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| author | luxagraf <sng@luxagraf.net> | 2022-02-17 11:40:02 -0500 |
|---|---|---|
| committer | luxagraf <sng@luxagraf.net> | 2022-02-17 11:40:02 -0500 |
| commit | f201e4978c1f4fa0ed9c73372a0df1662a97662c (patch) | |
| tree | ad7bcabf77905f29814e9a2055b911d5aec85e12 | |
| parent | d42d115e5e23d32bf364c2a4c477497757b83d29 (diff) | |
all: added new essays and published posts
| -rw-r--r-- | books.txt | 6 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | economics.txt | 41 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | essays/leica.txt | 44 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | essays/new-from-current.txt | 15 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | essays/off-grid-brotherhood-of-the-wrench.txt | 141 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | maps.txt | 13 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | news.txt | 5 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | pages/about.txt | 85 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2021-12-19_perfect-from-now-on.txt | 45 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2021-12-26_edisto-holidays.txt | 60 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2021-12-29_southern-summer.txt | 40 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2022-01-03_on-the-path.txt | 33 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2022-01-08_hunting-island-storms.txt | 56 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2022-01-12_hunting-island-sunshine.txt | 49 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2022-01-17_a-tale-of-two-huntingtons.txt | 62 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2022-01-23_huntington-beach-birds.txt | 55 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | scratch.txt | 216 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | used-stuff.txt | 11 |
18 files changed, 907 insertions, 70 deletions
@@ -8,3 +8,9 @@ If you ever want to feel incredibly soft, read some books about European explore "[I believed] no proposal for seeing any part of the world which I had never seen before could possibly come amiss." -- William Dampier His own, more unyielding, philosophy was that “men as cannot comply with any custom or cannot endure hardships or hard fare … should endeavour to live at home for they are apt to make mountains of molehills.” + +# The Cooking Gene + +The Cooking Gene is about the influence that the enslavement of Africans by European settlers has had on foodways and history of the Old South. The Cooking Gene includes personal narratives, history, recipes, and folk songs. The recipes have African, Native American, and European roots as the author integrates his Jewish faith into African-American cooking. Twitty emphasizes the African flair that has been added to European and Native American ingredients by African American cooks. Additionally, he discusses plants used in cooking that are native to Africa such as sesame, okra, and sorghum. + +T diff --git a/economics.txt b/economics.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c0d69eb --- /dev/null +++ b/economics.txt @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +Once people get over the big blue bus, two questions inevitably follow. + +The first is, *so... what do you do?* This is the polite American way of saying, *how the hell do you afford to do this?* + +The second thing people ask is what the kids do for school. That requires a much more complex answer. Let's stick to money. Money is simple. Well, compared to education. + +### Set a Goal + +Before you figure out how you can afford to travel you need a goal. What is your goal? Is it to travel somewhere specific? Some specific means of traveling (e.g. RV, boat, AirBnB, etc)?Is it some specific amount of time (e.g. a few months between jobs, during a summer break, etc)? + +It's important to have a concrete goal in mind before you start trying to arrange your life in a way that carries you to that goal. I hate to sound like a life coach, but if you don't have a goal you'll never find your path. Without a clear path you won't go anywhere. + +For example, the first time I went on a long term trip I had general destination in mind (India and Southeast Asia). That allowed me to research to costs of getting to those places, the likely costs of life there, and then I could work backwards to figure out how much I need to save. I had a concrete number in mind ($10k, which I expected to last me 6 months), and I started saving until I had enough and I then I left. When it ran out I came home. I was young enough then that I just crashed on friends couches until I landed a new job, if that's not an option be sure to set aside a fund to re-enter normal life. + +This isn't the only way to do it though. I met several people on that trip who went the opposite direction, they saved up a chunk of money and then figured out where they could make it last the longest. That's another way to do it. + +And finally there is what I do now, which is working on the road. I only recommend this if your goal is to travel indefinitely. And for the record, neither I nor anyone I've ever met traveling left home planning to travel indefinitely. That tends to be something you decide when it comes time to end a long trip. You start thinking, *I want to keep doing this forever*, and that sudden pressure (the thought of going back) tends to lead to the creative thinking you need to develop if you do indeed want to live on the road. + +### Get Rid of Everything + +The first step to affording to travel is to get rid of everything you don't absolutely need. I actually think it would be easier to get rid of literally everything, head out the door and just buy things as you need them, but no one has ever taken this suggestion seriously so the best I can say is: if everything you doesn't fit in two bags, you're going to run into problems. + +Get down to two bags. If you need to add things down the road, that's fine. For example, if you end up traveling with your home, like a van, RV, boat, or whatever, you're going to need tools, you can add those in later. But for the most part get rid of everything. + +This is important literally, as an act, but also as a process. It will teach you things. It will teach you how remote your wants are from your needs. Get rid of your wants along with all the debris those wants have brought into your life. Focus on what you absolutely need. If you want nothing you will not need as much money. Needs turn out to be pretty cheaply met. Find a dumpster and throw your TV in it. That alone will do more to get you on your way to having enough money to travel than anything else on this page. + +Don't worry if this is really hard or insanely time consuming. It's that way for everyone. I've written about this elsewhere, but it is astronomically easier to let stuff into your life than it is to get it out. + +Stuff costs money and takes up space, neither of which you have future traveler. Life on the road is one of necessities (food and shelter) and great views, not endless wants fulfilled and Amazon deliveries. The less you want the better off you will be financially. Yes, you can take this too far, but very few people do so don't worry about that. + +One trap to beware of, having less doesn't mean you have to have the best. I see things on the internet from people who profess to be minimalists because they have only one fork, spoon, and knife, but those utensils are $40. That's not what you're after. Let go of the need to impress if you can, it will save you a ton of money. And none of us out here traveling will be impressed anyway. + +### Become Financially Self-Dependant + +I stole the phrase Financially Self-Dependant from the good people at Wanderer Financial because it captures something key that no other way of putting it does: you're in control. There are myriad ways this can be achieved depending on your skill set, but one thing I can absolutely promise you is that it won't mean having a traditional job. Can you travel with a full time job? Sure. I have several times. It sucks. It doesn't suck because you have set hours, though that's part of it, but mostly it sucks because you are not in direct control of your income. Worse, you only have one source of income. + +Lose your job at home and it's a big deal. + +I hate to tell you this, but the truth is we saved up for a long time before we went traveling so that we would have a good cushion of money should anything go wrong. + +Speaking of which, if you're like me you got no financial education. You're going to need to fix diff --git a/essays/leica.txt b/essays/leica.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f9626e4 --- /dev/null +++ b/essays/leica.txt @@ -0,0 +1,44 @@ +Leica's new M11 digital rangerfinder camera may as well come from an entirely different era. Don't get me wrong, it's plenty modern. The M11 has a high resolution sensor (a 60-megapixel backside-illuminated full-frame CMOS sensor to be precise), sophisticated metering tools, and even some of the usual digital accoutrements of cameras in our age. But it thumbs its nose at autofocus, and is perfectly happy to work with lenses that are decades old. + +More than that though, the Leica M11 just *feels* like, well, an old Leica. + +The M11 is very much true to the heritage of the M series camera. It looks like an M series. It's compact, understated, a box on which you attach a lens. The M11 doesn't make many promises, but those it does it keeps. + +The M11 is also true to M series when it comes to price, which is high. The retail price of $8,995 is more that most of us are ever going to spend on a camera. But even for those of us who will never own a Leica M11, I think this is an important device that deserves something more than a simple review. + +The M11 is important because it shows that the engineers at Leica are keeping something alive, something that I think the rest of the camera world has forgotten—that the camera doesn't matter, the photographs matter. The camera is just a tool. + +Any tool is only as good as the person using it. A wrench is just a wrench. Some wrenches may be better made than others, but if you want to do anything useful with a wrench, you need a person with the skill to use a wrench. That skill might come in different forms and guises too. I know what I'm doing with a socket wrench in an internal combustion engine, but I have no skill at all in using a plumbing wrench on the pipes in the basement. + +In the same way, camera are tools. Put an outdated digital camera from the early 2000s in Sebastião Salgado's hands and odds are you'll end up with a great image. Put the Leica M11 in my hands and the odds of getting a great image are less in your favor. + +The reason I say the Leica M11 feels more like a film Leica than a modern digital camera isn't because it isn't capable, but because it has been engineered to be used in conjunction with human skill, that is, your skills as a photographer. This is what makes the M11 so different. + +Cameras are increasingly designed to remove the human skill, or more importantly the lack thereof, from the equation. From autofocus to auto white balance to auto metering, the engineering skill of most camera manufacturers over the last several decades has gone into replacing the skilled individual with a algorithm that presents, not a challenge you must rise to or adapt to, but a series of options you can choose between. + +This is the path of all technological advance in our consumer society, the abstraction of skill to a set of features which claim to have removed the need for skill. And yet. Some photographs are better than others. Some photographs tell a story that's independent of technical perfection. No amount of autofocus speed is going to make your image tell a story if you have no story to tell. + +The Leica comes from a time before photography became a means for social approval, and was about telling stories. Stories the world needed to hear, stories the world would not have been able to hear any other way. The work of photographers like [Sebastião Salgado](https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/sebasti%C3%A3o-salgado?all/all/all/all/0) brought the rest of the world into my sheltered high school photography class in a way that nothing else I'd ever seen did. I would sit for hours leafing though *An Uncertain Grace*, staring at the same photographs day after day until I knew every corner of them. Same with [Susan Meiselas](https://www.susanmeiselas.com), whose sometimes shockingly brutal images brought home the conflicts in Central America in a way that the circus of Oliver North on TV (which happened around the same time) never could, never would. TV was sanitized. Meiselas's photography was a collection of raw emotion seared onto the page in way that no one could fail to understand. These were the things that made me want to be a photographer. + +I don't want to give the impression that no one is doing the kind of work Salgado and Meiselas did. There are plenty of truly great photographers working today. In fact the winner of the [Leica Oscar Barnack Newcomer Award for 2021](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQteG83kQqo), Emile Ducke, is a great example. You know what no one asks in the linked film about his work? What camera he uses. You know what no one asked Salgado back in those days? No one asked what camera he used. No one asked Meiselas what lenses she preferred because it didn't matter. The images are all that matter and we all knew that just owning a Leica M series camera, which it turns out both Salgado and Meiselas used, at least some of the time, wasn't going to get you those images. + +That's why I don't know if you should buy the Leica M11 or not. It's an opinionated camera. It's from a different time, when what mattered was the image. I shot with it as a loaner for one week. The highest praise I can give any tool is the praise I'll give the M11: It did what I asked it to do. It never failed. I failed plenty, but the tool kept on being the tool, waiting for me to rise to the occasion. + + + + + + + + + +Today Instagram is like the TV, it's sanitized photography. + + + +lacks autofocus, or because it uses a rangefinger focusing systemmost of the engineering is going into trying to replicate human skill with digital smarts. + + + + + diff --git a/essays/new-from-current.txt b/essays/new-from-current.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..603fab3 --- /dev/null +++ b/essays/new-from-current.txt @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ + + + + +--- + +From Charles Eisenstein: It is not only systems and institutions that are crumbling. It is not only political parties, social patterns, and economic organizations that are in a state of crisis. On a deeper level, we face a crisis of sense, meaning, and identity. More and more of us have lost trust in the authorities we once trusted. We have come to doubt old standards by which to discern true from false. We don’t know what to believe. We don’t know what is real. We aren’t so sure even who we are. Our notions of progress and our faith in the future has been shaken. + +The collective response to Covid so far has been to deepen our immersion in the old story of Separation, fear, and control. Part of that story is that progress means advancing the human capacity to manage and control everything outside of us. Better security means controlling terrorists and criminals. Better living means controlling bad habits and addictions. Better health means controlling germs and our own bodily processes. At the present writing, it has become obvious that the regime of intensifying control will not bring its promised paradise. Paradise remains ever at the horizon no matter how quickly we race toward it. + +The resolution of this state of affairs, however, need not be a bifurcation. We are not in the world in order to leave it. We are here to anchor a more beautiful world the present one. How do we do that? Not through force of will alone. We need other people who share our vision, who have seen the same possibility that we have seen. Those people remind us that choices and perceptions that seem crazy in the old story, that seem naive or impractical or irresponsible, are actually both sane and necessary. In other words, enlightenment is a group activity. + +--- + +Of course, if there are things to be done, they should be done. But that does not mean we should rush around doing stuff, just because it seems better than doing nothing. Here is what Vinay Prasad has to say in his blog ‘Will science do better post COVID19?’ diff --git a/essays/off-grid-brotherhood-of-the-wrench.txt b/essays/off-grid-brotherhood-of-the-wrench.txt index cf8026f..1bbc064 100644 --- a/essays/off-grid-brotherhood-of-the-wrench.txt +++ b/essays/off-grid-brotherhood-of-the-wrench.txt @@ -1,67 +1,167 @@ +Beautiful is better than ugly. +Explicit is better than implicit. +Simple is better than complex +Complex is better than complicated + +Fail gracefully when possible (an elevator is still stairs even when broken mitch hedburg joke) + +Complex systems are inherently fragile. The optimization that makes the system "easy" to use, also generally eliminates the redundancies and graceful degadation that makes a system resilient. + +The exhilaration of figuring something out. + +This little movie runs on a loop in my head. It invades everything I do. I see it sitting at stoplights, a similar path of electricity out of the breaker, up the light pole and to the switch which sends it to the top lens, which happens to be red. + +I see it doing the dishes. The water leaving the tower, flowing down increasingly narrower pipes, off the main street line and into my hot water tank where it sits until a flick of the faucet calls it up through more pipes and out onto my hands. + +Everything flows like this. Every system around us, when it works, does something similar. + +Right now the Travco does not work. I can see it in my head and yet I cannot make it work. It has to be the fuel pump. I have spark, I have compression, the missing ingredient in the basic trifecta of the internal combustion engines is fuel. + +But seeing it and understanding it are different than actually solving the problem, making it work. This is basic difference between architects and builders. Builders have to solve problems in the real world that architects will never encounter. + +Days pass. I continue to fail with the bus. The real world of by time constraints, pay checks that don’t arrive, other commitments, weather. I work on other things. Hang wall panels, sand and apply finish. I do things I know I know how to do. More days pass. Still the bus doesn’t start. I get sullen. My wife thinks I’m mad all the time. I’m not. I’m thinking about the engine, I can’t get it out of my head. It reminds me of the first time I tried to write some code. It was fun, but it also was not. + + + +# Main + There's no temperature gauge. It broke several thousand desert miles ago. But before we overheat you can smell it coming, whiffs of radiator fluid slip in the draft at the front of the engine doghouse. That's when you know, it's time to stop. It doesn't happen often. The 318 likes to run hot, but climbing mountains with a 12,000 pound RV on your back will make any small block engine overheat eventually. -I start looking for a place to pull over. There's nothing. The left side of the road is a sheer cut of rock, quartzite, phyllite, limestone laid bare by dynamite. To the east as far as I can see the barren rocky foothills of the White Mountains bubble and scrape their way along, toward the desert floor, dust swept and brown. Dotted here and there are clumps of green-gray shrubs, creosote and sagebrush, interrupted occasionally by splashes of yellow Rabbitbrush. It's a stark but beautiful landscape. +I start looking for a place to pull over. There's nothing. The left side of the road is a sheer cut of rock, quartzite, phyllite, limestone laid bare by dynamite. To the east as far as I can see the barren rocky foothills of the White Mountains bubble and scrape their way, toward the desert floor, dust swept and brown. Dotted here and there are clumps of green-gray shrubs, creosote and sagebrush, interrupted occasionally by splashes of yellow Rabbitbrush. It's a stark but beautiful landscape. + +What I don't see is a good place to pull over. But it doesn't matter, we haven't seen another car in at least an hour of driving. We are on highway 168 somewhere in Nevada between the ghost town where we camped last night, and the top of the White Mountains. So I stop right in the middle of the road. Why not? + +When the engine shuts off a silence descends. There's no sound but the quiet hissing steam escaping the radiator cap. No wind. No birds. No talking. We all, my wife, three children, and myself, just listen to the now gentle gurgle of coolant in the engine. It's October, but I'm glad I had the presence of mind to stop in the shade, the Nevada sun casts a harsh light on the road a few feet beyond us. After a minute my wife turns to the kids and says, "you want to walk around and see if we can find some fossils?" + +As a child of the 70s, I've spent my fair share of time at the side of the road next to broken down vehicles. This is just what vehicles of those days did.There was the 1967 VW fastback, which managed to get me home safely from the hospital after I was born. That was replaced with a 1976 mustard yellow Volkswagen Dasher that routinely overheated near Yuma on its way from my childhood home in Los Angeles to my grandparents' home in Tucson, AZ. To this day my father curses that car. There was also a 1969 Ford F-150 pickup that was reliable until you stuck a camper on its back and tried to climb over the Sierra Nevada mountains. + +All of which is to say that I was no stranger to dealing with the work, the sweat, the cursing, and the occasional blood, that it requires to keep old cars running. That's why, two years ago, my wife and I bought a 1969 Dodge Travco, a motorhome that was just shy of its 50th birthday at the time. My kids called it our bus. Which was apt. When you say motorhome most people these days picture something that looks nothing like our new old Dodge. To call it an RV is to say a Stradivarius is a violin. The Travco is not an RV; it’s a 27 foot long fiberglass container full of beauty and joy. And it hails from a very different era, one when the Right to Repair was more, the Need to Repair, and when the need to repair was an accepted part of using technology. + +I wanted one from the first moment I saw it. Partly because it is just that cool, but also partly because I wanted to own my own home, but not a house. I wanted a home I could move wherever I wanted. I wanted to build it out how I wanted, to understand it, to design everything in it exactly the way we needed it, to maintain it, and to take it wherever we wanted to go. The Travco was all that and more. + +-- + +The Travco was cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne. Now almost no one besides us seems to want one. That's probably just as well, there aren't many left. + +There also aren't many people left who even know how to fix these vehicles. Well, that's not entirely true. Since the first day I owned the Travco, people have been coming up to talk to me about it. I bought the bus from a couple that lived up in the mountains of North Carolina. I got a ride up there to pick it up, and after about an hour of looking it over, I handed over the money. The previous owner mentioned offhand that it attracted a lot of attention. I was focused on other things and didn't really pay any attention to that comment until about three hours later. + +That first drive was nerve wracking. According to the odometers of my past vehicles, I've driven about 250,000 miles. But those were cars. Driving a car is nothing like strapping yourself to a 27-foot long monstrosity in unknown condition and promptly pointing it downhill toward home. A prudent man would have done a test drive. A couple of hairpin turns had my palms sweating—I made a note to myself to buy my next vehicle in Kansas—but I managed to get her out on a four lane road where it felt more manageable. Still, I realized I had been driving completely tensed up for a couple of hours. I decided to pull over at a rest area and take a break. + +The engine wasn't even off before two people come running up to the bus wanting to see it, take pictures, and talk about it—what year is it, where did you get it, and eventually they work their way around to what has become the big question almost everyone wants to know: what engine is in it? + +The answer is a Chrysler 318 LA, a 5.2L small-block V8 engine. The LA stands for lightweight A series engine. This is the same engine you'll find in most things Dodge made in 1969, from the Dart to the D100 truck. Larger engines like the 440 are more sought after in vintage racing circles, but the 318, as most enthusiasts call it, is the unsung hero of the muscle car era. Some people claim the cylinder bore size in my 318 is bigger than what you find in a Dart, which would give the bus's 318 more power. I've done a little research, but have not been able to confirm or deny this speculation. I can say that at times, on the side of a long mountain climb in the desert hills of Nevada for instance, it feels like I have about the same amount of power as a Dodge Dart, but with 8000 extra pounds of weight. + +In 2016 when I stopped at that rest area to collect my wits, I knew next to nothing about engines. I knew that the modern ones looked intimidatingly complex and involved a lot of computer chips and automation via sensors. But I'm a former computer programmer, part of what I wanted when we decided to live in a vintage RV was less computers, maybe even no computers. There's not a computer chip in the 318, nor is there one anywhere else in the bus. + +I completely rebuilt the interior, gutting it down to the bare fiberglass and re-running all the electrical, propane, and water systems before insulating it and sealing it back up. I deliberately kept everything low tech. There's no backup cameras, no automated systems at all. I had to go out of my way to find a hot water heater with a non-electric pilot light system. I have to get out and light it by hand every time we stop, but the automatic pilot system will never fail. Because there isn't one. + +A friend of mine joked that I had become like Captain Adama from Battlestar Gallactica, who famously would let no networked computers on his ship because they introduced a vulnerability he considered unacceptable. It wasn't that he was opposed to technology, it was a particular kind of technology, perhaps even a direction of technology, that Adama opposes. + +Adama would approve of our solar panels, which have been our primary source of power for years, but he would not approve of the Bluetooth network the solar charge controller uses. I used to be able to check our battery charge status from my phone, before Bluetooth stopped working on my phone. But I knew there was a good chance bluetooth would fail me, it had before. Luckily for me I had long ago added a shunt with a hardwired gauge, should the Bluetooth fail. Like Adama, I am not opposed to technology, but I'm not going to leave the systems that keep the lights on to technologies I can't repair. I thought of the Adama character when my phone stopped connecting to the charge controller, I could almost seem him smiling. + +Complex systems are inherently fragile. It might be more convenient to flip a switch and have hot water or to check the battery status from my phone, but the trade off in complexity wasn't worth the small gain in convenience. Nothing brought this home for me quite like the choke cable. + +When I bought the bus the manual choke cable was broken. When your engine is cold it needs more gas than air to get started. In an aspirated engine the carburetor controls this mixture with a flap that opens and closes, controlling how much air gets into the engine. Too much air and the engine won't cold start. In older vehicles, prior to the mid-1960s, this mixture was controlled by the driver with the chock leveler. Pull it out and the flap in the carburetor closes, the cold engine starts, and then you push it back in. + +Manual choke is archaic. But since the bus's was broken I went even more archaic. I did what the choke cable should have been doing -- pulling the carburetor shut so that the cold engine gets enough gas to start -- with my finger. Every time I start the engine I have to lift up the cover, unscrew the air filter and work the carburetor with my finger. At first this was just expedient. Fixing the choke was on my list of things to do, but finding a long enough choke cable, with a period-correct Dodge dash board knob took years of scouring eBay. By then, well I was used to it. I've had a choke cable for over a year now and I still haven't installed it. + +What I discovered after hundreds of cold morning starts is that I like opening the engine, I like making sure everything looks right, I like watching it come to life. If something is wrong, I know right away. Once the cable came off the ignition coil and instead of wondering why the engine wasn't starting, which it wasn't, I was startled to watch electricity arcing out of the ignition coil. That's not right. -What I don't see though is a good place to pull over. Not that we need one really. We haven't seen another car in at least an hour of driving. We are on highway 168 somewhere in Nevada between the ghost town where we camped last night, and the top of the White Mountains. So I stop right in the middle of the road. Why not? +Every morning before we head out on the road, I open the engine cover and spend some time studying the engine, connecting with it if you will. It's a ritual, somewhere between making coffee and invoking the gods, a small part of my morning that's dedicated to making sure the rest of our day goes smoothly. For a long time I really was looking over the engine every time, but these days I am less looking things over than just spending time with it. -When the engine shuts off there's no sound. No wind. No birds. No talking. We all, my wife, three children, and myself, just listen to the slow hiss of the radiator boiling over. It's October, but I'm glad I had the presence of mind to stop in the shade, the Nevada sun casts a harsh light on the road a few feet beyond us. After a minute my wife turns around and says to kids, "you want to walk around and see if we can find some fossils?" +Car ethusiasts often get this way + + +This has become my guiding design principle, my philosophy of technology if you will, the technology must connect me with the machine in a meaningful way. There is no technology for its own sake, no technology that abstracts function for convenience, no technology that removes the human interaction for "simplicity" or "ease of use". Ease of use means I can use it, as well as repair it and rebuild it if need be. + +Eventually I was able to track down reprints of the original shop manuals for the Dodge M300 chassis, which is the basis for the Travco, as well as many other motorhomes of the era. From reading this in the evenings around the campfire, I know that the designers of the bus meant for it to be maintained by anyone. It's written in simple language, with clear instructions, and explanations of why you need to do something as well has how to do it. + +I used the same guiding principle when upgrading things to make it livable for a family of five.Limiting complexity was a concious decision by me, just as it was a conscious decision by the Dodge and Travco engineers in 1969. The bus is all mechanical and easy enough to understand, which is why so many people do. Take the thermostat, part of the coolant system that had us at the side of the road climbing up the White Mountains. The thermostat is controlled by a piece of wax that melts when it's hot, releasing a spring that lets coolant into the engine. As the engine cools the wax hardens, closing the spring so that coolant stops flowing and the engine heats up again. + +The engine temperature system is controlled by a piece of wax. The carburetor jets, which control how much gas and air are pulled into the carburetor and sent on to the combustion chambers are just metal cones you tighten or loosen with a screw driver. There are almost no special tools required to fix anything in the bus. I carry a lot of wrenches, a few screwdrivers, and a wide array of spare parts. That's about all I need to keep it going. --- -As a child of the 70s, I've spent my fair share of time at the side of the road in broken down vehicles. There was a mustard yellow Volkswagen Dasher that routinely overheated near Yuma on its way from my childhood home in Los Angeles to my grandparents' home in Tucson, AZ. There was a 1969 Ford F-150 pickup that was actually very reliable until you stuck a camper on its back and tried to climb over the Sierra Nevada mountains. +I haven't always kept it going though. That's not where I started. For a long time I was happy to understand how it worked, but still let others do the actual work. A mechanic in Florida flared new transmission cooler lines for us. Another in Colorado did the shocks. Another in Utah fixed the transmission cooler lines (again). Everything on the inside I rebuilt and repaired myself, but the engine, for all its apparent simplicity, was still intimidating to me. -This might help explain why, two years ago my wife and I bought a 1969 Dodge Travco, a motorhome that was just shy of its 50th birthday at the time. When you say motorhome what most people these days picture looks nothing like our bus as my kids call it. The Travco hails from a different era, an era when the Right to Repair was more the need to repair. In its day the need to repair seems to have been an accepted trade off of technology. The Travco was cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne. Now almost no one besides us seems to want one. That's probably just as well, there aren't many left. +One evening in the laundry room at Ridgway State Park just outside of Ridgway Colorado, while watching the famous golden light of the Rockies play across the Cimmarron Range, another man came in and, after he stuffed his laundry in the machine, we started talking. Eventually the conversation came around to the bus, as most conversations I have in campgrounds do. After he asked which engine was in it, he took a different tack than most people. He asked me something no one else ever had, something that caught me off guard and has haunted me ever since. He said, "do you turn your own wrenches?" I told him I did as much as I could, but that sometimes I had to get professional help. "You have to turn your own wrenches," he said shaking his head. "You can't have a vehicle like that if you don't turn your own wrenches." -There also aren't many people left who even know how to fix these vehicles. Well, that's not entirely true. In fact, ever since the first day I bought the Travco people have been coming up to talk to me about it and 90 percent of the time what people want to know is what engine does it have in it? +I knew he was right. I knew he was right before he said anything because I had come to realize that knowing is not enough. Knowing only becomes useful when you apply it by doing. I knew it was time for me to start doing more, to start doing everything. Sometimes I get sick of crawling under the bus to fix things. Sometimes I want to make it all go away, just tow it to a mechanic and make it all better, leave me free to spend time with my kids. But that's not how it works. If I wanted to really be in control, if I wanted to be responsible for my own home, I had to take ownership of it, all of it. I had to turn my own wrenches. I realized that evening that I was not living up to the goals I claimed I had. I had to do the work myself. The knowledge was nothing without the know-how and the know-how took getting in there and getting dirty. -When I bought the bus the previous owner mentioned that it attracted a lot of attention, but I didn't really pay any attention to that comment until about three hours later when I stopped at a rest area and two different people came running up to the bus wanting to see it, talk about it, and eventually work their way around to asking me what engine was in it. +That's part of why we were at the side of the road that day in Nevada. We were on our way to visit my uncle. I didn't know it yet that day, but he would end up saving us just couple of days later. He would keep the bus going when it almost broke completely, in an irreparable way. But more than that, he would show me how to turn my own wrenches. He helped me rebuild my carburetor and exhaust system, and he showed me that there was no mystery to it. It's all just nuts and bolts he would tell me every time I got frustrated. Remember it's all just nuts and bolts. -At the time I knew next to nothing about engines. I knew that the modern ones looked intimidatingly complex and involved a lot of computer chips and automation via sensors. I am a former computer programmer, I wanted to get away from computers. There's not a computer chip in the 318. It's mechanical and relatively easy to understand, which is why so many people do. Take the thermostat, part of the system that had us at the side of the road climbing desert mountains. The thermostat is controlled by a piece of wax that melts when it's hot, releasing a spring that lets coolant into the engine. As the engine cools the wax hardens, the spring closes, coolant stops flowing and the engine heats up again. The entire engine temperature system is controlled by a piece of wax. +Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is though. Most of the work I do in keeping this engine running happens in my head. A mechanic isn't someone who blindly turns wrenches, anyone can do that. A mechanic, professional or otherwise, is someone who can listen to an engine and figure out, based on experience, which nuts and bolts need turning. It's the problem solving that happens in your head that separates those who can fix an engine from those who cannot. This is a skill that takes years, even decades to develop. I am still very early on this journey, but it is infectious and exhilarating when you hold something unknown in your head and step through the system until you come up with a hypothesis about what might be wrong. This takes me many miles of driving, many miles of thinking. +Problem solving seems fun after the problem is solved. During the actual solving it’s less fun. Food, sleep, these things seem unimportant when I have a problem that needs solving stuck in my head. I tend to get obsessed about things. Even when I don’t want to. It’s one of the reasons I don’t do much programming anymore. I never let things go until I solve the problem to my satisfaction. Of course breaking a web server doesn’t cost much relative to damaging an engine, so with the bus the stakes are much higher, the sullen thinking phase I pass through is correspondingly more sullen and requires more concentration. +Something here about the exhilaration of figuring things out. Example with the fuel pump and then later with the exhaust manifolds +--- +Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. +These are the first three [philosophical "rules" of the Python programming language](https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonPhilosophy), which happens to be the thing that allows me to live in a Travco, traveling full time. +After finding out about bus, the engine, and that we live in it "full time" as RVers say, the inevitable next question is -- how? The American version of this is *what do you do?