cleaned up dir

8 files changed, 153 insertions, 56 deletions

diff --git a/bus-todo.txt b/bus-todo.txt
index 2319b7f..8b256e9 100644
--- a/bus-todo.txt
+++ b/bus-todo.txt
@@ -1,14 +1,13 @@
-To BUY:
+inside:
+    fix molding around dinette
+    fix trim around steering column
 
-water tank $650
 
-solar:
-    mmpt controller
-    2 x 200w panels
-    12v battery
-    battery isolator
 
-Finish bus engine:
+engine:
     new tailpipe and muffler
     suspension feels sloppy
+    rebuild carb
+    flush block
+    new shocks
 
diff --git a/canyon-of-the-ancients.txt b/canyon-of-the-ancients.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..481879f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/canyon-of-the-ancients.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,38 @@
+I spend more time than is strictly necessary staring at maps. I have since I was a kid. I used to drag my dad to a map store just to buy 7.5 topo sheets of the High Sierras and desert around southern California. 
+
+I like maps, especially blank spots on maps and in the United States there are very few places with as many blank spots as the four corners region of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona. One of the relative blank spots I kept staring at was something called Canyon of the Ancients. After our disappoint experience with Mesa Verde we were anxious to get back to some ruins that were less crowded and I felt like Canyon of the Ancients was a good place to start. Looking up reviews on the web got me tons of negative reviews from people complaining about the lack of signage, getting lost and never seeing anything but private farmland. Perfect.
+
+We started at a museum up in Dolores CO, which exists mostly because in the mid 1980s this area decided it need a reservoir. The problem with filling in a canyon around here is that you're filling in 2000 years of archaeological treasures. They found so much pottery here that (according to some locals we talked to) the museum put most of it in burlap sacks and smashed them to fit in drawers. Keep that in mind next time you think archaeologists are the best preservers of the past. Personally I'd rather have those pots on someone's mantel than smashed in a drawer. The rest of us will never see it either way, might as well let at least one person enjoy it.
+
+I didn't actually know this tidbit when we were at the museum so I was able to enjoy it. It had a good bit of interactive stuff. The kids got to grind some corn, which made me incredibly happy we don't have to do that these days. Though of course, at the rate we're going I would not at all be surprised if we're back to grinding corn before my grandchildren grow old.
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-08-01_114616_canyon-of-the-ancients.jpg" id="image-714" class="picwide" />
+
+The main purpose of stopping at the museum though was to get some better maps of the area, which we did. We decided to go to the best preserved ruin first, which was nice enough, but metal reinforcements and the rest of the modern structural work necessary to stabilize an excavated ruin are, to my mind, distracting (but necessary, I get it).
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-08-01_130613_canyon-of-the-ancients.jpg" id="image-715" class="picwide" />
+
+After that the kids were tired of driving around so we headed back to Mancos.
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-08-01_141900_canyon-of-the-ancients.jpg" id="image-716" class="picwide caption" />
+
+But then Corrinne and I changed our minds and decided we'd go see one other pueblo, known as Sand Canyon. 
+
+After winding through a bizarre patchwork of private and public lands we finally found a tiny turnout with an even tinier sign. We tucked some water in our packs and hit the short trail. Unlike most ruins we'd been to, Sand Canyon was reburied after it was excavated back in the 1960s (if you want something to last out here, you don't leave it exposed to the elements, you rebury it and leave it like you found it). Instead of walking through buildings and rooms as we did in Chaco, in Sand Canyon you step over vaguely defined walls and crumbs of stones, a bit like my favorite ruin in southeast asia -- Beng Melea, which is about two hours north of the rest of Angkor Wat and still mostly just a bunch of stone in the jungle. There's no jungle in Sand Canyon, but the juniper, prickly pear and rice grass -- all of which the kids pointed out, unprompted, as we hiked, so perhaps Mesa Verde was not a total loss -- fill the same roll.
