I spent the better part of six years with a very narrow idea of "home". My literal home was the boxy, six-wheeled place I slept and stored my assorted garbage. My actual home was, well, anywhere else, as I've oh so dramatically written about before. I'd whittled away the utility of my primary shelter to little more than a literal shell, and it's no secret that I was happy (and maybe even a bit proud) with that.

A Complete 180°

So when I moved into an honest-to-God house a year ago, I found myself in the relatively novel position of redefining what I wanted "home" to mean to me. For example, my home is now all of the following, in no particular order:

• Where I sleep
• Where I store my stuff
• Where I work ^New!
• Where I shower ^New!
• Where I exercise ^New!
• Where I spend my free time ^New!
• Where I eat ^{Definitely New!}

As such, it made sense to go back to the drawing board and figure out what I wanted my ^(New!) relationship with home to look like.

Back to Basics

When trying to make Important Decisions™ that will have lasting knock-on effects for years down the road, I try to put them in the context of my overarching principles and beliefs and see if that makes the answers any clearer. These are a useful North Star because, even with changing life circumstances, they hopefully aren't changing all that much (short of an existential crisis). In this case, the relevant principles and beliefs probably looked something like:

• Keep it simple - I'm a big fan of simplicity and cutting out unnecessary cruft. Simpler things tend to be cheaper, easier to maintain, etc.
• Stay healthy - I've got things I'd like to accomplish, and those things are way harder to do if I'm dead or even just descending into decrepitude. Fewer preventable ailments means more time to do stuff that matters to me.
• Be mindful of money - Money is a thin abstraction over our time, money is freedom, yadda yadda yadda. I want to be conscious of trading money for stuff, because that's less money Future Me has for his wild schemes for world domination whatever he wants to do. Plus I'm not making Big Tech money anymore, I'm making nonprofit money, which is like, literally one fifth as much.
• Build stuff - I like being able to take a stupid idea and turn it into a stupid reality.

With those things in mind, the first thing I did when I moved into my house was…nothing. I figured the best way to keep things simple was to start at the bare minimum, and then add things once it was obvious they were going to be truly useful.

Nothing turned out to be a bit spartan for my tastes, so I went to the local grocery store and picked up a pan, a pot, and a big mug-bowl thing. Then I scoured Craigslist for the few implements I thought were relevant to my goals. I bought a treadmill desk (to work at), and assembled a squat rack (to lift at) out of six or so different postings. I drove around in rented UHauls schlepping stuff around like the good ole days.

And for the first month or so, that's what my life looked like. All my meals were sautéed vegetables + some carb + some protein. I ate them out of my one weird mug-bowl thing, either standing in the kitchen, or sitting cross-legged on a yoga mat* on the floor like some New Age yuppie. In retrospect, it acted as a gradual transition to being a real person, and it was glorious.

Then my better half moved up to Oregon and politely requested we live in a real house, with reasonable amounts of actual furniture and kitchenware. I now eat my meals sitting at a table like a Real Human Being, out of Very Normal plates and bowls.** There's even an area rug, which was a completely foreign concept to me. It's alright I guess.

Some New Definitions

With the house as a blank canvas to paint the rest of my life on, I started thinking about what I liked most about life in the truck — the regimentation, the simplicity, the drive to minimize stuff, etc — and how I was going to replicate those things in the new digs. Having a gym in the basement certainly makes it easier to get into an exercise routine, though not quite as rigidly as in the truck times of yesteryear where I had to go to the gym to shower, or risk my coworkers smelling my degeneracy. Video calls (mercifully) don't transmit scent, so the imperative to shower isn't as dire anymore. As far as keeping things simple + minimal, that one has mostly handled itself. While I'm not one to use the phrase "Feng shui" unironically, I definitely find myself preferring the vibes of a mostly empty room, so there's little incentive for me to fill the house with stuff. even without the space constraints of the truck.

On the flip side, I also thought about all the, shall we say, less than ideal aspects of the truck. The inability to store and/or cook food. Co-workers coming in while I'm brushing my teeth in the office bathroom. Rain being cataclysmically loud. Being roasted alive during the day. That sort of stuff. For the most part, these have been solved by, well, just not living in a box truck. Easy peasy.