*. The European version (about half the people we met in National Parks and other public lands between 2017-2018 were visitors from abroad) is *what is your job?*. I prefer the European version for its specificity. -Behind that question I've come to think there are several others worth asking, the first is, how did this thing last so long when so little else has? The answer to that is a long and twisting tale, but the short version is that the Chrysler 318 LA engine was made for a long time, and used in a lot of vehicles, which is to say a lot of these engines are out there in the world. That created a huge market for parts and so far, that market continues to exist though I have to imagine it's shrinking every year. For now though, I can walk into any parts store in America and have whatever part I need in a couple of days.[^1] +The answer is that, since I walked out of the last restaurant kitchen I ran in 2005, I have been a writer and programmer, working from home. For a long time, thanks to demand, I was able to limit my programming to Python (even more specifically, the Django web framework). -There is, however, I think another question the people who've asked me about the bus engine have in mind though when they say, what engine does it have in it, they are, almost universally, people from the time when many people could and did repair their own engines. -[^1]: This is still true even with post pandemic shortages, though I, and many others, have noticed a significant drop in the quality of part available. +After years of working at home it occurred to me that I didn't actually need a house to work (yes, I am a slow learner). +I pointed this out to my wife one day and somewhere over some beers while on vacation in Florida we decided to try living in an RV. Two months later we had the Travco, 9 months after that we were on the road. +Lest you think programming from an RV is somehow glamorous... well, it's not. The project that sustained our early travels involved building an inventory tracking system. We're not talking about building cool apps for hot startups that were going to IPO. I prefer to work for small, family-run businesses even if that means building inventory tracking systems, which, trust me, is not glamorous. +There is one aspect of work though that very much informed +--- +Later when I knew enough to know what questions to ask, I went to YouTube where dozens of total strangers walked me through how to repair everything from faulty wires to brake adjuster screws. But the biggest single step after my uncle set me on the path to turning my own wrenches was to buy a reprint of the original shop manual. Here were the words of the engineers who made the bus. How to test systems, what to do when different problems arise. Even how to tune things just the way you want them. +There are still things I can't fix. I don't travel with an engine lift so I can't do a complete rebuild. But since that afternoon in the laundromat I've replaced or rebuilt the carburetor, the radiator (twice), the water pump, the alternator, the power steering pump, the fuel pump (twice), the brakes, the shocks, the transmission cooler lines, and a host of other little things I've long since forgotten about. Far more important than any single thing I've fixed though is that I know it's all just nuts and bolts. I given the right tools and the enough time, anyone can fix anything in this bus, including me. Which is exactly where I wanted to be when I bought it. +And yet, despite all that, despite all the wrench turning, here we are, at the side of the road in Nevada. Because older vehicles might be repairable, but they have other limitations most of us aren't used to facing anymore. This is another part of what I love about the bus. It's an adventure every time I drive it. Nothing has failed in the buses systems to leave us at the side of the road. There is nothing for me to fix. Nothing is broken. The bus is just overworked. It may not have the power to get over the mountain. That's a limitation we've pushed a few times and each time we've made it what gets us over the top isn't technical skills, spare parts, or engine savvy, it's patience. +--- +This is just one moment. This is another one. They pass by whether we use them or not. This is what I tell myself while I sit idly throwing gravel down into a dry ravine, waiting. Patience. This is just one moment. The rest of the day has been amazing. +We woke that morning in the ghost town of Gold Point. We headed west because for nine months of that's a much of plan as we'd come up with, let's go west. West today started on Highway 266, a little climb up into the hills, through another ghost town and down some more hills into a small town called Oasis. It was when we turned on highway 168 that we got some hints of our future. There was an ominous collection of road signs indicating steep, winding roads ahead. There was even a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a three digit state highway in Nevada, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I figured it meant there was no passing lane. It did not mean that. -Somewhere far up the road there are cool pinyon-juniper woodlands with sagebrush meadows and bristlecone pine forests. +Up and over the second pass was not too bad. It was the windiest road we'd driven in the bus, but we made it over the second pass into a valley with nothing. Not even phone service. There was one lone building set way back from the road with a huge sign that read “no telephone available." +We stopped for lunch and a road work crew we’d passed up the mountain came down and pulled into the same turnout we were in. I took the opportunity to ask them about the final pass. They seemed to think we’d be fine, though one of them did say, "there’s one part we call the narrows, it's only one lane through there." I just stared at him for a minute. "Seriously?" "Seriously." "Don’t tell my wife that." -Highway 266 was uneventful, a little climb up into the White Mountains, through a ghost town and down into a small town called Oasis. It was when we turned on 168 that we got some hints of what was to come. The signs read steep, winding roads ahead. Okay, no biggie, probably. Then there was a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a two digit state highway in California, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I thought maybe it meant there was no passing lane. It did not mean that. +--- -We're only going about 25 miles an hour +The kids are headed back up. They have gNo fossils were found, though -alpine fell fields +and pulled into the next turn out. The bus sat boiling over for a bit, maybe a quart, and then it stopped. We climbed out to sit for a while and consider our options. Except that there weren’t any really. With no cell reception to call a tow truck, no real way to turn around, and no where else to go even if we did, we had to get over the pass. At one point an older gentleman on a Harley stopped at see if we were okay. We chatted for a bit and he told us the top of the pass was only about four or five miles ahead, which was encouraging. -the horizen +--- +Programming is a relatively new discipline and still believes that the ideal can exist in the real world. Mechanics know better. Programmers, Python programmers anyway, invent things like virtual environments and attempt to sandbox their programs from outside influence, they try to ignore the real world and it keeps failing. Programmers call these failures bugs and pretend they'll all be fixed one day. They won't. Ask any mechanic. That's not how it goes in the real world, and you can't mitigate or abstract away the real world. Eventually programming will figure this out and become a mature discipline that realizes perfection only exists on paper. +Behind that question I've come to think there are several others worth asking, the first is, how did this thing last so long when so little else has? The answer to that is a long and twisting tale, but the short version is that the Chrysler 318 LA engine was made for a long time, and used in a lot of vehicles, which is to say a lot of these engines are out there in the world. That created a huge market for parts and so far, that market continues to exist though I have to imagine it's shrinking every year. For now though, I can walk into any parts store in America and have whatever part I need in a couple of days.[^1] + +There is, however, I think another question the people who've asked me about the bus engine have in mind though when they say, what engine does it have in it, they are, almost universally, people from the time when many people could and did repair their own engines. + + +[^1]: This is still true even with post pandemic shortages, though I, and many others, have noticed a significant drop in the quality of part available. + + + @@ -71,6 +171,13 @@ the horizen +Somewhere far up the road there are cool pinyon-juniper woodlands with sagebrush meadows and bristlecone pine forests. + + +Highway 266 was uneventful, a little climb up into the White Mountains, through a ghost town and down into a small town called Oasis. It was when we turned on 168 that we got some hints of what was to come. The signs read steep, winding roads ahead. Okay, no biggie, probably. Then there was a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a two digit state highway in California, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I thought maybe it meant there was no passing lane. It did not mean that. + + + @@ -78,7 +185,6 @@ Of course they do. They barely notice when we break down. They half like it. It' I unbuckle the lap belt and lean over to open the doghouse and make sure it's just the radiator overheating. We live in a 1969 Dodge Travco, a motorhome cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne. Now almost no one besides us seem to want one. Ours is electric blue with a wide white stripe wrapped around it. -After a night in the middle of Gold Point we hit the road, continuing our somewhat random plan. I came up with something I thought was pretty good: take highway 266 west from Gold Point, grab highway 168, go over the White Mountains, drop down into Big Pine and follow 395 up to my aunt and uncle’s house up in Wellington. It seems simple when you type it out. I bet it made the gods chuckle anyway. Highway 266 was uneventful, a little climb up into the White Mountains, through a ghost town and down into a small town called Oasis. It was when we turned on 168 that we got some hints of what was to come. The signs read steep, winding roads ahead. Okay, no biggie, probably. Then there was a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a two digit state highway in California, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I thought maybe it meant there was no passing lane. It did not mean that. @@ -136,7 +242,6 @@ I unbuckle the lap belt and lean over to open the doghouse and make sure it's ju -It's hard to embrace van life as a family of five. Most vans are, well, they're vans. I'll never get Chris Farley screaming *in a van, down by the river* out of my head. I can't live in a van. And RVs are for retirees. I'm not retired. I don't want to be retired. Let's get a trailer then, my wife said two years ago when we decided to try living on the road. So I searched for a trailer, but Google, bless its algorithmic heart, which that day had a bit of arrhythmia, showed me a Travco instead. "That," I said, "that is what we need". Two months later we had one. A year later it was actually liveable. My kids dubbed it "the big blue bus," or just "the bus" for short. diff --git a/maps.txt b/maps.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..29eb106 --- /dev/null +++ b/maps.txt @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +It was a bit of an odd child. I loved map shops. I am old enough to remember when there were stores that sold nothing but maps, and I wanted all of them, but especially USGS 7.5 topo maps of California's Sierra Nevada mountains. I would beg my parents to take me to take me and then spend all my lawn mowing money on maps. + +Then I'd go home and piece them together to plan hiking and climbing trips around the Sierras. While I'd been hiking in the high sierras since I was born, it was my first multi-day backpacking trip the summer after eighth grade that really got me into maps. I got some books from the library, taught myself basic navigation and map and compass reading skills and eventually planned my first trip for later that same summer after eighth grade. + +From then on I became the trip planner among my friends. I quickly learned two things. The first was that while I could look at a map and immediately and easily translate it to a three dimension model that I could then spin around and contemplate in my head, um, turns out this is very difficult for many people. I realized most people looked at the topo and saw a lot of lines and nothing more. + +The second thing I learned was more profound, and I had to learn it the hard way, by underestimating just how close together those lines on the topo were. It's one thing to look at the map and see that something is steep. It's a whole other thing to stand at the base of a long uphill climb and watch the trail zigzag its way up the exposed, bare granite peaks above timberline. + +The reality on the ground is always different than the elegant simplicity of the map. Always. Everything turns out to be steeper, longer, hotter, and much harder than it looks on the map. + +The map is just that, a map. A representation of reality. Not reality. After experiencing this a few times I learned what those densely clustered lines really meant, not that it was steep or difficult, but that it was going to be a hard, hot slog. Years later, when I read Jorge Borges and came across his rather famous remark, the map is not the territory I knew first hand exactly what he meant. + +That the maps is not the territory is one those rare truths that applies both literally and metaphorically to nearly everything. diff --git a/news.txt b/news.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..622c1ca --- /dev/null +++ b/news.txt @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left. -- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 1964 + +As an experiment, one that was easy at the time since we'd just started traveling, in 2017 I stopped watching all forms of visual media. In the time since I have allowed myself to watch a few short instructional videos (e.g., engine repair, 18th century cooking, sailing), but by and large I continue to avoid visual media. + +Interestingly, in the same time I became interested in creating short form visual media myself. diff --git a/pages/about.txt b/pages/about.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..91265cd --- /dev/null +++ b/pages/about.txt @@ -0,0 +1,85 @@ +<img src="/media/img/bio.jpg" alt="Scott Gilbertson" class="circle-pic" /> + +Luxagraf is [written and published](/technology) by Scott Nathan Gilbertson. + +I am a <a href="/jrnl/" title="the travel jrnl">writer</a>, <a href="/jrnl/" title="the travel jrnl">photographer</a>, <a href="dialogues/">birder</a>, and would-be mechanic. <br /> + +For the past five years my wife, our 3 children, and I +have lived mostly outdoors, in a 26-ft long [1969 Dodge Travco motorhome](https://luxagraf.net/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome). We call it <em>the big blue bus</em>, or home, for short.<br /> + +<hr /> + +<img src="images/2019/2017-06-16_094935_trinidad-and-around.jpg" id="image-1840" class="picfull" /> +If you'd like to follow along, sign up for the newsletter [*Friends of a Long Year*](https://luxagraf.net/friends/) (explained [here](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2020/11/invitation)). There's also an [RSS feed](https://luxagraf.net/feed.xml) if you prefer. + +<hr /> + +### Particulars + +#### About The Big Blue Bus + +The big blue bus gets its [own about page](https://luxagraf.net/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome), but what a lot of people want to know is, what engine does it have? So I'll save you a click: it's a Chrysler 318 LA. Yes, it's a little slow on hills. + +#### About me. + +I'm a freelance writer. I like writing about life on the road, engines, cooking, birds, and my personal, somewhat eccentric, ideas about life and how to live it. Unfortunately I have thus far not figured out how to pay the bills writing about just those topics. + +To pay the bills I mostly end up writing about technology. Over the years I've written extensively for *Wired* (where I've even been on staff for some years), *Budget Travel*, *Consumer Digest*, *Ars Technica*, *GQ*, *Epicurious*, *Longshot Magazine*, and other magazines, newspapers, and websites. + +I used to have a section in here about editors because I would not be nearly as good a writer if it weren't for the editors I've worked with. To keep things shorter, I'm reducing it to just say thanks to my wife Corrinne, who gets first pass at everything I do (whether she wants it or not), William Brandon, Laura Solomon, Michael Calore, Jeffery Van Camp, Nathan Mattisse, Leander Kahney, Alexis Madrigal, Evan Hansen, Gavin Clarke, Ashley Vance, and Paul Kunert. + +And extra special thanks to Maria Streshinsky, Executive Editor at Wired Magazine, and Adam Davies, my one and only formal writing teacher. + +If you're thinking there's no way freelance writing pays the bills, you're right. My wife also works. She's a reading specialist, teaching structured word inquiry to children age 6-15. You can visit her website, [Cumulus Learning]() for more details. + +#### About Stuff + +I get emails about stuff. What _____ do you use to ______. A lot of this is my fault, I have written a lot of product reviews for *Wired*. People believe I am a stuff expert. Here's a secret about product reviewers: we hate stuff. Stuff gets in our way and there's nothing we love more than we get to send the stuff back to the people who made it. And thankfully everything I've ever tested went either to back to the company that made it or to Wired's end of the year charity auction. Still, because people email me about what stuff I actually buy, I wrote a [whole page about the stuff I use](/technology). The essential stuff I use every day is: + +##### Photography +* **[Sony A7RII](https://electronics.sony.com/imaging/interchangeable-lens-cameras/full-frame/p/ilce7rm2-b)** - It takes pictures. +* **[Minolta 50mm f/2](https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=minolta+50+2+md+-1.2+-mc+-1.7+-58mm&_sacat=0)** - A 40-year-old lens you can buy for $25. Over half of