I like to think I'm pretty environmentally friendly. I try to minimize my waste, take quick showers, and not run unnecessary appliances, like heating and cooling systems. I'm definitely not a super earthy-crunchy-Hippie-type, but I'm at least vaguely cognizant of the atrocities I commit against Mother Nature. My main sin against the planet, aside from just being American, is the fact that I run errands in an 11,500 pound tank that gets 8 MPG on a good day. That's bad for at least four different reasons, in no particular order:

1. I weigh ~170 pounds, it's wildly inefficient for me to haul six tons of metal with me to a cafe.
2. As it turns out, the truck doesn't just fold up and fit in my pocket once I get somewhere. I have to park the stupid thing, and I've noted before how that isn't always easy.
3. It's also my home. And really, it makes a better home than mode of transportation. Plus, I invariably forget to secure something, and the next time in the box becomes a game of "find and pick up all the stuff that was violently thrown around while you were driving". The joy.
4. It costs money. I like having money, it's better than not having money because I spent it on 100 million year old plants (read: gasoline) to please my truck-beast.

So, you can imagine my elation when I found out that my company was piloting an electric bicycle program. Looking at the list of Bad Things^TM above, here's how an electric bike would make my life better:

1. It weighs like 50 pounds, which is ~99.6% less than the truck. Much more efficient for moving me places.
2. Parking a bicycle is infinitely easier than a 20-something foot long truck.
3. Bicycles are made for taking people places. Moving trucks are meant for taking things places. I'm glad to no longer be forcing a square peg into a round hole.
4. It's free! It's mine to use as long as I stay with my current employer. I can charge it up at work, and it gets 25+ miles on a single charge. That's enough for a trip to my mailbox and a few local errands.

So naturally, I signed up for the program, did the training, and picked up my shiny new toy. The bike is a Specialized Turbo. It's a pedalec, which means that it only helps me move along, it doesn't do all the work like a motorcycle would. It has a torque-sensor, so it puts in effort proportional to my own. This is all great, because frankly my cardio sucks, and I can't be bothered to actively work on it. But when you incorporate it into my daily routine, and also let me do it at almost 30 MPH (I got a motorcycle license just so I could get the faster version), I'm much more inclined to play along. I've only had it for four days, but I've already racked up 50 miles on it. I bought a bike rack for the truck so I can take it places with me, but I haven't installed that yet. I'll save that for a separate "Home Improvement" post.

I'm still working out little details, like where I want to mount the rack in the truck (not that there are a ton of choices), and how to get it in and out of the truck smoothly (it's 50 pounds and awkward to maneuver), but overall it's been a total boon to my routine.

I've never really been camping before, so when a friend asked if I wanted to go camping over Labor Day weekend, I gladly accepted. In the past, I've mentioned that living in the truck feels like perpetual camping. Think about it: I practically live outside, I forgo a lot of modern conveniences (namely heat, A/C, and a nearby bathroom), and I fall asleep to the sounds of nature every night (there's a shocking amount of wildlife at the edge of my parking lot). So I expected camping to feel like just another day for me, and I packed for it almost like I'd pack for a normal day: a few t-shirts, a pair of shorts, and my handy dandy battery pack. So, how was it?

When your entire life fits in a parking space, leaving it for a few days (on twenty minutes of notice) is super easy. There's no sense of homesickness or yearning for first-world amenities. You never catch yourself thinking, "Gee, I miss my television and refrigerator right now"...because you didn't have those things to begin with. In the same vein, because you have so little to even consider bringing with you, the cognitive overhead for packing is minimal. In a house overflowing with assorted objects of questionable utility, you have to mentally iterate through them and decide what makes sense to bring with you on a three-day excursion. Like I said above, I just tossed all my useful belongings in a bag, and that was that. Granted, if I was camping alone or with other truck people, this wouldn't have worked in the slightest. It's only because everyone else was able to bring things like tents, utensils, and food that I was able to pack so lightly.

