From 908696ae0af8463d3034d96e306b0ab8091045e0 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: lxf Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2020 15:40:09 -0500 Subject: rolled in latest changes --- TODO | 53 ++----- abundance.txt | 73 --------- beyond-your-head.txt | 33 ---- bird-watching.txt | 13 -- birds.txt | 45 ------ book--how-to-travel/book.txt | 61 -------- books-to-do.txt | 34 ---- books/beyond-your-head.txt | 33 ++++ books/books-to-do.txt | 34 ++++ by-hand.txt | 54 ------- camera.txt | 37 ----- covid-notes.txt | 7 - covid.txt | 36 ----- dialogues/violet-crowned-hummingbird.txt | 97 ++++++++++++ eight.txt | 1 - equinox.txt | 43 ------ ...st-shoes-ive-ever-worn-are-hardly-shoes-all.txt | 29 ++++ fear.txt | 25 --- fict-book.txt | 8 - flying.txt | 6 - hard.txt | 7 - high-water.txt | 63 -------- how I set up arch.txt | 3 + instant.txt | 17 -- invitation.txt | 50 +++--- june.txt | 49 ------ kindle-hacking.txt | 16 -- ko-kradan-wally.txt | 27 ---- leopold-essay.txt | 45 ------ lttr/lttr-01.txt | 38 ++++- meditation-notes.txt | 5 - motivational.txt | 21 +++ new-job-essay.txt | 9 -- not-traveling.txt | 1 - notes.txt | 28 ++++ pages/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome.txt | 25 ++- pre-apacholyptic-adventures.txt | 36 ----- published/2006-05-01-closing-time.txt | 45 +++--- published/2019-10-09_bird-watching.txt | 45 ++++++ published/2020-03-04_high-water.txt | 63 ++++++++ published/2020-03-11_distant-early-warning.txt | 42 +++++ ...20-03-18_pre-apocalyptic-driving-adventures.txt | 36 +++++ published/2020-07-01_wouldnt-it-be-nice.txt | 68 ++++++++ published/2020-07-08_windfall.txt | 54 +++++++ published/2020-07-15_eight.txt | 63 ++++++++ published/2020-09-23_summer-teeth.txt | 38 +++++ published/2020-10-01_light-is-clear-in-my-eyes.txt | 61 ++++++++ .../2020-10-28_walking-north-carolina-woods.txt | 57 +++++++ published/2020-11-04_halloween.txt | 44 ++++++ published/2020-12-02_learning-to-ride-bike.txt | 33 ++++ qutebrowser-notes.txt | 18 --- scratch.txt | 69 ++------- se-renta.txt | 117 -------------- ...-use-websters-1913-dictionary-linux-edition.txt | 39 +++++ src/kindle-hacking.txt | 16 ++ src/qutebrowser-notes.txt | 18 +++ src/solving-common-nextcloud-problems.txt | 92 +++++++++++ src/vagrant-custom-box.txt | 171 +++++++++++++++++++++ src/why-i-built-my-own-mailing-list-software.txt | 52 +++++++ sufficient.txt | 61 -------- unused/abundance.txt | 73 +++++++++ unused/bird-watching.txt | 13 ++ unused/camera.txt | 37 +++++ unused/fear.txt | 25 +++ unused/fict-book.txt | 8 + unused/flying.txt | 6 + unused/hard.txt | 7 + unused/instant.txt | 17 ++ unused/june.txt | 33 ++++ unused/ko-kradan-wally.txt | 27 ++++ unused/leopold-essay.txt | 45 ++++++ unused/new-job-essay.txt | 9 ++ unused/not-traveling.txt | 1 + unused/se-renta.txt | 117 ++++++++++++++ vagrant-custom-box.txt | 171 --------------------- violet-crowned-hummingbird.txt | 97 ------------ 76 files changed, 1777 insertions(+), 1373 deletions(-) delete mode 100644 abundance.txt delete mode 100644 beyond-your-head.txt delete mode 100644 bird-watching.txt delete mode 100644 birds.txt delete mode 100644 book--how-to-travel/book.txt delete mode 100644 books-to-do.txt create mode 100644 books/beyond-your-head.txt create mode 100644 books/books-to-do.txt delete mode 100644 by-hand.txt delete mode 100644 camera.txt delete mode 100644 covid-notes.txt delete mode 100644 covid.txt create mode 100644 dialogues/violet-crowned-hummingbird.txt delete mode 100644 eight.txt delete mode 100644 equinox.txt create mode 100644 essays/best-shoes-ive-ever-worn-are-hardly-shoes-all.txt delete mode 100644 fear.txt delete mode 100644 fict-book.txt delete mode 100644 flying.txt delete mode 100644 hard.txt delete mode 100644 high-water.txt create mode 100644 how I set up arch.txt delete mode 100644 instant.txt delete mode 100644 june.txt delete mode 100644 kindle-hacking.txt delete mode 100644 ko-kradan-wally.txt delete mode 100644 leopold-essay.txt create mode 100644 motivational.txt delete mode 100644 new-job-essay.txt delete mode 100644 not-traveling.txt delete mode 100644 pre-apacholyptic-adventures.txt create mode 100644 published/2019-10-09_bird-watching.txt create mode 100644 published/2020-03-04_high-water.txt create mode 100644 published/2020-03-11_distant-early-warning.txt create mode 100644 published/2020-03-18_pre-apocalyptic-driving-adventures.txt create mode 100644 published/2020-07-01_wouldnt-it-be-nice.txt create mode 100644 published/2020-07-08_windfall.txt create mode 100644 published/2020-07-15_eight.txt create mode 100644 published/2020-09-23_summer-teeth.txt create mode 100644 published/2020-10-01_light-is-clear-in-my-eyes.txt create mode 100644 published/2020-10-28_walking-north-carolina-woods.txt create mode 100644 published/2020-11-04_halloween.txt create mode 100644 published/2020-12-02_learning-to-ride-bike.txt delete mode 100644 qutebrowser-notes.txt delete mode 100644 se-renta.txt create mode 100644 src/how-use-websters-1913-dictionary-linux-edition.txt create mode 100644 src/kindle-hacking.txt create mode 100644 src/qutebrowser-notes.txt create mode 100644 src/solving-common-nextcloud-problems.txt create mode 100644 src/vagrant-custom-box.txt create mode 100644 src/why-i-built-my-own-mailing-list-software.txt delete mode 100644 sufficient.txt create mode 100644 unused/abundance.txt create mode 100644 unused/bird-watching.txt create mode 100644 unused/camera.txt create mode 100644 unused/fear.txt create mode 100644 unused/fict-book.txt create mode 100644 unused/flying.txt create mode 100644 unused/hard.txt create mode 100644 unused/instant.txt create mode 100644 unused/june.txt create mode 100644 unused/ko-kradan-wally.txt create mode 100644 unused/leopold-essay.txt create mode 100644 unused/new-job-essay.txt create mode 100644 unused/not-traveling.txt create mode 100644 unused/se-renta.txt delete mode 100644 vagrant-custom-box.txt delete mode 100644 violet-crowned-hummingbird.txt diff --git a/TODO b/TODO index f2e7a89..0714f7a 100644 --- a/TODO +++ b/TODO @@ -1,18 +1,24 @@ birds to write about: -carolina wren -tree swallow -black capped chickadee -cedar waxwing -kingbird -that hawk on the ground -willet -gold crowned kinglet -blackthroated green warbler +- carolina wren +- tree swallow +- black capped chickadee +- cedar waxwing +- kingbird +- that hawk on the ground +- willet +- gold crowned kinglet +- blackthroated green warbler --- -post on living outside, tiny homes mean you're outside more. public spaces are more important, you end up living in public much more. +- history of american nature writing, listing some more obscure authors and themes + - list of nature writing books, + - where is the thoreau of africa? + - Is there a thoreau of russia? + - what is the relationship of other literatures to nature? + +--- "It seems to me that we all look at nature too much, and live with her too little." -Oscar Wilde, De Profundis @@ -21,7 +27,6 @@ The average person spends 87% of their time indoors and another 6% in enclosed v --- ## GUIDES - - How to travel as a woman alone in RV - The best camp stoves - How to make great Coffee - Health Insurance @@ -36,29 +41,3 @@ The average person spends 87% of their time indoors and another 6% in enclosed v - Boondocking - Birdwatching https://www.adventure-journal.com/2019/10/how-to-choose-binoculars-a-guide-for-the-optics-curious/ - Road schooling - - - -## ESSAYS - - Panasonic Lumix S1R Field Test - ** tasks: - - create CSS of inline picture stories ala CM - - create referal link callout at top of the page - - - - TNF essay - - history of american nature writing, listing some more obscure authors, (themes therein?) - - list of nature writing books, - - where is the thoreau of africa? - - Is there a thoreau of russia? - - what is the relationship of other literatures to nature? - -## JRNL - - Birthday quickly followed by Summertime rolls - - Invitation to mailing list - - - -# Completed - - Sounds of mexico 2019-03-12 - - Blessing of the seeds Candelaria 2019-03-20 - - Eggs in the jardin 2019-03-26 diff --git a/abundance.txt b/abundance.txt deleted file mode 100644 index bf9ab1a..0000000 --- a/abundance.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,73 +0,0 @@ -The idea behind comments, behind Facebook, and twitter as well ends up being, you post your personal experiences and someone comes along and injects their belief system into your experience and judges your experience against their framework. I have no idea why you would want to experience that, but I certainly don't so I don't use this things and I heavily moderate comments here. Most comments here are from friends, family, and other thoughtful people, but every now and then someone feels the need to tell me I am not living inside their moral framework. Here's the thing: I already know that. - - - -Travel cannot be taught in a class, and lists of travel tips are fraught with problems, because every traveler is different. I am still learning how to travel, and in these travel organization ideas and tips, I try to share some of the lessons and techniques I've learned along the way. - -I don't want to presume to tell you how to travel. Everyone is different, and I am still learning. I created this section to share some lessons and techniques I've learned in twenty years of traveling, especially in the last four years on the road, [living full time in a vintage RV](/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome). - - -Spanish palindrome on the subject of pilgrimage: La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural – "The path provides the natural next step". Its form cleverly acknowledges the transformative consequences of the pilgrimage, which turns the mind back upon itself, leaving the traveller both ostensibly unchanged and profoundly redirecte - -https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/15/rites-of-way-pilgrimage-walks - - - -True materialism is respect for nature—it is an appreciation for what nature has given us: Throw things away just because we tire of them or buying things because we are bored shows lack of respect. I’d argue that traveling (burning jet fuel) for simplistic reasons such as reaching goals we can brag about e.g. “I’ve visited more exotic places or a greater number of destinations than you” is also disrespectful [of nature]. In a similar vein showing off by buying bigger houses or bigger cars or more stuff than one needs is disrespectful and contemptible as well. In general consumer culture is somewhat of an immature delinquent civilization; it is inconsiderate and has no class—it is only concerned with itself. - -I repeat: A respectful philosophy is crucial. - -Without a philosophy, one’s understanding and behavior is simply a collection of techniques. It is possible to just follow “rules”, but I think this is merely the first step on the path towards living well. Perhaps by repeating the actions of a good life, they will eventually be internalized and grow into something greater, that is, personal growth. - - - - - - - - -Abundance is the natural state of the world. If you leave something alone, there is enough, plenty in fact for all. Anyone who thinks that life is a competitive battlefield filled with individuals struggling, clawing at each other to survive needs to get outside more. - -That's not what life is and the first time you sit still and listen to the forest, pause in a grassy meadow in the moonlight, or tk you'll realize our conception of the world as struggle is flat wrong. It's flat wrong for many reasons, but the one that's come to interest me the most is that that boundary between individual and environment is not nearly so neat and clean as we imagine. - -There is a harmonic resonance between the world and forms that make it up, a kind of vibrating, edge-blurring, feedback loop. Things move, change, do what they need to do, others dissolve, morph, recombine in new ways. Nothing is still, nothing is static, nothing is cut off from anything else. We're still not sure where a tree ends: is it the roots? The mats of fungi feeding nutrients to the roots, without which the tree would die? Where is the beginning and end? - -The better question might be, why are we looking for these things? Where did we get the idea that things begin and end? - -If you do pause somewhere and sit and be still and watch, listen, smell, taste, you'll also notice something very important: you are part of this harmonic dance going on around you. The grass presses against your feet, the gnats explore your skin, the carpenter bees' wings announce their arrival to you. - - - - -When we come to a place where the ecosystem is thriving we feel at peace - -When we seperate ourselves from the ecosystem that abundance goes away. - -Until we learn to love ourselves we can't fix anything, we can't be part of anything. We have to come to grips with who we are, how we fit into the larger picture. We need to see the ways in which we are part of ecosystems, we just have to change how we do it. We do not use things, we are in things. - -Anyone who believes that life is a battlefield full of -individual warriors should go out into the meadows -on a spring night. There, you can learn that the -biosphere does not spawn cutoff, clearly -differentiated individuals who compete against one -another—assuming you find such a meadow; that is, -now that some farmers have started to sow a single, -standardized species of grass. - -Such an experience of the harmony between a -landscape and its lifeforms is probably not the -result of objective analysis. But this is precisely the -point: If you let the calyxes and grasses slide -through your hands amid the firefly flurries, -celebrating the coming summer, you don’t just -perceive a multitude of other beings—the hundred -or so species of plants and countless insects that -make up the meadow’s ecosystem. You also -experience yourself as a part of this scene. And this -is probably the most powerful effect of experiences -in the natural world. When you immerse yourself in -the natural world, you wander a little through the -landscape of your soul. -For a long time now, such experiences have been -considered not very reliable, certainly unscientific, -and, if valid at all, deeply steeped in that pleasant diff --git a/beyond-your-head.txt b/beyond-your-head.txt deleted file mode 100644 index e2cacf6..0000000 --- a/beyond-your-head.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,33 +0,0 @@ -Wim Wenders, in “Written in the West” — his most excellent book of photographic research for his film, Paris, Texas — writes: - -Solitude and taking photographs are connected in an important way. If you aren't alone, you can never acquire this way of seeing, this complete immersion in what you see, no longer needing to interpret, just looking. -... -If you're not alone you take different photos. I rarely feel the urge to take pictures if I’m not on my own. - - -Stop giving away your work to people who don’t care about it. Host it yourself. Distribute it via methods you control. Build your audience deliberately and on your own terms. - -I don’t read a lot of philosophy, but I found Crawford’s book here timely, deeply considered and very profound. He takes a thoughtful approach to how one constructs an authentic life in a world surrounded by “choice architects” that mediate our experiences through technology.Blair Reeves added, - - -It's come to my attention that people spend considerable amounts of their day looking at other people's thoughts on social media. I did this for a while myself, but I found that it left little room for my own thoughts and, call me selfish, but I value those more, so I stopped. And this was some time ago, when services like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram were considerably more innocent than they are today. - -All of which is a long-winded way to say that I very much agree with Michael Crawford's premise in this book: that our attention is a precious resource and that we need to actively protect it, or risk losing it to politico-corporate interests. - -Crawford isn't some attention blogger though, and this is not a self-help book. It's a book of philosophy more than anything, and it's central premise isn't just that you should reclaim your attention, but that your best bet to reclaim your attention is through a culture of traditional craftsmanship and hands-on activities. Crawford isn't suggesting you close that Facebook tab so much as you close your laptop and go do something physical, with your hands rather than your mind. - -Much of the book is spent on a deep dive through into various communities where excellence and even competence comes only through apprenticeship with experts and, wait for it, hard work. And that last bit is why I propose, most people will not like this book. Among the things Crawford looks at in some detail are glasswork, engines (Crawford owns, or did own, a motorcycle repair shop), and most interesting to me, pipe organs. - -More than anything, The World Beyond Your Head is a wonderfully well-thought out rebuttal to the argument that technology drive culture. It doesn't. Humans drive culture. Human activity, human skill, human excellence, drive culture. In the end, for Crawford, this mis-centering, this hyper-focus on technology, is the real cause of our mis-placed attention and it is going to take real work to free ourselves from it. - ->What I have found is that once you recognize the "choice architects" for what they are, you begin to see them everywhere. They are the sites you visit, the networks you use, right down to the form factor of device that is your internet portal. The internet is inherently a mediated platform, after all, and there’s just no getting away from any filter whatsoever. In the real world, you can’t just Richard Stallman your way through the internet. Thus, it becomes a question of making the right choices to maximize your agency and take what control of your internet experience any one person can. - -If you're looking for an easy answer to your own attention problems, you won't find it here. If, however, you want to spend some time taking a deep dive into the *other* things you could be doing with your time, I highly, highly recommend this book (and along with it Crawford's first book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, which played no small part in convincing me that it was worthwhile to try to understand and maintain an 1969 Dodge 318 engine). - -which ruminates on the value of engaging with the physical world in one’s work. The dude is both a philosophy professor and owns his own motorcycle repair shop in Richmond. -A lot to absorb in this book, but two parts that really resonated with me: Crawford points to our attention itself as a precious resource (which it is), and describes how protecting it against politico-corporate imperatives to seize it helps construct ourselves intentionally. -In addition: he goes into some lengths discussing the cultures of traditional craftsmanship in fields like glasswork, pipe organs and engine mechanics, in which, technological progress aside, real excellence is achieved only in a community of expert practitioners. -“The World Beyond Your Head” was, to me, a powerful rebuttal to the mantra of technology as the chief driver of human progress and a mis-centering of the modern self. I strongly recommend it. -The internet’s slow transformation from a collection of communities into just another media platform has lots of causes, and is not wholly a bad thing. After all, media platforms should exist on the internet. The problem is that passive consumption as a primary mode of engagement turns the user into a product to be securitized and sold, exactly as Facebook does and many others aspire to. It leads to an algorithmization of the online experience that, aside from removing individual agency, is also frequently manipulated into promoting whatever wacky, far-out craziness “performs” well in your given demographic. (As a 30-something white guy, I can attest that the portals into alt-righty Trumpism basically follow me around the internet.) -"What I have found is that once you recognize the “choice architects” for what they are, you begin to see them everywhere. They are the sites you visit, the networks you use, right down to the form factor of device that is your internet portal. The internet is inherently a mediated platform, after all, and there’s just no getting away from any filter whatsoever. In the real world, you can’t just Richard Stallman your way through the internet. Thus, it becomes a question of making the right choices to maximize your agency and take what control of your internet experience any one person can." -@BlairReeves diff --git a/bird-watching.txt b/bird-watching.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 349d5ca..0000000 --- a/bird-watching.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,13 +0,0 @@ -One of the wonderful side effects of home schooling your children is that ornothology can begin at age five, rather than waiting for, well, never. - -One of my twin daughters has in fact been studying birds far longer than that. My wife has picture of her, age two, pasifier still in her mouth, cell phone in one hand, looking at an image a friend's mother had texted to my wife, the Sibley guide spread out before her, thumb thoughtfully tracing it's way down a page of yellow warblers. Which was a pretty good guess for what was actually a female goldfinch in non-breading plumage. - -It probably helps that her middle name is Bird. Not, actually, for avians, for the intrepid 19th century British explorer Isabella Bird, but when it comes to love and namesakes intention it seems is irrelevant. - -It also probably helps that we travel the country by RV, stopping off, when we can, migration hot spots. We're not Kenn Kaufman by any means, but we've been known to be on St. Georgia Island in April, summer in the Great Lakes and perhaps even spend a fall in the Chiricauhua region. And no we did not see a tk, or a tk or a trogan. The truth is we're fans of the rather less rare, but still spectacular avians. The Cardnial never ceases to cause wonder. - -We spent two weeks around the Natchez Trace area watching nesting Summer Tanagers in full breeding plumage. - - - -I write a travelogue, mostly for friends and family, but I set it up to list the birds we see, which I know puzzles plenty of relatives and other visitors. diff --git a/birds.txt b/birds.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 3b81b39..0000000 --- a/birds.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,45 +0,0 @@ -Most mornings I am up early enough to hear the signature sounds of whippoorwills, sometimes even the cackling of an owl. It's not long before those birds quiet down though. By the time my coffee is ready the forest is transitioning from night sounds to dawn sounds. Song birds warble in the dogwoods. Red-bellied woodpeckers drum on oaks. Somewhere high over head a red-tailed hawk shrieks. - -We were house sitting for a few days once and the kids were complaining that, with the curtains closed, they could not tell when it was morning in the house. I asked them, "how do you know when it's morning in the bus?" And they said, "we hear the birds singing." Birds mean morning. - -Every morning somewhere between the golden light of sunrise and the starker white of midday, three Carolina Wren's stop by our campsite looking for food. Many birds move through the forest around us throughout the day, but these three come right into the campsite as if we're not even here. - -I sit at the table, writing. I don't move that much I suppose, but certainly the wrens are aware that I am here. The noise of my fingers typing on the keyboard is enough to keep squirrels away. Yet everyday these three wrens behave as if I don't exist. - -Carolina wrens are tiny brown and tan birds with a slightly downward curved bill. They're the sort of small brown bird that never stops moving. They flit and hop and bounce and chip-chip around beneath the table, even *on* the table sometimes, while I work. - - - -Periodically one stops moving and cocks its head to look at me, as if reassessing what sort of threat I represent. But inevitably curiosity is satisfied and it goes back to ignoring my existence, hopping around, once even perching on my foot to get a better view of the ground. One wren even got up on the table and hopped along picking at crumbs, coming right toward me. I thought it was going to land on my arm, but at the last minute it seemed to suddenly remember me and it flew off into the bushes. - -It's nearly the time of year when the permanent avian residents of the Georgia mountains begin to ban together. There aren't that many. Most species are off in Mexico or South America by now. Those that remain band together for the winter. You see flocks consisting of Carolina chickadees, tufted titmice, and Carolina wrens, sometimes joined by golden-crowned kinglets, downy woodpeckers, perhaps a nuthatch or two. They join up in Autumn and often, from what I saw back when we lived here, stick together for most of the winter. - - - -But it's not quite cold enough for that yet. These are Carolina wrens, traveling alone, together. Their dark eyes watch me whenever I walk around. If I get too close they scurry away, flutter off under the bus or into the wheel well, but for the most part it feels like I am in their mid-morning snack spot and it's me who should be moving. - -These three were the first time I'd had much encounter with the avian world in a long time. Mockingbirds had ruled in Texas, and I was feeling bad about the summer tanager I'd hit and killed while driving out there. It seemed as if the avians were angry with me, understandably. I dreamed once that a goldfinch was pecking at my finger, biting me until I bled. - -After a few days of the wrens coming through I started to feel like perhaps I was forgiven for that bloody mishap with the tanager. Then one morning I stepped outside at dawn and there was a barred owl not more than ten feet away. - - - -I don't write about them much, but birds have dictated our destinations as much as anything else. If you were to overlay our route [through the Gulf coast in 2018](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/01/almost-warm) with popular spring migration birding spots, our route might make more sense. We're not [Kenn Kaufman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenn_Kaufman) by any means, but we've been known to be [on St. George Island in April](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/04/migration), maybe [spend summer in the Great Lakes](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/07/trees), and perhaps try for an [early spring in the Chiricauhua region](https://live.luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/01/ghost-cochise). - -My kids have been bird watching since they could stand up. It wasn't something I forced on them, they'd never do it if I'd done that. You can't force things on people, especially kids. If you want to teach your kids something, don't talk about it, do it. Don't tell them what you're doing, just do it. They learn by osmosis and curiosity, not "teaching"[^1]. - - - -Our kids picked up the bird book that was sitting on the coffee table in our old house and started looking at the pictures before they could walk. There's a photo of one of them, still in diapers, the Sibley Guide to Birds spread out before her, thoughtfully tracing her finger down a page of warblers, trying to find one that looks like the bird in a photo a friend's mother had sent us (it was a goldfinch). - - - - - -Our kids know a lot about the natural world because it surrounds them every day and piques their curiosity. They wake up to the sound of birds singing. They point out the shrieks of the red-tailed hawk when it circles overhead in the morning. They note the chickadee and titmouse flock when it comes through not long after that. Every time they go for a walk when I'm working I get a full catalog of interesting birds I missed. Birding by proxy. - -It's not always birds of course. One evening the kids found a meadow vole under the bus, drinking from the tiny puddle of condensation that collects below the air conditioner. I imagine it's busy around that water at night. The vole apparently overstayed and got caught out in the open. The kids dug it some roots and piled them back in the shade, where it could eat, but still keep cool. We stepped in for dinner and when we came back out it had moved on. - -Later, after the kids were in bed, I sat out by the fire, listening as the evening sounds faded back to night sounds. The songbirds fell quiet. The woodpeckers stopped tapping. The whippoorwills started up. Later the deep voice of a great horned owl drifted up from somewhere down by the river below. I thought of the vole. Good luck out there friend. - -[^1]: At least not teaching the way we commonly do it in American schools. General strategies can often be conveyed well (aka, taught) but no one (kids or adults) learns when they aren't interested. And you can't force interest. diff --git a/book--how-to-travel/book.txt b/book--how-to-travel/book.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 83ec439..0000000 --- a/book--how-to-travel/book.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,61 +0,0 @@ -## Get a side hustle. - -There are literally thousands, tens of thousands of ways to make a little extra money on the side. Hit up Google for a few thousand examples. Except that copying someone else's side hustle doesn't always work out for you the way it did for them. Markets change, early movers -- i.e. the people whose ideas you're thinking of copying -- have advantages you do not. Markets mature and pricing tends to decline over time. Once upon a time you could make a boatload of cash drop shipping Miracle Fruit (that berry you eat that makes lemons taste sweet). It was a novelty that no one was really importing. Then 1000 people were and the proverbial bottom dropped out. - -The takeaway isn't that side hustles therefore are impossible, rather than copying someone else's side hustle isn't always a good idea. - -That said there are some patterns or types of side hustles that you can copy. I'm going to tell about two that helped earn my family and I an average of about $300 extra a month and required about 4 hours or so a week of effort (I say average because there are $50 months and there are $500 months). We could in fact have made much more than that if we'd been willing to put in more time, but we weren't. - -### Master Ebay/Craiglist - -Ebay, Craiglsist and others that offer simple ways to sell things are a gold mine for making money on the side. They require almost no effort on your part and formula is very simple: buy low, sell high. - -The bit question is *what* should you sell. The answer is, pick a market that either is appealing enough for you to do research on or that you already know well enough to know what's low and what's high. - -My wife buys and sells children's shoes and brings in about $100-$300 a month doing so. The process is pretty simple, she goes to the local thrift stores and second hand clothing stores and buys shoes for about $1-$3 and then sells them on Ebay for $10-$20 plus shipping. The net profit then is anywhere from $7 - $19, occasionally more. It's not earth shattering, but she spends about 3 hours a week on it, an hour at the thrift store, a couple hours taking photos and listing everything. She sells about 5 pairs a week, bringing in an average of $50 week (I know this because I averaged it out using the Paypal admin). It's not paying the bills, that's why I call it a side hustle, but an extra $1000 to $3000 a year is 25 percent of our annual living expenses on the road. If you're single $3000 can last you six months in many parts of the world. - -And remember this is just one thing that took about four hours a week. Doubling out input time would have doubled the output (I know this because for three months we did double the input time and the income did in fact double), though after that there are probably diminishing returns. In other words 4x the input would not be earning us $12,000 a year. - -Now I know what you're thinking. *Okay, that's great, but I know nothing about children's shoes...* Me either, so this might not be the best choice for you or I. Again, it's the idea, no the details that I want you to focus on. - -That said, it's worth pointing out that my wife didn't know much about children's shoes when she started. In fact our kids weren't even wearing shoes yet when she started. Corrinne came up with idea because she was in a Facebook group of parents buying and selling kids clothes and toys and stuff. She was getting things cheap for our girls and in course of doing that she noticed that parents spend absurd amounts of money on children's shoes. - -My wife is much smarter than me so where I just made fun of people for wasting their money on something their kids would out grow in six months, she saw an opportunity. - -Because kids outgrow shoes very quickly the shoes typically have very little wear. However, people who spend $60 on kids shoes that will last three months also seem to not make much effort to re-sell them. Apparently if you have that kinds of money you just chuck them in the donate pile and send them off. That means thrift stores often have very popular shoes with almost no wear and tear at rock bottom prices. - -At the same time there are lots of parents around the country who do not buy expensive new shoes, but still want their kids to have to the "coolest" shoes. These parent haunt eBay and are willing to spend roughly 50-60% of retail value. - -So you buy low at the thrift stores and used clothing shops and then turn around and sell high on eBay. The spread is yours to squirrel away for plane tickets to Buenos Aires. - -When Corrinne started she bought and sold brands she already new, Converse and other big names like that, but as she got more involved in the market she began to pick up other names and now she knows what to look for, what can turn the biggest profit and what to avoid. As an added bonus our kids have very cool shoes, not that they care, but if you ever see photos on luxagraf rest assured the shoes were bought used on th super cheap. - -What's the take away? Simple: buy low, sell high. - -In many cases you can do the entire buy low, sell high on eBay. As I was writing this chapter my wife yelled from the other room to tell me a a pair of shoes she bought on eBay for $11 just re-sold for $23. Technically "flipping" these shoes was not the plan, they were in fact for our daughter Olivia, but they didn't end up fitting so my wife relisted to recoup the money and ended up more than doubling her money. - -There are ways to buy low and sell high all within eBay, no leaving the house necessary. Sometimes you just get lucky, as my wife just did, but there are actually some tricks you can use to increase your luck. One great way to do this is to search common misspellings of the items you want to flip. Because these listing have typos they don't show up in searches, get very few bids and (sometimes) that means they sell well below their actual value. There are dozens of sites you can use to automate this process, but I use [TypoHound](http://typohound.com/). It's pretty simple, you just enter a search term and it generates a link to an eBay search based on common misspellings and typos. You can then follow that search on eBay and keep track of items that are misspelled. I don't actually flip things this way, but I do use this whenever I buy something for my own use. - -If you want to try something similar start by shopping for something on eBay or Craigslst. Ebay is more useful at this stage because you can look at finished auctions to get an idea of what things actually sell for. Don't forget that you can ask anything on eBay, the only thing that matters is what people actually pay and to see that you only want to look at finished auctions. - -Once you have a niche selected and general idea of what the high price is, the question is can you get it for less? One of the great advantages of Ebay over craigslist is that Ebay reaches a national audience. That means you can leverage the fact that your town's thrift stores are stuffed full of old Patagonia rain gear and people in San Francisco will pay top dollar for those jackets (I made that example up, but you get the idea). One persons junk is another person's treasure and you if you can connect those two people and make the spread you will make money. - -Another approach if you're a handy person is to buy things that are broken and then fix them and sell for a profit. There's more effort involved in this and there's ahigher potential risk (if it turns out you can't fix it, you're screwed), but there's a correspondingly higher payoff as well. The internet abounds with people who've made many thousands of dollars flipping things on eBay and Craigslist. I find [Ryan Finlay's ReCraigslist.com](http://recraigslist.com/) to be one of the most helpful. He even has an entire [online course](http://applianceschool.com/) on how to flip appliances like he did. - -That's not an endorsement by the way, just an example of how a little side hustle can actually turn into a very lucrative income. Now our goal isn;t to build a brick and morter business, pretty much the opposite in fact, but it is certainly possible to make a tone of money this way. - -That said, one thing I hate about overly enthusiastic sales pitches is that they pick a few (possibly outlier) examples and make it seem like you can do it to, you plunk down the money and then... nothing. You fail. What's wrong with you? Nothing really, I failed too. - -Before I get all pep talkish on you and lay out the excercises for this chapter, let me tell you a little bit about my failure to make money on ebay. I used to collect books. I lived in western Masschusetts for three years (three loooong winters) and as anyone who lives in NEw England can tell you that area is a treasure trove of used book stores. AT one point I had something in the neighborhood of 1000 volumes. I sold about half of them before I traveled around the world the first time, but I stored the rest and still had them when we were getting ready to make the move to our current mobile lifestyle. - -Watching my wife bring in tidy sums of money on shoes I thought, hey, no problem, I'll just unload all these books. Except that no bought my book. I listed them at pretty good deal, then at great deals, then, just to see what happned I listed a few a $.99. Not one sale. Why? I don't know. And that's why I failed. I did no research, I didn't know the market, I didn't even check to see if there was a market for books on eBay (turns out, not really). I ended up having a book sale in front of our house and did quite well there, so it was not a total loss, but I recount it hear to illustrate a point: do not assume you understand a market, get out there and do your research, watch auctions, look at finished auctions and find the selling price. Then look for the lowest possible buying price. - -### Exercises - -1) Go sign up for an ebay account and a paypal account. Connect them up so you're ready to sell. - -2) Find something in your house that's - - - -## Side Hustle #2: Use your skills. diff --git a/books-to-do.txt b/books-to-do.