Self-Reliance(?)

(Warning: boring post ahead having to do with the minutia of being a nomad.)

I'm still getting the hang of the homeless thing, and at this early stage even the little victories give me a thrill. Simple, mundane things like filing paperwork become challenges when you don't have a fixed address or even a printer.

Case in point: a letter from my insurance company arrived for me at my forwarding address in Seattle. I had my mail forwarding service open and scan it for me. (Have I mentioned how great I think EarthClassMail is?) The next day, I download the letter as a PDF file and see it's a form I need to fill out and mail in. Grrr. OK, I copy the PDF file to a thumb drive and take it around the corner to a file and print shop where I print it out. I also pick up an envelope and a stamp. Form filled, envelope addressed, stamped and mailed, mission accomplished.

Another point: yesterday I wanted to visit my old friend KC in Oakland. No car? No problem. BART gets me where I need to go. San Francisco is a fine place to live if you don't own a car; there's no shortage of public transit options.

All this leads me to wonder if I am more or less self-reliant now than I was before. Although I'm free to go where I please and do what I want, I am heavily reliant on local infrastructure for meeting my needs. If I had a printer, a fax machine, and a car, I could just do this stuff for myself, dammit.

I wonder what mail forwarding solution Caine from Kung Fu used.