Peanut butter sandwiches only go so far. Sure they’ve been quite the staple of late as they provide both complex carbs and protein with a minimum of fat, frustration and cost, but I just can’t eat the same food for every meal. First off, that’s not good nutrition. Proper nutrition is from a diverse range of quality foods. Secondly, after a point I simply loose interest in eating them. Especially as my eagerness for meals would diminish over time leading to an increasing hesitation to eating. And when I don’t eat my blood sugar gets wacked out, my brain gets foggy, my ambition drops to zero and nothing to eat will sound appealing. In a proper kitchen preparing foods was easy. I had a refrigerator, stove and plenty of space to store pots, crockery and other kitchen accouterments. But in a van with just 300 cubic feet of interior volume?

So clearly, I need something more to eat than the easy to fix, easy to store and cheap to acquire peanut butter sandwiches. But, this new food source needs similar properties!

Meet my new cookware and serving dish all in one!

After reading various websites on Thermos cooking it quickly occurred to me that I could eat quite happily from the various dehydrated and “just add water” sorts of foods out there. And it would easily solve the problem of how to cook in a van! In a regulation RV I’d not have a problem as a kitchen would be standard, but, that’s only wishful thinking at this point. This solution of mine scores points by the whole kit being small to store and cheap to acquire. In researching insulated food jars I found it highly curious that the ten ounce size like mine is considered a “snack” size. Ten ounces sure seems like a meal to me! Combine a jar full of curried lentil soup with some bread and an apple and I’d be stuffed silly!

Foods that’ll work for this system are cheap and they’re also things I’ve eaten for years but never pondered the portability of. Like all those years I was bringing the Cup-O-Soups to workplaces and adding hot water from the kitchen to them. At my last straight job I had a whole drawer full of these in all sorts of varieties. And with a Thermos to heat them in I don’t have to pay extra for all those paper cups I’d just end up tossing. Even at the really expensive hippie store near me the dry foods are just $2.50 to $4 a pound. And certainly I could do better than that locally, somewhere. And beating that price with bulk mail order should be a breeze. Even just filling it with brown rice is surely going to beat any other hot food choices I could make in terms of price and nutrition! Sure fast food would be more convenient, but at what price to pocketbook and health?

One of the hints I read about this style of cooking is to make absolutely sure your cooking vessel, regardless of the brand or capacity, has a wide mouth on it and if of high quality. This is both for ease of eating and cleaning and logically it holds true. As shown on the box illustration my food jar opens fully wide on top and as a bonus has few nooks inside to trap food. So I’m hoping over time it’ll prove to be simple and quick to clean up too. Mine will allegedly keep foods hot for up to five hours. So theoretically regular rice should cook just fine in it though I’ve not tried it yet. Being a better made one it keeps things hotter longer and is also much more durable than less expensive ones. Save the cheap plastic ones for kids lunches as they’ll loose it before it breaks.

Now, the only problem is how to boil water. Easy! Get a stove and tea kettle!

Ikea to the rescue

As I’ve not had a decent paying gig since early January I’m being particularly tight with my funds. But I’ve got to eat, right? I looked for months at thrift stores and just gave up. I knew Ikea would have something that looked attractive and was dirt cheap. And indeed, here it is. Now, what about a heat source?

Enter the stove

Mitsuwa, my favorite Asian mega-grocer has two propane options for me. I honestly couldn’t tell the difference between the two stoves in terms of quality or features so I opted for the cheaper one. Twenty bucks for a single burner stove! Absolutely perfect. I looked at the Coleman style camping stoves, but they were way too big and are more expensive. I don’t need two burners and I don’t want to have an external gas tank that needs to be disconnected and reconnected all the time. This also ruled out the little backpacking stoves plus I’d worry too much about accidently tipping one of those over since the base is so small and the center of gravity would be so high when cooking.

The Asian stoves hold the tanks within them and come with carry cases. The tanks aren’t nearly as readily available as the one pound propane tanks, this is the only downside I’ve found thus far. For the convenience and size I’m willing to pay a little extra for the fuel. I bought one pack of butane bottles here too. I’ve seen them cheaper elsewhere but can’t for the life of me remember where!

Enter the Dragon Roll

Oh the temptations here! I can just go crazy with their foods. Mitsuwa has the biggest Asian grocery selection I’ve ever seen. Walking through there I was just picturing all the fabulous meals I could make, but I held off. Knowing that I only have one burner to use and no refrigeration does limit things a good bit! But…they were having a sale on sushi!