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 671d6e4..0000000 --- a/books-to-do.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,34 +0,0 @@ -The Farfarers - -The premise of Farfarers is that the Norse were not the first to arrive in Iceland, Greenland and North America. Mowat call the first settlers, Albans, the name generally given to the people of the British Isles who most likely were descendants of the Neolithic peoples of Britain. He argues that as they were driven out by successive waves of Celts, Norse and other invaders, the Alben pushed across the Atlantic, first to Iceland, then on to Greenland and North America. - -He traces the history of these people using everything from Norse epic poetry, to the diaries of Irish monks. There is very little evidence on the ground (though there is some), so Mowat is well outside archeological dogma, but the case is convincing and I see no reason to disbelieve the accounts of the Sagas, private journals, and so on just because they are "unprovable". All archeological is ultimately a hypothosis at best, I see no reason to favor tales constructed out of scraps of wood and fire over those constructed out of paper. - -It probably helps that Mowat is a first-rate storyteller and this is a rip-roaring good yarn. Also sailing, there's never been a bad book about sailors. - - - -Voices in the Stones -The Overstory -The Wolf at Twilight -Davy -Neither wolf nor Dog -Only Approved Indians -Columbus and Other Cannibals -A World Full of Gods -Grandma Gatewood's Walk -The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs -The old ways -Extreme Ownership -World we used to live in -God is red -Desert Solitaire -Light Action in the Caribbean -steep trails -decline of the west -the white stage -After Progress -Braiding sweetgrass -Heaven's Breathe -Forest and Sea -Appachian trail ann and myron sutter diff --git a/books/beyond-your-head.txt b/books/beyond-your-head.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e2cacf6 --- /dev/null +++ b/books/beyond-your-head.txt @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +Wim Wenders, in “Written in the West” — his most excellent book of photographic research for his film, Paris, Texas — writes: + +Solitude and taking photographs are connected in an important way. If you aren't alone, you can never acquire this way of seeing, this complete immersion in what you see, no longer needing to interpret, just looking. +... +If you're not alone you take different photos. I rarely feel the urge to take pictures if I’m not on my own. + + +Stop giving away your work to people who don’t care about it. Host it yourself. Distribute it via methods you control. Build your audience deliberately and on your own terms. + +I don’t read a lot of philosophy, but I found Crawford’s book here timely, deeply considered and very profound. He takes a thoughtful approach to how one constructs an authentic life in a world surrounded by “choice architects” that mediate our experiences through technology.Blair Reeves added, + + +It's come to my attention that people spend considerable amounts of their day looking at other people's thoughts on social media. I did this for a while myself, but I found that it left little room for my own thoughts and, call me selfish, but I value those more, so I stopped. And this was some time ago, when services like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram were considerably more innocent than they are today. + +All of which is a long-winded way to say that I very much agree with Michael Crawford's premise in this book: that our attention is a precious resource and that we need to actively protect it, or risk losing it to politico-corporate interests. + +Crawford isn't some attention blogger though, and this is not a self-help book. It's a book of philosophy more than anything, and it's central premise isn't just that you should reclaim your attention, but that your best bet to reclaim your attention is through a culture of traditional craftsmanship and hands-on activities. Crawford isn't suggesting you close that Facebook tab so much as you close your laptop and go do something physical, with your hands rather than your mind. + +Much of the book is spent on a deep dive through into various communities where excellence and even competence comes only through apprenticeship with experts and, wait for it, hard work. And that last bit is why I propose, most people will not like this book. Among the things Crawford looks at in some detail are glasswork, engines (Crawford owns, or did own, a motorcycle repair shop), and most interesting to me, pipe organs. + +More than anything, The World Beyond Your Head is a wonderfully well-thought out rebuttal to the argument that technology drive culture. It doesn't. Humans drive culture. Human activity, human skill, human excellence, drive culture. In the end, for Crawford, this mis-centering, this hyper-focus on technology, is the real cause of our mis-placed attention and it is going to take real work to free ourselves from it. + +>What I have found is that once you recognize the "choice architects" for what they are, you begin to see them everywhere. They are the sites you visit, the networks you use, right down to the form factor of device that is your internet portal. The internet is inherently a mediated platform, after all, and there’s just no getting away from any filter whatsoever. In the real world, you can’t just Richard Stallman your way through the internet. Thus, it becomes a question of making the right choices to maximize your agency and take what control of your internet experience any one person can. + +If you're looking for an easy answer to your own attention problems, you won't find it here. If, however, you want to spend some time taking a deep dive into the *other* things you could be doing with your time, I highly, highly recommend this book (and along with it Crawford's first book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, which played no small part in convincing me that it was worthwhile to try to understand and maintain an 1969 Dodge 318 engine). + +which ruminates on the value of engaging with the physical world in one’s work. The dude is both a philosophy professor and owns his own motorcycle repair shop in Richmond. +A lot to absorb in this book, but two parts that really resonated with me: Crawford points to our attention itself as a precious resource (which it is), and describes how protecting it against politico-corporate imperatives to seize it helps construct ourselves intentionally. +In addition: he goes into some lengths discussing the cultures of traditional craftsmanship in fields like glasswork, pipe organs and engine mechanics, in which, technological progress aside, real excellence is achieved only in a community of expert practitioners. +“The World Beyond Your Head” was, to me, a powerful rebuttal to the mantra of technology as the chief driver of human progress and a mis-centering of the modern self. I strongly recommend it. +The internet’s slow transformation from a collection of communities into just another media platform has lots of causes, and is not wholly a bad thing. After all, media platforms should exist on the internet. The problem is that passive consumption as a primary mode of engagement turns the user into a product to be securitized and sold, exactly as Facebook does and many others aspire to. It leads to an algorithmization of the online experience that, aside from removing individual agency, is also frequently manipulated into promoting whatever wacky, far-out craziness “performs” well in your given demographic. (As a 30-something white guy, I can attest that the portals into alt-righty Trumpism basically follow me around the internet.) +"What I have found is that once you recognize the “choice architects” for what they are, you begin to see them everywhere. They are the sites you visit, the networks you use, right down to the form factor of device that is your internet portal. The internet is inherently a mediated platform, after all, and there’s just no getting away from any filter whatsoever. In the real world, you can’t just Richard Stallman your way through the internet. Thus, it becomes a question of making the right choices to maximize your agency and take what control of your internet experience any one person can." +@BlairReeves diff --git a/books/books-to-do.txt b/books/books-to-do.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..671d6e4 --- /dev/null +++ b/books/books-to-do.txt @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +The Farfarers + +The premise of Farfarers is that the Norse were not the first to arrive in Iceland, Greenland and North America. Mowat call the first settlers, Albans, the name generally given to the people of the British Isles who most likely were descendants of the Neolithic peoples of Britain. He argues that as they were driven out by successive waves of Celts, Norse and other invaders, the Alben pushed across the Atlantic, first to Iceland, then on to Greenland and North America. + +He traces the history of these people using everything from Norse epic poetry, to the diaries of Irish monks. There is very little evidence on the ground (though there is some), so Mowat is well outside archeological dogma, but the case is convincing and I see no reason to disbelieve the accounts of the Sagas, private journals, and so on just because they are "unprovable". All archeological is ultimately a hypothosis at best, I see no reason to favor tales constructed out of scraps of wood and fire over those constructed out of paper. + +It probably helps that Mowat is a first-rate storyteller and this is a rip-roaring good yarn. Also sailing, there's never been a bad book about sailors. + + + +Voices in the Stones +The Overstory +The Wolf at Twilight +Davy +Neither wolf nor Dog +Only Approved Indians +Columbus and Other Cannibals +A World Full of Gods +Grandma Gatewood's Walk +The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs +The old ways +Extreme Ownership +World we used to live in +God is red +Desert Solitaire +Light Action in the Caribbean +steep trails +decline of the west +the white stage +After Progress +Braiding sweetgrass +Heaven's Breathe +Forest and Sea +Appachian trail ann and myron sutter diff --git a/by-hand.txt b/by-hand.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 710cc5b..0000000 --- a/by-hand.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,54 +0,0 @@ -The change from living on the road to living in a house is more difficult than the reverse. Or perhaps more painful is the better way to put it. It was difficult to get rid of all of our stuff, [surprisingly difficult](/jrnl/2016/05/root-down), but buying new stuff is downright painful. - -In order to avoid the financial pain, but also the more nebulous, soul-sucking pain of consumer culture that eats at us all, and since most stores were closed anyway, we ended up essentially camping in the house. This was not so much a conscious decision, as a thing that happened. Camping is what we know. - - - -We did have a few items in a storage unit that we brought out here. Our storage unit provided an interesting lesson (again) in how bad I am at estimating what my future self will want. I saved all the wrong things (again). Five boxes of books? Could not get rid of those fast enough[^1]. But damn I wish I had kept more of my tools. I wish I had my saws, my benches, my shelves, my shovels and rakes. [Tools](/jrnl/2015/12/tools). Always save tools. - -Thankfully I did keep my desk. We also kept a dining table. No chairs though. No problem. We pulled up our camp chairs for the first couple weeks. Eventually we found some cheap chairs at a local antique store. To date, that and a bunk bed for the kids, are the only pieces of furniture we've purchased. The previous tenant left a bed frame, we bought a new mattress. - - - - -For the most part though, even months later, we are camping in a house. - -We try to spend most of our time outdoors anyway. Early on in the spring this worked great, but as the summer wore on, without much water the swim in, the heat drove us in. - -
- - - - - - -
- -While we did buy some furniture, there were certain things we just did not want to spend money on. Like a wash machine. What an insanely boring thing to spend money on. No one needs a wash machine. What we all need are clean clothes. - -I assumed Corrinne would not stand for this line of thinking, so I said we'd get a wash machine off Craigslist. To get us by until that happened, I bought a hand washing plunger and a couple of five gallon buckets. The house came with, as any house dating from the 19th century should, a clothes line. - -If you've followed luxagraf for long you probably know where this story is headed. Yes, six month later, we're still hand washing all our clothes. In a bucket, with a plunger. It sounds crazy, but the things is... we like it better. Our clothes get just as clean, very little money was spent, and, as a nice added bonus we get healthier because we've built a little exercise into our day. At this point, if I were going to buy anything, it'd be a clothes dryer. - -
- - - - -
- -I think this little fringe benefit, of exercise, is a bigger deal than it seems at first glance. Maybe it's just me, but I really dislike "working out". I don't dislike the effort or process, actually, truth be told I love lifting weights, but the whole idea of "exercise" bothers me. That I should stop my life and go to a gym or go do *something* other than just daily living, feels fundamentally unnecessary to me. It feels like a symptom of much deeper problem. Why does my daily life not provide enough physical exertion to keep me healthy? Doesn't that see odd? - -There are certain habits and customs of modern life that only seem sane because we've been so deeply indoctrinated into them. I believe this is one of those. The idea that you should stop your actual life and "exercise" says a lot about our lives. Life has become so physically easy for most of us these days that we become unhealthy living this way. If this is true, and most evidence suggests it is, I posit there is something seriously wrong with our lives, and the effects probably go far beyond needing to exercise. - -I think this is a sign that life is not supposed to be physically easy, that there needs to be struggle and even suffering to be a fully realized, healthy human being, but never mind that right now. Let's just say you hate the idea of working out, and want to build more exercise into your life: that's quite simple. - -The more time I spent thinking about this, and yes, I often think about it while plunging the day's laundry, the more I thought hmm, what if I built more of these little workouts into my day? What if you used a hand crank blender instead of a Vitamix, what if you used a reel push mower instead of riding mower? What if you used a plunger and a bucket to do laundry? It's really just extends a basic life philosophy I established years ago when I was living in New York: when there's an option, take the stairs. Walk slowly if you want, but take the long way. - - - -And I have good news: you can do this too if you want. It's simple really. Look around your life for machines, and then figure out what people did before there were machines to do it for them. In this spirit I bought a push reel mower and a hand crank coffee grinder. And I know it sounds silly. But you know what, it works. - -The best thing is that it actually makes life more fun. The kids get involved, doing laundry becomes a little thing you do everyday rather than an anonymous task that has to get done. And I like that. I don't think we're here to get things done, I think we're here to do things. - -[^1]: Not that books don't have value. But I find that making notes, writing down passages that grab me, and other methods of extracting information from books is sufficient that there's rarely a need to keep the actual book around. I've since gotten rid of most of them. There are a few I keep for their rarity, or because I frequently refer to or re-read them. diff --git a/camera.txt b/camera.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 508b04c..0000000 --- a/camera.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,37 +0,0 @@ -One of the best parts of my job is that I get to test some very nice cameras. I've used the Hasselblad X1D, the Fuji X-Pro 3 (personal favorite), Canon tk, Sony A7RIV, and others. For the most part I am cynical about new technology, but I won't lie, I love testing new cameras. - -That said, every camera I've ever tested I've been happy to send back[^1]. I've yet to test anything that made me want to give up the [camera system](/technology) I actually own. - -Part of this is related to how I shoot. For nearly four years now I have been shooting everything with manual focus lenses and fully manual exposure. Everything. Landscapes, street scenes walking the cities, the kids playing, running, jumping, swimming. I compose, I focus, I meter, I shoot, I adjust, I refocus I re-shoot. - -It's a process, one that's become part of me at this point, it just happens without me really thinking about it. I rarely miss a shot that autofocus would have pulled off. - -which is something I never realized until I pressed the shutter on the X-T4 and realized, oh, right, that's all there is to it. - -The most recent one to cross my desk is the Sony A7RIV. We've been in this area for a few months now and I have quiet a few images in mind, that I knew I wanted to make at some point. Having a new camera to test is a good excuse to get out and shoot them. I try to mix things up, shooting at different times of day to see how the camera/lens responds. - -The scene above is about half a mile down the road, half way between our house and our nearest neighbor. It's just an open field, but when the thunderheads give it a good dramatic backdrop, it's fun to shoot. - -I wandered down one afternoon by myself and spent a few minutes taking in the scene and then... pointed the camera, everything snapped into focus, and I pressed the shutter. Well, that was boring. - - -I felt less a part of the process, less invested in the result. - -I felt let down. Being out and doing nothing but making images makes me want to shoot more, that part was good, but it made me want my lenses, the feel of metal turning. There's a hard stop when I reach infinity, there satisfying clicks when you turn the aperture ring. The Canon is a great camera, and the lenses are nice too, but I much prefer what I have. - -I worry this sounds like some hipster lamenting the bygone era of records or lumberjack shirts. But then, I'm not really sure I care if that's how it sounds because that's not what I mean. I don't want some previous time to come back, I just think the technology of that time was much better than we might think. - -But then I have an attachment to the tactile parts of the process of making a photo. Possibly others do not. I enjoy the process of turning the focus ring and snapping through apertures. Sometimes I count them. That way I can focus on the scene and know what my depth of field is without having to look at the info on screen. - -and am glad that I have found a way to have the best of both worlds, analog process, digital and analog results. - -I don't really miss film the way some do, a little maybe, again the tactile part of standing in the dark, feeding and winding the film into the metal wheels, hoping it wasn't touching as you spiraled it on, but I certainly don't miss paying for film. And I'm far better at developing in darktable than I ever was at working with prints in the darkroom. - -Sometimes technology moves so fast and pulls us with it so fast we don't get a chance to process what we're giving up. I didn't start out with manual focus lenses because I was nostalgic or missing focusing and metering. I started out with them because I was frugal and they're cheap. My favorite lense, a Minolta 50.. f/2, which I suspect is no one else's favorite lens, cost me $20. My most expensive lens, which is a 100-300 zoom, which I pair with a 2X teleconverter, was a whooping $200. - -I got in because I was trying to get some good glass without spending a fortune. What I didn't realize was happening was that photography was again becoming a process in which I was a key participant. At first I missed shots all the time. I still miss shots, but far fewer. My focusing skills have become much better and I can meter a scene in my head within a stop or two without consciously thinking about it any more. I see the kids playing, backlit by the morning sun coming through the trees and I just sort of know that I'm going to want about f5.6 to hold them in focus but let the trees and light blur, and in this light, shooting at 100 ISO I should set the exposure around 1/80, maybe faster or slower depending on how much light is getting in the trees, but I know my starting point before I ever raise the camera to my eye. - -That sounds pretentious again perhaps, woohee, look at how skilled I am. But it's not skill, it's repetition. Do anything for a while and it becomes *second nature*. - - -[^1]: I hope it goes without saying, but I will say it anyway: I don't keep anything I review for work. Expensive cameras go back to the manufacturer. Things that companies don't want back go to charity. diff --git a/covid-notes.txt b/covid-notes.txt deleted file mode 100644 index b500080..0000000 --- a/covid-notes.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,7 +0,0 @@ -While I agree people need to get back to work, and I look forward to them being able to do so (I am fortunate to work from home and so far, have been able to continue), I do worry about some of the findings that suggest there may be long term consequences to covid-19, even among the asymptomatic, e.g., lungs are affected even though people didn't even know they had the disease: - -https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/ryct.2020200110 - -I've seen other less formal reports of lingering damage to the heart and kidneys as well. I think this hits a big blindspot in American thinking regarding the virus (conceiving of the future isn't our nation's strong suit). On one had perhaps there's nothing to be done, no way to avoid that longer term impact and we just have to bear it collectively. On the other I wonder how considering this might change our individual responses? If we knew there was - -I know for me, meditating on this over the course of the last few weeks has made me consider my choices in the light of future impacts. But maybe that's just me, I've always been on the collapse now, avoid the rush bandwagon (I found you years ago from a link in a permaculture forum when I was first experimenting with hügelkultur beds). diff --git a/covid.txt b/covid.txt deleted file mode 100644 index fe67407..0000000 --- a/covid.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,36 +0,0 @@ -"I wish travel in the widespread recommendation sense was understood and in a wider or more metaphorical sense. Try out new things. Different ways of living. Associating with different socioeconomic classes. Different kinds of works. Different faiths. Different politics. Different ways of providing for yourself. Testing boundaries." - - -At the risk of pointing out the obvious, life is not on pause. Culture is on pause. - - - -This seems to be something that becomes whatever the politicians want it to be. This is no longer about health and science. - - - - - - -This is the same sort of paradox Michael Pollan identified regarding food: we are the first generation to have obesity and malnourishment simultaneously. - - - - -• 104 nuclear reactors in 31 states, operated by 30 different companies. Every single one “temporarily” storing high-level waste that will be lethal for 10,000 to 24,000 years - -• 40,000 to 80,000 (exact number unknown) chemical factories producing or processing materials with multiple “compounds known to be carcinogenic and/or mutagenic” - -• More than 40 weapons-testing facilities and 70,000 nuclear bombs and missiles - -• 104,000,000 cubic meters of high-level radioactive waste from weapons-testing activities alone - -• 925 operating uranium mines - -• 20 to 30 times the average historical background rates of mercury in rain - -• 2,200 square miles of excavated valleys and leveled mountains in Appalachia alone - -• 478,562 active natural gas mines in the United States in 2008, with 1,800 expected to be drilled in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania alone in 2010 - -• 18,433,779,281 cubic feet of trash per year, or 100,000 acres of trash one-foot deep per year, or about 250 square miles, with trash 400 feet deep diff --git a/dialogues/violet-crowned-hummingbird.txt b/dialogues/violet-crowned-hummingbird.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..35e779e --- /dev/null +++ b/dialogues/violet-crowned-hummingbird.txt @@ -0,0 +1,97 @@ +The white stands out against the green and brown tangle of Bamboo. Even without the darting erratic and eye catching movement, even without the striking red bill, even without the iridescent violet namesake atop its head, the white alone is enough to know a Violet Crowned hummingbird is in the courtyard. + +I see it in the mornings when I sit outside, drinking coffee, making notes about the previous day. I see it in the afternoon, passing by the upstairs window, I catch the white belly in the corner of my eye and stop, pulling back the drapes the housekeeper always pulls shut so I can once again see the outside world. The Violet Crowned hummingbird is sitting there, perched on a leaf of bamboo, barely bending it, seemingly regarding me just as the house sparrows and rock doves do throughout the day. They linger, the Violet Crowned does not. He hovers, perhaps snatching insects, I've never been able to tell, though there are very few flowers in the courtyard so if he's here for food it must be meat. + +Is it the same bird? A different bird each day? For the first month I never saw a hummingbird anywhere near here, then one day, there was the while belly flitting in the bamboo. Every day after that he came back. Something here he liked, I suspect it was not me though I could not shake the feeling he was watching me. + +Hummingbirds are more than birds in Mexico. They are omens, gods, creatures of the old world. + +Further south in Peru, out on the Nazca plain, there is an image of a hummingbird so large it's only recognizable from many hundreds of feet in the air, which has proved puzzling to everyone since since there's no way to get several thousand feet in the air and actually see the hummingbird. + the hummingbird is 93 m (305 ft) long + +It seems safe to assume that the creators had completely different ways of looking at the world, literally and figuratively, if may be so bold. And yet they too celebrate the hummingbird. + +in southern Peru, ancient artists carved out an image of a hummingbird so large that it can only be recognized at about 1,000 feet in the air. These people recognized the sacredness of nature. They understood the magnitude of these tiny gifts, which are unique to the New World. + + + + +Frida painting with hummingbird necklace (Chilam Balam of Chumayel). reference andrea. + +--- + +https://vivirmexicohermoso.wordpress.com/2015/12/09/the-hummingbird-in-mexican-culture/ + +Hummingbird has different names in Mexico depending on the region quindes, tucusitos, picaflores, chupamirtos, chuparrosas, huichichiquis, or by name in indigenous languages: huitzilli Nahuatl, Mayan x ts’unu’um, Tzunún in huasteco or Jun in Totonac, among others. + +The Aztecs or Mexica, recognized hummingbirds as brave and courageous fighters. It was admired because, despite its size, showed great strength and power to fly. Its beauty, color and accuracy were highly prized qualities besides. Notably, the Aztecs believed that this bird never died, and was the symbol * Huitzilopochtli, the god of war. In the Zapotec culture, it was in charge of drinking the blood of the sacrifices. + +* Huitzilopochtli was usually translated as ‘left-handed hummingbird “or” Southern Hummingbird’, although there is disagreement around the meaning since the Opochtli ‘left’ is not modified and the modifier to be right, so the translation literal would be ‘left Hummingbird’ + +In the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel “it is called the hummingbird as a referral from a Nahuatl name, Pizlimtec, which comes from Piltzintecuhtli, Sun Young (name also Xochipilli, Aztec goddess of music, song, flowers and plants hallucinogenic), and presented himself as the father of the sun of today’s universe, it generates when it had to restructure the earth after a cosmic cataclysm. This coincides with the Popol Vuh, where the sun of today appears after the creation of men corn (De la Garza, 1995) ” + + + + + + + + + + + +--- + +http://www.hummingbirdworld.com/h/native_american.htm + +On the Nazca plain in southern Peru, ancient artists carved out an image of a hummingbird so large that it can only be recognized at about 1,000 feet in the air. These people recognized the sacredness of nature. They understood the magnitude of these tiny gifts, which are unique to the New World. + +This massive image can't be far from the place where, in primordial times, the first hummingbird opened its eyes to the pale light of dawn. In Peru and other South American countries, at or near the equator, there is an amazing variety of hummingbirds. Probably all of them have not been discovered yet. We know of over 300. + + +There is a common folk belief in Mexico that hummingbirds bring love and romance. In ancient times, stuffed hummingbirds were worn as lucky charms to bring success in matters of the heart. + + + +There is a legend from Mexico about a Taroscan Indian woman who was taught how to weave beautiful baskets by a grateful hummingbird to whom she had given sugar water during a drought. These baskets are now used in Day of the Dead Festivals. + + +A Mayan legend says the hummingbird is actually the sun in disguise, and he is trying to court a beautiful woman, who is the moon. + +Another Mayan legend says the first two hummingbirds were created from the small feather scraps left over from the construction of other birds. The god who made the hummers was so pleased he had an elaborate wedding ceremony for them. First butterflies marked out a room, then flower petals fell on the ground to make a carpet; spiders spun webs to make a bridal pathway, then the sun sent down rays which caused the tiny groom to glow with dazzling reds and greens. The wedding guests noticed that whenever he turned away from the sun, he became drab again like the original gray feathers from which he was made. + +A third Mayan legend speaks of a hummingbird piercing the the tongue of ancient kings. When the blood was poured on sacred scrolls and burned, divine ancestors appeared in the smoke. + + +In Central America, the Aztecs decorated their ceremonial cloaks with hummingbird feathers. The chieftains wore hummingbird earrings. Aztec priests had staves decorated with hummingbird feathers. They used these to suck evil out of people who had been cursed by sorcerers. + +An Aztec myth tells of a valiant warrior named Huitzil, who led them to a new homeland, then helped them defend it. This famous hero's full name was Huitzilopochtli, which means "hummingbird from the left." The "left" is the deep south, the location of the spirit world. The woman who gave birth to Huitzil was Coatlicul. She conceived him from a ball of feathers that fell from the sky. Huitzil wore a helmet shaped like a giant hummingbird. + +At a key moment in an important battle, Huitzil was killed. His body vanished and a green-backed hummingbird whirred up from the spot where he had fallen to inspire his followers to go on to victory. After Huitzil's death, he became a god. + +The Aztecs came to believe that every warrior slain in battle rose to the sky and orbited the sun for four years. Then they became hummingbirds. In the afterlife these transformed heroes fed on the flowers in the gardens of paradise, while engaging from time to time in mock battles to sharpen their skills. At night the hummingbird angels became soldiers again and followed Huitzil, fighting off the powers of the darkness, restoring warmth and light. As dawn broke, the hummingbirds went into a frenzy. The sun rewarded them for this by giving them a radiant sheen. + +In an Aztec ritual dancers formed a circle and sang a song which included these words: "I am the Shining One, bird, warrior and wizard." At the end of the ritual young men lifted young girls helping them to fly like hummingbirds. + +There is another Aztec legend which says the god of music and poetry took the form of a hummingbird and descended into the underworld to make love with a goddess, who then gave birth to the first flower. + +grape_1.gif (1301 bytes) + +One of the widespread beliefs is that hummingbirds, in some way, are messengers between words. As such they help shamans keep nature and spirit in balance. The Cochti have a story about ancient people who lost faith in the Great Mother. In anger, she deprived them of rain for four years. The people noticed that the only creature who thrived during this drought was Hummingbird. When they studies his habits, the shamans learned that Hummingbird had a secret passageway to the underworld. Periodically, he went there to gather honey. Further study revealed that this doorway was open to Hummingbird alone because he had never lost faith in the Great Mother. This information inspired the people to regain faith. After that the Great Mother took care of them. + + + + + + + +--- + + +This good-sized hummingbird was not found nesting in the U.S. until 1959. It is now uncommon but regular in summer in a few sites in southeastern Arizona and extreme southwestern New Mexico. In places where flowers are not abundant, the Violet-crowned Hummingbird may be discovered flying about or hovering in the shady middle levels of tall trees, catching small insects in flight. + +Mostly nectar and insects. Takes nectar from flowers, and eats many small insects as well. Will also feed on sugar-water mixtures in hummingbird feeders. + +Distinguished from all other North American hummingbirds by its immaculate white underparts, iridescent bluish-violet crown, and red bill, the Violet-crowned Hummingbird reaches the northern end of its range in southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico. There, it nests almost exclusively in the Arizona sycamore tree (Platanus wrightii), which, in the United States, is limited to the riparian zones of the arid Southwest. In Mexico, this hummingbird's range extends down the Pacific slope from Sonora through Jalisco to northwestern Oaxaca and in the interior Madrean Highlands from western Chihuahua south through Durango to Oaxaca. Within its Mexican range, it inhabits arid to semiarid scrub, thorn forests, riparian and oak woodlands, and parks and gardens. Fairly common in Mexico, it is uncommon and local in the United States. + +It is most easily identified by its white under plumage and iridescent bluish-violet crown (from where it gets its name). The back is emerald green. The tail is dark brown / olive green. diff --git a/eight.txt b/eight.