added latest posts

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+The change from living on the road to living in a house is more difficult than the reverse. Or perhaps more painful is the better way to put it. It was difficult to get rid of all of our stuff, [surprisingly difficult](/jrnl/2016/05/root-down), but buying new stuff is downright painful. 
+
+In order to avoid the financial pain, but also the more nebulous, soul-sucking pain of consumer culture that eats at us all, and since most stores were closed anyway, we ended up essentially camping in the house. This was not so much a conscious decision, as a thing that happened. Camping is what we know.
+
+<img src="images/2020/2020-08-12_141449_misc-mcphail.jpg" id="image-2395" class="picwide caption" />
+
+We did have a few items in a storage unit that we brought out here. Our storage unit provided an interesting lesson (again) in how bad I am at estimating what my future self will want. I saved all the wrong things (again). Five boxes of books? Could not get rid of those fast enough[^1]. But damn I wish I had kept more of my tools. I wish I had my saws, my benches, my shelves, my shovels and rakes. [Tools](/jrnl/2015/12/tools). Always save tools. 
+
+Thankfully I did keep my desk. We also kept a dining table. No chairs though. No problem. We pulled up our camp chairs for the first couple weeks. Eventually we found some cheap chairs at a local antique store. To date, that and a bunk bed for the kids, are the only pieces of furniture we've purchased. The previous tenant left a bed frame, we bought a new mattress.
+
+<img src="images/2020/DSC_2459.jpg" id="image-2399" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2020/2020-08-14_130959_a7r4-test.jpg" id="image-2396" class="picwide caption" />
+
+For the most part though, even months later, we are camping in a house. 
+
+We try to spend most of our time outdoors anyway. Early on in the spring this worked great, but as the summer wore on, without much water the swim in, the heat drove us in.
+
+<div class="cluster">
+<img src="images/2020/2020-07-03_133106_water-slide.jpg" id="image-2394" class="cluster picwide" />
+<span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2020/DSC_2832.jpg" id="image-2402" class="cluster pic66" />
+<img src="images/2020/DSC_2838.jpg" id="image-2403" class="cluster pic66" />
+</span>
+<img src="images/2020/2020-06-13_161120_mcphail-yard-misc.jpg" id="image-2392" class="cluster picwide caption" />
+</div>
+
+While we did buy some furniture, there were certain things we just did not want to spend money on. Like a wash machine. What an insanely boring thing to spend money on. No one needs a wash machine. What we all need are clean clothes.
+
+I assumed Corrinne would not stand for this line of thinking, so I said we'd get a wash machine off Craigslist. To get us by until that happened, I bought a hand washing plunger and a couple of five gallon buckets. The house came with, as any house dating from the 19th century should, a clothes line.
+
+If you've followed luxagraf for long you probably know where this story is headed. Yes, six month later, we're still hand washing all our clothes. In a bucket, with a plunger. It sounds crazy, but the things is... we like it better. Our clothes get just as clean, very little money was spent, and, as a nice added bonus we get healthier because we've built a little exercise into our day. At this point, if I were going to buy anything, it'd be a clothes dryer. 
+
+<div class="cluster">
+<span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2020/DSC_2436_iIkoaQQ.jpg" id="image-2398" class="cluster pic66" />
+<img src="images/2020/DSC_2483.jpg" id="image-2401" class="cluster pic66" />
+</span>
+</div>
+
+I think this little fringe benefit, of exercise, is a bigger deal than it seems at first glance. Maybe it's just me, but I really dislike "working out". I don't dislike the effort or process, actually, truth be told I love lifting weights, but the whole idea of "exercise" bothers me. That I should stop my life and go to a gym or go do *something* other than just daily living, feels fundamentally unnecessary to me. It feels like a symptom of much deeper problem. Why does my daily life not provide enough physical exertion to keep me healthy? Doesn't that see odd?
+
+There are certain habits and customs of modern life that only seem sane because we've been so deeply indoctrinated into them. I believe this is one of those. The idea that you should stop your actual life and "exercise" says a lot about our lives. Life has become so physically easy for most of us these days that we become unhealthy living this way. If this is true, and most evidence suggests it is, I posit there is something seriously wrong with our lives, and the effects probably go far beyond needing to exercise.
