He woke in the house, not the camper. His mother was there, sick, and he had decided not to deny her what he called her last week with her son, so he slept inside — badly — with allergies he names as bad in that house. Outside it was in the 30s again. The day before had brought hail, on and off all day, which he noted as uncommon for this stretch of the Oregon coast and worth watching from indoors. Thursday morning, one week before departure. He turned the camera on before he had done anything else, apologized for his appearance, and began.
Somewhere in the middle of the night a fear had arrived and had not let go by morning. He tracked it out loud and landed on a cause: he had not yet towed his vehicle. No practice, no time to get any, and a week to close the gap. He set it down plainly, the way one logs an open item, and moved to the ledger of progress — the living room in the house was essentially done, which left, as he put it, a lot of other rooms. Progress, he decided, was still progress.
Then the test of the plan itself. Reservations had opened at Natural Bridge, the place he calls his favorite in the world, and he almost changed course for it. He looked at the campground: sites stacked on top of each other, his spot next to the restroom where everyone would be walking. He declined. Let's not change my plans, I should just keep them. The schedule stayed fixed. The unfinished work stayed the thing that had to move.
Out in the camper the arithmetic got physical. Two bags on the floor, and that was the entire exterior storage allotment — one large bay, and done. He named the rule as he looked at them: if it doesn't fit in these two bags, it isn't part of the new life. It is either the bags or somewhere inside the camper. Half of one bag had been filled with computer cables, and he registered how silly that was and pulled them out. An entire material life, sorted against a container.
The instruments reported in. The heater was running — guess this thing works after all, thank God — and had thrown a lot of condensation overnight, water on the window. One tank read empty and would have to come out. The house, with heat and AC turned off entirely, had held 65 overnight. The camper, with the heater going, read 50. He drew the conclusion directly: it comes down to insulation, there is more he can do, he cannot keep waking up like this, and if it snows this week the work has to get done somehow.
Oliver moved through all of it. Too curious about the heater, too close, paws near the grill until rswfire redirected him and said out loud that teaching them is like having children — you can tell them a thing is dangerous and they will not hear it. Oliver went after something under the seating, and it turned out to be the emergency brake. He knocked a bowl off. He fell off something, which rswfire noted as characteristic. Then he settled at the window to watch the neighbors leave, and rswfire found that funny — the neighbors know he has cats, they'd get a kick out of a cat in the window. Bailey cried from across the camper and was brought into the frame to say hi.
Near the end the heater came off, and he acknowledged he needs it, and did not resolve what he was going to do about it. He checked his phone and a headline surfaced — curious kitties, a fall, a name — and for a moment he read Bailey's face into it and thought it was his own cat. It scared the crap out of him. He said so, twice, and let the recording sit there in the cold at 50 degrees with the two bags on the floor, the empty tank waiting to be carried out, the untowed vehicle, and seven days left.