From 84abb974c8fc4cf74e929d8497b29771e7d9c84a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: luxagraf Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2024 15:18:00 -0500 Subject: deleted some old cruft --- .../jrnlold/2019/01/sounds-san-miguel.html | 610 ------------------- .../jrnlold/2019/01/sounds-san-miguel.txt | 42 -- .../jrnlold/2019/01/these-walls-around-me.html | 651 -------------------- .../jrnlold/2019/01/these-walls-around-me.txt | 59 -- .../jrnlold/2019/02/candlelaria-in-san-miguel.html | 589 ------------------ .../jrnlold/2019/02/candlelaria-in-san-miguel.txt | 33 -- .../jrnlold/2019/03/around-san-miguel.html | 534 ----------------- .../jrnlold/2019/03/around-san-miguel.txt | 48 -- bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/cascarones.html | 640 -------------------- bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/cascarones.txt | 51 -- bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/visa-run.html | 518 ---------------- bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/visa-run.txt | 60 -- bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/horses.html | 531 ----------------- bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/horses.txt | 31 - bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/koyaanisqatsi.html | 620 ------------------- bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/koyaanisqatsi.txt | 48 -- bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/semana-santa.html | 551 ----------------- bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/semana-santa.txt | 41 -- bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/06/hasta-luego.html | 596 ------------------- bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/06/hasta-luego.txt | 42 -- bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/07/seven.html | 511 ---------------- bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/07/seven.txt | 25 - .../jrnlold/2019/07/summertime-rolls.html | 558 ------------------ .../jrnlold/2019/07/summertime-rolls.txt | 48 -- .../jrnlold/2019/08/georgia-road-trip.html | 570 ------------------ .../jrnlold/2019/08/georgia-road-trip.txt | 62 -- .../jrnlold/2019/09/hanging-around-town.html | 602 ------------------- .../jrnlold/2019/09/hanging-around-town.txt | 63 -- bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/09/old-growth.html | 578 ------------------ bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/09/old-growth.txt | 69 --- .../jrnlold/2019/10/back-to-raysville.html | 517 ---------------- .../jrnlold/2019/10/back-to-raysville.txt | 32 - bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/bird-watching.html | 567 ------------------ bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/bird-watching.txt | 52 -- .../jrnlold/2019/10/elberton-county-fair.html | 631 -------------------- .../jrnlold/2019/10/elberton-county-fair.txt | 72 --- .../jrnlold/2019/11/halloween-watson-mill.html | 545 ----------------- .../jrnlold/2019/11/halloween-watson-mill.txt | 45 -- bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/11/land.html | 647 -------------------- bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/11/land.txt | 48 -- .../jrnlold/2019/12/birthday-beach.html | 635 -------------------- bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/12/birthday-beach.txt | 62 -- .../jrnlold/2019/12/holiday-island.html | 656 --------------------- bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/12/holiday-island.txt | 50 -- 44 files changed, 13940 deletions(-) delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/01/sounds-san-miguel.html delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/01/sounds-san-miguel.txt delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/01/these-walls-around-me.html delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/01/these-walls-around-me.txt delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/02/candlelaria-in-san-miguel.html delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/02/candlelaria-in-san-miguel.txt delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/around-san-miguel.html delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/around-san-miguel.txt delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/cascarones.html delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/cascarones.txt delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/visa-run.html delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/visa-run.txt delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/horses.html delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/horses.txt delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/koyaanisqatsi.html delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/koyaanisqatsi.txt delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/semana-santa.html delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/semana-santa.txt delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/06/hasta-luego.html delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/06/hasta-luego.txt delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/07/seven.html delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/07/seven.txt delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/07/summertime-rolls.html delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/07/summertime-rolls.txt delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/08/georgia-road-trip.html delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/08/georgia-road-trip.txt delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/09/hanging-around-town.html delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/09/hanging-around-town.txt delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/09/old-growth.html delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/09/old-growth.txt delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/back-to-raysville.html delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/back-to-raysville.txt delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/bird-watching.html delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/bird-watching.txt delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/elberton-county-fair.html delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/elberton-county-fair.txt delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/11/halloween-watson-mill.html delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/11/halloween-watson-mill.txt delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/11/land.html delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/11/land.txt delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/12/birthday-beach.html delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/12/birthday-beach.txt delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/12/holiday-island.html delete mode 100644 bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/12/holiday-island.txt (limited to 'bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019') diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/01/sounds-san-miguel.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/01/sounds-san-miguel.html deleted file mode 100644 index 10fe0f3..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/01/sounds-san-miguel.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,610 +0,0 @@ - - - - - Sounds Of San Miguel - by Scott Gilbertson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
-
- - -
-
- - - -
-
-
-

Sounds of San Miguel

-

Everything is music

-
-
-

San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

- – Map -
- - -
-
-
-

In California I only ever met my neighbors after an earthquake. In Georgia it was big snowstorms that brought everyone together. In Massachusetts it took the first Red Sox victory in 86 years for me to meet my upstairs neighbor.

-

Down here the trash truck brings everyone together every morning.

-

One of the men hops off the truck at each stop and walks ahead, banging a bell up and down the street. It’s not really a bell, though it sounds like one. It’s a hunk of metal the size of reporter’s notepad, which he beats with a broken bit of pipe that clangs and echoes off the concrete facades. There is no mistaking when the trash man cometh. Assuming you know what the sound means.

-

-

That’s how trash is done here, you bring it to the truck yourself. You hear the bell, grab your trash and then stand in line with your neighbors, awaiting the trash truck. Everyone says hello, everyone chats. Some raised an eyebrow at me in the beginning, a gringo bringing out the trash. Unexpected apparently. After a few days people started to say buenos dias to me as well, commenting on the chill of the desert mornings, and then turning to ask after their other neighbors.

-
- - man taking out trash, san miguel de allende, mx photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

San Miguel has a reputation for being a bright and colorful colonial town, with good reason. Still, what I end up noticing when I walk around is the kaleidoscope of sound that bounces around amidst all those colors. Not the random noise of chaos in a city, though there is that, but out of that comes organized sounds — the bells, chimes, whistles, and clangs that mean something. There’s always a melody drifting around the corner, down the alleys, always someone signaling their whereabouts.

-
- - red and pink walls, San miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - hole in the wall photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - San miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

Even in our courtyard, sounds drift in and the kids know now, sound has meaning. They always want to open the courtyard doors and discover the source of whatever reaches us. Every morning they yell, Daddy, trash man is here. But the trash man isn’t the only one announcing his arrival.

-

The knife man comes by in the afternoons. You know him by the piercing whistle he plays. He carries what looks like a miniature pipe organ, similar to indigenous flutes I’ve seen elsewhere. Whatever it is, it’s an unmistakable calling card. Grab your knife and head out the door to get it sharpened.

-

The propane tank guys aren’t so creative. They blast a musical spiel that I assume is some sort of sales pitch, though I can’t understand it. It’s not the Spanish that’s hard, it’s because it’s played out of what sounds like a New York City subway announcement speaker. It squawks and buzzes in roughly four-four time with a scratchy harmony, and that’s when you know the truck with all the propane tanks is near. Not to be confused with the propane truck, which is one giant tank of propane, and must be summoned by phone.

-

Bells, softer bells you won’t notice if the windows are closed, are generally pushcart vendors of some kind, helado or elote or pina or who knows.

-
- - helado cart, san miguel de allende, mx photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

The honey hawkers shout, miel, miel! The shrimp man, whose son usually carries the bucket of shrimp, cups his hands and yells something that vaguely resembles the word camarones, but we live in a desert and for a long time I thought I must be mishearing him. But no, it is a bucket of camarones on ice.

-

The water truck is silent. The delivery man holds everything in his head, knows who needs what and delivers it all without any signifying sound. I want to tell him he should leave a few empties on the outside of the truck, they’d drone all down the road, but my Spanish isn’t that good, besides, maybe silence is his calling card.

-
-
- - - -
-
- - -
- -
-
-
-
You might also enjoy
- -
-
- - - - - -

4 Comments

- - - - - - -
- -
- -
- DREW ELDRIDGE - March 13, 2019 at 9:34 a.m. -
- -
- -

“Bring out Ye dead”.

- -
-
- -
- -
- Gwen - March 13, 2019 at 1:32 p.m. -
- -
- -

Interesting post. Thanks for including audio. I liked the O’Neill allusion.

- -
-
- -
- -
- Scott - March 13, 2019 at 2:09 p.m. -
- -
- -

Drew-

-

Haha, yeah haven’t heard that one fortunately.

-

Gwen-

-

So I had to google that, but I’m assuming you mean Eugene O’Neill.

-

I have to admit, that was not a conscious allusion. I’m not that clever alas. I did wonder where I got that line from though. It seemed a little pretentious, but I left it because it reminded me of something. Thanks for figuring out what :)

- -
-
- -
- -
- Scott - March 18, 2019 at 11:41 a.m. -
- -
- -

Drew-

-

On further listening, I realized there is, sadly, essentially that — single shots of fireworks generally keep pace with funeral processions from the church to graveyard.

- -
-
- -
- - -
- -
-

Thoughts?

-

Please leave a reply:

-
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- -
-
- - - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
-
-

All comments are moderated, so you won’t see it right away. And please remember Kurt Vonnegut's rule: “god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” You can use Markdown or HTML to format your comments. The allowed tags are <b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <a>. To create a new paragraph hit return twice.

- - -
- -
- - - - -
- - - - - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/01/sounds-san-miguel.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/01/sounds-san-miguel.txt deleted file mode 100644 index a5464d9..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/01/sounds-san-miguel.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,42 +0,0 @@ -Sounds of San Miguel -==================== - - by Scott Gilbertson - - Friday, 11 January 2019 - -In California I only ever met my neighbors after an earthquake. In Georgia it was big snowstorms that brought everyone together. In Massachusetts it took the first Red Sox victory in 86 years for me to meet my upstairs neighbor. - -Down here the trash truck brings everyone together every morning. - -One of the men hops off the truck at each stop and walks ahead, banging a bell up and down the street. It's not really a bell, though it sounds like one. It's a hunk of metal the size of reporter's notepad, which he beats with a broken bit of pipe that clangs and echoes off the concrete facades. There is no mistaking when the trash man cometh. Assuming you know what the sound means. - - - -That's how trash is done here, you bring it to the truck yourself. You hear the bell, grab your trash and then stand in line with your neighbors, awaiting the trash truck. Everyone says hello, everyone chats. Some raised an eyebrow at me in the beginning, a gringo bringing out the trash. Unexpected apparently. After a few days people started to say buenos dias to me as well, commenting on the chill of the desert mornings, and then turning to ask after their other neighbors. - - - -San Miguel has a reputation for being a bright and colorful colonial town, with good reason. Still, what I end up noticing when I walk around is the kaleidoscope of sound that bounces around amidst all those colors. Not the random noise of chaos in a city, though there is that, but out of that comes organized sounds -- the bells, chimes, whistles, and clangs that mean something. There's always a melody drifting around the corner, down the alleys, always someone signaling their whereabouts. - - - - - -Even in our courtyard, [sounds drift in](/jrnl/2019/01/these-walls-around-me) and the kids know now, sound has meaning. They always want to open the courtyard doors and discover the source of whatever reaches us. Every morning they yell, *Daddy, trash man is here*. But the trash man isn't the only one announcing his arrival. - -The knife man comes by in the afternoons. You know him by the piercing whistle he plays. He carries what looks like a miniature pipe organ, similar to indigenous flutes I've seen elsewhere. Whatever it is, it's an unmistakable calling card. Grab your knife and head out the door to get it sharpened. - -The propane tank guys aren't so creative. They blast a musical spiel that I assume is some sort of sales pitch, though I can't understand it. It's not the Spanish that's hard, it's because it's played out of what sounds like a New York City subway announcement speaker. It squawks and buzzes in roughly four-four time with a scratchy harmony, and that's when you know the truck with all the propane tanks is near. Not to be confused with the propane truck, which is one giant tank of propane, and must be summoned by phone. - -Bells, softer bells you won't notice if the windows are closed, are generally pushcart vendors of some kind, helado or elote or pina or who knows. - - - -The honey hawkers shout, miel, *miel!* The shrimp man, whose son usually carries the bucket of shrimp, cups his hands and yells something that vaguely resembles the word camarones, but we live in a desert and for a long time I thought I must be mishearing him. But no, it is a bucket of camarones on ice. - -The water truck is silent. The delivery man holds everything in his head, knows who needs what and delivers it all without any signifying sound. I want to tell him he should leave a few empties on the outside of the truck, they'd drone all down the road, but my Spanish isn't that good, besides, maybe silence is his calling card. diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/01/these-walls-around-me.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/01/these-walls-around-me.html deleted file mode 100644 index 1eec6fb..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/01/these-walls-around-me.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,651 +0,0 @@ - - - - - These Walls Around Me - by Scott Gilbertson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
-
- - -
-
- - - -
-
-
-

These Walls Around Me

- -
-
-

San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

- – Map -
- - -
-
-
-

We moved into a new place at the beginning of the year, down a block and over a street from where we’d been, overlooking Canal. I miss swinging open the heavy wood doors on the second floor of that house and watching the life of the street below. Our new place has its charms though. We have a courtyard, a roof top deck. Pretty fancy stuff for us. Haven’t been able to find the engine though.

-

It’s a spare place, tending toward the monastic, which is perfect us. There’s no knick knacks, no clutter, nothing on the walls even, save one image of Guadalupe. It suits us I think. It’s nice enough, but it seems obvious that this a place for people who are passing through, in every sense of the idea. We did our own temporary decorating.

-
- - house, san miguel de allende, mx photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - house, san miguel de allende, mx photographed by luxagraf - -
There’s a little window in the wall by the stairs, a horse big enough for three.
-
- -
- - view from the balcony of our new house photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

We moved in a couple days before the new year. One nice thing about our one-bag-per-person lifestyle, moving is simple. Except for food. Pretty sure our new neighbors thought I was crazy schlepping bags of sauces and spices and flours and oils and vinegar down the street, but hey, we like to cook. And we wanted to spend the new year in a new place, which we did. With sparklers of course.

-
- - sparklers, san miguel de allende, mx photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - sparklers, san miguel de allende, mx photographed by luxagraf - -
Dad, what’s that statue again? That looks like this?
-
- -
- - house, san miguel de allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

The streets here are cobblestone rivers threading canyons of smooth, watercolor concrete. The canyon walls rise on either side as you walk, one side offering shade, the other sun, their smooth contours running continuous, unbroken lines down the street, save the occasional door or window.

-

Sometimes it’s hard to tell where homes begin and end. Looking at photographs, you might assume that color changes in the canyon wall mark where one home ends and the next begins. Sometimes you’d be right. This can be misleading though — sometimes colors change for no reason, or don’t change at all from one house to the next for an entire block.

-

The doors aren’t much help either. It’s hard to know which door goes to which house, or even if they lead to a house at all. Many doors, usually double doors, open to courtyards like ours, or similar outdoor spaces, which offer an air-gap between home and world, making home feel at least a little removed from the bustle of the street.

-
- - Streets of San miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - Walls of San Miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - courtyard, umaran, san miguel de allende, mx photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

Courtyards are one-way mirrors of sound. The street comes in. You hear everything. Less seems to go out. Walking down the streets you rarely hear noise coming out of the walls. Perhaps the noise of the street hides it, or perhaps a single family can’t make a enough noise to get it over the tops of the walls.

-

I do a lot of listening in the courtyard. It’s visually cut off from the world, but sound surges over the high yellow walls. Disconnected from the source, it’s only tiny parts of stories, never the whole thing. Inchoate beginnings, clipped endings, snippets of sound — brakes whining sharp and shrill, engines grinding gears, cracked mufflers growling, conversations drifting, doorbells buzzing, phones chiming, whistles, horns, bells, birds, buzzers.

-

On rare days when the wind blows, it seems oddly quiet on the street. The courtyard swirls with sound of rustling bamboo and clattering palm leaves, putting me back in southeast Asia, or wishing for the west coast of Mexico, the Yucatan, somewhere tropical, somewhere sandy, somewhere hot and humid, with watery winds, salt air, the unbroken horizon of the sea.

-
- - Papel Picado, San Miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

In our courtyard, near the door to the street there’s a cluster of bamboo stretching far above the broken-glass topped walls. The leafy crowns of bamboo play host to a flock of house sparrows every morning and every evening.

-

It’s a deafening chorus of feathers, a large enough flock to leave a significant amount of crap on the concrete below. Strangely though, you rarely actually see the birds. The bamboo isn’t particularly dense, but it’s enough to mask them. The balcony off our bedroom is roughly eye level with the top of the bamboo, and even from there it still takes concentrated effort to make them out. If you sit and stare, wait for your eyes to adjust to the subtlety of shadow and leaf and bird and light you slowly begin to make them out, singing, fluttering and bouncing among the leaves.

-

-

They’ve been here for a long time. One day I was walking back from the market, about to cross the street to our house, when I noticed a little girl walking, tugging on her mom’s dress, saying mama, mama, el arbol de los pájaros. Another day I was sitting at the table in the courtyard, drinking coffee when I heard a little girl’s voice drifting in from the street, roughly the same words, but in English.

-

You can set clocks by the sparrows, light clocks anyway. They are shadow singers. Like true Mexican birds, they don’t seem to care much about watch time, but they do sing at the same time everyday, with regard to the light. When the light in the evening reaches a certain point, when the tops of the bamboo are in shadow I think, and it seems obvious that dusk has settled on the world, they begin their farewell songs.

-
- - courtyard, umaran, san miguel de allende, mx photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

In the mornings, when it is light enough to see, but the sun hasn’t yet risen high enough to reach the bamboo, they sing again. Each time their singing and chattering lasts about twenty minutes and then they sort of fade out. In the mornings they don’t leave all at once, they trickle away in pairs and alone, which makes the noise of them seem to fade away, you don’t notice them leaving, just later, when they’re definitively gone.

-

They come back around the time we eat dinner and have their evening song and chattering, and then, I’m not sure, but I suspect they roost in the bamboo. It seems at tad rude to go out later at night and shine lights on them just to check a hunch, but I think they’re up there all night. I like to think of them still up there anyway, roosted down for the night, a ruffle of feathers tucked in a bamboo node here and there, sleeping, waiting for dawn, waiting to sing again.

-
-
- - - -
-
- - -
- -
-
-
-
You might also enjoy
- -
-
- - - - - -

4 Comments

- - - - - - -
- -
- -
- Nicola - February 21, 2019 at 8:58 a.m. -
- -
- -

Enjoyed this post, but watch out for that bird poop. There can be all sort of nasty viruses lurking in that stuff.

- -
-
- -
- -
- Scott - February 21, 2019 at 2:00 p.m. -
- -
- -

nicola-

-

Glad you like the post. As for bird poop and disease, I’ll be honest, that’s not something I’m at all worried about.

- -
-
- -
- -
- DREW ELDRIDGE - February 27, 2019 at 7:33 a.m. -
- -
- -

You need a sound clip for every article. It was nice reading this and getting a feel for the area at the same time. Awesome.

-

Also, that stone door is the only door I want to go through. Where does that door lead? Narnia?

- -
-
- -
- -
- Scott - February 27, 2019 at 5:13 p.m. -
- -
- -

Drew-

-

There’s more sounds coming! That’s something I’ve been getting into a lot more lately. Right now the problem is I use my camera to record it and then I have to split the audio from video, which is a pain. I’m working on a better solution, but yeah I thought it’d be cool. I actually have a backlog of recordings from all over the place, maybe I should go back and add them…

-

As for the door, it leads… somewhere.

- -
-
- -
- - -
- -
-

Thoughts?

-

Please leave a reply:

-
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- -
-
- - - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
-
-

All comments are moderated, so you won’t see it right away. And please remember Kurt Vonnegut's rule: “god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” You can use Markdown or HTML to format your comments. The allowed tags are <b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <a>. To create a new paragraph hit return twice.