+
+Sand Canyon sits on the edge of a juniper strewn mesa with a short trail that winds through it and eventually down that canyon. The pueblo itself was one of the largest in the area, bigger than anything in Mesa Verde. Just about 800 years ago roughly 725 people lived on the edge of this mesa in a singular walled structure. There were 420 rooms, 90 kivas and 14 towers. A spring used to run right through the middle of it, though it didn't have any water when we were there. There were roofed plazas, kivas connected to towers and some other oddities. Although it doesn't fit with the park service narrative and therefore wasn't on any of the signs, in 1290 41 women men and children were massacred here and if anyone survived they moved on. No one has lived here since.
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-08-01_150613_canyon-of-the-ancients.jpg" id="image-717" class="picwide caption" />
+
+We wandered around, trying to piece together the structure of things based on the shape of rocks piled here in there in might have been patterns. It's tough to trust your brain when it comes to patterns though, it'll see patterns where there are none. Or perhaps patters that aren't the ones you're looking for. Still, we picked out a few kivas and what a sign said was the outer wall. We found potsherds. And then we put them back in the ground. 
+
+Unlike Chaco this location made sense -- there was a commanding view of the canyon and a spring running right through the middle of what became the city. Anyone passing through the area would want to stay here. And a lot of people did pass through here. Over 6,000 sites have been recorded in the area Canyon of the Ancients covers and the best guess is that there are plenty more out there waiting to be found.  
+
+Even if you don't head off into the desert in search of some new ruin -- it's worth bearing in mind that not officially recorded is very different than undiscovered -- there's plenty to find here. All the kids found their own potsherds, including the biggest piece we've found yet.
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-08-01_152352_canyon-of-the-ancients.jpg" id="image-719" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-08-01_152431_canyon-of-the-ancients.jpg" id="image-720" class="picwide" />
+
+Eventually the heat and the stillness got to us and we headed back to the car for more water. One the way we detoured up to the high point of the mesa overlooking the canyon. We made a stab at a group picture, but mostly we just sat there awhile, listening to the silence of the desert and ruins.
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-08-01_152017_canyon-of-the-ancients.jpg" id="image-718" class="picwide caption" />
diff --git a/durango2.txt b/durango2.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index e9a8937..0000000
--- a/durango2.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,31 +0,0 @@
-Every evening around 5 the thunder starts in. You could set your watch by it. Except that there's no need for a watch up here. 
-
-This evening the thunder gods have conspired to produce something a little extra. Thor is pounding a little harder, Zeus throwing a little more than usual, flash and the rolling peel of sound dying off to the east, down the mountain side. 
-
-Around here they call this the start of the monsoon season. The rain comes soft and steady, the kind that leaves no puddles here in the forest, much to my children's disappointment. Here all the water is captured by something, held in a bed of rotting needles, leaves, and the roots of rice grass, false oats and mountain parsley. Then lower down the roots of gambel oak and snow willows grab what they can, and finally somewhere deeper still, up to 12 meters down, the Ponderosa pine roots and their atendant webs of fungi get what's left. 
-
-Nothing remains on the surface of things. 
-
-It is easy here to sink into the soil and disappear for a while, everything here is doing it, you are too. 
-
-The valley wall opposite our camp has disappeared in a rainy mist of gray white nothingness. The light is fading prematurely, leaving a shadowless forest where darkness fades in rather than falling like a shadow. It is silence save the soft pelting of rain and the call and response of two hardy wood peewees, seemingly unfazed by the storm. 
-
-And then some storm god throws another bolt and the silence is blasted apart.
-
-I am sitting here listening to the rain, feeling the pace of my chair sinking into the soil. It is a slow but steady rain, a slow but steady sinking. 
-
-I am listening to the rain because that is what you do when it rains.
-
-In every place the rain sounds different. 
-
-The rain that reaches down here does not do so directly, not much of it anyway. Most of it has hit at least one, probably hundreds, of pine needles on its way to the earth. These drops are small and soft because they have been broken up on their way down. By the time they hit the ground they are more alike than different, every drop having been similarly, but differently bounced through the pine canopy. The result is a steady even sound, broken up by the rougher splatter of rain coming through a gap in the canopy to land on oak leaves, or the split wood of the picnic table, or the roof of the bus.