+
+I think this is a sign that life is not supposed to be physically easy, that there needs to be struggle and even suffering to be a fully realized, healthy human being, but never mind that right now. Let's just say you hate the idea of working out, and want to build more exercise into your life: that's quite simple. 
+
+The more time I spent thinking about this, and yes, I often think about it while plunging the day's laundry, the more I thought hmm, what if I built more of these little workouts into my day? What if you used a hand crank blender instead of a Vitamix, what if you used a reel push mower instead of riding mower? What if you used a plunger and a bucket to do laundry? It's really just extends a basic life philosophy I established years ago when I was living in New York: when there's an option, take the stairs. Walk slowly if you want, but take the long way.
+
+<img src="images/2020/DSC_2476.jpg" id="image-2400" class="picwide" />
+
+And I have good news: you can do this too if you want. It's simple really. Look around your life for machines, and then figure out what people did before there were machines to do it for them. In this spirit I bought a push reel mower and a hand crank coffee grinder. And I know it sounds silly. But you know what, it works. 
+
+The best thing is that it actually makes life more fun. The kids get involved, doing laundry becomes a little thing you do everyday rather than an anonymous task that has to get done. And I like that. I don't think we're here to get things done, I think we're here to do things.
+
+[^1]: Not that books don't have value. But I find that making notes, writing down passages that grab me, and other methods of extracting information from books is sufficient that there's rarely a need to keep the actual book around. I've since gotten rid of most of them. There are a few I keep for their rarity, or because I frequently refer to or re-read them.
diff --git a/eight.txt b/eight.txt
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+I feel like these days call for a reminder that it's okay to be happy. 
diff --git a/june.txt b/june.txt
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+Abundance is the natural state of the world. 
+
+If you leave something alone, it thrives. Anyone who thinks that life is a competitive battlefield filled with individuals struggling, clawing at each other to survive, needs to get outside more.
+
+That's not what life is, and the first time you sit still and listen to the forest, pause in a grassy meadow in the moonlight, or crouch in the crook of hard red sandstone halfway up the canyon wall, you'll realize that the conception of the world as struggle is flat wrong. It's flat wrong for many reasons, but the one that's come to interest me the most is that that boundary between individual and environment is not nearly so neat and clean as we like to imagine.
+
+That is to say, in order for there to be competition there must be individuals and, when you start looking closely, the line between you and everything is indistinct at best.
+
+There is a harmonic resonance between the world and forms that fill it. There is a kind of vibrating, edge-blurring, feedback loop. Things move, change, do what they need to do, others dissolve, morph, recombine in new ways. Nothing is still, nothing is static, nothing is cut off from anything else. We're still not sure where a tree ends: is it the roots? The mats of fungi feeding nutrients to the roots, without which the tree would die? Where is the beginning and end? 
+
+The better question might be, why are we looking for these things? Where did we get the idea that things begin and end?
+
+If you do pause somewhere and sit and be still and watch, listen, smell, taste, you'll also notice something very important: you are part of this harmonic dance going on around you. The grass presses against your feet, the gnats explore your skin, the carpenter bees' wings announce their arrival to you. 
+
+Many don't even think of themselves as part of the environment at all, which is part of why they know nothing of the abundance of the world. When we separate ourselves in our minds, when we see ourselves as separate from the ecosystem, the abundance goes away.
+
+
+
+
+
+When you get out in it, that's not what life is. That might be what we have made our lives, but it's not what life *is*.
+
+Sit still and listen to the forest. Pause at the edge of grassy meadow in the moonlight and listen. Crouch in a crook of red sandstone halfway up the canyon wall and listen. Here the insects, the birds, the wind. The conception of the world as struggle did not come from observation of the world.
+
+Observing the world you very rarely find individuals struggling. To be sure, creatures eat each other. Just today I watched a wasp and spider have an epic battle, I turned away for a moment though, and when I looked back, both were gone. Who won? I have no idea. Probably neither. Even if the spider did kill the wasp, it was gone from its web.