As for the actual weekend, it was a total blast. There wasn't anything truck-related for the three days I was away, save for my recounting of a few particularly strange truck stories,. I certainly didn't drive the truck to the campgrounds, I doubt it would even have survived the journey. It was just three days of cooking over an open fire, stargazing with a clear view of the Milky Way, drinking to excess, and swimming in a lake of questionable quality water, all perfectly legitimate camping activities.

It wasn't entirely sunshine and rainbows though. Sleeping on the cold, hard ground did make me miss my truck bed a little bit, and it's true that I've been pampered by my corporate fitness and hygiene facilities over the past few months. We did have a bathroom at the campsite, which came with a complimentary coating of dirt and a potpourri of random insect infestations. Several bouts of tiny, uninvited truck guests have made me pretty unconcerned with bugs, so I definitely appreciated the unintentional conditioning. Those negligible gripes aside (one could and should even consider them part of the experience), truck life was good preparation for camping, and in turn, camping was a nice departure from truck life.

People have all sorts of suggestions for how you should spend your 20s, and they land pretty much everywhere on the spectrum. Some say you should work extra hard to provide yourself with a solid foundation for the future. After all, you're young and void of life's later obligations, put that time to good use. Others say you shouldn't squander it toiling your best years away in monotony. As is probably evident from some of my other writings (read: ramblings), I fall somewhere in the middle. On one hand, I recognize that I'm setting up the foundation for the rest of my life right now (little to no expenses, investing early, yadda yadda yadda). But on the other hand, as I'm one to note, I only get to be this young once and I'll be damned if I don't make some memories to reminisce about when I'm old and gray. Plus, one of the main reasons I decided on the truck life was to minimize the time until I could start travelling.

Anyway, this is all just a long-winded introduction for the actual topic at hand: striking a work-life balance when you literally live at work. Sounds tricky, right? When your lifestyle blurs the line between working and just living, how do you make sure that they don't amalgamate into one never-ending workday? Early on, this was a legitimate issue for me, and I didn't even realize it because of how natural it felt. During the week, I would wake up, head to a gym (at work), shower (at work), work (obviously at work), and hang around the office (working, mainly) until it was time to go to sleep. Rinse and repeat. It took me a few weeks of this routine to realize that I was spending 70-80% of my waking time working. I ever-so-briefly became a zombie, constantly and mindlessly working away at whatever problem I was given, reduced to a machine that turned food into code and waste. It wasn't that my workload was too high, I just didn't know what else to do, and that happened to be the path of least resistance. However, after a few months of experimentation, I think I've figured out a reasonable formula, but I still have to be very cognizant of what I'm doing, lest I slip back into my bad work habits of yestermonth.

Separation of Truck and Work

The first thing I had to do was to realize that just because I'm relying on work for most of my basic needs (showers, bathrooms, food, laundry, gym, etc), I can still draw a clear line between when I'm working and furthering the goals of the company I work for, and when I'm enjoying my own free time. Recognizing this was the first step, once I was able to understand the difference, I just had to define which was when, and add a little bit of regimentation into the mix.

Set Work Hours - And Stick to Them

The first thing I did was put my foot down and establish what time of day I would be working. Any other time of day, that's Brandon time. I decided that 8-9 hours a day of working was more than enough to get everything done that I needed/wanted to. There is very little I currently work on that is too important to wait until tomorrow if it's getting late. And I figure I normally workout, shower, and head to breakfast by 8 am, so 8 until 4 or 4:30 pm sounds like a pretty reasonable work schedule. Okay, let's say I've done my time and 4 o'clock rolls around, what's next?

Find Places to Go After Work

I quickly realized that it wasn't quite enough to just say that work ended at 4, I had to physically get up and go somewhere. Sure, I could just sit at my desk and work on my blog, or plan my travels, or code up some side projects, but being physically located at my desk meant that I was much more likely to accidentally get wrangled back into doing work stuff. Plus, being at my desk for 10-12 hours a day, every day, probably looks pretty strange to my coworkers. The solution? Go somewhere else. If I don't have any other plans, I have a mental list of locations to hang out and enjoy my own time. Some of them are just different places on campus far from my desk, others are cafes downtown, and still others are random places near where I pick up mail from my faux mailbox. So that covers the week, but you're going to need a new game plan for when Saturday shows up at your truck door.