the photos on this site were taken with this lens. For $25, and another $20 for an adapter to fit the Sony, you have a spectacular setup. No autofocus, but you don't need autofocus. +* **[Darktable](http://www.darktable.org/)** - My favorite app for developing digital images. The initial learning curve is steep, but hang in there it's worth it. It's so much more powerful than Adobe Lightroom. + +##### Writing +* **Pen and paper** - The nice thing about writing is it requires almost no gear, all you need is a pen and paper. I go for ball point pens because they're waterproof (relatively), usually a cheapo Bic of the sort you find for free in hotel rooms. I write in notebooks of all shapes and sizes and have no real preference. Except no spirals. I hate spiral binding. +* **[Vim](http://www.vim.org/)** - This is the text editor I used to type things up, including these words right now. It's very powerful, but it does take some practice before that power becomes apparent. + +##### Publishing +Luxagraf is created by hand, with a lot of tools loosely joined. Most of these tools are free software that you too can use and modify as you see fit. Without these amazing tools I wouldn't be able to do this -- many thanks to the people who created and maintain them. + +* [GeoDjango framework](http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/gis/) -- Behind the scenes this handles a few things, like geographic queries and putting everything on a map. If you have any interest in working with geographic data, this is by far the best tool I've used. +* [Python](https://www.python.org/) -- GeoDjango is written in Python (a full list of modules used is the [README](/readme), which I in turn run on a [Linux server](http://www.debian.org/). [Nginx](http://nginx.org/) serves the HTML files you're looking at here. +* [OpenStreetMap]( http://www.openstreetmap.org/) -- I use OpenStreetMap data for all the maps on this site. OpenStreetMap is like the Wikipedia of maps, except that it isn't wrong half the time. Whenever I feel skeptical about the so-called collective power of people on the internet, I remember OpenStreetMap and feel a little better. + +### Extended about (updated 2022) + +Lordy, you're still here? Okay, well, then you're either past the whole *why should I care who the fuck you are* thing or you're frothing at the mouth with hatred, but for some reason loving that hatred, which is odd. If that's you, here's a simple solution: [stop visiting](/dear-internet-commenter). You’ll feel better, and I won’t miss you because I never knew you existed. Good? Good. Let's get to the interesting things. Why write all this? I dunno, I guess it's the kind of stuff I enjoy reading about other people. I thought I'd return the favor for someone else. + +#### Purpose + +Why make this site? Why write things down at all? I think about this all the time and honestly, I'm not sure. It takes a tremendous amount of time to write, edit photos and think about what we've experienced and then put it up here -- I must get something out of it, I'm just not sure what. I think maybe I do it to find out what I think about things. I rarely know what I'm going to say about anything until I start look at photos and thinking about experiences, organizing them in my head into stories. I could do all that without posting it here I guess though, so I'm back at I don't know... the people I get to interact with? + +Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the web as we know it, once said, "for me the fundamental Web is the Web of people. It’s not the Web of machines talking to each other... [the] machines are talking on behalf of two people." + +Unless you're reading this from the same town I wrote it in, for most of history, up until the mid 20th century, it would have been impossible for you and I to connect in any way. Until the 21st century the best I could have hoped for was to reach you via a magazine, newspaper, etc, or you to reach me the same way, but there would be no way for us to reach each other in return (maybe via a letter to editor?). I suspect in the future this will be true again. But right now we have this moment, with these tools we can reach each other and I think that's pretty wonderful. How could you not want to participate in that? So I do. + +#### What to Write + +For the most part I write about what interests me, but I've noticed over the years that I am drawn to the people I meet, and the parts of a place that don't make sense at first or even repeated glances. The details that feel out of place are usually the interesting things. Why does this bird only come to *this* place? Why are there petroglyphs in this canyon and not this one? Why does this trail cross this ridge? What are those boulders doing up there? Why are there paintings of bunnies in a museum? Why does Wall Drug have 5 cent coffee? What is this island of rock and tree doing in a sea corn? + +Those are the more creative posts, but I aim for at least one post a week so sometimes I just write about whatever we've been doing. I think of those posts as posts for the grandparents and friends, but everyone gets to read them. + +#### How We Explore + +The word *travel* has a lot of baggage, I avoid it. I think of what we do as more like itinerant living. I suppose you could call it nomadic living, but nomadic people typically live within a fixed area and move around in it seasonally. We don't say in a fixed area. We do move seasonally though. + +Because so much of our lives are spent outdoors, we necessarily follow the seasons. To some degree anyway. As I write this we're sitting out an ice storm in South Carolina so it's not like we avoid winter, but at the same time we head of the UP in summer, not winter, and we're looking at the coast of Mexico for the winter, not the summer. When you spend as much time off-grid as we do you have no climate control. That means you sweat (and shiver), but it also means you pay attention to the weather and try to find places where the weather suits your clothes. + +#### Home, Everywhere + +We've travels several different ways and eventually settle on what I call the turtle method of travel: slow, and carrying our home with us. This way of living allows us to avoid hotels, AirBnBs, restaurants and other places that exist primarily to extract money from tourists. Not that there's anything wrong with tourists. We're tourists too. I try not to turn up my nose at tourists, but I don't want to spend all my time with fellow tourists and I don't want to participate in the tourist industry when there's real people out there I could be paying instead. + +Having your house parked nearby allows us to spend more time in places we wouldn't otherwise get to see, and in some cases to get closer to the local people. Not only does it keep you out of the tourist traps like hotels, it gives you a place to invite people into. You aren't just invading people's place in the world, you have a way to let them invade yours. It's been my experience that this creates an entirely different dynamic and relationship (not universally for the better, but often enough). + +Having your home with you gives other people a reason to approach you, especially if your home happens to be, say, a [bright blue 1969 Dodge Travco](/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome), which it seems to afford a certain amount of unearned goodwill no matter where we park it. So there's that too. diff --git a/published/2021-12-19_perfect-from-now-on.txt b/published/2021-12-19_perfect-from-now-on.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..19ef3b1 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2021-12-19_perfect-from-now-on.txt @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +It began the way all Travco adventures should. After the last things were stowed securely away, I fired up the engines, which roared the life. I sat down, grabbed the shift handle, put my foot on the brake... and it went straight to the floor. No brakes at all. Perfect start. + +<img src="images/2021/2021-11-21_111000_bus-interior.jpg" id="image-2655" class="picwide" /> + +Travco brakes. You either hate them, or you don't have a Travco. Actually they really aren't *that* bad, but they do require regular attention. I knew what was wrong. Whenever I park with the wheels angled too sharply to the right, the driver's side wheel leaks brake fluid[^1]. We'd been sitting like that for five days. I opened the master cylinder reservoir and sure enough, it was basically dry. I refilled it and started pumping the pedal. Still nothing. Well damn, so much for the easy fix. + +I had to run the last of the trash to the dump (where we live there's no trash service), so I did that and used the time to think about the brakes. Probably just need to pump them some more I reasoned, 26 feet of brake line takes a while. I got back and did that, but still had no pedal. Now it was past departure time. Well. Shit. + +It started to rain. I watched the drops running down the windshield and tried to think of what to do. The yard was quickly getting muddy, especially right around the bus. Still, the next step was going to be bleeding the brake lines. I grabbed a strip of sockets and a socket wrench and got down in the mud. Corrinne pressed the pedal, the kids fetched my tools when I forgot them back at the previous wheel, and together we bled the lines all the way around. Wet and muddy, I got back in, and fired it up again. Nice strong pedal. Perfect. We hit the road. + +<img src="images/2021/2021-12-18_hands-on-the-wheel.jpg" id="image-2656" class="picwide" /> + +---- + +I've had people ask if I am really as calm and collected in these situations as I make it seem when I write about them and the answer is... usually. I have a natural tendency to remain calm in stressful situations, and in fact I get calmer as tension increases, which even I don't understand, but that's a good starting point I guess. That said, I definitely lose my cool and do some swearing at the bus. + +It's not in the way you might think though. Whenever something goes wrong, the stress for me isn't that something went wrong, I expect that, the stress for me is in figuring out the problem. I used to get very frustrated because I wouldn't know what was wrong with the bus and you can't solve a problem if you don't know what that problem is. When I lost my cool in the past it was because I didn't know what the problem was and that frustrated me. + +When we left on this trip [back in 2017](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/04/april-fools) I knew very little about how an engine works and even less about the nearly infinite number of things that can go wrong with one. I still don't know everything, but after three years of [keep on keepin' on](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/05/keep-on-keeping-on), I've figured out a few things. + +Thanks to my uncle, a mechanic in New Orleans, some [YouTube channels](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9SzQNYLqsPQGY_nbHogDDw), and that very powerful motivating factor -- necessity -- I know more about what might be wrong these days. Whether or not I can fix it is a different story. Not only are my skills limited, the tools I can carry and the places I have to work are also limited. I'm probably not going to be replacing a cam shaft at the side of the road. + +Things I can't fix will probably still go wrong, but at least now I'll know when those situations come up. In hindsight, of the four major mechanical repairs I've hired out in the first three years, today I would only hire out one of them. Even that one I'm not sure I'd hire out. I might at least try to convince a Walmart to let me spend a few days in their parking lot redoing a head gasket myself. + +This day though really was kinda perfect because something went wrong, our plans got thrown for a loop and yet none of us lost our cool. We figured out what needed to be done, did it, and headed on down the road. To me that's what this life is all about. + +--- + +The drive down to Edisto meandered through forests and farms, rolling hills giving way to the flatlands of the Carolina lowcountry. We drove a route that felt a little like going back in time, people sat on porches of what looked like hundred year old houses, waved as we passed. + +<img src="images/2021/2021-12-18_fields.jpg" id="image-2657" class="picwide" /> + + +It was a stark contrast to the [drive to Edisto in 2017](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/04/edge-continent) when it felt like we were driving through a hollowed out, ruined land. It may be that it was just a difference in routes, I couldn't really say. I've now spent enough time in rural America to know that I'll never be a part of it, and should never try to speak for it. Still, it felt better out there this time around and that made me feel better. + +<img src="images/2021/2021-12-18_trees.jpg" id="image-2658" class="picwide" /> + + +The rain let up not long after we started driving, and I opened the windows and vents to get some air moving through. It wasn't long before I began to smell burning leaves and trash, a smell that has, for some odd reason, always smelled like home to me, like life. That smoke for some reason always makes me feel like something good is happening nearby. There are people, living, as people do, as people always have. There's a kind of vitality to that smell. It's a smell I associate more with the rest of the world than with the US where such things are usually banned. Out here though, it was happening all over, banned or no. + +<img src="images/2021/2021-12-18_edisto-marshes.jpg" id="image-2659" class="picwide" /> + +I somehow take that as a good sign. Maybe that wrecked world is still there too, I don't know, but this drive gave me a sense of hope and peace I haven't felt much in the last couple of years. It may not be perfect from now on, but I think we'll find a way to get by, and that's all you need. + +[^1]: This is something that needs to be properly addressed at some point, I've already had two mechanics try to parse it out, but neither solved the problem. It's been doing this for over three years now, so I don't worry about it too much anymore. In a campground the wheels usually end up straight, it's only boondocking where sometimes the wheels end up cockeyed and I forget to spin them straight. diff --git a/published/2021-12-26_edisto-holidays.txt b/published/2021-12-26_edisto-holidays.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..48e6822 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2021-12-26_edisto-holidays.txt @@ -0,0 +1,60 @@ +Edisto is a great place for the holidays if you're not a big Christmas celebrater, and we're not really Christmas people, so it works for us. You get mostly deserted beaches and sometimes you really hit the jackpot and it's 70 and sunny on those mostly deserted beaches. + +It didn't start out that way though. The day we got here the rain we'd outrun on the way down caught up with us. The cold didn't deter the kids. Spitting rain or no, they were getting in the water. + +<img src="images/2022/2021-12-19_092650_edisto-beach.jpg" id="image-2661" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2021-12-19_095150_edisto-beach.jpg" id="image-2662" class="picwide" /> + +The rain went away that evening and it started getting warmer every day until we were all in our bathing suits. + +<img src="images/2022/2021-12-26_105515_edisto-beach.jpg" id="image-2675" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2021-12-26_105424_edisto-beach.jpg" id="image-2674" class="picwide" /> + +Although this time around the bus was in much better shape than it was the first time we left (when almost nothing worked besides the propane, I installed the plumbing, solar, even the water tank as we went), we were still missing one key thing: our new refrigerator. + +Yes, it's true, after three years of living with an ice box we've joined the modern world and now have a refrigerator. Except that it was one of those things affected by all the shipping delays you read about so we didn't actually have it when we left. + +It's a 12V RV/marine fridge so we couldn't just head to the local big box store and pick one up. We ordered it through the company, which is in Italy, and had it delivered to the nearest dealer, which turned out to be in Wilmington, NC, about a four hour drive up the coast. + +So one day I got up a bit early and drove up to Wilmington and picked it up. Unlike almost everything else I've ever installed in the bus this was totally uneventful from beginning to end. I picked it without issue, turned around and drove back in time to catch twilight from the Charleston harbor bridge, and then the next morning I installed it and it just worked. As I write this several weeks later, it's still just working. And yes, it is nice to have a fridge. The ice box worked, but it had become a limitation for us, especially on the east coast where block ice is unheard of. + +<img src="images/2022/2021-12-22_174845_edisto-beach.jpg" id="image-2666" class="picwide" /> + +Elliott and I also managed to celebrate our birthday in there. He turned seven and I turned... somewhat older than seven. This was the second [birthday we've had here in Edisto](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2019/12/birthday-beach) and this time the weather cooperated and we got to spend our birthday on the beach. Corrinne's parents came to visit for Elliott's birthday too, so I smoked some ribs and we had a big birthday feast. + +<div class="cluster"> +<img src="images/2022/2021-12-20_065027_7th-birthday.jpg" id="image-2663" class="cluster picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2021-12-20_165821_7th-birthday.jpg" id="image-2664" class="cluster picwide" /> + <span class="row-2"> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20211220_062505.jpg" id="image-2683" class="cluster pic66" /> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20211220_170619_NEINFeM.jpg" id="image-2677" class="cluster pic66" /> + </span> +<img src="images/2022/2021-12-20_170647_7th-birthday.jpg" id="image-2665" class="cluster picwide" /> +</div> + +And yes, Christmas happened too. We have some friends that have been coming every year for decades now, and we met up with them again for some cookie decorating and hanging out. + +<img src="images/2022/2021-12-23_133308_christmas.jpg" id="image-2667" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2021-12-23_140239_christmas.jpg" id="image-2668" class="picwide" /> + +Our neighbors in the campground also gave the kids rides on their trike as a Christmas present, which was a hit. + +<img src="images/2022/2021-12-24_100447_christmas.jpg" id="image-2669" class="picwide" /> + +And then Christmas morning, which I'd been looking forward to because I love watching them open the gifts they get each other. We've had a tradition for a while now of taking them to a store of their choosing (Treehouse in Athens GA the last two years) and letting them pick a present for each other. We have a budget so they don't go crazy, but they don't go crazy anyway. This year the girls got each other the same gift without realizing it of course so I was waiting to see their faces when they opened each others' gift. They may not look anything alike, but they're still twins. + +<div class="cluster"> +<img src="images/2022/2021-12-25_064707_christmas.jpg" id="image-2670" class="cluster picwide" /> + <span class="row-2"> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20211225_063721.jpg" id="image-2679" class="cluster pic66 /> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20211225_065246.jpg" id="image-2682" class="cluster pic66" /> + </span> +<img src="images/2022/2021-12-25_070014_christmas.jpg" id="image-2671" class="cluster picwide" /> +</div> + +I always thought I'd left the sunny and 75 Christmas weather behind when I moved out of LA, but Edisto proved me wrong this year, once we'd dispensed with the gifts, we headed out to the beach (with a couple new toys in tow). + +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20211225_123601.jpg" id="image-2680" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20211227_123157.jpg" id="image-2681" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2021-12-25_141719_edisto-beach.jpg" id="image-2672" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2021-12-25_142011_edisto-beach.jpg" id="image-2673" class="picwide" /> diff --git a/published/2021-12-29_southern-summer.txt b/published/2021-12-29_southern-summer.