-
-Somewhere out there is a forest. It's too dark now to see more than a few feet in front of me. There are two trees at the edge of what faint light the moon offers, locked away somewhere behind cloud. There's just enough glow that I can still make out the roughness of the tree bark and the curve of their trunks hint at the vastness of space behind them. Here next to the trunks the ground is still dry, whatever water has made it through the canopy is already down below the surface of the needles I'm lying on, staring up, trying to see the branches coming together above me.
-
-When you lie on your back and stare up at the trees running together up into the vastness of space and you can feel the planet spinning through the heavens and smell the warm fecundity of the soil, all the billons of microbes you're lying on churning their way through the seemingly endless supply of organic material of the forest, one day you. 
-
-You can feel that vastness of existence and the minute intimacy of existence at the same time here in the forest. And it is impossible to tease apart all the links between everything micro and macro, do not even try. In one way you are you, the you you experience, in another you are the joining together of cells of that found it advantageous to become parts of a whole rather than go it alone -- which one is you? That's the wrong question. Know that all of this is you. All those solitary cells within you are now too specialized to survive without the rest of you, they gave up their individuality to all you to exist. As has already been pointed out, hundreds if not thousands of years before we had the language of microbes and devil of the details by the tail, the wiser among realized that the biggest thing is in the smallest thing. 
-
-I think this is one of the principle realizations travel unfolds for you -- that there is no other. You are a part of a whole, interconnected and joined far more intimately to everything around you than you could ever hope to understand, though sometimes when you travel you feel it. You feel it when you are still somewhere for a while and start to sink into the soil. At the same time all is alien, your own 
-
-[^1]: I can only assume no one around here has ever been in a real monsoon, because while it does rain a little more, it's hardly what most of the world would call a monsoon.
diff --git a/mancos-mesa.txt b/mancos-mesa.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 6d6c124..0000000
--- a/mancos-mesa.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,17 +0,0 @@
-Stay anywhere to long and things start to settle in too much. The bus was made to move, it's fluids pool, metal rusts, wood decays, everything, as AKe put it, is falling apart. Everything, all the time. Stay too long and the world will settle down on you. The chipmunks will come for your avocados. I'm from California, messing with my avocados is messing with my emotions, I don't care if you're cute and striped.
-
-So we pulled out of Junction Creeks for a few days, headed up over the pass to the west, to Mancos and points beyond. We found a nice enough campground, nearly deserted and only wanting for a little quiet -- it was up on a hill above the highway and the sound of the road was at times annoying. Aside from that though it was much better than Junction Creek. Fewer people and Mancos was much more my speed than Durango.
-
-Mancos consists of one stop light and two paved roads. Or partly paved roads. The rest is dirt and hardly even a stop sign to be found. Still, there's a decent grocery store, a pretty good sandwich shop and a coffee roaster with the best double espresso I've had since we left Athens. There's also a Library with passable internet speeds that I could work at.
-
-Mancos is also only about 20 minutes from the entrance to Mesa Verde National Park. 
-
-I knew that after Chaco Canyon Mesa Verde was going to be a let down. You just can't have crowds and retain the stillness and mystery that Chaco has. I feel strange criticizing a place for it's crowds because on the one hand if no one is going to our National Parks no one is going to fight for them to continue existing. Still, I did not enjoy Mesa Verde. I am glad that it draws crowds, glad that people are out there visiting natinal parks and I'm glad they aren't going to Chaco.
-
-If you know me you know I'd sooner chew my leg off than go on a guided tour. And Mesa Verde is all guided tours, you don't go into the big ruins by yourself anymore. You get a nanny. That's not for us really so we skipped that part and went to the one smaller ruin you can still explore (somewhat) on your own. It was a nice stroll. It was funny to hear the rangers questioning whether our kids could do it, it was less than a mile and only 300 feet elevation change. The trail was paved. It's sad that we've created a world where it's considered amazing for five year olds to walk a mile on asphalt.