Then, there's all the new perks. I save money by cooking all my own meals (and have started a torrid love affair with Costco + buying in bulk). I have a stable place for working on my assorted projects, and I can run them on a small (also Craigslist-purchased) data center in my basement.*** I can stare at a wall for hours at a time and nobody will call the police. I live in the middle of nowhere, the only external activity I can do easily is hiking; stuff like going to restaurants requires driving into town or hours of round trip hiking. I consider these all Good Things™ — making "the things you want to do" easy and "the things you don't want to do" hard is Habit Change 101.

Settling In

At this point, I've been in the house for a whole year (almost to the day!), and generally feel like I've settled into a happy (and new and different) rhythm. I've had plenty of time to reflect on the truck and all the changes and whatnot, and that alone should be enough to keep this blog from collecting too much dust in the near future. Stay tuned!

*I've had the yoga mat for years, it's a surprisingly useful piece of fabric.

**I still use the giant mug-bowl thing for cereal. I measure my cereal serving size in "high double digit percentages of the whole box".

***This blog is not running in my basement. While I have gigabit download speeds, my uploads are limited to the low double digit megabits per second, which means serving large content like images would become a bottleneck, potentially choking out my (and my partner's) ability to use the internet and do work and stuff. I might eventually run the blog admin infrastructure locally though.

Hello! It's been an eventful few weeks months: the job has been quit, the truck has been sold, the California has been left, and the new venture has been started (full-time!).

Selling the truck is probably the biggest and most blog-relevant event. Even though I'd already announced my plans to sell it, having legitimately sold it still feels different. One of those things that doesn't really register until it's actually happened. Truly the end of an era. In Marie Kondo-fashion, I thank the truck for its service and wish it the best in its new life.

Speaking of which, as best as I can tell, it won't be used as the stealth^ish RV I've used it as. Rather, it'll be used to help a couple start their fledgling potato chip business, which is delightfully specific and quirky. Not that the truck cares either way, but I'm glad it'll be put to (good?) use.

Since none of my stuff is relevant to hauling potato chips around, I took it all out of the truck and loaded it into my beloved 2004 Honda Civic, now my only motor vehicle.

But this post isn't about the minutiae of my move, it's about why any of this is happening at all. Why I'm shaking up my life in such dramatic fashion. But before we get to that, it's probably useful to rewind a bit and go on a tangent or two, which is really standard fare at this point.

A Game of Roles

I'm a big believer in actively choosing the life you want to live, mainly because if you don't, more clever and enterprising folk will pick your life for you, usually to their benefit. Part of choosing your life is asking lots of questions about how you spend your time, why you spend your time that way, and if you like spending your time that way.

Of course, this only makes sense once you've got the more visceral basic layers of Maslow's hierarchy covered. It's kinda hard to think about what you want out of life if you don't know where your next meal is coming from. Which is to say that I recognize there's a certain amount of privilege embedded in even being able to think about the things I'm rambling about. That ackowledged, let's talk about time.

Time

Time. We inhabit our respective mortal coils for a short and finite amount of it. It flies by. We never have enough of it. And so on and so forth. Since it's so scarce and precious, it seems reasonable to scrutinize those things that consume the most of it. And for the majority of folks between the ages of 18 and 65 (or thereabouts), the most time-consuming activity is exchanging it for money (aka "a job"). And so it follows that it's useful to ask what role you want that job to play in your life.

Personally, I've always oscillated on what I think the role of work should be in my life, and it looks something like this:

Basically, I bounce back and forth between two modes of operation:

1. "Work can be a force for removing misery from the world" - In this mode, I try to convince myself that the work I'm doing is not only keeping me fed, but also improves the lives of other folks in some way. I get to feel warm and fuzzy about what I spend most of my time doing, my employer implicitly gets a discount on my labor.
2. "Work is a transaction, plain and simple" - In this mode, I am a machine that consumes coffee and kale, and produces code, efficiently run meetings, and…well, poop. I sell my labor to the highest (non-arms-dealing) bidder. "Doing good" at a company is just a marketing ploy to attract young, fresh talent, who haven't had enough time to become jaded by the actual shape of the world yet.

"Serving the Public Conversation"

That first way of thinking (i.e. Doing Good Things at Work™) is leveraged to nauseating effect by Bay Area employers. You'd legitimately be hard-pressed to find a Silicon Valley tech job listing that doesn't frame itself in terms of the "impact" or societal good that you'll do working there. To give an illustrative example, I picked Twitter, pretty much at random, but you'll have similar success by throwing darts at any ol' tech stock index fund.