- - -
- -
- - - - -
- - - - - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/01/these-walls-around-me.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/01/these-walls-around-me.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 4a5eb53..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/01/these-walls-around-me.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,59 +0,0 @@ -These Walls Around Me -===================== - - by Scott Gilbertson - - Thursday, 03 January 2019 - -We moved into a new place at the beginning of the year, down a block and over a street from where we'd been, overlooking Canal. I miss swinging open the heavy wood doors on the second floor of that house and watching the life of the street below. Our new place has its charms though. We have a courtyard, a roof top deck. Pretty fancy stuff for us. Haven't been able to find the engine though. - -It's a spare place, tending toward the monastic, which is perfect us. There's no knick knacks, no clutter, nothing on the walls even, save one image of Guadalupe. It suits us I think. It's nice enough, but it seems obvious that this a place for people who are passing through, in every sense of the idea. We did our own temporary decorating. - - - - - -We moved in a couple days before the new year. One nice thing about our one-bag-per-person lifestyle, moving is simple. Except for food. Pretty sure our new neighbors thought I was crazy schlepping bags of sauces and spices and flours and oils and vinegar down the street, but hey, we like to cook. And we wanted to spend the new year in a new place, which we did. With sparklers of course. - - - - - - -The streets here are cobblestone rivers threading canyons of smooth, watercolor concrete. The canyon walls rise on either side as you walk, one side offering shade, the other sun, their smooth contours running continuous, unbroken lines down the street, save the occasional door or window. - -Sometimes it's hard to tell where homes begin and end. Looking at photographs, you might assume that color changes in the canyon wall mark where one home ends and the next begins. Sometimes you'd be right. This can be misleading though -- sometimes colors change for no reason, or don't change at all from one house to the next for an entire block. - -The doors aren't much help either. It's hard to know which door goes to which house, or even if they lead to a house at all. Many doors, usually double doors, open to courtyards like ours, or similar outdoor spaces, which offer an air-gap between home and world, making home feel at least a little removed from the bustle of the street. - - - - - -Courtyards are one-way mirrors of sound. The street comes in. You hear everything. Less seems to go out. Walking down the streets you rarely hear noise coming out of the walls. Perhaps the noise of the street hides it, or perhaps a single family can't make a enough noise to get it over the tops of the walls. - -I do a lot of listening in the courtyard. It's visually cut off from the world, but sound surges over the high yellow walls. Disconnected from the source, it's only tiny parts of stories, never the whole thing. Inchoate beginnings, clipped endings, snippets of sound -- brakes whining sharp and shrill, engines grinding gears, cracked mufflers growling, conversations drifting, doorbells buzzing, phones chiming, whistles, horns, bells, birds, buzzers. - -On rare days when the wind blows, it seems oddly quiet on the street. The courtyard swirls with sound of rustling bamboo and clattering palm leaves, putting me back in southeast Asia, or wishing for the west coast of Mexico, the Yucatan, somewhere tropical, somewhere sandy, somewhere hot and humid, with watery winds, salt air, the unbroken horizon of the sea. - - - -In our courtyard, near the door to the street there's a cluster of bamboo stretching far above the broken-glass topped walls. The leafy crowns of bamboo play host to a flock of house sparrows every morning and every evening. - -It's a deafening chorus of feathers, a large enough flock to leave a significant amount of crap on the concrete below. Strangely though, you rarely actually see the birds. The bamboo isn't particularly dense, but it's enough to mask them. The balcony off our bedroom is roughly eye level with the top of the bamboo, and even from there it still takes concentrated effort to make them out. If you sit and stare, wait for your eyes to adjust to the subtlety of shadow and leaf and bird and light you slowly begin to make them out, singing, fluttering and bouncing among the leaves. - - - -They've been here for a long time. One day I was walking back from the market, about to cross the street to our house, when I noticed a little girl walking, tugging on her mom's dress, saying *mama, mama, el arbol de los pájaros*. Another day I was sitting at the table in the courtyard, drinking coffee when I heard a little girl's voice drifting in from the street, roughly the same words, but in English. - -You can set clocks by the sparrows, light clocks anyway. They are shadow singers. Like true Mexican birds, they don't seem to care much about watch time, but they do sing at the same time everyday, with regard to the light. When the light in the evening reaches a certain point, when the tops of the bamboo are in shadow I think, and it seems obvious that dusk has settled on the world, they begin their farewell songs. - - - -In the mornings, when it is light enough to see, but the sun hasn't yet risen high enough to reach the bamboo, they sing again. Each time their singing and chattering lasts about twenty minutes and then they sort of fade out. In the mornings they don't leave all at once, they trickle away in pairs and alone, which makes the noise of them seem to fade away, you don't notice them leaving, just later, when they're definitively gone. - -They come back around the time we eat dinner and have their evening song and chattering, and then, I'm not sure, but I suspect they roost in the bamboo. It seems at tad rude to go out later at night and shine lights on them just to check a hunch, but I think they're up there all night. I like to think of them still up there anyway, roosted down for the night, a ruffle of feathers tucked in a bamboo node here and there, sleeping, waiting for dawn, waiting to sing again. diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/02/candlelaria-in-san-miguel.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/02/candlelaria-in-san-miguel.html deleted file mode 100644 index cf5b900..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/02/candlelaria-in-san-miguel.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,589 +0,0 @@ - - - - - Rite Of Spring - by Scott Gilbertson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
-
- - -
-
- - - -
-
-
-

Rite of Spring

-

Candelaria and blessing of the seeds

-
-
-

San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

- – Map -
- - -
-
-
-

Someone once quipped that cultures only need a word for “religion” when they no longer have one. Aside from our brief encounters with indigenous tribes, no other people I’ve lived among have less need for the word religion than Mexicans. Here there is life, and it is always a celebration.

-

It feels the opposite of where we come from. You want to bring it back with you when you leave, but I don’t think that’s possible. All you ever get to take with you are memories.

-
- - Church at twilight, San miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

Halfway between winter solstice and spring equinox lies a day that has long been celebrated in various forms as the “return of the light”. Around the British Isles it’s known as Imbolic. Farther south it fell close enough to forty days after Christmas that it merged with existing pagan traditions and become Candlemas.

-

Candelaria, as it’s called around here, is not celebrated in the States anymore, but in San Miguel it’s going strong. Like most things here it’s half Catholic, half indigenous and falls such that it marks roughly the beginning of spring. To celebrate there’s an indigenous ceremony at the park, with a blessing of the seeds to future harvests, and a huge plant sale.

-

The park is transformed into an outdoor arboretum. Plant vendors line the walkways and little kids push wagon loads of plants through the park to waiting cars on the street. And of course there’s food. Any time three or more people gather in Mexico, someone materializes bearing food.

-
- - candelaria, san miguel de allende, mexico photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - candelaria, san miguel de allende, mexico photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - girls on swings, parque juarez, san miguel de allende, mexico photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

We’re not great with plants. We took the kids to a nursery to get some plants for the pots we gave them for Christmas and by Candlelaria they were already dead. We bought a few more at the plant sale, but um, cough, one of those is already mostly dead as I write this. Not sure what’s wrong with us, perhaps we’re just not plant people. Animals seem drawn to us though, so at least there’s that.

-
- - portrait of girl with butterfly on her head. photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - portrait of boy photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - kids playing courtyard of house, san miguel de allende, mexico photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - kids playing courtyard of house, san miguel de allende, mexico photographed by luxagraf - -
The free dancing portion of our obstacle courses is where I always get left behind.
-
- -

It is warming up here. Perhaps our plants will do better going forward. I doubt it though. All you ever get to take is your memory. Like this memory, which has an explanation, but which I like better without it.

-
- - None photographed by luxagraf - -
-
-
- - - -
-
- - -
- -
-
-
-
You might also enjoy
- -
-
- - - - - -

2 Comments

- - - - - - -
- -
- -
- Gwen - March 20, 2019 at 3:24 p.m. -
- -
- -

Yep, it was O’Neill. Enjoyed this post and appreciated learning about Candlemas/ Candlearia. There is a poem by Denise Levertov titled Candlemas that I really like, but I have never really known what exactly Candlemas was, so thanks for the information.

- -
-
- -
- -
- Scott - March 22, 2019 at 4:26 p.m. -
- -
- -

Gwen-

-

Yeah it’s not big in the north, I’d heard of it, but never really paid any attention. And I’d never even heard of Kings day, which is a huge deal here. All three are related.

- -
-
- -
- - -
- -
-

Thoughts?

-

Please leave a reply:

-
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- -
-
- - - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
-
-

All comments are moderated, so you won’t see it right away. And please remember Kurt Vonnegut's rule: “god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” You can use Markdown or HTML to format your comments. The allowed tags are <b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <a>. To create a new paragraph hit return twice.

- - -
- -
- - - - -
- - - - - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/02/candlelaria-in-san-miguel.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/02/candlelaria-in-san-miguel.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 5385401..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/02/candlelaria-in-san-miguel.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,33 +0,0 @@ -Rite of Spring -============== - - by Scott Gilbertson - - Monday, 04 February 2019 - -Someone once quipped that cultures only need a word for "religion" when they no longer have one. Aside from our brief encounters with indigenous tribes, no other people I've lived among have less need for the word religion than Mexicans. Here there is life, and it is always a celebration. - -It feels the opposite of where we come from. You want to bring it back with you when you leave, but I don't think that's possible. All you ever get to take with you are memories. - - - -Halfway between winter solstice and spring equinox lies a day that has long been celebrated in various forms as the "return of the light". Around the British Isles it's known as Imbolic. Farther south it fell close enough to forty days after Christmas that it merged with existing pagan traditions and become Candlemas. - -Candelaria, as it's called around here, is not celebrated in the States anymore, but in San Miguel it's going strong. Like most things here it's half Catholic, half indigenous and falls such that it marks roughly the beginning of spring. To celebrate there's an indigenous ceremony at the park, with a blessing of the seeds to future harvests, and a huge plant sale. - -The park is transformed into an outdoor arboretum. Plant vendors line the walkways and little kids push wagon loads of plants through the park to waiting cars on the street. And of course there's food. Any time three or more people gather in Mexico, someone materializes bearing food. - - - - - -We're not great with plants. We took the kids to a nursery to get some plants for the pots we gave them for Christmas and by Candlelaria they were already dead. We bought a few more at the plant sale, but um, cough, one of those is already mostly dead as I write this. Not sure what's wrong with us, perhaps we're just not plant people. Animals seem drawn to us though, so at least there's that. - - - - - - -It is warming up here. Perhaps our plants will do better going forward. I doubt it though. All you ever get to take is your memory. Like this memory, which has an explanation, but which I like better without it. - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/around-san-miguel.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/around-san-miguel.html deleted file mode 100644 index 07f6bd5..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/around-san-miguel.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,534 +0,0 @@ - - - - - Around San Miguel - by Scott Gilbertson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
-
- - -
-
- - - -
-
-
-

Around San Miguel

-

Parades, dancing, and Mexican patience

-
-
-

San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

- – Map -
- - -
-
-
-

Last week I was walking up from the bus station when I happened across my favorite of the indigenous dance groups that come into town, dancers luxagraf readers might recognize — a group that turns out to be called La Sagrada Familia. There’s no machetes, but they have the best drummers, best costumes, and best dancing in my opinion.

-
- - danza de indios, La Sagrada Familia, San Miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - danza de indios, La Sagrada Familia, San Miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

They were on a narrow side street, dancing between a line of cars and the brick and plaster facades of houses. It was a tight space, not great for photos, but with no more than 20 or 30 people sitting around watching. This was the closest I’d been able to get to them. In the Jardin they’re always surrounded by a crowd at least three people deep.

-

Thanks to the concrete confines of the street the drums were more than sound, they hit me in the chest with vibrations I could feel from my ribcage to solar plexus. It was a more intimate and intense experience in the narrow street than anything I’d seen in the Jardin.

-

Vibrations are an important part of many ceremonies. As anyone who’s spent a good bit of time either vibrating with their voice or sitting in front of something that vibrates your whole body can tell you, it has profound effects after a while.

-

This is probably best known as a negative thing, as in the PTSD many soldiers get from being too close to too many explosions. The shock waves have permanent and lasting negative effects. But there are more positive effects to vibration when it arrives in smaller, saner doses. The effect is similar, just lower dosage you might say. This is why rhythmic chanting and other ways of vibrating your own body are so often a part of religious ceremonies — they are a quick and easy way to change brain states (among other things).

-

-

I sat in the middle of the street and watched them dance their way up and down in a slow looping ellipse, feeling the drums vibrate inside me while the dancers’ foot work, with ankle rattles attached, filled the mid tone space, and hand held shakers hissed in at the high end of the rhythmic scale. It was a wall of percussion that all fit together, making something larger than the sum of the parts.

-
- - La Sagrada Familia, san miguel de allende, mexico photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - La Sagrada Familia, san miguel de allende, mexico photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

I’m still not sure what the occasion was, or why they were in town. It was the weekend of Benito Juarez’s birthday, which could have been the reason. Earlier in the day there was a parade just up the street from our house, which also could have had something to do with Juarez’s birthday, though it looked more like Halloween than anything.

-
- - parade, san miguel de allende, mexico photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - parade, san miguel de allende, mexico photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - parade, san miguel de allende, mexico photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

Sometimes there’s no discernible reason for a parade. Even the locals standing on the street around us seemed a little mystified by it all. Or perhaps that was annoyance since the parade held up all the buses headed out of town for a good hour or so. On the weekend many people just want to get the market, get their food for the week, and head home. Damn the parades.

-

But they’re Mexican, so they waited patiently, with almost no outward sign of irritation, certainly not anger, though, if Octavio Paz is correct, there might be plenty of irritation and anger behind the public mask.

-

I’m not sure if Paz is right, sweeping general statements about an entire culture have severe rounding errors, nor an I sure that keeping everything behind a mask is a good thing. Anger has its place, it’s a natural, common human emotion. Still, I do admire the Mexican ability to keep it in check, especially in one particular circumstance I encounter nearly every time I head out the door - northerners behaving badly.

-

There’s no shortage of bad behavior by northerners around here, but Mexicans never confront it. At least as far as I’ve seen. That is a choice after all — confronting and complaining about the things you don’t like. It’s one I generally choose, but you can also choose, as my neighbors do, to ignore it all. Or, as I suspect, to store it up for gossip in the evenings, when everyone comes out into the streets to gather around the grills and cookers to eat, gossip, and laugh. My Spanish isn’t good enough to say for sure, but I suspect some of this talk is all the crazy and annoying things that gringos did in the neighborhood that day.

-

Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Paz is wrong too. It’s impossible to know as an outsider, and even when you’re an insider, part of the culture, can you speak for everyone? We like to sort the world, to group individuals together by common traits, behaviors, beliefs. Sometimes there do seem to be currents of thought and idea running common among us, the backbeat of our dreams perhaps. Other times though those who would speak for all of us are really speaking of themselves, for themselves. Sometimes I think we’d all be better off if more of us spoke only of ourselves, for ourselves without assuming anyone else thinks, feels, or dreams the same.

-
-

Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the maze of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed. –Octavio Paz

-
-
-
- - - -
-
- - -
- -
-
-
-
You might also enjoy
- -
-
- - - - - -
- -
-

Thoughts?

-

Please leave a reply:

-
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- -
-
- - - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
-
-

All comments are moderated, so you won’t see it right away. And please remember Kurt Vonnegut's rule: “god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” You can use Markdown or HTML to format your comments. The allowed tags are <b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <a>. To create a new paragraph hit return twice.

- - -
- -
- - - - -
- - - - - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/around-san-miguel.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/around-san-miguel.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 0b91773..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/around-san-miguel.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,48 +0,0 @@ -Around San Miguel -================= - - by Scott Gilbertson - - Sunday, 17 March 2019 - -Last week I was walking up from the bus station when I happened across my favorite of the indigenous dance groups that come into town, dancers luxagraf readers might recognize -- a group that turns out to be called La Sagrada Familia. There's no [machetes](/jrnl/2019/03/cascarones), but they have the best drummers, best costumes, and best dancing in my opinion. - - - - -They were on a narrow side street, dancing between a line of cars and the brick and plaster facades of houses. It was a tight space, not great for photos, but with no more than 20 or 30 people sitting around watching. This was the closest I'd been able to get to them. In the Jardin they're always surrounded by a crowd at least three people deep. - -Thanks to the concrete confines of the street the drums were more than sound, they hit me in the chest with vibrations I could feel from my ribcage to solar plexus. It was a more intimate and intense experience in the narrow street than anything I'd seen in the Jardin. - -Vibrations are an important part of many ceremonies. As anyone who's spent a good bit of time either vibrating with their voice or sitting in front of something that vibrates your whole body can tell you, it has profound effects after a while. - -This is probably best known as a negative thing, as in the PTSD many soldiers get from being too close to too many explosions. The shock waves have [permanent and lasting negative effects](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/10/us/ptsd-blast-waves-research.html). But there are more positive effects to vibration when it arrives in smaller, saner doses. The effect is similar, just lower dosage you might say. This is why rhythmic chanting and other ways of vibrating your own body are so often a part of religious ceremonies -- they are a quick and easy way to change brain states (among other things). - - - -I sat in the middle of the street and watched them dance their way up and down in a slow looping ellipse, feeling the drums vibrate inside me while the dancers' foot work, with ankle rattles attached, filled the mid tone space, and hand held shakers hissed in at the high end of the rhythmic scale. It was a wall of percussion that all fit together, making something larger than the sum of the parts. - - - - -I'm still not sure what the occasion was, or why they were in town. It was the weekend of Benito Juarez's birthday, which could have been the reason. Earlier in the day there was a parade just up the street from our house, which also could have had something to do with Juarez's birthday, though it looked more like Halloween than anything. - - - - - -Sometimes there's no discernible reason for a parade. Even the locals standing on the street around us seemed a little mystified by it all. Or perhaps that was annoyance since the parade held up all the buses headed out of town for a good hour or so. On the weekend many people just want to get the market, get their food for the week, and head home. Damn the parades. - -But they're Mexican, so they waited patiently, with almost no outward sign of irritation, certainly not anger, though, if Octavio Paz is correct, there might be plenty of irritation and anger behind the public mask. - -I'm not sure if Paz is right, sweeping general statements about an entire culture have severe rounding errors, nor an I sure that keeping everything behind a mask is a good thing. Anger has its place, it's a natural, common human emotion. Still, I do admire the Mexican ability to keep it in check, especially in one particular circumstance I encounter nearly every time I head out the door - northerners behaving badly. - -There's no shortage of bad behavior by northerners around here, but Mexicans never confront it. At least as far as I've seen. That is a choice after all -- confronting and complaining about the things you don't like. It's one I generally choose, but you can also choose, as my neighbors do, to ignore it all. Or, as I suspect, to store it up for gossip in the evenings, when everyone comes out into the streets to gather around the grills and cookers to eat, gossip, and laugh. My Spanish isn't good enough to say for sure, but I suspect some of this talk is all the crazy and annoying things that gringos did in the neighborhood that day. - -Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Paz is wrong too. It's impossible to know as an outsider, and even when you're an insider, part of the culture, can you speak for everyone? We like to sort the world, to group individuals together by common traits, behaviors, beliefs. Sometimes there do seem to be currents of thought and idea running common among us, the backbeat of our dreams perhaps. Other times though those who would speak for all of us are really speaking of themselves, for themselves. Sometimes I think we'd all be better off if more of us spoke only of ourselves, for ourselves without assuming anyone else thinks, feels, or dreams the same. - -> Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the maze of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed. –Octavio Paz diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/cascarones.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/cascarones.html deleted file mode 100644 index c3502d8..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/cascarones.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,640 +0,0 @@ - - - - - Cascarones And Machete Dancing - by Scott Gilbertson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
-
- - -
-
- - - -
-
-
-

Cascarones and Machete Dancing

-

Something like Carnaval in San Miguel

-
-
-

San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

- – Map -
- - -
-
-
-

The weekend before Ash Wednesday is Carnival, marking (roughly) the beginning of Lent. Lent is an odd duck to me, but then all the various religions growing out of the Arabian deserts are odd ducks to me.

-

When faced with deprivation, followers go on a spree of excess, which is considered a sin, but then you can “repent” and all is magically forgiven.

-
- - - - paroqia, san miguel de allende, mexico photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - smirking virgin mary, mexico photographed by luxagraf - - - -
- -

On one hand I think this idea that you can do whatever you want and later be absolved is the source of most of what’s wrong with western culture. It’s the source of our environmental and social problems and I think in hindsight will be seen as the bit of philosophy that landed us in history’s dustbin way ahead of schedule.

-

On the other hand, who doesn’t love a big party in the streets?

-

Unfortunately, just as Candelaria fades the further you go north, Carnival seems to fade the further north you get from Brazil. Which isn’t to say Mexico doesn’t celebrate at all — by most accounts Mazatlan is the place to be for Carnival — but here in San Miguel de Allende it’s been reduced to día de los cascarones, or day of the confetti eggs.

-

It’s good fun for the kids anyway.

-

Cascarones are eggs that have been drained and filled with confetti. Or glitter or flour. They’re colorfully painted, cost less than 50 cents a dozen and exist primarily to smash on someone’s head. What’s not to love?

-
- - Dia de los Cascarones, san miguel de allende, mexico photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - Dia de los Cascarones, san miguel de allende, mexico photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - Dia de los Cascarones, san miguel de allende, mexico photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - Dia de los Cascarones, san miguel de allende, mexico photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - Dia de los Cascarones, san miguel de allende, mexico photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

Aside from a few vendors hawking giant crepe paper flowers, some glittery masks, and various hand-made puppets to tourists, the only other sign of anything happening in relation to Carnival was the indigenous dancers. One night I took the girls up to the Jardin to watch the drumming and dancing.

-
- - indigenous dancers, san miguel de allende, mexico photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

Most of the dancing groups we’ve seen quite a few times at this point, but there was one that was new to me who had drumming punctuated by machetes clanking like cymbals, by far my favorites from a musical point of view.

-
- - indigenous dancers, san miguel de allende, mexico photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

The dancers all wore white outfits with red fringing and large feather head dresses. They would dance in a circle and then at some point in the rhythm, form up into two lines of four or five people all facing each other. The footwork moved with the drums, but the hands then clanged the flat side of the machete blade against that of the partner opposite them. The line then shifted and everyone lined up with a different person and the melody and rhythm repeated. When they reached the end of the line they broke into a circle again.

-

-

The kids loved everything about día de los cascarones so much they dragged me back up the next morning to see if there was anything still happening. There wasn’t. No one’s kidding about the “día” part, but we did get to see the entire square in the Jardin covered in flour, evidence that the night before had gotten considerably messier after we headed home.

-
-
- - - -
-
- - -
- -
-
-
-
You might also enjoy
- -
-
- - - - - -

4 Comments

- - - - - - -
- -
- -
- Gwen - March 27, 2019 at 5:44 p.m. -
- -
- -

Fascinating to hear the audio of the machetes! While I see your point about excess and Lent and agree that many folks probably practice what you characterized here, I don’t think it’s the whole picture. While I have never practiced Lent, I do know sincere folks who give up something in order to focus more specifically on Christ’s sacrifice. They aren’t trying to receive a magical absolution. It’s more about sincere faith. At any rate, that’s my perspective…

- -
-
- -
- -
- Gwen macallister - March 27, 2019 at 6:56 p.m. -
- -
- -

Also, my kids would love the cascarones! Pure awesomeness.

- -
-
- -
- -
- Scott - March 27, 2019 at 10:05 p.m. -
- -
- -

Gwen-

-

I probably shouldn’t have printed that, I’m sure it offended quite a few of my Christian friends.

-

But since I did, might as well double down: I don’t have a problem with Lent especially, I have a problem with the whole notion of absolution.

-

It’s easy to look down on something when it doesn’t have meaning in your worldview, but it seems very easy to make last-minute absolution the gateway to a two-faced and insincere life and I am suspicious of it for that reason.

-

I think it’s how you get the pious mob boss killing all week, but in the front row of mass on Sunday, the racist belting out hymns and more broadly seems to have been picked up and reworked by materialists into the notion that something is going to save us from ourselves (technology, science, what have you depending on who’s talking).

