jrnl: finished up bus work and baseball

1 files changed, 140 insertions, 60 deletions

diff --git a/scratch.txt b/scratch.txt
index 4796cf1..8e94158 100644
--- a/scratch.txt
+++ b/scratch.txt
@@ -205,6 +205,146 @@ People have forgotten how important the sun is. You can die from lack of sun.
 
 Every little withdrawl you can make, not only resists the system, but empowers you. Yes even tiny acts like paying cash to a person rather than swiping your implant at the self checkout screen.
 
+
+### night sounds
+
+walking in the evenings whipoorwills echo on all sides, the spring peepers croak and creak in the reeds. A warm soft wind puffs a sigh of coolness, here and there through the trees I catch a glimmery flicker of flames from a campfire.  
+
+The window tracks
+
+### night sounds
+
+walking in the evenings whipoorwills echo on all sides, the spring peepers croak and creak in the reeds. A warm soft wind puffs a sigh of coolness, here and there through the trees I catch a glimmery flicker of flames from a campfire.  
+
+The window tracks 
+
+## Fire, cooking with fire
+
+
+"No longer did pre-humans hide in the safety of their trees, but communicated, learned to make music, discuss politics, gossip and laugh under the protection of ground predator’s worst enemy - the campfire, while cooking meals that were collaboratively brought home.{
+
+"During the age of the campfire, communication and language, cunning and humor, strategy and camaraderie all intermingled in a shared life by the warmth of a fire. The campfire imposed advanced communication and social interaction onto the arc of human evolution, and this is the time in which the human brain swelled in size - rapidly by evolutionary standards - to meet the demands of a socialized group."
+
+from: https://www.notesfromtheroad.com/cascadia/dark-divide.html
+
+There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace. . . . To avoid the second, he should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm his shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside. If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind work the while, he will remember much about where the heat comes from, and with a wealth of detail denied to those who spend the week end in town astride a radiator.
+
+–Aldo Leopold (“February” in A Sand County Almanac)
+
+"First and foremost, heating with wood requires planning. Paradoxically, *well-seasoned* wood does not grow on trees. Best practices for heating with wood dictate that one had better budget for several months of curing and drying—a year is even better. And this is not an aspirational best practice given that burning unseasoned, “green” wood is frustrating, inefficient, and dangerous: unseasoned wood leads to greater creosote build-up in the flue and thus an increased risk of a flue fire."
+
+"To have a year’s supply of firewood stacked and covered twelve months before one plans to burn it requires a commitment to preparation that runs counter to our “on demand” and “just-in-time” world. "
+
+"Thus, depending on wood for heat places one in a close relationship with wood. In addition to the BTUs particular species contain, one who is mindful and observant can learn much about other, sometimes subtle characteristics of specific species of trees for, as Thomas Hardy notes at the beginning of Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), “to dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.” Black walnut (Juglans nigra), as it burns, buries itself in a layer of ashes that insulate and preserve coals. In this regard black walnut even seems to outlast long-burning, high-BTU species like oak, hickory, and locust. I don’t know exactly what to call this quality other than an afterlife. Black walnut seems to me to have the longest afterlife I have come across—even after the fire has dwindled and the stove cooled, I have uncovered a bed of glowing embers that enables me to bring the fire back to life. Tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) is about the opposite: it ignites quickly and burns out rapidly. And it gets its other name (yellow poplar) from the way it “pops” as it burns, so be wary of leaving an open poplar fire unattended."
+
+
+https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2023/01/heating-with-wood-as-a-habit-of-mind/
+
+https://amazingribs.com/more-technique-and-science/grill-and-smoker-setup-and-firing/campfire-cooking/?p=22415
+
+## loss of getting lost
+
+https://www.vagabondjourney.com/you-cant-get-lost-anymore/
+
+## Q and A Bus article
+
+
+
+# jrnl
+
+## Bus Work and Baseball
+
+Our last few days on St. George between all of us we saw a Scarlet Tanager, Rose-Breasted Grosbeak, and an Indigo Bunting. The migrant birds were moving through. That's one of our cues that it's time to go. When the birds are headed north it's about time for us to do likewise.
+
+A couple days later we were headed back over to Pensacola to take care of some unavoidable business. We dragged our feet though. The day before we were set to leave a spot opened up at Grayton Beach, so we stopped off there for five days and enjoyed the white sand beaches. And the occasional low flying attack helicopter.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-17_160745_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3499" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-19_130210_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3500" class="picwide" />
+
+When that week was up we finally headed for Big Lagoon. It was on that drive, stuck in bumper to bumper traffic on highway 98, that we knew it was time to wrap things up and head elsewhere. We had to stop off at Joe Patti's again to have a last seafood fest.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-20_131819_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3501" class="picwide" />