Their selection runs a good thirty or forty feet of refrigerated cases. I was overwhelmed but quickly chose individual pieces from the far side of the register rather than the pre-arranged boxes in foreground of the picture below. All told I had a full belly for just five bucks and the quality was superb. The area that Mitsuwa is located in has lots of Japanese-Americans and Japanese nationals too. Just north of the shop are lots of business that seem to bring many Japanese citizens over for work. As such, this store is really hard core. My friends who’ve been to Japan have commented that Mitsuwa is the closest thing in the states to what they experienced over there.

Eat in a food court? Don’t be silly! I had my home parked outside! I ate my sushi from the front seat of my van.

Odd Coffee at Mitsuwa!

It’s a shame I don’t like coffee. Omnipotent GOD coffee
must be a great morning Wake Me Up.

Did Stalin smoke a pipe?

Do we really need to have one-touch shopping for groceries? Who in their right mind is going to surrender their biometric data to a grocery store so that they don’t have to remember a pin number or carry an ID or whatever alleged perk this system offers.

When the US government is going willy nilly in spying on their citizens without warrant, I for one am not going to even point at this data collector let alone touch it. Perhaps I’ll even avert my eyes.

Last night I really wished my van had a bathroom. Even though I made darn sure to have a fully functioning bathroom visit before retiring for the night I really wished I had some sort of toilet in the van. At some point I’ll be taking care of that, but for now it’s a bit of a hike to relieve myself. This was not urban camping at it’s best, this was clearly the van dwelling that is not suited to be romanticized.

My troubles started yesterday when I found a little stash of my medications and returned to taking them. One of them is a diuretic and true to it’s nature will keep me running to the bathroom to pee the first five or so hours after I take it. And when did I take last night’s medication? Oh, about 9pm. The effect is especially strong after not taking them for a few days. Oops!

So within an hour of going to bed I had the rather pointed desire to pee. Not fun, especially as there was people outside the van chatting obliviously to my being there and I didn’t want to change that. And smart thing too, as it turned out there was two visits from the cops in the immediate area and I really don’t want to be hassled for living in my van. I was parked within eye sight of a Jerry Springer style relationship drama involving a trampy ho new girlfriend, a baby daddy and a psycho ex girlfriend with jealousy issues. It was a bit comical that the outside there were potty mouths talking shit about each other, that outside was a free flowing human sewer while inside the van I didn’t have a pot to piss in.

At some point I’ll either get a bucket/sawdust system or a self-contained toilet, but that’ll have to wait for the future. A pee bottle would have been really nice last night and the inconvenience of using would would likely have outweighed the pains in my bladder.

My descent into the bowels of hell

As much as I love free food I really should say no more often. This whole last weekend I ate junk, largely to conserve funds and partially to simply indulge in some forbidden fruit.

For medical reasons I do have some eating restrictions. I’m lactose intolerant so dairy isn’t the best choice I can make and I had my gallbladder removed years ago so high fat foods also disrupt my digestive system. Then there is also the hyperglycemia, where simple carbs throw my blood sugar into a tizzy at the drop of a hat. I’m fine with slow digesting whole grains and more natural foods with a low glycemic index, but anything processed, fast food or grocery store convenience food is probably going to cause blood sugar issues. White flour and sugars are in just about anything ready to eat.

And what did I have the last two days? Lasagna, soda, chips and salsa, chili con queso, cheese and crackers. Tons of white flour, tons of dairy and even some pure sugar water in a can. But hey… it was free, right?

So on top of really needing to pee last night my entire digestive tract was bloated and crampy and I really wished my van was more of an RV and that I had more common sense this weekend. Free is not necessarily the best choice for me when it comes to food. Eating right is the first step to good health especially when there’s outstanding medical issues. And the whole taking a medication with a strong diuretic effect immediately before bed was just ignorance to the reality of living in a home without a bathroom of any sort.

Oh RV conversion fairies! Please wave your magic wands! I’m too stupid to save myself from myself!

In medieval London, people did not have indoor plumbing. It was common to use a chamber pot as an indoor toilet. The chamber pot could then be dumped out a window into the street gutter below. A person who did not have a “pot to piss in” was poor indeed.

In medieval times the word “piss” was not considered at all vulgar. It was not until Victorian England that words such as piss were deemed vulgar. Even today phrases like “pot to piss in” and “Full of Piss and Vinegar” are somehow considered to be generally acceptable and only moderately crude.

stolen from Phrases. Clichés, Expressions & Sayings

Thus far living in my van has been pretty easy as the weather has been nice. But not last night. My life on wheels had been really quite enjoyable until bedtime when I finally admitted to myself that I wasn’t going to be happy falling asleep in the cold and as such I put off bedtime as long as possible, but in reality it wasn’t as bad as I feared.