-

I think it was Jack Forbes who wrote something to the effect of one cannot fool the spiritual world by uttering words that contradict what is in one’s heart, what one intends. And to understand yourself well enough to recognize your intentions for what they are, let alone change them to be what you desire them to be, takes a lot of work (more than I have done certainly).

-

Absolution seems to me to come along and say hey, why bother with intentions, you can be absolved of those no problem. And I think that’s a very dangerous line of logic within the religious context and even more so when it gets pulled outside of it.

-

All that said, I am always happy to be proved wrong.

- -
-
- -
- -
- Gwen - March 28, 2019 at 11:57 a.m. -
- -
- -

I appreciate your thoughtful response and hearing your perspective. I agree there is much hypocrisy among believers along with problematic theology. Romans 6 addresses this issue. (“Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!” Romans 6:15)

- -
-
- -
- - -
- -
-

Thoughts?

-

Please leave a reply:

-
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- -
-
- - - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
-
-

All comments are moderated, so you won’t see it right away. And please remember Kurt Vonnegut's rule: “god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” You can use Markdown or HTML to format your comments. The allowed tags are <b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <a>. To create a new paragraph hit return twice.

- - -
- -
- - - - -
- - - - - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/cascarones.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/cascarones.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 80933ae..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/cascarones.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,51 +0,0 @@ -Cascarones and Machete Dancing -============================== - - by Scott Gilbertson - - Sunday, 03 March 2019 - -The weekend before Ash Wednesday is Carnival, marking (roughly) the beginning of Lent. Lent is an odd duck to me, but then all the various religions growing out of the Arabian deserts are odd ducks to me. - -When faced with deprivation, followers go on a spree of excess, which is considered a sin, but then you can "repent" and all is magically forgiven. - -
- - - - -
- -On one hand I think this idea that you can do whatever you want and later be absolved is the source of most of what's wrong with western culture. It's the source of our environmental and social problems and I think in hindsight will be seen as the bit of philosophy that landed us in history's dustbin way ahead of schedule. - -On the other hand, who doesn't love a big party in the streets? - -Unfortunately, just as Candelaria fades the further you go north, Carnival seems to fade the further north you get from Brazil. Which isn't to say Mexico doesn't celebrate at all -- by most accounts Mazatlan is the place to be for Carnival -- but here in San Miguel de Allende it's been reduced to día de los cascarones, or day of the confetti eggs. - -It's good fun for the kids anyway. - -Cascarones are eggs that have been drained and filled with confetti. Or glitter or flour. They're colorfully painted, cost less than 50 cents a dozen and exist primarily to smash on someone's head. What's not to love? - - - - - - - -Aside from a few vendors hawking giant crepe paper flowers, some glittery masks, and various hand-made puppets to tourists, the only other sign of anything happening in relation to Carnival was the indigenous dancers. One night I took the girls up to the Jardin to watch the drumming and dancing. - - - -Most of the dancing groups we've seen quite a few times at this point, but there was one that was new to me who had drumming punctuated by machetes clanking like cymbals, by far my favorites from a musical point of view. - - - -The dancers all wore white outfits with red fringing and large feather head dresses. They would dance in a circle and then at some point in the rhythm, form up into two lines of four or five people all facing each other. The footwork moved with the drums, but the hands then clanged the flat side of the machete blade against that of the partner opposite them. The line then shifted and everyone lined up with a different person and the melody and rhythm repeated. When they reached the end of the line they broke into a circle again. - - - -The kids loved everything about día de los cascarones so much they dragged me back up the next morning to see if there was anything still happening. There wasn't. No one's kidding about the "día" part, but we did get to see the entire square in the Jardin covered in flour, evidence that the night before had gotten considerably messier after we headed home. diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/visa-run.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/visa-run.html deleted file mode 100644 index 0a6a353..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/visa-run.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,518 +0,0 @@ - - - - - Visa Run - by Scott Gilbertson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
-
- - -
-
- - - -
-
-
-

Visa Run

-

Checking in on the bus

-
-
-

Plano, Texas, U.S.

- – Map -
- - -
-
-
-

I’m not aware of another country with a tourist visa process that’s as simple and generous as what Mexico offers. You show up at the border, you get six months in the country. Cross over the border, come back, another six months. I’ve met people who have been doing this for years, which is silly really because getting a resident card is about as simple as it gets too.

-

We recently reached the end of our six month visa, and the end of bus storage situation, so we headed back to Dallas for a week to visit family and move the bus to a new storage location.

-

Our travel day started about 5 AM. It was a strangely foggy morning, the world muted and blurry at the edges. We walked a mile or so down to the bus station in San Miguel and caught a bus to Mexico City. The age of the chicken bus is long past in Mexico, or at least the necessity for it, these are smooth sleek buses far nicer than the plane we’d be on later in the day.

-
- - low clouds over the hills of guanajuato photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - bus ride to mexico city photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - bus ride to mexico city photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

We made it to Mexico City around noon and caught a cab across the city to the airport. We made an amateur mistake in not eating at the bus station and had to settle for some pretty awful airport food, but it passed the hours before our flight at least.

-
- -
- - Looking out the window of the plane over mexico city photographed by luxagraf -
Mexico City is unbelievable from the air, it goes on and on and on. What’s even more staggering is it’s not even the largest city in the world anymore.
-
- - - - - - On the plane flight to Dallas photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - - on the plane photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - On the plane to the US photographed by luxagraf - - - -
- -

The flight up from Mexico City had probably a dozen kids on it, more than any flight I’ve ever been on which made it kind of fun because kids love everything about flying. It was a laughing, shrieking, happy kind of flight. And it was funny to watch the handful of people without kids frowning in their seats about the raucousness of their fellow passengers.

-

-

At first I barely even noticed it. I’m so used to kids being allowed to be, well, kids that I didn’t even think about it. Mexico loves children. The only other place I’ve been that’s as kid-friendly is India. Yesterday I was running some errands around town with the girls. We stopped to buy tortillas and the woman working at the tortilla shop gave them each a fresh warm tortilla. We went to the carnitas shop and the man working there gave them each a napkinful of carnitas to eat while he packaged up our order. And then, walking home, two random strangers handed the girls some beautiful paper flowers because… Mexico loves children. It wasn’t until I got up and walked down the aisle to the bathroom that I noticed people, yes Americans, giving me dirty looks. Which was funny because our kids weren’t the ones making noise. Guilt by association I guess.

-

No one said anything though and we made it to Dallas, fourteen hours of travel later. It wasn’t as bad as that probably sounds.

-

Our kids were super excited to be back in Dallas, see their relatives and jump in the pool. No amount of warning would put them off the pool, it’s going to be cold we told them. Didn’t care. Until they got in the water. Then they cared.

-

To their credit though they did get in. The water was 62 degrees. Both girls swam across the pool a couple times on two different days. I used to surf in the ocean in those temps (without a wetsuit) all the time when I was younger, but I’ve gone soft. I didn’t even think about getting in.

-
- - Swimming in the pool, Dallas, TX photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - swimming pool, dallas texas photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

At one point the hot tub got turned on, which proved a much bigger hit. There was also the trampoline to jump around on and warm up.

-
- - bobcat, dallas texas photographed by luxagraf - -
Not a house cat.
-
- -

While we mostly played and worked, we did make a trip down to the bus to move it to its new temporary home. Everything was as we left it, she fired and drove without major protest, though the gas is clearly at the end of its lifespan, I may have to siphon some out when we get back again.

-

Up until the moment we climbed in I think we were all pretty happy in Mexico. And then we got in the bus. There was no one else around. We all sort of stood there looking at each other for a minute and then Corrinne said I miss our home.

-
- - The bus, dallas photographed by luxagraf - -
Moving to its new (temporary) home.
-
- -

The kids ran back to their room and grabbed the toys and books and clothes they’ve been missing. I surveyed the batteries, crack the doghouse and looked the engine over. And then… it fired it right up. The wire fell off the ignition coil after about a minute and it died, which temporarily freaked me out until I opened the doghouse again and immediately saw the problem.

-

After that I had no problems driving the bus and Volvo down to a nearby RV park where we’re storing them. It’s not ideal, but it’ll do for a few more months. We’ll give it lots of love when we get back later this year. Stay tuned.

-
- -
- - -
- -
-
-
-
You might also enjoy
- -
-
- - - - - -
- -
-

Thoughts?

-

Please leave a reply:

-
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- -
-
- - - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
-
-

All comments are moderated, so you won’t see it right away. And please remember Kurt Vonnegut's rule: “god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” You can use Markdown or HTML to format your comments. The allowed tags are <b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <a>. To create a new paragraph hit return twice.

- - -
- -
- - - - -
- - - - - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/visa-run.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/visa-run.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 50f18e9..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/03/visa-run.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,60 +0,0 @@ -Visa Run -======== - - by Scott Gilbertson - - Wednesday, 27 March 2019 - -I'm not aware of another country with a tourist visa process that's as simple and generous as what Mexico offers. You show up at the border, you get six months in the country. Cross over the border, come back, another six months. I've met people who have been doing this for years, which is silly really because getting a resident card is about as simple as it gets too. - -We recently reached the end of our six month visa, and the end of bus storage situation, so we headed back to Dallas for a week to visit family and move the bus to a new storage location. - -Our travel day started about 5 AM. It was a strangely foggy morning, the world muted and blurry at the edges. We walked a mile or so down to the bus station in San Miguel and caught a bus to Mexico City. The age of the chicken bus is long past in Mexico, or at least the necessity for it, these are smooth sleek buses far nicer than the plane we'd be on later in the day. - - - - - -We made it to Mexico City around noon and caught a cab across the city to the airport. We made an amateur mistake in not eating at the bus station and had to settle for some pretty awful airport food, but it passed the hours before our flight at least. - -
- - - - - - -
- -The flight up from Mexico City had probably a dozen kids on it, more than any flight I've ever been on which made it kind of fun because kids love everything about flying. It was a laughing, shrieking, happy kind of flight. And it was funny to watch the handful of people without kids frowning in their seats about the raucousness of their fellow passengers. - - - -At first I barely even noticed it. I'm so used to kids being allowed to be, well, kids that I didn't even think about it. Mexico loves children. The only other place I've been that's as kid-friendly is India. Yesterday I was running some errands around town with the girls. We stopped to buy tortillas and the woman working at the tortilla shop gave them each a fresh warm tortilla. We went to the carnitas shop and the man working there gave them each a napkinful of carnitas to eat while he packaged up our order. And then, walking home, two random strangers handed the girls some beautiful paper flowers because... Mexico loves children. It wasn't until I got up and walked down the aisle to the bathroom that I noticed people, yes Americans, giving me dirty looks. Which was funny because our kids weren't the ones making noise. Guilt by association I guess. - -No one said anything though and we made it to Dallas, fourteen hours of travel later. It wasn't as bad as that probably sounds. - -Our kids were super excited to be back in Dallas, see their relatives and jump in the pool. No amount of warning would put them off the pool, it's going to be cold we told them. Didn't care. Until they got in the water. Then they cared. - -To their credit though they did get in. The water was 62 degrees. Both girls swam across the pool a couple times on two different days. I used to surf in the ocean in those temps (without a wetsuit) all the time when I was younger, but I've gone soft. I didn't even think about getting in. - - - - -At one point the hot tub got turned on, which proved a much bigger hit. There was also the trampoline to jump around on and warm up. - - - -While we mostly played and worked, we did make a trip down to the bus to move it to its new temporary home. Everything was as we left it, she fired and drove without major protest, though the gas is clearly at the end of its lifespan, I may have to siphon some out when we get back again. - -Up until the moment we climbed in I think we were all pretty happy in Mexico. And then we got in the bus. There was no one else around. We all sort of stood there looking at each other for a minute and then Corrinne said I miss our home. - - - -The kids ran back to their room and grabbed the toys and books and clothes they've been missing. I surveyed the batteries, crack the doghouse and looked the engine over. And then... it fired it right up. The wire fell off the ignition coil after about a minute and it died, which temporarily freaked me out until I opened the doghouse again and immediately saw the problem. - -After that I had no problems driving the bus and Volvo down to a nearby RV park where we're storing them. It's not ideal, but it'll do for a few more months. We'll give it lots of love when we get back later this year. Stay tuned. diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/horses.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/horses.html deleted file mode 100644 index 8cebcc5..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/horses.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,531 +0,0 @@ - - - - - Horses - by Scott Gilbertson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
-
- - -
-
- - - -
-
-
-

Horses

-

Riding on the ranchero

-
-
-

Around San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

- – Map -
- - -
-
-
-

The girls have been asking to go horseback riding for quite a while now. Well before we came to Mexico. But in San Miguel horses come and go on a daily basis, which brought things to a sort of fever pitch.

-

While finding a horse in San Miguel is easy, finding one to ride is more challenging. There’s plenty of tourist outfits in town that do horseback rides just like the ATV ride I did, but none of them have much in the way of kid-friendly riding options. After a few months of stalling, a lot of hemming and hawing on my part, Corrinne’s parents’ friend, who owns a ranch outside of town, heard about our kids and invited them out to go riding.

-

That’s how we ended up in the campo with the girls riding horses for the first time. Elliott was not interested.

-
- - Riding horses on ranch outside of San Miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - Riding horses on ranch outside of San Miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - Riding horses on ranch outside of San Miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

The ranch hands brought out some wonderfully gentle horses that seemed content to walk in circles in exchange for the occasional carrot.

-

While Olivia’s horse was completely sedate with a rider on her back, she had a whole smiley routine she pulled out in the stable to get attention and more carrots. It worked very well on us. Who knew horses could smile?

-
- - Horse sticking head out of stall on ranch outside of San Miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - horse leaning out of stall, ranch outside of San Miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - Riding horses on ranch outside of San Miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

I didn’t do any riding, but I did make a friend.

-
- - Dog on ranch outside of San Miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

The campo is a world apart from the life we know in San Miguel. It’s been hot lately in the city, but when you get out of the concrete canyons of the city streets there’s a nice steady breeze that blows through and keeps things cool, if a little dusty. Life out here has a different rhythm, a different pace. Sitting on the bus back into town I couldn’t help thinking that I really need to get out and see more of Mexico, less of the city.

-
- -
- - -
- -
-
-
-
You might also enjoy
- -
-
- - - - - -

2 Comments

- - - - - - -
- -
- -
- DREW - July 31, 2019 at 2:34 p.m. -
- -
- -

I love the girls riding boots!

-

Admittedly I have not spent a lot of time around horses… But, that being said I every time I am, and even from your pictures you can feel that human connection. There eyes are so deep and mysterious and “knowing” it can be very calming just to be in a barn with them.

-

Im glad the girls got to experience that!

- -
-
- -
- -
- Scott - July 31, 2019 at 3:16 p.m. -
- -
- -

Drew-

-

I’ve always loved horses, but I’ve always been unsure if the feeling was mutual. Those big dark eyes, so hard to decipher…

- -
-
- -
- - -
- -
-

Thoughts?

-

Please leave a reply:

-
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- -
-
- - - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
-
-

All comments are moderated, so you won’t see it right away. And please remember Kurt Vonnegut's rule: “god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” You can use Markdown or HTML to format your comments. The allowed tags are <b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <a>. To create a new paragraph hit return twice.

- - -
- -
- - - - -
- - - - - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/horses.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/horses.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 349ad90..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/horses.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,31 +0,0 @@ -Horses -====== - - by Scott Gilbertson - - Tuesday, 30 April 2019 - -The girls have been asking to go horseback riding for quite a while now. Well before we came to Mexico. But in San Miguel horses come and go on a daily basis, which brought things to a sort of fever pitch. - -While finding a horse in San Miguel is easy, finding one to ride is more challenging. There's plenty of tourist outfits in town that do horseback rides just like [the ATV ride I did](/jrnl/2018/11/lets-go-ride), but none of them have much in the way of kid-friendly riding options. After a few months of stalling, a lot of hemming and hawing on my part, Corrinne's parents' friend, who owns a ranch outside of town, heard about our kids and invited them out to go riding. - -That's how we ended up in the campo with the girls riding horses for the first time. Elliott was not interested. - - - - - - -The ranch hands brought out some wonderfully gentle horses that seemed content to walk in circles in exchange for the occasional carrot. - -While Olivia's horse was completely sedate with a rider on her back, she had a whole smiley routine she pulled out in the stable to get attention and more carrots. It worked very well on us. Who knew horses could smile? - - - - - -I didn't do any riding, but I did make a friend. - - - -The campo is a world apart from the life we know in San Miguel. It's been hot lately in the city, but when you get out of the concrete canyons of the city streets there's a nice steady breeze that blows through and keeps things cool, if a little dusty. Life out here has a different rhythm, a different pace. Sitting on the bus back into town I couldn't help thinking that I really need to get out and see more of Mexico, less of the city. diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/koyaanisqatsi.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/koyaanisqatsi.html deleted file mode 100644 index b355ce4..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/koyaanisqatsi.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,620 +0,0 @@ - - - - - Koyaanisqatsi - by Scott Gilbertson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
-
- - -
-
- - - -
-
-
-

Koyaanisqatsi

-

Dancing shadows and mesquite trees

-
-
-

Around San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

- – Map -
- - -
-
-
-

A twenty minute cab ride north of San Miguel, on the road to Atotonilco, there’s a stand of towering mesquite trees set back up against several plowed fields. Sprawled out under the mesquite like an old hacienda is a restaurant that’s at least partly aimed at kids. One of the huge mesquites plays host to a towering tree house and there’s plenty of open space to let the kids roam.

-
- - - treehouse, mama mia campestre, near san miguel de allende photographed by luxagraf - - - - - -
- - Ribs at Mama Mia Campestre, San Miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf -
Some come for the playing, some for the ribs.
-
- - - - - - tree house at mama mia campestre, near san miguel de allende photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - - mama mia campestre, near san miguel de allende photographed by luxagraf - - -
- -

Prior to coming down here I thought of mesquite trees as smallish shrubs that occasionally, with the right blend of soil, water and light, sometimes make it to tree status. In the United States that’s a fair characterization. Our mesquite are not big trees. Here they soar like oaks.

-

I don’t know if perhaps the trees here are a different species or if they just like it better down south. Whatever the case, the mesquite down here can grow into huge canopies of green that can shade you from even the intensity of the midday Mexican sun

-

The midday Mexican sun has become more intense lately. The dry season stretches its legs and lays down across the land, pulling a blanket of dusty haze over it. I don’t know where it comes from, I don’t even know what it is, perhaps it’s the wind out on the plains kicking up dust. Perhaps it’s smog drifting up from Mexico City. Perhaps its the endless construction in town. Whatever the case it’s bad enough to burn the eyes and lungs some days and anything we leave outside soon has a thin coat of dust on it.

-

Between the dust, the sun, and work I’ve been spending more time around the house, indoors even, than I have in years. I don’t like it. We get by, we have fun. Elliott and I try to get outside on the roof in the afternoons.

-
- - Eating guava on the roof, san miguel de allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - Blowing bubbles on the roof, san miguel de allende photographed by luxagraf - -
Some times you get a haircut between photos.
-
- -
- - playing in the house, san miguel de allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

Still, there have been days where I’ve felt like I was living in some taco-filled version of Plato’s cave, watching the shadows on the walls all day. I go up to the roof sometimes after the kids are in bed and try to feel like I’m getting out into the light, but it’s usually just leaving.

-
- - Sunset over San Miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

I want open space, clear air, room to roam, a horizon to stare at, silence to listen in, rain to fall, but it never does, there will be no rain for at least another month, possibly more.

-

Corrinne and the kids get out more than I do thankfully. I get to look at the pictures, just like you. One day they went to the toy museum in town.

-
- - toy museum, san miguel de allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - toy museum, san miguel de allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - toy museum, san miguel de allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - toy museum, san miguel de allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

It looked like fun, but what I enjoyed far more than I would have enjoyed the musem was seeing the kids come home and start making their own toys out of whatever we had lying around. One evening I walked down to the tienda and bought them corn husks which they used to build not just corn husk dolls but whole families with houses, canoes, tikinagans, birchbark houses, and more.

-
- - homemade toys photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

Like all children, they’re much better than us adults at playing enthusiastically with what the world has given them, regardless of what that may be.

-
- -
- - -
- -
-
-
-
You might also enjoy
- -
-
- - - - - -

4 Comments

- - - - - - -
- -
- -
- Gwen - May 07, 2019 at 8:25 p.m. -
- -
- -

What does the title of this post mean? Love the kids’ corn husk creations. And what a beautiful sentence— “The dry season stretches its legs…”

- -
-
- -
- -
- Scott - May 09, 2019 at 10:47 a.m. -
- -
- -

Gwen-

-

Thanks for the kinds words, glad you liked the post.

-

As for the name, let me first say I deeply suspicious of English translations of words or ideas for which there is probably no equivalent, e.g. Schadenfreude, of which koyaanisqatsi is very likely a great example. That said, it’s a Hopi word that means roughly, unbalanced or life out of balance. I, and most other non-Hopi speakers, know it because the movie by that name. While it’s not for everyone, I still love that movie and highly recommend it to anyone, though I suggest first researching it a little bit so you know what you’re in for, it’s not a movie the way most of us think of them.

- -
-
- -
- -
- DB - May 09, 2019 at 11:54 a.m. -
- -
- -

One of the rare times I go into Facebook and scroll my own posts to find this gem as a morning interlude.

- -Are you back yet? -Is the band back together? - -

You know my number.

-

D

-

BTW: I don’t think the markdown is working properly

- -
-
- -
- -
- Scott - May 09, 2019 at 12:05 p.m. -
- -
- -

DB-

-

Thanks for stopping by, glad you liked this one.

-

We are back. In Dallas area right now. I might even have a phone number again soon. I’ll call you soon.

-

Not getting any bands back together though :)

-

What happened with the markdown by the way? As far as I know it works, but beyond paragraph tags, I don’t really use it.

- -
-
- -
- - -
- -
-

Thoughts?

-

Please leave a reply:

-
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- -
-
- - - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
-
-

All comments are moderated, so you won’t see it right away. And please remember Kurt Vonnegut's rule: “god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” You can use Markdown or HTML to format your comments. The allowed tags are <b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <a>. To create a new paragraph hit return twice.