+
+We came back to the crowds and cities because we needed to sell our old Volvo, which had been sitting in a storage facility ever since we [bought the Wagoneer](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/03/wagoneer). We would have sold it right away, but we didn't have the title. As it turned out the woman who ran the storage unit office had a friend who needed a car so getting that off our hands proved easier than we thought.
+
+That left us with some time to catch a baseball game at the local minor league stadium. Ever since he watched the world series this fall, Elliott has been obsessed with baseball. We've played sandlot games and he's got the basics down, but he really wanted to see a real game so we'd had our eye on the Blue Wahoos' schedule and timed it right for a home game. 
+
+<div class="cluster">
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-21_210515_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3508" class="cluster picwide" />
+    <span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-21_181548_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3502" class="cluster pic66" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-21_181943_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3503" class="cluster pic66" />
+    </span>
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-21_194403_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3504" class="cluster picwide" />
+</div>
+
+It turned out to be a great game, plenty of action to keep the kids enthralled. I think the final score was 12 to 1 Blue Wahoos (which are a farm team for the Florida Marlins). 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-21_194417_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3505" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-21_205516_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3506" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-21_210334_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3507" class="picwide" />
+
+At one point a foul ball came vaguely our way, landing in the stands a section below us. That prompted Olivia to ask me if people ever got hit by balls. I told her I'd never seen that happen, and that I wouldn't worry about it. The minute I said that I thought, hmm, maybe I should not have said that. Sure enough, about ten minutes later a foul ball came right at us. It ended up hitting the ground about a foot from her, and hard enough that it bounced clear over the section behind us and out of the stadium. I think it happened so fast she didn't have time to be any more than startled. It was moving fast enough that no one around us made any move to catch it, not even the kids with gloves. 
+
+Thinking about it later I realized at pro games a net usually covers the seats where we were, which is why you never see fouls come down on anyone. At a minor league game there's not much net. Yet another reason to prefer the minors really. Whatever the case, we had a good time, though I must say, Major League Baseball seems to really be on a quest to alienate baseball fans. The poor park management had signs up apologizing for not taking cash anymore, but apparently MLB won't let them. Buying tickets on the MLB site was a nightmare. Some friends of ours who recently went to the Braves game in Atlanta endured one hassle after another, including having their water bottle confiscated. The only people going to pro games anymore are true, diehard fans. People like us would never put up with it. I'm glad the kids got to experience the minor leagues first since they're a little less tainted by the mobsters running MLB.
+
+The next day I got busy readying the bus and Wagoneer for the long drive north. It was, naturally, hot, humid, and buggy. I always make grand plans of all things I am going to get done, with post-its the length of my arm full of tasks. In the end I usually end up doing about 20 percent of it and I base that on okay, what do I have to do to keep everyone safe and comfortable?
+
+The bus is easy at this point. I do a tune up, change the oil, plugs, wires, all the filters, top off the fluids, lube the various undercarriage joints and make sure I have a spare fuel pump, because those always seem to go out whenever we're on a long drive.
+
+Less frequently I reseal the windows, but it was time. The Florida sun is not kind to rubber or sealant. One afternoon I was scraping the old sealant off the windows, prepping them for a fresh coating to withstand any rain we might hit on our drive, when I realized I was miserable. The Florida sun can feel like a heat lamp, relentless, baking, all you want to do is get out of it before you completely shrivel up like breaded shrimp. I was sweating and scraping and the old sealant was warm so it was gummy and not coming off the way it does in cooler weather and I was hot and frustrated and mad and feeling like I'd rather be at the beach and why was I doing this anyway? What kind of idiot lives like this?
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-26_160049_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3521" class="picwide" />
+
+Just then my daughter walked by and said *hey, that's our window*. *Well, we share it* (meaning her and her twin sister). She pointed to the pane that is behind her head and the pane that is behind her sister's head and then she walked off. And I stood there for a minute and thought right, that's why I am doing this, to keep my family warm and dry.
+