There's a lot to unpack here, but I'm going to leave most of it in the box. The thing I want to note is that Twitter, which makes 89% of its revenue from selling ads, and the remaining 11% from selling data,¹ talks a big game about "[serving] the public conversation" in their hiring materials.

And sure, Twitter does indeed do that. But that isn't why Twitter exists. As with any for-profit corporation, they quite literally exists to generate value for their shareholders. Nothing more, nothing less.² But when you're vying for a limited pool of data scientists and machine learning experts, you'll probably be more successful in hiring by telling prospective employees that they're "[serving] the public conversation," even if the day-to-day job description is more like "[finding] new ways to hoover more data (and therefore shareholder value) from our users".

And so I oscillate between drinking the Kool-Aid and being disenchanted with the endless streams of disingenuous verbal diarrhea that companies spew in the name of attracting talent.³ But I also can't blame them, because people do want to feel like they're doing something good or making a difference or whatever with their work. Of course, work can just be about work. But, given the choice between two otherwise identical jobs, I reckon most folks would take the one that purports to be about something more.

Maybe it's the warm fuzzy feeling we get when we do something "good". Maybe it's because we want to sound interesting and altruistic at cocktail parties. Maybe it's part of a larger narrative we're trying to weave about the purpose of our respective lives. Maybe it's all the above. Maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Me, Personally

Wading out of the depths of hand-wavy generalizations and talk of people in the abstract, what do I want out of work? I've got a roof over my head and food in the fridge, why shouldn't I make work about more than than just work? As a starting point, I looked at my life and some deeply held⁴ beliefs:

1. I believe that life is a cosmic poker game where way too many people get dealt a truly terrible hand through absolutely no fault of their own. See previous ramblings.
2. I've been dealt a pretty stellar hand, both in relative and absolute terms. You know, the whole being-born-in-a-rich-country-and-not-into-abject-poverty thing.
3. I have a very particular set of skills, which are in demand and applicable to a diverse set of problems.

How do I pick a job based on these things? Historically, I've been pretty awful at it, falling prey to the aforementioned glossy marketing material/Kool-Aid. But it sounds like I want a job where I use my skills to attempt to level the cosmic playing field. And I don't want this "doing good" to be a side-effect of some other business/money-making venture, I want it to be the direct goal/outcome of my work.

And from there, it seems pretty clear I won't be looking at traditional for-profit organizations. I spent a few years working at a healthcare-focused tech company, where I worked on surgical robots, baby diaper sensors, temperature + COVID sensing patches, etc. All of those technologies have the potential to improve people's lives, which is cool. There are two main problems though:

1. Those technologies are addressing problems and needs, but not the biggest or most urgent problems and needs.
2. The people who will have access to those technologies are not-so-coincidentally people who have significantly more wealth than the median human being on this planet.

That second point is the source of most of my cynicism. If you are a for-profit organization, you have a fiduciary responsibility to make decisions that will generate returns for your shareholders. Those returns need to come from somewhere, meaning that some party in your business model is giving you money. This usually means you aren't building things directly for the global poor because, by definition, they have no money to give you.

There are, of course, exceptions to this. Governments and private foundations will sometimes foot the bill for things that benefit the poor, even if they come from for-profit corporations. Examples include the US government buying medicine for low-income Americans via Medicaid, and the Gates Foundation funding private biotech companies doing medical research that can benefit low- and middle-income countries via Global Health Innovative Technology Fund. Beyond that, climate change-adjacent technologies, like carbon capture or better batteries, are promising in that they can be both wildly profitable and beneficial to the global poor,⁵ who disproportionately have not produced the emissions warming the planet.

So if I was going to go into industry somewhere, it'd probably be in green/climate technology. But that's not what I've done. Instead, I've started a nonprofit. I'll start with the elevator pitch, then a pre-emptory straw man Q & A.

The Elevator Pitch

First, an opinion: the two most important problems in the world are climate change and global inequality, for different but intertwined reasons. Further, I claim that nonprofit organizations have made great strides in both domains, whether by lobbying for greener public policy, or helping to eliminate smallpox or control malaria. Continuing the claim-train: nonprofits don't invest in technology the same way for-profit organizations do, usually because nonprofits have more limited resources, and using technology effectively requires some level of upfront investment (engineers and/or IT folk) that isn't feasible, especially when the nonprofit also has their actual mission to spend time and money on.⁶ The result is that nonprofits don't get to reap the benefits of investing in technology to automate all of the manual minutiae they deal with day to day.