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b3c8d94 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2021-12-29_southern-summer.txt @@ -0,0 +1,40 @@ +It's strange to spend your December at the beach, lying out in the sun, swimming in the ocean. Not that I'm complaining mind you, but every now and then I did find myself thinking, is it really still December? What if I've fallen into some strange time warp and it's actually April? These kinds of things can happen in beach towns. + +If you popped me in a time machine, set it to random, and pulled me out here I would say it's late March, early April. Or I'd say we were Mexico again. Then again, it's not the first time we've had a [December warm enough for the beach](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/12/funland-beach), and with any luck it won't be the last. + +We took full advantage of it, ignoring everyday tasks like laundry in favor of living in bathing suits. + +<div class="cluster"> + <span class="row-2"> + <img src="images/2022/IMG_20211227_122823.jpg" id="image-2685" class="cluster pic66" /> + <img src="images/2022/IMG_20211227_122734.jpg" id="image-2684" class="cluster pic66" /> + </span> +</div> + +Mornings and evenings were still cool, but that made them perfect times for a little marsh walking. You can't play at the beach all day. Actually, our kids probably could, but variety is good. + +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20211227_100348.jpg" id="image-2686" class="picwide" /> + +We've always made a trip to Charleston from Edisto, usually to do laundry, but this year we skipped that headed straight out to Battery Park for a picnic. + +<div class="cluster"> +<img src="images/2022/2021-12-29_155709-1_charleston.jpg" id="image-2689" class="picwide" /> + <span class="row-2"> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20211229_132145.jpg" id="image-2687" class="cluster pic66" /> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20211229_131300.jpg" id="image-2693" class="cluster pic66" /> + </span> +</div> + +Last year, part of what I did while we were holed up at the farmhouse, was to write a historical novel. I wrote it mostly for the kids, about some kids living in the early 18th century. Some of the action, or I guess you would say the climatic scenes, are set in 1710 Charleston (then called Charlestown). It was fun to show them some of the places things happened in the book, in real life. I enjoy overlaying the world in front of us with a good story. + +In the end though, I think the kids were mostly excited about ice cream. History is fascinating, but ice cream is delicious. We've been coming to Charleston and getting ice cream at the same place downtown for years now. It's a family tradition at this point. + +<div class="cluster"> +<img src="images/2022/2021-12-29_165346-1_charleston.jpg" id="image-2690" class="cluster picwide" /> + <span class="row-2"> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20211229_135312.jpg" id="image-2688" class="cluster pic66" /> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20211229_135720.jpg" id="image-2694" class="cluster pic66 caption" /> + </span> +</div> + +I'd have to say coming to Edisto Beach and Charleston for the holidays is something of a tradition now too. I'm not sure it's one we'll do every year, but it's fun while it lasts. diff --git a/published/2022-01-03_on-the-path.txt b/published/2022-01-03_on-the-path.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..dc3464f --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2022-01-03_on-the-path.txt @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +Now that we are back on the road I've been reflecting on our time off the road. + +Everything out here on the road feels the same, or better, in all the fundamental ways that matter. It's marginally different in minor ways -- it's more crowded -- but it feels like it always did, at least for us. We have our rhythm. We have our adventures. Everything feels right, as it used to, it feels good. + +<img src="images/2022/2021-12-30_183434_hunting_island.jpg" id="image-2695" class="picwide" /> + +It's left me wondering a little bit what we were waiting for when we were waiting to get back on the road. Naturally we weren't waiting the whole time we were off the road. We were working on projects that were harder to do while on the road. My wife started a business (which has become very successful), I wrote a novel, and am well into a book of non-fiction as well, and even sketched out a sequel to the first novel. We learned new skills, grew in new ways. + +That was all good, but there was that background of waiting lingering about. I feel like everyone I know has been doing a bit of waiting the last couple of years. We've been almost like characters in a Greek play, waiting for something outside to come in and wrap things up. + +If you spend any time looking at history though, you find there's really never a neat tidy ending. When things become unusually uncertain, for whatever reason, as they did, our response is to pull back, we hunker down, we wait -- no one wants to get caught out mid stride when it all comes crashing down. But it never all comes crashing down. Just bits and pieces here and there. And eventually it -- whatever *it* may be, economic crashes, wars, political strife, disease -- eventually we figure out where the pieces are falling, adjust, and then we stop waiting and get going again. + +I feel like that's about where we are right now, collectively. I *know* that's were I am, and I hope you are too. I think it's high time to get going again. + +But where to go? For most people that's metaphorical, and it's that for us too, but for us it's also literal. Where should we go? + +For us the past felt like it was still sitting out there, waiting for us to come back. So we decided let's go back. Let's go back and find the path we had been on, see if it's still there. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-02_131142_hunting_island.jpg" id="image-2697" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-02_131328_hunting_island.jpg" id="image-2698" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2021-12-31_230721_hunting_island.jpg" id="image-2696" class="picwide" /> + + +That's why we're at Hunting Island South Carolina. This is where we were almost two years ago when we decided we didn't want to get caught out mid stride, when we decided we wanted to wait a bit, hunker down, assess the situation, see where the pieces were going to fall. Now that we've done that, this is where we pick up again. Not to repeat anything, but to start out again on the path. + +I don't know exactly where this path leads (and I have no idea where yours might lead you), but I do know that there is a path out there for each of us. And I don't think the path that's being offered up by our society these days is very appealing. I think that's part of the reason people read this site. Because you also probably don't think we were put here on earth, as part of this grand dance of existence, to maximize our safety and security, to build wealth or amass petty power. + +I believe that we are here to give the gifts that we have built up inside us over millennia of our soul's existence, that we are here to shepherd each other toward our gifts and give to the world those things that we have inside us. + +We are all in the process of maturation. Both as individuals and as a species. None of knows where this all goes, but I think we all know that the current stories don't wash and it's time for something new. I don't know what that looks like for you, but for myself, for us out here, it looks like this. It looks like walks through primordial forests, long afternoons on windswept beaches, evenings around the fire. + + +I believe that you'll know when you are on the right path. You'll feel it. Life will begin to feel like what it is, a gift, an adventure, a joy. You'll feel connection, fulfillment, that deep sense of satisfaction at the end of the day that comes from knowing there is nothing else you would rather have done that day. That is the path. And if you manage to find it, don't stray. Do the work. It isn't always easy. It isn't always beaches and campfires. Sometimes it's engine repair and frustration and despair. But these moments are fleeting, they are the necessary growth, the twists and turns that reveal. Stay disciplined, stay focused, stay on the path. Let go of control and just walk the path. It will reveal itself slowly, only as much as you need to see, just keep on it, and see where it leads you. That's adventure. That's living. diff --git a/published/2022-01-08_hunting-island-storms.txt b/published/2022-01-08_hunting-island-storms.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d7a0670 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2022-01-08_hunting-island-storms.txt @@ -0,0 +1,56 @@ +The warm December weather was bound to end at some point. We didn't get far into January before that old cold north wind found us. It came roaring in one night, throwing palm fronds and bombing pine cones down on the bus all through the night. The next morning the entire campground was littered with debris. I haven't been up top to inspect yet, but it doesn't seem like we suffered too much damage, aside from some lost sleep. + +Behind the wind came the cold, putting an end to our days in bathing suits, at least for a little while. I know people think we're crazy, being out here in the cold. But I grew up by the sea, and my love of it goes way beyond warm weather. I am happy beside the sea in any weather. The ocean on a cold, windy day is as beautiful and wonderful as a day of sunshine and warmth. The best part is that when it's only 45 degrees and rain is spitting in a 20 knot wind you'll typically have the beach to yourself. + +And cold doesn't mean we don't swim, it just means we get a lot more strange looks when we do. One afternoon I took the kids down to go swimming, but it turned out the beach was completely engulfed in cloud. It only went about 100 yards inland, but once you crested the last dune it was like stepping into an eerie black and white world. + +<img src="images/2022/2021-12-31_190025_hunting_island.jpg" id="image-2699" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2021-12-31_191242_hunting_island.jpg" id="image-2700" class="picwide" /> + +Since we were in Hunting Island when the pandemic hit and everything shut down, we never had a chance to explore it much. This time around we were able to get out more and do some hiking. South Carolina's coastal state parks don't have a ton of land in most cases, so there's not much hiking in terms of mileage, but very few people seem to do anything but go to the beach, which leaves the trails mostly deserted. + +One morning we packed a few snacks, filled our water bottles, and headed out to do a little hike through the coastal forest. Hunting Island is covered by a dense maritime that's taken root in some ancient sand dunes. That's actually about all the island is really, and it's in trouble as rising sea levels push the water tables higher, but we got distracted from all that when we spied a boardwalk that struck out in the opposite direction, off the backside of the island, across the inland marsh to an island. + +<div class="cluster"> + <span class="row-2"> + <img src="images/2022/IMG_20220102_094735.jpg" id="image-2708" class="cluster pic66" /> + <img src="images/2022/IMG_20220102_094623.jpg" id="image-2713" class="cluster pic66" /> + </span> + <img src="images/2022/IMG_20220102_092403.jpg" id="image-2705" class="cluster picwide" /> +</div> + +The salt marsh is what's called a Spartina marsh, after the dominant cord grass, various species of *Spartina*. Three things make low country marshes what they are, the Spartina, the oysters, and the salty tides constantly pulling water in and out. Spartina is able to desalinate the water, if you climb down in the pluff mud and run your fingers along the bottom side of a blade you'll find salt crystals. + +Birds love the cordgrass because it provides plenty of places to hide. Walking out on the boardwalk to the island the kids and I spotted almost a dozen species, including clapper rails, which emerged from hiding scold our intrusion in their world. + +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20220102_092048.jpg" id="image-2704" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20220102_093938.jpg" id="image-2706" class="picwide" /> + +The kids are getting to be good birders, they bring their notebooks and write down everything they see, and then later draw pictures of them. + +It was a windy day though, so after a while out in the exposed marsh we decided to head back and duck into the forest for some shelter from the wind. In the parking lot, when we were getting ready to go, we ran into a man who told us how to get to the lagoon using a different route, so we ended up leaving the car where it was and finding the trail down the road that cut across the forest to the ocean. + +Hunting Island isn't very large, and it seems very heavily managed, but somehow it manages to have one of the wildest, more primordial-feeling forests I've ever hiked through. The maritime mix of palms and pines and oaks always has an otherworldly feel to it to me, like you've somehow made it back to the Mesozoic. It probably helps that this little stretch of ancient dunes, which couldn't have been more than half a mile across, seemed to have more bird species in one place than anywhere else we've been. + +And then all the sudden it ends with a salt lagoon emptying out to sea, surrounded by the stark bleached remains of trees that tried to live too close to a shore that's forever shifting. + +The day we emerged from the woods the storms were still hanging around the edges, giving the place a sense of wildness that made it remarkable to think there was a crowded fishing pier less and a mile down the coast. So far we were concerned it felt like we were the only people on earth. + + +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20220102_101148.jpg" id="image-2709" class="picwide" /> + +<div class="cluster"> + <span class="row-2"> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20220102_102223.jpg" id="image-2710" class="cluster pic66" /> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20220102_102458.jpg" id="image-2711" class="cluster pic66" /> + </span> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20220102_102659.jpg" id="image-2712" class="cluster picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-02_133637_hunting_island.jpg" id="image-2701" class="cluster picwide" /> +</div> + +The kids ran around playing on the shore while Corrinne and I sat and hashed out some plans for the near future. We're flying a little less by the seat of our pants these days, which means a little more preparation is needed. And these things they call reservations. + +We watched as the clouds gave way to sun for a while, and then moved back in, just like the fog had a few days before. It was almost like Patrick's Point, although not quite that dramatic. Eventually the nuts and dried fruit that was tiding us over ran out, and we headed back. We took the long way, walking the length of the lagoon and back up through the forest, with the kids identifying plants and birds as we went. A good day on the path. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-02_135737_hunting_island_T3RaeHh.jpg" id="image-2715" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-02_140252_hunting_island.jpg" id="image-2703" class="picwide" /> diff --git a/published/2022-01-12_hunting-island-sunshine.txt b/published/2022-01-12_hunting-island-sunshine.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..26968a3 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2022-01-12_hunting-island-sunshine.txt @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +The storms that rolled through while we were on Hunting Island thankfully didn't last more than a couple of days. A couple of rainy days gave us time to get some mundane tasks done, like laundry, which feels less like a wasted day when it's raining anyway. + +Fortunately for us once we'd done a little laundry the weather warmed up and we managed to get a little beach time in. It wasn't exactly warm, but the kids and I went swimming a couple times. It is an odd thing to be walking down the shoreline in a bathing suit when everyone else is bundled up in puffy jackets, but honestly, it didn't feel that cold. I sometimes worry people think we're nuts, but if they do they at least don't say it. + +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20211230_082428.jpg" id="image-2716" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20211230_154613.jpg" id="image-2717" class="picwide" /> + +One day we decided to ride our bikes up the beach. The wind was blowing pretty good and a wise fellow cyclist urged up to ride upwind first, which was good advice. We made it up to the lighthouse, though it was a slog. We didn't go up in the lighthouse because they wouldn't let Elliott in (not tall enough) and we weren't going without him. As I told the kids, going up in a lighthouse is counter to its purpose. The whole point of a lighthouse is to stay away from it, not go in it. + +We went swimming instead. And then we road home with the wind at our backs, our bodies like tiny sails propelling us back down the beach with hardly pedaling at all. + +With nicer weather we spent more time out on the beach adjacent the campground, especially in the evening. With the sunset out of view behind the island, twilight on beach turned in soft oranges and pinks and blues. + +With nicer weather we spent more time out on the beach adjacent the campground, especially in the evening. With the sunset out of view behind the island, twilight on beach turned in soft oranges and pinks and blues. It was usually just us and a sky full of colors. + +<div class="cluster"> + <img src="images/2022/2022-01-05_202313_hunting_island.jpg" id="image-2718" class="cluster picwide" /> + <span class="row-2"> + <img src="images/2022/2022-01-05_203821_hunting_island.jpg" id="image-2719" class="cluster pic66" /> + <img src="images/2022/2022-01-05_202328_hunting_island.jpg" id="image-2720" class="cluster pic66" /> + </span> +</div> + +It's strange how different your experience of a place can be just based on the campsite you're in. When we were here in March of 2020 we weren't really fans. Sure, there was the pandemic, which was just starting and there was lots of uncertainty, but really we just had a not so great campsite. We felt crowded in and somewhat on display. The front loop of sites are cramped together and there's almost no vegetation between sites, and the bus is really one big wrap around window. There isn't a lot of privacy when we're in campsites with some separation. + +This time we were in the back loop campsites, further from the beach, but with denser tree cover, palmetto and oaks provide a barrier, and there's more room between campsites. That meant room for the kids to play and set up the hammock and have a good time. We were also backed right up against the favorite watering hole for a small group of deer that would stop by for a visit every day, including one that seemed fascinated by Elliott. + +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20220106_140058.jpg" id="image-2722" class="picwide caption" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-06_170715_hunting_island.jpg" id="image-2721" class="picwide" /> + +The beach near the campground was nice enough, and the long tidal flats that extended back into the marsh made for good birding, but there was something about the dead trees that made me want to go back to what the locals call the boneyard. It used to be a lot bigger, but the state park tore a bunch of it out to shore up the beach, and, the assumption is, because they were worried about being sued should someone get hurt climbing on the trees. + +Clearing out most of the boneyard was [not a popular move in these parts](https://www.postandcourier.com/news/prized-boneyard-beach-bulldozed-at-scs-natural-hunting-island-state-park/article_b86926fe-15f8-11ea-9557-ab79ab5454d6.html), and they did it all sneakily without applying for a permit because they knew they wouldn't get it. It's a good reminder that just because an area is protected, doesn't, unfortunately, mean it's protected from the interests that need to make money off it, in this case, Hunting Island State Park. You'd think they'd have enough money with what they charge for firewood, but apparently not. Gotta have those white sand beaches right in front of the lighthouse. + +Fortunately, as we'd already accidentally discovered, there's more to the boneyard, you just have to walk a bit to get to it. One sunny afternoon I decided to go back and see what it looked like in the sunlight, and see if maybe there was a way across the channel to the rest of the trees. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-06_183840_hunting_island.jpg" id="image-2724" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-06_183306_hunting_island.jpg" id="image-2723" class="picwide" /> + + +We watched the birds to see where the shallows were and eventually we found a place to cross. The water only came up to my knees, but it was a surprisingly strong current. Squeeze and outgoing tide through a narrow enough channel and you can get a strong river. I ended up carrying Elliott, not that there was anywhere to go really should you be swept away, but the wind made the prospect of being soaking wet very unappealing. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-06_185927_hunting_island.jpg" id="image-2725" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-06_190325_hunting_island.jpg" id="image-2726" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-06_190358_hunting_island.jpg" id="image-2727" class="picwide" /> + +The man who'd originally pointed out the trail to us mentioned that he used to have a house out here, which, judging by the ruins of a road we found, wasn't as long ago as I'd assumed. Or the ocean is slower to reclaim asphalt than I thought. Whatever the case, there was plenty of road left, some power lines even still hanging limp from telephone poles. + +I'm not a believer in the apocalyptic fantasies so popular these days (history shows that civilizations don't collapse, they decline), but it was odd to wander around what amounted to ruins of our civilization. A good moment for the kids to connect back to some of the ruins we've seen of other civilizations. Everything ends eventually, best to enjoy it while you can. diff --git a/published/2022-01-17_a-tale-of-two-huntingtons.txt b/published/2022-01-17_a-tale-of-two-huntingtons.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..40bee00 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2022-01-17_a-tale-of-two-huntingtons.txt @@ -0,0 +1,62 @@ +We left Hunting Island earlier than I'd have liked, but based on our previous experience in 2020, we weren't expecting to like it all that much, a few days seemed like plenty. I'd have stayed another week if we could have, but we had already booked another park up the coast. That's one of the downsides to booking so much in advance, but around here we just don't have a choice a lot of the time[^1]. + +We headed north to Huntington Beach State Park. This was confusing for me because I grew up just down the coast from a Huntington Beach State Park. Throw in Hunting Island and it gets even more confusing. But it turns out there is a much less famous Huntington Beach State Park here in South Carolina, not to be confused with Hunting Island or the Huntington Beach in California. + +Like everywhere we've been lately, we had the beach mostly to ourselves. + +<div class="cluster"> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20220109_092420.jpg" id="image-2729" class="cluster picwide" /> + <span class="row-2"> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20220109_094001_DTM926j.jpg" id="image-2731" class="cluster pic66" /> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20220116_155818.jpg" id="image-2734" class="cluster pic66" /> + </span> +</div> + +A little bit of internet sleuthing revealed that the Huntington Beach State Park in South Carolina is related Huntington Beach State Park in California. The men whose names grace the parks were cousins. They don't appear to have much to do with each other though. The east coast Huntington dabbled in poetry, married a famous sculptor, and was obsessed with Spain. The west coast Huntington built a trolley car empire in southern California. + +Those not familiar with southern California history might not realize that the area once had one of the best mass transit systems in the world. In part because of Huntington, there was once over 1,100 miles of mass transit trolley track servicing fifty cities in the greater Los Angeles area. Lest you think Huntington was a civic-minded philanthropist, let's add that all these trolley lines were there to interconnect his real estate developments. + +There's a legend that Standard Oil and Goodyear Tire conspired to tear it all out, but that's not true. Those two *were* convicted of a conspiracy to monopolize bus systems, which in some cases did replace trolley lines, but if they destroyed the trolley lines they did it without a paper trail. + +There was plenty of cheerleading against the rail lines from Harry Chandler, owner of the Los Angeles Times and, ahem, member of the Goodyear board at the time (in case you thought big media cheering on industry's deliberate destruction of common good was just a recent thing), but there doesn't seem to have been an actual conspiracy. + +Today there's no trace of the California Huntington's rail lines. All that work has long since been paved over. The neighborhoods might remain in some cases, but the chief legacy of the California Huntington is the city that bears his name. + +The South Carolina Huntington, whose name was Archer, led a more laid back life it seems, based on some books I read in the visitor center one day while the kids were playing with the touch tank animals. Archer liked to write, he liked to tinker and invent thing, and he liked to study all things Spain and spanish culture. + +I have no idea what he was like as a person, but from the outside he seems to have been what's now a lost breed -- a true philanthropist. That is, someone who has money and the good sense to give it to people with more talent than he had. That might sound harsh, but I think we need more people who are able to recognize their own strengths and weaknesses and live within them. Today we get wealthy people so profoundly lacking in self awareness that they think we'll cheer when they build giant cock rockets that can't even make it into space. It makes you miss a man like Archer Huntington, who seemed to have no such need to prove anything to the world. + +The land we're camped on was once part of the Huntington's summer home, which they called Atalaya, after the Moorish castle in Spain which inspired its design. The Huntington's left the estate to the State of South Carolina in the 1950s. Try to imagine Bill Gates, the [largest owner of farmland in the United States](https://landreport.com/2021/01/bill-gates-americas-top-farmland-owner/), donating any of it. Some how I can't see it. Archer Huntington was of a different era. + +The Huntington's left this small state park, along with their completely bizarre house, inspired by Archer's memories of [Atalaya Castle in Spain](https://flickr.com/photos/124338116@N08/35658863184/). If you click that link and look at the image... maybe it's just me, but I don't find the original Atalaya particularly inspiring. Archer did though, which is why this is in South Carolina. + +<img src="images/2022/atalaya.jpg" id="image-2736" class="picwide" /> + +Inside is no less strange. It's a rectangular set of room built around a central courtyard that once housed a water tower. Nothing has been preserved but the walls and few shelves. It's an odd thing to tour. Corrinne thinks that might be how Archer wanted it, obsessed as he was with the Moorish buildings in Spain, which would have been somewhat in ruins even when he was there. Whatever the case, it's a very empty place with a very hollow feel to it. + +<div class="cluster"> +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-26_130425_huntington-beach.jpg" id="image-2737" class="cluster picwide" /> + <span class="row-2"> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20220112_152238.jpg" id="image-2741" class="cluster pic66" /> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20220112_153700.jpg" id="image-2739" class="cluster pic66" /> + </span> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20220112_153311.jpg" id="image-2740" class="cluster picwide" /> + <span class="row-2"> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20220112_151455.jpg" id="image-2742" class="cluster pic66" /> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20220112_154102.jpg" id="image-2738" class="cluster pic66" /> + </span> +</div> + +I was surprised by how much the kids enjoyed it. I didn't even go the first time they went because I just don't find abandoned houses all that interesting, but they insisted on going back with me to show me everything. + +That's when I started thinking more about what Corrinne said, that Archer's plan might have been to recreate ruins. The more I thought about it the more I started to research him, to try to figure him out. He didn't have to work, there was no real struggle for survival in his life so far as I can tell. Once you eliminate that, the world opens up. You can start thinking in longer terms, beyond your own lifespan. You can also indulge whims. Not that he was capricious. Atalaya was not a small undertaking. + +I think that's the thing that bothers me most about our current system. Most of us don't have the luxury of thinking in such broad terms. And our decisions reflect this. There aren't going to be any Atalayas in the future because few of us are able to pursue our idle whims the way Archer did. + +Think for a moment, if you never needed to worry about shelter or food again, what would you do with your days? My guess is you'd probably spend your days doing something different than you do now. And I suspect that thing you would be doing, whatever it is, is what you ought to be doing, is what you *need* to be doing. And not just for yourself. We need more Atalayas. + +We need more whimsy and why not in the world. I think we all would do well to channel a little Archer Huntington. Maybe we still have to worry about shelter or food, but maybe too we can carve out a little space, a little time, and start making our Atalayas, whatever they might be. + + + +[^1]: We were under the impression that we could only stay two weeks at any given park in South Carolina. This is generally the policy almost everywhere we've been. Definitely true on federal land, though we've occasionally bent the rules by a few days. Turns out though that South Carolina doesn't care. Or at least has no hard and fast rules. So we could have stayed in Hunting Island, but we didn't know this until after we'd already left. diff --git a/published/2022-01-23_huntington-beach-birds.txt b/published/2022-01-23_huntington-beach-birds.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..352f41f --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2022-01-23_huntington-beach-birds.txt @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +Long before the [Huntingtons showed up in these parts](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/01/a-tale-of-two-huntingtons), the Carolina low country was full of massive rice plantations. This where Hoppin' John and other southern rice dishes have their origins. + +Part of the success of rice in this area is climate-related, but another part of the local success of rice was an irrigation system that used something called a rice trunk. These were ingeniously designed wooden boxes that allowed just one or two people to control the flow of water into rice fields. There aren't many left these days, but there's a former rice pond here in Huntington Beach State Park and it has some rebuilt rice trunks that still get used (albeit, not to irrigate rice). You can see a video of it in action [here](https://www.facebook.com/SC.State.Parks/videos/check-off-for-parks-help-us-repair-the-rice-trunks-at-huntington-beach/1147180642390192/). + +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-12_195537_huntington-birds.jpg" id="image-2744" class="picwide" /> + +The road out to the main part of Huntington Beach State Park is built top of what was previously a causeway to divide the salt marsh from a freshwater rice pond. The park more or less left the system in place, sans rice, and uses the rice trunks to control water levels for migrating birds. In the winter they drain it down for the migrants that feed in shallower water, in the summer they let in more salt water for the mullet population which feeds other migrating birds. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-12_195244_huntington-birds.jpg" id="image-2743" class="picwide" /> + +Our campsite was just a short walk through the trees to causeway so the kids and I spent plenty of evenings watching the birds on the pond. The kids were especially into the Roseate Spoonbill, which has to be one of earth's most awkward looking creatures. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-19_195356_huntington-birds.jpg" id="image-2751" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-26_184434_huntington-birds.jpg" id="image-2752" class="picwide" /> + +Maybe they just look strange relative to grace of other marsh birds. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-19_131924_huntington-birds.jpg" id="image-2747" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-19_131315_huntington-birds.jpg" id="image-2746" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-19_131124_huntington-birds.jpg" id="image-2745" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-19_132524_huntington-birds.jpg" id="image-2749" class="picwide caption" /> + +Unlike most places we've been, we were never alone birdwatching in Huntington. In all but the coldest of weather there would be plenty of people out with binoculars, and there was often an army of photographers toting around huge lenses. Sometimes we'd see a cluster of people at the side of the road and now there was something in the trees. It reminded me of the [the traffic jams in Yellowstone](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2010/07/endless-crowds-yellowstone) that tell you there's a grizzly bears somewhere nearby. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-19_195122_huntington-birds.jpg" id="image-2753" class="picwide" /> + +I cover cameras for *Wired* and when testing high-end cameras and lenses I often find myself thinking, *who spends this much on camera gear?* Usually I end up deciding that hardly anyone does, but Huntington Beach proved me wrong. I met photographers of all sorts, from professional wildlife photographers to totally self-taught amateurs, but whatever their status they all seemed able to afford really nice, long lenses. Not sure what's wrong with me, but I just can't bring myself to spend $2,000 on a camera lens. + +The funny thing is, in Huntington most of these birds were so close you really didn't need a very long lens. Almost all the images here are from a dinky little (manual focus) 100mm lens. The one time I did take out a longer lens (300mm) half the time I ended up with bird head shots. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-19_132013_huntington-birds.jpg" id="image-2748" class="picwide" /> + +It was fun to be around other bird nerds though. I've met a few fellow bird watchers in our travels, but at Huntington birders seemed to outnumber non-birders. Birders are among the nicest people I've met traveling, always pointing me to some thicket where some bird they'd just spotted is hiding. Some people are little wary of the kids, kids do tend to scare off birds, but our kids know better. Unless something comes up. Sometimes when you see the perfect stick you have to go crashing through the underbrush to get it, screw the birds. They are still kids after all. + +The kids know though that often looking for birds leads us to interesting places, like the octopus tree[^1]. + +Corrinne works with students in the mornings a couple days a week, so the kids and I go out exploring. Initially it was pretty cold, so we stuck to the nature center, where I spent time reading about the Huntingtons, and the kids played with the starfish and stingrays in the touch tanks. The next day was warmer so we went for a walk around another pond and stumbled on a huge tree, or group of trees, with limbs going every which way. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-22_132444_huntington-beach-sp_q3XFko4.jpg" id="image-2771" class="picwide" /> + +The first day we paused for a few minutes, but we wanted to see what else was down the trail so we kept walking. There was nothing else down the trail quite as compelling as the tree though, not even birds, which were mostly hiding from the wind, so we turned around and went back. And we went back the next day. This time we dispensed with hiking and just went to the tree. I brought along a notebook and worked while they climbed and played games in the tree. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-18_132444_huntington-beach-sp.jpg" id="image-2769" class="picwide" /> + +This became our mornings for the better part of two weeks. They were good mornings, sitting in a crook of the tree, writing while the kids scampered around me. It was warm in the sunshine, and the wind hardly stirred back in the forest, no matter how much it might be blowing out on the beach. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-22_122444_huntington-beach-sp.jpg" id="image-2772" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-22_122445_huntington-beach-sp.jpg" id="image-2773" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20220109_121140_lB3u266.jpg" id="image-2768" class="picwide" /> + +It's a common misconception that living on the road means you don't have to work. I'm sure that is true for some people somewhere, but not any I've ever met. It's definitely not true for us. Living on the road doesn't mean working less, in fact it often means working more, working harder. It does, however, often mean you get to working in interesting places. I've worked beside rivers, sitting on rock outcroppings, picnic tables, beaches, sand dunes, marshes, and now, sitting in a tree. + + + +[^1]: Two different locals used this name. One said there used to be a sign, but we never saw anything about the tree anywhere in the park. diff --git a/scratch.txt b/scratch.txt index fc78462..712e968 100644 --- a/scratch.txt +++ b/scratch.txt @@ -1,83 +1,74 @@ The energy of chaos is required to change the existing order. -# Scratch - -It began the way all Travco adventures should. After the last things were stowed securely away, I fired up the engines, which roared the life. I sat down, grabbed the shift handle, put my foot on the brake... and it went straight to the floor. No brakes at all. Perfect. Travco brakes. You either hate them, or you don't have a Travco. - -Actually they aren't that bad, but they do require regular attention. I knew what was wrong. Whenever I park with the wheels angled too sharply to the right, the driver's side wheel leaks brake fluid[^1]. We'd been sitting like that for five days. I opened the master cylinder reservoir and sure enough, it was basically dry. I refilled it and started pumping the pedal. Still nothing. - -I had to run the last of the trash to the dump (where we lived there was no trash service), so I did that and used the time to think about the brakes. Probably just need to pump them some more. I got back and did that. Still no brakes. And it was past departure time. Well. Shit. It was raining by now. The yard was getting muddy, especially right around the bus. - -I pulled out the service manual just to make sure there was nothing unusual about bleeding the brakes in this thing. There didn't seem to be. So I grabbed a strip of sockets and a socket wrench and got down in the mud. Corrinne pressed the pedal, the kids fetched my tools when I forgot them back at the previous wheel, and together we bled the lines all the way around. I got back in and fired it up again. Nice strong pedal. Perfect. We hit the road. - -I've had people ask if I am really as calm and collected in these situations as I write them and the answer in the past, was, not always. I do have a natural tendency to remain calm in stressful situations, and in fact I get calmer as tension increases, which even I don't understand. Whenever something goes wrong, the stress for me isn't that something went wrong, it all comes down to -- what is the problem? I used to get very frustrated because I wouldn't know what was wrong with the bus. - -When we left on this trip originally I knew very little about how an engine works and even less about the nearly infinite number of things that can go wrong. I still don't know everything, but after three years of keepin' on keepin' on, I've figured out a few things. Thanks to my uncle Ron, a mechanic in New Orleans, some YouTube channels, and the powerful motivating factor of, I HAVE TO FIGURE THIS OUT, I know more about what might be wrong. Whether or not I can fix it is a different story. Not only are my skills limited, the tools I can carry and the places I have to work are also limited. I'm probably not going to be replacing a cam shaft at the side of the road. Things I can't fix will probably still go wrong, but at least now I'll know when those situations come up. In hindsight, of the four major mechanical repairs I've hired out in the first three years we traveled this way, today I would only hire out one of them. Even though one, I'm not sure I'd hire out. I might at least try to convince a Walmart to let me spend a few days in their parking lot redoing a head gasket. - +# Stories to Tell +- ice storm, staying longer in one place, snow storm +Long time readers may have noticed we've been moving a little slower than we once did. This was partly a conscious decision on our part, and partly a consequence of needing to stay south until it warms up. And it has not warmed up yet. +I like the slower pace most of the time -- we've ended up spending about two weeks everywhere so far -- but one unintended consequence of both moving slower and making reservations is that you really can't dodge the weather. In the old days I used to study wind and weather maps to figure out where we should go to stay warm or cool, but when you have immutable reservations, and everything else is booked solid for months anyway, the weather becomes something that happens to you. -[^1]: This is something that needs to be properly addressed at some point, but it's been doing this for over three years now, so I don't worry about it too much. In a campground site the wheels usually end up straight, it's only boondocking that sometimes the wheels end up cockeyed and I forget to spin them straight. +Our first week at Huntington the weather was beautiful. Warm enough to spend some time out on the beach, though not quite warm enough for bathing suits. -# Stories to Tell -- Packing up chaos, pairing down, getting rid of -- Drive down, perfect beginning, solving problems -- Edisto and birthday +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-26_175623_huntington-beach.jpg" id="image-2779" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-24_164914_huntington-beach.jpg" id="image-2778" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-23_170931_huntington-beach-sp.jpg" id="image-2777" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-23_165640_huntington-beach-sp.jpg" id="image-2776" class="picwide" /> -"It seems to me that we all look at nature too much, and live with her too little." -Oscar Wilde, De Profundis +Then, the day we were supposed to leave an ice storm rolled through. Judging by the way the chain stores around town shutdown early you'd have thought it was the end of the world. Most of the locals seemed imperturbed, but for some people these days any slight inconvenience seems to be the end of the world. What actually happened was that overnight the world was coated in a thin layer of ice. Beautiful, cold, and windy, but hardly the end of the world. It was all gone by the afternoon. -The average person spends 87% of their time indoors and another 6% in enclosed vehicles https://indoor.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/lbnl-47713.pdf +We got up early to see the rime of ice on the marsh, the trees. The birds were imperturbed, picking in the shallows for food as they always do. -## birds to write about: +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-22_105735_huntington-ice-storm.jpg" id="image-2793" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20220123_094515.jpg" id="image-2784" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-22_105425_huntington-ice-storm.jpg" id="image-2775" class="picwide" /> -- carolina wren -- tree swallow -- black capped chickadee -- cedar waxwing -- kingbird -- that hawk on the ground -- willet -- gold crowned kinglet -- blackthroated green warbler -# In Progress -## Essay on Will -If you want control over what you consume, you're going to have to strengthen your will. So long as you are surrounded by signals that are trying to get you to spend money on crap, it is going to be an uphill battle. If you can I strongly suggest removing yourself from the signals -- think about where your attention is going and how you can redirect it to craft rather than stuff. -but there are things more powerful. The most important of those is your will. -If, like most people, you can't pick and move to foreign country for a month then you're going to have to try to change in the midst of the battle so to speak. While possible, this is much much harder. And again, while I like to think I have mastered this, my spreadsheet says otherwise, so take this advice with a grain of salt. Chances are good that this actually much harder than you or I think and you're going to need to put in more effort than I'm suggesting. +## birds to write about: +## Carolina Wren +I have so many Carolina wren stories it's hard to know where to start. +If you're ever in the eastern woods and you hear a bird singing and you think *that's beautiful, what bird is that?* there's a good chance it's a Carolina wren. +These little gregarious, brown, slightly hook-billed birds are champion singers and, insatiably curious. According to my kids we've had about ten birds come in the bus in five years of traveling. Nine of them have been Carolina wrens[^1]. Several of them have ended up having to be rescued by hand. +<img src="images/2022/wreninhand.jpg" id="image-2792" class="picwide" /> -The most important thing is to develop your will. I am serious. Start doing exercises to develop your will. For example, force your self up out of the chair right now, turn away from the computer and walk to the nearest wall. Touch it. Come back and sit down. Repeat this at random during the day. Is it pointless? Absolutely. So is lifting weights. The principle is the same. So choose a deliberately pointless thing to do, and do it. Then do another one. Then do the same thing every morning for a week. +Before that they used to come in our house in Athens from time to time. This one would sit on the corner of the roof singing every morning for years. -One will-building exercise I do periodically is what I call, for lack of a better phrase, micro travel. It works like this: pick a place at random in the city you live, somewhere you've never been. Choose a time and make an appointment with yourself. Now go work out all the details of getting there, if possible use public transit or walk. Then meet yourself there and make sure you're there on time. Now enjoy a few minutes exploring the area and head home. +<img src="images/2022/bird-feeder_2015-01-10_112302_01.jpg" id="image-2774" class="picwide" /> -I'll leave thinking up other exercises to you, but the point is to develop your will, to have control over your life. It takes a little time to see and feel the effects of this, it's quite subtle, but it will cascade throughout your life in a number of interesting ways, I promise. One will be better control over your impulses. When you walk into, say Target, to buy a new toothbrush your newly developed will will make it easier to walk past everything else and only buy the toothbrush. +Well, it seemed like the same bird, but who knows. Birds do have individual songs, especially Carolina wrens, so if I had been paying attention I might know if it really was the same bird, but I didn't pay that much attention back then. Life before the road tended to run together, I lacked focus and attention. Which isn't to say the days don't sometimes run together on the road, or that I live in a state of constantly heightened awareness, just that there are more markers by which to measure on the timeline of our travels. -Eventually your will may help you recognize that stores that have everything are too much for your will. It would be cleverer to buy that toothbrush at a smaller store with fewer things, because it's easier to remove temptation than resist it. Think of it like dieting. If you're trying to eat less ice cream it's much easier to not walk down the ice cream aisle at all than it is to walk down it and without buying anything. +To tell the truth I didn't pay much attention to Carolina wrens until we started to travel. They were so ubiquitous I found them overwhelming. I've always thought of wrens as the more solitary creatures of the desert southwest, where canyon wrens are a familiar sound in the red rock country of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado. But they're a familiar sound you usually hear by itself, not a chorus like you get with the Carolina wrens. -This also leads into my second suggestion for buying less stuff: change your habits. It's convenient to go to Target and get everything you need in one place, but chances are you're going to spend more than you intended without realizing it. In fact the entire experience of being in Target has been engineered to increase the chance you'll spend more than you intended. Every time you enter a store you are entering a hostile environment designed to extract your life energy from you. +It wasn't until they started flying in the bus that I really started pay attention to the Carolina wren. -Oh sure it's all abstracted so you don't have think of it that way. Still, strip the abstraction and relationship is pretty clear, you trade hours of your life for shit you buy at Target. You get up the morning and go to work. That's a day of your life you just traded for paper tickets. Why do you need those tickets? To put a roof over your head and food in your stomach. Pretty much everything after that is not strictly necessary. So once those basics are met you're in th realm of swapping your existence on earth for stuff. +[^1]: Regardless of the actual number, only one has not been a wren, that much I know. It was a chickadee. For whatever reason, all these happened on the east coast. Perhaps western birds are more wild? -The less stuff you buy, the less you need to work. By extension, the less time you spend in places designed to extract money from you, the less of your life you'll have to trade for stuff. +- tree swallow +- black capped chickadee +- cedar waxwing +- kingbird +- that hawk on the ground +- willet +- gold crowned kinglet +- blackthroated green warbler -That's a habit you can break -- going to all-in-one-place stores -- but there are other habits you can build that will help immensely as well. +# Scratch -One of the things I've been at pains to avoid is making it sound like we don't like the United States. In fact we do very much, it's one of the most beautiful places in the world and has some of the wildest and safest wilderness you're ever going to enter. +"It seems to me that we all look at nature too much, and live with her too little." -Oscar Wilde, De Profundis -Unfortunately, the United States is not the best travel value for us. Without an income we'd have to dip heavily into savings to travel the states in the bus. +The average person spends 87% of their time indoors and another 6% in enclosed vehicles https://indoor.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/lbnl-47713.pdf @@ -99,7 +90,7 @@ Ways to reduce travel spending: * no more lenses, amazon orders, ever. * use local libraries * have corrinne get meds down here. - * start with forays into mexico, but gradually reverse -- here becomes our home base with forays into the states + * start with forays into mexico, but gradually reverse—here becomes our home base with forays into the states * how much less? Don't know but I think we could do - $1200/month groceries @@ -129,7 +120,7 @@ The other major task in midlife is to recognize the ciclical nature of, well, na You learn to live your life on the margin, that strange zone between what is known and what is not. There are some answers here, but not many, and you have to make that place your home. -The margins are where you want to be though, this is where everything happens, it's where life is, where growth is. Go deep in the forest and everything gets soft and quiet, but come out to the edge and you'll find the berries and the birds and the deer and all the rest of life -- inhabiting the margins. In ecology this is sometimes called a liminal zone. It's where life is in transition and biodiversity is greatest. It's where the action is and it's where you want to be. +The margins are where you want to be though, this is where everything happens, it's where life is, where growth is. Go deep in the forest and everything gets soft and quiet, but come out to the edge and you'll find the berries and the birds and the deer and all the rest of life—inhabiting the margins. In ecology this is sometimes called a liminal zone. It's where life is in transition and biodiversity is greatest. It's where the action is and it's where you want to be. I've learned that the future will get here at the same steady pace as it always does whether you worry about it or not. @@ -251,7 +242,7 @@ Now the evolutionary threat is largely gone though novelty becomes useful. It a ## Maps -“Some for one purpose and some for another liketh, loveth, getteth, and useth Mappes, Chartes, & Geographicall Globes.” -- John Dee, +“Some for one purpose and some for another liketh, loveth, getteth, and useth Mappes, Chartes, & Geographicall Globes.”—John Dee, source: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2019/oct/20/the-perfect-combination-of-art-and-science-mourning-the-end-of-paper-maps @@ -349,7 +340,7 @@ After all, we’re really dealing with two separate things: The purpose of work is to create. It is to fuel your soul. -Whereas the purpose of earning money is to have enough of the stuff. How much is enough? Whatever you need to max out your happiness potential. After that, more money will not make you any happier." -- MMM +Whereas the purpose of earning money is to have enough of the stuff. How much is enough? Whatever you need to max out your happiness potential. After that, more money will not make you any happier."