Planning Weekend Activities

I like to wake up bright and early Saturday morning and do all of the week's laundry.* Up until last month, I had a laundry room in the same building as my office. That sounds super convenient, but what ended up happening was that I'd hang out at my desk while I was waiting for my laundry to finish, and inevitably my feeble mind would wander back onto work topics. I'm sure someone with a better understanding of basic human psychology would be able to explain why that happens, but I certainly don't have that answer. In any case, doing laundry in a building other than my own, far from the temptation of productivity, solved that problem. My routine is now doing laundry and exercise in parallel, killing two proverbial birds with one proverbial stone. That only accounts for 2 or 3 hours of my whole weekend though, surely there's more to it. After all, the truck likes to pretend it's an oven during the day. It's not as if I can just hang out in there all afternoon, and I actually prefer it that way. At some point I'll dedicate a whole post on how to have a successful night on the town with the truck in tow. For now, just know that I prefill my weekends with cafes, trips to the city, parks, errands, events, movies, and questionably appropriate levels of alcohol. Note the emphasis on the "pre" part, if I don't plan things out in advance, I'll inevitably end up back at my desk, which I consider a Bad Thing^TM.

Know Your Limitations

Living in a truck makes some types of fairly normal leisure activities more difficult. Namely, not having a TV/reliable internet (and by extension cable/Netflix) means I can't just plop on the couch, throw on some Beverly Honey Hills Ninja Boo Boo Warrior, and let my brain matter leak out of my ears. I can't watch Netflix on my laptop in the truck because I don't get quite good enough reception, and I just feel off doing it at work. I'm okay with this though, because it almost forces me to find something more productive to do, which I don't mind in the slightest.

The takeaway here is that having a life of your own outside of work is important, truck or not. Truck living is easier in some ways, harder in others, and just plain stranger in some places. But making a concerted effort to only give a portion of your soul to your employer means that you still have some left over to put towards your dreams. Maybe a little too sappy and idealized, but the sentiment is there.

*_{Sidenote: This was definitely a good habit to get into. It turns out a full laundry bag of sweaty gym clothes can make a small confined space, say a box truck for example, smell pretty bad, pretty quickly. So regularly purging the demons of well-worn clothing from my life improves my quality of living fairly dramatically.}

In a world where everything is prepackaged, replaceable, and easily disposable, trash is tragically an unavoidable by-product of living. Whether it's paper towels, tissues, plastic packaging, cleaning products, cardboard containers, clothing tags, receipts, pretty much every transaction you make is going to generate some type of waste. And waste is, like, generally bad, right? It takes up space, serves no real purpose, wastes resources and energy, and most importantly for truck folk, there's really no good place to put it.

If you live in a house, you probably put your trash on the curb once a week and the trash fairy comes and takes it away. You either pay the town or a contractor to send this fairy to your house. If you live in an apartment building or complex, chances are there's a communal trash heap/chute that you dump your undesirables into. As far as I'm aware, there's no truck-to-truck trash removal service, and quite frankly it would be pretty weird if there was. My strategy for managing waste was non-existent up until recently, and that was definitively a Bad Thing^TM.

Minimizing Waste

You're going to have to deal with some amount of trash, it's inevitable. However, the raw magnitude of refuse you generate will vary dramatically with how proactive you are in controlling it. Here are some of the things that help me minimize what I'm throwing away:

1. Buy less disposables. This one makes sense. Instead of going for paper towels, go for cloths instead. Instead of cleaning wipes, buy cleaning solution and some quality sponges. The whole "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" mentality works wonders here.
2. Buy the more expensive items used. Most of the time, when you buy something used, it's not going to have the original packaging, which (in my experience) accounts for most of what you have to throw away. It's always extra packaging: bubble wrap, cardboard, packing slips, instruction manuals etc. Buying used stuff eliminates that step, especially if you pick it up in person instead of having it shipped. This was my main antagonist, the Ikea packaging was ~50% of all the trash I had built up.
3. Just buy less stuff. A bit of reiterating what I was talking about in this post. Ask yourself, "Do I really need this? Does this actually improve my life in any articulable, perceptible way?" If the answer is no, great! You've just saved yourself money, space, and the burden of having more trash to toss out.