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 33e83dc..0000000 --- a/eight.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1 +0,0 @@ -I feel like these days call for a reminder that it's okay to be happy. diff --git a/equinox.txt b/equinox.txt deleted file mode 100644 index bfbb06c..0000000 --- a/equinox.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,43 +0,0 @@ -There is nothing like a good storm by the sea. The smell of salt on the wind, the slash and clatter of palms and the wind comes ashore. The muffled *thick thick think* of the first drops spitting on the sand. The lightning flashing far out at sea is always visible long before you hear any hint of a rumble. It blinks like christmas lights on the horizen. - -The waves of wind begin to swing ashore, it's then that you can sense the life in the storm, the personalities, the intentions. Storms are alive too. They have a path to follow just like us. Just because something only lasts a few days, does not mean it doesn't have intentions. Just because you can't decipher the intentions doesn't mean they aren't there. - - - -Tonight I sat by the fire feeling the barometer drop, feeling the stir of wind, watching the whirl of embers as the fire died down and the wind came up. I could feel it coming, I could sense its presence. - -This storm comes from the southwest, a mix a southern and western personalities, a storm we all know in this part of the world. I never worry about storm unless is comes from the north. Storms from the north aren't more dangerous exactly, but they're chaotic and unpredictable. You never know what a north wind will bring. Though around here the ones you really have to watch out for are the east and southeast winds. But we're months from those. - -This one we watched arrive. Storm clouds sweeping up from the southwest all day. One or two at first, floating lazily along. Then more, as if they were forming up around some kind of a plan. Whatever the plan was, it didn't involve Edisto. Despite spitting rain a little during the night it was back to sunshine the next day. - -I love a good storm, but not when I have to drive. That morning we headed down the coast a couple hours to Hunting Island State Park.The drive was sunny, fortunately. Uneventful. Beaufort proved to be a charming little coastal southern town. Or it looked that way anyway. By the time we drove through, the rest of the country was starting to lock down over the coronavirus. South Carolina remained in a state of blissful ignorance, but having watched the virus spread via stories of friends and family on the west coast, I wasn't about to head out and wander that streets. - -I'd just as soon strangers always keep a six foot distance from me. But South Carolina wasn't about to make rules regarding that or anything else. South Carolina is the south's "live free or die" state. There still aren't helmet laws here, which I think is great actually. But a virus is not a motorcycle. A virus is not something you choose to do. A virus really has nothing to do with "rights". A virus is a good reminder that rights are a thing conferred by communities of people to members of those communities. There are no "natural" rights. - -It's also important to dig too, because behind all the talk of rights, usually you find someone making money. As one of the camp hosts put to it when I asked if he thought the South Carolina State Parks would close, "These greedy bastards? Never." And he was right. The parks down there remained essentially open through April 12. - -So we missed Beaufort because the virus-exposure-to-fun ratio did not work out in its favor. We did get to spend a few days on Hunting Island though. By a stroke of pure luck we had the nicest campsite in the campground, which was good because otherwise it was packed in and crowded, as beach campgrounds tend to be. The best I can say for it was that the water was walking distance away. - - - - -The kids spent all day every day out on the sand. We even made in the water a couple times despite the cold. As you do. - - - - - - - -The beach here was not nearly as forthcoming with treasures. There were shells, and a lot of jellyfish, but little of the fossils and other things we'd been finding in Edisto. - - - - - -And then our options began to fade. North Carolina shut down its parks, which killed our next plan, which was head to the outer banks for a few months. Then Florida shut down its state parks and we were starting to feel the squeeze. Competition for what few camping spots remained became much more intense. We full timers may fly under the radar for most people, but there are far more of us than you know. Take away public camping and the options get thin quickly. We decided it was time to get out of South Carolina. - -Here's the thing. Maybe you can get Covid-19 and be fine. But what if you can't? Do you really want to find out right now when there's no treatment and hospitals are crowded? When we don't even really understand what the virus does, [especially any long term effect](https://mobile.twitter.com/lilienfeld1/status/1251335135909122049)? Just because you survive it does not mean you go back to normal. Ask anyone who lives with Lyme, RSV, chronic fatigue syndrome, or any of the other virus-borne diseases with long term consequences. Viruses are nothing new, sickness and death are nothing new, but that doesn't means we should run full speed toward them without a care. - -We decided to take steps we felt would best help us avoid coming in contact with SARS-CoV-2. -Unfortunately that meant changing our plans. But it's hardly the first time we've had to change plans. These things happen. Traveling around in RV isn't a right you know, it's a privilege that we've enjoyed, but right now it isn't possible. A big part of travel is waiting, so that's what we're doing right now, just like everyone else. diff --git a/essays/best-shoes-ive-ever-worn-are-hardly-shoes-all.txt b/essays/best-shoes-ive-ever-worn-are-hardly-shoes-all.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..97780aa --- /dev/null +++ b/essays/best-shoes-ive-ever-worn-are-hardly-shoes-all.txt @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +The Z-Trail sandals from footwear maker Xero are true "barefoot" shoes. The [sandals](https://xeroshoes.com/shop/gender/mens/ztrail-men/) are so thin of sole, so minimal of strap, I routinely forget I'm wearing them. Which is the whole point: Instead of protecting your feet from the ground, barefoot shoes bring the feel of the ground through the sole to your feet. + +Barefoot shoes—a design that has gained a sizable following among runners and outdoors enthusiasts, particularly those of us inclined to believe that modernity creates more problems than it solves—take everything you think you know about shoes and inverts it. + +A growing body of evidence [suggests](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090724091339.htm) that the padding in the modern shoe [isn't good for your feet](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24500535/). Allowing your feet to bend, twist, flex, stretch and otherwise do [what feet evolved to do](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08723) can reduce injuries and improve balance and agility. The more information your feet can convey to your brain, the better you can navigate the terrain. + +Still, there's something undeniably quixotic about paying real money for footwear with almost no support or cushion. While emerging science appears to be on the side of bare feet, for me the barefoot shoe is about something more than the purely physical benefits. I have had a lifelong love affair with being barefoot, because to be barefoot is to be free. + +Not free in any political sense of the word, but free in the way you were free as a child. Free to run and jump and play. Free of obligation. Free to do whatever you wanted for no reason at all because that freedom is the foundation of all human delight. + +Remember when school first let out for the summer? Your feet had been imprisoned in shoes all through the year and suddenly they were free. You'd head to the pool or the beach or the park and jump out of the car with bare feet, ready to play. Of course, it hurt. The burning hot asphalt singed your bare soles. But it hurt so good. Walking across the hot blacktop was nothing compared to the boredom of staring at a blackboard all day. That pain would be gone after a few weeks—your feet are remarkably adaptable body parts—but that sense of freedom remained. + +This carries into adulthood. What do we do at the end of the long day? We take off our shoes. If you're barefoot, it's unlikely you're working. (And if you can do your job barefoot, congratulations, you win.) If you're barefoot, you're also unlikely to have any pressing tasks. You're more likely to be in the backyard or at a pool or at the park or at the beach. You're probably outside and free, or at least doing something delightful. + +There was only one thing that ruined those barefoot summers. It was that sign you'd always see at the entrance to the mini mart: "No shirt. No shoes. No service." Ah, commerce, enemy of freedom. + +That's where the Z-Trails come in. I'm not ten anymore. I want my freedom *and* I want to go into the store. The soles of the Z-Trails are 10 millimeters thin, and the shoes are enough that I don't even notice them in my bag. (They're a favorite camp shoe among ultralight backpackers.) Walking around, I still feel like I'm barefoot. My feet stretch and flex and bend and roll the same way they would even if I wasn't wearing the sandals. + +While I had already tried a few barefoot shoes, I wasn't sold on the idea until I tried the $80 Z-Trails. Every other "barefoot" design I had tried felt too much like a regular shoe. Then Xero sent me a pair of the sandals to test for a barefoot shoes buying guide I'm working on. I distinctly remember putting them on and going outside to walk around the yard for a bit. I remember following my kids around the yard, and when they headed into the brambles at the back of the house, I hesitated. I thought I wasn't wearing shoes. Then I looked at my feet, and surprise, I *was* wearing shoes. I plowed right into the brambles. Twenty minutes later, I was on the Xero Shoes website buying myself three pairs. Since that day, I have worn next to nothing else on my feet. + +Barefoot shoe advocates would probably prefer I extol the science behind the benefits of barefoot shoes rather than sounding like a hippie chasing childhood memories down flower strewn trails, but you can discover that yourself by starting with the links I put at the top of this piece. I will also say that an increasing body of evidence shows that, while comfortable shoes make life easy on our feet, they make life much harder on the rest of our body. Balance and coordination decline over time, injuries become more likely. + +More compelling to me, the Xero Z-Trails are the type of shoes people have worn for most of human history. The materials may be new, but the design is very nearly as old as human feet. Put on these sandals and you will walk like your ancestors. Their tactility creates a positive feedback loop between your feet and your brain. You step on a rock, your brain tells your muscles to adjust. Your balance improves, you stumble less. Your feet grow tougher too. + +The benefits of barefoot shoes cascade over time, but if you decide to dive in, start slowly. *Very* slowly. Xero founder Steven Sashen suggests anyone curious about barefoot shoes should begin by going outside and walking about ten steps in bare feet. Yes, just ten. Then tomorrow, walk 20 steps. If there's no pain, keep increasing the daily step counts from there. + +I should probably say there may still be some circumstances where padded shoes are better. In October, I spent three days of hiking some of the most brutal, root-strewn, leaf-covered [rocky trails the North Carolina mountains](/jrnl/2020/10/walking-north-carolina-woods) have to offer with 50 pounds on my back and barefoot shoes on my feet. I chickened out and did not wear the Z-Trails backpacking. Instead, I wore [Xero's HFS road running shoe](https://xeroshoes.com/shop/shoes/hfs-men/). It doesn’t offer any more padding than the sandal, but since it's an actual enclosed shoe, it’s better at keeping your foot situated over the sole. Even though I was worried my feet would slide around too much in the Z-Trail sandals, the HFS turned out to be overkill. I missed my sandals. + +In fact, the only thing better is letting my bare feet free. That’s the point after all—to feel the world. So even if I haven't convinced you, and even if you never buy a pair of barefoot shoes, take a moment every now and then to delight in that child-like joy of feeling the ground beneath your feet, the earth between your toes. Your soles will thank you. diff --git a/fear.txt b/fear.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 9121a8b..0000000 --- a/fear.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,25 +0,0 @@ -I spend a fair amount of time thinking about fear. My own mostly, but sometimes how others get through or past their fear. - -I listen to a history podcast, particularly military history. I'm interested in warrior cultures, how that way of life manifests itself in the various places it's come up in history, be it amoung the tribes of North America pre-western contact, or special forces soldiers in Vietnam. In practical terms of human behavior there's not a huge difference. - -Anyway, dig into this idea at all and you will brush up against fear. In many ways fear is a constant part of any warrior society. It's a very obvious fear though. There is nothing subtle about it. Fear of death, fear of injury. These are things anyone can relate to, what become fascinating is how individuals move past those fears. - -I think what I like so much about these stories of overcoming fear is that the fear is so obvious and confrontational. The fears in most of our lives are neither as extreme nor as obvious, which in a paradoxical way makes them almost harder to recognize and deal with. - -There are many kinds of fear. There's the one you probably thought of when you first read the word a sentences back: fear as in something is going to get you. There are other sorts of fear though and the one I've been thinking about lately is the kind of fear you have when you get married. Or at least you might have had. I did anyway. - -If you've ever been married you probably recall a certain amount of anxiety, fear, about getting married. Not that you're scared of marriage, or scared of your partner, or the commitment (if you had any of those fears I sincerely hope you didn't get married). The fear I'm thinking of stems I think from the fact that this thing -- this case marriage -- means a lot to you, it's this very important thing, and you want it work out the way you have it in your head, but you're afraid too -- what if it doesn't work out that way? - -This is the kind of fear that I think subtly grabs us and pulls us around in all sort of ways. I know it does me. I can sit around for months rationalizing all sorts of inaction, dodging that underlying fear, which usually boils down to: oh crap, what if this doesn't work out the way I want? - -God forbid you take this question to the internet because there are seemingly millions out there waiting to browbeat you for your inaction, to belittle your fear and tell you to get over it by just doing it. But what few, if any of these people do is help you answer that questions, what if it doesn't work out? - -Like if full of decisions that may not work out. That plan to quit your job and travel the world working in dive shops or building websites? It might work. It also might not. And you'd be wise to spend some time at least considerng the latter and planning around it. - -That whole travel in a 1969 RV? There are some ways in which that might not work out. They range from the frustrating, finding yourself at the side of the road, unable to move a 12 ton hunk of steel and fiberglass, to the potentially fatal, finding yourself unable to stop a 12 ton hunk of metal and steel. I've had both happen to me. So far I am still here to tell the tale, but who knows? It's a fear I have. It's fear that's kept me from doing what I've wanted to do a number of times. Glance through our travels, see how many mountains we've climbed? - -There's a book I really dislike that nevertheless has one bit of wisdom in it that I do like: "the more we're scared of something, the more we know we have to do it." There's an element of the cheesy, "face your fears" nonsense in that, but there's also something more subtle there if you consider it as speaking to that other sort of fear: that fear of what if it doesn't go the way I want? - -The answer is, it doesn't matter how it goes, if you're scared that it might go wrong the lession to take away is that this thing, getting married, traveling the world, driving a vintage RV, whatever it may be, is important to you. And if it's important to you, you need to follow it. You need to see where it goes. That doesn't mean it won't end badly. It just means you have follow it. - -I'm not telling you to chuck caution to the wind. I'm not suggesting you risk everything just because you're scared of the outcome. But you know those things, those things you're afraid of, but they just won't go away. You do have grab them, you have to direct your will toward them and see where it goes. diff --git a/fict-book.txt b/fict-book.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 50df2e1..0000000 --- a/fict-book.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,8 +0,0 @@ -After Oil 5: Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology, and stories should be submitted by January 1, 2020 - - -A family father who restores a wrecked boat on the shores of Lake Michigan in order to build a future for his family that will help them rise above their current station in the de-industrial world to lead lives of adventure and daring. he fixes up the boat he found, he makes sails of the skins of dogs, the largest easy to kill animal left in the area. He then takes the extra furs to a town at the mouth of the lock and attempts to sell them and gets laughed off the docks as backward, a yoken with skins in a world that doesn't yet need skins. He manages to get passage through the locks anyway somehow and navigates down the st. larwence river and out to sea. - -A young girl, patterned after the hummingbird's daughter and omakayas Mexus people, the ojibwe, the remnants of christianity clinging to power in the city. The high and lowland peoples. - -ON THE COOL OCTOBER MORNING when Cayetana Chávez brought her baby to light, it was the start of that season in Sinaloa when the humid torments of summer finally gave way to breezes and falling leaves, and small red birds skittered through the corrals, and the dogs grew new coats. diff --git a/flying.txt b/flying.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 3014bd3..0000000 --- a/flying.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,6 +0,0 @@ -I like airports -- liminal zones between worlds fascinate me even when those zones are only between national borders -- but I really dislike flying. I dislike the process of it the way that everyone dislikes it, but I also dislike parachuting into a place, so to speak, without any context of how you got there. Airplane travel also is far worse for the environment[^1], and, to me at least, feels gratuitous in a way that buses, trains, autos and RVs do not. As I've written before, I like the planning process, I like driving in, I even like traffic sometimes because it teaches you something about the place. - -We spent most of December at our friends' house while they were back in the states for the holidays. Aside from saving our asses from homelessness, it was a really nice house and had a lot of books. One of the books I read while we were staying at their house was called Gringo, by Chesa Boudin. I was not a huge fan of the book overall, but Boudin captures my dislike of plane travel in one rather tidy little sentence: "Airplane travel predisposes us to superficial, compartmentalized knowledge of a country, while land travel forces us, often uncomfortably, into contact with more everyday realities". - -Arguably, you can go further. Bike in and you'll understand it that much better. Walk and you'll know it rather well indeed. Since walking more than a few miles with a three year old isn't a lot of fun, we effectively parachuted in, as you do. And despite having been here three months I still I feel like I do have a superficial, compartmentalized understanding of the area. That feeling is compounded by the difference in language and culture. It's relatively easy for us as Americans to go from Georgia up the UP, spend the summer there and come away with reasonable understanding of the area. It's impossible to do the same when spanning cultures and throwing in different language for good measure. - diff --git a/hard.txt b/hard.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 7ef9c5e..0000000 --- a/hard.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,7 +0,0 @@ -I've debated for years now whether I should write something like this and one day, about a month ago I finally came up with the particular set of circumstance that made for a good story to illustrate the point of writing something like this. It all just sort of came out, felt right, so why not? - -I hope that the handful of you who follow along by reading this site realize that what is documented here are only the highlights. While we are fortunate to have what we consider interesting day, adventures, and what have you, it's not like we do that all the time. That would be insane. - -One thing I don't think I've ever written about is how damn hard it is to live this way. Some times anyway. There are roughly four weeks a year my job more or less sucks. Which is to say I don't enjoy it. Which is amazing. I mean that's 48 weeks in which my job is more or less amazing. I get sent things in the mail, I use them, I write about them. I am amazed I get paid to do this. but then there are those four weeks. And somehow, heading into them, I've also got to fly to Dallas, pick up the bus, drive it back to Athens, not knowing mind you if it will even begine to make it, it hasn't been driven more than five miles in 18 months. That's nail biting stress. And my wife and kids are back in the GA in a bus they can't even move, have never driven and depend on me to deal with, and we're trying to buy a car in GA, with a loan from a bank in California, while registering it in our home state of South Dakota, while our other car may well stop working at any moment and I'm the one who can fix it and I'm 800 miles away and did I mention I might not make it any closer to home? So if you think living on the road is all fun and games and whatever you see on the internet, instagram or youtube. It's not. Life on the road is harder than the life you live right now because it's everything in the live you live right now, plus all the extra stress of all kinds of weird shit like I just listed. - -So the question becomes, why do we do it? There's probably a different answer for everyone you ask, but for me it's pretty simple: it's just more interesting. diff --git a/high-water.txt b/high-water.txt deleted file mode 100644 index a194d3a..0000000 --- a/high-water.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,63 +0,0 @@ -After a winter in Georgia, we were ready for some warmer climes. We managed to book up a month of beach time at some South Carolina State Parks. Everything came together well, weather, work, and bus repairs. Like we did nearly three years ago, we split the drive down into two days. This time we stopped off for a night at a tiny state park on the Edisto River. - - - -This part of the country, and upriver of here, has out-rained even the pacific northwest so far this year, and it showed. The river was ten feet over flood stage. It was difficult to even tell where the river was, it looked more like a lake. Another three feet and and campground would have been under. There wasn't much land to explore, we settled for an early fire and some marshmallows. - -
- - - - - -
- -The next day we headed the rest of the way out to what I still think of as the [edge of the continent](/jrnl/2017/04/edge-continent). Edisto Island is remote, for the east coast anyway. It's true, Charleston is only an hour and half away, but somehow Edisto still feels like the edge of the world. - -Civilization falls away as you drive. The road winds through alternating stretches of muddy marshland and deep stands of gnarled oak trees, bearded with Spanish Moss. Chain stores and strip malls disappear, replaced by crumbling no-name gas stations, fish shacks, cinder block garages, old single story motels. - - - - - -It's not some idyllic world out here of course. The land and people here are abused like they are everywhere. Environmental destruction and the deep, unsolvable poverty that follows it linger everywhere in the shadows. The ruin of modern systems is always more obvious out here at the leading edges, the places where the supposed benefits never quite reached, just inexhaustible desires. These are the places from which life was extracted to enable comfort in some other place. - -There's a divide. I notice it every time we come down here. You cross a high bridge over the ICW onto Edisto Island proper and everything after that is magically fine, derelict buildings hidden away, poverty pushed off the main highway to some backroad most of us will never take. - -Life here is different let's say. And we'll leave it at that. - - - -Humans are latecomers here anyway, newcomers to this world of sea and sand and muddy marsh. This is the time of year that other migrants are passing through. Every morning we get to wake to the *tea-kett-le, tea-kett-le* of Carolina wrens, the *chip chip chip* of cardinals, and the more elaborate songs of the warblers headed north to their summer homes. I can't think of a better way to wake up than lifting your head, looking out the window, and seeing a Carolina wren staring back at you. - -Our time at the beach here is starkly divided. I am a sitter. To me the beach is a place to come and watch the sea, the sky, the birds. For much of the rest of my family it's a place to hunt for treasures from previous worlds. While I relaxed, staring up at the blue veil of sky, occasionally given depth by a passing gull or brown pelican, Corrinne and the kids wandered up and down the shore finding fossil shark's teeth, bones, bits of black, fossilized turtle shells, and thoroughly modern seashells. - -
- - - - - - - -
- -The temperature always hovered on the edge of warm, usually tipping over by late afternoon.Most days you could find a small depression in the sand to stay out of the breeze and it was warm enough to relax in shorts. Sit up though and the temperature dropped considerably. - - - - - - - - -I did a lot of staring at the sky. I'm not sure if it's the act of lying down and looking up, or the actual view of the blue sky, or warmth and light of the sun itself, or some combination of those things and more I haven't sussed out, but there is something wonderfully cathartic and healing about staring up at the sky. - -I did it every chance I got, which alas was not quite as much as the last time we were here. But things change, morph, I wouldn't want them to stay the same. If they stayed the same it never would have warmed up enough to coax me off my back and out into the water. - - - - -The water was cold, biting cold when the wind hit you after you came up. But you have to get in. And not just when it's easy, not just when everyone is swimming. - -You have to get in even on the days when you don't want to. Even when it's so cold your teeth are chattering before you even get your shirt off. Those are the times when you have to reach down inside and find some way to get out there. The ocean makes me do it. It's part of an old deal we have. I'd to it anyway though. You have to or you'll look back and spend the rest of your days facing the worst question of all -- I wonder what it would have been like? diff --git a/how I set up arch.txt b/how I set up arch.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2a91095 --- /dev/null +++ b/how I set up arch.txt @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +espeak +yay +vivaldi-snapshot diff --git a/instant.txt b/instant.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 78a452c..0000000 --- a/instant.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,17 +0,0 @@ -I've been living with them for weeks now, scattered like wind nlown seeds around the bus, memories surfacing at first of the images, then of the printing, of times I pve though of them, there are here in the real world,not locked away behind glass somewhere, they do not scroll away, they are here, now, with us, about . It's finny then that we call these instant, they take far more time to come into the world than the digital scenes immediately chimpable under glass. - -They are not particularly good prints as such things are judged from a technical standpoint, and yet they are in some way some immediate and micaculous. This technology is like something out the future and that we are not utterly amazed by it says far more about us than it does about the quality of the prints. - -The immedicy is why. - -The real, the artifact. What does it mean to have the artifacts? The ability to share with others, to take a portrait is far less introsive when you can share the results immideate. I do not have a fuji camera so it takes considerably more effort ofr me, but I've seen several Fuji photographers go on at length about what a game changer this was to be able to immediately hand an artifact to a subject, or even to return the next day with a gift. - -In an age when photography has a sinsier undercurrent about it -- cameras in use! shoplifters will be perscuted! facial recognition -- the instant print reminds us the camera can, and should, be a thing of joy, a thing of sharing, connecting and a bridge between rather than the all-seeing eye that big brother in all its forms seeks to twist it into. - -The little rectagles are smaller than the full size polarouds of my childhood, but they are somehow more powerful for it, as if these are new growth, the old growth has been clear cut away, a loss yes, but look what remains, look wt we still have, look what can still be enjoyed. Thes tiny artifacts have been to put up like seeds taking root. There were siveral tucked in the molding aa cabinent this morning. Tomhgith I found one tucked beneath the wall mounted face in my daughters' room, another leaning against the bookshel and a third wedged in the clasping weave of a bamboo basket. We print, they scatter and take root in our world. The colors are all wrong, the blies too dark, the light tones washed out, the shadows less vibrant than the should be. And no cares, not ne loosk at these and things wow, that black doesn't go to 250. - -They have their own frame, setting them off from the world, a little whie border, a way of becoming their own thing perhaps. Little squares and rectables of color popping up everywhere I run. And the more I ove with them the more IO love them. I buy some twine and tiny clothes pins, the one and only time I ave set foot in the crafting isle at Walmart. I want then to have room to grow, places to live, little exibits that subtly keep the past alive all around us. - -It could be argued that perhaps we should keep the past alive only in hour heads, or more in our heads, in our memories and we do. I have know people who displike photographs a famous climber pasked Gelen Rowell not to photograph his climbs because the photo interfered with his meory of the event. ButI don't know, it does not have the affet for me, I think of these events more when I see the phiti, I feel in the detaisl that phoio failed to capture, the minutes befoe and faster the shugger flicked up for that fraction of a second to capture whatever it is that if captured. All those meoment that come bfore and ater come with the phitigraph, it's stack of time not singular moment. Ilike what it is fir the viewer, for the photographer and subject a photoigraph is a stack of time, not a single moment, what happened juest befoer the sutter opened, what happened just after, it is all there in memory and singlyuar images, the moment draw out, calls up all the rest as well. It's a movie of the moments in the mind. perhaps this why I can not particular drawn to video, perhaps this is why the instax has some power because it keeps that movie in the mind, it doesn't share it, it is a private moment. - -This may be why photographs do not ruin my memories, but movies do, the feel artifical this need to record, I like to record with my head, memorie becomes my vide I use photographs to categolue and organize it. diff --git a/invitation.txt b/invitation.txt index 2310397..9ac6cab 100644 --- a/invitation.txt +++ b/invitation.txt @@ -1,49 +1,51 @@ -In 1993 I moved to the sleepy little college town of Redlands, California. Wedged between two mountain ranges, the Mojave desert, and Los Angeles, Redlands was a good base camp for the hiking, climbing, skiing and body surfing I hoped to get out of college. +**TL;DR**: I started a club in the form of an email newsletter. I call it *Friends of a Long Year*. We meet once a month, digitally, in your email. If you'd like to join, drop your email address in the box below. If you'd like to know why you might want to join, and where the name comes from, read on. -Redlands was also one of a handful of colleges where you could write your own degree program, which I thought sounded like a swell idea. It turned out to be a good deal more work than I imagined, but I originally planned to write a major that was one part photography and one part "nature writing". + -I still think it was a good idea, one I could never let go. Luxagraf is more or less the third draft of this idea. +Late last year I got it into my head that I should start a club, a good old fashioned club, like the Elks or the Masons. -The first draft did not take off. I dropped out after two semesters. Before slinking back down the freeway to Los Angeles I did manage to write and complete a couple of classes. One was akin to Nature Writing 101, if such a thing existed[^1]. I tried to keep it simple, I had a lot of photography and climbing and hiking to do as well. So I read and wrote about authors I'd already read before. I didn't get too creative, mostly the usual American nature writing suspects -- Thoreau, Abbey, Dillard, Lopez, Stegner. +But then, we travel, how the heck would that work, traveling while trying to have a club that has meetings? Hmmm. Well, then, a digital club. But what does that look like? And what is a club really? Why would you join one? -Fortunately, my advisor in this project, who looked like a heavier-set John Muir, threw in a few authors I was not familiar with. I remember thinking damn, I *am* going to have to do some work. But that's how I first heard of Mary Hunter Austin. +There's actually [a really good book][1] about this, but I think it boils down to getting together with people and talking, building a community, usually around a common interest or theme. A good club is a way of bringing together people from all walks of life who have some thing in common. -Austin lived and travel in the Mojave desert for 17 years, studying the wildlife, as well has human life. She documented native and immigrant life in the region long before anyone else. But she is probably best known for a book called The Land of Little Rain, her Walden, with the Mojave desert starring in the role of Thoreau's pond. +[1]: https://bookshop.org/books/bowling-alone-the-collapse-and-revival-of-american-community-9781982130848/9781982130848 -Perhaps she came to early. The west, especially the Mojave desert, wasn't fully settled when Austin went exploring and writing. She began traipsing around the desert in the 1890s, no one wanted to think about anything but silver and gold and pick axes and railroads. Austin's sensibility as a writer was colored by three things that flew in the face of her time, and to an unfortunate degree, ours as well. Mary Austin was three things that a nature writer shall not be: a woman, a mystic, and a defender of rights and lives of native people. It was the middle thing that intrigued me then, and it still does today because, I think it's what grew out of the other two things. +Around the same time I was thinking that I should start a club, I pitched (but later abandoned) an article about the email culture of the early 2000s, what now looks like the golden age of email. Perhaps you remember that time? The days when you would email friends just to say hello, just because frictionless simplicity of email was still new and exciting. -Recently, in searching for new books for the kids, I was re-united with Austin. Austin wrote several children's books. I stumbled across one, The Trail Book, that the girls loved. Exhibits in the Natural History Museum in New York come to live for two children and various adventure ensue. Finding this sent me off searching for more Austin, and somewhere in the early hours of the morning, bleary-eyed and half-asleep at the keyboard, I ran across a digital copy of a collection of Austin's short stories called Lost Borders. What caught my eye was the dedication, "to Marion Burke and the Friends of a Long Year." +I distinctly remember the emails my friend Mike used to send. He was traveling around Southeast Asia in those days. He didn't *blog* about 13 Things You Have to Do in Thailand or some bullshit. He emailed us. Like we were people, not *readers* or *supporters*. He didn't write to an audience, he wrote to *us*, his friends, his club if you will. He wrote about the things he did, riding elephants, walking on beaches, visiting ruins. They were little things these emails, but they were great. I looked forward to those emails more than I look forward to anything on the internet of today. -Who were the friends of a long year? What were the friends of a long year? When were the friends of a long year? It's hard to tell from the typesetting if Austin capitalized Friends of a Long Year or not, but I like to think she did, I like to think it was some kind of club. I did a little research before I dragged myself to bed and dreamed of the friends of a long year. +This is all I want to do with this club, to bring a little bit of joy back to your inbox. -
