Cloning our life

When Jett and I left Flagler Beach, headed north on Amtrak, we took as many of our belongings as we could carry in one large suitcase and four small shopping bags. A few days after we arrived, I returned to Florida to return the RV to its home base and to collect more of our belongings – what would fit into another large suitcase and a small carry-on. I think I did a fabulous job in selecting items to bring north as so far the only thing that regret not bringing is my back-scratcher.

So, for the first two or three weeks in Massachusetts, we were operating with a fairly small subset of our possessions – or “stuff” as George Carlin would put it. It was obvious that we would have to replace some of the things we left behind if we were to live in Massachusetts all summer without our RV.

When we moved into our Extended Stay America studio apartment, the need to clone our life intensified. We started acquiring things needed to enhance our apartment – a coffee maker (and I chose red because I decided we needed a little color in our lives), additional cookware, silverware, glassware and kitchen utensils. The bathroom, which is spacious with a wonderfully comfortable shower and fine water pressure, lacked any kind of shelving or cabinetry, so I acquired one of those cheap ($19) three-drawer plastic dresser units. We also started buying additional clothes – underwear, shirts, shorts, slacks – until we had a sufficient quantity that we didn’t have to do laundry every four days. A clothes hamper. A DVD player and a few DVDs. Fortunately we will not have to replicate our RV collection of over 500 DVDs as Jett’s brother has a large DVD library (alphabetized!) from which we can borrow.

I bought a minimalistic set of 3 golf discs so that I can play disc golf. And just yesterday I purchased, second-hand, for under $150, a complete set of golf clubs so I can also play real golf.

Must of this will not be going back to Florida with us. The golf clubs will probably be put into our storage unit until I decide whether to bother moving them south. The other stuff will probably be donated or discarded.

But in the meantime all of this duplicate “stuff” will assist us in cloning our life.