+That's really the only job there is in life -- making sure my wife and kids have a warm, dry, safe place in the world. Strip away all the pretensions of culture and what's left? We make shelters and feed our family and friends, maybe even strangers. That's what all creatures do, each in their own way. My way includes heat and no-see-ums, but you know what, whatever needs to be done, needs to do done.
+
+The Wagoneer is a more difficult thing for me to get a handle on because I don't know yet what needs to done. Right now I am just playing whack-a-mole. The first mole was the power windows, which stick. This turns out to be the bane of many a Jeep owner's existence. Not knowing that at the time, I ordered some new plastic tracks and started tearing apart the doors. One fringe benefit of the Wagoneer is the massive tailgate, which gives me something I've never had -- a workbench.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-23_083437_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3519" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-23_105223_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3522" class="picwide" />
+
+I replaced three of the little plastic tracks and the windows kinda sorta rolled up and down a little better. I also need to replace the felt tracks, but that can happen down the road. At least the kids could roll their windows down. They're going to need to because the air conditioning gave up the ghost about two weeks after we bought it. I took it to a mechanic and paid him a service fee to track down the source of the leak, which turned out to be the compressor. The compressor that's barely two years old (I have the records from the previous owner). The mechanic wanted $800 to change it out. Which was funny. Corrinne and I decided we didn't need air conditioning that bad so long as the windows worked. I did find a rebuilt compressor for $150, so at some point I'll replace it and get it recharged, but for now we have old school WD60 air conditioning: windows down, sixty miles an hour.
+
+After going over the Jeep for a couple of days I headed to the parts store and tracked down some new brake pads, along with all the various filters I could find and decided that's where I'd leave it. When something comes up down the road, we'll deal with it then.
+
+Lest you think everyone in this bus spends their days sweating and covered with no see ums, fear not. The kids do fun things even when I don't. Big Lagoon finally re-opened some sections of the park that had been closed since the last hurricane (which was almost two years ago now) and there's a new amphitheater, which, so far as I know, so far has only been host to plays and dances put on by three children.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_134708_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3513" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_134518_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3511" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_134611_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3512" class="picwide" />
+
+The kids have also started doing nature journals, which they learned about at the Esturary Center back in Apalachicola. John Muir Laws has [a fantastic book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-laws-guide-to-nature-drawing-and-journaling-john-muir-laws/12658634?ean=9781597143158) and [series of free videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Fb65ZOjBDA&list=PLpcRk9AaBeWjswF9kYxwcVwxx7oHFT5sH&index=40) that are well worth your time no matter what age you are. In Big Lagoon we finally got to see the resident alligator, which spent the entire afternoon patiently floating just below the wooden bridge so the kids could draw it.
+
+<div class="cluster">
+    <span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_131547_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3510" class="cluster pic66" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_131530_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3509" class="cluster pic66" />
+    </span>
+  <span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_154430_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3515" class="cluster pic66" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_153917_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3514" class="cluster pic66" />
+</span>
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_154638_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3516" class="picwide" />
+  <span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_165801_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3517" class="cluster pic66" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_165808_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3518" class="cluster pic66" />
+</span>
+</div>
+
+Just around the corner from Big Lagoon is a road named Blue Angel Parkway. At one intersection on Blue Angel Parkway there's some big box stores and a nice large parking lot where people gather every Monday and Tuesday to watch the Blue Angels rehearse. It's basically a free airshow. We headed over and dropped the tailgate with the rest of the spectators.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-25_103838_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3523" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-25_105538_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3524" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-04-26_103900_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3520" class="picwide" />
+
+And then it was back to work. Onward and upward.
+
+
+
+
+
 ## Under The Bridge
 
