It's not often that I quote other people directly in this space, but I do it occasionally. Today, for the first time, I am resorting to copy and paste to make my point. Last night, in a conversation about the caravan, which happens very often now between the man and me, I suggested that it would be a crucial investment to finally get our own espresso machine to take with us. My way of thinking is that it pays for itself in the first ten trips to Starbucks that we can skip, so while traveling, let's call that three weeks. I was told, and this is the pasted quote: "I don't think you're grasping the power/weight/space issues correctly." The same guy who is very excited to go on a minimally-salaried sabbatical from all of our obligations is telling me it's more efficient to get our latte fixes (which neither of us is ever really going to give up, let's be honest with ourselves and each other) from a retail establishment? Okay, sure, I will have to stock up lots more coffee beans and half and half to make up for what isn't coming from a barista, but it's not like I was going to go without in the first place. There are a lot of tradeoffs I'm willing to make. I can store all of my family heirloom furniture and dishes. I can donate half of my wardrobe to the consignment shop that my club runs, and live in a handful of jeans, t-shirts, and sweatpants for a year. I'm pricing out what I thought would be a cheap set of Corelle dishes, that will be lighter and harder to break on bumpy roads (and which were far more expensive than I would ever have predicted, as I learned tonight), and I looked at enough lightweight stick vacuums on Amazon that a picture of one appears on the top of my Facebook feed every single time I check it. But to imagine that I couldn't find a square foot of storage space for an espresso maker, for when we are camping in some mountainous backcountry is foolish. He wants to be far away from the madding crowd, as the saying goes, so that means one of us is going to be responsible for all the cooking. I think she who will be the master chef will get to select her own tools. (Besides, this is the only way I can guarantee that my kitchen is kept gluten free, and I am safe from cross contamination. I was thinking today, what happens when he cheats and has a piece of pizza when he goes back to his office here, and then unsuspecting, I kiss his mustachioed face? I worry about this.)
It is the story of our lives, whenever one of us points a finger at the other's foibles, we forget about the giant stack of corresponding weaknesses we have lurking in our own closets. Here is the man exposing my unwillingness to travel super lightly, or to forgo every one of my modern conveniences. I've been doing a lot of thinking about what I can trim off lately, and I think he'd be surprised at what I'm ready to give up, at least for a year. But I'm very curious... He has talked about selling a few of these rugs he sent home, as if doing so on the road would be preferable than creating a brick and mortar store, as one of my BFFs and I would like to do. At this moment, I'm staring at eight full eighteen gallon tubs of rugs, five full thirty gallon tubs, and two twenty-seven gallon tubs with one monstrously large rug each, plus one nylon duffel bag with the Broncos-colored rug in it. And I have the choice of emptying and re-sorting every single tub, risking contamination with dog and cat hair, in order to fit in the one undyed wool rug that is left over, or heading back to Target for a ninth purple tub. If I am not mistaken, there are three more rugs heading this way, to add to the Great Wall of Carpeting that is taking over my living room. So the question becomes, where exactly on the bus will all of these rugs fit? Does he plan on pulling out all fifteen (or more) tubs every time someone wants to see what we've got? Somehow, that doesn't sound like a workable plan. So let's talk for a little while about power, weight, and space issues, Mr Man.
When I look at these rugs, I think a brick and mortar store sounds so much easier to wrap my head around. That way, they can be displayed flat, in an environment free of pet hair, well lit and with a pleasing ambiance for shopping. But then every time I think about a store, I wonder, do we have enough inventory to support a shop? Should I have him hurry up and buy twice as much, so that we have time to factor into our retail price the cost of his follow up plane ticket to fly back and restock us? It's a perpetual motion problem. And I don't know at what point it all becomes too much. At some point it might cross the line from business venture to hoarding nightmare, and I hope that someone stops me before my toes touch that line.
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