Week One

October 4th, 2015

My name is Sean and I live in my car.  I broke my apartment lease and decided to do this to save money for this coming spring when I’ll become a dad.  I’ll be documenting the experience here over the following months.

The car!

In trying to imagine who might read this I imagine two types of people:  The first thinks this is the dumbest thing anyone could do, the second would call it a great adventure.  If those opinions were on a thermometer with dumb (cold) on one side and adventurous (hot) on the other, I think I’d fall around the summer in Vegas area.  Wow, way to complicate a metaphor, huh?  Anyway, we’ll see how I might fluctuate in two months as winter in Cleveland gets underway.  For the moment I’m excited.

My other car is a Tauntaun.

Although I doubt many people outside my friends and family will actually read this, I suppose I should give a little info on myself.  I work full-time in a nice office job for a very large business and have done so for 5 years (five years today actually).  My co-parent-to-be (CPTB)* is brilliant and hilarious and just as adventurous as me (if not moreso).  I love the shit out of her, and that’s actually less a shibboleth and more a metaphor now since many women poop while giving birth.  By the way, people won’t stop warning me about that, as if either CPTB or I are interested in watching when that goes down.  I mean, seriously, no matter what anyone tells me I find it hard to believe anyone ever wants to get in the splash zone all up-close and personal.

That’s close enough for me, thanks.

In my free time I write screenplays and paint.  The scripts are Goonies or Indiana Jones-type adventures and I get a bit obsessed with them.  I’m trying to sell one right now, so if you tell your aunt’s friend’s daughter’s college roommate who is the daughter of a big producer to email me and it gets sold I’ll be your best friend and do your laundry for a year.

Oh, I also paint stuff.  You can check the art out here if you’d like:  Sean’s Art Page!

Okay, enough about me for now.  Back to living in a car.

Now you might ask, Why not just move in with CPTB now, split the bills, and save like a normal person?  Well, my darling CPTB lives with her sister and her sister’s toddler and for multiple logistical reasons that would simply not work.  CPTB’s sister will be purchasing a home and moving out sometime before the due date in April at which point I’ll give up this life of vagary, move into the house, and live happily ever after.

So initially I thought, heck $600 for the rent and another $100 for utilities.  I’ll be saving $700 every single month!  When I told CPTB the great news, she was at first jealous (I said she was adventurous, right?) then she asked what I was going to do about food (she’s also more practical than me).  While I’m still working on a specific answer, I have allocated an extra $200 toward that for the month as an initial estimate. 

My second miscalculation was realized just last night.  Sometimes car, clothes, and blankets are just not enough insulation when it drops below 45 degrees at night (yeah, some nights are already getting that chilly in Cleveland, Ohio).  So I put another $100 toward the extra gas burned in idle whenever I wake up from the cold.  So $400 a month!  That means every two months in the car will cover the expenses for one month while CPTB is off work after the baby is born.  Not bad!

Those are the finances thus far.  Maybe at the end of the month I’ll post a more detailed breakdown and we’ll see where I actually landed in my savings.

Next post:  You think I’m nuts?  Here are some facts!

Challenge:  Help me find a cool name for this blog.

My email:  mccoynstard@gmail.com

*The word “girlfriend” seems too flimsy and I’d rather run my teeth over cement than use the term, “baby-mama.”  The problem is that “co-parent-to-be” is just clunky.  I’ll have to work on a better moniker as this blog goes on.  For now I’ll use CPTB, because that at least sounds cute when spoken...