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Airstream Renovation: Week 1 - Demoing & Removing the Interior

Ashley Longnecker / September 14, 2016

I told Jonathan that I saw that some people demoed their Airstream in 2 days! If they can do it in 2 days, so can I. But the thing is, I have never demoed an Airstream before, so...my 2 days turned into 7. Turns out, there’s a heck of a lot of rivets in an Airstream. And when thing one is connected to thing two which can’t be removed until you loosen thing 3 and then kick thing 4, it takes a lot longer than you thought. Then your all like, “why won’t this tambour door come out?” and then the credenza table nearly falls on your face when you remove the last screw. That’s was what my first week was like trying to demo the darn thing.

Luckily, the first week Jonathan was able to be done with work soon after his lunch break, and helped me remove all the things.

Saying Goodbye to Rocksteady and Beebop

Ashley Longnecker / September 08, 2016

Hey friends. You may have noticed that we’ve been a little quiet here on the blog. Let me get you caught up on what’s been going on the last few weeks. 

We left La Grande, OR on August 24th. We took 5 days to drive to Grapevine, TX. When we arrived in Grapevine we had one day go pick up the Airstream and get all of our stuff out of the 5th wheel. Unfortunately when we picked up the Airstream, Jonathan ended up twisting his ankle pretty bad and was on the couch the rest of the day. Poor guy. 

Power of Words

Ashley Longnecker / August 12, 2016

Well, its been a few days that I’ve been trying to process something that happened to me. You’ve heard the saying, “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” Well, I’m hear to tell you that’s just stupid. I’m guessing that we can all relive exact words spoken to us that just broke our souls. I know I can. I can remember the smells, the sounds, how I felt and the exact words that were spoken to me that crushed my spirit. I’m going to try to explain what happened the other day without using the language that’s currently running through my mind.

I was working in the office at our campground. It was a beautiful day. I was in an exceptionally good mood until it happened. A couple came into the office to check in. I made small talk like I do with all the guests. “How are you? Did you have a long drive today?” They proceeded to tell me that they’ve been traveling for weeks and couldn’t wait to get home to Canada. “Oh, I can’t wait to visit Canada,” I said. She proceeded to ask if we travel full time and I told her yes! She looked at me confused. “You don’t have a home?” I tell her about how we sold our home and we travel full time now with our 4 kids. Her confused look turned to complete horror and said, “Well, why are the kids not in school?” I told her that I homeschool the kids. Then the bombardment of questions took place. 

What curriculum do you use? Who published it? Where was it published? How do you know how well they’re doing? Did you go to college? Do you have a degree? What kind of an education is that for kids? What does your husband do? How do you homeschool them if you’re working?

I am still shaking with anger and frustration at the way she spoke to me. It was so degrading. So mean how she just tore into me, especially when I couldn't tell her who and where our curriculum was published. And you should have seen the look on her face when she found out I don’t have a college degree. The questions just kept coming.

What is your plan for them for education past high school? How will colleges look at what you’re doing?

I told her, I could care less if they went to college! You would have thought I shot her in the head. She was appalled at my response. I wasn’t even allowed to finish what I wanted to say. I would have liked to tell her how we hope to inspire our kids to be entrepreneurs and think creatively and make a living doing something they love. If they choose to go to college that’s fine but it is definitely not a requirement for our kids.

Finally, her husband got her to stop with all the questions and they were off to find their campsite. I was shaking and sweating so bad. Mostly because I was mad and partly because...‘what if she’s right.’ 

I know, I don’t have a college degree. Sometimes I really do feel like I’m not qualified to teach our kids. But you know what? We didn’t choose to homeschool because we thought we knew more than others, or could teach better than the teachers at traditional school. There are so many reasons why we chose this for our kids. Reasons like...

We want to spend as much time as we can with our kids. We want them to be able to learn about things that interest them. If they’re stuck on something, we can spend more time helping them figure it out. We want the options to travel more. We don’t believe in the way the school system works. The list goes on, and on, and on. 

But my point is, her words were so degrading and spoken with such hatred that I still get shaken up when I relive that moment in my head. I couldn’t even sleep that night. I woke up so much with her words ringing in my head. It really got to me. 

It made me question EVERYTHING. Am I doing enough? Are they on track? Am I messing them up? Are they going to grow up and resent their childhood? 

The truth is, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not sure any homeschool mom feels like they got it all under control. But you know what? This is what works for us right now. Our kids are happy. They’re learning about the places we are. They’re doing great with their school work. They love to read and learn new things. Adali can identify so many birds and tell you all about them. They love to go to the library and get new books. I can’t keep up with all the books they’ve been reading. We’d have to be at the library every 3 days to keep up with Jett these days.

Right now, my main goal is to teach them how to learn and how fun is is to learn something new. My plan is to not make school work stressful. I hear so often of kids having anxiety about going to school for different reasons. Maybe the bullies in their class, maybe they don’t understand what’s being taught but there’s no time to have it explained differently. Maybe they’re worried about their grades. Maybe they’re tired of being yelled at because they hate to sit in a chair for 8 hours a day. Maybe it’s because they are away from home all day and they have to come home and do more school work. Maybe they miss their family.

