Essential things

Here's what I have learned after living for a month in a $38/night hotel room with my wife and dog:
- we can live in small quarters.  I think we could live in this hotel room permanently (and it'd be cheaper than rent... :) ).
- there are hotel rooms in Texas that cost $38/night that are totally fine for us (and if you stay more than 30 days, you pay no taxes).
- we can do with what we have in this hotel room, which is probably 5% of what we have (which is now mostly in storage).
- after packing in the car 80% of the clothes I had in the hotel room (since we thought we'd move into our new place but then had to stay in the hotel for another two weeks) a week later the clothes are still in the car, which means I can probably do with 20% of 5%.
- I can't do without a good chair.  After 2 weeks using the hotel chairs (doing computer work all day), my back was killing me.  I had to go to our storage space and dug out my chair from underneath lots of boxes, after which my back became happy again.
- I really like receiving mail virtually and not being tied to location or dealing with physical papers.
- I like using Pocket as a way to "read" (listen to) articles while walking the dog.
- Amazon is a nice problem-solving tool.  We thought we'd move into a place that smelled like smoke, so we ordered the Bad Air Sponge.  We ran out of poopie bags, so we ordered more.  My phone stopped charging, so I ordered an external charger and super battery.
- The perfect Chipotle carnitas burrito bowl can be made even better by adding a little lemon (which they have by the water)
- Overall, I did a pretty good job picking the things that would be most important for me to have in the hotel room: my computer, external keyboard and mouse, of course.  Scanner.  Phone headset.  Electric toothbrush.  Sleep mouth guard.  Running gear.  Deep tissue self-massage tools (golf balls, back buddy).  And of course, my phone.
- Aside from my chair, the thing I missed the most, by far, was the VitaMix we use to make our fruit & vegetable smoothies (which we couldn't have used anyway because it is so loud). Odwalla and Naked juices are nice every once in a while but they don't come close to the ones we make and they get old.
- I don't feel as great when I don't have my smoothies and Trader Joe's salads for a month.
- I also do miss my inversion table in which I meditate every morning (which I haven't been doing) (though this device seems to be a possible substitute if we lived in a hotel room, though it probably doesn't meet fire code...). (a couple weeks ago we did have to evacuate the building upon a false fire alarm from someone's cooking).
- I'd probably miss our printer and shredder too if I hadn't outsourced those functions to Allison at her office.
- this past weekend when we went two steppin' at Electric Cowboy I also missed the boots I had from when I was in high school in Oklahoma, which either are in storage or Allison threw them out a couple of years ago, I'm not sure.  I knew I'd "need" them again.
- And despite realizing we don't need 95% of what we have, inspired by Shanahan I still ordered the Tovolo Groovy Ice Pop Molds so that when we move into our new place and get our VitaMix back we can have some fruit & veggie ice cream to enjoy in the Texas heat.
2013 living is quite luxurious.