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ratisangy · 24 days ago

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Realities Of RV Living

I feel this needs to be discussed as sadly it may become more of an option for many people as the cost of living increases. I want to provide a realistic look into this life. Unless you are well off with a luxury RV, what you typically see on social media is not even close to reality.

Traveling and Long Term RV Parks

Ask about rates monthly and compare multiple parks. Make sure to ask if the rate is the same all year long. Also, ask if utilities are included. You can save a lot of money by not having to pay electricity. Some parks don't have one of the main hookups, so make sure eletricity, water and septic are all available.

This is only good when you have a new properly functioning RV. When you live in something older and in bad shape, it means a broken part, packing up your entire life, and finding a new park friendly to long-term stay. I've moved 3 times in 2 and a half years.

The first RV park was $750 a month plus electricity ($100 in summer $200 in winter) and had multiple times were we were without power or had no use of our septic. Many of the times without power it was single digits or in the negatives. We got 120 inches of snow and had to make a homemade rv skirt of a tarp and pack the snow like an igloo around the rv to stay warm.

The second RV park was $350 plus electricity ($150 summer). This park was more affordable but had a lot more issues. Our neighbor had frequent septic issues and we often had it leak onto our rv space. We also were next to the septic for the whole park. So basically the smell of shit was ever present. It got to 110 F here and we basically ran the AC until it broke as heat exhaustion always felt right around the corner.

Third park arguably the nicest park is $550 utilities included only catch is $1200 a month in summer months. (No I don't live in a high value area either most of the town and houses are literally abandoned). It's a franchise park and the owner isn't even supposed to offer long term but deals with it for the insane price he gets in summer. I haven't had issues with electricity or other people's sewage here. Basically one good employment place here and my fiancé gets retirement, so that made it worth the move.

Extreme cold

Frozen septic and frozen water lines are a huge and common issue, especially in older, less insulated models. You can put insulation around the pipes and drip water all you want its going to happen if it's cold enough. So get comfortable with the idea of taking warm buckets of water and a rag to your septic pipe and pouring warm water down into your septic. A smell you will never forget ❤️.

Insulating the rv is very important from being almost 3 years in. Here's the best way to avoid hypothermia. Get R-tech insulation board and stuff it into your windows then cover it up with a blanket. Put this behind your pillows as well so heat can stay in the bed area. Find pre-owned carpets and cut them to fit in your rv so the floor remains warmer. Get socks or cozy slippers to wear most of winter. Your floor will most likely never be a comfortable warm and you may be at risk of hypothermia depending on tempature. Dress in layers put on two pants a shirt and a sweater and socks and slippers. If you need to gloves and a hat as well. Put a blanket over your door. Making a rv skirt out of a tarp and super gluing velcro to the tarp and rv can be useful. Use concrete blocks to hold down the ends. Depending on wind speed this can be hard to keep in place though.

As much as this may sound like a joke it's currently saving me. Xbox 360 consoles make ALOT of heat if you run a DVD that replays itself in the background all night it will warm your sleeping area. If I die I will fade out to the Do The Mario theme song I guess 🥲.

Extreme Heat

Just pump up your AC and have alot of ice packs and cold water. This is going to suck and may kill your AC. The smell oh god the smell will make you want to die. Your septic will boil in the heat and make BAD soup. Less things will break on your RV than extreme cold.

Mail

If your RV park doesn't allow you to get mail at the park its going to suck ass. PO Boxes are the most annoying things on earth. UPS and certain FedEx mail will not deliver to them. Most companies will not ship to them. Even if they say they do. You will often get packages shipped all the way to your post office only for them to be rejected and sent back to the seller. The crapiness is exemplified if you live in a very rural area like I do. Just ship to a family member and pay them to ship it to you in a USPS box only!

RV Common Issues

Too high of water pressure

Get a pressure gage/regulator a park with to high of pressure can cause your lines to burst

Electricity Surges

Get a surge protector a bad surge with no protector can permanently fry your eletricial system. The protector saved me on a bad surge that literally set my plug on fire 🔥.

Eletricity Constriants

Older 30 amps don't have much power. Depending on the appliances you may have to choose to use one at a time. Want to use the heater and your Ninja to cook? Well, enjoy tripping your breaker. In fact just get comfortable with your breaker you'll be spending alot of time with it as you figure out what appliances aren't friends.

