As I've talked with more and more people about my living situation, I've noticed a few questions that come up all the time. I'm going to answer them here in full, gory detail.

How do you go to the bathroom at night? Do you just pee in the woods?

As cool as it would be, my life is not an episode of Man vs Wild. I do have 24 hour key card access to any building on the campus that I work at, so I could use the facilities in there if I really needed to, but thus far it's just been about planning. I try not to eat or drink anything after about 7:30 PM, and I wash up and go to the bathroom right before I head out to the truck at night. When I wake up in the morning, I ride my bike to the gym and go to the bathroom there.

Where do you, like, shower and stuff?

I've mentioned this one in an earlier post, but my employer has showers and gyms on campus, mainly because a lot of people bike into work and need to shower off so the office doesn't smell like a frat house. So every morning, I wake up nice and early (around 5:30 AM), ride my bike to the gym, work out, shower, and start my day. While I could skip the gym and go straight for the showers, I feel like that would look strange. Even if I got passed that, keeping that regimen of working out every day is a good habit to be in.

Don't you get lonely out there?

The fact of the matter is that I'm hardly ever in here, except to sleep. I'm working until 5 or 6 PM, and then hanging out with friends or working on personal projects until 8:30 or 9 PM. When I'm in the box, I'm either writing these posts or getting ready for bed. The whole point of this experience is that a bed was the only part of a house that I needed, so if I was in here all of the time, I'd be doing it wrong.

How much money are you saving?

A really cheap apartment in the Bay Area (and I'm talking really cheap), would be about $1,000 a month, bare minimum. So over the course of four years, I'd be paying (again, bare minimum here) about $48,000 in rent, and have nothing to show for it. No physical property, no equity, nothing. After taxes, the truck cost me $10,000, plus about $750 a year for insurance. Let's also factor in the cost of gas. Assuming it gets about 10 miles to the gallon, and I drive it about 25 miles a week (I don't really drive it much at all), that's 2.5 gallons a week, and 130 gallons a year. On a pricier week, gas is $4 a gallon, so that's $520 a year. So $10,000 + $750 * 4 + $520 * 4 = $15,080. So for a super conservative estimate, I'm saving about $33,000 over the course of four years. That's just the raw minimum savings, I'll be investing approximately 95% of all of my post-tax, post-401k, post-benefits income. I've mentioned many times that it isn't about the money, but clearly this living situation makes my future plans much more flexible.

Have you ever been caught?/Where do you keep the truck?/What happens when you get caught?

In the week and a half that I've been doing this so far, I haven't had anyone approach the truck while I was in it or question me or anything like that. I keep it parked at the edge of an open-air parking lot on my employer's campus. If security were to come by, I doubt it would be a big issue. I've registered the car with the company vehicle database, so they know it belongs to an employee, and I've read stories about people at very similar companies having short conversations with security, and then never being bothered again. I'm not very worried about it right now, but if security does come knocking, I'll let them know that I work there. Worst case scenario, they aren't happy and they ask me to leave, at which point I get a membership at the RV parking lot down the street.

What do you do for electricity?

I don't actually own anything that needs to be plugged in. The truck has a few built-in overhead lights, and I have a motion-sensitive, battery-powered lamp I use at night. I have a small (15,000 mAh) battery pack that I charge up at work every few days, and I use that to charge my headphones and cell phone at night. My work laptop will last the night on a charge, and then I charge it at work. As I mentioned in a previous post, I could get a solar panel/power bank for real AC power, but I just don't even know what I would use it for right now.

Those were all the main questions I could think of. If you have any more you'd like me to answer, and you're reading this, you probably know me well enough to just ask me.

I've mentioned in the past that I believe getting enough sleep is a key component to happiness and success. I also believe that the quality of sleep contributes to these factors. Because of this, I've been using an application on my phone that tracks my sleep, for the past year. Basically, you tell the application what time you'd like to wake up, and then tell it how much earlier you're willing to be woken up. Then, you put it next to you on your mattress while you sleep, and based on your movements, it can estimate what stage of sleep you're in and wake you up at the best time.

I've definitely noticed that I wake up less groggy most of the time, but since moving out here, I've also noticed something else. The picture above shows two recorded nights of sleep. One of them is from late April, leading up to finals and end of semester projects. The other one is from two nights ago, near the end of my second week of full-time employment. Even though I went to bed later and woke up earlier in the more recent recording, I spent an hour and a half more time in deep sleep, which is where your brain is doing most of its resting.

So what?

It could just be an anomaly, and once I have more data, I'll average it all out and get some more concrete results. But I think this aligns with what I was saying in an earlier post, about how quickly I've become adjusted to my new life. I'm actually sleeping noticeably better, not restless or tossing and turning all the time, and it could very well be because, subconsciously, I'm exactly where I want to be with my life. Or maybe not, maybe this was just one strange reading, or maybe the new bed is just more comfortable, or maybe I'm incorrect in correlating deep sleep with happiness. In any case, time will tell.

My parking situation is very much analogous to my housing situation: I don't quite fit in. One of the most difficult parts of my situation, one that I underestimated during the planning process, is trying to fit the silly thing in parking lots.

Imagine this. It's Saturday morning, and you'd like to run some errands. No big deal right, just hop in the car and go do them. Think again. There are two ways your scenario can play out.