-
-We left after lunch.
-
-Camp was more to our liking, the kids built obstacle courses, made bees out of pine cones and looked up whenever the thunder rumbled up above, somewhere high in the San Juans because after a month here they've learned that the storms come out of the high country.
-
-In the evenings we sat around the fire and listened to the nighthawks darting after food between the pines overhead. This is the Western slope of the Rockies, less water, fewer pines, more oak, more stars to backlight the silhouettes of Ponderosa needles scratching at the wind.
diff --git a/dallas.txt b/published/2017-06-07_dallas.txt
index 4ebe7fe..4ebe7fe 100644
--- a/dallas.txt
+++ b/published/2017-06-07_dallas.txt
diff --git a/published/2017-07-17_mancos-and-mesa-verde.txt b/published/2017-07-17_mancos-and-mesa-verde.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5847690
--- /dev/null
+++ b/published/2017-07-17_mancos-and-mesa-verde.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,36 @@
+Stay anywhere to long and things start to settle in too much. The bus was made to move, its fluids pool, metal rusts, wood decays, the windows smear with dirt and rain, as Chinua Achebe put it, things fall apart. Everything. All the time. Stay too long and the world will settle down on you. The tires will lose air, the chipmunks will come for the avocados. I'm from California, messing with my avocados is messing with my emotions, I don't care if you're cute and striped.
+
+So we shook off the cobwebs, pulled out of Junction Creek for a few days, and headed up over the pass to the west, to Mancos and points beyond. 
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-15_162643-1_mancos-mesa-verde.jpg" id="image-697" class="picwide caption" />
+
+We found a nice enough campground, nearly deserted. The only downside was a little road noise -- it was up on a hill above the highway and the sound of truck engine brakes was at times annoying. Aside from that though it was much better than Junction Creek. Fewer people and Mancos was much more my speed than Durango.
+
+Mancos consists of one stop light and two paved roads. Or partly paved roads. The rest is dirt and hardly even a stop sign to be found. Still, there's a decent grocery store, a pretty good sandwich shop and a coffee roaster with the best double espresso I've had since we left Athens. There's also a library with passable internet speeds that I could work at.
+
+Mancos is also only about 20 minutes from the entrance to Mesa Verde National Park. 
+
+I knew that after Chaco Canyon Mesa Verde was going to be a let down. You just can't have crowds and retain the stillness and mystery that Chaco has. I feel strange criticizing a place for it's crowds because on the one hand if no one is going to our National Parks no one is going to fight for them to continue existing. Still, I did not enjoy Mesa Verde. I am glad that it draws crowds, glad that people are out there visiting natinal parks and I'm glad they aren't going to Chaco.
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-17_122428_mancos-mesa-verde.jpg" id="image-700" class="picwide" />
+
+
+If you know me you know I'd sooner chew my leg off than go on a guided tour. And Mesa Verde is all guided tours, you don't go into the big ruins by yourself anymore. You get a nanny. That's not for us really so we skipped that part and went to the one smaller ruin you can still explore (somewhat) on your own. 
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-17_123232_mancos-mesa-verde.jpg" id="image-701" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-17_123659-1_mancos-mesa-verde.jpg" id="image-702" class="picwide" />
+
+It was a nice stroll. It was funny to hear the rangers questioning whether our kids could do it, it was less than a mile and only 300 feet elevation change. The trail was paved. It's sad that we've created a world where it's considered amazing for five year olds to walk a mile on asphalt.
+
+We left after lunch.
+
+Just hanging around camp was more to our liking. The kids built obstacle courses, made bees out of pine cones and looked up whenever the thunder rumbled up above, somewhere high in the San Juans because after a month here they've learned that the storms come out of the high country.