Septic

You will spend way to much time with your septic. Whether it be unfreezing, unclogging, general emptying or trying to find a product that doesn't harm it but keeps the smell down during hot summers. Get Scott thousand ply tiolet paper or just cheap thin tiolet paper. It's very similar to the rv specific tiolet paper and way less money.

Water

Pex pipes are cool and easy to repair replace your lines with them. With cold your water lines of course have the chance to freeze or burst. Keep them insulated and use the warm water wash cloth method to unfreeze. Just make sure not to leave wash cloths on the pipes for to long or they will also freeze.

Propane

Please please please check your models history with propane if you plan on using it. Some were built with manufacturing issues that cause them to blow up. There's not many left of my model due to this. It also means I have no central heating or use of the oven.

Laundry

If your park has a laundry mat awesome but this not usually the case. Locate your nearest laundry mat and take that into consideration when looking for a park.

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sunderwight · 6 months ago

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Thinking about a crack SV AU where Shen Yuan transmigrates into a horse.

Luckily he is not a normal horse, no! He is a spiritual stallion, a character that was mainly a joke about the novel's genre in PIDW, originally bred on Cang Qiong's beast tamer peak but not actually encountered until Luo Binghe's "raze cultivation society to the ground" phase. At which point there was a subplot about him finding the stallion and letting it loose to run free, as like, an allegorical reference. Occasionally Binghe would find other horses across the years that were obviously descended from that one, as more jokes, until Airplane forgot about the reference and never brought it up again.

Shen Yuan, of course, was always Big Mad that Binghe never got to actually ride this super magical mystical horse, and never got the horsegirl arc he deserved! Where is the man's companion animal? How can someone with nine billion wives and even more nameless underlings be fated for a life of perpetual loneliness??

Naturally, the first thing Shen Yuan does upon figuring out that he's this magic horse is break out of the beast peak and make for Qing Jing. He's not necessarily planning to go bond with the protagonist or anything, but he's not particularly keen to live out his fate as some feral horse that fucks other horses either, and he's extremely valuable so it's unlikely anyone will kill him even if they catch him again. So, might as well take the opportunity to clap eyes on his favorite character before he's doomed to a life of eating hay and whatever, right?

Horse SY manages to arrive on Qing Jing Peak right before the start of the skinner mission, though, just as Ming Fan is telling Luo Binghe that there aren't enough horses. Ning Yingying points out SY and is all oh look, one of the stable hands must have realized the error and brought another, and everyone else is kind of like "uh that is... not a normal horse...?" but then Shen Qingqiu gets impatient and snaps at them to get a move on, and fear of their mercurial shizun overrides everything else to the point where Binghe just clambers desperately onto this mystical saddle-free horse.

Airplane borrowed kelpies for his demon beasts at some point and they are pretty common, so it occurs to Luo Binghe only after he's climbed onto the strange and definitely not normal Horse SY that he might be on the verge of getting carried off and drowned. But SY just kind of rolls with it, and falls into line with the other horses.

Hey, it's an excuse to leave the sect! And practice doing horse stuff! And also, he's not going to buck Luo Binghe off of his back!

Of course as it happens, the specific kind of magical horse that Shen Yuan is comes with a specially bred-for trait where they only bond to one rider. They're usually bred for like, kings and emperors and other highly important figures as status symbols, like magical companion animals but ones with perfectly mundane utilities. He's also got Shadowfax-like stamina and speed, meaning that Airplane can treat this kind of horse as interchangeable with a motorbike, and of course the capacity to cultivate. Which means that when the party finally arrives at their destination, everyone suddenly realizes that Luo Binghe has unwittingly bonded with a horse that's worth a fortune and won't ever let anyone else ride it now.

Shen Qingqiu flips his shit, Shen Yuan bites Shen Qingqiu, Luo Binghe hyperventilates, Ning Yingying gets kidnapped, and the situation basically resolves with Shen Yuan kicking the shit out of the skinner demon in defense of his new BFF the baby protagonist.

Well if he's going to end up letting anyone ride him for the rest of his life, Luo Binghe would be his first choice.

