Walden

I am currently reading Walden, by Henry David Thoreau. It is very revealing that a lot of things that people think are wrong now were wrong then, in the 1840s and 50s. I am learning a lot from it. Seems to me that this is the original Your Money or Your Life, and that Joe Dominguez was not so original, after all. Yes, his plan is his own, but the concept of equating hours spent earning money to buy something or go somewhere is the real tradeoff we are making for stuff is all Thoreau. That new car is hours and hours and hours of work out of our lives, not dollars. We spend our lives, not dollars, for things.

Anyway, I'm not far into it. Just finished Economy. I'll report more as I learn more.

This has been a rough day, moneywise. We took our used, paid for RV on a 400 mile round trip, but only mde it 100 miles before we had to pull over. Fortunately, we did make to my niece's house, and there is a nice park just south of here. So, we spent a nice day yesterday and last night at the park with our great niece and nephew. My brother and sister also altered their travel plans and came here, instead of our original destination, so we were all able to make the best of a bad situation.

This is small town Oklahoma, so there were no transmisison places open today or yesterday, but fortunately our niece's fiance had a friend who is a shadetree mechanic. The bad thing is that we are spending money to fix this thing that we didn't think we would need to. The good thing is it is getting worked on on a Sunday, and he charges a lot less than a shop. The tranny looks in bad shape, but with the work this guy is doing we should be able to limp around for a few weeks. No more long trips until we get the thing worked on right, though. We probably need it rebuilt.

The thing I am kicking myself about, though, is that we knew it had problems. We didn't know they were this bad, but we still should have fixed it before a trip of this magnitude. This is what Dave Ramsey would call Stupid Tax: doing something dumb that costs you money. It certainly wasn't a frugal thing to do.

The RV isn't all that bad as such things go, though. It is a small four cylendar, paid for with cash, uses little gas, so I don't feel so bad about the concept for RVing. Just this particular situation on this particular day.