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-12_181825_mancos-mesa-verde.jpg" id="image-695" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-15_084210_mancos-mesa-verde.jpg" id="image-696" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-16_144635_mancos-mesa-verde.jpg" id="image-699" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-15_193426-1_mancos-mesa-verde.jpg" id="image-698" class="picwide caption" />
+
+
+
+In the evenings we sat around the fire and listened to the nighthawks darting after food between the pines overhead. This is the Western slope of the Rockies, less water, fewer pines, more oaks, more stars to backlight the silhouettes of Ponderosa needles scratching at the wind.
diff --git a/published/2017-07-24_time-and-placement.txt b/published/2017-07-24_time-and-placement.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..07bae0d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/published/2017-07-24_time-and-placement.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,42 @@
+Every evening around 5 the thunder starts in. You could set your watch by it. Except that there's no need for a watch up here. 
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-24_211753_durango-parents.jpg" id="image-693" class="picwide" />
+
+The way it cracks high and seems to cascade down the mountains reminds me of Greek or Norse stories, the sound feels thrown by some unseen thing. This evening those thunder gods, whomever they may be, have conspired to produce something a little extra. Thor is pounding a little harder, Zeus throwing a little more than usual. A flash and then seconds later a rolling peel of sound the echoes off to the east, down the mountain side. 
+
+Around here they call this the start of the monsoon season[^1]. The rain comes soft and steady, the kind that leaves no puddles here in the forest, much to my children's disappointment. Here all the water is captured by something, held in a bed of rotting needles, leaves, and the roots of rice grass, false oats and mountain parsley. What little makes it lower ends up in the roots of gambel oak and snow willows, and finally somewhere deeper still, up to 12 meters down, the ponderosa pine roots and their attendant webs of fungi get what's left. 
+
+Nothing remains on the surface of things. 
+
+It is easy here to sink into the soil and disappear for a while, everything here is doing it, you are too. 
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-24_212533-2_durango-parents.jpg" id="image-694" class="picwide" />
+
+The valley wall opposite our camp has disappeared in a rainy mist of blue gray nothingness. The light is fading prematurely, leaving a shadowless forest where darkness fades in rather than falling as it does when the sun ducks behind the ridge. 
+
+It is silence save the soft pelting of rain and the call and response of two hardy wood peewees, seemingly unfazed by the storm. And then some storm god throws another bolt and the silence is blasted apart.
+
+I am sitting here listening to the rain, feeling the pace of my chair sinking into the soil. It is a slow but steady rain, a slow but steady sinking. 
+
+I am listening to the rain because that is what you do when it rains.
+
+In every place the rain sounds different. 
+
+Here the rain has a soft and spread out sound. The rain that reaches down here does not do so directly, not much of it anyway. Most of it has hit at least one, probably hundreds, of pine needles on its way to the earth. These drops are small and soft because they have been broken up on their way down. By the time they hit the ground they are more alike than different, every drop having been similarly, but differently bounced through the pine canopy. The result is a steady even sound, occassionally broken up by the rougher splatter of rain coming through a gap in the canopy to land on oak leaves, or the split wood of the picnic table, or the roof of the bus.
+
+Somewhere out there is a forest. It's too dark now to see more than a few feet in front of me. There are two trees at the edge of what faint light the rising moon offers tonight, locked away as it is, somewhere behind a veil of cloud. There's just enough glow that I can still make out the roughness of the tree bark. The curve of their trunks hint at the vastness of space behind them. Despite the rain it is dry here next to the trunks of the pines, whatever water has made it through the canopy is already down below the surface of the needles I'm lying on, staring up, trying to see the branches coming together above me.
+
+One of the more remarkable things about lying on your back in the forest is that you can stare up at the trees running together up into the vastness of space and you can feel the planet spinning through the heavens, but at the same time you can smell the warm fecundity of the soil, all the billions of microbes you're lying on churning their way through the seemingly endless supply of organic material of the forest, one day you. You can feel for fleeting moments the vastness of existence and the minute intimacy of existence at the same time. You find yourself in a web of life and energy that is flowing all around and through you. 