- - -
- -
- - - - -
- - - - - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/koyaanisqatsi.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/koyaanisqatsi.txt deleted file mode 100644 index fb38f3b..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/koyaanisqatsi.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,48 +0,0 @@ -Koyaanisqatsi -============= - - by Scott Gilbertson - - Sunday, 07 April 2019 - -A twenty minute cab ride north of San Miguel, on the road to Atotonilco, there's a stand of towering mesquite trees set back up against several plowed fields. Sprawled out under the mesquite like an old hacienda is a restaurant that's at least partly aimed at kids. One of the huge mesquites plays host to a towering tree house and there's plenty of open space to let the kids roam. - -
- - - - - - -
- -Prior to coming down here I thought of mesquite trees as smallish shrubs that occasionally, with the right blend of soil, water and light, sometimes make it to tree status. In the United States that's a fair characterization. Our mesquite are not big trees. Here they soar like oaks. - -I don't know if perhaps the trees here are a different species or if they just like it better down south. Whatever the case, the mesquite down here can grow into huge canopies of green that can shade you from even the intensity of the midday Mexican sun - -The midday Mexican sun has become more intense lately. The dry season stretches its legs and lays down across the land, pulling a blanket of dusty haze over it. I don't know where it comes from, I don't even know what it is, perhaps it's the wind out on the plains kicking up dust. Perhaps it's smog drifting up from Mexico City. Perhaps its the endless construction in town. Whatever the case it's bad enough to burn the eyes and lungs some days and anything we leave outside soon has a thin coat of dust on it. - -Between the dust, the sun, and work I've been spending more time around the house, indoors even, than I have in years. I don't like it. We get by, we have fun. Elliott and I try to get outside on the roof in the afternoons. - - - - - -Still, there have been days where I've felt like I was living in some taco-filled version of Plato's cave, watching the shadows on the walls all day. I go up to the roof sometimes after the kids are in bed and try to feel like I'm getting out into the light, but it's usually just leaving. - - - -I want open space, clear air, room to roam, a horizon to stare at, silence to listen in, rain to fall, but it never does, there will be no rain for at least another month, possibly more. - -Corrinne and the kids get out more than I do thankfully. I get to look at the pictures, just like you. One day they went to the toy museum in town. - - - - - - -It looked like fun, but what I enjoyed far more than I would have enjoyed the musem was seeing the kids come home and start making their own toys out of whatever we had lying around. One evening I walked down to the tienda and bought them corn husks which they used to build not just corn husk dolls but whole families with houses, canoes, tikinagans, birchbark houses, and more. - - - -Like all children, they're much better than us adults at playing enthusiastically with what the world has given them, regardless of what that may be. diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/semana-santa.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/semana-santa.html deleted file mode 100644 index 577f6a9..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/semana-santa.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,551 +0,0 @@ - - - - - Semana Santa - by Scott Gilbertson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
-
- - -
-
- - - -
-
-
-

Semana Santa

-

Paletas, fireworks, and papier mâché Judases

-
-
-

San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

- – Map -
- - -
-
-
-

Semana Santa, holy week, is the roughly two week period leading up to and just after Easter. If you want to pin it down more than that you’re not Mexican. There is no pinning down time here. That’s one of the things you should leave at home if you ever come. Here time is vast and endless you must make yourself at home in it.

-

The first of the public events was around Palm Sunday, which the locals celebrate with plenty of decorations and paletas, which get handed out to just about anyone who will take one. The paletas, melting in a increasingly intense dry season sun, represent the tears of Mary mixed with, um, fruit. The kids loved it anyway.

-
- - - palm fronds on the street, palm sunday, san miguel de allende photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - - Popsicle, palm sunday, san miguel de allende photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - Popsicle, palm sunday, san miguel de allende photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - - procession, palm sunday, san miguel de allende photographed by luxagraf - - -
- -

San Miguel has its own little special little tradition on Good Friday, which involves papier mâché figures called Judases. They are not, however, limited to figures of Judas. Everything is Mexico is layered and goes far below what things appear to be, so I won’t pretend to know who the figures represented, but local political figures and other controversial people are common targets.

-

The puppets get wrapped in firecrackers with one big one inside. They’re strung up on a horizontal line and lit up. The fireworks cause the figures to spin for a bit and bam, the big one blows them apart. And it really blows them apart. Even for here this was a substantial blast that hurt your ears if you were at all close.

-
- - - - palm sunday, san miguel de allende photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - palm sunday, san miguel de allende photographed by luxagraf - - - -
- -

Domingo de Pascua as Easter Sunday is known around here, doesn’t have any of the non-religious associations it does in the states. I didn’t see any Easter Bunny or chocolate eggs. It’s a day people go to Mass and celebrate with their families. We dyed some eggs anyway.

-
- - Dieing homemade easter eggs, semama santa photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - colored eggs, semama santa photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - hunting for eggs, semama santa photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - hunting for eggs, semama santa photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

We also found some good pork belly tacos for lunch. I’ve never understood it, but something about travel causes you to find more and more things you like the closer and closer you get to leaving a place.

-
- - sisters hugging, lunch, semana santa photographed by luxagraf - -
-
-
- - - -
-
- - -
- -
-
-
-
You might also enjoy
- -
-
- - - - - -
- -
-

Thoughts?

-

Please leave a reply:

-
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- -
-
- - - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
-
-

All comments are moderated, so you won’t see it right away. And please remember Kurt Vonnegut's rule: “god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” You can use Markdown or HTML to format your comments. The allowed tags are <b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <a>. To create a new paragraph hit return twice.

- - -
- -
- - - - -
- - - - - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/semana-santa.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/semana-santa.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 065680d..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/04/semana-santa.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,41 +0,0 @@ -Semana Santa -============ - - by Scott Gilbertson - - Monday, 22 April 2019 - -Semana Santa, holy week, is the roughly two week period leading up to and just after Easter. If you want to pin it down more than that you're not Mexican. There is no pinning down time here. That's one of the things you should leave at home if you ever come. Here time is vast and endless you must make yourself at home in it. - -The first of the public events was around Palm Sunday, which the locals celebrate with plenty of decorations and paletas, which get handed out to just about anyone who will take one. The paletas, melting in a increasingly intense dry season sun, represent the tears of Mary mixed with, um, fruit. The kids loved it anyway. - -
- - - - - - -
- -San Miguel has its own little special little tradition on Good Friday, which involves papier mâché figures called Judases. They are not, however, limited to figures of Judas. Everything is Mexico is layered and goes far below what things appear to be, so I won't pretend to know who the figures represented, but local political figures and other controversial people are common targets. - -The puppets get wrapped in firecrackers with one big one inside. They're strung up on a horizontal line and lit up. The fireworks cause the figures to spin for a bit and bam, the big one blows them apart. And it really blows them apart. Even for here this was a substantial blast that hurt your ears if you were at all close. - -
- - - - -
- -Domingo de Pascua as Easter Sunday is known around here, doesn't have any of the non-religious associations it does in the states. I didn't see any Easter Bunny or chocolate eggs. It's a day people go to Mass and celebrate with their families. We dyed some eggs anyway. - - - - - - -We also found some good pork belly tacos for lunch. I've never understood it, but something about travel causes you to find more and more things you like the closer and closer you get to leaving a place. - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/06/hasta-luego.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/06/hasta-luego.html deleted file mode 100644 index 0ebf0e9..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/06/hasta-luego.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,596 +0,0 @@ - - - - - Hasta Luego - by Scott Gilbertson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
-
- - -
-
- - - -
-
-
-

Hasta Luego

-

Heading back to the United States

-
-
-

Plano, Texas, U.S.

- – Map -
- - -
-
-
-

We came to Mexico with a pretty simple plan — hang out, visit family, live cheap, save money, get some projects done. It is hard, traveling and working for someone else, to carve out time for your own work and I had some work I needed to get done.

-

But sawdust in a hurricane has more permanence than our plans, so nothing we planned to do ended up happening. That’s how these things go. You adjust, tack as it were, and keep sailing. We loved our time in Mexico even if it didn’t turn out at all like we planned.

-
- - San miguel graffiti photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - Church, San miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - Streets of San miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

After I was laid off I went back to doing what I’ve always done, drumming up clients and writing things that made them happy. In my search for new clients I noticed my old friends at WIRED were looking for a full-time writer to do roughly what I’ve done for them on a freelance basis for years.

-

I applied. I talked to the editors. Some months passed. I talked to more editors. Then all at once I had a job and was hurriedly booking plane tickets back to the United States. While the job is remote, it involves products, shipping physical things to me. If you know anything about customs, you know that’s not something that’s going to work abroad.

-

We love Mexico, we’ll miss the people, our friends, our family, but this feels like the right thing to do, at the right time too.

-

The longer, more in-depth projects I’d like to tackle are still there. As I’ve discovered in last eight months, they’re projects that are hard to do without the stability of a regular paycheck. As a freelance writer you are either hustling all the time or starving. I dislike starving. A job with a steady paycheck eliminates the need to spend every free minute hustling up more work. It helps draw a line between work and play, giving you the time and mental space you need to tackle other things in your free time.

-
- - Las Cuat, San Miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - Streets of San miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

The last few days in town our friend Mike from San Francisco and a friend of his stayed with us. We showed them around as best we could while trying to pack up. It was good to get out and walk around town, show other people this wonderful little world we found down here. It also gave us an excuse to get out and visit our favorite haunts for the last time now, which always makes you see them differently.

-

Then before we really knew it we were stumbling up the street half asleep in pajamas in Elliott’s case, catching a cab to the bus station to catch our pre-dawn ride to Mexico city.

-
- - bus ride to mexico city photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - Yellow green dawn, road to Mexico City photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - Yellow green dawn, road to Mexico City photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

After scarfing a few tacos in the bus station and catching a cab over to the airport, we whisked through security and found ourselves climbing out of the smog, back to the United States.

-
- - Benito Juarez aeropuerto photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - Between the seats photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - on the wing out of mexico city photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

There are plenty more stories to tell, and I do plan to get caught up eventually. Until then.

-
- -
- - -
- -
-
-
-
You might also enjoy
- -
-
- - - - - -

4 Comments

- - - - - - -
- -
- -
- Mark Rabo - September 02, 2019 at 12:44 a.m. -
- -
- -

Hey Scott, Mark here (we originally talked when I found your site when reaching out to writers for work). Glad to see you’re posting through the mailing list. Your life is interesting and not easy to live but also seems meaningful to you and your family. Its great stories and I hope to see more in the future. Photos are excellent too. All the best.

- -
-
- -
- -
- Scott - September 02, 2019 at 10:19 a.m. -
- -
- -

Mark-

-

Thanks for stopping by.

-

I figured I did build the mailing list, might as well use it even if I’ve never gotten my act together to advertise it. I’m going to be using more going forward.

-

Anyway, glad you like this one. I’ve got a backlog of stories I’m trying to work my way though. Sometimes it’s hard to live and find time to write about living. In the grand scheme of things though, I think it’s a good problem to have.

- -
-
- -
- -
- Jake - September 04, 2019 at 2:26 a.m. -
- -
- -

It was good to read an update, It’d been awhile. Happy to have you back in the States!

-

Interesting point, “It helps draw a line between work and play, giving you the time and mental space you need to tackle other things in your free time”. I’m actually trying to do the exact opposite, finally blur the line between work and play. I guess the grass is always greener.

- -
-
- -
- -
- Scott - September 05, 2019 at 8:07 a.m. -
- -
- -

Jake-

-

Thanks for the welcome! I will get caught up eventually.

-

It’s an interesting thing, that work/play. I have not enjoyed blurring the line between work and play as much as I thought I would when I set out to do it. I find attention a difficult thing to divide, especially with regard to very mental work like writing. If I’m thinking about writing something for luxagraf, though I find that an enjoyable thing to give attention to, it takes attention away from, say, playing with the kids around the campsite.

-

As I’ve gotten older I find that like those hard edges between the things I’m giving attention too, setting aside one before moving on to the next. Maybe I’m getting dumber, less able to concentrate, or something, but I find I like clear divisions. I also find I’m better at writing and being a parent when I have those edge clearly defined to myself. I like it enough that these days I get up early and try to have “work” done by early afternoon and then I have the rest of the day to “play”.

-

I actually have a whole essay on this, about traveling while working, or working while traveling. I could dig that up and publish it.

-

Anyway, thanks for stopping by.

- -
-
- -
- - -
- -
-

Thoughts?

-

Please leave a reply:

-
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- -
-
- - - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
-
-

All comments are moderated, so you won’t see it right away. And please remember Kurt Vonnegut's rule: “god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” You can use Markdown or HTML to format your comments. The allowed tags are <b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <a>. To create a new paragraph hit return twice.

- - -
- -
- - - - -
- - - - - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/06/hasta-luego.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/06/hasta-luego.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 71d3b10..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/06/hasta-luego.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,42 +0,0 @@ -Hasta Luego -=========== - - by Scott Gilbertson - - Monday, 03 June 2019 - -We came to Mexico with a pretty simple plan -- hang out, visit family, live cheap, save money, get some projects done. It is hard, traveling and working for someone else, to carve out time for your own work and I had some work I needed to get done. - -But sawdust in a hurricane has more permanence than our plans, so nothing we planned to do ended up happening. That's how these things go. You adjust, tack as it were, and keep sailing. We loved our time in Mexico even if it didn't turn out at all like we planned. - - - - - -After I was laid off I went back to doing what I've always done, drumming up clients and writing things that made them happy. In my search for new clients I noticed my old friends at WIRED were looking for a full-time writer to do roughly what I've done for them on a freelance basis for years. - -I applied. I talked to the editors. Some months passed. I talked to more editors. Then all at once I had a job and was hurriedly booking plane tickets back to the United States. While the job is remote, it involves products, shipping physical things to me. If you know anything about customs, you know that's not something that's going to work abroad. - -We love Mexico, we'll miss the people, our friends, our family, but this feels like the right thing to do, at the right time too. - -The longer, more in-depth projects I'd like to tackle are still there. As I've discovered in last eight months, they're projects that are hard to do without the stability of a regular paycheck. As a freelance writer you are either hustling all the time or starving. I dislike starving. A job with a steady paycheck eliminates the need to spend every free minute hustling up more work. It helps draw a line between work and play, giving you the time and mental space you need to tackle other things in your free time. - - - - -The last few days in town our friend Mike from San Francisco and a friend of his stayed with us. We showed them around as best we could while trying to pack up. It was good to get out and walk around town, show other people this wonderful little world we found down here. It also gave us an excuse to get out and visit our favorite haunts for the last time now, which always makes you see them differently. - -Then before we really knew it we were stumbling up the street half asleep in pajamas in Elliott's case, catching a cab to the bus station to catch our pre-dawn ride to Mexico city. - - - - - - -After scarfing a few tacos in the bus station and catching a cab over to the airport, we whisked through security and found ourselves climbing out of the smog, back to the United States. - - - - - -There are plenty more stories to tell, and I do plan to get caught up eventually. Until then. diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/07/seven.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/07/seven.html deleted file mode 100644 index 3aefbf9..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/07/seven.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,511 +0,0 @@ - - - - - Seven - by Scott Gilbertson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
-
- - -
-
- - - -
-
-
-

Seven

-

Happy Birthday Girls!

-
-
-

Tool, Texas, U.S.

- – Map -
- - -
-
-
-

This year we spent the girls’ birthday in Texas. Stuck in the middle as it were. We made the best of it. I drove to the nearest Mexican market and got a piñata. We found some papel picado at the bottom of a bag. We bought way too many balloons. As you do.

-

We made do with what we had, a skill you learn well living on the road. And we had a pool, a lake, and family in town. Everything you need for a good birthday. And some chocolate waffle cake. Of course. We’ll always find a way to make chocolate waffle cake.

-
- - None photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

As per usual we were up at early dark thirty for the girls’ seventh birthday. I’ve embraced the early rising. I’m usually up before the kids. Not on their birthday though. No one beats a kid out of bed on their birthday, not even the one trying to pile balloons on them before they wake up.

-
- - Birthday morning photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - Birthday morning presents photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - Birthday morning new books photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - Birthday morning, new watercolor sets photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

After presents and breakfast we strung up a piñata and took turns pounding on it with a stick. I can’t recall who finally broke it, one of the birthday girls, but it was a sturdy piñata, made in Mexico. More impressively, despite never playing or even watching any baseball, the kids can hit. Some things come naturally, especially things useful in the pursuit of hidden candy.

-
- - piñata swinging photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - girl swinging a stick at piñata photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - birthday pinata photographed by luxagraf - -
-
-
- - - -
-
- - -
- -
-
-
-
You might also enjoy
- -
-
- - - - - -
- -
-

Thoughts?

-

Please leave a reply:

-
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- -
-
- - - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
-
-

All comments are moderated, so you won’t see it right away. And please remember Kurt Vonnegut's rule: “god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” You can use Markdown or HTML to format your comments. The allowed tags are <b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <a>. To create a new paragraph hit return twice.

- - -
- -
- - - - -
- - - - - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/07/seven.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/07/seven.txt deleted file mode 100644 index e3733d1..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/07/seven.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,25 +0,0 @@ -Seven -===== - - by Scott Gilbertson - - Saturday, 13 July 2019 - -This year we spent the girls' birthday in Texas. Stuck in the middle as it were. We made the best of it. I drove to the nearest Mexican market and got a piñata. We found some papel picado at the bottom of a bag. We bought way too many balloons. As you do. - -We made do with what we had, a skill you learn well living on the road. And we had a pool, a lake, and family in town. Everything you need for a good birthday. And some [chocolate waffle cake](/essays/waffle-world). Of course. We'll always find a way to make chocolate waffle cake. - - - -As per usual we were up at early dark thirty for the girls' seventh birthday. I've embraced the early rising. I'm usually up before the kids. Not on their birthday though. No one beats a kid out of bed on their birthday, not even the one trying to pile balloons on them before they wake up. - - - - - - -After presents and breakfast we strung up a piñata and took turns pounding on it with a stick. I can't recall who finally broke it, one of the birthday girls, but it was a sturdy piñata, made in Mexico. More impressively, despite never playing or even watching any baseball, the kids can hit. Some things come naturally, especially things useful in the pursuit of hidden candy. - - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/07/summertime-rolls.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/07/summertime-rolls.html deleted file mode 100644 index b61ae14..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/07/summertime-rolls.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,558 +0,0 @@ - - - - - Summertime Rolls - by Scott Gilbertson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
-
- - -
-
- - - -
-
-
-

Summertime Rolls

-

Stuck in Texas, Again

-
-
-

Tool, Texas, U.S.

- – Map -
- - -
-
-
-

We flew back to states thinking we’d booked a house in Athens, GA. That ended up falling through at the last minute, which left us homeless. Not a new thing for us, but a hassle when you’re trying to start a new job. We decided to head down to where the bus was stored to see where things stood.

-

We knew we had to stay in one place for a while and unfortunately we didn’t have time to move. Between the summer heat, working, and a cracked exhaust manifold, there was no time to go anywhere.

-

We decided, against our better judgment, to hunker down in Texas and wait out the summer. We’d get our exhaust manifold, knock out a few other bus projects we’d been wanting to do, and then, once the weather caught up with us and things cooled off, we’d head west and spend the autumn and winter out west in the Arizona desert.

-
- - homemade aligator photographed by luxagraf - -
Alligator sculpture.
-
- -
- - marker on face photographed by luxagraf - -
Temporary tattoos.
-
- -
- - sign for country dancing photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

The challenging part of this plan was the middle, the wait out summer in Texas part. As regular readers know, I do not like Texas. I try not to complain too much because we have a pretty great life, but given a choice between Texas and anywhere else and I’d go with anywhere else. Yes, even California. Still, it was the best plan we could come up with and I thought we could do it.

-

There were a couple things going for us. The RV park where we were staying had a nice big oak tree we could park under and a swimming pool to cool off in. Even better, just down the road some extended family have a lake house where the kids could swim, ride jet skis and generally have fun and stay cool.

-

Those things, the pool and the lake house were the highlights of the summer. The girls learned to swim and got to go inner tubing, ride jet skis, and spend their days in the water. If you’re stuck in Texas, this is the way to do it.

-
- - swimming in Texas photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - swimming in Texas photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - swimming in Texas photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - swimming in Texas photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - swimming in Texas photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - swimming cedar creek reservoir photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - swimming cedar creek reservoir photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

It’s funny how oblivious children are to the problems of adults. Not all problems, but some. Corrinne and I were frustrated being stuck in Texas. We tried to make the best of it, but I’ll be honest, we didn’t always. But the kids didn’t care at all. They loved it. They had a pool to go to every day, a playground to run around on, a lake house to visit at least twice a month. Jet ski rides, boat rides, inner tubing. When I look at from their perspective it feels like we had everything we could possibly want. They didn’t care where they were.

-

Early on, before the heat became insufferable, we went out and explored the area. There was a big flea market once a month in nearby Canton, Texas that was fun to explore.

-
- - hot dog stand, canton, tx photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

I was struck by the fact that we could stroll around a huge flea market for a couple of hours and the only thing we bought were some small bamboo flutes for the kids and snow cones.

-

Living in a small space really does curb your consumer tendencies. Everything we even consider buying has justify itself: where would we put it? More importantly, is it worth the space it takes up? The answer, after a bit of reflection, is almost always no. At this point we don’t even really have to think about it. We have what we need, adding more would create clutter.

-
- - eating snowcones, texas photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - eating snowcones, texas photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - eating snowcones, texas photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

What’s nice about this way of living is that it eliminates purchasing stuff as a form of entertainment. That leaves us free to be entertained by just wandering, watching the world around us. We’ve always done this to some degree, but I think our time in Mexico really brought this out. There’s so much to see just walking around in Mexico that it became a habit. When there’s nothing to do you walk up to the Parroquia, sit in the shade, have a snack, and watch the world around you.

