Posted by Canadian Dream on July 13, 2009
Well my vacation was enjoyable except for one major issue. I didn’t do what I had planned for almost half of it. You see I was suppose to go camping for a full week during my vacation, we managed only to get two days of camping in the mountains. The weather turned cold (ie: over night lows of 7 C and high of 11C) and very wet (50 mm or more of rain). So we pulled the plug on camping and returned home and tried out a staycation, a vacation at home.
Overall I was a little disappointed to have to cut our camping short, but it was easy to shift to a staycation instead. We already had meals planned so we just came home put the food in the fridge and proceeded to plan out which tourist sites we were going to visit wit the rest of our vacation cash.
In the end I went to the local science center, RCMP museum and a short drive to Moose Jaw to see the heritage museum on transportation. I also managed to finally see Star Trek in the cheap movie theater. Overall cost including gas was $80 and everyone in the family enjoyed themselves. So for being the back up plan, it worked out great.
So how do you have a good staycation? Well this is what I learned from mine.
- Make Sure You Are Left Alone. We didn’t tell anyone we were back other than who was looking after our house. It’s no good to try and relax with everyone stopping over, so we just didn’t tell everyone we came back early until we ran into them.
- Don’t Work Too Much. I had a mountain of jobs I could have done around the house during my staycation. I ignored 95% of them while I was here. I did water the plants and cut the lawn, but those are harder to ignore without having dead plants and an overgrown lawn at the end of it.
- Treat Yourself. We then proceeded to indulge ourselves a bit more than usual. We ate a bit more of dessert and drank a bit more than usual. It was great.
So overall it is possible to have a good vacation at home, but it does take some planning. Make sure you decide what you are going to do and more importantly not do during it and then get out your routine a bit. I would also highly recommend having a meal plan done in advance, we found not having to think about what to cook each night was a great way to help focus on relaxing.
So have you done a staycation? If so what did you learn from your experience? If not, why haven’t you tried one?
Posted by Canadian Dream on July 10, 2009
Let’s face it organic products cost more and on a net environment basis they may not be all that useful. After all is it better to eat something organic that traveled 1500 km to get to your plate or go to the farmer’s market and buy local food that is organic in everything but name?
I tend to follow the second route and buy local nearly organic products. To date I’ve switched most of my fresh veggies over to nearly organic over the summer, we eat free range chicken eggs most of the time and I’m currently trying some nearly organic beef. This is what I’ve learned from our experience to date.
- Eggs. We noticed a significant improvement in the free range eggs over our regular ones at the store. Much more flavour and the price premium is less than $0.50 per dozen eggs. I highly recommend switching if you can find a supplier.
- Veggies. To be honest I consider the nearly organic nature of our veggies a nice bonus, I really buy the stuff because of the freshness. After all it is hard to beat the taste when the food been out of the ground for at most two days when I get it.
- Meat. I’ve often heard that buying organic meat is a good choice, but so far I’ve yet to notice much of a difference other than the extra cost. Yet to be honest this is a rather new choice for us, so I’m giving it a bit more time before making a final judgment.
To date I’ve not done much for organic fruit so I don’t really have an opinion yet on that. In general I tend to support local over organic, because of the relationship issues. I get to know my farmer and I feel good supporting his farm as it grows.
Posted by Canadian Dream on July 9, 2009
Yes, the title of this post is correct and you are still reading the correct blog. I’m starting to not care about early retirement as much as I used to. Why? I think I’ve found a job I can really love doing, which for me is a bit shocking to discover.
You see I’ve always considered work a bit of necessary evil in the world. I do a job to get paid and I use that money to pay for the basics in life and then save a bit for my dreams. I’ve never considered finding a good paying job that I might actually love doing. Yet during my last vacation here I’m starting to get a really odd feeling I’ve never had before about going back to work: I’m looking forward to going back to my job!
For once I’ve actually found a job I might consider continuing to do even if I become financially independent, which to me is really odd find. I expected to sort of like my job, but to like it this much is really unusual for me. So the offshoot of this new feeling towards work is I’ve become a bit disinterested in my own blog and the concept of early retirement. Strange, but true.
I finally get the idea that is you love what you do, being financially independent becomes less important to you. So my focus really has not been on this blog as of late and I’ve also found working on the book project a bit more difficult lately. So does this mean I’m going to stop? No, I still enjoy writing, but I might start injecting a bit more time on some fiction work as well to help balance my interests out a bit more.
I’m not sure what all this means in the long haul. I’ve yet to think that much about it, but I’ll keep you posted on my thoughts as they develop.
So for those of you who love your jobs, do you care about early retirement or not? Or for those of you that don’t like your job, is that your main reason for planning early retirement?
