On Tue, 30 Sep 2014 18:10:55 -0500, Califbill
wrote:

We keep kicking around taking a couple months trip to Alaska. The
problem, from my perspective, is the house and lawn. I suppose the
thing to do would be to let the lawn go without watering. Now's when I
wished we lived in a condo.

Hire a mow and blow for the yard. Get the neighbor kid to bring in the
mail. I auto pay all of by recurring bills, so not a problem there.

===

If you are going to be away for a while as we frequently are, there
are better ways to handle mail. We use a forwarding service which is
popular with boat cruisers, RV people and ex-pats. It is called St.
Brendan's Isle and they provide fantastic service which we and many
others have been using for years:

http://www.sbimailservice.com/

We tell the post office to forward all of our mail to SBI. They scan
the incoming envelopes every day and forward us a summary by EMAIL. If
there is something important in the summary where we need to see the
contents immediately, we check off the box for that item and return
it. They then open that piece of mail (with our advance permission),
scan the contents, and EMAIL it to us the next day. It's a great
service, professionally done, and reasonably priced. They hold all of
the paper and send it to us periodically on request via UPS or Fed Ex.

All of our bills are paid electronically with online banking.

The lawn and pool are under contract with service professionals that
we have used for years, and we have neighbors who check up on things
and let us know if anything is amiss.