with her dark curls, permanent tanned complexion and penchant for jewelry with turquoise stones never seemed to quite find her place in the world without Grandpa and died a few years after him.  They had met while working at the same chicken farm, cleaning slaughtered birds. From that modest start they built a marriage that lasted 61 years.

My maternal grandparents lived at 1015 Colfax Street, Grand Haven, MI their whole married life - in a small story and a half house my Grandfather built after they married.  They took longer trips to the south in the winter time, but as vacations rather than relocating the entire season.  My Grandma Bosma I always remember sitting with a dress on, her legs crossed, with a Bible laying in her lap.  She dabbled in poetry and that was a small connection between us as I started writing odd bits in my career.  She was around for the birth of my son and the video I have of the subsequent visit where she holds him as an infant is a treasure to me - I never fail to tear up watching it.  She - whom I considered the strongest and healthiest of all of my grandparents - contracted pneumonia and passed away years before I expected her to. My Grandpa Bosma was adopted so we were never sure of his heritage or nationality.  His short stature was a source of merriment for us kids as we quickly topped him in height during our teen years and started calling him “Shorty”.  An industrial electrician (who wired up many a classic soda fountain in the 1950’s), he was also a life-long smoker and in spite of our constant nagging was the last man standing of all of my grandparents.  He lingered in a nursing home for a while after my grandmother passed and as I worked a short distance away I’d have Crissa and the kids meet me there for lunch once a week to visit him. If I recall the story correctly he met my Grandmother at the local grocery store where she was a checkout. Their marriage?  64 years.

My parents, retired and splitting time between a lakefront Michigan home in the summer and a house in Mission, Texas during the winter, just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. My in-laws, despite having married at ages 16 & 18 and coming from families rent apart by divorce on all sides are coming up on their 45th anniversary.

With age comes reflection, and I’ve been reflecting often about heritage and modeling of behavior.  I have a 14 year old son who needs to be navigated through the remaining teen years to adulthood and into the workforce.  It was through watching the men in my life - my hardworking, blue-collar grandparents and father - that I learned my own values and work ethic.  Because I have their personal and professional lives to contrast my own to I can so easily see how incredibly blessed I am to have a fulfilling job and to be able to choose what I do and whom I do it for.  I worry that without that same blue-collar foundation my son won’t have the same sensibilities when it comes to his work life - and indeed that is one of the reasons we are currently camp-hosting at an RV park in northern Washington.  Being here allows for some additional work opportunities and I’m actually glad to have the opportunity to model a different work environment for him - one that includes sweeping restrooms, wiping down showers, and carrying firewood for people.  I think it’s working - as I write this I’m watching him carrying a bucket and shovel around the campground digging up nasty “sticker weeds”, motivated to earn money in hopes of being able to fly a friend out to visit him next summer.

But this was supposed to be a post on marriage, not jobs.  If I can in anyway attribute any work-related success in my own life to what was modeled for me by my father, father-in-law, and grandfathers, I can only attribute any success in marriage to those same men.  If I define wealth as money or possessions, there is none of that in my family.  No family businesses, no large estates, no trust funds.  But if I define wealth as practicality, hard work ethics, and above all else modeling solid life-long commitment to God and their spouses, then I indeed have a most generous inheritance. 

But that’s only half of the story.  The other half is being married to a true help-meet, friend, and soul-mate.  She’s my navigator, my copy-editor, and my straight-man for jokes on the kids.  She still has that same beautiful smile and I still love to make her laugh.  After 20 years it’s still hard to believe how well-matched we are and I can only thank God for that.

Happy Anniversary MsBoyink!

Experienced User?
I’d like to know more about your use of the module, what problem you feel it solves, and how you educate your clients around it (vs the content that doesn’t use it).  Have you used 3rd party addons in conjunction with it and if so, which ones?  Have you run into issues with it that needed workarounds or additional addons to solve?

Confused Newbie?
Have you looked at the Pages Module and just don’t grok it?  What requirement led you to looking at it? Did you install it and experiment?  What didn’t make sense to you?

You can either reply with a comment here or by emailing me using my contact form

The finished article will appear on Train-ee with full attribution for quotes, etc.

Thanks!