-

That was early on though. As the heat increased and the utter lack of anything to do overwhelmed me, I got considerably less zen about being stuck in Texas. Still, I’m old fashioned. If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything.

-
-
- - - -
-
- - -
- -
-
-
-
You might also enjoy
- -
-
- - - - - -
- -
-

Thoughts?

-

Please leave a reply:

-
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- -
-
- - - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
-
-

All comments are moderated, so you won’t see it right away. And please remember Kurt Vonnegut's rule: “god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” You can use Markdown or HTML to format your comments. The allowed tags are <b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <a>. To create a new paragraph hit return twice.

- - -
- -
- - - - -
- - - - - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/07/summertime-rolls.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/07/summertime-rolls.txt deleted file mode 100644 index f47f019..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/07/summertime-rolls.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,48 +0,0 @@ -Summertime Rolls -================ - - by Scott Gilbertson - - Sunday, 28 July 2019 - -We flew back to states thinking we'd booked a house in Athens, GA. That ended up falling through at the last minute, which left us homeless. Not a new thing for us, but a hassle when you're trying to start a new job. We decided to head down to where the bus was stored to see where things stood. - -We knew we had to stay in one place for a while and unfortunately we didn't have time to move. Between the summer heat, working, and a cracked exhaust manifold, there was no time to go anywhere. - -We decided, against our better judgment, to hunker down in Texas and wait out the summer. We'd get our exhaust manifold, knock out a few other bus projects we'd been wanting to do, and then, once the weather caught up with us and things cooled off, we'd head west and spend the autumn and winter out west in the Arizona desert. - - - - - -The challenging part of this plan was the middle, the wait out summer in Texas part. As regular readers know, I do not like Texas. I try not to complain too much because we have a pretty great life, but given a choice between Texas and anywhere else and I'd go with anywhere else. Yes, even California. Still, it was the best plan we could come up with and I thought we could do it. - -There were a couple things going for us. The RV park where we were staying had a nice big oak tree we could park under and a swimming pool to cool off in. Even better, just down the road some extended family have a lake house where the kids could swim, ride jet skis and generally have fun and stay cool. - -Those things, the pool and the lake house were the highlights of the summer. The girls learned to swim and got to go inner tubing, ride jet skis, and spend their days in the water. If you're stuck in Texas, this is the way to do it. - - - - - - - - - -It's funny how oblivious children are to the problems of adults. Not all problems, but some. Corrinne and I were frustrated being stuck in Texas. We tried to make the best of it, but I'll be honest, we didn't always. But the kids didn't care at all. They loved it. They had a pool to go to every day, a playground to run around on, a lake house to visit at least twice a month. Jet ski rides, boat rides, inner tubing. When I look at from their perspective it feels like we had everything we could possibly want. They didn't care where they were. - -Early on, before the heat became insufferable, we went out and explored the area. There was a big flea market once a month in nearby Canton, Texas that was fun to explore. - - - -I was struck by the fact that we could stroll around a huge flea market for a couple of hours and the only thing we bought were some small bamboo flutes for the kids and snow cones. - -Living in a small space really does curb your consumer tendencies. Everything we even consider buying has justify itself: where would we put it? More importantly, is it worth the space it takes up? The answer, after a bit of reflection, is almost always no. At this point we don't even really have to think about it. We have what we need, adding more would create clutter. - - - - - -What's nice about this way of living is that it eliminates purchasing stuff as a form of entertainment. That leaves us free to be entertained by just wandering, watching the world around us. We've always done this to some degree, but I think our time in Mexico really brought this out. There's so much to see just walking around in Mexico that it became a habit. When there's nothing to do you walk up to the Parroquia, sit in the shade, have a snack, and watch the world around you. - -That was early on though. As the heat increased and the utter lack of anything to do overwhelmed me, I got considerably less zen about being stuck in Texas. Still, I'm old fashioned. If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything. diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/08/georgia-road-trip.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/08/georgia-road-trip.html deleted file mode 100644 index 286e459..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/08/georgia-road-trip.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,570 +0,0 @@ - - - - - Road Trip - by Scott Gilbertson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
-
- - -
-
- - - -
-
-
-

Road Trip

-

Screw Wally World, we’re going to Athens, Georgia

-
-
-

Athens, Georgia, U.S.

- – Map -
- - -
-
-
-

The America family road trip — immortalized so well by Chevy Chase and company — is a pretty miserable experience in my view. Pack the kids in the car to drive all day and half the night to Disney World? No thanks.

-

Driving long distances is pretty awful. Our rule in the bus has always been no more than 200 miles a day. There are plenty of days when we don’t even hit triple digit mileage. When you do this full time there’s no reason to hurry anywhere. The only time we’ve ever hurried anywhere was because we were meeting someone.

-

One reason we didn’t immediately head west out of Texas for spots more to our liking was that we knew we’d be heading east to Georgia at the end of summer. Corrinne’s parents came up from Mexico for a couple weeks and we wanted to see them. We knew we were going to drive and less driving the better.

-

Visiting family and friends in Athens sounded like a whole lot more fun than Wally World or Disney World or any other fake world. We’re awfully fond of the world we have, so why not try a good old fashioned road trip to Athens, GA?

-

We left the bus in Texas, but there was still no way we were going to drive 12 hours straight through. Jackson, Mississippi is roughly the halfway point, so we set about finding something fun to do in Jackson. Something better than wrecking our health or making a big fool of ourselves.

-

Corrinne discovered that the natural history museum was hosting a dinosaur exhibit complete with huge animatronic dinosaurs. Sold. We set out early Saturday morning and made Jackson by afternoon. The dinosaurs were a hit and the crowds weren’t too bad considering it was a weekend.

-
- - animatronic dinosaur, Jackson Natural History Museum, Jackson, MS photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - animatronic dinosaur, Jackson Natural History Museum, Jackson, MS photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

The rest of the museum wasn’t quite a nice as the traveling exhibit. It had a semi-broken down feeling to it and many of the stuffed specimens were old and ratty, but not really in a charming or understandable way like La Specula in Italy.

-
- - Kids using microscopes Natural History Museum, Jackson, MS photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - reptile pile, Natural History Museum, Jackson, MS photographed by luxagraf - -
Reptile pile.
-
- -

When in doubt, more dinosaurs.

-
- - animatronic dinosaur, outside the Jackson Natural History Museum, Jackson, MS photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - animatronic t-rex, outside the Jackson Natural History Museum, Jackson, MS photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

After we’d had our fill of animatronic dinosaurs we had a mediocre dinner and crashed out in a hotel room.

-

You might think, after years on the road, that we’d be super-organized, super-efficient packers, but no, we’re not. It’s pretty much a chaotic sprawl of bags, clothes, electronics, and toys.

-
- - messy hotel room photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

The next day we drove the rest of the way into Athens. Overall not to bad. Are we there yet did not reach cliche road trip fever pitch and no one got too grumpy. Or else I blocked all that out in my memory.

-

AirBnB we rented in Athens was a strange place though. We found and unplugged 15 air fresheners. No joke. Who lives that way? I suspect that many air fresheners put out enough petro chemicals to shorten your life by a measurable amount. Even without them, the place still smelled like someone was trying to cover up something awful.

-

At least the view across the street was good, some neighbor had a 1970ish Crown school bus at least partly converted to an RV. If we ever do the school bus conversion thing, the 60s and 70s Crown school buses would be high on my list. The mid-body diesel engine is awkward though, eats up all the room for your tanks. Not that I’ve put a lot of thought into this or anything.

-
- - 1970s Crown School Bus photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

I first came to Athens in 1999, moved here on a whim. I’ve never really felt at home anywhere except the wilderness, but Athens is probably as close as I come to having a home town at this point. Whatever the case, it’s always fun to come back for a visit. We wandered around, went to some of our old haunts, took the kids places they claim not to remember, ate some good food, even managed to put together a huge cousins sleepover party.

-
- - - - Walking the streets of Athens photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - taking a picture of child taking picture photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - - girls ballet dancing photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - kids at a sleepover photographed by luxagraf - - -
- -

Around the time we were getting ready to head back to Texas, an opportunity to stay in Athens presented itself. Well, not stay in Athens exactly, but hang around the area for a few months. After thinking it over for about five minutes, we said sure, why not?

-

The next day I got in the rental car, drove it back to Texas, and returned it. Then I grabbed our stuff out of the bus, threw it in the Volvo, said goodbye to the bus for another little while, and headed back to Athens. Boom, done. The less you have the easier it is to drop it all and do something else.

-

Okay, so I forgot the silverware. No one is perfect. But one thing I’ve learned on the road is to trust our intuitions. If something feels right, it generally is. If something feels wrong, it’s time for change. It took quite a while and several second-guessing failures to get that confidence, but even those failures taught me that no matter what happens, things have a way of working themselves out in the end.

-
-
- - - -
-
- - -
- -
-
-
-
You might also enjoy
- -
-
- - - - - -
- -
-

Thoughts?

-

Please leave a reply:

-
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- -
-
- - - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
-
-

All comments are moderated, so you won’t see it right away. And please remember Kurt Vonnegut's rule: “god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” You can use Markdown or HTML to format your comments. The allowed tags are <b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <a>. To create a new paragraph hit return twice.

- - -
- -
- - - - -
- - - - - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/08/georgia-road-trip.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/08/georgia-road-trip.txt deleted file mode 100644 index e9602e5..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/08/georgia-road-trip.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,62 +0,0 @@ -Road Trip -========= - - by Scott Gilbertson - - Sunday, 25 August 2019 - -The America family road trip -- immortalized so well by [Chevy Chase and company](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHThGmVfE3A) -- is a pretty miserable experience in my view. Pack the kids in the car to drive all day and half the night to Disney World? No thanks. - -Driving long distances is pretty awful. Our rule in the bus has always been no more than 200 miles a day. There are plenty of days when we don't even hit triple digit mileage. When you do this full time there's no reason to hurry anywhere. The only time we've ever hurried anywhere was because we were meeting someone. - -One reason we didn't immediately head west out of Texas for spots more to our liking was that we knew we'd be heading east to Georgia at the end of summer. Corrinne's parents came up from Mexico for a couple weeks and we wanted to see them. We knew we were going to drive and less driving the better. - -Visiting family and friends in Athens sounded like a whole lot more fun than Wally World or Disney World or any other fake world. We're awfully fond of the world we have, so why not try a good old fashioned road trip to Athens, GA? - -We left the bus in Texas, but there was still no way we were going to drive 12 hours straight through. Jackson, Mississippi is roughly the halfway point, so we set about finding something fun to do in Jackson. Something better than [wrecking our health or making a big fool of ourselves](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGhCsznO0S8). - -Corrinne discovered that the natural history museum was hosting a dinosaur exhibit complete with huge animatronic dinosaurs. Sold. We set out early Saturday morning and made Jackson by afternoon. The dinosaurs were a hit and the crowds weren't too bad considering it was a weekend. - - - - -The rest of the museum wasn't quite a nice as the traveling exhibit. It had a semi-broken down feeling to it and many of the stuffed specimens were old and ratty, but not really in a charming or understandable way like [La Specula](/jrnl/2011/06/natural-science) in Italy. - - - - -When in doubt, more dinosaurs. - - - - -After we'd had our fill of animatronic dinosaurs we had a mediocre dinner and crashed out in a hotel room. - -You might think, after years on the road, that we'd be super-organized, super-efficient packers, but no, we're not. It's pretty much a chaotic sprawl of bags, clothes, electronics, and toys. - - - -The next day we drove the rest of the way into Athens. Overall not to bad. *Are we there yet* did not reach cliche road trip fever pitch and no one got too grumpy. Or else I blocked all that out in my memory. - -AirBnB we rented in Athens was a strange place though. We found and unplugged 15 air fresheners. No joke. Who lives that way? I suspect that many air fresheners put out enough petro chemicals to shorten your life by a measurable amount. Even without them, the place still smelled like someone was trying to cover up something awful. - -At least the view across the street was good, some neighbor had a 1970ish Crown school bus at least partly converted to an RV. If we ever do the school bus conversion thing, the 60s and 70s Crown school buses would be high on my list. The mid-body diesel engine is awkward though, eats up all the room for your tanks. Not that I've put a lot of thought into this or anything. - - - -I first came to Athens in 1999, moved here on a whim. I've never really felt at home anywhere except the wilderness, but Athens is probably as close as I come to having a home town at this point. Whatever the case, it's always fun to come back for a visit. We wandered around, went to some of our old haunts, took the kids places they claim not to remember, ate some good food, even managed to put together a huge cousins sleepover party. - -
- - - - - - -
- -Around the time we were getting ready to head back to Texas, an opportunity to stay in Athens presented itself. Well, not stay in Athens exactly, but hang around the area for a few months. After thinking it over for about five minutes, we said sure, why not? - -The next day I got in the rental car, drove it back to Texas, and returned it. Then I grabbed our stuff out of the bus, threw it in the Volvo, said goodbye to the bus for another little while, and headed back to Athens. Boom, done. The less you have the easier it is to drop it all and do something else. - -Okay, so I forgot the silverware. No one is perfect. But one thing I've learned on the road is to trust our intuitions. If something feels right, it generally is. If something feels wrong, it's time for change. It took quite a while and several second-guessing failures to get that confidence, but even those failures taught me that no matter what happens, things have a way of working themselves out in the end. diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/09/hanging-around-town.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/09/hanging-around-town.html deleted file mode 100644 index d296113..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/09/hanging-around-town.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,602 +0,0 @@ - - - - - Hanging Around Town - by Scott Gilbertson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
-
- - -
-
- - - -
-
-
-

Hanging Around Town

-

Having a sit and think in good old Athens Georgia

-
-
-

Athens, Georgia, U.S.

- – Map -
- - -
-
-
-

Athens has always been a good town to come back to. It’s something of a joke among those of us who’ve been coming and going for decades now. Most of my friends in Athens have left for somewhere else at least once, many have left more than that, but most seem to find their way back here again too.

-

I thought about this a good bit as we walked around town, exploring what’s left of the Athens I once enjoyed.

-
- - - - taking a picture of child taking picture photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - Walking the streets of Athens photographed by luxagraf - - - -
- -

It’s always interesting to take the kids to places I’ve been and see how they react, how they like it. They don’t have any history to get in the way of enjoying it as it is now, which helps me figure out if a place really has started to suck, or if it’s just me.

-

The kids don’t remember downtown Athens before it was all chain restaurants and banal, new-construction high rises. They love walking around downtown Athens the same way they love walking around downtown San Miguel de Allende, downtown San Francisco, or downtown New Orleans. I don’t anymore though, try as I might to see it through their eyes.

-
- - - - running on the grass, downtown athens, UGA photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - running on UGA lawn, downtown Athens, GA photographed by luxagraf - - - -
- -

I came to Athens for the first time in 1996 and moved here for good in 1999. I left for a few years in 2002. Came back in the 2005. Left for a couple more. Came back in 2007. Stayed a decade that time, which is as long as I’ve lived anywhere since I moved out of my childhood home.

-

In that decade things changed in Athens. Things are always changing, but this time things changed more than usual. California came to Athens.

-
- - Automatic Pizza, Normaltown, Athens, GA photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

It’s the same story everywhere, a handful of greedy people sell out their town to highest bidder, which is inevitably wealthy refugees from California1. In Athens it was, as far as I can tell, a semi-senile mayor and a handful of real estate developers who did the damage2. Whatever the case it’s done. It’ll be decades before the pendulum of wealth swings back the other way, and then decades more before it gets back near the balanced center, where it was when I first arrived in 1996.

-

When we left in back 2017 I didn’t figure we’d ever come back. Visit sure, but hang around for any length of time? Probably not. It’ll be years before the housing market crashes back down to sane levels. House prices are currently well out of the price range of staff writers. Houses in our old neighborhood sell for well over half a million dollars (do I wish I still had ours? Not even a little bit).

-

Still, an opportunity came up for us to spend a few months around here and, after talking it over for ten minutes, we took it. So we’re going to hang around our old home town for Autumn, maybe Winter too.

-

The key to living on the road is learning to deal with the uncertainty. You never knowing where you’ll be in two weeks, which is both freeing and stressful. To cope with it you need to act slowly, and be able to turn midstream as it were because things will very rarely turn out as you plan.

-

In some ways I think much of my travel strategy is something I read once in poker book: be selective, but be aggressive. That is, do not play many hands in poker, but when you do, play them aggressively. In travel terms that means spend a lot of time making plans. Not plans you act on, just possibilities. Think things over, explore possibilities in your imagination. And I mean that literally. Sit in a chair, back straight, hands on your knees, breathe slow to relax, clothes your eyes and bring some ide a to mind and follow it out.

-

Part of the beauty of living on the road is that you have much more relaxed, quiet time than most people, which means you can think things through much more easily. You can have a lot of sit and thinks as my favorite kids’ show calls it. You can’t be selective if you haven’t considered all the options. So you consider as many as you can.

-

But then when it is time to act, you must act decisively and without hesitation because you have to commit. Once you jump, you can’t unjump. Sometimes you have to correct your course on the way down, sometimes you go oh shit and start flapping your arms. Sometimes you hit the ground hard. It happens. But this is just a metaphor so you pick yourself up, dust off, and carry on. Usually. And you have to be okay with any and all of the outcomes. Otherwise, this is probably not a lifestyle that’s going to make you happy.

-

We’ve spent a lot of time in the sit and think stage of late. We’ve been trying to figure out what comes next for us for the better part of year now and we’ve been all over the map. We’ve put significant effort into lots of different imaginary plans, all of which were appealing for a time, but none of which drove us to actually take that decisive step forward and commit.

-

The ones that stick out range from the obvious, continuing to travel in the bus, to the less obvious, like moving to the Yucatan. We had another plan that would have seen Corrinne running a small school in Costa Rica. We considered living on the coast of Serbia, which then somehow led us to consider living in a remote village in Alaska, and then a small town in Nevada.

-

Then we thought no, let’s buy a boat, or maybe an Airstream, or maybe a smaller Travco. There were other ideas in there I can’t remember now, and those are just the ones we were semi-serious about. Not that we could actually have made all these things happen. There are all sorts of technical and financial hurdles to overcome in all those plans, but when you’re just having a sit and think you don’t have worry about details, rather you worry about whether or not it feels right.

-

If it does feel then you move on to practical things. Maybe (probably) it turns out you don’t have the money for a boat. Okay, scratch that off the list. Or you make a longer term plan to get the money you need. And so on.

-

Like I said, you have to be willing to think things over, consider every possibility. There comes a time to act though. In my experience the universe will present you with an opportunity to move in some direction you’ve been considering. I try not to think of these things as suggestions from the universe. Just because an opportunity comes doesn’t mean you should take it, just that hey here’s something that will help you do X if that’s what you think you should do.

-

For us, right now that opportunity was to hang around Athens GA for a while. It’s not our whole plan, but it’s a step in the direction we want to go. So you go. One step at a time.

-
-
-
    -
  1. -

    They’re wealthy by every standard of wealth save those of California. ↩

    -
    2. -
  2. -

    And let’s not forget complacent constituents like myself who could have gone to some city council meetings and made an effort to stop said developers and mayor. While it would most likely have been ineffectual it would have been worth a try if Athens were a place worth fighting for to you. For me, I take it, it was not. Because I did not. I prefer to move on rather than resist. ↩

    -
    3. -
-
-
-
- - - -
-
- - -
- -
-
-
-
You might also enjoy
- -
-
- - - - - -

2 Comments

- - - - - - -
- -
- -
- Gwen - November 04, 2019 at 11:42 a.m. -
- -
- -

Welcome back to the South. I seem to remember that you had a post awhile back about being in St Louis. Am I right about that? We are thinking of taking our kids there next month. Wondering what you would recommend doing in the city?

- -
-
- -
- -
- Scott - November 04, 2019 at 8:48 p.m. -
- -
- -

Gwen-

-

Hey, thanks. It is good to be back in the South. Texas thinks it’s the South. but. cough. yeah.

-

Anyway, we did spend a little time in St. Louis, but not much. We mostly went because everyone told us we had to go to the St. Louis City Museum. And we did. It’s awesome. A fair bit of it is exposed to the elements, but I think it would still be pretty cool even if it were freezing cold. Assuming it stays open all year; I have no idea if it does.

-

Everything else we did was out around the Babler State Park area, which is nice, but a little ways out of town and not that nice.

- -
-
- -
- - -
- -
-

Thoughts?

-

Please leave a reply:

-
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- -
-
- - - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
-
-

All comments are moderated, so you won’t see it right away. And please remember Kurt Vonnegut's rule: “god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” You can use Markdown or HTML to format your comments. The allowed tags are <b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <a>. To create a new paragraph hit return twice.