Anyway they get back and Shen Qingqiu is still spitting mad and offers Luo Binghe's head on a platter to the lord of the beast peak, but Beast Peak's people are actually kind of pleased. Like sure it's a little inconvenient, because Luo Binghe is a Qing Jing disciple and not one of theirs, but they were honestly beginning to worry that this stallion wouldn't bond with anyone! It's really hard to manage them when they don't! And SY in particular comes from a long and illustrious lineage that has nearly died out a few times, so they were never planning to sell him off even for a high price anyway. With a rider chosen, the odds of them getting him to cooperate for breeding purposes are a lot higher, plus it will be much easier to take care of him now! Though they will be taking Shen Qingqiu up on his offer of Luo Binghe's time, since "punishment" for this transgression will involve splitting his time between the peaks in order to help take care of SY (all the beast peak disciples are super relieved, apparently before Shen Yuan transmigrated, the horsey original goods was extremely prone to biting and kicking...)

Shen Qingqiu basically tells Luo Binghe not to bother coming back, which fills Binghe with despair, but he gets over it eventually. The beast peak is nice! They give him a cultivation manual as well, in order to help him understand what they do, and it seems that Binghe can understand it a lot better than his QJP one. The peak lord gives him permission to use the dorms as well, since there will probably be times when he has to stay overnight, and no one says much about it when Binghe basically moves in full time. On the books he's still a Qing Jing disciple, but functionally he's a transfer student now. He even sits in on classes and lectures, and a lot of the peak are just under the impression that he was transferred over to their peak in full.

Shen Yuan considers this a big improvement, and expects Luo Binghe to enjoy running around with all the pretty girls on the peak. But Binghe mostly seems to spend his time with him, in fact, asking questions upon questions not only about Shen Yuan's breed, but about his specific background and lineage. The beast peak is overall pretty nice, although sadly it's not full of cool monsters and companion animals as Shen Yuan would have hoped. Mostly the peak specializes in the cultivation world's equivalent of livestock and work animals, training beasts like spirit eagles and horses like himself, and raising animals prized for their meat, organs, bones, or other parts for medicinal, alchemical, or culinary ingredients, or sometimes components for weapons or other spiritual tools. They work the most closely with Qian Cao, Wan Jian, and An Ding.

Being a horse is honestly kind of boring for Shen Yuan, although running is fun, and he at least gets plenty of time to work on his cultivation.

By the time Sha Hualing's invasion happens, he's gotten pretty comfortable in his new state of affairs. Binghe has even figured out that he likes being read to, and has started reading aloud to him from various texts in the evenings! So far no good novels, or even bad trashy novels, but it's better than nothing!

Binghe also takes him for a lot of rides around the peaks (not Qing Jing) which is how they end up caught on Qiong Ding when the rainbow bridge goes down. When Shen Qingqiu tells Luo Binghe to fight, Binghe doesn't even have a weapon at hand.

Actually, he doesn't have a sword at hand.

Turns out having your magical horse kick a demon to death is still pretty effective!

Shen Yuan even manages to avoid getting poisoned too. Rather, Elder Hammer threatens to poison him and Luo Binghe charges at him shouting "stay away from my horse! I'll kill you!" and etc, and does get nicked by the thorns, but only Binghe and Shen Yuan notice and of course the poison doesn't work on Binghe, congrats for unlocking a new hint as to Luo Binghe's mysterious origins!

Yes, Horse SY shows up to help Binghe in the Dream Demon event. He still looks like a horse for it, but it also marks the first time he's able to speak to Luo Binghe, which successfully distracts Luo Binghe from a lot of the tormenting visions of his past because talking magic horse friend has a way of doing that.

So the Dream Demon is like, that's not a normal horse, and Luo Binghe is all "stay away from my horse! I'll kill you!" and Shen Yuan gets knocked out of the dream as usual. Wakes up to Luo Binghe rushing to his stall to check on him and prepare him some nice warm congee and double-check that he can't talk for reals (only in dreams for now, alas).

Anyway Luo Binghe has no reason to hide his demonic cultivation practice from his horse, so Shen Yuan gets to sit in on it as Binghe tries to put Meng Mo's teachings into practice, which he finds super cool. Binghe's normal cultivation also progresses quite a bit, but he's still very much disadvantaged there because the beat peak is only giving him like, half-assed guest disciple status lessons, no personal one-and-one tutelage, and he's unofficially banned from Qing Jing and wouldn't get any help there anyway (apart from Ning Yingying). The beast peak lord isn't really his shizun and Shen Qingqiu isn't going to take Binghe to do things like claim a sword from Wan Jian, either.

Luckily, Binghe can now confer with his horse in his dreams! Shen Yuan has such helpful ideas as compelling various hall masters and combat teachers to dream about their lessons, so that Binghe can insert himself into the form of their students and supplement his tutelage with nighttime training from all around the sect. And also stealing some blank documents from An Ding and forging paperwork to turn over to Wan Jian to make it look like Binghe has permission to claim a spiritual sword without Shen Qingqiu's approval.