And that's the crux of the idea: use my existing skills to help nonprofits use technology better. I am not an climate change expert, nor do I have a strong background in dealing with global inequality. Even calling myself "moderately knowledgeable" is probably a stretch. But there are well-run, effective organizations chock full o' experts for each of those areas, and I can help them achieve their goals better through strategic application of tech (IT stuff, computers, cloud systems, custom software, etc).

I talked with a few nonprofits to see if any of this makes any sense whatsoever, and it seems like it does. Further, there are indeed organizations, both nonprofit and otherwise, that help nonprofits use technology, like Software for Good and Tech Soup. This is all to say that this isn't a novel idea, but it's clearly one with some merit, and I think it's an under-served area.

A Straw Man Q & A

But Brandon, didn't you just leave your job?

In my defense, it's been a whole year, which is an eon in the world of tech. That one year was enough time for me to build and deploy a whole platform for the startup I've mostly left (but still moonlight for). Not so coincidentally, it was the experience of building this platform that made me go, "You know, I'm at a point in my career where I can kinda just build arbitrary stuff on my own."

You're starting a tech nonprofit? Could you be any more of a Silicon Valley cliché?

I'm sure if I really tried, I could figure something out.

If there are organizations already doing this, why not join one of them?

Well, a few reasons. The first is that I want to focus on a narrow subset of nonprofits, ones that I think are working on The Most Important Problems™. Aside from that, I have some ideas on how to make the technology side of things 'scale' well,⁷ ranging from how we build and deploy stuff, to how we structure legal contracts, etc, etc, and it'd be harder to try those things out if I wasn't calling the shots. Plus, I convinced a talented engineer and good friend from Google to join me in starting this endeavor, which certainly helps.

Beyond that, nonprofits don't really compete with each other in the same way that for-profit businesses do. They certainly compete for donor dollars, but more nonprofits working on big problems is generally a good thing and they can happily co-exist/specialize/whatever. As for the donor dollars, I expect that most of the funding for the organization will come from the (heavily discounted) software consulting services we provide and the occasional grant, not directly from donors.

What's the name of your new organization?

I'm going to strategically omit that one, as I have no desire to link my truck-related degeneracy with the organization I plan to spend years (at least!) working on and growing. That said, if you represent a private foundation or a nonprofit working on climate change or global inequality and would like more information, feel free to reach out to me through my blog email.

¹This is according to Twitter's 10-K SEC filing. Also I'm using numbered footnotes instead of my usual asterisks because I have seven of them, and ******* looks less like a footnote and more like I'm censoring myself.

²Now, before people start calling me a "communist", I'll note that I'm not making any political or economic arguments here, I'm just regurgitating the definition of what it means to be a for-profit corporation. Then again, I wouldn't expect people who use "communist" as a derogatory term to have read all the way to the footnotes.

³This is perhaps the only area where I can appreciate Oracle. Well, seems like their recruiting department didn't get the memo, because their hiring page is full of the same kind of non-specific "impact" garbage I've been complaining about.

⁴And backed up by data, when relevant.

⁵I mean, technically everyone benefits from the world not bursting into literal flames. It's just that 'everyone' happens to include 'the global poor'.

⁶Another reason is that donors frequently want their money to go to directly the cause, and things like "hiring someone to set up a sync between Salesforce and <some other system>" are far less glamorous than "give orphans homes", even if doing the former allows the organization to do more of the latter.

⁷'Scale' in this context just means the amount of work required per additional unit of impact. For example, something that requires twice as much work to support twice as many nonprofits doesn't scale as well as something that only requires marginally more work for each additional nonprofit.

A quick recap: I'm quitting my job and moving out of the truck/state of California.

As a person who doesn't like having stuff they don't need/use, I'm getting rid of the truck. More specifically, as a person who recognizes the utility of money, I'm selling the truck.*

Using the blog in this fashion is probably the closest I'll ever get to monetizing it, but I think posting this here also makes sense for one other big reason:

The truck is weird.

Allow Me to Explain

There are ostensibly two groups of people who might be interested in this truck:

• People who'd use it for moving things - As I'm more than happy to attest, the truck is great for moving things. I've lost count, but I've used the truck to help people move on 15-20 occasions. But a truck for moving doesn't need a sunroof...or the interior door, and is that insulation on the walls??
• People who'd live in it - As I'm also more than happy to attest, one can totally live in this truck for long periods of time. That said, it's pretty bare bones. There's no power, plumbing, or any meaningful climate control, it only really makes sense if you're spending most of your waking hours elsewhere.