- - -
- -
- - - - -
- - - - - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/09/hanging-around-town.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/09/hanging-around-town.txt deleted file mode 100644 index d028cb2..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/09/hanging-around-town.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,63 +0,0 @@ -Hanging Around Town -=================== - - by Scott Gilbertson - - Thursday, 12 September 2019 - -Athens has always been a good town to come back to. It's something of a joke among those of us who've been coming and going for decades now. Most of my friends in Athens have left for somewhere else at least once, many have left more than that, but most seem to find their way back here again too. - -I thought about this a good bit as we walked around town, exploring what's left of the Athens I once enjoyed. - -
- - - - -
- -It's always interesting to take the kids to places I've been and see how they react, how they like it. They don't have any history to get in the way of enjoying it as it is now, which helps me figure out if a place really has started to suck, or if it's just me. - -The kids don't remember downtown Athens before it was all chain restaurants and banal, new-construction high rises. They love walking around downtown Athens the same way they love walking around downtown San Miguel de Allende, downtown San Francisco, or downtown New Orleans. I don't anymore though, try as I might to see it through their eyes. - -
- - - - -
- -I came to Athens for the first time in 1996 and moved here for good in 1999. I left for a few years in 2002. Came back in the 2005. Left for a couple more. Came back in 2007. Stayed a decade that time, which is as long as I've lived anywhere since I moved out of my childhood home. - -In that decade things changed in Athens. Things are always changing, but this time things changed more than usual. California came to Athens. - - - -It's the same story everywhere, a handful of greedy people sell out their town to highest bidder, which is inevitably wealthy refugees from California[^1]. In Athens it was, as far as I can tell, a semi-senile mayor and a handful of real estate developers who did the damage[^2]. Whatever the case it's done. It'll be decades before the pendulum of wealth swings back the other way, and then decades more before it gets back near the balanced center, where it was when I first arrived in 1996. - -When we left in back 2017 I didn't figure we'd ever come back. Visit sure, but hang around for any length of time? Probably not. It'll be years before the housing market crashes back down to sane levels. House prices are currently well out of the price range of staff writers. Houses in our old neighborhood sell for well over half a million dollars (do I wish I still had ours? Not even a little bit). - -Still, an opportunity came up for us to spend a few months around here and, after talking it over for ten minutes, we took it. So we're going to hang around our old home town for Autumn, maybe Winter too. - -The key to living on the road is learning to deal with the uncertainty. You never knowing where you'll be in two weeks, which is both freeing and stressful. To cope with it you need to act slowly, and be able to turn midstream as it were because things will very rarely turn out as you plan. - -In some ways I think much of my travel strategy is something I read once in poker book: be selective, but be aggressive. That is, do not play many hands in poker, but when you do, play them aggressively. In travel terms that means spend a lot of time making plans. Not plans you act on, just possibilities. Think things over, explore possibilities in your imagination. And I mean that literally. Sit in a chair, back straight, hands on your knees, breathe slow to relax, clothes your eyes and bring some ide a to mind and follow it out. - -Part of the beauty of living on the road is that you have much more relaxed, quiet time than most people, which means you can think things through much more easily. You can have a lot of sit and thinks as my [favorite kids' show](https://www.sarahandduck.com/watch/) calls it. You can't be selective if you haven't considered all the options. So you consider as many as you can. - -But then when it is time to act, you must act decisively and without hesitation because you have to commit. Once you jump, you can't unjump. Sometimes you have to correct your course on the way down, sometimes you go oh shit and start flapping your arms. Sometimes you hit the ground hard. It happens. But this is just a metaphor so you pick yourself up, dust off, and carry on. Usually. And you have to be okay with any and all of the outcomes. Otherwise, this is probably not a lifestyle that's going to make you happy. - -We've spent a lot of time in the sit and think stage of late. We've been trying to figure out what comes next for us for the better part of year now and we've been all over the map. We've put significant effort into lots of different imaginary plans, all of which were appealing for a time, but none of which drove us to actually take that decisive step forward and commit. - -The ones that stick out range from the obvious, continuing to travel in the bus, to the less obvious, like moving to the Yucatan. We had another plan that would have seen Corrinne running a small school in Costa Rica. We considered living on the coast of Serbia, which then somehow led us to consider living in a remote village in Alaska, and then a small town in Nevada. - -Then we thought no, let's buy a boat, or maybe an Airstream, or maybe a smaller Travco. There were other ideas in there I can't remember now, and those are just the ones we were semi-serious about. Not that we could actually have made all these things happen. There are all sorts of technical and financial hurdles to overcome in all those plans, but when you're just having a sit and think you don't have worry about details, rather you worry about whether or not it feels right. - -If it does feel then you move on to practical things. Maybe (probably) it turns out you don't have the money for a boat. Okay, scratch that off the list. Or you make a longer term plan to get the money you need. And so on. - -Like I said, you have to be willing to think things over, consider every possibility. There comes a time to act though. In my experience the universe will present you with an opportunity to move in some direction you've been considering. I try not to think of these things as *suggestions* from the universe. Just because an opportunity comes doesn't mean you *should* take it, just that *hey here's something that will help you do X if that's what you think you should do*. - -For us, right now that opportunity was to hang around Athens GA for a while. It's not our whole plan, but it's a step in the direction we want to go. So you go. One step at a time. - -[^1]: They're wealthy by every standard of wealth save those of California. -[^2]: And let's not forget complacent constituents like myself who could have gone to some city council meetings and made an effort to stop said developers and mayor. While it would most likely have been ineffectual it would have been worth a try if Athens were a place worth fighting for to you. For me, I take it, it was not. Because I did not. I prefer to move on rather than resist. diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/09/old-growth.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/09/old-growth.html deleted file mode 100644 index 4b4fce8..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/09/old-growth.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,578 +0,0 @@ - - - - - Old Growth - by Scott Gilbertson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
-
- - -
-
- - - -
-
-
-

Old Growth

-

Out of the trees, into the forest

-
-
-

Watson Mill State Park, Georgia, U.S.

- – Map -
- - -
-
-
-

Spread out a map of the United States and trace your finger down the border of North Dakota and Minnesota. Let your finger drift to the west a little as to comes down through South Dakota, across eastern Nebraska, through the middle of Kansas, and down from Wichita Falls, Texas to the border in Laredo. This line you have just drawn separates The East from The West.

-

There’s no real consensus on this line. You’ll have to give a couple hundred miles of gray area in either direction to make everyone happy, but by and large this is where two things happen as you move west: the humidity drops and the forest stops.

-

Trinidad, Texas, where we spent the summer, is just to the east of this line, but still mostly out of the great hardwood forests of the east. When we decided to stick around Athens for a bit it had been well over a year since we’d spent any amount of time around trees. Well over a year since we’d had our horizon raised by leaves.

-
- - Sunrise over a lake, Elberton, GA photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

I was born out west, and the wide open spaces and skies of the west will always feel more like home to me than the forests of the east, but my people come from forests. I think there are trees in my blood, somewhere back there. I don’t know everything about my ancestors, but what stories I do know are of people who would have lived in the primeval beech forests of the southern Carpathians on one side, and the ancient hemlock and white pine forests of eastern United States on the other. For me, going back into the woods will always be a kind of homecoming.

-

I feel relaxed in forests. But also sharper. All the leaves require more visual acuity, sharpen the senses. After a few days in the trees I start to feel more what might be called poise, that balance point between relaxation and tension.

-
- - hammock in the woods, watson mill state park, ga photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - riding scooters in the woods, watson mill state park, ga photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

Maybe it’s the extra oxygen. It would make senses to me that the more trees around, the more oxygen you have and the more oxygen the clearer and sharper you feel. I’m not particularly interested in the science behind it though, just the experience of it. And interestingly, I get the same feeling of clarity, sharpness, and overall well-being walking in the desert, above timberline, and other places without trees, so maybe it’s not that at all.

-

Perhaps its not strictly trees, but the entirety of the ecosystem around me. The wholeness of it. The way everything is continuous, intertwined, uninterrupted.

-
- - ferns and lichen, watson mill state park, ga photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

The words we have for these things somehow fail to capture them well though. Our language is better at separating out and dividing up than it is in joining together or describing connections. We often talk about forests, trees, deserts as though these things were somehow separate. We say “ecosystem,” or more often “nature,” as if this were something other than the world we live in.

-

It’s not though. We are part of nature, part of the ecosystem, part of the world. We are never separated from anything else on this planet. But I do understand what people mean when they say they want to “get out in nature” as opposed to where they live.

-
- - fall growth, watson mill state park, ga photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

I think what we seek when we seek “nature” is part of something where all the connections between all the parts remain intact, where hard edges of modern human ideas do not exist. Where everything flows into everything else. Where the connectedness of life has not been severed to serve human purposes. Where roads and sidewalks to not keep the earth hidden away, the grass divided, the trees encased. Where power lines do not bisect the sky into segments, where hedges are not trimmed, grounds not neatly swept.

-
- - boy walking in the woods, watson mill state park, ga photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

We seek places away from the order we have attempted to impose on the world because our imposition fundamentally does not work. Drawing lines between things does not work. The worst part is all the lines we draw around ourselves, as if we were not part of all this.

-

We are creations of earth. We come from here. We are part of this planet. No more and no less than any other part of it. And like every other species we shape it, it shapes us. We seem to have lost sight of that. We see ourselves on one hand as special snowflakes, exceptions, immune to laws of this planet. We are not. We cannot continue to draw everything out for ourselves without also drawing everything down on ourselves.

-

On the other hand I think it’s just as naive to think the world, “nature,” needs to be protected from us. The world does not need to be protected from us, it needs respect from us. It needs us to recognize it for what it is, rather than how it’s “useful” to us. It needs us to treat it with dignity and respect, like a brother, sister, mother, father. Like family.

-

Thanks to science our current perception of the world is more nuanced and detailed than any culture we’re aware of in history. This has opened a million doorways into the how the world works. But it’s also left us cut off from the world in ways that no other culture we’re aware of has ever been. We know so much and understand so little1.

-
- - mossy rock, watson mill state park, ga photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

It seems to me that this has happened because our stories, our ways of understanding the world, have seriously diverged from the way the world actually is. This is the source of our problems: on the one hand self-destruction, and the other self-loathing. Vicious cycles repeat.

-

I think we are slowly coming to realize that we need different stories. We need stories that better reflect the world as it is, not the world as we think it should be, but it will be a slow walk down a long road to get back from here.

-

I don’t have a solution. This is a problem with one solution. It is not even a problem we will solve. Not you and I. We will play our parts, whatever they may be. We can show that there are other possibilities by living them. But this is something happening on a grand scale. The stories that shape our world, the processes that got us here, are intertwined with the very language we were born into. These are process that have been in motion for thousands of years and will likely continue along for many hundreds, perhaps even thousands, more to come.

-

Still, we have our lives here, now. In the trees or out of them. I prefer in.

-
- - forest trail, watson mill state park, ga photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

From what I read, the great forests of the east are not what they used to be. They are not “virgin” (always Europeans with their sacrosanct virgins), but to my mind these woods are still a grand thing. A beautiful place to sit quietly in, to play in, to drink this early morning coffee in, to live in.

-

The afternoons swelter. We go to the cool water of the river. Its slick, algae-covered rock slide is a welcome escape from the heat.

-
- - Natural rock water slide below watson mill bridge photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

Summer hasn’t let go yet, but you can feel Autumn lurking at the edges of evening. The breeze stirs, the dead still, stagnant air of summer is broken by wind wandering through the trees. It comes in fits and stutters. Cool puffs of air that find us as the sun sets.

-

It’s coming though. I watch the chickadees and squirrels, they know it’s coming too. If they are right this winter will be long and cold, even down here in the South.

-
-
-
    -
  1. -

    This is a choice. And increasingly it looks like a choice many do not like. Unfortunately these days science looks to be going the way of the bathwater. Again, we’re not good at connecting. But really, there is no reason science’s experience of the world must be the only experience of it. So many things that seem either/or can just as easily be and/both. We just have to find the triad hiding behind the binaries. ↩

    -
    2. -
-
-
-
- - - - -
-
- - -
- -
-
-
-
You might also enjoy
- -
-
- - - - - -
- -
-

Thoughts?

-

Please leave a reply:

-
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- -
-
- - - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
-
-

All comments are moderated, so you won’t see it right away. And please remember Kurt Vonnegut's rule: “god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” You can use Markdown or HTML to format your comments. The allowed tags are <b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <a>. To create a new paragraph hit return twice.

- - -
- -
- - - - -
- - - - - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/09/old-growth.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/09/old-growth.txt deleted file mode 100644 index f5bc8ff..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/09/old-growth.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,69 +0,0 @@ -Old Growth -========== - - by Scott Gilbertson - - Wednesday, 25 September 2019 - -Spread out a map of the United States and trace your finger down the border of North Dakota and Minnesota. Let your finger drift to the west a little as to comes down through South Dakota, across eastern Nebraska, through the middle of Kansas, and down from Wichita Falls, Texas to the border in Laredo. This line you have just drawn separates The East from The West. - -There's no real consensus on this line. You'll have to give a couple hundred miles of gray area in either direction to make everyone happy, but by and large this is where two things happen as you move west: the humidity drops and the forest stops. - -Trinidad, Texas, where we spent the summer, is just to the east of this line, but still mostly out of the great hardwood forests of the east. When we decided to stick around Athens for a bit it had been well over a year since we'd spent any amount of time around trees. Well over a year since we'd had our horizon raised by leaves. - - - -I was born out west, and the wide open spaces and skies of the west will always feel more like home to me than the forests of the east, but my people come from forests. I think there are trees in my blood, somewhere back there. I don't know everything about my ancestors, but what stories I do know are of people who would have lived in the primeval beech forests of the southern Carpathians on one side, and the ancient hemlock and white pine forests of eastern United States on the other. For me, going back into the woods will always be a kind of homecoming. - -I feel relaxed in forests. But also sharper. All the leaves require more visual acuity, sharpen the senses. After a few days in the trees I start to feel more what might be called poise, that balance point between relaxation and tension. - - - - -Maybe it's the extra oxygen. It would make senses to me that the more trees around, the more oxygen you have and the more oxygen the clearer and sharper you feel. I'm not particularly interested in the science behind it though, just the experience of it. And interestingly, I get the same feeling of clarity, sharpness, and overall well-being walking in the desert, above timberline, and other places without trees, so maybe it's not that at all. - -Perhaps its not strictly trees, but the entirety of the ecosystem around me. The wholeness of it. The way everything is continuous, intertwined, uninterrupted. - - - -The words we have for these things somehow fail to capture them well though. Our language is better at separating out and dividing up than it is in joining together or describing connections. We often talk about forests, trees, deserts as though these things were somehow separate. We say "ecosystem," or more often "nature," as if this were something other than the world we live in. - -It's not though. We are part of nature, part of the ecosystem, part of the world. We are never separated from anything else on this planet. But I do understand what people mean when they say they want to "get out in nature" as opposed to where they live. - - - -I think what we seek when we seek "nature" is part of something where all the connections between all the parts remain intact, where hard edges of modern human ideas do not exist. Where everything flows into everything else. Where the connectedness of life has not been severed to serve human purposes. Where roads and sidewalks to not keep the earth hidden away, the grass divided, the trees encased. Where power lines do not bisect the sky into segments, where hedges are not trimmed, grounds not neatly swept. - - - -We seek places away from the order we have attempted to impose on the world because our imposition fundamentally does not work. Drawing lines between things does not work. The worst part is all the lines we draw around ourselves, as if we were not part of all this. - -We are creations of earth. We come from here. We are part of this planet. No more and no less than any other part of it. And like every other species we shape it, it shapes us. We seem to have lost sight of that. We see ourselves on one hand as special snowflakes, exceptions, immune to laws of this planet. We are not. We cannot continue to draw everything out for ourselves without also drawing everything down on ourselves. - -On the other hand I think it's just as naive to think the world, "nature," needs to be protected from us. The world does not need to be protected from us, it needs respect from us. It needs us to recognize it for what it is, rather than how it's "useful" to us. It needs us to treat it with dignity and respect, like a brother, sister, mother, father. Like family. - -Thanks to science our current perception of the world is more nuanced and detailed than any culture we're aware of in history. This has opened a million doorways into the how the world works. But it's also left us cut off from the world in ways that no other culture we're aware of has ever been. We know so much and understand so little[^1]. - - - -It seems to me that this has happened because our stories, our ways of understanding the world, have seriously diverged from the way the world actually is. This is the source of our problems: on the one hand self-destruction, and the other self-loathing. Vicious cycles repeat. - -I think we are slowly coming to realize that we need different stories. We need stories that better reflect the world as it is, not the world as we think it should be, but it will be a slow walk down a long road to get back from here. - -I don't have a solution. This is a problem with one solution. It is not even a problem we will solve. Not you and I. We will play our parts, whatever they may be. We can show that there are other possibilities by living them. But this is something happening on a grand scale. The stories that shape our world, the processes that got us here, are intertwined with the very language we were born into. These are process that have been in motion for thousands of years and will likely continue along for many hundreds, perhaps even thousands, more to come. - -Still, we have our lives here, now. In the trees or out of them. I prefer in. - - - -From what I read, the great forests of the east are not what they used to be. They are not "virgin" (always Europeans with their sacrosanct virgins), but to my mind these woods are still a grand thing. A beautiful place to sit quietly in, to play in, to drink this early morning coffee in, to live in. - -The afternoons swelter. We go to the cool water of the river. Its slick, algae-covered rock slide is a welcome escape from the heat. - - - -Summer hasn't let go yet, but you can feel Autumn lurking at the edges of evening. The breeze stirs, the dead still, stagnant air of summer is broken by wind wandering through the trees. It comes in fits and stutters. Cool puffs of air that find us as the sun sets. - -It's coming though. I watch the chickadees and squirrels, they know it's coming too. If they are right this winter will be long and cold, even down here in the South. - -[^1]: This is a choice. And increasingly it looks like a choice many do not like. Unfortunately these days science looks to be going the way of the bathwater. Again, we're not good at connecting. But really, there is no reason science's experience of the world must be the only experience of it. So many things that seem either/or can just as easily be and/both. We just have to find the triad hiding behind the binaries. diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/back-to-raysville.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/back-to-raysville.html deleted file mode 100644 index 3969038..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/back-to-raysville.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,517 +0,0 @@ - - - - - Back To Raysville - by Scott Gilbertson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
-
- - -
-
- - - -
-
-
-

Back to Raysville

-

It’s been almost three years, but little has changed

-
-
-

Raysville, Georgia, U.S.

- – Map -
- - -
-
-
-

After the better part of a month hanging around Athens, GA, we were ready for a break. Cities, even small ones like Athens, stress me out these days. Even when I’m technically miles away from them. It’s not a very acute stress, not even something I notice until I leave and I catch myself sitting around the fire in the evening with my shoulders tensed tight.

-

I don’t know why, but I know some time further from civilization was calling. Our friends Mike and Cassidy were feeling the same. They wanted to get out on the water in some boats so we all headed down to Raysville, the very first place we stopped when this trip began nearly three years ago.

-

The campground at Raysville is under used, which is to say almost no one is ever there. We arrived on a Friday and had no trouble getting a spot. It took all of about five minutes for the kids to be out the door and into the water.

-
- - swimming in lake, raysville, ga photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

I don’t think they’ll ever get tired of getting in water. Doesn’t matter what water really, they’re out there. They’ll ask to go swimming when it’s near freezing temps outside. It’s like just the idea of water makes things seem warmer.

-
- - boy swimming, raysville, ga photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - boy swimming, raysville, ga photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

The Raysville campground is an old army corp of engineers campground that the corp sold to the county a few years ago. It makes me laugh every time I think about it because there are all these things that only an engineer would think of — every site has a ground fire pit and a raised cooking grill, and there’s a table to eat off and another by the grill for cooking. It’s brilliantly well engineered. Also the sunsets are remarkable.

-
- - clouds and sunbeams over lake, raysville GA photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - Sunset over lake, island, raysville ga photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

The next morning the kids were back in the lake pretty much as soon as the sun was up.

-
- - kids swimming in a lake, raysville ga photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - john boat and standup paddleboard, raysville ga photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - drone image of boat and swimmers on lake, raysville ga photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

That was pretty much life for a week: wake up, go swimming, write some things, paddle around on the SUP, test out a drone, row the john boat out to the island (which the kids named poop-rock island for what the nesting Canada geese and other birds leave behind), write some more things. Then eat dinner and watch the sun light up the clouds. That’s about all you need really. Water. Sun. Food. Friends.

-
-
- - - - -
-
- - -
- -
-
-
-
You might also enjoy
- -
-
- - - - - -
- -
-

Thoughts?

-

Please leave a reply:

-
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- -
-
- - - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
-
-

All comments are moderated, so you won’t see it right away. And please remember Kurt Vonnegut's rule: “god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” You can use Markdown or HTML to format your comments. The allowed tags are <b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <a>. To create a new paragraph hit return twice.

- - -
- -
- - - - -
- - - - - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/back-to-raysville.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/back-to-raysville.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 0c62cc8..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/back-to-raysville.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,32 +0,0 @@ -Back to Raysville -================= - - by Scott Gilbertson - - Wednesday, 16 October 2019 - -After the better part of a month hanging around Athens, GA, we were ready for a break. Cities, even small ones like Athens, stress me out these days. Even when I'm technically miles away from them. It's not a very acute stress, not even something I notice until I leave and I catch myself sitting around the fire in the evening with my shoulders tensed tight. - -I don't know why, but I know some time further from civilization was calling. Our friends Mike and Cassidy were feeling the same. They wanted to get out on the water in some boats so we all headed down to Raysville, the very first place we stopped when this trip began nearly three years ago. - -The campground at Raysville is under used, which is to say almost no one is ever there. We arrived on a Friday and had no trouble getting a spot. It took all of about five minutes for the kids to be out the door and into the water. - - - -I don't think they'll ever get tired of getting in water. Doesn't matter what water really, they're out there. They'll ask to go swimming when it's near freezing temps outside. It's like just the idea of water makes things seem warmer. - - - - -The Raysville campground is an old army corp of engineers campground that the corp sold to the county a few years ago. It makes me laugh every time I think about it because there are all these things that only an engineer would think of -- every site has a ground fire pit *and* a raised cooking grill, and there's a table to eat off and another by the grill for cooking. It's brilliantly well engineered. Also the sunsets are remarkable. - - - - -The next morning the kids were back in the lake pretty much as soon as the sun was up. - - - - - -That was pretty much life for a week: wake up, go swimming, write some things, paddle around on the SUP, test out a drone, row the john boat out to the island (which the kids named poop-rock island for what the nesting Canada geese and other birds leave behind), write some more things. Then eat dinner and watch the sun light up the clouds. That's about all you need really. Water. Sun. Food. Friends. diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/bird-watching.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/bird-watching.html deleted file mode 100644 index 7bdf140..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/bird-watching.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,567 +0,0 @@ - - - - - Bird Watching - by Scott Gilbertson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
-
- - -
-
- - - -
-
-
-

Bird Watching

-

Carolina wrens, barred owls, and red-tailed hawks

-
-
-

Fort Yargo State Park, Georgia, U.S.

- – Map -
- - -
-
-
-

Most mornings I am up early enough to hear the signature sounds of whippoorwills, sometimes even the cackling of an owl. It’s not long before those birds quiet down though. By the time my coffee is ready the forest is transitioning from night sounds to dawn sounds. Song birds warble in the dogwoods. Red-bellied woodpeckers drum on oaks. Somewhere high overhead a red-tailed hawk shrieks.

