A Year Inside The Box
Source: Calendar from ClipArtix, truck still from Clker. Slapping them together done by me, a weak first attempt at using Adobe Illustrator.

Staying true to my well-documented inability to write timely posts, here’s a post that I probably should have finished three months ago.

I wasn’t always the truck-faring degenerate that I am now. Reading some of my earlier posts, I can vividly remember a (roughly four percent) younger, more hesitant Brandon, sitting in an airport terminal, running through the plan over and over in his head, making sure he didn’t miss any important details. I’d picked out a class of vehicle, I’d picked out a place to get my private mailbox through, I’d scoped out parking locations. It was all there, I just had to go out and do it. I had some ideas about what truck-life would be like, but no experience to say whether or not my trepidation was justified.

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Truck Tech: You've Got Mail (and TLS and other stuff)
Source: Amalgamated from Jim Browne Chevy and Bob 'n' Bee. Basically, I took a way nicer, newer version of my truck and Photoshopped someone else's mail icon onto it.

I’ve gotten into this wonderful rhythm of publishing posts that are tragically untimely. My Spring Cleaning post was five days too late, I’d had the insulation and skylight for weeks before I’d recounted the tale, and I’d successfully picked up and put down my weight goals way before I picked up the pen and put down a post. So it’s only fitting that I’m just getting around to talking about a feature I added to the site over eight months ago.

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Q&A #8: Cleaning Out The Closet
Source: My actual "closet", aka a pipe bolted across the back of the truck. And it only took me 6 months to finish.

It’s that time again, when I realize that I’ve been neglecting people’s questions for too long and they’ve reached a critical mass. It’s time to clean out the closet. Not the literal one pictured above, though I should probably do a write up for how I threw that together too.

I just read your leather strap solution to your drawer problem. Have you considered magnets?

Indeed I had, and in fact I use some neodymium magnets to hold a makeshift screen onto my sunroof. I decided against using magnets on the dresser drawers because of their force characteristics. Basically, I didn’t like the idea that I’d have to Goldilocks my way to the right strength of magnet: too weak and the drawers do as they please when I take turns, too strong and they become difficult to open, not to mention they might rip the super glue off instead of simply separating. Snaps and straps are much easier to reason about: I snap them closed and the drawers don’t move, I unsnap them and I can get at my clothes freely, without a fight.

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A Question of Time
Source: Question mark from Online Web Fonts, clock from ClipArt Best. Looking at this again, it would have made more sense to put the clock in the dot of the question mark…oh well.

As of me typing these words, my little truck experiment has been going on for over a year and four months. That’s been more than enough time to see a thousand different questions fly through this site and my inbox, and every so often I’ll sit down and answer a few of them. But there’s one question that I haven’t answered, and can’t seem to escape. It’s usually one of the first questions to come up in conversation, and half a bazillion variations of it are sitting in my queue:

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Obvious Facts About Box Trucks #1: They Don't Have Bathrooms
Source: Truck clipart forever from Clker, bathroom stick peeps from ClipArtBest

I feel like it’s been a while since I started a new series of posts. Sure, we’ve got Truck Tech and Home Improvement and Tips from the Truck and Q & A, but I’m pretty confident we have room for at least one more. If titles weren’t supposed to be short, I’d probably extend the series name to: Incredibly Obvious Facts About Box Trucks (And Their Implications), just so we’re all definitely on the same page. Anyway, these posts will be all about inherent properties of box trucks, and what that means for how I structure and live my life. Our first patently obvious fact about box trucks: they definitely don’t have bathrooms.

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