Managing Waste

Like I said, it all started with a trip to Ikea. I had successfully (and painfully) assembled the dresser, and I was left with a huge mass of cardboard and plastic wrap and all the other various fixings of the packaging. I did what seemed like the reasonable thing to do at the time: I took all of the trash, threw it in a big bag, and dumped the bag in a corner of the truck. This would have been fine and all, except that the bag was still there three months later. And every time I cleaned anything, or bought anything, or did pretty much anything other than sleep, there would always be some new piece of trash. Naturally, I threw it into that ever-growing black hole of bad decisions and didn't think any more of it.

It probably doesn't sound all that bad, it just sounds like a trash bag. Except that at this point in the story, it's filled with who knows how many random house-cleaning chemicals, discarded shampoo bottles, and random other waste that I've accumulated by being alive. Not only was I sleeping within a few feet of this near-definite biohazard, but if I've learned anything, it's that bugs will eat pretty much anything. And I had a whole lot of anything and everything in that bag. I wouldn't be entirely shocked if that's what was attracting all of my bug buddies.

And I'd still have that same mystery bag in my truck, had a friend not needed some help moving. Luckily they did though, unintentionally giving me the perfect opportunity to quietly rid myself of 20-ish pounds of God knows what into a dumpster in their apartment complex. But clearly that's not a sustainable solution; I'm not going to be consistently helping friends move. That said, I'm sure my friends enjoy knowing someone in possession of a moving truck. But still, if I can't rely on throwing trash in friends' dumpsters, what are my options?

Uhh, a landfill?

This is a pretty obvious option. You have trash, you need to get rid of it, you take it to the landfill. Simple and easy. The first problem is that most landfills don't like to take random trash. They'd prefer if you sorted it, placed it in separate bags, and other completely reasonable requests that I had no interest in complying with. Not a huge deal, I'm sure I could travel 50 or so miles and find one that would take my wad of trash in all of its unadulterated glory. In the grand scheme of things, a 50 mile drive actually isn't all that bad. It's inefficient for sure, and I'm not big on rampant inefficiency, but that's manageable since I would only be doing it every few months. But once I get there, I still have to pay for it, and on top of that, I'm dumping it straight from the box to their facilities, meaning some garbage guys and gals are going to be all up in my house. Like I've said before, I don't mind people seeing my situation, but I'd prefer not baring all to some complete strangers. Finally, I still have the aforementioned problem of building up trash for weeks or months at a time, an all-you-can-eat buffet for pests. Certainly not ideal.

Just toss it somewhere?

Definitely not. Aside from being straight up illegal to dump your trash in unauthorized dumpsters, it's also just incredibly rude and not my thing. I'm not trying to be the homeless guy creeping around foreign apartment complexes looking for a place to dump my trash under the cover of night. That's beyond weird. I'm also not going to ask my friends if I can dump my discards in their trash, because that's just as strange. In the same vein, it's also not their responsibility in the slightest. I'm the one who signed up to live in a truck, they shouldn't be responsible for any of the side effects or consequences.

Moderation.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized the main issue was one of quantity. It's easy to throw away a piece of trash, you just toss it in one of the million receptacles blending into the background of your day-to-day activities. If you let it accumulate though, it quickly becomes a cumbersome blob, an entity all its own. So the solution I went with was a simple one: buy some small, biodegradable trash bags, and every time you generate trash, throw it in one of those bags, then toss it out the next time you're out and about. Tossing a small bag into a public trash can isn't a burden to anyone, and it saves me from building a trash stockpile in the same place I sleep. Combine this with the above practices for minimizing trash in the first place, and you have a reasonable, low-cost, sustainable system. I've found that I only really generate trash one or two nights a week now that I'm all settled in, and it's usually just a tissue or old cloth while cleaning or exterminating the occasional bug who wanders into my crosshairs.

