Patience

Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish. ~John Quincy Adams

All things come to he who waits, provided he knows what he is waiting for. ~ Woodrow Wilson

Patience is the key to paradise. ~ Turkish proverb

These quotes seem to fit our situation perfectly. And patience has been our focus as of late because we're basically in wait-mode. We are waiting until after the holidays to put our house up for sale. We are waiting until the January RV show in Denver to start seriously shopping for an fifth wheel (although we continue to research). But we also need the house to sell in order to buy the RV. We are also waiting until the house goes under contract before we sell some of our major stuff like furniture and car and before I tell my employer that I will be leaving. Tracy already shared the news with hers, but hasn't given a hard date. It feels like all we're doing is waiting for time to pass...

I've not blogged recently, mostly because I didn't feel like I had much to report. But we do continue to make small progress, especially in the area of purging. Our garage sale a few weeks ago introduced us to a gentleman who was interested in buying some of our large items - elliptical machine, pool table, bar. He was in the process of finishing his house and wasn't in a position to make a deal that day, but we kept in touch with him. He came by tonight and gave us the payment in full for all three pieces, although he won't be taking them until he can bring along some helpers. We have no problem holding the stuff as long as we have the cash. I'll be making a trip to the bank tomorrow morning to make the deposit! :)

We have also been able to get rid of some of our household items. A friend of ours is in the process of moving into an apartment and doesn't have much in the way of the basics. So it worked out great for us. There were several things leftover from the garage sale which he could use, as well as some of the household items from our current RV. After all, we won't be needing 2 sets of things. We also sold him our dish set, which we weren't exactly planning to sell quite yet, but we knew it was a good opportunity. They are a nice Pfaltzgraff stoneware set, but way too heavy for RVing. They had to go eventually. We still have some mismatched pieces from old sets and our cheapo dishes from the RV, so we'll get along fine for awhile. But it will also give us incentive to go shopping for our new dishes soon!

Speaking of shopping, it is so hard not to continue to accumulate stuff. Now I'm not a real big shopper, be we did just make a Kohls run last week and replenished some of our clothing. We are trying to live by the one in, one out rule, but we have yet to discard anything after this trip. We are justifying it to ourselves that we just did a big purge of clothing, but we probably need to be a little more strict. I know there are things that are worn and old, our "weekend" clothes, but how many of those do you really need? And then the other night we were walking by a book/gift store and decided to go in. Of course I kept finding books that I wanted. It was a spiritual store and there were many books about achieving your dreams and following your instincts. As I read the synopsis, I kept saying 'hey that sounds just like us!' It would have been fun to read a few of them, but we walked out without buying any. Small victory! After all, we have a stack of books to get through before we leave. And then, most of our reading will be done through our Kindles, which I prefer to physical books anyway.

We know that time will go by fast now that the holidays are upon us. We need to spend the next month doing a few cosmetic things to the house in order to have it ready to go on the market. Luckily, there's nothing major we need to do, but it's hard to get motivated to fix up the house for someone else. I hate to invest any amount of money in it not knowing if it will really make a difference in the end.

So in the meantime, we will continue to work on our patience. That is not something I'm very good at, but practice makes perfect, right? And we have a lot of practice ahead of us!

Until next time, Happy Thanksgiving. We sure do have a lot to give thanks for this year! :)