+So this club is an email newsletter in the spirit of Mike's emails[^1]. I call it *Friends of a Long Year*. -As several people have noted, I've been writing for luxagraf less than previously. There are partly practical reasons for this, but also I've been suffering from the feeling of writing into a black hole. +I know what you're thinking, that's not much of a club there Scott, that's just you email us. And, well... that's true. I do have some additional plans. More things to build, which takes time. But as they say, you have to start. You have to overcome the inertia. First email. Then the world. -Now I know a few thousand people a month stop by this site, and I know that several hundred of them appear to actually read things, or perhaps they go off to make coffee and forget to close the tab. Either way I guess I can say I know there are readers out there. +Now, that name. What is *with* that name? -Unfortunately, I've recently come to realize I don't really want to have readers, I want to have conversations. +The name comes from Mary Hunter Austin, and we need to say some things about Austin because I think she might be the sort of beacon we need just now. Certainly she will be the guiding beacon of this newsletter. -I spend most of my time on the internet interacting with communities, sometimes through forums, occasionally through the comments on websites, but what I like is having conversations. +Mary Hunter Austin was an explorer, botanist, desert rat, author, mystic, misfit. She was also far ahead of, and out of step with, her time. All qualities we could use more of just now. -And I've come to think that websites might not be such a good way to have a conversation. They're rather one-sided. And leaving comments here is kind of a pain because I have to moderate them, you have to come back to see if I responded and so on. Technology is getting in the way of the conversations. +Austin lived in, explored, and wrote about the Mojave desert of Nevada and California at the turn of the 20th century. What makes her writing special is that she saw things other people did not. At a time when most people saw the Mojave desert as a wasteland to be mined, Austin saw a thing of raw, majestic beauty. -But wait, Scott, this problem has been solved. You can post on Facebook or Twitter. Those are great for conversations! +Most people in her day hurried across the desert to the central valley of California to farm. Mary Austin stayed behind to wander the desert. She dug down, got to know the sand. She wrote about the sand. She wrote about dry, cracked, brutal expanses of sand. She wrote about the hills rising out of the desert heat, about the mountains above the hills. She wrote about the natives calling this strange place home. She wrote about the immigrants trying to make it home. -Well. So. No. Those are not the conversations I want to have. +She saw what no one else around seemed to notice because she paid careful attention to details. She did not hurry through. She did not gloss over. -Conversations in public become strangely twisted by the knowledge of the audience watching. The same thing happens when you record a conversation. People change, slide that public persona mask on. +These are qualities we need more of. We need more adventurers, explorers, more curiosity, more DIYers, more attention to details, more mystics, more misfits digging in the sand. -So, in casting about for some solution to this problem I considered building a forum. I may still do that, but then I happened to think of these really long emails my friend Mike used to send when he was traveling around Southeast Asia decades ago. He'd send them to a group of us, people would respond, threads would form, conversations would be had, things were learned, plans were made. +I think it's possible Austin and friends founded our club. Austin's collection of short stories, Lost Borders, is dedicated "to Marion Burke and the Friends of a Long Year." -I don't think I've ever given my friend Mike the credit he deserves for propelling me on the trajectory that my life has been on since 2005. But he does deserve credit. And some of it goes to those emails. +It's a mysterious dedication. Who were the friends of a long year? What were the friends of a long year? When were the friends of a long year? I like to think it was some kind of club. Some kind of gathering of explorers out in the wilds of the desert. -So I decided to start a newsletter in the spirit of Mike's emails, about things Mary Austin would have enjoyed talking about, deserts, mountains, trees, walking, photography, and yes, mystics. If you'd like to join the Friends of a Long Year, you can do so right here: +So I decided the *Friends of a Long Year* is the club we will build, or perhaps rebuild. In the spirit of Mary Austin. And Mike's emails. +I don't know exactly what it will be, or where it will go, but it will be done in the spirit of the emails we used to send back in the early 2000s, it will strive to bring joy to your inbox. It will be about things Mary Austin would have enjoyed talking about: deserts, mountains, trees, oceans, misfits, mystics, and marvels of the mundane. If you'd like to join *Friends of a Long Year*, you can do so right here: + -Two things to note. Until the list gets to large for it I plan to send these by hand in such a way that you can reply directly to me, no one else will see your response. I encourage you to do so, that's the point after all. Mailing lists are for introverts, we can have a conversation without the rest of the world looking on and I think that's a good thing. +Two things to note: First, I [built my own mailing list software](). This was an adventure (natch) and took a lot longer than I expected, but it was worth it. I looked around for some existing software that respected your privacy, the way email did in the early 2000s, but found nothing. So I made my own. There are no tracking codes, no pixels, no sneaky links, nothing. It's just an email. I will have no idea if you read them or not. +The only way I will even know you got the email is if you hit reply, and I encourage you to do so. It's set up in such a way that you are only replying to me. There's no way to accidentally reply to the whole list -- we all have a painful story about that happening. Don't worry, that can't happen here, no one else will ever see your response. And I encourage you to respond, that's the point after all. -[^1]: Nowadays it does, perhaps not under that name, and not at every school, but it's out there. -[^2]: Not that I don't find it interesting +[^1]: I don't think I've ever given my friend Mike the credit he deserves for propelling me on the trajectory that my life has been on since 2005. But he does deserve credit. And some of it goes to those emails. diff --git a/june.txt b/june.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 5975eea..0000000 --- a/june.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,49 +0,0 @@ -Abundance is the natural state of the world. - -If you leave something alone, it thrives. Anyone who thinks that life is a competitive battlefield filled with individuals struggling, clawing at each other to survive, needs to get outside more. - -That's not what life is, and the first time you sit still and listen to the forest, pause in a grassy meadow in the moonlight, or crouch in the crook of hard red sandstone halfway up the canyon wall, you'll realize that the conception of the world as struggle is flat wrong. It's flat wrong for many reasons, but the one that's come to interest me the most is that that boundary between individual and environment is not nearly so neat and clean as we like to imagine. - -That is to say, in order for there to be competition there must be individuals and, when you start looking closely, the line between you and everything is indistinct at best. - -There is a harmonic resonance between the world and forms that fill it. There is a kind of vibrating, edge-blurring, feedback loop. Things move, change, do what they need to do, others dissolve, morph, recombine in new ways. Nothing is still, nothing is static, nothing is cut off from anything else. We're still not sure where a tree ends: is it the roots? The mats of fungi feeding nutrients to the roots, without which the tree would die? Where is the beginning and end? - -The better question might be, why are we looking for these things? Where did we get the idea that things begin and end? - -If you do pause somewhere and sit and be still and watch, listen, smell, taste, you'll also notice something very important: you are part of this harmonic dance going on around you. The grass presses against your feet, the gnats explore your skin, the carpenter bees' wings announce their arrival to you. - -Many don't even think of themselves as part of the environment at all, which is part of why they know nothing of the abundance of the world. When we separate ourselves in our minds, when we see ourselves as separate from the ecosystem, the abundance goes away. - - - - - -When you get out in it, that's not what life is. That might be what we have made our lives, but it's not what life *is*. - -Sit still and listen to the forest. Pause at the edge of grassy meadow in the moonlight and listen. Crouch in a crook of red sandstone halfway up the canyon wall and listen. Here the insects, the birds, the wind. The conception of the world as struggle did not come from observation of the world. - -Observing the world you very rarely find individuals struggling. To be sure, creatures eat each other. Just today I watched a wasp and spider have an epic battle, I turned away for a moment though, and when I looked back, both were gone. Who won? I have no idea. Probably neither. Even if the spider did kill the wasp, it was gone from its web. - -Watching this though I couldn't help but think it was actually less an epic battle than a kind of dance. Martial arts, deadly though it can be, often looks like ballet. That's what the spider and wasp looked like, a kind of deadly ballet. - - - -is flat wrong. It's flat wrong for many reasons, but the one that's come to interest me the most is that that boundary between individual and environment is not nearly so neat and clean as we like to imagine. - -That is to say, in order for there to be competition there must be individuals and, when you start looking closely, the line between you and everything is indistinct at best. - -There is a harmonic resonance between the world and forms that fill it. There is a kind of vibrating, edge-blurring, feedback loop. Things move, change, do what they need to do, others dissolve, morph, recombine in new ways. Nothing is still, nothing is static, nothing is cut off from anything else. We're still not sure where a tree ends: is it the roots? The mats of fungi feeding nutrients to the roots, without which the tree would die? Where is the beginning and end? - -The better question might be, why are we looking for these things? Where did we get the idea that things begin and end? - -If you do pause somewhere and sit and be still and watch, listen, smell, taste, you'll also notice something very important: you are part of this harmonic dance going on around you. The grass presses against your feet, the gnats explore your skin, the carpenter bees' wings announce their arrival to you. - -Many don't even think of themselves as part of the environment at all, which is part of why they know nothing of the abundance of the world. When we separate ourselves in our minds, when we see ourselves as separate from the ecosystem, the abundance goes away. - -When you live in a bubble, that bubble starts to become the world. It's too easy to live in our bubbles, it becomes hard to reach out. And to do so without passing judgement. Just to say there are all kids of people living here and they're all different, and that's okay. There is no one right way. - - - -Homeschooling bothers people because it implies we're living on a single income, and that that's enough. I think it reminds people that that did *use* to be enough, but that things have declined from that, that it is simply no longer possible. - - diff --git a/kindle-hacking.txt b/kindle-hacking.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 064c700..0000000 --- a/kindle-hacking.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,16 +0,0 @@ -links: - -[Installing ADB and Fastboot on Linux & Device Detection "Drivers"](https://forum.xda-developers.com/android/general/guide-installing-adb-fastboot-linux-adb-t3478678) - -You need to be on 6.3.1.2 firmware: -[Fire HD 8 2018 (karnak) amonet-3](https://forum.xda-developers.com/hd8-hd10/orig-development/unlock-fire-hd-8-2018-karnak-amonet-3-t3963496/page52) - -[Download 6.3.1.2 firmware](https://fireos-tablet-src.s3.amazonaws.com/LlO8A9g4Q6ugQCylaeqWBWxYBb/update-kindle-Fire_HD8_8th_Gen-NS6312_user_1852_0002517056644.bin) - -2. Download the amazon frimware above and keep it where you can flash it. -3. Boot into recovery (Volume Down + Power at the same time) -4. Select "adb sideload" or whatever it says using your volume keys and press the power to select -5. Now adb sideload .bin - -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN6PphcI6XQ - diff --git a/ko-kradan-wally.txt b/ko-kradan-wally.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 2ae4344..0000000 --- a/ko-kradan-wally.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,27 +0,0 @@ -In February of 2015, my friend Wally Sanger died of natural causes at Paradise Lost on Ko Kradan. - -I spent two weeks on Ko Kradan. I arrived their on a whim. I had been island hopping, traveling alone after a long time with a group, working my way down the Andaman sea side of the Thai peninsula for the better part of the month, mostly by convincing day trip snorkel boats to drop me at various relatively remote islands. - -Ko Kradan was not supposed to be the last. I was heading down to Thailand's Tarutao National Marine Park and then perhaps into Malaysia, but I never made it. And the reason I never made it was Wally Sanger and Ko Kradan. - -There was a storm blowing in the day I was dropped off so the snorkle boat I had convinced to take me from Ko Hai down to Ko Kradan would only drop my at an isolated beach on the windward side of the island. I jumped out from the bow and my bag hit the ground about the same time I did. The boat was gone two minutes later. The beach was small and lined with a thick wall of jungle. It was about 3 o'clock in the afternoon and I could tell it would be pouring in 15 minutes. - -I sat down on the sand and smoked a cigarette. I figured, worst case scenario, I'd get a little wet. - -The guidebook I had claimed there was a trail to the other side of the island, and somewhere over there were a couple of guesthouses. It took me ten minutes to find the trail and another ten to make it to the other side of the island. The rain held off longer than I thought. The first place I encountered was Wally's Paradise Lost. - -He offered me a room, but at this point I had been in southeast asia for nine months, no way I was taking a room from the first farang I met. I might have literally been fresh off the boat, but metaphorically I was too cynical to take Wally up without surveying the island first. I set off for the other guesthouse on the island, which was down on the beach. - -The rain hit at the edge of the tree line on the leeward beach. I followed a couple of dogs deeper into the trees for shelter. A woman walked up off the beach and came into the thicket. We chatted for a while and she talked me out of even seeing the other guesthouse by describing it as “more of a refugee camp.” I did later head down there and that was in fact an apt description. - -I went back and got a room at Paradise Lost. Wally seemed entirely unperturbed by my snub and reversal; I trust he had seen more than few of my kind -- there's no shortage of self assured dumbasses in Thailand. I would not have blamed him for being a bit standoffish with me, but he was in fact the opposite. That night he pulled some ribeye steaks out of the freezer for me, as well as Tony and Zoe, the only other people staying there are the time. Sure, I paid for the steaks, that's not the point. They weren't on the menu. - -The whole of Paradise Lost was like that. There were quite a few layers to the place. There was the one most people saw while I was there, which was the standard guesthouse experience. It was a clean, friendly and cheap place. There'd be no reason to complain if that was all you ever got. - - - - -He will be missed. Condolences to his family and anyone who had the great pleasure of knowing him. - - -http://www.offbeatthailand.com/2015/04/17/ko-kradans-wally-sanger/ diff --git a/leopold-essay.txt b/leopold-essay.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 2bb8c0b..0000000 --- a/leopold-essay.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,45 +0,0 @@ -One of Thoreau's most quoted phrases claims that "in wildness lies the preservation of the world". - -If that's true we're screwed. - -Fellow conservationist Aldo Leopold seems to have written much of what he did to let us know not so much what we could save as what it was already too late to save, the wildness we had already lost. The last grizzly killed in Arizona. The jaguars disappearing from the banks of the Colorado as it snakes it's way through the Grand Canyon; the ways countless birds in Leopold's day still clung to existence in the islands of native prairie that speckled his home country of Sand County. - -All that was gone long before I was born. Or mostly gone. - -Wilderness - -When I was young there were still small pockets of wildness to be found. Buy enough 7.5 topo sheets and you were bound to find some relatively blank spots. The Superstition mountains. The chocolate mountains. The Chihuahuas. The Dragoons. For a kid who grew up in the decidedly not wilds of southern California, the southern edge of Arizona, the borderlands in more ways than one, retained pockets of wildness here and there. - -My father and I made frequent forays into such places. He always looking for snails. Me looking for something I could not put my finger on at the time. Some intangible thing that felt missing from the world. Adventure perhaps, connection perhaps. Whatever it was, all I knew back then was that it did not, for a few moments here and there, hiking the agave chocked hillsides of nameless mountains, tracing the delicate wisps of shade in the Palo Verde lined washes, sitting at the base of sheer buttes, back leaning against the warm sandstone, watching the shadows lengthen and the thunderheads roll in the from the south, it did not feel like anything was missing from the world. - -It wasn't just wildness though. Or not wildness in the sense that we westerner's tend to think of it -- roadless natural areas that are inaccessible. Accessibility is after all, very relative. Could you have driving a 4x4 up the wash to the base of the butte where I sat? Possibly and that alone is enough to destroy the kind of wildness that Leopold wrote about. A kind of wildness that ceases to exist not so much through the loss of land -- though that certainly doesn't help -- but through the growth of technology. - -Leopold writes when I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process of ordinarly referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adeults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living. - -"When I first lived in Arizona the White Mountain was a horseman's world. Except along a few main routes, it was too rough for wagons. There were no cars. It was too big for foot travel; even sheepherders roade. Thus by elimination, the coutnry-sized plateau know as 'on top' was the exclusing domain of the mountaed man: mounted cowman, mounted sheepman, mounted forest officer, mounted trapper, and those unclassified mounted men of unknown origin and uncertain destination always found on frontiers. It is difficult of this generation to understand this aristocracy of space based upon transport." - -These days we eschew aristocracy of space or otherwise. We want everyone to have equal access.: - - - - -We called half a dozen or more car rental places, but each time the minute the words four wheel drive and Dragoon Mountains came together in the same breath the lin went dead suspriciously soon after. Finaly we stumbled upon roadrunner car rentals, which had an old Dodge truck we could use. Roadrunner proved to be little more than a single wide trailer in front of car wrecking lot, which did not inspire confidence, but did in fact have a dirt brown dodge truck that looked like it was probably held to gether with tin cans, bailing wire and a healthy amount of duct tape. There seemed to be a mutual don't ask don't tell policy at work in which if we didn't ask the owner about the condition of the truck he wouldn't ask what sort of roads we plannned to take it down. - -We brought the thing home amid belches of smoke and accidental peeling of the nearly bald rear tires. It was those tires we were worried about. The roads we planned to take were intended for four wheel drive jeeps, but all we had was a lightweight truck with bald tires. Sometimes when adventurous land is running low you have to create your own adventure. - -And so we did. - -Grandpa eyeing the truck. My mom did not come. This was before cellphones, when a modicum of danger still existed in travel. - -The drive in, building our own road over the ruts with split fire wood. Piling rock in the back of the truck to weigh it down so the rear wheel drive tires would have some bite/purchase in the rutted dirt. - -the widlness of the west slope versus the tamed campgrounds of the east slope. The chiricuauas in the distance, the history of Cochice and jeffer's, cave creek, Jeffer's house, the dark roots of the blank walnut stump that had become a coffee table. - -The last grizzly in arisona. - -We did no so much reach a camp as reach a point at which we -- the truck my father and I -- seemed to wordlessly conclude that this is as far as we were going. We set up the tent amid fading light. It was far to dry and windy, to say nothing of the general treeless of the west slope of the mountains for a camp fire fire. We cooked over a Coleman stove borrowed from my grandfather - -Mysterious foot prints. There are plenty of possible explanations of the footprints, though they all stretch credulity enough that I don't quite believe any of them. It could have been a barefoot hiker with extrorinarily large feet. It could have been bigfoot, the ghost of cochise, geronimo, an entirely non-hominid source, a hominid stepping in the larger track of something else. Whatever it was though, the location it was in spoke of concealment. If it was a thing, the path it took was one you would take if you wished to stay hidden from view by anyone on the rock summit above or from the trail below. These were the footrpints of something that did not want to be seen and that realization only fueled the mystery over the years. - -It's been well over two decades now since I set foot in the Dragoons, but I still think about them. About those footprints. I think two about my dissatifaction with explanations and wonder if herpahs thsi isn't a defense against the lose of wildness. If I explain them away the wildness fades. With so much wildness already gone this feels like too great of a cost so I live with mystery. - diff --git a/lttr/lttr-01.txt b/lttr/lttr-01.txt index 07b137e..b3fa3b8 100644 --- a/lttr/lttr-01.txt +++ b/lttr/lttr-01.txt @@ -1,19 +1,43 @@ Greetings Friends! -In case you've forgotten, you signed up for this mailing list at luxagraf.net. +In case you've forgotten, you signed up for this mailing list at [luxagraf.net](https://luxagraf.net/newsletter/friends/) and you can unsubscribe just as easily, no hard feelings, there's a link at the bottom of this email. -It's raining and I'm sitting in the bus watching the water run down the windows. I'm feeling a little smug because, so far as I can tell over the last hour or so, there is only one leak. One leak is pretty good for fifty-year-old rubber seals. But as I often say, people who claim their RVs don't leak are really saying they don't know *where* their RVs leak. +Hello from the early days of December, where it is finally, genuinely cold. What we call cold around here anyway. +My desk is just to the right of the front door, which no one uses, and there's a window next to the door that I look out. But it's cracked and leaks cold air. It's 26 degrees F outside. There's a good chance it's colder wherever you are, but here in South Carolina, that counts as cold. -The other thing I did while I waited for the rain to stop, was publish an essay on using a waffle iron as an oven. It's a slightly different version of something I write for WIRED. This one isn't as breathlessly excited, since that's WIRED, not me. But I enjoy it more I think. Did you know you can make just about anything in a waffle iron? True story: +It's strange how relative temperature is though -- there were days when I lived in Massachusetts when 26 F would count as warm. Cold depends on what you're used to. Most things depend on what you're used to. Habit is a force to be reckoned with. - +I should really do something about the cracked window. The wafts of arctic air are terrible for the monthly electric bill. Right now though, I rather enjoy it. The cold keeps me more awake, gives me that slight discomfort that reminds you you're a human, in a body. Best not to forget that. -Until next time... +--- --s + + +Earlier today I did something I have never done in my forty-five years of living: I cut down my own Christmas tree. + +It was like temporarily living in a Norman Rockwell painting. We traipsed through the forest in search of an appropriate tree. There was no snow, but it was suitably cold at least. We ended up cutting down a tree much larger than we needed and then just using the top. Small trees turn out to be scraggly things, unless they're spruce or fir, neither of which grow around here. + +It sounds simple enough when I write it, but imagine it would have been hilarious to watch. + +The only hand saw I have is a mitre saw, which is terrible for cutting down trees. It took an embarrassingly long time to get through a 6-inch diameter tree trunk. Then you'd have seen us dragging and pulling, grunting and sweating our way out of the forest and back to the house where we quickly realized it was still far too large. We have 12-foot ceilings here, but even with that I had to go back at it with the saw, taking off another foot or two from the base. + +Then we dragged it in the front door and tried to stand it up only to realize it was still way too tall. I cut another foot off right in the living room, sawdust piling on the floor. Tried to stand it up again. Still too tall. Sigh. More sawdust. + +Eventually we got it down to size, but it's still so tall I can't reach the top of it. + +Somewhere in the midst of all that sawing I started wondering how it was we ended up cutting down trees for Christmas anyway. Rituals that involve destruction of the natural environment around you tend to make for short-lived civilizations. Just ask an Easter Islander. + +It turns out Christmas trees are a relatively recent ritual. At least cutting them down. That habit was imported by the Germans about 150 years ago. Decorating with evergreen boughs -- a more sustainable approach -- goes all the way back to Greek times, possibly further. Of course the Greeks were celebrating the Winter Solstice, not Christmas. + +Massachusetts, place of bitter cold and, historically, bitterness, once outlawed any Christmas celebration other than a church service. A win for sustainability and trees, but a loss for, well, everything else. People were fined for hanging evergreens or decorating in any way. Because who wants all that joy around them? Not Massachusettians of days past. Christmas trees were too much fun for Puritans. Or maybe they just hated trudging out in the woods to get one. There were witches in those woods. + +We don't have any witches in our woods. So far as I have been able to observe anyway. Still, I wonder about these rituals we stumble through. I suspect they're far more important than we give them credit for. These stories we tell ourselves about ourselves shape us, they determine our behavior, our destiny to some degree, perhaps to a large degree. They feel like the kinds of things we should spend more time considering, but we don't. Or I don't. Not often anyway. + +That's what gives them their power. Those stories are there, shaping our existence whether we stop to consider them our not. For me it usually takes something to jar me into questioning my habits, like being tired of sawing. Why am I sawing again? What are we doing out in this forest full of witches in the (relative) freezing cold? --- +Technical note: the software that I wrote to generate, mail, and archive these letters may be a bit rough around the edges, for which I apologize in advance. I am sending this a week late because I needed to fix some last minute issues. But if you see anything completely, bizarrely wrong looking. Or you get 300 copies. Please do let me know. -You can unsubscribe from this newsletter whenever you like, just reply with the word "unsubscribe" and you'll be removed, no hard feelings, no questions asked. +-s diff --git a/meditation-notes.txt b/meditation-notes.txt index 604a763..e69de29 100644 --- a/meditation-notes.txt +++ b/meditation-notes.txt @@ -1,5 +0,0 @@ -take structure and code of notes site, apply it to organizing MM archive -luxagraf essay tracing history of american nature writing, listing some more obscure authors, (themes therein?) -luxagraf list of nature writing books, where is the thoreau of africa? Is there a thoreau of russia? and so on. what is the relationship of other literatures to nature. - -"the joy of travel, in this case, had less to do with the actual motion of travel than escaping the 9-to-5, suburban, consumer-capitalist world of which I’d been a clock-punching member from the beginning. My escape proved life-affirming and necessary." https://rolfpotts.com/ken-ilgunas/ diff --git a/motivational.txt b/motivational.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..73f76cd --- /dev/null +++ b/motivational.txt @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +At the risk of sounding like a motivational poster, I feel like these days call for a reminder that it's okay to be happy. + +It's been a very different year, a terrible one for some people. But it's possible, it's okay to have sympathy for those people, while still being happy yourself. Happiness is not a zero sum game, you being unhappy on someone else's behalf does not make them any happier. + +In fact, about the only thing I can say for sure is that sitting around bemoaning the state of the world doesn't help anyone or anything. If you're not happy that's okay, but sit down and figure out why. Then see if there's something you can do about it. Unless you're reading this from prison, there's probably something you can do to make yourself feel better. It might be something really simple, like petting your dog or making raspberry studdle bars, but there's probably something. + +If you're like a lot of people I know, you're probably in a kind of shock that the world took a turn you weren't expecting. I feel you. This year has actually been pretty good to me, but the world took several turns in 2019 that I was not expecting and frankly, did not like. No, they sucked. I did not like those turns. I opposed those turns. A year ago I was spending most of my time feeling like people I know are feeling right now. + +I was probably worse though. I was whiny and feeling bad for myself because the future arrrived and did not look at all like I planned for it to look. + + that assuming the future will be whatever it is we want it to be has always been an unwise, baseless assumption. The future will be whatever it damn well pleases, our task is to navigate it. + + +I feel like these days call for a reminder that it's okay to be happy. + + +Sometimes when I start writing I don't really have a plan about where what I'm writing will end up, this is one of those pieces I considered putting on Wired, but thought no, wrong, albiet much larger, audience. Sometimes it's better to reach the right 10 people than thousands of the wrong people. + +I got an ad the other day that instead of back to school, said back to learning. As if learning were a thing that didn't happen all the time. And sure, it's just an ad, ads exist to make you feel bad about yourself in some way so that you'll buy something to try to assauge that pain. That said, it's a sad slogan. + +When I said that living in a bus didn't help prepare us for a pandemic, I did acknowledge that working from home and homeschooling our kids definitely *did* helpi diff --git a/new-job-essay.txt b/new-job-essay.