 Halfway through our stay on St. George we had a little problem called Friday night. The problem was that the campground at St George was full for Friday night. One night missing in a string of twelve nights. We knew that when we came out here, but I was really hoping something would open up. It did not. That's how we came to be under the bridge in Apalachicola again. 
@@ -274,66 +414,6 @@ It's not just an abstraction though, the changes wrought by hurricanes and cultu
 
 I have been called nostalgic, but I don't think it's nostalgia to wish for the days when there local oystermen with plots on the bay rather than international seafood conglomerates. The days when buildings were made of real brick and wood rather than thin metal "2x4s" and wallboard. If it's nostalgia to recognize that things today are not as well made, and designed to serve the needs of corporations rather than people, then fine, I am nostalgic.
 
-## Bus Work
-
-Our last few days on St. George between all of us we saw a Scarlet Tanager, Rose-Breasted Grosbeak, and an Indigo Bunting. The migrant birds were moving through. That's one of our cues that it's time to go. When the birds are headed north it's about time for us to do likewise.
-
-A couple days later we were headed back over to Pensacola to take care of some unavoidable business. We dragged our feet though. The day before we were set to leave a spot opened up at Grayton Beach, so we stopped off their for five days and enjoyed the white sand beaches. And the occasional low flying attack helicopter.
-
-When that week was up we finally headed for Big Lagoon. It was on that drive, stuck in bumper to bumper traffic on highway 98, that we knew it was time to wrap things up and head elsewhere. We had to stop off at Joe Patti's again to have a last seafood fest.
-
-We came back to the crowds and cities because we needed to sell our old Volvo, which had been sitting in a storage facility ever since we [bought the Wagoneer](). We would have sold it right away, but we didn't have the title. As it turned out the woman who ran the storage unit office had a friend who needed a car so getting that off our hands proved easier than we thought.
-
-That left us with some time to catch a baseball game at the local minor league stadium. Ever since he watched the world series this fall, Elliott has been obsessed with baseball. We've played sandlot game and he's got the basics down, but he really wanted to see a real game so we'd had our eye on the Blue Wahoo's schedule and timed it right for a home game. 
-
-It turned out to be a great game, plenty of action to keep an eight year old enthralled. I think the final score was 12 to 1 or something like that. We left in the seventh inning.
-
-Other than that though, we had week of working hard getting the bus and Wagoneer ready for the long drive north. It was, naturally, hot, humid, and buggy. One afternoon I was scraping the old sealant off the windows, prepping them for a fresh coating to withstand any rain we might hit this spring. The Florida sun can feel like a heat lamp in a kitchen, relentless, baking. I was sweating and scraping and the old sealant was warm so it was gummy and not coming off the way it does in cooler weather and I was hot and frustrated and mad and feeling like I'd rather be at the beach and why was I doing this anyway and my daughter walked by and said that's our window. We share it (meaning her and her twin sister). She pointed to the pane that is behind her head and the pane that is behind her sister's head and then she walked off. And I stood there for a minute and thought right, that's why I am doing this, to keep my family warm and dry.
-
-That's really the only job there is in life -- making sure my wife and kids have a warm, dry, safe place in the world. Strip away all the pretensions of culture and what's left? We make shelters and feed our family and friends, maybe even strangers. That's what all creatures do, each in their own way. 
-
-
-### night sounds
-
-walking in the evenings whipoorwills echo on all sides, the spring peepers croak and creak in the reeds. A warm soft wind puffs a sigh of coolness, here and there through the trees I catch a glimmery flicker of flames from a campfire.  
-
-The window tracks 
-
-
-## Fire, cooking with fire
-
-
-"No longer did pre-humans hide in the safety of their trees, but communicated, learned to make music, discuss politics, gossip and laugh under the protection of ground predator’s worst enemy - the campfire, while cooking meals that were collaboratively brought home.{
-
-"During the age of the campfire, communication and language, cunning and humor, strategy and camaraderie all intermingled in a shared life by the warmth of a fire. The campfire imposed advanced communication and social interaction onto the arc of human evolution, and this is the time in which the human brain swelled in size - rapidly by evolutionary standards - to meet the demands of a socialized group."
-
-from: https://www.notesfromtheroad.com/cascadia/dark-divide.html
-
-There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace. . . . To avoid the second, he should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm his shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside. If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind work the while, he will remember much about where the heat comes from, and with a wealth of detail denied to those who spend the week end in town astride a radiator.
-
-–Aldo Leopold (“February” in A Sand County Almanac)
-
-"First and foremost, heating with wood requires planning. Paradoxically, *well-seasoned* wood does not grow on trees. Best practices for heating with wood dictate that one had better budget for several months of curing and drying—a year is even better. And this is not an aspirational best practice given that burning unseasoned, “green” wood is frustrating, inefficient, and dangerous: unseasoned wood leads to greater creosote build-up in the flue and thus an increased risk of a flue fire."
-
-"To have a year’s supply of firewood stacked and covered twelve months before one plans to burn it requires a commitment to preparation that runs counter to our “on demand” and “just-in-time” world. "
-
-"Thus, depending on wood for heat places one in a close relationship with wood. In addition to the BTUs particular species contain, one who is mindful and observant can learn much about other, sometimes subtle characteristics of specific species of trees for, as Thomas Hardy notes at the beginning of Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), “to dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.” Black walnut (Juglans nigra), as it burns, buries itself in a layer of ashes that insulate and preserve coals. In this regard black walnut even seems to outlast long-burning, high-BTU species like oak, hickory, and locust. I don’t know exactly what to call this quality other than an afterlife. Black walnut seems to me to have the longest afterlife I have come across—even after the fire has dwindled and the stove cooled, I have uncovered a bed of glowing embers that enables me to bring the fire back to life. Tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) is about the opposite: it ignites quickly and burns out rapidly. And it gets its other name (yellow poplar) from the way it “pops” as it burns, so be wary of leaving an open poplar fire unattended."
-
-
-https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2023/01/heating-with-wood-as-a-habit-of-mind/
-
-https://amazingribs.com/more-technique-and-science/grill-and-smoker-setup-and-firing/campfire-cooking/?p=22415
-
-## loss of getting lost
-
-https://www.vagabondjourney.com/you-cant-get-lost-anymore/
-
-## Q and A Bus article
-
-
-
-# jrnl
-
 ## St George
 
 Driving west on Florida's highway 98 is a little like traveling back in time. It's hard to believe standing amidst the crowds of Panama City Beach, but not ten miles east, once you pass through the actual Panama City, the crowds disappear, along with everything else.