+
+Watching this though I couldn't help but think it was actually less an epic battle than a kind of dance. Martial arts, deadly though it can be, often looks like ballet. That's what the spider and wasp looked like, a kind of deadly ballet. 
+
+
+
+is flat wrong. It's flat wrong for many reasons, but the one that's come to interest me the most is that that boundary between individual and environment is not nearly so neat and clean as we like to imagine.
+
+That is to say, in order for there to be competition there must be individuals and, when you start looking closely, the line between you and everything is indistinct at best.
+
+There is a harmonic resonance between the world and forms that fill it. There is a kind of vibrating, edge-blurring, feedback loop. Things move, change, do what they need to do, others dissolve, morph, recombine in new ways. Nothing is still, nothing is static, nothing is cut off from anything else. We're still not sure where a tree ends: is it the roots? The mats of fungi feeding nutrients to the roots, without which the tree would die? Where is the beginning and end? 
+
+The better question might be, why are we looking for these things? Where did we get the idea that things begin and end?
+
+If you do pause somewhere and sit and be still and watch, listen, smell, taste, you'll also notice something very important: you are part of this harmonic dance going on around you. The grass presses against your feet, the gnats explore your skin, the carpenter bees' wings announce their arrival to you. 
+
+Many don't even think of themselves as part of the environment at all, which is part of why they know nothing of the abundance of the world. When we separate ourselves in our minds, when we see ourselves as separate from the ecosystem, the abundance goes away. 
+
+When you live in a bubble, that bubble starts to become the world. It's too easy to live in our bubbles, it becomes hard to reach out. And to do so without passing judgement. Just to say there are all kids of people living here and they're all different, and that's okay. There is no one right way. 
+
+
+
+Homeschooling bothers people because it implies we're living on a single income, and that that's enough. I think it reminds people that that did *use* to be enough, but that things have declined from that, that it is simply no longer possible. 
+
+
diff --git a/sketches/two-cameras.txt b/sketches/two-cameras.txt
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@@ -1,8 +1,9 @@
 <img src="images/2020/DSC02692.jpg" id="image-2388" class="picwide caption" />
 
+I took this image just down the road from the house where we're staying. I shot it because the day before I had shot the image below with a brand new Fujifilm X-T4 that I was <a href="https://www.wired.com/author/scott-gilbertson/" rel="me">testing for Wired</a> ([read my review](https://www.wired.com/review/fujifilm-x-t4/)).
 
+<img src="images/2020/DSCF0120.jpg" id="image-2387" class="picwide" />
 
+I love the X-T4's in-camera Acros black and white setting, but you know what I like even more? The camera I already own. I shot the top image to remind myself why: I can already make great images, no need to buy anything new. Thanks to the wonderful open source app [Darktable](https://darktable.org/), I am able to replicate the look and feel of the X-T4 using what I already have.
 
-
-
-<img src="images/2020/DSCF0120.jpg" id="image-2387" class="picwide" />
+And any time I can quell a little consumer desire without spending money, I won't lie, I get a little excited. Like the old saying goies, use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.
diff --git a/sufficient.txt b/sufficient.txt
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+Perhaps the strangest thing for us about these times is the number of people who have said to us something along the lines of, "well, you had three years to prepare for this, huh?" Or "not much of a change for you, eh?" 
+
+I've had plenty of time to meditate on these statements, but I am still puzzled about what people mean by them. On the one hand, thanks so much for thinking we have any idea what we're doing, ever.
+
+On the other hand, let's be clear: there's nothing about living in an RV that prepares you for illness, nationwide shutdowns, supply chain disruptions, or anything else we've all dealt with in the past six months. If anything, living in an RV makes you much more vulnerable to these things[^1]. Where are you going to camp when public lands close (which has [happened to us twice now](/jrnl/2018/01/eastbound-down))?
+
+When people say these things I think maybe they're referring to the fact that I've always worked remotely, and we homeschool our children, but that was true long before we started living in an RV. The other thing I've considered is that, historically, people who are willing to leave at the drop of a hat, tend to survive upheaval better than those who are dug in, but I don't think that's what the comments above are getting at.