+
+It is impossible to tease apart all the links between everything micro and macro, do not even try. In one way you are you, the you you experience, in another you are the joining together of cells of that found it advantageous to become parts of a whole rather than go it alone -- which one is you? That's the wrong question. Know that all of this is you. All those solitary cells within you are now too specialized to survive without the rest of you, they gave up their individuality to all you to exist. As has already been pointed out, hundreds if not thousands of years before we had the language of microbes and devil of the details by the tail, the wiser among realized that the biggest thing is in the smallest thing. 
+
+John Muir, who spent his fair share of time lying on his back in pine forests, captures this feeling better than I can when he wrote, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."
+
+I think this is one of the principle realizations travel unpacks for you -- that there is no other. You are a part of a whole, interconnected system and joined far more intimately to everything around you than you could ever hope to understand, though attempting to understand it is worth the effort, even if it's impossible. Travel doesn't make it any easier to understand it, but sometimes when you travel you can *feel* it all around you, moving and flowing through you like an invisible wind. 
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-22_172903_durango-parents.jpg" id="image-692" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-22_174408_durango-parents.jpg" id="image-690" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-22_174428-1_durango-parents.jpg" id="image-691" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-22_155812_durango-parents.jpg" id="image-689" class="picwide" />
+
+[^1]: I can only assume no one around here has ever been in a real monsoon, because while it does rain a little more, it's hardly what most of the world would call a monsoon.
diff --git a/published/2017-07-30_mancos-days.txt b/published/2017-07-30_mancos-days.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..268a305
--- /dev/null
+++ b/published/2017-07-30_mancos-days.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,30 @@
+After my parents headed home we said goodbye to Durango -- for good this time -- and headed back over the pass to Mancos. 
+
+Our plan was to spend the weekend there and then head on, but one day I drove down to the coffee shop and instead of the quiet little town I'd been expecting streets were shut down, and there were cars and people everywhere. It turned out to be something called Mancos Days. Naturally we couldn't miss that, so we ended up staying a week longer than we intended and we got to see the Mancos days Parade.
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-29_111230_mancos-days.jpg" id="image-711" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-29_111456_mancos-days.jpg" id="image-710" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-29_111538_mancos-days.jpg" id="image-709" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-07-29_113035_mancos-days.jpg" id="image-708" class="picwide caption" />
+
+One day I trekked up past Mancos to Cortez to do some laundry and discovered a really good Thai restuarant. The next day we all went for Thai food and on the way back we noticed that the Montezuma County Fair started that weekend. This is how we end up spending weeks in the same place, things slowly unfold and there's always more to see and do. 
+
+You can't miss the fair. I love the fair, especially fairs that aren't all rides and entertainment, which this one was definitely not. Most of it was devoted to the display and sale of livestock. 
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-08-05_115935_montezuma-county-fair.jpg" id="image-712" class="picwide caption" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-08-05_120257_montezuma-county-fair.jpg" id="image-713" class="picwide caption" />
+
+
+The fair also had a corn shucking contest which I really think we should have entered. Next time.
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-08-05_105833_montezuma-county-fair.jpg" id="image-707" class="picwide caption" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-08-05_111958_montezuma-county-fair.jpg" id="image-706" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2017/2017-08-05_113842_montezuma-county-fair.jpg" id="image-704" class="picwide" />
+
+The girls were really excited about something that I admit did sound fun: the chicken chase. After about 10 seconds in a ring with a bunch of chickens though it was painfully obvious that our kids had no idea what to do with a chicken when the chicken chase turned to the chicken caught.
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-08-05_113335_montezuma-county-fair.jpg" id="image-705" class="picwide" />
+
+Just to make sure they girls weren't the only ones with a moment of awkwardness at the fair, I got picked to join in the Ute tribe's Bear Dance. I thought I held it together okay, but when I was done Corrinne was shaking her head. "You look nothing like a bear," she said.
+
+<img src="images/2017/2017-08-05_114314_montezuma-county-fair.jpg" id="image-703" class="picwide" />