—MMM Greek Proverb which says, “A society grows great when the old people plant trees, even when they know they will never get to enjoy their shade.” @@ -375,7 +366,7 @@ Who were the friends of a long year? What were the friends of a long year? When It was a hard time. My wife took a job teaching English to Chinese five year old. It was a degrading business for someone with a master's in education, dancing like a monkey (I mean that literally) for tech companies whose "training materials" had more typos than a teenager's messaging logs. It was a dark time, but one you have to put somewhere else so your children don't realize how thin the line between having food and not can be because that's stress you try to keep your children from, even if you ultimately can't. Better your child be hungry than be hungry and have to wrestle with why. There's a surface level of why, the obvious, the because we have no job, that's easy enough to explain and we did, what's harder is to look the whole system in the eye and consider it, this thing humans have built where in fact there needs be nothing of the sort. Why force people to earn paper tickets, really electronic tickets these days, not even real tickets, that can be exchanged for food, shelter, etc. Why allow such a small number of humans to own all the land? Why allow anyone to own the land at all? These are much harder questions for children to face, for anyone to face. The rest of us have time and effort already invested in ignoring these questions, in pretending that the way things are is the only way they could be, that we don't have to face them the way children do, we simply look the other way and hang our heads and dance like monkeys for the foriegn kids and collect our digital tickets and buy food for our children, or try anyway. -The stupid thing is we know this isn't the only way. The status quo only seems inevitable if it's all you know and we, creators of a culture that is obsessed with past cultures, know for absolute surety that there are other ways. Pretty much any tribal society for instance -- which is a huge negative value judgment in that phrase that I'll be coming back to -- +The stupid thing is we know this isn't the only way. The status quo only seems inevitable if it's all you know and we, creators of a culture that is obsessed with past cultures, know for absolute surety that there are other ways. Pretty much any tribal society for instance—which is a huge negative value judgment in that phrase that I'll be coming back to -- @@ -396,7 +387,7 @@ The ability to think deeply and purposefully is one of those skills that, once y ## family in mexico -I've never lived in a culture that was so hard working an so devoted to family. These are things that I grew up hearing people talk about -- hard work and family -- but I've never actually seen it like I see it here. Which is not meant to denigrate people in other places, hard work is not a zero sum game, but here work and life flow together with no real strong boundaries like you'd find in the States, for example. +I've never lived in a culture that was so hard working an so devoted to family. These are things that I grew up hearing people talk about—hard work and family -- but I've never actually seen it like I see it here. Which is not meant to denigrate people in other places, hard work is not a zero sum game, but here work and life flow together with no real strong boundaries like you'd find in the States, for example. My favorite example of this is bus drivers. In the United States if you drive a bus, you wear a uniform and, aside from your face and body shape, you are largely indistinguishable from whomever is driving the next bus. Chances are, when you get off you park the bus and go home. It's not in any meaningful way, your bus or even your work, you are by design an meaningless cog in a profit wheel where most of the profits go to someone other than you. I could make a good case that this is an awful way to live, severely limits your humanity, leads to depression and dissatisfaction with your work and life, and is one of the more profound and overwhelming problems in American culture, but we won't get into that here. @@ -572,3 +563,124 @@ we could manage cocktails out of ice and water I wouldn't want to be faster or greener than now if you were with me O you were the best of all my days + +# Essays + +## Buying Used + +I can't recall the last time I bought something new. We almost always buy electronics used, mostly off eBay. We also rarely buy new books. We generally pick up books at used bookstores around the country, but when we can't find what we want we use Thriftbooks. + +Buying used has several advantages over buying new. The obvious one is that it's almost always cheaper. But beyond that there are other appealing aspects. Buying used means you're not contributing as much to the waste stream of modern economies, and you're (potentially) removing things from that waste stream by finding a use for them. Used items, especially electronics, tend to be functionally superior to new ones[^1] both because they are farther back on the curve of [diminishing returns](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/law%20of%20diminishing%20returns) and because they have stood the test of time. There are exceptions of course, but buy and large last year's model is as good, and sometimes better, than this year's model. + +Buying used also enables you to take advantage of little curiosities of time. For example all the really good low-noise sound recording devices seem to have been made between 2007-2016. Why? No idea. But everyone who needs low noise recording seems to agree, and high end recorders from that era sell for more than they did when they were new. Which is to say that buying used isn't always cheaper, but when it's not it generally means you're getting something superior. And not something that the manufacturer thinks is superior, but something the people using it the most think is superior. + +This is why the only affiliate links on luxagraf.net lead to either eBay or Thriftbooks, my two preferred marketplaces for buying used stuff. + +Anyone using affiliate links is trying to sell you something -- that includes me -- and you should always be suspicious about that. I know my motives are simple, to make some money to pay for this website and maybe some tea for myself, but you have every right to skeptical. Really though, I don't want you to buy anything you don't need. But if you do need something, please buy it used. And if you're going to buy something I've recommended based on my experiences with it, then the affiliate links will help support this website. + +[^1]: The odd mixture of capitalism and our culture's worship of "progress" means that new things must constantly be released, but the law of diminishing returns suggests that newer/bigger/better/faster eventually fails to deliver any meaningfully improvement. This is most obvious in software, where the most feared phrase in any software user's heart is "please restart to update", but this lack of improvement over previous versions is increasingly painfully obvious in hardware as well. +## Essay on Will + +If you want control over what you consume, you're going to have to strengthen your will. So long as you are surrounded by signals that are trying to get you to spend money on crap, it is going to be an uphill battle. If you can I strongly suggest removing yourself from the signals—think about where your attention is going and how you can redirect it to craft rather than stuff. + +but there are things more powerful. The most important of those is your will. + + +If, like most people, you can't pick and move to foreign country for a month then you're going to have to try to change in the midst of the battle so to speak. While possible, this is much much harder. And again, while I like to think I have mastered this, my spreadsheet says otherwise, so take this advice with a grain of salt. Chances are good that this actually much harder than you or I think and you're going to need to put in more effort than I'm suggesting. + + + + + + +The most important thing is to develop your will. I am serious. Start doing exercises to develop your will. For example, force your self up out of the chair right now, turn away from the computer and walk to the nearest wall. Touch it. Come back and sit down. Repeat this at random during the day. Is it pointless? Absolutely. So is lifting weights. The principle is the same. So choose a deliberately pointless thing to do, and do it. Then do another one. Then do the same thing every morning for a week. + +One will-building exercise I do periodically is what I call, for lack of a better phrase, micro travel. It works like this: pick a place at random in the city you live, somewhere you've never been. Choose a time and make an appointment with yourself. Now go work out all the details of getting there, if possible use public transit or walk. Then meet yourself there and make sure you're there on time. Now enjoy a few minutes exploring the area and head home. + +I'll leave thinking up other exercises to you, but the point is to develop your will, to have control over your life. It takes a little time to see and feel the effects of this, it's quite subtle, but it will cascade throughout your life in a number of interesting ways, I promise. One will be better control over your impulses. When you walk into, say Target, to buy a new toothbrush your newly developed will will make it easier to walk past everything else and only buy the toothbrush. + +Eventually your will may help you recognize that stores that have everything are too much for your will. It would be cleverer to buy that toothbrush at a smaller store with fewer things, because it's easier to remove temptation than resist it. Think of it like dieting. If you're trying to eat less ice cream it's much easier to not walk down the ice cream aisle at all than it is to walk down it and without buying anything. + +This also leads into my second suggestion for buying less stuff: change your habits. It's convenient to go to Target and get everything you need in one place, but chances are you're going to spend more than you intended without realizing it. In fact the entire experience of being in Target has been engineered to increase the chance you'll spend more than you intended. Every time you enter a store you are entering a hostile environment designed to extract your life energy from you. + +Oh sure it's all abstracted so you don't have think of it that way. Still, strip the abstraction and relationship is pretty clear, you trade hours of your life for shit you buy at Target. You get up the morning and go to work. That's a day of your life you just traded for paper tickets. Why do you need those tickets? To put a roof over your head and food in your stomach. Pretty much everything after that is not strictly necessary. So once those basics are met you're in th realm of swapping your existence on earth for stuff. + +The less stuff you buy, the less you need to work. By extension, the less time you spend in places designed to extract money from you, the less of your life you'll have to trade for stuff. + +That's a habit you can break—going to all-in-one-place stores -- but there are other habits you can build that will help immensely as well. + + + +One of the things I've been at pains to avoid is making it sound like we don't like the United States. In fact we do very much, it's one of the most beautiful places in the world and has some of the wildest and safest wilderness you're ever going to enter. + +Unfortunately, the United States is not the best travel value for us. Without an income we'd have to dip heavily into savings to travel the states in the bus. + + + +# Pages +## Technology + +The less technology your life requires the better your life will be. That's not to say technology is bad, but I encourage you to spend some time considering your technology use and making sure you *choose* the things you use rather than accepting everything marketed at you. + +This is not my idea. I stole it from the Amish. The Amish have a reputation for being anti-technology, but they're not. Try searching for "Amish compressed air tool conversion" if you don't believe me. The Amish don't rush out and get the latest and greatest, that much is certainly true. They take their time adopting any new technology They step back, detach, and evaluate new technology in a way the rest of us seldom do. + +That's what I try to do. There's very little latest and greatest on this page. I am always trying to get by with less. There's no affiliate links here and I'd really prefer it if you didn't buy any of this stuff, you probably don't need it. Again, I could get by with less. I should get by with less. I am in fact always striving to need less and be less particular. + +Still, for better or worse. Here are the main tools I use. + +## Writing +### Notebook and Pen + +My primary "device" is my notebook. I don't have a fancy notebook. I do have several notebooks though. One is in my pocket at all times and is filled with illegible scribbles that I attempt to decipher later. The other is larger and it's my sort of captain's log, though I don't write in with the kind regularity captains do. Or that I imagine captains do. Then I have other notebooks for specific purposes, meditation journal, commonplace book, and so on. + +I'm not all that picky about notebooks, if they have paper in them I'm happy enough. I used to be very picky about pens, but then I sat down and forced myself to use basic cheap, clear black ink, Bic-style ballpoint pens until they no longer irritated me. And you know what? Now I love them, and that's all I use -- any ballpoint pen. Ballpoint because it runs less when it gets wet, which, given how I live, tends to happen. + +### Laptop + +My laptop is a Lenovo x270 I bought off eBay for $384. I upgraded the hard drives and RAM, which brought the total outlay to $489, which is really way too much to spend on a computer these days, but my excuse is that I make money using it. + +Why this particular laptop? It's small and the battery lasts quite a while (like 15 hrs when I'm writing, more like 12 when editing photos, 15 minutes when editing video). It also has a removable battery and can be upgraded by the user. I packed in almost 3TB of disk storage, which is nice. Still, like I said, I could get by with less. I should get by with less. + +The laptop runs Linux because everything else sucks a lot more than Linux. Which isn't too say that I love Linux, it could use some work too. But it sucks a whole lot less than the rest. I run Arch Linux, which I have [written about elsewhere](/src/why-i-switched-arch-linux). I was also interviewed on the site [Linux Rig](https://linuxrig.com/2018/11/28/the-linux-setup-scott-gilbertson-writer/), which has some more details on how and why I use Linux. + +## Photos + +### Camera + +I use a Sony A7Rii. It's a full frame mirrorless camera which makes it easy to use the legacy lenses I love. I bought the A7Rii specifically because it was the only full frame digital camera available that let me use the old lenses that I love. Without the old lenses I find the Sony's output to be a little digital for my tastes, + +The A7 series are not cheap cameras. If you want to travel you'd be better off getting something cheaper and using your money to travel. The Sony a6000 is very nearly as good and costs much less. In fact, having tested dozens of cameras for Wired over the years I can say with some authority that the a6000 is the best value for money on the market period, but doubly so if you want at cheap way to test out some older lenses. + +### Lenses + +All of my lenses are old and manual focus, which I prefer to autofocus lenses. I am not a sports or wildlife photographer so I have no real need for autofocus. Neither autofocus nor perfect edge to edge sharpness are things I want in a lens. I want, for lack of a better word, *character*. I want a lens that reliable produces what I see in my mind. + +One fringe benefit of honing your manual focus skills[^1] is that you open a door to world filled with amazing cheap lenses. I have shot Canon, Minolta, Olympus, Nikon, Zeiss, Hexanon, Tokina, and several weird Russian Zeiss clones. + +These days I have whittled my collection down to these lenses: + +* Minolta 50mm f/2 +* Minolta 55mm f/1.7 +* Minolta 100mm f/1.7 +* Olympus 50mm f/1.8 +* Olympus 100mm f/2.8 +* Pentax 35 f/3.5 +* Pentax 20 f/4 + +Yes, that's a lot of lenses. I used keep the Minolta 50 f/2 on there about 90 percent of the time, but these days I actually change things up quite a bit more. I'm all over the place. None of these lenses are over $200. + +I also have a Tokina 100-300mm f/4 which happens to be Minolta mount so I use a Minolta 2X teleconverter with it to make it a 200-600mm lens. It's pretty soft at the edges. That's a nice way of saying it's utter garbage at the corners, but since I mostly use if for wildlife, which I tend to crop anyway, I get by. I also have a crazy Russian fisheye thing that's hilarious bad at anything less than f/11, but it's useful for shooting in small spaces, like the inside of the bus. + +## Video + +In addition to the photo gear above, which I also use for video, I have GoPro Hero 9. I mostly use it while driving the bus and have yet to actually make a movie out of any of the footage I shoot. But it piles up on my hard drive and I keep telling myself, one of these days. + +## Audio + +I like to record ambient sound. I use an Olympus LS-10 recorder, which has the lowest noise floor I can afford (it was $100 on eBay). I use a couple of microphones I made myself and occasionally a wireless Rode mic. + +--- + +And there you have it. I am always looking for ways to get by with less, but after years of getting rid of stuff, I think I have reached something close to ideal. + +[^1]: If you've never shot without autofocus don't try it on a modern lens. Most modern focusing rings are garbage because they're not meant to be used. Some Fujifilm lenses are an exception to that rule, but by and large don't do it. Get an old lens, something under $50, and teach yourself [zone focusing](https://www.ilfordphoto.com/zone-focusing/), use the [Ultimate Exposure Computer](http://www.fredparker.com/ultexp1.htm) to learn exposure, and just practice, practice, practice. Practice relentlessly and eventually you'll get there. diff --git a/used-stuff.txt b/used-stuff.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fa4877e --- /dev/null +++ b/used-stuff.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +I very rarely buy new electronics. I can't recall the last time I bought something new. We almost always buy electronics used, mostly off eBay. We also rarely buy new books. We generally pick up books at used bookstores around the country, but when we can't find what we want we use Thriftbooks. + +Buying used has several advantages over buying new. The obvious one is that it's almost always cheaper. But beyond that there are other appealing aspects. Buying used means you're not contributing as much to the waste stream of modern economies, and you're (potentially) removing things from that waste stream by finding a use for them. Used items, especially electronics, tend to be functionally superior to new ones[^1] both because they are farther back on the curve of [diminishing returns](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/law%20of%20diminishing%20returns) and because they have stood the test of time. There are exceptions of course, but buy and large last year's model is as good, and sometimes better, than this year's model. + +Buying used also enables you to take advantage of little curiosities of time. For example all the really good low-noise sound recording devices seem to have been made between 2007-2016. Why? No idea. But everyone who needs low noise recording seems to agree, and high end recorders from that era sell for more than they did when they were new. Which is to say that buying used isn't always cheaper, but when it's not it generally means you're getting something superior. And not something that the manufacturer thinks is superior, but something the people using it the most think is superior. + +This is why the only affiliate links on luxagraf.net lead to either eBay or Thriftbooks, my two preferred marketplaces for buying used stuff. + +Anyone using affiliate links is trying to sell you something -- that includes me -- and you should always be suspicious about that. I know my motives are simple, to make some money to pay for this website and maybe some tea for myself, but you have every right to skeptical. Really though, I don't want you to buy anything you don't need. But if you do need something, please buy it used. And if you're going to buy something I've recommended based on my experiences with it, then the affiliate links will help support this website. + +[^1]: The odd mixture of capitalism and our culture's worship of "progress" means that new things must constantly be released, but the law of diminishing returns suggests that newer/bigger/better/faster eventually fails to deliver any meaningfully improvement. This is most obvious in software, where the most feared phrase in any software user's heart is "please restart to update", but this lack of improvement over previous versions is increasingly painfully obvious in hardware as well. |