+
+What I think people are referring to is the very mistaken idea that there's something self-sufficient about living in an RV. There isn't. Look, I love living in the bus, but even I will admit that the self-sufficient notion is mostly fantasy. 
+
+There's plenty about living in an RV that makes you self-reliant, which is well worth being, and will help you all the time, not just in these peculiar times, but self-reliant is a far cry from self-sufficient. Self-reliance means you know what to get at the hardware store, self-sufficient means you never needed to go the hardware store in the first place.
+
+It's an interesting notion, self-sufficient. When I looked it up in the Webster's 1913 dictionary (the one true dictionary) nearly all the example usage was negative, bordering on pejorative. Self-sufficient was next to words like "haughty", "overbearing", and "overweening confidence in one's own abilities."
+
+At first glance I thought, well, that does describe luxagraf fairly accurately, maybe we *are* self-sufficient. But whatever it used to mean, for most of us today it means roughly, *sufficient for one's self without external aid*. Which is to say, no one anywhere on earth is 100 percent self-sufficient.
+
+We think self-sufficient is a singular thing when in fact it's a spectrum on which we all live, where at one end you have the floating chaise-lounge bound people in the movie Wall-E and at the other you have children raised by wolves. That there are more people at the Wall-E end of the spectrum right now seems indisputable, and any effort you can make to slide yourself down toward the wolf children is worth making in my opinion.
+
+But just because you can get a month's worth of groceries at CostCo does not mean you're self-sufficient for a month. It means you can plan ahead, that's all. Similarly, if you think living in an RV is going to make you completely self-sufficient you are in for a learning experience. I know this because that's how I envisioned living in an RV, and I have personally learned the hard way how wrong that vision was.
+
+The easiest example of this is solar power. I need about three minutes of conversation to discover whether the person I'm talking to has ever actually lived entirely off solar power. Which is to say that, while I love solar power, it does not make you self-sufficient. Having solar slides you down the spectrum a bit closer to the wolf kids, but honestly the lifestyle changes you have to make to live with limited solar power do a lot more for your self-sufficiency than the actual solar (which doesn't last forever, and has to be made in a clean room -- got one of those in your RV?).
+
+Typically people hear solar power, and think, oh cool, you're self-sufficient for energy. And sure, we can run our freezer, lights, and charge all our devices with nothing more than the sun. That *is* pretty cool. In fact there are times when I pinch myself because it still seems so science fiction to me. Solar is awesome. When it works. But sometimes the sun [doesn't come out for five or six days](/jrnl/2017/10/pacific), or we're camped in a deep valley with only a few hours of sun a day, or we're [camped under trees](/2018/07/trees), or a fuse blows, or a wire frays, or the [alternator goes out and you don't realize it until it's too late and you batteries are dead because you never installed the isolator](/jrnl/2017/10/through). These are not hypothetical scenarios. All of these things have happened to us.
+
+And you know how we have saved ourselves every single time solar power has let us down? By connecting to the power grid. By admitting that we're not self-sufficient and using the available shared resources of our times. 
+
+Want another example? Water. We can carry just under 80 gallons. We can stretch that to about six days if we don't shower much. That's actually crazy impressive. The [average American uses 80-100 gallons of water](https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/science/water-qa-how-much-water-do-i-use-home-each-day?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects) *every day*[^2]. But it doesn't make us self-sufficient at all. Not even close. If we happen to be camped near water then sure, we can filter and boil and get by pretty much indefinitely, but I can only think of a handful of times in three years on the road when this would have been possible.
+
+Then there's food. Food is the best case scenario. We can easily store two weeks worth of food. I believe we could probably go about a month, though it might be a little grim and vegetable-less by the end. I'm super interested in trying to grow some veggies in the bus[^3], but so far we have not tried this.
+
+The single biggest limitation on our self-sufficiency is waste. I'd guess this is true for all RVers, but I do know that five people on a single black tank is somewhat extreme, even by RV standards. Under normal circumstances we can go about three days without dumping the tank. If we're camped somewhere that it's okay to dump grey water (AKA, dish and washing water), we can stretch our tank to six days. Six days. That's the hard limit. Anything beyond that, and you are full of shit. 