What a way to pass the time before the Immortal Alliance Conference!

Horse Shen Yuan would like very much to just carry Luo Binghe away in the opposite direction, thank you, but he does have a system and it is still holding a metaphorical gun to his head about this. Still, there's no force in the world that could keep Shen Yuan in his stable when shit starts to go down, or that could stop him from kicking the snot out of Shen Qingqiu when he tries to throw Binghe into the Abyss. (Binghe's thoughts on the fight: "stay away from my horse! I'll kill you!")

However, Binghe does still get thrown down, and Horse SY runs off whilst weeping crystalline tears of dismay as his mane whips in the wind, imagining a future where a blackened Luo Binghe returns for his revenge arc and symbolically sends his beloved horsie companion away forever to go frolic or some shit, which Shen Yuan is not interested in!

But what can he do? By the time Binghe gets out of the Abyss, his need for a horse will be decidedly minimal. It already went down a bunch when he finally got Zheng Yang (that Binghe somehow almost never flew anywhere on, surely for reasons unrelated to his bond with SY), and with Xin Mo and all his OP talents, even if he did keep Shen Yuan, wouldn't he become as much of a useless background character as countless auxiliary wives in his harem?

No! He won't stand for it! There has to be a way for him to convince even blackened Binghe that Shen Yuan is still the best ride in town!

Luckily, Shen Yuan knows where there are some power-ups that might be able to help him. While he won't touch anything that would be vital for the protagonist, he's more flexible on screwing over random future harem members or side characters, especially when it wouldn't even really harm them all that much. So while Binghe is going through his gauntlet of horrors in the Abyss, Shen Yuan embarks on his own level-up quest to dramatically increase his cultivation, and become more capable of keeping up with Binghe.

When this leads to Shen Yuan being able to take on a human form, he gets really excited, but that's mostly for personal comfort reasons. He can finally hold books again! And talk to people! Who cares if he looks like someone's ponysona gijinka, he can walk over to a stall and order meat buns!

Unicorn form is next, and it's... meh? Mostly it's a boost in his cultivation. The horn looks fun but doesn't really do much.

When he upgrades to being able to take on a pegasus form, now that's really cool. He can fly now! Not only is it crazy good fun, but it also increases his mobility exponentially. Surely riding a flying horse would be more comfortable than balancing on a sword, too?

But that's not enough for his actual goal, he needs to keep going until he finally finds the right bullshit mythical item that will do what he hopes:

Turn him into a dragon!

Unfortunately said bullshit item is in the demon realms, which are a fairly difficult place to navigate as either a horse or a human. Beefing up for the trip takes Shen Yuan just about two years, and requires all of his other upgrades. But he does it, he gets to the demon realms, eats the creatively named Dragon Fruit Plant, and... gets... stuck???

In his new dragon form???

WTF this didn't happen to the random ox that Luo Binghe fed the fruit to in order to create a suitable beast of burden to impress the husband of Wife No.666! Although, thinking about it, maybe it did because it wasn't like the ox ever turned back into an ox afterwards. But Shen Yuan just figured that was because it was a simple beast of burden and saw becoming a dragon as an overall upgrade, why go back? He honestly hadn't really thought about it!

Cue Luo Binghe getting out of the Abyss only to shortly find that a random dragon is following him around. Maybe that just happens here? It doesn't attack him, at least, and he has no time to deal with it (or to sleep) because his first order of business is establishing enough of a foothold in the demon realms to regain access to the human ones, and find out what happened to his horse. And then kill Shen Qingqiu. In that order.

#svsss #bingqiu #scum villain #scum villain's self saving system #long post #bonus: in dreams shen yuan often refers to luo binghe finding a herd of wives as interchangeable with his ideas of success #binghe assumes this is because shen yuan is a literal stallion #shen yuan makes reference at one point to tolerating it if binghe needs to pull a girl up into his saddle #sy has of course been thinking about it and his magical one-rider-only horse aversions to the idea #but he's pretty sure he could control the impulse to knock her off and trample her for binghe's sake #and also because that would probably cost him good horsie privileges since binghe's wives come first etc etc #meanwhile binghe would probably sooner stab someone than let her ride shen yuan with him #the whole idea is so off-putting to him he's like if I encounter a damsel in distress with two broken legs she can drag herself home :)

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