Guys, I know it’s not for everyone. But homeschool is something that works for us. We love having our kids with us all day every day. We love watching them discover new things and come up with creative ideas on their own. We get to experience so many things with them while we’re traveling. They get to see things that most kids will never get to see. They get to sled down sand dunes, and swim in different oceans. They get to hike mountains and learn how to adjust to new environments. How can you say that what we’re teaching our kids isn’t good? An education isn’t just learning what’s written in books. It’s learning how to do life, and I think they’re doing pretty well.

One of the most important things we should teach our kids is respect. I want them to know that when they say mean things to someone, it can really hurt. I want them to think about what they are going to say before they blurt it out. Can we all agree that teaching our kids to be decent, respectful human beings is top on our list? Can we teach them that being kind to others, despite our differences, is what this world needs? I want them to understand the powerful effect their words have on others, and even on themselves. 

Recently Jett has been struggling in math. He would just give up and say he’s stupid and can’t memorize things. We started a little tradition with him that seems to be helping. We have him repeat after us... “My name is Jett. I am smart. I am funny. I can memorize things. I can do hard things. I will not give up because I am awesome.” It’s a little different every time we have him say it, but we can see his spirit light up again. Words are powerful. 

I’m trying really hard to learn to not take in every negative word spoken to me. Some things people say are not worth holding on to. I won’t let them get me down. I won’t let them ruin my week again. I won’t let her words define who I am as a mother, a teacher and as a human being. I may not have a degree but I know how to treat others with respect and that may be worth more than a piece of paper.

I walked home after work, still shaken. I had my hands full and was carrying home 2 of my homemade muffins that were left over from the day. And guess who was walking along my path. The same lady. I wanted to turn around and pretend I left something at the office and wait until she was gone. But I kept walking. Our eyes met and I smiled and asked her if she would like the left over banana muffins. She politely declined. I said, “Are you sure? I just made them this morning.” Her face changed from sour to curious as if she didn’t believe that I could make muffins. She then said, “Okay, that’s very sweet of you.” I started to walk off and she said, “Can I give you a hug?” I agreed, and at that moment (though I wasn’t ready to forgive her for how she made me feel) I knew that maybe, just maybe she knew she had really offended me and that she was sorry. That, or maybe she was just hungry for muffins.

Simplifying 2.0

Ashley Longnecker / August 10, 2016

It was about this time 2 years ago that we wrote about our plans to travel full-time. We spent lots of time researching and talking to other full-time families before we settled on buying our 5th wheel. Everyone we talked to told us to ‘buy your last rig first’ or ‘you’ll never regret going with a big rig’. Well, we found out that what works for most people isn’t necessarily what works for us. While we have loved this rig, it has become too comfortable for us. It's just like our house. We find our selves in different rooms often and staying inside way too much. That is not what we had in mind when we decided to travel full-time.

So, what are we going to do about it? Well, we are buying a 1972 Airstream and we will be picking it up in TX in just a few weeks! 

Moving BareNeckers to Craft CMS

Jonathan Longnecker / August 04, 2016

Fellow bloggers, I know many of you swim in the vast sea that is WordPress. It’s free, easy to get setup and has lots of automatic fixes in the form of plugins. As far as blogging engines go it’s pretty nice.

Today I’m going go make a case or three for why you may not want to use WordPress for your site, though. And tell you why we moved from WordPress to ExpressionEngine and finally to Craft CMS. Ready? Here it goes.

WordPress Weirdness

When we started this blog (formerly Last Night Ago), I was busy, didn’t want to pay for software and thought I’d give WordPress a shot. For my clients at FortySeven Media I have historically always built ExpressionEngine sites, so this was hard for me to deal with at first. But I wanted to give WP it’s fair shake. 

It lasted about 8 months. During that time I ended up fighting with the system for so many little things that I couldn’t believe how many people used WordPress on a regular basis. Did you know that WordPress doesn’t store it’s paragraphs in the database with <p> tags around them? True story. Here’s a few of my issues (keep in mind this was about 3 years ago so things may have changed):

1. Images uploaded from our phones weren’t rotated properly. Had to add a plugin to make that work, but it didn’t fix things retroactively so I had to re-upload a bunch of images.
2. Image management in general was abysmal. The interface is confusing and weird. You only get 3 options for resizing, and WP stores all those versions in the same folder as your main images. So if you happen to change one of those other sizes you just bloat that images folder - and because the image linking is done through the text editor field and not the templates, it’s hard to change the sizes of your images site wide (like you would during a redesign). I’ll explain how images are handled so much more elegantly in other systems later.
3. Every plugin we added bloated our pages in ridiculous ways. I’m mean we were looking at 20 javascript files and 20 css files that were adding very little value, but slowing our pages down massively. This is my biggest gripe with WordPress - how it injects a bunch of code you don’t know about into the front end of your site.
4. While the publishing area has come a long way, I still don’t agree with how images are inserted into content, custom fields feel like they’re hacked on and most importantly Ashley found the whole thing pretty confusing. She hated it.

Security

The last straw for me after fighting with all these little things was the security issues that WordPress has. If you don’t upgrade immediately you’re going to get hacked. The problem is upgrading all the time causes potential incompatibilities with plugins. And you need a lot of plugins to make stuff work right. During one of those in-between times, our site was indeed hacked. After that I just blew it up and re-built in ExpressionEngine. That worked fine for another year or so. But EE has it’s own set of problems. While it’s more secure and doesn’t need constant updating, you have to throw about $800 - $1,000 worth of licensing and add-ons to get a good publishing experience. And even with that we were flying blind publishing without built-in live previewing.