+
+So for everyone thinking, damn, those RVers were really ready for this lockdown, yeah, not so much. If it seemed that way it's simply because full time RVers to started abiding by the rules later and stopped abiding by them sooner. And I think in most cases they did that not because they didn't think the virus was a problem, but because really they had no choice. And that's not were you want to be.
+
+This is actually something I spend a good bit of time thinking about though. I am with you people who think RVs are self-sufficient. I *wish* there were a way to make an RV more self-sufficient. But I've yet to come up with a way to do that without going to extremes that are impractical. We could, for example, put out tarps and harvest rain water when it rains, and dew when it's damp, but that's way more hassle than it's worth when you're going to have to dump the tanks anyway. And this is the core of why an RV will never be very far to the self-sufficient end of the spectrum.
+
+If you want self-sufficiency in travel, look to boats. The self-sufficiency of boats was born out the best of mothers: necessity. 
+
+Boats are more self-sufficient because they have no choice. 
+
+So long as you are always just a few miles from the grocery and hardware stores (like RVers) you're never going to apply the same kind of evolutionary pressure and so you're never going to get the same level of self-sufficiency in the outcome.
+
+Every smart thing in the bus was taken from reading books on sailing. Sailors know how to store food and stretch water because they have no choice. 
+
+There's a side effect of this that's worth thinking about though no matter how you live. Without that pressure, you also don't generate the kind of community that sailors have, and in the end, even with social distancing, that community is what I've seen sailors turning to more than their own individual skills. The collective sufficiency trumps self-sufficiency every time.
+
+But you have to have that collective sufficiency, and I'd argue that the dynamics of sailing are what created it. Take a group of people, select for self-reliance out of the gate, because you have to have some degree of self-confidence and self-reliance to even begin to want to live on a boat, and then throw those people together and stir the pot for a hundred-odd years. What you'll get is a tight-knit community of like-minded individuals who know the value of working together because they know the hardship of going it alone. 
+
+That last bit is the key. The hardship of going it alone. When the going gets tough, most RVers go home. Most people with houses lock the door behind them and hole up. That's not to say we haven't met great people on the road, or that communities don't come together, we have and they do, but so long as there's a fall back plan to fall back on, we all do. 
+
+If there is no backup plan and everyone around you is used to improvising, solutions will be found. If everyone around you has a fall back plan, no solutions will be found. 
+
+In the end this is really neither here nor there, except to say that no, living in an RV does not make you much more self-sufficient than living in a house. Buy a few solar panels, get a water holding tank and composting toilet, and you'll be every bit as self-sufficient as we are. Throw in a garden, five years practice in the garden, and you'll be well ahead of us. 
+
+Don't get me wrong, I love living in an RV. It's more fun, puts a lot more adventure in your life, makes you feel more alive, makes you learn to rely on yourself, and host of other things that make it my favorite way to live of the ways I've tried so far. Don't let me put you off it if you're thinking of trying.  
+
+This is really just to say that, no, we were no more prepared for this very interesting year than you were.  
+
+[^1]: Living on a boat puts you in a better place because you have access to a much more self-reliant, better connected community (few, if any RVs have radios. Every ocean-going vessel has a way to communicate, which is a big part of it I think). You might also be able to harvest water if you have a desalinizer, but those are fantastically expensive (worth it in my opinion, but still expense). And seafood is easier to catch than land food. But yeah, self-sufficient RVs? Not a thing.
+[^2]: The largest single use of water in the average household is flushing the toilet. Every day we fill a bowl with clean, pure, drinkable water, and then we literally take a crap in it. The is to me, probably the most puzzling, bizarre behavior in the modern western world.
+[^3]: There's an old guide to growing veggies on a boat called *Sailing the Farm* that got me thinking about how we could grow food in 26 feet. Crazy as that sounds, people have some clever ideas out there on the internet. And no, it wouldn't make us self-sufficient, but it would move us a little closer to those wolf children.