So that's that. Take a little bit of planning, add some small bags, develop a process that takes up no more than 2 minutes and you have a solid recipe for keeping your truck home free of trash.

_{First of all, apologies for the lack of updates over the past few weeks, I've been busy with a product launch and doing a bit of work-related travel, so I haven't had a chance to sit down and polish off any of posts. However, things are starting to settle down, and I have a bunch of new posts in the pipeline at various levels of readiness, so watch for those over the coming week.}

I did a bit of traveling back east last week, first to give a tech talk at my alma mater, and then to work out of the Boston branch of my company. Aside from the general allure of travel and visiting other offices, there was also something particularly interesting about this trip for me: I got to experience a work routine much closer to what everyone else in the working world experiences. For the first day of my trip, I stayed in a hotel near UMass, but opted to stay at a (hospitable) friend's house on the South Shore while working in Boston. No trucks, no showering at a gym, just a normal house and a normal commute to work.

The Commute

I've definitely mentioned my distain for traffic before; nothing rubs me quite as wrong as a couple thousand cars idling unnecessarily and wasting time that could otherwise be spend on less menial, mindless, monotonous tasks. Truck life allows me to avoid this for the most part, I live walking distance from work, and my normal "commute" doesn't even touch real roads, it's an assortment of trails and pedestrian areas.

The First Day

Leaving UMass for Boston at 10 am on a Wednesday morning was a great call. I had a zippy (but otherwise unnoteworthy) trip down the Mass Pike, steering wheel in one hand and some sorely missed Dunkin' Donuts coffee in the other. Unfortunately, my good fortune didn't extend to my commute home, because in spite of my contempt for traffic, my travel plans had me leaving the office at exactly the worst possible time. I was placed at the pinnacle of Boston rush hour traffic and left at the mercy of the angry, burnt out commuters around me. Two and a half hours into what should have been an hour long commute, I made it home.

The Rest of the Week

After the horror show otherwise known as my commute home, I opted to take the train in for the rest of the week. I figured a 20 minute drive followed by a 45 minute train ride would be much less painful, especially because it's 45 minutes I don't have to spend behind the wheel. But alas, like the majority of things I think will work out, it wasn't nearly as smooth as I'd hoped. First, I went to a train station that had a closed down parking garage, then I proceeded to draw imaginary knots in the road trying to find the garage at the next train station. Eventually I parked, and proceeded to spend the next 45 minutes awkwardly bumping into strangers on the train because I clearly haven't earned my sea legs yet. After work, the train ride back was a similar game of body bumper cars, though this time I got to top it off by sitting in 20 minutes of traffic before I even escaped the parking garage. Wonderful.

So, how's it compare?

Clearly the commuting part of my day was not as buttery smooth as I had hoped, but it was far from the worst thing that's ever happened to someone, and millions of people perform similar commutes every day without complaint. Like anything else in life, I'm sure it's something you get used to. Plus, I had a ton of fun working out of the Boston office, so it was totally worth it. Other things being equal, my truck commute wins hands down. I can wake up in both places at 5:30 am and be at work at 8 am, fact. The difference is that when I wake up in the truck, I spend the 2.5 intervening hours exercising and pumping myself up for the day, whereas if I commute, those same 2.5 hours are spent basting myself in exhaust fumes and the sweat of fellow train-goers.

Obviously there are trade-offs here, and pretty much every other post will discuss the pros and cons of living in of a truck. My only point here, if there really even is one, is that the truck facilitates a stress-free, uneventful commute. And when I'm expected to do that five days a week for (more or less) the rest of my life, it's a pretty dramatic improvement to the quality of my life.