Scenario #1: You're going to the Mall

Sweet, we're going to the mall, a huge outdoor complex, parking should be a breeze, right? Still wrong. If it's even mildly busy, you're going to be constantly within inches of a multi-car insurance claim, and don't expect any other car on the road to understand that your vehicle doesn't maneuver as tightly as their Prius does. They'll pull right up to your front bumper as you're in the middle of a very tight right turn, and then look mortified as you play a game of Operation/horizontal Limbo that would make your childhood self envious. Not to mention the cases where backing up in the middle of a four way intersection becomes necessary. You've never seen fear until you've looked into a soccer mom's anxious eyes as you back your wrought iron tailgate nanometers away from her prized RAV4.

Scenario #2: You're not going to the Mall

So you're going to a small store, like a GNC or an Autozone. How do you know where to park when you get there? You don't fit in any old spot. If you're lucky, the spots might be a little longer than usual and you can back your tail end a few feet over the curb. That is if there aren't any poles, street lamps, or sprinklers, and if the curb is low enough that you don't bounce it off the gas tank. Otherwise, you have to hope that the lot is designed so that it butts two parking spots up against each other without any curbs, medians, or trees between them, because then you can just park and take up the entirety of two spots. Oh, and be on the lookout for low hanging branches while you're doing on this, or one of them might get caught in the sheathing on top of the box and rip the whole thing open. My strategy for not destroying my house has been to look up the area on Google Maps ahead of time, scope out a good location, and then hope nothing goes horribly wrong in the actual execution of the plan.

I did quite a bit of internal debating over whether or not the 16' box would be too cumbersome. In the end, I'm glad I have all of the extra space (compared to, say, a 10' box), but if you're even thinking of doing something similar, make sure you're completely comfortable maneuvering large vehicles. I drove 40' buses in college, and I never thought that knowledge would be so incredibly necessary for my future life as a software engineer. Life's funny that way.

As you may or may not have noticed, I've been slowly rolling out new functionality to the site. What I've added so far:

Box Badges

Some posts have a little black box truck icon to the right of the title, which means that I was writing the post from inside the box. Since the blog is called "From Inside the Box", it'd be disingenuous of me not to say whether or not I was actually in there while I was writing. This post, for example, was not written from within the box, but rather a quaint little cafe in downtown Mountain View.

Search

If you're looking for a particular post, there's now a search box below the "About" section. Type in your search term and hit "Enter", and I'll the site will do my its darnedest to find the posts that you're looking for.

From the Top

If you're just coming on board with all of this, and you're really into Shadenfreude, then clicking the "Beginning" button at the top will list the posts from earliest to latest, so you can read up on the hot mess that constituted my first week or two, and get caught up with how I got here.

Post List

Similar to search, if you want to see all of the posts in one place, there's an "Index" button at the top that has a chronological list of all the currently available posts.

I've been thinking about adding comments and a few other features, but if you have any requests in the meantime, feel free to let me know!

Before you get too worried, the title probably isn't what you think it is.

I've heard some strange sounds at night, things that sound vaguely like dirt bikes, drones, jackhammers, fireworks, people playing Pac-Man, you name it: if it's unidentifiable and doesn't belong in a parking lot, I've probably heard it from the back of this box. But there has been one sound I've heard on several occasions, usually in the morning on weekends, that until recently, has been totally baffling to me.

The Sound

I can't remember when I first heard it, but in my groggy, half-awake state, I thought it was someone typing up a citation for me. Now, this doesn't make much sense in retrospect, but it sounded like someone typing loudly on a keyboard. When I say loudly, I mean I legitimately imagined someone outside my truck with an old mechanical typewriter, slamming away at keys and watching the tiny hammers force ink onto paper. And to my hazy, early morning mind, this meant that someone was typing up my license plate, prepared to give me a ticket freshly printed from their antique typewriter. Stranger still, in between these loud keystrokes, I'd hear softer pecks, as if they were more gingerly hitting some keys, though less frequently than others. It wasn't until a Sunday morning, when I woke up and had the chance to listen to it for a while, that I figured out what it was.

Birds.

More specifically, crows. The sound I was hearing was them hopping along the roof of the box, their claws scraping against the metal roof. They must be pretty large, because they produce some thunderous thuds as they plop their way across. The "softer pecks" that I was hearing were actual pecking sounds, on one specific part of the roof.

The Hole

Pictured above, the hole is a home improvement project I'm not quite sure how to tackle yet. It's some old damage, probably from someone bumping the truck into a structure that didn't quite fit the 11' clearance requirement. It's been covered up out the outside with duct tape, and on the inside with what looks like a protective spray coating. In the morning, a single beam of light shines through an exposed hole. Not a big deal in my book because, one, it never rains here, and two, I like to think of it as a tiny skylight. But for some reason, whether it's the tape or the coating, the crows just love to peck at it. Regardless of where they initially land on the roof, they always trot on over to this one corner, which is right above my head, and they peck at it until they're sufficiently satisfied they've banged their faces against it enough times and that they've succeeded in waking me up.

No complaints on my end, I'm more than happy to have Nature's alarm clock at my disposal, and anyone who's ever listened to raindrops rhythmically landing on a car roof knows just how relaxing it can be.