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 5d8399b..0000000 --- a/new-job-essay.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ -We came to Mexico with a pretty simple plan -- hang out, visit family, live cheap, save money, get some projects done. It is hard sometimes, traveling and working, to carve out time for your own work and I had some work I wanted to get done. - -Sawdust in a hurricane has more permanence than a plan of ours. So nothing we planned to do ended up happening. That's how these things go. I went back to doing what I do, drumming up clients, writing things that made them happy. In my search for new clients I noticed my old friends at Wired were looking for a full time writer to do roughly what I've done on a freelance basis for them for years. - -I applied. I talked to the editors. Some months passed. I talked to more editors. Next thing I knew I was booking plane tickets back to the states. While the job is remote, it involves products, shipping physical things to me. If you know anything about customs, you know that's not something that's going to work abroad. - -So we're headed stateside once more and we're excited about it. We love Mexico, we'll miss the people, our friends, our family, but this feels like the right thing to do to me, at the right time too. - -I still have some projects I'd like to tackle, some projects that would be hard to do without the stability of a regular paycheck. As a freelance writer you are either hustling all the time or starving. I need some time, and mental space, to tackle some longer term work and a job provides that, so we're off, back to the United States. diff --git a/not-traveling.txt b/not-traveling.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 5746c18..0000000 --- a/not-traveling.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1 +0,0 @@ -"the joy of travel, in this case, had less to do with the actual motion of travel than escaping the 9-to-5, suburban, consumer-capitalist world of which I’d been a clock-punching member from the beginning. My escape proved life-affirming and necessary." https://rolfpotts.com/ken-ilgunas/ diff --git a/notes.txt b/notes.txt index fe0e88e..10c0130 100644 --- a/notes.txt +++ b/notes.txt @@ -1,3 +1,31 @@ + + + +This is the same sort of paradox Michael Pollan identified regarding food: we are the first generation to have obesity and malnourishment simultaneously. + + +From Ben Falk's book: + +• 104 nuclear reactors in 31 states, operated by 30 different companies. Every single one “temporarily” storing high-level waste that will be lethal for 10,000 to 24,000 years + +• 40,000 to 80,000 (exact number unknown) chemical factories producing or processing materials with multiple “compounds known to be carcinogenic and/or mutagenic” + +• More than 40 weapons-testing facilities and 70,000 nuclear bombs and missiles + +• 104,000,000 cubic meters of high-level radioactive waste from weapons-testing activities alone + +• 925 operating uranium mines + +• 20 to 30 times the average historical background rates of mercury in rain + +• 2,200 square miles of excavated valleys and leveled mountains in Appalachia alone + +• 478,562 active natural gas mines in the United States in 2008, with 1,800 expected to be drilled in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania alone in 2010 + +• 18,433,779,281 cubic feet of trash per year, or 100,000 acres of trash one-foot deep per year, or about 250 square miles, with trash 400 feet deep + + + ## Novelty and place It's one Barry Lopez spends some time on in *Artic Dreams*, noting that for natives of the Arctic Circle, "land does... what architecture sometimes does for us. It provides a sense of place, of scale, of history." Architecture has never done much for me, but I've been known to try constructing a cathedral of words to describe simple things, the way a blade of grass bends in the wind. diff --git a/pages/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome.txt b/pages/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome.txt index 97e5776..4ebae98 100644 --- a/pages/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome.txt +++ b/pages/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome.txt @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ We found this 1969 Dodge Travco Motorhome on Craigslist in June of 2015. We drov ### What's it like to live in a 1969 Dodge Travco Motorhome? -Lots of people ask some variation of this question -- they want to know what it's like for two adults and three kids to squeeze into 90 square feet for years on end. Some people seem predisposed to think it's all great with endless epic adventures. Other people clearly have images of us living in the proverbial van down by the river. +Lots of people ask some variation of this question -- they want to know what it's like for two adults and three kids to squeeze into 90 square feet for years on end. Some people seem predisposed to think it's all an endless epic adventure. Other people clearly have images of us living in the proverbial van down by the river. Neither of those are entirely accurate. If you really want to know what our life is like, [read the site](/jrnl/). Sign up for [the email list](/newsletter/) or [subscribe to the RSS feed](/jrnl/feed.xml) to get notified when I post something. What I try to record here is what our life is like. @@ -14,11 +14,11 @@ Neither of those are entirely accurate. If you really want to know what our life We love the way we live and wouldn't want to live any other way. But we're not you and this isn't for everyone. It just works for us. -To answer a few random questions that pop up regularly in conversations curious people: Yes it's crowded. No we don't mind that. Yes we are close. No, our kids aren't perfect. Yes, there are days when I wish I lived some other way. Being sick in the bus is awful. +To answer a few random questions that pop up regularly in conversations curious people: Yes it's crowded. No we don't mind that. Yes, we are close. No, our kids aren't perfect. Yes, there are days when I wish I lived some other way. Being sick in the bus is awful. Most of the time though, we're not in the bus. -When you live in a small space you invert your spacial relationship with the world. You spend your time outside rather than in, and that was one of the main reasons we did this, to be outside more. To be part of the larger world. I wrote about this at some length for a travel magazine, in piece about [why we live in a vintage RV](/essays/why-a-vintage-rv). +When you live in a small space you invert your spacial relationship with the world. You spend your time outside rather than in, and that was one of the main reasons we did this, to be outside more. To be part of the larger world. I wrote about this at some length for a travel magazine, in piece about [why we live in a vintage RV](/essay/why-a-vintage-rv). @@ -30,9 +30,9 @@ The best part of the way we live is waking up in the morning and stepping outsid -I think it's worth pointing out that everything is not always sunsets and adventures. We struggle the same as anyone living in a house. Our challenges and struggles are just different. For example, when we owned a house I had to mow the lawn and clean the gutters. Now I have to change the oil and maintain an engine instead. In the end, it's probably about the same amount of work in either case. +I think it's worth pointing out that everything is not always sunsets and adventures. We struggle the same as anyone living in a house. Our challenges and struggles are just different. For example, when we owned a house I had to mow the lawn and clean the gutters. Now I have to change the oil and maintain an engine instead. In the end, it's probably about the same amount of work in either case. Just kidding, it's way more work to maintain a house. I had forgotten. So yeah, we have challenges, but not nearly as much maintenance as a house. -For me though, maintaining the Travco is more challenging, and therefore more fun. I'm still not an engine expert. I can't listen to a knock or ping and figure out what's going on right away. I have to spend more time thinking it through, asking people more knowledgable than me. And I end up turning to mechanics more than I'd like. But I'm learning, and that's what I enjoy in life, being challenged, solving problems, getting outside my comfort zone so I can expand it. +Besides, for me, maintaining the Travco is more challenging, and therefore more fun and rewarding than mowing the lawn. Again. I'm still not an engine expert. I can't listen to a knock or ping and figure out what's going on right away. I have to spend more time thinking it through, asking people more knowledgeable than me. And I end up turning to mechanics more than I'd like. But I'm learning, and that's what I enjoy in life, being challenged, solving problems, getting outside my comfort zone so I can expand it. Still, the bus is our home and when it breaks down, well, sometimes we camp on a mechanic's driveway. @@ -40,31 +40,30 @@ Still, the bus is our home and when it breaks down, well, sometimes we camp on a Or I spend hours at the side of the road listening to the radiator boil over or getting covered in power steering fluid, transmission fluid, brake fluid. To live this way you have to be able to let go of the idea that there is anywhere else you need to be, anywhere else you *can* be. More than anything else, a vintage vehicle will teach you patience. Or you will lose your mind and sell it. - ### You don't have to be rich. -The other question everyone asks is *how can you travel all the time*? What am I some kind of rich asshole? Trust fund kid? Thankfully I'm neither. Most of the trust fund kids I've known have been pretty screwed up people. We're not rich, we're comfortably lower middle class. But as noted rock climber Eric Beck once quipped, "there's a leisure class at both ends of the economic spectrum." +The other question everyone asks is *how can you travel all the time*? What am I some kind of rich asshole? Trust fund kid? Thankfully I'm neither. Most of the trust fund kids I've known have been pretty screwed up people. We're not rich, we're comfortably lower-middle class I guess. But as noted rock climber Eric Beck once quipped, "there's a leisure class at both ends of the economic spectrum." -Which is to say that if you discard the value system of upper middle class America, you can find an amazing amount of time and money that you can use to do more interesting things than buying stuff. Yes, you need some money to live the way we do, but not much really. We live on about $40k a year. That's not much within the spectrum of US earning possibilities. +Which is to say that if you discard the value system of upper middle class America, you can find an amazing amount of time and money that you can use to do more interesting things than buying stuff. Yes, you need some money to live the way we do, but not much really. We live on about $36k a year. That's not much within the spectrum of US earning possibilities. -I do recognize that the ability to make that kind of money while traveling is not available to everyone. There are more opportunities to do it today than at any point in human history, but that doesn't mean it's possible for everyone. I happen to be a writer and computer programmer, both which can be done from just about anywhere, so that's how I do it. And no, we don't have much in the way of insurance, we have some money set aside to cover the basics, but if something catastrophic happened, we, like many of you I'm sure, would be in trouble. These days I'm not sure that would be any different even if I had an office job, but either way, like I said earlier, living this way is not for everyone. +I do recognize that the ability to make that kind of money while traveling is not available to everyone. There are more opportunities to do it today than at any point in human history, but that doesn't mean it's possible for everyone. I happen to be a writer and computer programmer, both which can be done from just about anywhere, so that's how I do it. And no, we don't have much in the way of insurance. We have some money set aside to cover the basics, but if something catastrophic happened, we, like many of you I'm sure, would be in trouble. These days I'm not sure that would be any different even if I had an office job. Either way, like I said earlier, living this way is not for everyone. -For most people the difficult part of living this way is letting go of that value system that says you need to own a house, have amazing health insurance, a nice car, a bunch of stuff, and a huge savings for some perfect future when you can stop working. For me that ideology just never took hold for whatever reason, so I never had to escape it, but I watched others escape it and it did not look easy or fun. +For most people the difficult part of living this way is letting go of that value system that says you need to own a house, have amazing health insurance, a nice car, a bunch of stuff, and a huge savings for some perfect future when you can stop working. For me that ideology never really took hold for whatever reason, so I never had to escape it, but I watched others escape it and it did not look easy or fun. -I've spent a good bit of time trying to figure out why I never cared about that stuff. Maybe I read Thoreau too young. Maybe I listed to too much punk rock. Maybe it was that I took those people at their word, that I accepted their values at face value: that complaining does no good, you do what you need to do and you do it yourself. You do it yourself so you can do it exactly the way you want, the way that works best for you, not the way someone else thinks you should do it and in the end it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks so long as you're able to look yourself in the eye at three AM and know that all is well. +I've spent a good bit of time trying to figure out why I never cared about that stuff. Maybe I read Thoreau too young. Maybe I listed to too much punk rock. Maybe it was that I took those people at their word, that I accepted their values at face value: that complaining does no good, you do what you need to do, and you do it yourself. You do it yourself so you can do it exactly the way you want, the way that works best for you, not the way someone else thinks you should do it, and in the end it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks so long as you're able to look yourself in the eye at three AM and know that all is well. It's hard to write about these things without coming off like a jerk to some people, but I suppose that's okay. You can't please everyone. I'll assume since you've made it this far that you're good with it. -The problem is a lot of people see my values as a comment on their own. Like I am somehow sneering down at people from the top of the #vanlife heights. Again maybe this doesn't come off right, but really, I don't care how you live. If you love living in a house, that's awesome. I am glad you have found what makes you happy. If you hate living in a house and want to escape it, well, I guess to some extent I'm here to say it can be done. Maybe. +The problem is a lot of people see other values as a comment on their own. Like I am somehow sneering down at people from the top of the #vanlife heights here. Again maybe this doesn't come off right, but really: I don't care how you live. If you love living in a house, that's awesome. I am glad you have found what makes you happy. If you hate living in a house and want to escape it, well, I guess to some extent I'm here to say it can be done. Maybe. ### Why live this way? Because the worst part is going home. The why part two: I wanted to give my kids something close to the childhood I wish I'd had. -Which is not to imply I didn't have a good childhood. I've had an incredible life. I have to pinch myself sometimes to make sure this isn't a dream (which now maybe you're thinking oh god, what as asshole, and I know, I know, but really I have nothing to complain about, my life has been grand. If I die tomorrow, I would miss my family, but I would at least feel like I had lived deliciously well). +Which is not to imply I didn't have a good childhood. I've had an incredible life. I have to pinch myself sometimes to make sure this isn't a dream (which now maybe you're thinking oh god, what an asshole. And I know, I know it sounds cliche, but really I have nothing to complain about. My life has been grand. If I die tomorrow, I will miss my family, but I would at least feel like I had lived deliciously well). I grew up traveling a lot, something I'm very grateful to have experienced because those were always my favorite moments. Mostly I remember camping and hiking. The mountains, the beaches, the deserts. I remember being outside, the smell of pine needles, the dust in your nose as you step out of the tent to see what was for breakfast. I remember living outside for a week, sometimes two, and then going home. It was always such a drag to go home. diff --git a/pre-apacholyptic-adventures.txt b/pre-apacholyptic-adventures.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 53b52e9..0000000 --- a/pre-apacholyptic-adventures.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,36 +0,0 @@ -There are days that are good for driving and days that are not. I prefer Wednesdays. This was a Thursday. Close enough. I took the day off work and we hit the road, back to Athens. - - - -We didn't want to go. But to avoid a pandemic you have to be willing to sacrifice. And where we were there were no sacrifices being made. There is a sense of entitlement that runs deep in this country. I can't figure it out, but I see it all around me -- this idea that you can get everything you want out of life without compromise or concession. It's annoying when you're talking about politics or economics, but it's disastrous when it comes to community health. - -Staying six feet away from other people is socially awkward, but if that's all it takes to stop a pandemic, that's not a big deal for a few months. People spent *years* avoiding London and Paris during the plague. If all we need to do is stay six feet apart, and remain at home for a few months, we're getting off light. Unfortunately, even that wasn't happening in the campground. Rather the opposite in fact. - -We've already had a [bout of bad illness in the bus](/jrnl/2018/01/escaping-california) and let's just say it's not an ideal place to be ill. If one person gets something, everyone gets it, there's no way around that. We were not interested in dealing with that *and* having South Carolina State Parks close on us. - -Our reservation at Hunting Island was up. We'd planned to go back to Edisto for a couple more weeks, but the uncertainty regarding public lands -- would state parks in SC stay open? Would we be safe in them? Would groceries continue to make it to a small island at the edge of the world? Would the residents of that island mind our presence if things got real bad? -- made it an easy decision. We decided to head for some private land. - -Fortunately we had a friend back in Athens with a place we could stay for a while, so we jumped on it. We just had to make the four hour drive back. No big deal. - - - - -It started inauspiciously, as stressful drives inevitably do. I was dumping the tank when I noticed the driver's rear tire was low. There's two wheels in the back, so I wasn't overly worried, but it wasn't a great way to start. Still, it was only a couple hundred miles, what could possibly go wrong? - -Nothing for the first 70 or so miles. I even managed to get the rear tire filled up at a truck stop. All my tires in fact. No charge. And the woman stayed well away from me while doing it. Perfect. For minute I thought, hey, maybe this will all work out. - -Forty miles later the engine sputtered. At first I thought maybe my foot had let up off the gas pedal by accident. My knee had been swollen and driving was painful, so it wasn't out of the question. But no. Ten minutes later, it happened again. This time it was worse. I pulled over. Naturally it was the only stretch of the drive with no cell service. - -I knew from the way it behaved that the problem was gas, specifically not enough of it getting to the engine. I had a quick look and saw air bubbling into the fuel filter. Not good. I knew there was a little leak in the filling hose at the rear of the gas tank. I decided to start there, I got out old trusty -- the rigged up combo of small hose clamps that, along with some aluminum foil and header tape, once let us limp along with a cracked exhaust manifold -- and put it to new use on the rear of the gas tank. It stopped the leaking gas (a task I'd had on my list for the following weekend anyway), and for about ten miles I was pretty happy with myself. - -Then it happened again. Damnit. Stopped again. Now Corrinne wasn't just looking at me with that look that said, *really? today*, she actually said, "Really? Today?" I didn't say anything. I opened up the doghouse again. There were still bubbles leaking up in the fuel filter, so I knew the problem was somewhere between that and the gas tank. About 18 feet of fuel line and one pump. I put on my headlamp, crawled under the bus, inhaled unholy amounts of grass pollen, and slowly worked my way up the fuel line to the pump. No leaks. I stared at the fuel pump. The very [first thing I ever replaced in the bus](/jrnl/2016/06/engine). It's probably the fuel pump I thought as I lay there in the pollen. - -Under ordinary circumstances I'd just hop in the car, drive to the nearest parts shop, get a new fuel pump and install it. But that would mean all kinds of potential exposure of me and the family to coronavirus. That would defeat the purpose of this drive, which was to get us away from people, not closer to them. - -I considered the problem for a bit, lying there, staring up at the engine. If there's extra air coming in, maybe if I tightened up the carburetor to cut the air coming in that way it would balance out? At least enough to let me limp back to Athens. I crawled out and did it. It didn't help much -- the real problem was not enough fuel, not too much air -- but it helped enough that it got us back on the road, limping along. - -After experimenting some I figured out how to accelerate in such a way that it would not stutter much and I could get up to about 50 miles an hour. It took a while, but I limped into Augusta. I decided to skip the interstate and drove through on surface streets. It was slow going, but the bus didn't stutter as much at lower speeds, and eventually we got out of the city and back onto the highway to Athens. - - - -In the end it took an extra three hours, but we made it to the old farmhouse turned schoolhouse where we've been staying ever since. I was tired, but grateful to have made it. I squared the bus away, and made dinner. We put the kids to bed, and I went online and ordered a fuel pump from Rock Auto. Problem solved, no one sick. diff --git a/published/2006-05-01-closing-time.txt b/published/2006-05-01-closing-time.txt index 88690a3..d69dc60 100644 --- a/published/2006-05-01-closing-time.txt +++ b/published/2006-05-01-closing-time.txt @@ -1,30 +1,37 @@ ---- -template: single -point: 7.0586452366957175,98.53981016694692 -location: Koh Kradan,Trang,Thailand -image: 2008/thailandtrain.jpg -desc: This moment, on this train. This is the last time I'll post something from Southeast Asia for a while. Sadness -dek: Headed back to Europe: I started to write a bit of reminiscence, trying to remember the highlights of my time in Asia before I return to the west, but about halfway through I kept thinking of a popular Buddhist saying — be here now. Most of these dispatches are written in past tense, but this time I want to simply be here now. This moment, on this train. This is the last time I'll post something from Southeast Asia. -pub_date: 2006-05-01T00:14:23 -slug: closing-time -title: Closing Time ---- +The morning was a blur. The early morning boat ride in to the mainland was rough. Not the sea, which was choppy, but not to bad, but I was still suffering from an over celebration of ANZAC day the previous evening. Peter was the only Australian at Lost Paradise, but we wouldn't have wanted him to celebrate alone so we pitched in. What are friends for? -After spending the better part of the day running about Trang, from the customs house to immigration and then Tesco and other warehouse stores for Wally's supplies, I was dropped off near the train station. I had been feeling a bit drab, far too much celebration of ANZAC day the previous evening (which is an Australian holiday to remember a battle on the first world war and was technically only appropriate for Peter the only Australian at Lost Paradise, but we wouldn't have wanted him to celebrate alone). + -I spent the remainder of the afternoon wandering around downtown Trang, a pleasant little provincial riverside town. The train left just before sunset, sliding smoothly, far more smoothly than an India train, out of the station, through the suburbs of Trang and into the countryside with its banana trees and coconut palms and tamarind trees and bamboo thickets and jungly undergrowth of vines, some of which, if I'm not mistake, were Kudzu. The sky was a dull grey overcast with some strikingly dramatic cloud formations on the eastern horizon. I was lucky and had the two-person berth to myself for the majority of the journey. I sat by the window and watched the scenery slide by thinking about Wally and the rest probably motoring past Ko Muk or perhaps already back on Kradan unloading the weeks supplies into the cycle cart (Ko Kradan bus service) or maybe already back at the restaurant lounging under the thatched roofs telling stories over cold Chang. Barbeque orders would be placed and Ngu would be grilling or tinkering about with the one remaining generator. The dogs would be prowling about begging for scraps, the puppies wrestling in the yard, Tang and Blondie still off at the beach, lying in the shade, bellies full of chicken carcasses and pork scraps begged off the tourists that had lunch on the beach. +I spent the better part of the day running errands around Trang with Wally and crew. After the customs house and immigration, we moved on to Tesco, and other warehouse stores for Wally's supplies. I stocked up on snacks for the train ride, and after lunch they dropped me off near the train station downtown. -Children in backyards leaned over the fence watching the train as it passed. I thought also of the fact that my time in Southeast Asia was nearly over. Four days in Bangkok to do a bit of last minute work, maybe buy some bootleg DVDs and then poof it disappears from me for now. But it's less the place I will miss that the people, both the locals I've met and the travelers. I'll miss you Southeast Asia, you've changed my whole outlook on the world and shown me things I never dreamed I'd see. +I spent the remainder of the afternoon wandering around downtown Trang, a pleasant little provincial riverside town. The train left just before sunset, sliding smoothly, far more smoothly than an India train, out of the station, through the suburbs of Trang and into the countryside with its banana trees and coconut palms and tamarind trees and bamboo thickets and jungly undergrowth of vines, some of which, if I'm not mistake, were Kudzu. + + + +The sky was a dull grey overcast with some strikingly dramatic cloud formations on the eastern horizon. I was lucky and had the two-person berth to myself for the majority of the journey. I sat by the window and watched the scenery slide by thinking about Wally and the rest probably motoring past Ko Muk or perhaps already back on Kradan unloading the weeks supplies into the cycle cart, or maybe already back at the restaurant lounging under the thatched roofs telling stories over cold Chang. + +Barbeque orders would be placed and Ngu would be grilling or tinkering about with the one remaining generator. The dogs would be prowling for scraps, the puppies wrestling in the yard, Tang and Blondie still off at the beach, lying in the shade, bellies full of chicken carcasses and pork scraps begged off the tourists that had lunch on the beach. Life everywhere continues as it was without you. + +
+ + + + + +
+ +Children in backyards leaned over the fence watching the train as it passed. My time in Southeast Asia is nearly over. Four days in Bangkok to do a bit of last minute work, maybe buy some bootleg DVDs, and then poof, it disappears from me for now. It's less the place I will miss than the people, both the locals I've met and the travelers. + +I'll miss you Southeast Asia, you've changed my whole outlook on the world and shown me things I never dreamed I'd see. Like the evening light now falling on the hillsides just north of Trang, a quiet, relaxed light that falls like one of Winslow Homer's washes over the green hills and white thunderheads turning them a golden orange against the distant blackness of a storm over the gulf of Thailand. Thailand in this light becomes a softer, subtler place, less dramatic and harsh than in the glare of the midday sun. I started to write a bit of reminiscence, try to remember the highlights of my time in this part of the world before I return to the west, but about halfway through I kept thinking of a popular Buddhist saying—be here now. Most of these dispatches are written in past tense, but this time I want to simply be here now. This moment, on this train. This is the last time I'll post something from Southeast Asia. There is no way I could sum anything up for you, no way I can convey what I've seen and done and even what I have written of is only about one tenth of what I've actually done. So I'm not going to try. -I know it's hard to do when you're at home and working and everything is the same shit happening over and over again, but it really is true, that bit about tomorrow… that bit about yesterday… one is gone forever and the other will never arrive. There is only now. But I'm not very good at this sort of thing; instead I'll leave you with some thoughts from others: - -

"To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question." – Edward Abbey

+I know it's hard to do when you're at home and working and everything is the same shit happening over and over again, but it really is true, that bit about tomorrow... that bit about yesterday... one is gone forever and the other will never arrive. There is only now. But I'm not very good at this sort of thing; instead I'll leave you with some thoughts from others: -

"The most wasted of all days is one without laughter." – e.e. cummings

+"To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question." – Edward Abbey -

"What do we live for if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?" – George Eliot

+"The most wasted of all days is one without laughter." -- e.e. cummings +"What do we live for if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?" – George Eliot diff --git a/published/2019-10-09_bird-watching.txt b/published/2019-10-09_bird-watching.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3b81b39 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2019-10-09_bird-watching.txt @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +Most mornings I am up early enough to hear the signature sounds of whippoorwills, sometimes even the cackling of an owl. It's not long before those birds quiet down though. By the time my coffee is ready the forest is transitioning from night sounds to dawn sounds. Song birds warble in the dogwoods. Red-bellied woodpeckers drum on oaks. Somewhere high over head a red-tailed hawk shrieks. + +We were house sitting for a few days once and the kids were complaining that, with the curtains closed, they could not tell when it was morning in the house. I asked them, "how do you know when it's morning in the bus?" And they said, "we hear the birds singing." Birds mean morning. + +Every morning somewhere between the golden light of sunrise and the starker white of midday, three Carolina Wren's stop by our campsite looking for food. Many birds move through the forest around us throughout the day, but these three come right into the campsite as if we're not even here. + +I sit at the table, writing. I don't move that much I suppose, but certainly the wrens are aware that I am here. The noise of my fingers typing on the keyboard is enough to keep squirrels away. Yet everyday these three wrens behave as if I don't exist. + +Carolina wrens are tiny brown and tan birds with a slightly downward curved bill. They're the sort of small brown bird that never stops moving. They flit and hop and bounce and chip-chip around beneath the table, even *on* the table sometimes, while I work. + + + +Periodically one stops moving and cocks its head to look at me, as if reassessing what sort of threat I represent. But inevitably curiosity is satisfied and it goes back to ignoring my existence, hopping around, once even perching on my foot to get a better view of the ground. One wren even got up on the table and hopped along picking at crumbs, coming right toward me. I thought it was going to land on my arm, but at the last minute it seemed to suddenly remember me and it flew off into the bushes. + +It's nearly the time of year when the permanent avian residents of the Georgia mountains begin to ban together. There aren't that many. Most species are off in Mexico or South America by now. Those that remain band together for the winter. You see flocks consisting of Carolina chickadees, tufted titmice, and Carolina wrens, sometimes joined by golden-crowned kinglets, downy woodpeckers, perhaps a nuthatch or two. They join up in Autumn and often, from what I saw back when we lived here, stick together for most of the winter. + + + +But it's not quite cold enough for that yet. These are Carolina wrens, traveling alone, together. Their dark eyes watch me whenever I walk around. If I get too close they scurry away, flutter off under the bus or into the wheel well, but for the most part it feels like I am in their mid-morning snack spot and it's me who should be moving. + +These three were the first time I'd had much encounter with the avian world in a long time. Mockingbirds had ruled in Texas, and I was feeling bad about the summer tanager I'd hit and killed while driving out there. It seemed as if the avians were angry with me, understandably. I dreamed once that a goldfinch was pecking at my finger, biting me until I bled. + +After a few days of the wrens coming through I started to feel like perhaps I was forgiven for that bloody mishap with the tanager. Then one morning I stepped outside at dawn and there was a barred owl not more than ten feet away. + + + +I don't write about them much, but birds have dictated our destinations as much as anything else. If you were to overlay our route [through the Gulf coast in 2018](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/01/almost-warm) with popular spring migration birding spots, our route might make more sense. We're not [Kenn Kaufman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenn_Kaufman) by any means, but we've been known to be [on St. George Island in April](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/04/migration), maybe [spend summer in the Great Lakes](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/07/trees), and perhaps try for an [early spring in the Chiricauhua region](https://live.luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/01/ghost-cochise). + +My kids have been bird watching since they could stand up. It wasn't something I forced on them, they'd never do it if I'd done that. You can't force things on people, especially kids. If you want to teach your kids something, don't talk about it, do it. Don't tell them what you're doing, just do it. They learn by osmosis and curiosity, not "teaching"[^1]. + + + +Our kids picked up the bird book that was sitting on the coffee table in our old house and started looking at the pictures before they could walk. There's a photo of one of them, still in diapers, the Sibley Guide to Birds spread out before her, thoughtfully tracing her finger down a page of warblers, trying to find one that looks like the bird in a photo a friend's mother had sent us (it was a goldfinch). + + + + + +Our kids know a lot about the natural world because it surrounds them every day and piques their curiosity. They wake up to the sound of birds singing. They point out the shrieks of the red-tailed hawk when it circles overhead in the morning. They note the chickadee and titmouse flock when it comes through not long after that. Every time they go for a walk when I'm working I get a full catalog of interesting birds I missed. Birding by proxy. + +It's not always birds of course. One evening the kids found a meadow vole under the bus, drinking from the tiny puddle of condensation that collects below the air conditioner. I imagine it's busy around that water at night. The vole apparently overstayed and got caught out in the open. The kids dug it some roots and piled them back in the shade, where it could eat, but still keep cool. We stepped in for dinner and when we came back out it had moved on. + +Later, after the kids were in bed, I sat out by the fire, listening as the evening sounds faded back to night sounds. The songbirds fell quiet. The woodpeckers stopped tapping. The whippoorwills started up. Later the deep voice of a great horned owl drifted up from somewhere down by the river below. I thought of the vole. Good luck out there friend. + +[^1]: At least not teaching the way we commonly do it in American schools. General strategies can often be conveyed well (aka, taught) but no one (kids or adults) learns when they aren't interested. And you can't force interest. diff --git a/published/2020-03-04_high-water.txt b/published/2020-03-04_high-water.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3fabcb2 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2020-03-04_high-water.txt @@ -0,0 +1,63 @@ +After a winter in Georgia, we were ready for some warmer climes. We managed to book up a month of beach time at some South Carolina State Parks. Everything came together well, weather, work, and bus repairs. Like we did nearly three years ago, we split the drive down into two days. This time we stopped off for a night at a tiny state park on the Edisto River. + + + +This part of the country, and upriver of here, has out-rained even the pacific northwest so far this year, and it showed. The river was ten feet over flood stage. It was difficult to even tell where the river was, it looked more like a lake. Another three feet and the campground would have been underwater. There wasn't much land to explore, we settled for an early fire and some marshmallows. + +