If the Venn diagram of "people who'd be interested in the truck in its current state" contains more than just, well, me, it's likely one of you, dear blog reader(s).

And so, here we are.

Sweetening the Deal

But selling things is generally such an uninspired affair, so I've got some ideas to keep it interesting:

• I'll deliver the truck to you, no extra charge - If you live in the contiguous 48 United States, I'll take a road trip to give you the truck. I get one last hurrah with my soon-to-be-former home, you get a box truck straight to your front door. The only catch is that, if anyone actually wants to take me up on this offer, they'll have to put down a deposit for half the truck up front.
• You can have my stuff, also no extra charge - The few things I currently own are pretty useful for truck living. In no particular order:
  • Tool Cabinet (strapped to the wall with earthquake straps)
  • Tools (saws, socket set, drill, etc)
  • Fireproof document safe
  • Lots of plastic tubs and trays for organization
  • Flashlight
  • Battery packs
  • Clothes hangers

Of course, if someone wants none of those things, I'd just remove them all. I also have a bed and raised bed frame, if those are desirable. You can't have my clothes though, I think I'll still need those.**

Product Description

As for the truck itself, it's in pretty great shape. I've never had any mechanical problems, and I've gotten regular oil changes and replaced the tires and brakes. I also had the left headlight/fender and top radius/corner caps replaced for aesthetics and stopping leaks, respectively. Attempting to be a good custodian of the truck, I have the paperwork for all of the above mentioned things.

I've only put two or three thousand miles on it over the past six years, mostly helping people move and driving it around to keep the battery charged and fluids moving around. I think it has 165,000 miles on it, but I can get the actual numbers for the actuarially inclined.

My asking price is $15,000, which I think is pretty reasonable, especially given that I've paid at least half of that in improvements alone. If you're interested, leave a question or email me at brandon AT frominsidethebox DOT com. I'm more than happy to answer any questions/send photos/etc.

If this fails and nobody here wants the truck, I'll probably just do A More Normal Thing™ and put it on Craigslist or similar, so no pressure.

*I've also tied up pretty much all my semi-liquid savings with this in-progress house purchase, so the cash infusion would certainly be useful.

**Well, at least the shirts, for video conferencing and whatnot.

I've always said that I'll keep living in the truck as long as it keeps making sense in the larger context of my life. And for the past ~6 years (plus or minus a pandemic), I think that's been the case. I'm young*, healthy, unencumbered by other humans depending on me for survival, and have had access to food, gyms, and other useful resources provided by employers. But now I've gone and quit my job to start my own thing, and suddenly the truck doesn't look quite so sensible any more.

On one hand, I certainly didn't plan on living in a truck for the rest of my life. On the other hand, I never knew when I would stop. Well, I think I've got that last part figured out now, and it turns out it's in like a week.

The Next Chapter

Originally, I was going to talk about my new work adventures here, but that ended up being long and only tangentially related, so I'll save that for another post. The long and short of it is that I've started an organization with a good friend/old co-worker of mine, we'll be running it as our full-time jobs, and I'm terribly excited about it. I'm in the process of purchasing** a modest place in a small, nature-y town in the PNW, where I plan to live for the foreseeable future.

Finding a Good Home

Speaking of good homes, I'm also looking for one for my beloved box truck. If you're in the market for a vaguely habitable*** vehicle, hit me up. I plan on giving it the full post it deserves within the next day or two, just putting it out there now.

Getting Somewhat Sentimental

Few who know me would describe me as a sentimental person; I don't attach a ton of significance to things or places or dates or what-have-you. That said, I think it's second nature for people to organize their mental models of time into personal epochs, like being in college, working at a job, being in a romantic relationship, etc, etc, and I'm no different in that respect.

I definitely think of the truck as an era of my life, and an important one at that. Hell, I've lived in the truck longer than any other place since my childhood home, and I haven't lived there for like 17 years. I'm not the same person I was when I moved into the truck six and a half years ago, and I think the truck has played an outsized role in how I've changed since then.

Which is all to say that there's a certain bittersweetness to transitions like these. I'm excited for what the future may hold, but I also recognize that I'm giving up a big part of how I've lived for most of my adult life, and it'd be silly to not at least acknowledge that.