It was probably in the mid- to low-30s out as when I went to sleep the rain was breaking into snow. Throughout the night I’d occasionally wake up and when doing so I’d check the temperature and the lowest I saw for in the van was 44 degrees. So apparently all the insulation I put in there works! There’s both fiberglass and Reflectix in the walls and that pink foam board stuff under the floor. The ceiling was insulated by the people who did the conversion with styrofoam, but as with the rest of their craftsmanship and planning they did a poor job.

But even at 44 degrees I was plenty warm. I had a hoodie on so my head was kept warm and just a little bit of my face peeked out for air. I was in the Fugly Coleman 20 Degree sleeping bag and had all my blankets piled on top of me. Within ten minutes or so the bedding was noticeably warmed to my body temperature and I was loosing that chill. In about twenty or thirty minutes I was plenty warm and was drifting off.

So what ever happened to siphoning? Is it no longer cool anymore? Are all the hip kids risking blowing themselves up for a couple of gallons? What possible means of drilling would ensure there’d be no sparks?
from CBS 13 in Sacramento:

Sacramento Police report that thieves are drilling for gas — not from wells — but directly from vehicle’s gas tanks. And, as Rafer Weigel reports, your car or truck could be next.

Police say that crooks get under cars with a drill and make a hole in the gas tank, draining it. Police say that this isn’t a rare occurrence. Thieves have struck several times in the last week the same way, and authorities expect that it will get worse as the price of gas continues to climb.

I’d have to imagine vans would be tasty little targets, or anything else big and thirsty. A little Honda might only hold 12 gallons but some big boat vehicles have 30 gallons or more on board.

I once had my car siphoned and this was years ago when it was below $2 a gallon. Maybe six or seven gallons were taken, but I learned my lesson. These days I only keep in my tank what I need plus a little bit for safety. I figured this would be good since then if siphoned I’d only loose a little. But boy oh boy would I ever be upset if some thief getting three gallons of gas would cost me a couple of hundred for a new fuel tank!

from JWZ

Over the weekend I went with my sister and some of the kids to Steve and Barry’s, a radically cheap discount clothing vendor. Sweatshops and Chinese political re-education camps everywhere work overtime for places like this and their crazy sales. Everything was seven bucks or less. Shirts, shoes, jackets, jeans…everything in the store

I went to spend time with the kinfolks and had no interest in shopping, but I was awed with the store. Everywhere I turned it was more cheap stuff and yet more cheap stuff…

…and then I turned a corner! How could this place be? It went on forever!

Once I got past the overload I started actually examining things. Sure the stuff was cheaply made, you’re getting what you pay for after all. Things that should be cheaper seemed better made. Like the t-shirts seemed fine enough while the jackets and shoes looked okay from a distance but revealed their short comings the closer you got to them. But, for seven bucks, what do you expect? This place’s prices are putting Wal-Mart to shame.

And speaking of shame, who ever got goatse plastered all over the store should be applauded while the exec approved the campaign should be ashamed of themselves. I simply cannot believe that some smart aleck designer didn’t fully know what he or she was doing and as such probably wet themselves when they heard it got the green light for a corporate wide roll out of this magnitude. Goatse was everywhere, on everything and you just can’t avoid it!

Goatse was everywhere!

I took a little nap this afternoon in the van. The bed is raised up off the floor so I can have storage underneath and there’s just enough space up there for me so it’s quite cozy. Before I dozed off I was looking around at my new home and started thinking.

There I was, feeling all safe and happy in the tight little nest I realized there was little difference between the now of my van and the then of being six years old and making forts out of couch cushions and blankets.

Back then it was how I got privacy and a sense of my own space and oddly, it’s how I get it now too. The van is my only respite from the constant noise of the world. No home, no apartment, just my little fort on wheels.

At first glance it might seem that Dodge is addressing the need to homeless people to have shelter by suggesting the purchase of a Sprinter van. The article in the Calgary Sun is about local officials breaking up a homeless camp, allegedly not because of Not In My Backyard, but so that people can get into proper housing–like a shelter or a pay as you go campground.

In reality though, it doesn’t appear to be keyword driven placement. It looks like it’s just bought off an impression count as random ads are being thrown up into the space.

I’ve shopped Ikea before–many times. It’s quite the wonderland for those of us who are cheap, broke and like Danish Modern or Mid-Century aesthetics. My sister needed some storage accessories and I suggested it as a cheap place with nice options. Plus, I needed a tea pot. As such we recently went.