+ + + + + +
+ +The next day we headed the rest of the way out to what I still think of as the [edge of the continent](/jrnl/2017/04/edge-continent). Edisto Island is remote, for the east coast anyway. It's true, Charleston is only an hour and half away, but somehow Edisto still feels like the edge of the world. + +Civilization falls away as you drive. The road winds through alternating stretches of muddy marshland and deep stands of gnarled oak trees, bearded with Spanish Moss. Chain stores and strip malls disappear, replaced by crumbling no-name gas stations, fish shacks, cinder block garages, old single story motels. + + + + + +It's not some idyllic world out here of course. The land and people here are abused like they are everywhere. Environmental destruction and the deep, unsolvable poverty that follows it linger everywhere in the shadows. The ruin of modern systems is always more obvious out here at the leading edges, the places where the supposed benefits never quite reached, just inexhaustible desires. These are the places from which life was extracted to enable comfort in some other place. + +There's a divide. I notice it every time we come down here. You cross a high bridge over the Intercoastal waterway onto Edisto Island proper and everything after that is magically fine, derelict buildings hidden away, poverty pushed off the main highway to some backroad most of us will never take. + +Life here is different let's say. And we'll leave it at that. + + + +Humans are latecomers here anyway, newcomers to this world of sea and sand and muddy marsh. This is the time of year that other migrants are passing through. Every morning we get to wake to the *tea-kett-le, tea-kett-le* of Carolina wrens, the *chip chip chip* of cardinals, and the more elaborate songs of the warblers headed north to their summer homes. I can't think of a better way to wake up than lifting your head, looking out the window, and seeing a Carolina wren staring back at you. + +Our time at the beach here is starkly divided. I am a sitter. To me the beach is a place to come and watch the sea, the sky, the birds. For much of the rest of my family it's a place to hunt for treasures from previous worlds. While I relaxed, staring up at the blue veil of sky, occasionally given depth by a passing gull or brown pelican, Corrinne and the kids wandered up and down the shore finding fossil shark's teeth, bones, bits of black, fossilized turtle shells, and thoroughly modern seashells. + +
+ + + + + + + +
+ +The temperature always hovered on the edge of warm, usually tipping over by late afternoon.Most days you could find a small depression in the sand to stay out of the breeze and it was warm enough to relax in shorts. Sit up though and the temperature dropped considerably. + + + + + + + + +I did a lot of staring at the sky. I'm not sure if it's the act of lying down and looking up, or the actual view of the blue sky, or warmth and light of the sun itself, or some combination of those things and more I haven't sussed out, but there is something wonderfully cathartic and healing about staring up at the sky. + +I did it every chance I got, which alas was not quite as much as the last time we were here. But things change, morph, I wouldn't want them to stay the same. If they stayed the same it never would have warmed up enough to coax me off my back and out into the water. + + + + +The water was cold, biting cold when the wind hit you after you came up. But you have to get in. And not just when it's easy, not just when everyone is swimming. + +You have to get in even on the days when you don't want to. Even when it's so cold your teeth are chattering before you even get your shirt off. Those are the times when you have to reach down inside and find some way to get out there. The ocean pulls me in, it's part of an understanding I've reached with it, with myself. There are certain rituals that must be performed or the world stops working. And so you get in. When it's cold. When it's not. It doesn't matter. Just get in. diff --git a/published/2020-03-11_distant-early-warning.txt b/published/2020-03-11_distant-early-warning.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..41027e8 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2020-03-11_distant-early-warning.txt @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +There is nothing like a good storm by the sea. The smell of salt on the wind, the slash and clatter of palms as the wind comes ashore. The muffled *thick thick think* of the first drops spitting on the sand. The lightning flashing far out at sea is always visible long before you hear any hint of a rumble. It blinks like Christmas lights on the horizon. + +The waves of wind begin to swing ashore, it's then that you can sense the life in the storm, the personalities, the intentions. Storms are alive too. They have a path to follow just like us. Just because something only lasts a few days, does not mean it doesn't have intentions. Just because you can't decipher the intentions doesn't mean they aren't there. + + + +Tonight I sat by the fire feeling the barometer drop, feeling the stir of wind, watching the whirl of embers as the fire died down and the wind came up. I could feel it coming, I could sense its presence. + +This storm comes from the southwest, a mix a southern and western personalities, a storm we all know in this part of the world. I never worry about a storm unless it comes from the north. Storms from the north aren't more dangerous exactly, but they're chaotic and unpredictable. You never know what a north wind will bring. Though around here the ones you really have to watch out for are the east and southeast winds. But we're months from those. + +This one we watched arrive. Storm clouds sweeping up from the southwest all day. One or two at first, floating lazily along. Then more, as if they were forming up around some kind of a plan. Whatever the plan was, it didn't involve Edisto. Despite spitting rain a little during the night it was back to sunshine the next day. + +I love a good storm, but not when I have to drive. That morning we headed down the coast a couple hours to Hunting Island State Park.The drive was sunny, fortunately. Uneventful. Beaufort proved to be a charming little coastal southern town. Or it looked that way anyway. By the time we drove through, the rest of the country was starting to lock down over the coronavirus. South Carolina remained in a state of blissful ignorance, but having watched the virus spread via stories of friends and family on the west coast, I wasn't about to head out and wander the streets. + +I'd just as soon strangers always keep a six foot distance from me. But South Carolina wasn't about to make rules regarding that or anything else. South Carolina is the south's "live free or die" state. There still aren't helmet laws here, which I think is great actually. But a virus is not a motorcycle. A virus is not something you choose to do. A virus really has nothing to do with "rights". A virus is a good reminder that rights are a thing conferred by communities of people to members of those communities. There are no "natural" rights. + +It's also important to dig too, because behind all the talk of rights, usually you find someone making money. As one of the camp hosts put to it when I asked if he thought the South Carolina State Parks would close, "These greedy bastards? Never." And he was right. The parks down there remained essentially open through April 12. + +So we missed Beaufort because the virus-exposure-to-fun ratio did not work out in its favor. We did get to spend a few days on Hunting Island though. By a stroke of pure luck we had the nicest campsite in the campground, which was good because otherwise it was packed in and crowded, as beach campgrounds tend to be. The best I can say for it was that the water was walking distance away. + + + + +The kids spent all day every day out on the sand. We even made in the water a couple times despite the cold. As you do. + + + + + + + +The beach here was not nearly as forthcoming with treasures. There were shells, and a lot of jellyfish, but little of the fossils and other things we'd been finding in Edisto. + + + + + +And then our options began to fade. North Carolina shut down its parks, which killed our next plan, which was head to the Outer Banks for a few months. Then Florida shut down its state parks and we were starting to feel the squeeze. Competition for what few camping spots remained became much more intense. We full timers may fly under the radar for most people, but there are far more of us than you know. Take away public camping and the options get thin quickly. We decided it was time to get out of South Carolina. + +At the time most people were not taking the virus very seriously. Here's the thing. Maybe you can get Covid-19 and be fine. But what if you can't? Do you really want to find out right now when there's no treatment and hospitals are crowded? When we don't even really understand what the virus does, [especially any long term effects](https://mobile.twitter.com/lilienfeld1/status/1251335135909122049)? Just because you survive it does not mean you go back to normal. Ask anyone who lives with Lyme, RSV, chronic fatigue syndrome, or any of the other virus-borne diseases with long term consequences. Viruses are nothing new, sickness and death are nothing new, but that doesn't mean we should run full speed toward them without a care. + +We decided to take steps we felt would best help us avoid coming in contact with SARS-CoV-2. Unfortunately that meant changing our plans. But it's hardly the first time we've had to change plans. These things happen. Traveling around in RV isn't a right you know, it's a privilege that we've enjoyed, but right now it isn't possible. A big part of travel is waiting, so that's what we're doing right now, just like everyone else. diff --git a/published/2020-03-18_pre-apocalyptic-driving-adventures.txt b/published/2020-03-18_pre-apocalyptic-driving-adventures.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..53b52e9 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2020-03-18_pre-apocalyptic-driving-adventures.txt @@ -0,0 +1,36 @@ +There are days that are good for driving and days that are not. I prefer Wednesdays. This was a Thursday. Close enough. I took the day off work and we hit the road, back to Athens. + + + +We didn't want to go. But to avoid a pandemic you have to be willing to sacrifice. And where we were there were no sacrifices being made. There is a sense of entitlement that runs deep in this country. I can't figure it out, but I see it all around me -- this idea that you can get everything you want out of life without compromise or concession. It's annoying when you're talking about politics or economics, but it's disastrous when it comes to community health. + +Staying six feet away from other people is socially awkward, but if that's all it takes to stop a pandemic, that's not a big deal for a few months. People spent *years* avoiding London and Paris during the plague. If all we need to do is stay six feet apart, and remain at home for a few months, we're getting off light. Unfortunately, even that wasn't happening in the campground. Rather the opposite in fact. + +We've already had a [bout of bad illness in the bus](/jrnl/2018/01/escaping-california) and let's just say it's not an ideal place to be ill. If one person gets something, everyone gets it, there's no way around that. We were not interested in dealing with that *and* having South Carolina State Parks close on us. + +Our reservation at Hunting Island was up. We'd planned to go back to Edisto for a couple more weeks, but the uncertainty regarding public lands -- would state parks in SC stay open? Would we be safe in them? Would groceries continue to make it to a small island at the edge of the world? Would the residents of that island mind our presence if things got real bad? -- made it an easy decision. We decided to head for some private land. + +Fortunately we had a friend back in Athens with a place we could stay for a while, so we jumped on it. We just had to make the four hour drive back. No big deal. + + + + +It started inauspiciously, as stressful drives inevitably do. I was dumping the tank when I noticed the driver's rear tire was low. There's two wheels in the back, so I wasn't overly worried, but it wasn't a great way to start. Still, it was only a couple hundred miles, what could possibly go wrong? + +Nothing for the first 70 or so miles. I even managed to get the rear tire filled up at a truck stop. All my tires in fact. No charge. And the woman stayed well away from me while doing it. Perfect. For minute I thought, hey, maybe this will all work out. + +Forty miles later the engine sputtered. At first I thought maybe my foot had let up off the gas pedal by accident. My knee had been swollen and driving was painful, so it wasn't out of the question. But no. Ten minutes later, it happened again. This time it was worse. I pulled over. Naturally it was the only stretch of the drive with no cell service. + +I knew from the way it behaved that the problem was gas, specifically not enough of it getting to the engine. I had a quick look and saw air bubbling into the fuel filter. Not good. I knew there was a little leak in the filling hose at the rear of the gas tank. I decided to start there, I got out old trusty -- the rigged up combo of small hose clamps that, along with some aluminum foil and header tape, once let us limp along with a cracked exhaust manifold -- and put it to new use on the rear of the gas tank. It stopped the leaking gas (a task I'd had on my list for the following weekend anyway), and for about ten miles I was pretty happy with myself. + +Then it happened again. Damnit. Stopped again. Now Corrinne wasn't just looking at me with that look that said, *really? today*, she actually said, "Really? Today?" I didn't say anything. I opened up the doghouse again. There were still bubbles leaking up in the fuel filter, so I knew the problem was somewhere between that and the gas tank. About 18 feet of fuel line and one pump. I put on my headlamp, crawled under the bus, inhaled unholy amounts of grass pollen, and slowly worked my way up the fuel line to the pump. No leaks. I stared at the fuel pump. The very [first thing I ever replaced in the bus](/jrnl/2016/06/engine). It's probably the fuel pump I thought as I lay there in the pollen. + +Under ordinary circumstances I'd just hop in the car, drive to the nearest parts shop, get a new fuel pump and install it. But that would mean all kinds of potential exposure of me and the family to coronavirus. That would defeat the purpose of this drive, which was to get us away from people, not closer to them. + +I considered the problem for a bit, lying there, staring up at the engine. If there's extra air coming in, maybe if I tightened up the carburetor to cut the air coming in that way it would balance out? At least enough to let me limp back to Athens. I crawled out and did it. It didn't help much -- the real problem was not enough fuel, not too much air -- but it helped enough that it got us back on the road, limping along. + +After experimenting some I figured out how to accelerate in such a way that it would not stutter much and I could get up to about 50 miles an hour. It took a while, but I limped into Augusta. I decided to skip the interstate and drove through on surface streets. It was slow going, but the bus didn't stutter as much at lower speeds, and eventually we got out of the city and back onto the highway to Athens. + + + +In the end it took an extra three hours, but we made it to the old farmhouse turned schoolhouse where we've been staying ever since. I was tired, but grateful to have made it. I squared the bus away, and made dinner. We put the kids to bed, and I went online and ordered a fuel pump from Rock Auto. Problem solved, no one sick. diff --git a/published/2020-07-01_wouldnt-it-be-nice.txt b/published/2020-07-01_wouldnt-it-be-nice.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d955164 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2020-07-01_wouldnt-it-be-nice.txt @@ -0,0 +1,68 @@ +Perhaps the strangest thing for us about these times is the number of people who have said to us something along the lines of, "well, you had three years to prepare for this, huh?" Or "not much of a change for you, eh?" + +I've had plenty of time to meditate on these statements, but I am still puzzled about what people mean by them. + +Let's be clear. There's nothing about living in an RV that prepares you for illness, nationwide shutdowns, supply chain disruptions, or anything else we've all dealt with in the past six months. If anything, living in an RV makes you much more vulnerable to these things[^1]. Where are you going to camp when public lands close (which has [happened to us twice now](/jrnl/2018/01/eastbound-down))? + + + +When people say these things I think maybe they're referring to the fact that I've always worked remotely, and we homeschool our children, but that was true long before we started living in an RV. The other thing I've considered is that, historically, people who are willing to leave at the drop of a hat, tend to survive upheaval better than those who are dug in, but I don't think that's what the comments above are getting at. + +What I think people are referring to is the very mistaken idea that there's something self-sufficient about living in an RV. There isn't. Look, I love living in the bus, but even I will admit that the self-sufficient notion is mostly fantasy. + +There's plenty about living in an RV that makes you self-reliant, which is well worth being, and will help you all the time, not just in these peculiar times, but self-reliant is a far cry from self-sufficient. Self-reliance means you know what to get at the hardware store, self-sufficient means you never needed to go the hardware store in the first place. + +It's an interesting notion, self-sufficient. When I looked it up in the Webster's 1913 dictionary (the one true dictionary) nearly all the example usage was negative, bordering on pejorative. Self-sufficient was next to words like "haughty", "overbearing", and "overweening confidence in one's own abilities." + +At first glance I thought, well, that does describe luxagraf fairly accurately, maybe we *are* self-sufficient. But whatever it used to mean, for most of us today it means roughly, *sufficient for one's self without external aid*. Which is to say, no one anywhere on earth is 100 percent self-sufficient. + +We think self-sufficient is a singular thing when in fact it's a spectrum on which we all live, where at one end you have the floating chaise-lounge bound people in the movie Wall-E and at the other you have children raised by wolves. That there are more people at the Wall-E end of the spectrum right now seems indisputable, and any effort you can make to slide yourself down toward the wolf children is worth making in my opinion. + +But just because you can get a month's worth of groceries at Costco does not mean you're self-sufficient for a month. It means you can plan ahead, that's all. Similarly, if you think living in an RV is going to make you completely self-sufficient you are in for a learning experience. I know this because that's how I envisioned living in an RV, and I have personally learned the hard way how wrong that vision was. + +The easiest example of this is solar power. I need about three minutes of conversation to discover whether the person I'm talking to has ever actually lived entirely off solar power. Which is to say that, while I love solar power, it does not make you self-sufficient. Having solar slides you down the spectrum a bit closer to the wolf kids, but honestly the lifestyle changes you have to make to live with limited solar power do a lot more for your self-sufficiency than the actual solar panels (which don't last forever, and have to be made in a clean room -- got one of those in your RV?). + + + +Typically people hear solar power, and think, oh cool, you're self-sufficient for energy. And sure, we can run our freezer, lights, and charge all our devices with nothing more than the sun. That *is* pretty cool. In fact there are times when I pinch myself because it still seems so science fiction to me. Solar is awesome. When it works. But sometimes the sun [doesn't come out for five or six days](/jrnl/2017/10/pacific), or we're camped in a deep valley with only a few hours of sun a day, or we're [camped under trees](/2018/07/trees), or a fuse blows, or a wire frays, or the [alternator goes out and you don't realize it until it's too late and your batteries are dead because you never installed the isolator](/jrnl/2017/10/through). These are not hypothetical scenarios. All of these things have happened to us. + +And you know how we have saved ourselves every single time solar power has let us down? By connecting to the power grid. By admitting that we're not self-sufficient and using the available shared resources of our times. + +Want another example? Water. We can carry just under 80 gallons. We can stretch that to about six days if we don't shower much. That's actually crazy impressive. The [average American uses 80-100 gallons of water](https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/science/water-qa-how-much-water-do-i-use-home-each-day?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects) *every day*[^2]. But it doesn't make us self-sufficient at all. Not even close. If we happen to be camped near water then sure, we can filter and boil and get by pretty much indefinitely, but I can only think of a handful of times in three years on the road when this would have been possible. + +Then there's food. Food is the best case scenario. We can easily store two weeks worth of food. I believe we could probably go about a month, though it might be a little grim and vegetable-less by the end. I'm super interested in trying to grow some veggies in the bus[^3], but so far we have not tried this. + + + + +The single biggest limitation on our self-sufficiency is waste. I'd guess this is true for all RVers, but I do know that five people on a single black tank is somewhat extreme, even by RV standards. Under normal circumstances we can go about three days without dumping the tank. If we're camped somewhere that it's okay to dump grey water (AKA, dish and washing water), we can stretch our tank to six days. Six days. That's the hard limit. Anything beyond that, and you are full of shit. + +So for everyone thinking, damn, those RVers were really ready for this lockdown, yeah, not so much. If it seemed that way it's simply because full time RVers started abiding by the rules later and stopped abiding by them sooner. And I think in most cases they did that not because they didn't think the virus was a problem, but because really they had no choice. And that's not were you want to be. + +This is actually something I spend a good bit of time thinking about though. I am with you people who think RVs are self-sufficient. I *wish* there were a way to make an RV more self-sufficient. But I've yet to come up with a way to do that without going to extremes that are impractical. We could, for example, put out tarps and harvest rain water when it rains, and dew when it's damp, but that's way more hassle than it's worth when you're going to have to dump the tanks anyway. And this is the core of why an RV will never be very far to the self-sufficient end of the spectrum. + +If you want self-sufficiency in travel, look to boats. The self-sufficiency of boats was born out the best of mothers: necessity. + +Boats are more self-sufficient because they have no choice. + +So long as you are always just a few miles from the grocery and hardware stores (like RVers) you're never going to apply the same kind of evolutionary pressure and so you're never going to get the same level of self-sufficiency in the outcome. + +Every smart thing in the bus was taken from reading books on sailing. Sailors know how to store food and stretch water because they have no choice. + +There's a side effect of this that's worth thinking about though no matter how you live. Without that pressure, you also don't generate the kind of community that sailors have, and in the end, even with social distancing, that community is what I've seen sailors turning to more than their own individual skills. The collective sufficiency trumps self-sufficiency every time. + +But you have to have that collective sufficiency, and I'd argue that the dynamics of sailing are what created it. Take a group of people, select for self-reliance out of the gate, because you have to have some degree of self-confidence and self-reliance to even begin to want to live on a boat, and then throw those people together and stir the pot for a hundred-odd years. What you'll get is a tight-knit community of like-minded individuals who know the value of working together because they know the hardship of going it alone. + +That last bit is the key. The hardship of going it alone. When the going gets tough, most RVers go home. Most people with houses lock the door behind them and hole up. That's not to say we haven't met great people on the road, or that communities don't come together, we have and they do, but so long as there's a fall back plan to fall back on, we all do. + +If there is no backup plan and everyone around you is used to improvising, solutions will be found. If everyone around you has a fall back plan, no solutions will be found. + +In the end this is really neither here nor there, except to say that no, living in an RV does not make you much more self-sufficient than living in a house. Buy a few solar panels, get a water holding tank and composting toilet, and you'll be every bit as self-sufficient as we are. Throw in a garden, five years practice in the garden, and you'll be well ahead of us. + +Don't get me wrong, I love living in an RV. It's more fun, puts a lot more adventure in your life, makes you feel more alive, makes you learn to rely on yourself, and host of other things that make it my favorite way to live of the ways I've tried so far. Don't let me put you off it if you're thinking of trying. + +This is really just to say that, no, we were no more prepared for this very interesting year than you were. + +[^1]: Living on a boat puts you in a better place because you have access to a much more self-reliant, better connected community (few, if any RVs have radios. Every ocean-going vessel has a way to communicate, which is a big part of it I think). You might also be able to harvest water if you have a desalinizer, but those are fantastically expensive (worth it in my opinion, but still expense). And seafood is easier to catch than land food. But yeah, self-sufficient RVs? Not a thing. +[^2]: The largest single use of water in the average household is flushing the toilet. Every day we fill a bowl with clean, pure, drinkable water, and then we literally take a crap in it. The is to me, probably the most puzzling, bizarre behavior in the modern western world. +[^3]: There's an old guide to growing veggies on a boat called *Sailing the Farm* that got me thinking about how we could grow food in 26 feet. Crazy as that sounds, people have some clever ideas out there on the internet. And no, it wouldn't make us self-sufficient, but it would move us a little closer to those wolf children. diff --git a/published/2020-07-08_windfall.txt b/published/2020-07-08_windfall.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..dcc2b7c --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2020-07-08_windfall.txt @@ -0,0 +1,54 @@ +The change from living on the road to living in a house is more difficult than the reverse. Or perhaps more painful is the better way to put it. It was difficult to get rid of all of our stuff, [surprisingly difficult](/jrnl/2016/05/root-down), but buying new stuff is downright painful. + +In order to avoid the financial pain, but also the more nebulous, soul-sucking pain of consumer culture that eats at us all, and since most stores were closed anyway, we ended up essentially camping in the house. This was not so much a conscious decision, as a thing that happened. Camping is what we know. + + + +We did have a few items in a storage unit that we brought out here. Our storage unit provided an interesting lesson (again) in how bad I am at estimating what my future self will want. I saved all the wrong things (again). Five boxes of books? Could not get rid of those fast enough[^1]. But damn I wish I had kept more of my tools. I wish I had my saws, my benches, my shelves, my shovels and rakes. [Tools](/jrnl/2015/12/tools). Always save tools. + +Thankfully I did keep my desk. We also kept a dining table. No chairs though. No problem. We pulled up our camp chairs for the first couple weeks. Eventually we found some cheap chairs at a local antique store. To date, that and a bunk bed for the kids, are the only pieces of furniture we've purchased. The previous tenant left a bed frame, we bought a new mattress. + + + + +For the most part though, even months later, we are camping in a house. + +We try to spend most of our time outdoors anyway. Early on in the spring this worked great, but as the summer wore on, without much water to swim in, the heat drove us in. + +
+ + + + + + +
+ +While we did buy some furniture, there were certain things we just did not want to spend money on. Like a washing machine. What an insanely boring thing to spend money on. No one needs a washing machine. What we all need are clean clothes. + +I assumed Corrinne would not stand for this line of thinking, so I said we'd get a washing machine off Craigslist. To get us by until that happened, I bought a hand washing plunger and a couple of five gallon buckets. The house came with, as any house dating from the 19th century should, a clothes line. + +If you've followed luxagraf for long you probably know where this story is headed. Yes, six month later, we're still hand washing all our clothes. In a bucket, with a plunger. It sounds crazy, but the things is... we like it better. Our clothes get just as clean, very little money was spent, and, as a nice added bonus we get healthier because we've built a little exercise into our day. At this point, if I were going to buy anything, it'd be a clothes dryer. + +
+ + + + +
+ +I think this little fringe benefit, of exercise, is a bigger deal than it seems at first glance. Maybe it's just me, but I really dislike "working out". I don't dislike the effort or process, actually, truth be told I love lifting weights, but the whole idea of "exercise" bothers me. That I should stop my life and go to a gym or go do *something* other than just daily living, feels fundamentally unnecessary to me. It feels like a symptom of much deeper problem. Why does my daily life not provide enough physical exertion to keep me healthy? Doesn't that seem odd? + +There are certain habits and customs of modern life that only seem sane because we've been so deeply indoctrinated into them. I believe this is one of those. The idea that you should stop your actual life and "exercise" says a lot about our lives. Life has become so physically easy for most of us these days that we become unhealthy living this way. If this is true, and most evidence suggests it is, I posit there is something seriously wrong with our lives, and the effects probably go far beyond needing to exercise. + +I think this is a sign that life is not supposed to be physically easy, that there needs to be struggle and even suffering to be a fully realized, healthy human being, but never mind that right now. Let's just say you hate the idea of working out, and want to build more exercise into your life: that's quite simple. + +The more time I spent thinking about this, and yes, I often think about it while plunging the day's laundry, the more I thought hmm, what if I built more of these little workouts into my day? What if you used a hand crank blender instead of a Vitamix, what if you used a reel push mower instead of riding mower? What if you used a plunger and a bucket to do laundry? It's really just extends a basic life philosophy I established years ago when I was living in New York: when there's an option, take the stairs. Walk slowly if you want, but take the long way. + + + +And I have good news: you can do this too if you want. It's simple really. Look around your life for machines, and then figure out what people did before there were machines to do it for them. In this spirit I bought a push reel mower and a hand crank coffee grinder. And I know it sounds silly. But you know what, it works. + +The best thing is that it actually makes life more fun. The kids get involved, doing laundry becomes a little thing you do everyday rather than an anonymous task that has to get done. And I like that. I don't think we're here to get things done, I think we're here to do things. + +[^1]: Not that books don't have value. But I find that making notes, writing down passages that grab me, and other methods of extracting information from books is sufficient that there's rarely a need to keep the actual book around. I've since gotten rid of most of them. There are a few I keep for their rarity, or because I frequently refer to or re-read them. diff --git a/published/2020-07-15_eight.txt b/published/2020-07-15_eight.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4181d9a --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2020-07-15_eight.txt @@ -0,0 +1,63 @@ +Happy birthday girls. I can't believe it's been only eight years since you arrived. It feels like you have always been here, like we have all always been here. I can't remember what I did without you, but it couldn't have been much fun. + +I know we weren't able to celebrate your birthday where or how we'd intended this year. But I also know you've already learned that the world is always turning, and you know how to roll with it. + +One thing that doesn't change though is the waking up before dawn. As per birthday request we ate crepes for breakfast, and as per usual, we ate in the early morning twilight. + +