And a Bit Existential

As for the fate of this blog, I haven't really figured that one out yet. I enjoy putting stuff on here, though as anyone who's looked at the time gaps between the posts can attest, I take my sweet, sweet time in actually publishing things. I've also accumulated maybe two dozen half-finished posts over the years, so I should probably either finish those or toss them if they prove themselves completely irredeemable. We'll just have to see what happens!

Oh, and one last completely unrelated note — I was totally right about my sap situation, because I found the truck looking like this after a particularly warm day.

*Though not so young as I was, mostly because of the linear nature of time and whatnot.

**For anyone keeping score, this will be my third home, but the first one I'll actually get to live in (my family lives in the other two, on the east coast). I don't know how many homes you need before you get to call yourself a "real estate mogul", but I'm feelin' pretty mogul-y.

***The things that make it "habitable" are the skylight, interior door, and maybe insulation. Aside from that, it's just a normal box truck in all-around good condition.

Being back in the truck wouldn't really be complete without some semi-inexplicable phenomenon causing me troubles (cough cough). And thankfully, the truck hasn't disappointed. I say this because I came back to the truck a few days ago to several large mounds of thick, sticky sap on the floor of the truck.

This would be odd under normal circumstances, but to make things further befuddling:

• My sunroof was closed, and
• I wasn't parked anywhere near a tree.

Certifiably odd. But years of strange truck happenstances mean that my first reaction was along the lines of "This needs to be gone now", instead of just general confusion. I've witnessed one too many ant ^{et al} infestations even without any food in the truck, I sure as hell wasn't going to sit around and find out if they find sap tasty or not.*

So I busted out the cleaning products and scrubbed, scraped, or otherwise scooped up the sap. Once that was done, I was ready to be confused and/or befuddled.

A Grand Theory

Okay, so I've got a rough idea of what actually happened here. For a while leading up to the incident, I was indeed parked under a tree. Usually, I'm a big fan of trees, the shade and CO₂ sequestration and general ancestral predisposition toward them and whatnot. This tree however, not so much. It is a sappy, rude tree.** I don't believe that trees feel emotions in the same way that humans do, but if this tree could feel anything, I'd imagine it would feel nothing but unmitigated spite. It truly seems like this thing was purpose-built by nature to remove happiness from the world. As far as I can tell, this tree has two main hobbies:

1. Dropping infinitely sticky, gum-like sap bombs
2. Coating the world in pine needles, at a rate that logistically doesn't seem possible

I know I'm really hamming up the tree description here, but it'd be hard for me to overstate just how obnoxious the sap was. I'd hear it dropping at steady intervals, a substantive *thunk* on the thin metal roof. After a few days parked in the same spot, the sap was so thick on the sunroof that it no longer let light in. The potent combination of sap and pine needles made the truck absolutely filthy, and running the windshield wipers with torrents of washer fluid barely made a dent. I had to spray down the truck with a pressure washer to get most of it off. This whole sappy-mound-in-the-truck ordeal played out after I had already cleaned the truck. But anyway, here's what I think happened, in haiku form:

Basically, pine needles crept into the (usually waterproof) crevice between the sunroof glass and the liner, leaving a really small gap. One exceptionally hot day melted the sap on the roof (which I couldn't reach to clean off with the pressure washer) and it proceeded to seep through the gaps and plop onto the floor, where it cooled and solidified into a hateful mound.

And sure enough, when I took out the sunroof glass and swept a cloth around the crevice where the truck roof meets the sunroof bracket, it was full of pine needles. With that out of the way, a quick and preemptive Q & A.

A Quick and Preemptive Q&A

Why did you park there in the first place?

I didn't know what I was signing up for.

Why didn't you move the truck once you realized it was getting covered in sap?

Pure laziness.

Where are the pictures? I DEMAND PHYSICAL EVIDENCE

I took one photo afterwards if that counts:

Of Trucks and Troubles

As always, the truck shows an infinite capacity to be problematic in new and exciting ways. This is as entertaining as it is annoying. Especially after the long and relatively problem-free hiatus, I don't mind being kept on my toes a bit. Plus, how else would I get fed fodder to fuel this feed? (Okay, okay, I'll stop now.)

*This is all a long-winded explanation for why I don't have any pictures of the mounds of sap. Years of truck blogging apparently still haven't instilled any instinct to take photos first and destroy evidence later.

**As you can probably imagine from the context, I'm talking about "sappy" as in "produces a lot of physical sap," as opposed to "enjoyed the movie The Notebook".