One of the things that had impressed me in the past was their use of their own line of laminate flooring in their stores. Surely if it was tough enough to get installed there it’s be perfect for the homes of families with kids, right? That the daily pounding it’d take by hundred of thousands–it not millions–of shoppers per year, per square foot would not cause undue or unsightly wear was quite the free in-house advertisement for their product.

Well, that’s a nice thought. Look at who’s flooring they’re really installing!

Pergo?! Ikea is installing Pergo?! Why not their own laminate flooring? Googling “ikea pergo” brings no clear answers from the number of pages I’ve seen. Some sites say Pergo makes Ikea’s flooring material, other sites don’t. Some say Ikea’s version is inferior and others don’t specify. I don’t know what to believe of any of this and the Ikea and Pergo sites don’t readily yield clues. So what we’re left with is non-authoritative chitter-chatter.

Here’s what I do know though, I’m rather disappointed they’re not using this:

(At the moment I’m laying in my van tucked under blankets and leaching a little wifi to make this post.)

The last couple nights I’ve been quite surprised how comfortable I can be in what would seem rather chilly temperatures. It’s been about 50 degrees fahrenheit overnight here and yet I’m feeling fine. So much so that I’ve been running tests! Namely I’ve taken a small air thermometer to bed with me and checking the temperature when I toss and turn at night.

On average the last few nights it’s been 51 as a low. As I typically wake in the middle of my sleep naturally I’m also probably waking at the coldest points of the night, usually around 3am-4am or so. At this time I’ve also taken reading of the air pockets under the blankets, where I am when I sleep. The average temp in there is 84 degrees.

First off, 84 degrees in the daytime would be, in my mind, a rather nice summer day. So sleeping in such a temperature hasn’t been a problem at all! Also, I’m surprised at how much my body can raise the temperature of the surrounding air. I’m causing the temperature under the blank to rise 33 degrees. And I’m doing this with a below average body temperature too. I normally run about 1.5 degrees below normal.

And what can I credit with my warmth? Blankets! Lots of blankets!
Here’s the strata of my bed:

The top layer is the bootleg Disney fairy princess blanket a friend gave me a couple years back. She was told it’d be a Hello Kitty blanket by the lady at the Korean marketplace. Originally she was upset about it as it was my birthday gift I reassured her that I loved it anyways. Hello Kitty in my home is pretty comical as I’m not a girly-girl, but Disney Princesses are about as antithetical is it gets.

The magenta wool blanket from Ikea was cheaper than cheap. It was a clearance purchase from years ago. Eventually it’ll disappear in the washer as it leaves a hand towel worth of link behind with each cleaning, but for the four dollars I paid for it I’m not complaining. It’s still plenty thick and plenty warm.

I hate the two blankets where the whole thing is filled with holes. They’re nearly ineffective at keeping in warmth but they were free and they’re still better than nothing.

The knobbly pink blankie was another clearance item at Ikea. It’s actually a throw, but again, it’s better than nothing.

My sister made the pink and purple one for my birthday last year. I’m quite fond of it and it’s nice and warm. It’s made of two thick sheets of Polartec like fleece. The edges were cut into tassels and the two sides are tied together.

I love and adore flannel sheets. These are a set I’ve had for years and they’re delightfully soft and warm. Being civilized I of course have both a fitted and a flat sheet. And tucked under the fitted sheet is my sleeping bag. It’s a standard issue cold weather one that’s about as contrary to my fashion sense as it gets. It seems that manufacturers of camping gear thinks that everyone who camps or lives outside of traditional housing really like the “outdoorsy” look. Well, I for one don’t. As such it’s hidden under the sheet and is currently giving me cushion rather than warmth.

The futon was recently given to me to use in the van. It fits nicely into the space too. As it’s an old futon it’s pretty broken down and isn’t very supportive, another reason for sleeping on the sleeping bag. At some point I may need to replace this. Not just because it isn’t supporting my body well, my back is sore in the mornings because my hips have nowhere to sink into, but also it’s full of dust. Try as I might I just can’t get it all out and my allergies are suffering for it. But, that can come when the money does. Perhaps some memory foam can be ordered and the futon passed to someone else who has less sensitive back and nose.

With this pile of blankets I’ve been keeping mighty comfortable at night. And finding a parking spot with wifi makes it all the more so!

Addendum 5-9-06

I realized last night that I missed a golden cleverness opportunity with this entry. Playing off the Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon, the characters on the blanket and the rise of 33 degrees I could have called this entry “The 33 Degrees of Disney’s Cinderella, Ariel and Belle.”