-

We were house sitting for a few days once and the kids were complaining that, with the curtains closed, they could not tell when it was morning in the house. I asked them, “how do you know when it’s morning in the bus?” And they said, “we hear the birds singing.” Birds mean morning.

-

Every morning somewhere between the golden light of sunrise and the starker white of midday, three Carolina wrens stop by our campsite looking for food. Many birds move through the forest around us throughout the day, but these three come right into the campsite as if we’re not even here.

-

I sit at the table, writing. I don’t move that much I suppose, but certainly the wrens are aware that I am here. The noise of my fingers typing on the keyboard is enough to keep squirrels away. Yet everyday these three wrens behave as if I don’t exist.

-

Carolina wrens are tiny brown and tan birds with a slightly downward curved bill. They’re the sort of small brown bird that never stops moving. They flit and hop and bounce and chip-chip around beneath the table, even on the table sometimes, while I work.

-
- - carolina wren on picnic table photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

Periodically one stops moving and cocks its head to look at me, as if reassessing what sort of threat I represent. But inevitably curiosity is satisfied and it goes back to ignoring my existence, hopping around, once even perching on my foot to get a better view of the ground. One wren even got up on the table and hopped along picking at crumbs, coming right toward me. I thought it was going to land on my arm, but at the last minute it seemed to suddenly remember me and it flew off into the bushes.

-

It’s nearly the time of year when the permanent avian residents of the Georgia mountains begin to band together. There aren’t that many. Most species are off in Mexico or South America by now. Those that remain band together for the winter. You see flocks consisting of Carolina chickadees, tufted titmice, and Carolina wrens, sometimes joined by golden-crowned kinglets, downy woodpeckers, perhaps a nuthatch or two. They join up in Autumn and often, from what I saw back when we lived here, stick together for most of the winter.

-
- - red bellied woodpeckers on oak tree photographed by luxagraf - -
Red-bellied woodpeckers aren’t joiners. There’s plenty around, but they keep to themselves.
-
- -

But it’s not quite cold enough for that yet. These are Carolina wrens, traveling alone, together. Their dark eyes watch me whenever I walk around. If I get too close they scurry away, flutter off under the bus or into the wheel well, but for the most part it feels like I am in their mid-morning snack spot and it’s me who should be moving.

-

These three were the first time I’d had much encounter with the avian world in a long time. Mockingbirds had ruled in Texas, and I was feeling bad about the summer tanager I’d hit and killed while driving out there. It seemed as if the avians were angry with me, understandably. I dreamed once that a goldfinch was pecking at my finger, biting me until I bled.

-

After a few days of the wrens coming through I started to feel like perhaps I was forgiven for that bloody mishap with the tanager. Then one morning I stepped outside at dawn and there was a barred owl not more than ten feet away.

-
- - barred owl, watson mill state park, ga photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

I don’t write about them much, but birds have dictated our destinations as much as anything else. If you were to overlay our route through the Gulf Coast in 2018 with popular spring migration birding spots, our route might make more sense. We’re not Kenn Kaufman by any means, but we’ve been known to be on St. George Island in April, maybe spend summer in the Great Lakes, and perhaps try for an early spring in the Chiricauhua region.

-

My kids have been bird watching since they could stand up. It wasn’t something I forced on them, they’d never do it if I’d done that. You can’t force things on people, especially kids. If you want to teach your kids something, don’t talk about it, do it. Don’t tell them what you’re doing, just do it. They learn by osmosis and curiosity, not “teaching”1.

-
- - kids on playground photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

Our kids picked up the bird book that was sitting on the coffee table in our old house and started looking at the pictures before they could walk. There’s a photo of one of them, still in diapers, the Sibley Guide to Birds spread out before her, thoughtfully tracing her finger down a page of warblers, trying to find one that looks like the bird in a photo a friend’s mother had sent us (it was a goldfinch).

-
- - Kids walking down a road in georgia. photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - kids crossing a creek, georgia. photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

Our kids know a lot about the natural world because it surrounds them every day and piques their curiosity. They wake up to the sound of birds singing. They point out the shrieks of the red-tailed hawk when it circles overhead in the morning. They note the chickadee and titmouse flock when it comes through not long after that. Every time they go for a walk when I’m working I get a full catalog of interesting birds I missed. Birding by proxy.

-

It’s not always birds of course. One evening the kids found a meadow vole under the bus, drinking from the tiny puddle of condensation that collects below the air conditioner. I imagine it’s busy around that water at night. The vole apparently overstayed and got caught out in the open. The kids dug it some roots and piled them back in the shade, where it could eat, but still keep cool. We stepped in for dinner and when we came back out it had moved on.

-

Later, after the kids were in bed, I sat out by the fire, listening as the evening sounds faded back to night sounds. The songbirds fell quiet. The woodpeckers stopped tapping. The whippoorwills started up. Later the deep voice of a great horned owl drifted up from somewhere down by the river below. I thought of the vole. Good luck out there friend.

-
-
-
    -
  1. -

    At least not teaching the way we commonly do it in American schools. General strategies can often be conveyed well (aka, taught) but no one (kids or adults) learns when they aren’t interested. And you can’t force interest. ↩

    -
    2. -
-
-
-
- - - -
-
- - -
- -
-
-
-
You might also enjoy
- -
-
- - - - - -

2 Comments

- - - - - - -
- -
- -
- Gwen - November 28, 2019 at 9:01 p.m. -
- -
- -

Love the owl picture. Thanks for the info about St. Louis.

- -
-
- -
- -
- Scott - December 13, 2019 at 8:54 a.m. -
- -
- -

Gwen-

-

Thank you! Hope you had a good trip.

- -
-
- -
- - -
- -
-

Thoughts?

-

Please leave a reply:

-
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- -
-
- - - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
-
-

All comments are moderated, so you won’t see it right away. And please remember Kurt Vonnegut's rule: “god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” You can use Markdown or HTML to format your comments. The allowed tags are <b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <a>. To create a new paragraph hit return twice.

- - -
- -
- - - - -
- - - - - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/bird-watching.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/bird-watching.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 0ff4a74..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/bird-watching.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,52 +0,0 @@ -Bird Watching -============= - - by Scott Gilbertson - - Wednesday, 09 October 2019 - -Most mornings I am up early enough to hear the signature sounds of whippoorwills, sometimes even the cackling of an owl. It's not long before those birds quiet down though. By the time my coffee is ready the forest is transitioning from night sounds to dawn sounds. Song birds warble in the dogwoods. Red-bellied woodpeckers drum on oaks. Somewhere high overhead a red-tailed hawk shrieks. - -We were house sitting for a few days once and the kids were complaining that, with the curtains closed, they could not tell when it was morning in the house. I asked them, "how do you know when it's morning in the bus?" And they said, "we hear the birds singing." Birds mean morning. - -Every morning somewhere between the golden light of sunrise and the starker white of midday, three Carolina wrens stop by our campsite looking for food. Many birds move through the forest around us throughout the day, but these three come right into the campsite as if we're not even here. - -I sit at the table, writing. I don't move that much I suppose, but certainly the wrens are aware that I am here. The noise of my fingers typing on the keyboard is enough to keep squirrels away. Yet everyday these three wrens behave as if I don't exist. - -Carolina wrens are tiny brown and tan birds with a slightly downward curved bill. They're the sort of small brown bird that never stops moving. They flit and hop and bounce and chip-chip around beneath the table, even *on* the table sometimes, while I work. - - - -Periodically one stops moving and cocks its head to look at me, as if reassessing what sort of threat I represent. But inevitably curiosity is satisfied and it goes back to ignoring my existence, hopping around, once even perching on my foot to get a better view of the ground. One wren even got up on the table and hopped along picking at crumbs, coming right toward me. I thought it was going to land on my arm, but at the last minute it seemed to suddenly remember me and it flew off into the bushes. - -It's nearly the time of year when the permanent avian residents of the Georgia mountains begin to band together. There aren't that many. Most species are off in Mexico or South America by now. Those that remain band together for the winter. You see flocks consisting of Carolina chickadees, tufted titmice, and Carolina wrens, sometimes joined by golden-crowned kinglets, downy woodpeckers, perhaps a nuthatch or two. They join up in Autumn and often, from what I saw back when we lived here, stick together for most of the winter. - - - -But it's not quite cold enough for that yet. These are Carolina wrens, traveling alone, together. Their dark eyes watch me whenever I walk around. If I get too close they scurry away, flutter off under the bus or into the wheel well, but for the most part it feels like I am in their mid-morning snack spot and it's me who should be moving. - -These three were the first time I'd had much encounter with the avian world in a long time. Mockingbirds had ruled in Texas, and I was feeling bad about the summer tanager I'd hit and killed while driving out there. It seemed as if the avians were angry with me, understandably. I dreamed once that a goldfinch was pecking at my finger, biting me until I bled. - -After a few days of the wrens coming through I started to feel like perhaps I was forgiven for that bloody mishap with the tanager. Then one morning I stepped outside at dawn and there was a barred owl not more than ten feet away. - - - -I don't write about them much, but birds have dictated our destinations as much as anything else. If you were to overlay our route [through the Gulf Coast in 2018](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/01/almost-warm) with popular spring migration birding spots, our route might make more sense. We're not [Kenn Kaufman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenn_Kaufman) by any means, but we've been known to be [on St. George Island in April](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/04/migration), maybe [spend summer in the Great Lakes](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/07/trees), and perhaps try for an [early spring in the Chiricauhua region](https://live.luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/01/ghost-cochise). - -My kids have been bird watching since they could stand up. It wasn't something I forced on them, they'd never do it if I'd done that. You can't force things on people, especially kids. If you want to teach your kids something, don't talk about it, do it. Don't tell them what you're doing, just do it. They learn by osmosis and curiosity, not "teaching"[^1]. - - - -Our kids picked up the bird book that was sitting on the coffee table in our old house and started looking at the pictures before they could walk. There's a photo of one of them, still in diapers, the Sibley Guide to Birds spread out before her, thoughtfully tracing her finger down a page of warblers, trying to find one that looks like the bird in a photo a friend's mother had sent us (it was a goldfinch). - - - - - -Our kids know a lot about the natural world because it surrounds them every day and piques their curiosity. They wake up to the sound of birds singing. They point out the shrieks of the red-tailed hawk when it circles overhead in the morning. They note the chickadee and titmouse flock when it comes through not long after that. Every time they go for a walk when I'm working I get a full catalog of interesting birds I missed. Birding by proxy. - -It's not always birds of course. One evening the kids found a meadow vole under the bus, drinking from the tiny puddle of condensation that collects below the air conditioner. I imagine it's busy around that water at night. The vole apparently overstayed and got caught out in the open. The kids dug it some roots and piled them back in the shade, where it could eat, but still keep cool. We stepped in for dinner and when we came back out it had moved on. - -Later, after the kids were in bed, I sat out by the fire, listening as the evening sounds faded back to night sounds. The songbirds fell quiet. The woodpeckers stopped tapping. The whippoorwills started up. Later the deep voice of a great horned owl drifted up from somewhere down by the river below. I thought of the vole. Good luck out there friend. - -[^1]: At least not teaching the way we commonly do it in American schools. General strategies can often be conveyed well (aka, taught) but no one (kids or adults) learns when they aren't interested. And you can't force interest. diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/elberton-county-fair.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/elberton-county-fair.html deleted file mode 100644 index df40d4d..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/elberton-county-fair.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,631 +0,0 @@ - - - - - County Fair - by Scott Gilbertson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
-
- - -
-
- - - -
-
-
-

County Fair

-

Snow cones, rides, horses, and the banana derby

-
-
-

Richard B Russell State Park, Georgia, U.S.

- – Map -
- - -
-
-
-
- - Elberton county fair entrance sign, elberton GA photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

Once, years ago, Wired ran a Christmas wish list in which they asked each of the writers what we would want if we could have anything. I, fresh off the boat from southeast Asia, said: ubiquitous fast internet. These days I nearly have that and spend a good bit of time avoiding it.

-

I have a great fondness for places with no signal, but traveling with modems that connect to all three major U.S wireless carriers means those places are few and far between. Especially east the of the Mississippi. Which is why, when we pulled into to Richard B. Russell state park and discovered there was no cell service, I was caught off guard. It isn’t even remote. It has a golf course. We only came because everything else was booked.

-

I had work to do that afternoon so I did the only thing I could. I got in the car and drove into Elberton, which is how I discovered that the very next day was the opening of the Elberton 12-county Fair. As it says right there on the sign. That’s when I remembered that travel has its own agenda, it bends you to its will as it sees fit. If there had been signal, we’d have never made it to the fair. No fair, no monkeys racing on dogs. No one wants that. So no signal, yes fair.

-
- - Elberton county fair, entrance sign, elberton ga photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

We got there early the next day just after it opened. We sprung for some wrist bands so the kids could ride whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. Then we ran into the height problem — there were far too many rides that not everyone could get on.

-

We managed though. I taught them how to stand up straight and how to walk toward the entrance with the surety of step that says, don’t even think about questioning my height. And it worked with all but one ride operater. Doesn’t matter where you go, there’s always that guy.

-

No matter what the situation, in the United States, there is always someone obsessed with the letter of the law, lacking the creativity to discern the spirit behind it. Or as my daughter put it with some degree of frustration and disgust “in Mexico this would never happen”. Mostly though, we had a blast.

-
- - - riding the merry-go-round elberton county fair photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - riding the merry-go-round elberton county fair photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - girl on a ride elberton county fair photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - whirling ride, elberton county fair photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - - eating snowcones at the fair, elberton, ga photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - eating snowcones at the fair, elberton, ga photographed by luxagraf - - - -
- -

What surprised me was the solidarity. The one who could ride never did if the others could not. And there was no reluctance about it, the nose was very nearly upturned. She would not hear of it even when I encouraged her to go ahead.

-
- - running back for another turn, elberton county fair photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - at the top of the ferris wheel, elberton county fair photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

I have thus far been pretty lucky with aging. It’s rare that I feel my age, but things that spin or swing or whirl? Yeah, I can’t do that anymore. Those spinning swings used to be my favorite as kid too. These days the Ferris wheel is about the speed I can comfortably spin. There’d have been snow cone syrup all over those spinning rides if I’d been on them. The girls loved the spinning swings though.

-
- - view from the top of the ferris wheel, elberton county fair photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - swinging chair ride, elberton county fair photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - swinging chair ride, elberton county fair photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - nascar ride, elberton county fair photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

There was a livestock section at the fair, nowhere near as serious or big as what we saw at the Montezuma County fair back in Colorado, but there were horses to pet at least.

-
- - - - running in a giant barrel at the Elberton County fair photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - farm bureau peanut sign at the fair photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - - girl with horses, elberton county fair photographed by luxagraf - - -
- -

And then there were the monkeys riding dogs. The Banana Derby.

-

“Monkey jockeys” I believe was the phrase.

-
- - monkeys riding dogs, elberton county fair photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

I’m not sure what it is about small town fairs and monkeys, but I’ve seen them on two continents now, so I guess there’s some kind of universal appeal. Personally I find it far too much like rubber necking at an accident scene, but other people seem to like it. And unlike that night in Laos I just linked to, or the chicken chase at the fair in Colorado, this time we have video.

-
- -
-
- -
- - -
- -
-
-
-
You might also enjoy
- -
-
- - - - - -

2 Comments

- - - - - - -
- -
- -
- Jake Igoe - December 25, 2019 at 8:38 p.m. -
- -
- -

Spinning rides, it’s the same with me! I used to take pride is how fast I could get the tilt-a-whirl spinning. Two summers ago, at the age of 40, I rode on it, at the county fair no less, and almost puked! It was, a sad, sad day. I knew my life had changed forever. Oh well, at least I can still do roller coasters.

- -
-
- -
- -
- Scott - December 27, 2019 at 9:18 a.m. -
- -
- -

Jake-

-

I know the feeling. That’s interesting though about roller coasters. It’s been ages since I rode a roller coaster, but somehow I think I’d be fine too. It’s the spinning motion that gets me.

- -
-
- -
- - -
- -
-

Thoughts?

-

Please leave a reply:

-
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- -
-
- - - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
-
-

All comments are moderated, so you won’t see it right away. And please remember Kurt Vonnegut's rule: “god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” You can use Markdown or HTML to format your comments. The allowed tags are <b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <a>. To create a new paragraph hit return twice.

- - -
- -
- - - - -
- - - - - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/elberton-county-fair.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/elberton-county-fair.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 6710ea4..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/10/elberton-county-fair.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,72 +0,0 @@ -County Fair -=========== - - by Scott Gilbertson - - Wednesday, 23 October 2019 - - - -Once, years ago, Wired ran a Christmas wish list in which they asked each of the writers what we would want if we could have anything. I, fresh off the boat from southeast Asia, said: ubiquitous fast internet. These days I nearly have that and spend a good bit of time avoiding it. - -I have a great fondness for places with no signal, but traveling with modems that connect to all three major U.S wireless carriers means those places are few and far between. Especially east the of the Mississippi. Which is why, when we pulled into to Richard B. Russell state park and discovered there was no cell service, I was caught off guard. It isn't even remote. It has a golf course. We only came because everything else was booked. - -I had work to do that afternoon so I did the only thing I could. I got in the car and drove into Elberton, which is how I discovered that the very next day was the opening of the Elberton 12-county Fair. As it says right there on the sign. That's when I remembered that travel has its own agenda, it bends you to its will as it sees fit. If there had been signal, we'd have never made it to the fair. No fair, no monkeys racing on dogs. No one wants that. So no signal, yes fair. - - - -We got there early the next day just after it opened. We sprung for some wrist bands so the kids could ride whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. Then we ran into the height problem -- there were far too many rides that not everyone could get on. - -We managed though. I taught them how to stand up straight and how to walk toward the entrance with the surety of step that says, don't even think about questioning my height. And it worked with all but one ride operater. Doesn't matter where you go, there's always *that guy*. - -No matter what the situation, in the United States, there is always someone obsessed with the letter of the law, lacking the creativity to discern the spirit behind it. Or as my daughter put it with some degree of frustration and disgust "in Mexico this would *never* happen". Mostly though, we had a blast. - -
- - - - - - - - -
- -What surprised me was the solidarity. The one who could ride never did if the others could not. And there was no reluctance about it, the nose was very nearly upturned. She would not hear of it even when I encouraged her to go ahead. - - - - -I have thus far been pretty lucky with aging. It's rare that I feel my age, but things that spin or swing or whirl? Yeah, I can't do that anymore. Those spinning swings used to be my favorite as kid too. These days the Ferris wheel is about the speed I can comfortably spin. There'd have been snow cone syrup all over those spinning rides if I'd been on them. The girls loved the spinning swings though. - - - - - - - -There was a livestock section at the fair, nowhere near as serious or big as what we saw at the [Montezuma County fair back in Colorado](/jrnl/2017/07/mancos-days), but there were horses to pet at least. - -
- - - - - -
- -And then there were the monkeys riding dogs. The Banana Derby. - -"Monkey jockeys" I believe was the phrase. - - - -I'm not sure what it is about [small town fairs and monkeys](/jrnl/2006/02/cant-get-there-here), but I've seen them on two continents now, so I guess there's some kind of universal appeal. Personally I find it far too much like rubber necking at an accident scene, but other people seem to like it. And unlike that night in Laos I just linked to, or [the chicken chase at the fair in Colorado](/jrnl/2017/07/mancos-days), this time we have video. - -
- -
diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/11/halloween-watson-mill.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/11/halloween-watson-mill.html deleted file mode 100644 index 34d68e9..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/11/halloween-watson-mill.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,545 +0,0 @@ - - - - - Halloween - by Scott Gilbertson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
-
- - -
-
- - - -
-
-
-

Halloween

-

Returning to civilization for the candy

-
-
-

Athens, Georgia, U.S.

- – Map -
- - -
-
-
-

Autumn has finally arrived in this part of the world. A series of fronts have been moving through, delivering crisp cold mornings one day and then damp foggy ones the next.

-
- - watson mill bridge in the fog, watson mill state park photographed by Corrinne Gilbertson - -
image by Corrinne Gilbertson
-
- -

One thing I think that’s not obvious to people who don’t live this way is how much more the weather becomes a part of your life. Living in an RV is effectively living outside. And living outside is living with weather.

-

We do have a warm dry place to retreat to when we absolutely need it, for which we’re thankful, but for the most part we stay outdoors, even when it’s wet. That’s what rain boots and jackets are for after all.

-
- - playing in the rain, watson mill state park photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - hiking in the rain, watson mill state park photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - horses sculpted out of fall leaves photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

What an amazing thing to live in the day and age of waterproof clothing. Every time I see the kids out there playing in the rain I’m thankful for warm, rubberized clothing. I don’t image rain is nearly as much fun when the options are cotton, wool, or buckskin.

-
- -

After a few weeks out in the country, we came back to town for Halloween. And by town I mean Watson Mill State Park, which is about 30 minutes outside Athens. We don’t really get much closer than that to towns.

-

In hindsight we should have stayed further away.

-

There was Halloween hayride that more or less ruined Watson Mill for the week. A group that erroneously calls itself the Friends of Watson Mill, takes over the campground every year at Halloween and set up a bunch of cheesy horror movie decorations, flashing lights, and “haunted” sounds. For a few dollars they’ll drag you around in a trailer full of hay pulled behind a tiny, diesel-belching tractor.

-

It should be an innocuous, possibly even fun, thing. But it’s not. The people doing it manage to make it, at best, annoying, more often infuriating. We’ve never camped around a more dour, humorless, and downright rude group of people as the Friends of Watson Mill. They also completely trashed the place. We’ve never seen the campground as big of a mess as these people left it.

-

But we didn’t know any of that was happening when we made our reservation. We just wanted the kids to get a chance to spend Halloween with friends and Watson Mill seemed like the best place to stay while we did that. Thankfully, other than when we walked around the campground, we were mostly able to ignore the haunted hayride decorations.

-

The kids are at the perfect age for Halloween: old enough to think getting candy is the best thing ever, young enough to not worry about anything else. This year I made the mistake of introducing them to the theme song from the original Ghostbusters movie. Weeks later, we’re still listening to it on a daily basis.

-
- - kids in halloween costumes photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - kids at the door of a house, trick-or-treating photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

This Halloween the kids had to work more than usual for their candy. We ended up in a neighborhood where the houses were spread out on giant lots. Sometimes it was nearly a quarter mile from doorbell to doorbell, all which must of course be run at full speed.

-
- - kids trick-or-treating at a house with a very long driveway photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - trick-or-treating photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - trick-or-treating at sunset photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

On the bright side, by the end of the night, everyone was exhausted. The hayride had packed it in the day before, so we came home to blissfully quiet, empty woods. And despite all the candy consumed on the way home, all the running won in the end. Everyone went out like a light.

-
-
- - - -
-
- - -
- -
-
-
-
You might also enjoy
- -
-
- - - - - -
- -
-

Thoughts?

-

Please leave a reply:

-
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- -
-
- - - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
-
-

All comments are moderated, so you won’t see it right away. And please remember Kurt Vonnegut's rule: “god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” You can use Markdown or HTML to format your comments. The allowed tags are <b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <a>. To create a new paragraph hit return twice.

- - -
- -
- - - - -
- - - - - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/11/halloween-watson-mill.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/11/halloween-watson-mill.txt deleted file mode 100644 index d198362..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/11/halloween-watson-mill.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,45 +0,0 @@ -Halloween -========= - - by Scott Gilbertson - - Wednesday, 06 November 2019 - -Autumn has finally arrived in this part of the world. A series of fronts have been moving through, delivering crisp cold mornings one day and then damp foggy ones the next. - - - -One thing I think that's not obvious to people who don't live this way is how much more the weather becomes a part of your life. Living in an RV is effectively living outside. And living outside is living with weather. - -We do have a warm dry place to retreat to when we absolutely need it, for which we're thankful, but for the most part we stay outdoors, even when it's wet. That's what rain boots and jackets are for after all. - - - - - -What an amazing thing to live in the day and age of waterproof clothing. Every time I see the kids out there playing in the rain I'm thankful for warm, rubberized clothing. I don't image rain is nearly as much fun when the options are cotton, wool, or buckskin. - -
- -After a few weeks out in the country, we came back to town for Halloween. And by town I mean Watson Mill State Park, which is about 30 minutes outside Athens. We don't really get much closer than that to towns. - -In hindsight we should have stayed further away. - -There was Halloween hayride that more or less ruined Watson Mill for the week. A group that erroneously calls itself the Friends of Watson Mill, takes over the campground every year at Halloween and set up a bunch of cheesy horror movie decorations, flashing lights, and "haunted" sounds. For a few dollars they'll drag you around in a trailer full of hay pulled behind a tiny, diesel-belching tractor. - -It should be an innocuous, possibly even fun, thing. But it's not. The people doing it manage to make it, at best, annoying, more often infuriating. We've never camped around a more dour, humorless, and downright rude group of people as the Friends of Watson Mill. They also completely trashed the place. We've never seen the campground as big of a mess as these people left it. - -But we didn't know any of that was happening when we made our reservation. We just wanted the kids to get a chance to spend Halloween with friends and Watson Mill seemed like the best place to stay while we did that. Thankfully, other than when we walked around the campground, we were mostly able to ignore the haunted hayride decorations. - -The kids are at the perfect age for Halloween: old enough to think getting candy is the best thing ever, young enough to not worry about anything else. This year I made the mistake of introducing them to the theme song from the original Ghostbusters movie. Weeks later, we're still listening to it on a daily basis. - - - - -This Halloween the kids had to work more than usual for their candy. We ended up in a neighborhood where the houses were spread out on giant lots. Sometimes it was nearly a quarter mile from doorbell to doorbell, all which must of course be run at full speed. - - - - - -On the bright side, by the end of the night, everyone was exhausted. The hayride had packed it in the day before, so we came home to blissfully quiet, empty woods. And despite all the candy consumed on the way home, all the running won in the end. Everyone went out like a light. diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/11/land.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/11/land.html deleted file mode 100644 index 38c64fe..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/11/land.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,647 +0,0 @@ - - - - - Land - by Scott Gilbertson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
-
- - -
-
- - - -
-
-
-

Land

-

Living things inside the living thing

-
-
-

Watson Mill State Park, Georgia, U.S.

- – Map -
- - -
-
-
-

Out here the land is always present in you. The smell of wet leaves in your nose after a rain. The glittery glare of stream water in the noonday sun in your eye. The sharp crack of a twig breaking under foot. The grit of fresh soil under your nails. The silence of snow pressing in on your ears.

-
- - bright orange maple tree, fall colors photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - close up of bright orange leaves, fall colors photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

The land is everywhere around you, in you. You come out here and you find it again. Right where it always was.

-

Land reciprocates. The deeper you go, the more it reaches out to you, into you. The more you become part of the land, the world, the more it becomes part of you. It’s a simple truth I suspect good gardeners, farmers, anyone still living in the land knows well.

-
- - mossy green tree stump and log photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

The land is how we locate ourselves, our past, our present, how we measure the scale of ourselves in the world. We lose touch without the landscape to remind us. The land operates on a different scale. Some of the trees near me right now were seedlings during the civil war. The rocks record forgotten dreams of yesterday’s creatures. The land turns us all back into land eventually.

-

Let the land define your scale and your sense of the world enlarges. The way you see yourself within the world changes. Not in a reasoned, philosophical sense, but in a lived, experienced sense.

-
- - girl in a red coat, small figure lost in forest photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - orange flames of campfire in the night photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

It envelopes you slowly and subtly. At first you hardly notice. But then you notice things. You begin to sense the rhythms of the land. Your body soon knows when the sun rises. The hour of the day becomes less a number, more a quality of light. You notice the phase of the moon, where it is in the sky, when it rises, when it sets. Soon you know without thinking which way is east.

-

None of these are things I set out to learn. They are simply things I have come to know. Extra dimensions of experience that were always there, but in the background. They are not the background of the story though, they are the story.

-

I wish I could claim that this all dawned on me, or came to me in some profound way, but it did not. It was gradual. So gradual I can’t even go back and trace the path of thoughts that led me here, or even find an origin. It arrived so slowly and subtly it felt as if it were something I had always known. So obvious in hindsight it’s now impossible to imagine a time when I did not think this way. And I don’t think twice about any of it, until I brush up against those for whom these things are not so much a part of daily life.

-
- - flock of birds in the sky photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - children with buckets by the riverside, athens, ga photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - exploring the river, athens, ga photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

I try to keep it in check around others. It feels like censoring myself, like I am holding back key elements of the story by leaving out all these details, but I also think it’s the polite thing to do. I do not like to impose my world on anyone. It is okay to do here, you came here of your own free will. You can easily leave here of you own free will and I will never know. But I do not usually speak of these things in person.

-

Still, I would be lying if I said I am the same person who drove out of Athens three years ago. And I’m not sure that the experiences that lie between then and now are the reason. The more time I spend thinking on it, the more I think it is not me at all. It is this land. It is this world, what is left of it, that reached out and grabbed me in ways I was not expecting.

-
- - - forested hill, fall, bare trees and brown leaves photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - - orange mushroom growing on the forest floor photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - three children sitting on a fallen tree photographed by luxagraf - - - -
- -

As I told someone the other day, it’s all good and well to go out in the woods, but one day you’ll realize you’re not talking to the trees, you’re listening to them. And once that door swings open, there is no closing it. Once you see the world this way you cannot unsee it. It stays with you, it is part of you.

-
-
- - - - -
-
- - -
- -
-
-
-
You might also enjoy
- -
-
- - - - - -

3 Comments

- - - - - - -
- -
- -
- Gwen - December 30, 2019 at 8:31 p.m. -
- -
- -

Have you read any Wendell Berry? It seems like you would appreciate him.

- -
-
- -
- -
- Scott - December 31, 2019 at 10:44 a.m. -
- -
- -

Gwen-

-

Not really. I read some essays once upon a time in college, but I don’t remember anything really. I will put him on the list for the new year, thanks.

- -
-
- -
- -
- DREW ELDRIDGE - January 29, 2020 at 2:59 p.m. -
- -
- -

My favorite passage so far.

- -
-
- -
- - -
- -
-

Thoughts?

-

Please leave a reply:

-
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- -
-
- - - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
-
-

All comments are moderated, so you won’t see it right away. And please remember Kurt Vonnegut's rule: “god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” You can use Markdown or HTML to format your comments. The allowed tags are <b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <a>. To create a new paragraph hit return twice.

- - -
- -
- - - - -
- - - - - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/11/land.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/11/land.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 9892f06..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/11/land.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,48 +0,0 @@ -Land -==== - - by Scott Gilbertson - - Wednesday, 13 November 2019 - -Out here the land is always present in you. The smell of wet leaves in your nose after a rain. The glittery glare of stream water in the noonday sun in your eye. The sharp crack of a twig breaking under foot. The grit of fresh soil under your nails. The silence of snow pressing in on your ears. - - - - -The land is everywhere around you, in you. You come out here and you find it again. Right where it always was. - -Land reciprocates. The deeper you go, the more it reaches out to you, into you. The more you become part of the land, the world, the more it becomes part of you. It's a simple truth I suspect good gardeners, farmers, anyone still living in the land knows well. - - - -The land is how we locate ourselves, our past, our present, how we measure the scale of ourselves in the world. We lose touch without the landscape to remind us. The land operates on a different scale. Some of the trees near me right now were seedlings during the civil war. The rocks record forgotten dreams of yesterday's creatures. The land turns us all back into land eventually. - -Let the land define your scale and your sense of the world enlarges. The way you see yourself within the world changes. Not in a reasoned, philosophical sense, but in a lived, experienced sense. - - - - -It envelopes you slowly and subtly. At first you hardly notice. But then you notice things. You begin to sense the rhythms of the land. Your body soon knows when the sun rises. The hour of the day becomes less a number, more a quality of light. You notice the phase of the moon, where it is in the sky, when it rises, when it sets. Soon you know without thinking which way is east. - -None of these are things I set out to learn. They are simply things I have come to know. Extra dimensions of experience that were always there, but in the background. They are not the background of the story though, they are the story. - -I wish I could claim that this all dawned on me, or came to me in some profound way, but it did not. It was gradual. So gradual I can't even go back and trace the path of thoughts that led me here, or even find an origin. It arrived so slowly and subtly it felt as if it were something I had always known. So obvious in hindsight it's now impossible to imagine a time when I did not think this way. And I don't think twice about any of it, until I brush up against those for whom these things are not so much a part of daily life. - - - - - -I try to keep it in check around others. It feels like censoring myself, like I am holding back key elements of the story by leaving out all these details, but I also think it's the polite thing to do. I do not like to impose my world on anyone. It is okay to do here, you came here of your own free will. You can easily leave here of you own free will and I will never know. But I do not usually speak of these things in person. - -Still, I would be lying if I said I am the same person who drove out of Athens three years ago. And I'm not sure that the experiences that lie between then and now are the reason. The more time I spend thinking on it, the more I think it is not me at all. It is this land. It is this world, what is left of it, that reached out and grabbed me in ways I was not expecting. - -
- - - - - -
- -As I told someone the other day, it's all good and well to go out in the woods, but one day you'll realize you're not talking to the trees, you're listening to them. And once that door swings open, there is no closing it. Once you see the world this way you cannot unsee it. It stays with you, it is part of you. diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/12/birthday-beach.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/12/birthday-beach.html deleted file mode 100644 index 0390a70..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/12/birthday-beach.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,635 +0,0 @@ - - - - - Birthday At The Beach - by Scott Gilbertson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
-
- - -
-
- - - -
-
-
-

Birthday at the Beach

-

It wasn’t especially warm, but we made it back to the coast

-
-
-

Edisto Island, South Carolina, U.S.

- – Map -
- - -
-
-
-

Last year I promised Elliott that he and I would have our birthday at the beach, and we did.

-
- - playing at the beach photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

But next year I’m upping the specificity: we’re going to have our birthday at a beach where it’s warm.

-

Not that I’m complaining. Cold beaches beat no beaches any day. And a couple days after our birthday it warmed up and we had a week of great, relatively warm, weather.

-

The birthday celebrations started dark and early. Elliott was out of bed and asking to open presents at 5:30 in the morning.

-
- - - starting in on the birthday presents before the sun was even up photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - - opening presents birthday morning photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - birthday boy opening foam glider planes photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - - new red baseball hat photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - opening birthday gifts photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - birthday boy putting together lego photographed by luxagraf - - -
- -

After some breakfast it warmed up enough to get outside and play. And there was one more present waiting outdoors.

-
- - - kids throwing foam airplanes photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - throwing foam gliders photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - birthday boy playing photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - - birthday boy opening his new bike photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - birthday boy on his new yellow bike photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - - practicing riding new bike photographed by luxagraf - - -
- -

The most played with item of the day was… the cardboard box the bike came in. It was a raft, a houseboat, and several other things I wasn’t allowed to know. For all the plastic in the world, it’s been my observation that kids are best entertained with cardboard, sticks, mud, and the occasional bit of rope or twine.

-
- - playing with a cardboard box (they made it a raft) photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - playing on a box photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

It wouldn’t be a birthday without a pinata. As happened last year there was nothing around to string it up with so we just stuck it on the end of a stick and hoped for the best. Two years running with no injuries is probably pushing it.

-
- - - birthday boy taking a swing at the pinata photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - - birthday pinata photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - swinging stick at pinata photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - - blowing out the birthday candles photographed by luxagraf - - -
- -

After plenty of cake — and no, it was not waffle cake this time around — we headed down to the beach to burn off some sugar-driven energy. It may not have been all that warm, but there’s pretty much no such thing as a bad day at the beach.

-
- - running on the beach photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - playing at the beach photographed by luxagraf - -
-
-
- - - -
-
- - -
- -
-
-
-
You might also enjoy
- -
-
- - - - - -
- -
-

Thoughts?

-

Please leave a reply:

-
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- -
-
- - - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
-
-

All comments are moderated, so you won’t see it right away. And please remember Kurt Vonnegut's rule: “god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” You can use Markdown or HTML to format your comments. The allowed tags are <b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <a>. To create a new paragraph hit return twice.

- - -
- -
- - - - -
- - - - - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/12/birthday-beach.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/12/birthday-beach.txt deleted file mode 100644 index ab63ae6..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/12/birthday-beach.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,62 +0,0 @@ -Birthday at the Beach -===================== - - by Scott Gilbertson - - Sunday, 22 December 2019 - -Last year I promised Elliott that he and I would have our birthday at the beach, and we did. - - - -But next year I'm upping the specificity: we're going to have our birthday at a beach *where it's warm*. - -Not that I'm complaining. Cold beaches beat no beaches any day. And a couple days after our birthday it warmed up and we had a week of great, relatively warm, weather. - -The birthday celebrations started dark and early. Elliott was out of bed and asking to open presents at 5:30 in the morning. - -
- - - - - - - - -
- -After some breakfast it warmed up enough to get outside and play. And there was one more present waiting outdoors. - -
- - - - - - - - -
- -The most played with item of the day was... the cardboard box the bike came in. It was a raft, a houseboat, and several other things I wasn't allowed to know. For all the plastic in the world, it's been my observation that kids are best entertained with cardboard, sticks, mud, and the occasional bit of rope or twine. - - - - - -It wouldn't be a birthday without a pinata. As happened [last year](/jrnl/2018/12/four) there was nothing around to string it up with so we just stuck it on the end of a stick and hoped for the best. Two years running with no injuries is probably pushing it. - -
- - - - - - -
- -After plenty of cake -- and no, it was not [waffle cake](/essay/waffle-world) this time around -- we headed down to the beach to burn off some sugar-driven energy. It may not have been all that warm, but there's pretty much no such thing as a bad day at the beach. - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/12/holiday-island.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/12/holiday-island.html deleted file mode 100644 index 31f21c4..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/12/holiday-island.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,656 +0,0 @@ - - - - - Holiday Island - by Scott Gilbertson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
-
- - -
-
- - - -
-
-
-

Holiday Island

-

Christmas at the beach

-
-
-

Edisto Island, South Carolina, U.S.

- – Map -
- - -
-
-
-

It rained pretty much all day for a couple days. We spent way too much time indoors. Thankfully there were a lot of recent birthday gifts to keep the kids occupied.

-

We considered giving the kids their new rain boots a few days early, but the nice thing about storms in South Carolina is that even at Christmas, it’s warm enough for flipflops.

-
- - kids splashing in the rain, edisto state park, south carolina photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

The rain let up the day before Christmas. The wind and cold came in behind the storm, but it wasn’t bad enough to keep us off the beach. Looking at our kids you’d never know it was cold. They’d have been swimming if we’d let them. And we would have let them if the surf wasn’t so rough. They settled for running around at the shoreline exploring all the treasure the storm brought ashore.

-
- - Edisto beach, storm clouds in the distance photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - horseshoe crab shell in the sand, edisto beach photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - kids playing on the beach at sunset, stormy skies photographed by luxagraf - -
- -

Some friends of ours come to Edisto for Christmas every year. When they found out we were going to be in the area as well, they invited us over for some cookie decorating on Christmas eve. It was kid sugar heaven.

-

Normally this is the sort of thing I like to do early in the day and then take the kids out somewhere and let them run off the sugar. I was surprised at their restraint though. They went over the top decorating cookies, but they didn’t eating them. I mean they ate their fill, but their fill turned out to not be very many. I’d have eaten the lot and been sick.

-
- - - eating christmas eve cookies photographed by luxagraf - - - - - -
- - eating an over decorated cookie photographed by luxagraf -
I think she made it through about two bites and then it was too much.
-
- - - - -
- - over decorated christmas cookie photographed by luxagraf -
All the usual toppings: frosting, heart shaped sprinkles, marshmellows, Skittles, and chicletts.
-
- - - -
- -

I’m sure anyone with kids can say the same, but Christmas started before dawn. I never realized it until I had kids, but stockings aren’t about gifts, they’re about stalling the main present opening long enough to make some coffee. And monkey bread. Coffee is even better with monkey bread.

-

My favorite part of Christmas, or any other time there’s gifts being given, is watching the kids give each other gifts. They have the same look of anticipation and excitement watching someone open a gift they’ve carefully picked out as they do getting something themselves. It’s impossible to strip the gross face of consumer culture from Christmas at this point, but there’s these little moments like this, the honest enthusiasm of giving and sharing, where I can see what it must have once been like, not all that long ago.

-
- - - kids opening christmas presents photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - thank you hugs after opening christmas presents photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - kids holding up magnifying glass photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - - playing the christmas ukellele photographed by luxagraf - - - - - - looking a shells through a magnifying glass photographed by luxagraf - - - -
- -

After Christmas it was back to the beach to see what new treasures had come ashore. The sea is a little like Santa Claus. But real.

-
- - searching the shore for sharks teeth. photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - Walking the shoreline at low tide photographed by luxagraf - -
- -
- - starfish on the sand photographed by luxagraf - -
-
-
- - - -
-
- - -
- -
-
-
-
You might also enjoy
- -
-
- - - - - -

2 Comments

- - - - - - -
- -
- -
- Patty Hahn - January 23, 2020 at 5:59 p.m. -
- -
- -

so interesting. Good writing! Kids are

- -
-
- -
- -
- DREW ELDRIDGE - January 29, 2020 at 3:04 p.m. -
- -
- -

Have the kids figured out what they should and should not burn with the magnifying glasses :)

- -
-
- -
- - -
- -
-

Thoughts?

-

Please leave a reply:

-
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- - -
- - - -
- -
-
- - - -
- - -
- - -
- - -
-
-

All comments are moderated, so you won’t see it right away. And please remember Kurt Vonnegut's rule: “god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” You can use Markdown or HTML to format your comments. The allowed tags are <b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <a>. To create a new paragraph hit return twice.

- - -
- -
- - - - -
- - - - - - - diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/12/holiday-island.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/12/holiday-island.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 97ae70f..0000000 --- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2019/12/holiday-island.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,50 +0,0 @@ -Holiday Island -============== - - by Scott Gilbertson - - Tuesday, 31 December 2019 - -It rained pretty much all day for a couple days. We spent way too much time indoors. Thankfully there were a lot of recent birthday gifts to keep the kids occupied. - -We considered giving the kids their new rain boots a few days early, but the nice thing about storms in South Carolina is that even at Christmas, it's warm enough for flipflops. - - - -The rain let up the day before Christmas. The wind and cold came in behind the storm, but it wasn't bad enough to keep us off the beach. Looking at our kids you'd never know it was cold. They'd have been swimming if we'd let them. And we would have let them if the surf wasn't so rough. They settled for running around at the shoreline exploring all the treasure the storm brought ashore. - - - - - -Some friends of ours come to Edisto for Christmas every year. When they found out we were going to be in the area as well, they invited us over for some cookie decorating on Christmas eve. It was kid sugar heaven. - -Normally this is the sort of thing I like to do early in the day and then take the kids out somewhere and let them run off the sugar. I was surprised at their restraint though. They went over the top decorating cookies, but they didn't eating them. I mean they ate their fill, but their fill turned out to not be very many. I'd have eaten the lot and been sick. - -
- - - - - -
- -I'm sure anyone with kids can say the same, but Christmas started before dawn. I never realized it until I had kids, but stockings aren't about gifts, they're about stalling the main present opening long enough to make some coffee. And monkey bread. Coffee is even better with monkey bread. - -My favorite part of Christmas, or any other time there's gifts being given, is watching the kids give each other gifts. They have the same look of anticipation and excitement watching someone open a gift they've carefully picked out as they do getting something themselves. It's impossible to strip the gross face of consumer culture from Christmas at this point, but there's these little moments like this, the honest enthusiasm of giving and sharing, where I can see what it must have once been like, not all that long ago. - -
- - - - - - - -
- -After Christmas it was back to the beach to see what new treasures had come ashore. The sea is a little like Santa Claus. But real. - - - - -- cgit v1.2.3-70-g09d2