+ + + + + + +
+ +We skipped the balloons this year. As a birder I've always had hesitations about balloons, an alarming amount of which end up in seabird stomachs. This year we decided to retire that tradition. + +
+ + + + + + + +
+ +My favorite part of their birthdays, especially as they get older and more thoughtful, is watching them give each other gifts + +
+ + + +
+ +Then there's this boy who somehow has certain relatives convinced that he too should get some gifts on his sister's birthday. + + + + +Our original plan for the year was to spend a few months exploring the Carolina coasts, then cross the Allegheny Mountains, and head across Ohio, up the thumb of Michigan and back to the Great Lakes. Part of the motivation behind this was that the girls really wanted to spend their birthday at Lake Superior again. + +Obviously that didn't happen. Instead we are here, deep in the Carolina pine forests, making the best of it again. Mostly I am fine with this, but on their birthday, I did feel like I had failed them. I felt it even more so when I went to add the related entries to the bottom of this post and I saw the last four years: train rides, nearly private lakes, white sand beaches, even the swimming pool in Texas looks pretty appealing in the stifling summer heat of South Carolina. But it is what it is, and I don't mean to imply we have a hard life or anything like that. It's just harder to let go of some plans than others. + +On the bright side, we had an oven to bake an actual cake in. We still [love our waffle cake](/essay/waffle-world), but sometimes you need to change it up. Unfortunately, the kids weren't willing to wait for the cake the cool, so the frosting got runny and the cake split on us, something you don't have the worry about with waffle cake. No one cared but me. + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
diff --git a/published/2020-09-23_summer-teeth.txt b/published/2020-09-23_summer-teeth.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..df550db --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2020-09-23_summer-teeth.txt @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +I am so far behind telling these stories I am giving up and skipping a few things in the interest of catching up. + +I spent most of the summer unable to write. Or unable to write what I wanted to write. Unwilling perhaps? I'm not sure, all I know is I didn't do anything I had planned to do when we got here. Like most people I imagine, I was in a bit of a funk most of the summer. + +Opportunities were all around, but I just sat back and listened to the whooshing sound they made as they flew past me. + +Despite having a chance to work on the bus without deadline or the inconvenience of living in it while tearing it up, I did absolutely nothing. I didn't even wash it. I didn't even go in it for months. The coronavirus situation provided me with a nice excuse to be lazy. If the world's shut down anyway, what's the point of doing anything? + +Those bigger, longer writing projects [I said I was going to work on](/jrnl/2020/06/hands-on-the-wheel)? Nah, didn't touch them. I squandered months. The most I managed to do was help Corrinne plant a few things in a small garden plot. But by mid summer I'd lost interest in that too. Corrinne kept at it though. We managed to get a good tomato harvest at least, along with one lonely, but pretty delicious, watermelon. + + + + + +It was a strange summer. I think we were all longing for some beach time, some wide open stretches of sand and water instead of lawns and humidity. But even if there had been beaches open to go to, I'm not sure I'd have made the effort. Something in me was deeply in retrograde this summer. I couldn't even bring myself to post things here. Normally I write things for luxagraf like I breathe, without thinking about it. Not this summer. + +Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the transit of the stars, maybe it was just me. Whatever the case, I did finally snap out of it and start doing the work that needs to be done (more on that later). But for those few months I, we, maybe the whole world to some degree, moved like a somnambulist. + +That's not to say we just lay around in daze. We got out and picked wild berries growing down the road. The kids rode their bikes, built wooden weapons, and explored the world around them as they always do. From their point of view, this summer was undoubtedly different, maybe a little boring, but they still had fun. + + + + + + + + + +And lest you think I am so self-aware, let me be clear: I didn't notice any of this as it happened. It wasn't until the heat broke one day in early September that I suddenly sat up and thought wait, what the hell just happened? How is it September? Why am I not doing anything? + +I don't know for sure what it was that snapped me out of it, but I distinctly remember sitting on the porch, watching the kids reading in the hammock, and suddenly thinking *what am I waiting for? Whatever it is, clearly it isn't coming. I need to get going, now*. + + + + +So I did. There is really no magic to writing. It's like anything else you want to do, at some point you have to force yourself to sit in the chair and do it. Even when you don't want to. Especially when you don't want to. I forced myself into the chair and got to work. That effort cascaded. Start one project and it's easier to start another. And another. + +In some ways, though I look back on it mostly in disgust with myself for falling into a trap of my own thinking, my own lack of will, perhaps my summer malaise was necessary. Perhaps I needed to get the bottom of the barrel I'd been wallowing in for a while. Perhaps you never wake up until you have an uncomfortable collision with the ground beneath you. diff --git a/published/2020-10-01_light-is-clear-in-my-eyes.txt b/published/2020-10-01_light-is-clear-in-my-eyes.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7d95e47 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2020-10-01_light-is-clear-in-my-eyes.txt @@ -0,0 +1,61 @@ +Summer heat never bothers me. It's the humidity. The irony is that I moved back here two decades ago because I loved the humidity. I wanted to sweat, I wanted to suffer that overbearing presence of the world, air so thick you could cut it with a knife. Sometimes I still do. I'll take a humid night in New Orleans over a cool one in Chicago any time. But increasingly I find myself itching for that first day when the humidity breaks and you can feel Autumn in the air. + +You can see it too. There is a quality of light in dry air that is cleaner, crisper, more revealing. The world sparkles more, feels more brilliantly alive. + + + +I've come to think lately that it's not Autumn that I was wanting, but the dry western air of my youth. That dryness is calling me back home. Technically speaking, I grew up by the beach, the air was rarely dry like the desert. Still, it was never as humid like it is here. + +I miss the desert. But I miss the balance between extremes even more. I miss the damp foggy mornings that give way to warm, but crisp clear afternoons. Around here the damn foggy mornings give way to... damp foggy afternoons. + + + + +At least it's cool and we can get outside again. We'd gone soft over the summer. We lived inside. Cheated the heat. Lured into the air conditioned nightmare. It's hard to escape it without some serious effort of will. It also helps to have something worth going outside for -- white sand, red rock, cool mountain forests, waves, tacos, something. + +The minute the humidity broke though we went back out. The hammock went up, the camp chairs moved back by the fire pit, the rope swing got pulled out of the branches where it had hung, unused through the summer heat. Life is good again. + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ +I've said for years living indoors was killing us. All of us that is. This year, for the first time, I've seen quite few other people saying the same, albeit for different reasons. Stale, recycled building air is especially bad if you're trying to stop the spread of a virus, but it's bad for a host of other reasons too. Long after this virus is a distant memory, spending all your time indoors will still be bad for you. Get outside more if you can. Spend a little time every day under the open sky and you'll feel better. No roof but stars. + + + +With the heat gone I finally got to work cleaning and fixing up a few things on the bus. I replaced the exhaust manifold gaskets, flushed the radiator, bled the brakes, replaced the starter relay (again), and cleaned up some wiring. There's a considerable amount of exhaust leaking though and I think I am going to take it in to get that looked at. I have neither the tools nor skills to redo all the exhaust pipes and joints. I did finally get started washing and waxing it though. + + + +I also started on some interior work. I installed a new MPPT solar controller that is a thousand times better and cheaper than the PWM controller we had previously. It's amazing how much the price of solar components have come down in the past five years. Even LiPO batteries are about half the price they were two years ago. + +Next I tore out an entire wall, taking out the couch, and pulling down my custom made cabinet. I also removed a good portion of the ceiling. I did all that primarily so I could fix a water leak where the wires from the solar panel came in. I added a proper cable entry cover to stop the water leak. + + + +I decided not to drill for the cover, opting instead for some high strength polyurethane adhesive. It makes me a little nervous, but I thought this made a good test since if it fails, the wires will keep the cover from flying off. It definitely solved the leak anyway, how it holds up over the years remains to be seen. + + + +I figured as long as the wall was torn up I might as well make a few improvements as well. I installed some heavier wire coming down from solar setup so we can add a couple more panels down the road if we want. I also ran some coaxial cable up to the roof for a Wi-Fi antenna. The I added a shunt to the batteries and ran some wired up through the wall so we can monitor the battery state without Bluetooth (which is handy, but will inevitably fail). + + + +Since I was tearing up the ceiling I also decided to test how my initial ceiling panel installation strategy worked. I deliberately left some strategic gaps (which are covered by the metal strips you see in the photos) so I could remove the tongue and groove panels without removing all of them. I'm happy to say this did work, perfectly in fact. I was able to easily pull out a couple panels over the stove to fix the ground wire on the light there, which had been flickering annoyingly for years now. + +After a summer in which I was unable to do much of anything, working on things again felt good. When we were on the road I tended to work in small bursts when time and circumstances permitted (or at the side of the road when circumstances required). Now though I can get a little bit done everyday, which gives me a sense of slow steady progress that I rather prefer to the burst and then nothing workflow. + +I find this interesting because I was once a fan of the extremes of things: everything and then nothing at all. I still see the merit in this for some things, but the danger is that time spent doing nothing at all comes the vastly outweigh the time spent in intense bursts of work. Everything or nothing too often turns out to be nothing at all. + +I've come to appreciate that steady, little-bit-every-day approach. The secret is to never take a day off whatever it is, make it a habit. Do something every day. It doesn't matter how much, just do something. Sometimes it's hard to tell you're making any progress, but if you just force yourself to sit in the chair and do the work anyway, then one day you look back and realize how far you've come. diff --git a/published/2020-10-28_walking-north-carolina-woods.txt b/published/2020-10-28_walking-north-carolina-woods.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e69ffa1 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2020-10-28_walking-north-carolina-woods.txt @@ -0,0 +1,57 @@ +I started traveling with my feet, walking out the front door as a kid to go exploring. There was a tract of vacant land not far from my house I would walk to in the early days. It had a cluster of Eucalyptus trees that offered shade in the summer, and from mid way up, a view of the sea. + +I started going farther and farther afield as I got older, until I was sneaking off to catch the southbound PCH bus, carefully horded change heavy in my pocket, often ending up twenty or more miles from home at the age of twelve[^1]. + +Later I spent a lot of time on the trails of the Sierra Nevada, the White Mountains, the Trinity Alps, the Arizona desert, the western slope of Colorado, and the canyon lands of Utah. And then one day, I stopped walking around. + +It wasn't a conscious decision, stopping. I just didn't make the time for walking anymore. What you don't make time for, doesn't happen. And it didn't for over a decade, until I decided it was time to plan a walk. It just popped into my head one day, *you should go for a walk*. + + + +So I pulled up a map and plotted a trip to the mountain trails of North Carolina, a place called Shining Rock Wilderness. I'd intended to go alone, but my kids got wind of my plan and wanted in. It took some scrambling to find enough gear for us all, but I managed. I'm glad I did, walking with my kids made it better in every way. + + + + +It wasn't a long walk, but it was our kind of walk. We followed a river side trail a few miles up a thickly forested valley, under a canopy of yellow birch, oak, and beach, with buckeye and tulip poplar beneath. The forest was decked out in autumn colors. Red, orange, yellow, and brown leaves rained down with every shuddering breeze. + +We set up camp in the fading light the first evening, and there we stayed. We played by the river, exploring upstream the first morning to see where another river cut in and the valley opened up some. Mainly though we spent our time in our little neighborhood of river valley. + + + + +It was a fine river, babbling calmly in some places, but turning to a tumbling cataract in others. It had the perfect clarity of western rivers. Even in pools six feet deep, we could see the rocky, leaf-strewn bottom below. In the shallows thin ribbons of clear water slid over the black granite rocks, shimmering like heat waves on a desert horizon. You wanted to lay down and drink it right off the rocks. + +We didn't of course, but there is something tremendously calming about laying down by the water. It was cold, but not unbearable. We tossed our clothes on the rocks and went swimming one afternoon, laying afterward on the black granite shore, letting the warmth of the afternoon sun on the rocks chase away the chill. + + + + + + +In the evenings we would cook dinner down by the river on our tiny stove. We made all our own food in the dehydrator ahead of time and rehydrated it in camp. Mac and cheese, a chicken curry we named Shiny Rock Curry. Rehydrated canned chicken is better than it sounds. And everything is better when you eat it in the wild, next to a river. + + + + +Every night after dinner we walked a little way up the river and stashed our bear canister well away from the tent. On the way back we'd lie down on our backs and watch the pink sunset through the yellow leaves of the trees. Then the bats would dart overhead, silhouetted against the twilight sky. + + + + +The kids didn't seem to mind the deep darkness of the forest at night. Although, for once I didn't encounter any resistance to going to bed. They may not have been afraid of the dark forest, but they weren't terribly eager to remain out in it either. A campfire would likely have helped, but sadly, there are no fires allowed in the Shiny Rock Wilderness right now. + +One night I got up in the early morning darkness and unzipped the tent to a panorama of stars, with Orion perfectly framed in the one treeless spot of sky. It was cold, but I sat out on a log, watching the clouds drift past the glow of the moon, hidden somewhere behind the ridge. I couldn't help wondering how many problems might be solved if we all had a chance to more regularly see the stars. It's hard to take yourself too seriously when the stars are always there to remind you what's real and what's theatre. + + + +Early mornings on the river are magical. Get up when the light of the world is still soft and gray and stand and listen to the water. There is nothing better than morning twilight beside a river. + +We were up early every morning. The kids would play on the rocks while I made coffee in the close company of a trio of rock wrens that were our only real visitors the whole trip. They seemed genuinely curious about what we were doing. They studied us with cocked heads, watching as we ate our breakfast burritos. They left when I made hot chocolate, though even later, when we were racing leaf boats in the eddies, I heard them chattering somewhere in the thicket of mountain laurel across the river. + + + + +The last morning we packed up our gear and headed home. None of us wanted to though. I was kicking myself for not taking more time off, I had plenty to spare. I just hadn't anticipated how much we would all want to stay. The kids spent much of the hike back plotting ways to come back, times to come back, what would it be like in spring? Was it hot in summer? As I listened to them talk about it I found myself wondering how long it would be before they were counting their change and looking up bus schedules. + +[^1]: Kids don't do this any more. I'm not sure I'd want mine to, but it was a different time. And my parents were never, so far as I know, aware that I did this. The bus riding was mostly done in the company of a friend or two, mutual support was needed to travel far at that age. diff --git a/published/2020-11-04_halloween.txt b/published/2020-11-04_halloween.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..34263c6 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2020-11-04_halloween.txt @@ -0,0 +1,44 @@ +Our kids look forward to Halloween the way I used to look forward to Christmas. They'll sit around in May plotting different things they can be for next Halloween. Then they'll ask *when is Halloween?* the way some kids ask *are we there yet?* + +It's fun for Corrinne and I to listen to all their costume ideas. In the course of a year we hear dozens of plans tossed around. I encouraged the more outlandish ones, though those tend to be abandoned the fastest. I've always wanted to see if Corrinne could figure out a way to make some of their more creative ideas into costumes, like "a haunted pine tree" or a siren. + +
+ + + + + + + + + + +
+ +This year costumes that are also pajamas were all the rage. I support this rage because costumes should be worn for at least the next six months, ideally much longer. Our kids are still playing with the fairy wings they [wore for Halloween when we were in Patrick's Point](/jrnl/2017/11/halloween-and-big-trees) three years ago. + +Elliott somehow found out about these pajama costumes and discovered one that was a flying squirrel. But then his sister chose to be a rock star (specifically, [Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs](https://karenomusic.com/biography), because Lilah's imagination is always very detailed and precise), so he decided to be a rock star flying squirrel. Then the same thing happened to our erstwhile leopard, who became a rock star leopard. + +The funny thing about this is our kids really have no idea what a rock star is, not that such things matter. They just want to get dressed up, eat candy, and dance around all night. Are there even rock stars anymore? I have a hard time picturing Keith Richards or Mick Jagger getting away with their antics in today's world. + + + +We skipped the trick-or-treating this year, as I imagine most people did. For us there wasn't really anywhere to go anyway. Our nearest neighbors are cows, which are notorious for only having tootsie rolls, good and plenty, and other candy no one wants. + +We played it safe and celebrated by having a Halloween candy scavenger hunt and decorating some sugar cookies. The scavenger hunt was all Corrinne's doing, I lack that sort of festive creativity. + + + + + +Black frosting turns out to be tough, we settled for gray. Otherwise though the kids made out like bandits with cookies *and* plenty of candy squirreled away for the rest of the week. + +I always try to get them to eat all their candy on Halloween. I am a big believer in the binge -- just get it over with. Somehow they never fall for this. They have rather remarkable restraint in that way. Elliott always tells me he can't eat anymore or he'll get a stomach ache. No way I was smart enough to let that stop me when I was his age. + + + + + +One change from bus life, we have an oven so we got to roast our pumpkins seeds this year. It got me thinking, *hey now, I could fix the oven in the bus while we're sitting around here.* + +I'm not entirely sure I want to fix it though. Somehow it feels like abandoning our [waffling ways](/essay/waffle-world). Then again, there are things you can't waffle. Like pumpkin seeds. But is that worth the trouble? I don't know. I'm still mulling it over. Maybe by next Halloween we'll have it sorted out. You don't want to rush into these things after all. diff --git a/published/2020-12-02_learning-to-ride-bike.txt b/published/2020-12-02_learning-to-ride-bike.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b08d4be --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2020-12-02_learning-to-ride-bike.txt @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +We gave Elliott a bike for [his birthday last year](/jrnl/2019/12/birthday-beach), but I've been slow in teaching him how to ride. When we got back from our [walk in the woods](/jrnl/2020/10/walking-north-carolina-woods), I made it a point to give him a chance to practice every day. + +The road in front of our house sees four or five cars a day at most. It's generally a safe place to ride. We'd make a couple trips back and forth, up and down the hill with me running along beside him, holding on to the back of his seat. We'd do this two or three times before my back started to hurt and he'd want to go back to his scooter. He was faster on the scooter and he didn't have dad loping along behind him the whole time. I'd sit at the side of the road and watch the kids, the girls on bike Elliott on his scooter. The only condition was that we had to do the two laps on the bike. + +After doing this for a few weeks, my fingers getting ever lighter in their grip, he had it down. I'd let go for extended distances and he was riding his bike. He just didn't know it yet. He was cruising along in that blissful space where he had no idea that he could fail. In his mind, no matter what happened, I was there to catch him so he could relax and be free. + +One evening his sister noticed me letting go. She squealed in excitement and started to say something, but I managed to keep her quiet. I knew she'd tell him that night though -- they're very loyal to each other -- but I didn't want him to discover it while he was doing it. It's better to find out after the fact I think, to have that realization of not only can I do this, I already did it. + + + +The next day he asked me if it was true and I said yes. He smiled and got on his bike and asked me for a push and he was off riding. For a couple days I needed me to give him a little push to get him started, but then one day I went to do that and he said no, "I don't need any help." And there you go. + + + + + + + +--- + +If you know me or Corrinne it should come as no great surprise that our kids love to read. People often ask what we do out here in the woods all day, well, one answer would be: we read. These days nothing goes unread -- packaging, labels, fine print, everything gets read. + + + + + +This got me thinking about parenting. I've always said, half jokingly, that all you really need to teach your kids is basic human kindness and how to read. The rest is information and experience they can seek out for themselves using those tools. Be kind and read the signs is the modus operandi of life. + +I've since added cooking, spreadsheet formulas, compound interest, and edge cases in American tax code to my basic human curriculum, but I haven't changed my overall approach, which has always been that the main job of being a parent is to keep your kids alive and stay out of their way as much as possible. + +I've tried to do that, though sometimes it is hard. Mistakes have been made. One of my daughters is still getting over a fear of boats because I thought she'd be fine sitting on the floor of a canoe for a short paddle. She was not. She's coming around though. This spring we'll try again. + +Sometimes you have to hold onto the seat. No one just rides a bike. No one just reads. But I remain convinced that you should let go as soon as you can, probably sooner than you think you should. diff --git a/qutebrowser-notes.txt b/qutebrowser-notes.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 584a47a..0000000 --- a/qutebrowser-notes.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,18 +0,0 @@ -handy commands: - :download - -## shortcuts - -xo - open url in background tab -go - edit current url -gO - edit current url and open result in new tab -gf - view source -;y - yank hinted url -;i - hint only images -;b - open hint in background tab -;d - download hinted url -PP - Open URL from selection in new tab -ctrl+a Increment no. in URL -ctrl+x Decrement no. in URL - -Solarized theme: https://bitbucket.org/kartikynwa/dotty2hotty/src/1a9ba9b80f07e1f63b740da5e6970dc5a97f1037/qutebrowser.py?at=master&fileviewer=file-view-default diff --git a/scratch.txt b/scratch.txt index d1152ed..97f32e9 100644 --- a/scratch.txt +++ b/scratch.txt @@ -1,20 +1,23 @@ -It would seem that while you can take the travelers off the road, you cannot to some extent take the +We underestimate our capabilities. Not in the grand sense. In the grand sense we probably overestimate our capabilities. But in the personal sense most of us have been trained to underestimate ourselves. We underestimate what we can do when we combine vision, will, and work. -We are camping in our house. It is a long term campsite to be sure. We don't have to worry about where we're going to go next for quite a while, but without meaning to do it, we noticed that we are essentially camping in our house. +The strange thing is we seem to admire other people who are able to do this, but never think that we ourselves can do the same. -There is very little furniture, for the first two months the only places we had to sit were six chairs I bought for $30 at a local antique store. We're used to sitting on the ground, so we just sat on the ground. Even now that we've added two couches, we still sit on the floor more often than not it seems. -It's not that we can't get more furniture, we could. But once you learn to live with less, there is no need for more. I know that sounds kind of self-righteous perhaps, but it's not a conscious thing. We don't sit around thinking, oh, we get by on so little. That would silly. Getting by with less isn't worth building an identity around, but once you internalize it you will find life is much easier. +--- + + +I think there are two major tasks to be undertaken in the middle of your life, one is coming to terms with the reduced possibilities of the future, letting go of the ones you are sure aren't happening to focus on the one's that could still happen. I will never make the U.S Olympic rowing team and rather than have that missed goal rattling around somewhere in the back of my mind going, I have to address it. Rather than sitting around mumbling about how I could have been a contender I have to accept that no I could not, I tried and literally could not, and let that go so that other goals become more feasible. -There's a saying that used to be a way of life: use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without. Every time you're about to buy something, consider that saying for a moment first. +The other major task in midlife is to recognize the ciclical nature of, well, nature. -Whatever the case, +--- +"It's fun to do something for no reason at all because freedom is the foundation of all human delight... freedom of the will, the capacity to choose and act and attend for no other reason than that we happen to want to." 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. @@ -46,31 +49,7 @@ Another ancillary benefit (goal?) of traveling in the bus was getting to see all --- -We tossed around possibilities. We considered buying a house. We considered buying a boat. But then we stepped back and considered what it was we liked about traveling in the bus. There are many answers to this question, but some of the big ones are: nature, the lack of modern human noises, cars, planes -- I love it when my kids say the birds woke them -- and the self-reliance. - - -Just when we were considering packing it in, a pandemic shuts down the country. Just when were thinking of not packing it in, but carrying on for another year everyone and their mother decides to go camping. When everyone zigs, the only smart thing to do is zag. - -The joy of living in the bus has less to do with the actual travel and more to do with escaping the trappings of the 9-to-5, suburban, consumer-capitalist world. We're still part of the world in plenty of ways, and propped up by it in many ways -- we wouldn't be able to travel this way without that world -- but out there in the woods we just felt better. - -If you put these things in a spreadsheet, as I do, the things that jump out at you are that you don't actually need to travel to get all this stuff. So a confluence perhaps. At the time it's difficult to travel by land in the US, perhaps we don't need to? - -One day a house came up for rent not too far from where we were. It was an old farmhouse sitting on a few acres, but more importantly it was surrounded by hundreds of acres of forest. I called and talked to the landlord. We met. We talked. A few days later after he had told us we could rent it, he said he was sorry but his wife had rented it to someone else. - -We shrugged. These things happen so much when you travel you cease to worry about them for more than a couple hours. That confluence maybe wasn't meant to happen just now. Other confluences had me thinking. - -It is very hard to do anything other than travel when you are traveling. To create things on the road is a challenge. The updates I post here is the most I have ever managed beyond notes scribbled in one of the many notebooks I lug around. - -If you want to write a book about traveling, you have to stop traveling. If you want to do anything that requires sustained effort over weeks, months, traveling just gets in the way. This is one of the reasons I think long term travelers leave behind very little in the way of written legacy. The flip side of this is that the writers we think of as writing about traveling often haven't traveled all that much. -I always think of *On The Road*, of which the actual time on the road is vanishingly small. The *Air Conditioned Nightmare* is based on a single cross country trip lasting a couple of months. *Blue Highways* takes place over nine weeks. In *Travels with Charley* Steinbeck spends about 75 days on the road. *Wild America* spans barely a season. The only real exception I've found is *Kingbird Highway*, which does record a tremendous amount of travel sustained over many years. - -Do I want to write a book about our trip? Honestly, I am not sure. Possibly. But I have an unrelated book I very much want to write (and am). I have some other projects I'd like to tackle that would be tough to do while traveling. - - - - ---- Y'all are going to be very close. @@ -80,10 +59,6 @@ That's what an inspector said to me once when we were selling our house and I to - - - -⁣ I want to be tested in ways I can't imagine and try to be ok no matter what happens. I looked forward to disasters, I looked forward to having to get out of tough situations. @@ -94,15 +69,7 @@ Now, mind you, "ok" doesn't mean happy as a clam, totally unaffected, no bad fee Cycles. Loops. Close them where you find them. For example, heres an energy loop: sun, plants, animals, waste, plants animals, waste. Find yourself in that. For example, the sun helps plants grow, hogs eat some of those plants, hog get slaughtered and made into bacon, I eat the bacon, I crap out the bacon into a composting toilet that eventually becomes soil for the plants that grow so the hogs can eat them... this is a minimally wasteful loop. I don't want to call it closed because there are variables (water, sunlight, not having a plague of locusts decend on your plants, etc), but it is robust on scale that swings from robust to totally batshit crazy, which would be the cycle that puts bacon in a package you buy from the store. - - - - - - - - - +--- A while back someone at work mentioned wanting to write about how there is little to no regulation in the realm of "alternative" medicine and its rife with scams. I volunteered to write a rebuttal, because I'm glad alternative medicine is not regulated. I did not elaborate and I forgot all about it until someone brought it up again, this time specifically asking why I was glad there were no regulations. @@ -112,21 +79,7 @@ I don't hold this against science as a method of inquire, but I do very much hol There is always a priesthood setting the limits of acceptable discourse, what matters is how that priesthood (and the culture more broadly) handles dissent. How much room is there for discourse outside the acceptable? We're very fortunate to live in a culture where for the most part there are no limits placed on dissenters. I can write this, publish it where anyone can read it, and there are (currently) no consequences. I will not be burned at the stake, exiled or any number of horrible things visited on those with "unacceptable" ideas in various cultures throughout the ages. There is some risk of publishing these opinions and having them come back to haunt me at some point in the future of course, but ultimately all I am advocating for is that we continue to not punish, or censor people who old opinions, beliefs, customs, what have you, that are considered unacceptable to the current priesthood. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - +--- How do I make this while still being present. Here. Right now. In this bus, on this night, feeling this feeling? diff --git a/se-renta.txt b/se-renta.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 48690af..0000000 --- a/se-renta.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,117 +0,0 @@ -When we left Dallas our plan was to be gone six months. - -We were going to spend the winter down here, stay warm, improve our Spanish a bit and go back to the bus. Then we were going to spend spring traveling the southwest desert, see some areas of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah that we hadn't seen yet, and then head up to Wyoming, Idaho and Montana when it got hot, spend summer at higher, cooler elevations. Then we'd swing south again when it cooled off and come back down to Mexico and work our way down the west coast of Mexico for the winter of 2019/2020. - -It was a pretty good plan I thought. It still is a pretty good plan. It's important you make plans but it's rare to actually follow one for too long. And that one, much as I still like it, is no longer *the* plan. At least not on that timeline. - -The new plan is to stay down here an extra year. We love Mexico and we don't want to leave just now. We, I especially, have some larger projects I want to work on, projects that require more time than is easy to come by when traveling the way we were. The truth is it's very hard to write from the road. When you're traveling you're too busy living to do more than scribble notes frantically. To write well about travel, the irony is, you need to stop traveling. - -Then there's a other reason we're staying: money. - -When we parked the bus last year we knew that before it went much further it was going to need some work. Significant, time and money eating work. We need more power on hills and the only way I've come up with to do that is to either drop in something bigger, a 440 or the like, or rebuild the 318 to get better compression, which means boring out the engine, new pistons, new manifolds, probably a new transmission and quite a few other things that are not cheap. It's all doable, but it takes money. - -Coming to Mexico was part of that plan, live cheap, save up some extra cash and pour it into the engine. Then, just before it was done, my biggest client decided to scrap the project I'd been working on for a year. I won't lie, it caught me by surprise. It wasn't so much the money, though losing over half your income is rarely good, but it derailed me for a bit. Like you probably do I get wrapped up in the things I make, I want them to good, I want others to like them. No matter how much you like something though, not everyone is always going to like it. It took me a while to get past that on the emotional level, but I finally did and then it hit me, oh right, that was all our money too. Crap. - -We're very fortunate to be able to do this and there isn't a day that goes by that I'm not grateful for everything we've been able to do. If we had to sell the bus and go home tomorrow I would have no regrets. We're not going to do that, but I don't mind saying that the belts are going to have to be pulled tighter for a while. Sometimes you do have to adjust things if you want to keep going. - -Throughout this trip people have emailed to ask all kinds of questions about money and for the most part I've avoided the subject. Until now. - -It takes money to travel. Sometimes it takes a lot. To get our bus back on the road and house ourselves for nearly a month in California we spent over $7,000. We came close enough to just selling it that I have interior photos I was going to post in a Craigslist ad. That's a lot of money and it was the hardest decision we've ever had to make. - -I tell that story not in search of sympathy, but to point out the obvious. It take money to travel. - -For a point so obvious, this one gets little press. Before we left I searched high and low for anyone willing to talk about how much it cost to travel the U.S. by RV and came up with very few hard and fast numbers. Consider this my contribution to anyone searching for information on how much it cost to travel the United States in a 1969 RV. - -First though we need to get some terms down. We track our spending to the penny, so I can give some pretty accurate figures at the monthly level. Ultimately though this is not how much it costs. The real answer is that how much is costs to travel the U.S. by RV really depends on where you are, how many of you there are, and how you travel. For contrast's sake, to balance out the $7,000+ month in California we spent less than $2000 the month before we left for Mexico. - -That said, here's a rough number: **It costs around $3,000-$4,000 a month for our family of five to live on the road in the United Stats**. This figure assumes no unforeseen expenses, which is a euphemism for the bus didn't break down. Uou need to have extra money available for when it breaks down. It will. - -Now I know that's a big spread, $3k-$4k. The reason is that around half our spending is on food, which varies tremendously around the country. The west is much more expensive in nearly every regard, relative to the midwest and south, but especially for food. Generally speaking the $4000 a month areas would be California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, etc. The midwest and south are cheaper for us because food is cheaper there. In the end things rounded out to $3438/month[^1]. - -On the flip side of that equation boondocking tends to be easier out west -- there's lots more BLM land, which means you can find a free place to stay much easier -- so you spend less on camping (except in California, Calfornia is just expense). If you're on the Gulf Coast it's going to cost you upwards of $30 a night in to camp in most of Florida (unless you know where to look). - -Another way that average is lying is that throughout the course of our trip we've spent less and less per month (except for last winter in California, which puts an irritating bump in the nice downward sloping graph I generated). There are two reason for this. First, we're getting smarter about boondocking and finding cheap camping. Second, we went back cross the country to the south and midwest where food is cheaper. - -Final point -- we could do it for less. We could probably cut our food bill by 30 percent if we dropped the organic meat and eggs for conventional and changed our eating habits a bit (in fact we have by necessity here Mexico). We don't, or we didn't in the U.S., because we didn't need to. As I noted in the post on food, food is one of life's most important elements to me. Not that good food has to be expensive, but good quality ingredients in the U.S. are going to cost you even if you do what we do and mostly shop at Asian and Latin grocery stores. - -So what's the point of all this money talk? The U.S. is considerably more expensive than Mexico. We spend just over half our U.S. monthly spending here in Mexico, sans bus. - -You probably could have guessed that, what you probably would not guess is why. - -Part of it is that some things are cheaper here. Though really, not that much cheaper. Food, which makes up the largest part of our budget, is about 30% less here. That's nothing to sneeze at, it helps for sure, but it's not the real reason it's cheaper for us to live in Mexico. - -When I take a hard look at the spreadsheet, and then rotate it sideways to get a new perspective, what really jumps out is the "miscellaneous" category. I don't get real fine grained with spending categories so miscellaneous holds everything that is not gas, food, lodging or vehicle repair. It holds the non-essentials. That category doesn't exist in Mexico. We have spent less than $200 on misc spending in four months of living in Mexico. - -Why? It's pretty simple, we don't have access to Amazon.com. - -But wait, you're travelers, you live in a bus, you don't buy useless stuff, you can't, where would you put it? - -I know right? But it turns out they makes some pretty small and expensive useless stuff you even can fit in a bus. - -Why do we buy it though, surely we know better? - -We do know better and yet we still buy it. - -The spreadsheet does not lie. But why? - -After spending some time meditating on this I've a very simple answer: access. - -Mexico has pretty much everything the United States has, especially here in San Miguel. My wife brought home duck fat yesterday for crying out loud (it was only $2). We're not in the boonies, we're not just eating beans and tortillas. The difference is that here all the stuff you could buy is not all in your face 24/7. - -Shops here do not have windows, most do not even have a way to browse through stuff. Half of them you can't even get to the stuff yourself. Instead you walk in, tell the person what you need, the person asks small medium or large and then goes rummaging around to find what you want. - -Everything you buy here comes from your own mind first and is found second. - -In the United States everything is presented and then your mind decides what to buy. On the internet literally everything is right there at your finger tips. - -One of these purchasing models will leave more money in your pocket than the other, full stop. - -And I know, I know. I like to think I am immune to advertising too, that I am smarter than the advertisers, that I resist the never-ending onslaught "buy this stuff". - -Unfortunately my spreadsheet says otherwise. I am not immune. - -And I don't even own a TV, how much more would I be buying if I watched television and were subjected to that much more advertising? And it's not that I'm comparing many years of life in the U.S to just three months in Mexico. Comparing the U.S. to Mexico is not what led me to this conclusion. It got me thinking about it, but it wasn't until I went back and made another comparison that I believed it. It was when I comparing the time we spent in the bus without a car, to the time we had a car that made it painfully obvious to me. It's very simple: given a car and easy access to everything, we spent more. - -Take away the access and we spent less. Mexico also takes away the access, so we spend less here too, but it's not the situations or places really, it's us. - -I am not immune. You are not immune. We all fall for advertising. - -Advertising is a debased form of magic, which is another way of saying it's powerful and you probably are not aware of its power in any conscious way. I know I am not. However, now that I'm outside its sphere of influence a bit, I've noticed something -- I don't want anything. Maybe that's not quite true, I want much less. So much less that I became aware of it, I noticed how much less stuff I wanted. At first I thought I was maybe a little crazy, but we've talked to couple of Americans who've been down here a while longer than us and they've noticed it too. - -A good example of this for me would be camera lenses. I use old, manual focus lenses. In the course of the trip I've bought and sold about a dozen, and there were many more I wanted to buy. I used to follow all the used lens websites and would lust after various expensive hard to find lenses that I wanted. Wanting gives you a hit of dopamine. So nice. Not wanting takes away the dopamine. This is biochemical source of buyers remorse, once you have something, no more dopamine from wanting it. You have to move on to wanting something new. This will never end. Nothing you ever buy will satisfy you. It can't, no dopamine. Subjected to this cycle of wanting we become like a rat in cage, running on a wheel, around and around, chasing that hit of dopamine in an endless loop -- desire gratification dissatisfaction, desire gratification dissatisfaction. - -Once you see yourself doing this you can't unsee it. It's horrible to realize this is you. That you are a lab rat in someone else's experiment. You also start thinking more broadly about other things. I started obsessing more and more about where my attention goes and how that affects me. - -In the case of the lenses I stopped reading all those sites and redirected my attention to actual photographs. I started directing my focus to technique instead of tools -- things like composition, texture, light, tone and all the other bits of craft that actually make good photos. Not only have I not bought a lens since, I've become much more satisfied with the ones I own. - -This dovetails with a lesson we learned early on in the bus -- once you realize you can live without something, get rid of it. It will never become more useful by existing in your closet. It is either useful right now or not at all (tools are the only exception to that rule). Once I realized I could live without reading about cool new camera lenses I sat down and scrutinized everything I read on a regular basis and got rid of anything that was likely to make me want stuff. - -I wanted off that wheel. - -If you like to travel there's a good chance you have more D4 dopamine receptors (here's a good link to learn about D4) than the average person, which makes you especially prone to wanting, which in turn makes you susceptible to advertising, which in turn, ironically, makes you less likely to be able to save up the money to travel. - -What does this have to do with traveling? Well we sat back and took stock of things, what we all wanted to do, why we wanted to do it, the whole bit and we decided that we wanted to stay here in San Miguel for longer than six months. - -Not too long after that we found a house that was just about perfect for us so we signed a year lease and we're staying here. We're staying here to slow down for a while, to work on some projects that require the kind of deeper focus that's difficult to manage on the road, to get better at Spanish, to try to move beyond a superficial, compartmentalized understanding of the place we're in, and to save money, both because we can live a little cheaper and because we spend less here. - -There are other reasons, the kids wanted to do somethings that are hard to do on the road, like take gymnastics and swimming lessons, and I wanted a break from crawling under the bus every other day to see what the mysterious fluid was leaking now. - - - - - - - - - - - - -[^1]: This is endlessly debated on the internet by people looking to justify which variety of travel they support. Based on what I've read at the [Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies][1], as well as Michael Sivak's work for the University of Michigan Transportation Research on the energy intensity of both driving and flying, a family of 5 driving, even in the bus, puts less carbon in the air than flying. Would it be better to do neither? Yes. As for the whole climate change debate, I managed to pick up enough of an understand of energy flow and the laws of thermodynamics back in high school to realize that billions of tons of infrared-trapping gases into Earth’s atmosphere is going to fuck things up as it were. The fact that Earth’s climate has changed drastically without human interference in the past should really just demonstrate how idiotic it is to tinker with a system clearly vulnerable to destabilization. - -[^2]: To arrive at that figure I also threw out all our early spending on bus restoration. If you haven't been following along since the beginning, know that we went ahead and hit the road with no water tank (no plumbing at all for the first two weeks), no propane system and no solar system. Solar especially makes our actual monthly spending considerably higher for the first year, but assuming you're not remodeling on the road, you won't have these expenses so I left them out. - -[1]: https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2015/09/evolving-climate-math-of-flying-vs-driving/ - - - diff --git a/src/how-use-websters-1913-dictionary-linux-edition.txt b/src/how-use-websters-1913-dictionary-linux-edition.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..12898f3 --- /dev/null +++ b/src/how-use-websters-1913-dictionary-linux-edition.txt @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +I suspect the overlap of Linux users and writers who care about the Webster's 1913 dictionary is vanishingly small. Quite possible just me. But in case there are others, I am committing these words to internet. Plus I will need them in the future when I forget how I set this up. + +Here is how you install, set up, and configure the command line app `sdcv` so that you too can have the one true dictionary at your fingertips in the command line app of your choosing. + +But first, about the one true dictionary. + +The one true dictionary is debatable I suppose. Feel free to debate. I have a "compact" version of the Oxford English Dictionary sitting on my desk and it is weighty both literally and figuratively in ways that the Webster's 1913 is not, but any dictionary that deserves consideration as your one true dictionary ought to do more than spit out dry, banal collections of words. + +John McPhee writes eloquently about the power of a dictionary in his famous New Yorker essay, *[Draft No 4](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/draft-no-4)*, which you can find in paper in [the compilation of essays by the same name](https://bookshop.org/books/draft-no-4-on-the-writing-process/9780374537975). Fellow New Yorker writer James Somers has [a brilliant essay on the genius of McPhee's dictionary](http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary) and how you can get it installed on your Mac. + +Remarkably, the copy of the Webster's 1913 that Somers put up is still available. So go grab that. + +However, while his instructions are great for macOS users, they don't work on Linux and moreover they don't offer access from the shell. I write in Vim, in a tmux session, so I wanted an easy way to look things up without switching apps. + +The answer is named `sdcv`. It is, in the words of its man page, "a simple, cross-platform text-based utility for working with dictionaries in StarDict format." That last bit is key, because the Webster's 1913 file you downloaded from Somers is in StarDict format. I installed `sdcv` from the Arch Community repository, but it's in Debian and Ubuntu's official repos as well. + +Once `sdcv` is install you need to unzip that dictionary.zip file you should have grabbed from Somers' post. That will give you four files. All we need to do now is move them somewhere `sdcv` can find them. By default that's `$(XDG_DATA_HOME)/stardict/dic`, although you can customize that by add thing Environment variable `STARDICT_DATA_DIR` to your .bashrc. I keep my dictionaries in `~/bin/dict` folder so I just drop this in .bashrc: + +~~~bash +STARDICT_DATA_DIR="$HOME/bin/dict/ +~~~ + +### How to Lookup Words in Webster's 1913 from the Command Line + +To use your new one true dictionary, all you need to do is type `sdcv` and the word you'd like to look up. Add a leading '/' before the word and `sdcv` will use a fuzzy search algorithm, which is handy if you're unsure of the spelling. Search strings can use `?` and `*` for regex searching. I have never used either. + +My use is very simple. I wrote a little Bash function that looks like this: + +~~~bash +function d() { + sdcv "$1" | less +} +~~~ + +With this I type `d search_term` and get a paged view of the Webster's 1913 entry for that word. Since I always write in a tmux split, I just move my cursor to the blank split, type my search term and I can page through and read it while considering the context in the document in front of me. + +### But I Want a GUI + +Check out [StarDict](http://www.huzheng.org/stardict/), there are versions for Linux, Windows, and macOS, as well as source code. diff --git a/src/kindle-hacking.txt b/src/kindle-hacking.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..064c700 --- /dev/null +++ b/src/kindle-hacking.txt @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +links: + +[Installing ADB and Fastboot on Linux & Device Detection "Drivers"](https://forum.xda-developers.com/android/general/guide-installing-adb-fastboot-linux-adb-t3478678) + +You need to be on 6.3.1.2 firmware: +[Fire HD 8 2018 (karnak) amonet-3](https://forum.xda-developers.com/hd8-hd10/orig-development/unlock-fire-hd-8-2018-karnak-amonet-3-t3963496/page52) + +[Download 6.3.1.2 firmware](https://fireos-tablet-src.s3.amazonaws.com/LlO8A9g4Q6ugQCylaeqWBWxYBb/update-kindle-Fire_HD8_8th_Gen-NS6312_user_1852_0002517056644.bin) + +2. Download the amazon frimware above and keep it where you can flash it. +3. Boot into recovery (Volume Down + Power at the same time) +4. Select "adb sideload" or whatever it says using your volume keys and press the power to select +5. Now adb sideload .bin + +https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN6PphcI6XQ + diff --git a/src/qutebrowser-notes.txt b/src/qutebrowser-notes.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..584a47a --- /dev/null +++ b/src/qutebrowser-notes.txt @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +handy commands: + :download + +## shortcuts + +xo - open url in background tab +go - edit current url +gO - edit current url and open result in new tab +gf - view source +;y - yank hinted url +;i - hint only images +;b - open hint in background tab +;d - download hinted url +PP - Open URL from selection in new tab +ctrl+a Increment no. in URL +ctrl+x Decrement no. in URL + +Solarized theme: https://bitbucket.org/kartikynwa/dotty2hotty/src/1a9ba9b80f07e1f63b740da5e6970dc5a97f1037/qutebrowser.py?at=master&fileviewer=file-view-default diff --git a/src/solving-common-nextcloud-problems.txt b/src/solving-common-nextcloud-problems.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b32a629 --- /dev/null +++ b/src/solving-common-nextcloud-problems.txt @@ -0,0 +1,92 @@ +I love [NextCloud](https://nextcloud.com). Nextcloud allows me to have all the convenience of Dropbox, but hosted by me, controlled by me, and customized to suit my needs. I mainly use the file syncing, calendar, and contacts features, but Nextcloud can do a crazy amount of things. + +The problem with NextCloud, and maybe you could argue that this is the price you pay for the freedom and control, is that I find it requires a bit of maintenance to keep it running smoothly. Nextcloud does some decidedly odd things from time to time, and knowing how to deal with them can save you some disk space and maybe avoid syncing headaches. + +I should note, that while I call these problems, I **have never lost data** using Nextcloud. These are really more annoyances and some ways to prevent them than *problems*. + +### How to Get Rid of Huge Thumbnails in Nextcloud + +If Nextcloud is taking up more disk space than you think it should, or your Nextcloud storage space is just running low, the first thing to check is the image thumbnails directory. + +At one point I poked around in the Nextcloud `data` directory and found 11-gigabytes worth of image previews for only 6-gigabytes worth of actual images stored. That is crazy. That should never happen. + +Nextcloud's image thumbnail defaults err on the side of "make it look good in the browser" where as I prefer to err on the side of keep it really small. + +I did some research and came up with a few solutions. First, it looks like my runaway 11-gigabyte problem might have been due to a bug in older versions of Nextcloud. Ideally I will not hit that issue again. But, I don't admin servers with hope and optimism, so I figured out how to tell Nextcloud to generate smaller image previews. I almost never look at the images within the web UI, so I really don't care about the previews at all. I made them much, much smaller than the defaults. Here's the values I use: + +~~~bash +occ config:app:set previewgenerator squareSizes --value="32 256" +occ config:app:set previewgenerator widthSizes --value="256 384" +occ config:app:set previewgenerator heightSizes --value="256" +occ config:system:set preview_max_x --value 500 +occ config:system:set preview_max_y --value 500 +occ config:system:set jpeg_quality --value 60 +occ config:app:set preview jpeg_quality --value="60" +~~~ + +Just ssh into your Nextcloud server and run all these commands. If you followed the basic Nextcloud install instructions you'll want to run these as your web server user. For me, with NextCloud running on Debian 10, the full command looks like this: + +~~~bash +sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ config:app:set previewgenerator squareSizes --value="32 256" +sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ config:app:set previewgenerator widthSizes --value="256 384" +# and so on, running all the commands listed above +~~~ + +This assumes you installed Nextcloud into the directory `/var/www/nextcloud`, if you installed it somewhere else, adjust the path to the Nextcloud command line tool `occ`. + +That will stop Nextcloud from generating huge preview files. So far so good. I deleted the existing previews and reclaimed 11-gigabytes. Sweet. You can pre-generate previews, which will make the web UI faster if you browse images in it. I do not, so I didn't generate any previews ahead of time. + +### How to Solve `File is Locked` Issues in Nextcloud + +No matter what I do, I always end up with locked file syncing issues. Researching this led me to try using Redis to cache things, but that didn't help. I don't know why this happens. I blame PHP. When in doubt, blame PHP. + +Thankfully it doesn't happen very often, but every six months or so I'll see an error, then two, then they start piling up. Here's how to fix it. + +First, put Nextcloud in maintenance mode (again, assuming Debian 10, with Nextcloud in the `/var/www/nextcloud` directory): + +~~~bash +sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode --on +~~~ + +Now we're going directly into the database. For me that's Postgresql. If you use Mysql or Mariadb, you may need to adjust the syntax a little. + +~~~bash +psql -U yournextclouddbuser -hlocalhost -d yournextclouddbname +password: +nextclouddbname=> DELETE FROM oc_file_locks WHERE True; +~~~ + +That should get rid of all the locked file problems. For a while anyway. + +Don't forget to turn maintenance mode off: + +~~~bash +sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode --off +~~~ + +### Force a File Re-Scan + +If you frequently add and remove folders from Nextcloud, you may sometimes run into issues. I usually add a folder at the start of a new project, and then delete it when the project is finished. Mostly this just works, even with shared folders, on the rare occasion that I used them, but sometimes Nextcloud won't delete a folder. I have no idea why. It just throws an unhelpful error in the web admin and refuses to delete the folder from the server. + +I end up manually deleting it on the server using: `rm -rf path/to/storage/folder`. Nextcloud however, doesn't always seem to notice that the folder is gone, and still shows it in the web and sync client interfaces. The solution is to force Nextcloud to rescan all its files with this command: + +~~~bash +sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode --on +sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ files:scan --path="yournextcloudusername/files/NameOfYourExternalStorage" +sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode --off +~~~ + +Beware that on large data directories this can take some time. It takes about 30 seconds to scan my roughly 30GB of files. + +### Mostly Though, Nextcloud is Awesome + +Those are three annoyances I've hit with Nextcloud over the years and the little tricks I've used to solve them. Lest anyone think I am complaining, I am not. Not really anyway. The image thumbnail thing is pretty egregious for a piece of software that aims to be enterprise grade, but mostly Nextcloud is pretty awesome. + +I rely on Nextcloud for files syncing, Calendar and Contact hosting, and keeping my notes synced across devices. Aside from these three things, I have never had a problem. + +####Shoulder's Stood Upon + +* [Nextcloud's documentation](https://docs.nextcloud.com) isn't the best, but can help get you pointed in the right direction. +* I tried a few different solutions to the thumbnail problem, especially helpful was this post on [Understanding and Improving Nextcloud Previews](https://ownyourbits.com/2019/06/29/understanding-and-improving-nextcloud-previews/), but nachoparker. +* The [file lock solution](https://help.nextcloud.com/t/file-is-locked-how-to-unlock/1883) comes from the Nextcloud forums. +* The solution to scanning external storages comes from the [Nextcloud forums](https://help.nextcloud.com/t/automate-occ-filescan/35282/4). diff --git a/src/vagrant-custom-box.txt b/src/vagrant-custom-box.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d73019d --- /dev/null +++ b/src/vagrant-custom-box.txt @@ -0,0 +1,171 @@ +I'm a little old fashioned with my love of Vagrant. I should probably keep up with the kids, dig into to Docker and containers, but I like managing servers. I like to have the whole VM at my disposal. + +Why Vagrant? Well, I run Arch Linux on my laptop, but I usually deploy sites to either Debian, preferably v9, "Stretch", or (if a client is using AWS) Ubuntu, which means I need a virtual machine to develop and test in. Vagrant is the easiest way I've found to manage that workflow. + +When I'm deploying to Ubuntu-based machines I develop using the [Canonical-provided Vagrant box](https://app.vagrantup.com/ubuntu/boxes/bionic64) available through Vagrant's [cloud site](https://app.vagrantup.com/boxes/search). There is, however, no official Debian box provided by Debian. Worse, the most popular Debian 9 box on the Vagrant site has only 512MB of RAM. I prefer to have 1 or 2GB of RAM to mirror the cheap, but surprisingly powerful, [Vultr VPS instances](https://www.vultr.com/?ref=6825229) I generally use (You can use them too, in my experience they're faster and slightly cheaper than Digital Ocean. Here's a referral link that will get you [$50 in credit](https://www.vultr.com/?ref=7857293-4F)). + +That means I get to build my own Debian Vagrant box. + +Building a Vagrant base box from Debian 9 "Stretch" isn't hard, but most tutorials I found were outdated or relied on third-party tools like Packer. Why you'd want to install, setup and configure a tool like Packer to build one base box is a mystery to me. It's far faster to do it yourself by hand (which is not to slag Packer, it *is* useful when you're building an image from AWS or Digital Ocean or other provider). + +Here's my guide to building a Debian 9 "Stretch" Vagrant Box. + +### Create a Debian 9 Virtual Machine in Virtualbox + +We're going to use Virtualbox as our Vagrant provider because, while I prefer qemu for its speed, I run into more compatibility issues with qemu. Virtualbox seems to work everywhere. + +First install Virtualbox, either by [downloading an image](https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads) or, preferably, using your package manager/app store. We'll also need the latest version of Debian 9's netinst CD image, which you can [grab from the Debian project](https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-cd/) (scroll to the bottom of that page for the actual downloads). + +Once you've got a Debian CD, fire up Virtualbox and create a new virtual machine. In the screenshot below I've selected Expert Mode so I can go ahead and up the RAM (in the screenshot version I went with 1GB). + + + +Click "Create" and Virtualbox will ask you about the hard drive, I stick with the default type, but bump the size to 40GB, which matches the VPS instances I use. + + + +Click "Create" and then go to the main Virtualbox screen, select your new machine and click "Settings". Head to the audio tab and uncheck the Enable Audio option. Next go to the USB tab and disable USB. + + + + +Now click the network tab and make sure Network Adapter 1 is set to NAT. Click the "Advanced" arrow and then click the button that says Port Forwarding. Add a port forwarding rule. I call mine SSH, but the name isn't important. The important part is that the protocol is TCP, the Host and Guest IP address fields are blank, the Host port is 2222, the Guest port is 22. + + + +Hit okay to save your changes on both of those screens and now we're ready to boot Debian. + +### Install Debian + +To get Debian installed first click the start button for your new VM and Virtualbox will boot it up and ask you for the install CD. Navigate to wherever you saved the Debian netinst CD we downloaded earlier and select that. + +That should boot you to the Debian install screen. The most important thing here is to make sure you choose the second option, "Install", rather than "Graphical Install". Since we disabled USB, we won't have access to the mouse and the Debian graphical installer won't work. Stick with plain "Install". + + + +From here it's just a standard Debian install. Select the appropriate language, keyboard layout, hostname (doesn't matter), and network name (also doesn't matter). Set the root password to something you'll remember. Debian will then ask you to create a user. Create a user named "vagrant" (I used "vagrant" for the fullname and username) and set the password to "vagrant". + +Tip: to select (or unselect) a check box in the Debian installer, hit the space bar. + +Then Debian will get the network time, ask what timezone you're in and start setting up the disk. I go with the defaults all the way through. Next Debian will install the base system, which takes a minute or two. + +Since we're using the netinst CD, Debian will ask if we want to insert any other CDs (no), and then it will ask you to choose which mirrors to download packages from. I went with the defaults. Debian will then install Linux, udev and some other basic components. At some point it will ask if you want to participate in the Debian package survey. I always go with no because I feel like a virtual machine might skew the results in unhelpful ways, but I don't know, maybe I'm wrong on that. + +After that you can install your software. For now I uncheck everything except standard system utils (remember, you can select and unselect items by hitting the space bar). Debian will then go off and install everything, ask if you want to install Grub (you do -- select your virtual disk as the location for grub), and congratulations, you're done installing Debian. + +Now let's build a Debian 9 base box for Vagrant. + +### Set up Debian 9 Vagrant base box + +Since we've gone to the trouble of building our own Debian 9 base box, we may as well customize it. + +The first thing to do after you boot into the new system is to install sudo and set up our vagrant user as a passwordless superuser. Login to your new virtual machine as the root user and install sudo. You may as well add ssh while you're at it: + +~~~~console +apt install sudo ssh +~~~~ + +Now we need to add our vagrant user to the sudoers list. To do that we need to create and edit the file: + +~~~~console +visudo -f /etc/sudoers.d/vagrant +~~~~ + +That will open a new file where you can add this line: + +~~~~console +vagrant ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL +~~~~ + +Hit control-x, then "y" and return to save the file and exit nano. Now logout of the root account by typing `exit` and login as the vagrant user. Double check that you can run commands with `sudo` without a password by typing `sudo ls /etc/` or similar. If you didn't get asked for a password then everything is working. + +Now we can install the vagrant insecure SSH key. Vagrant sends commands from the host machine over SSH using what the Vagrant project calls an insecure key, which is so called because everyone has it. We could in theory, all hack each other's Vagrant boxes. If this concerns you, it's not that complicated to set up your own more secure key, but I suggest doing that in your Vagrant instance, not the base box. For the base box, use the insecure key. + +Make sure you're logged in as the vagrant user and then use these commands to set up the insecure SSH key: + +~~~~console +mkdir ~/.ssh +chmod 0700 ~/.ssh +wget https://raw.github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/master/keys/vagrant.pub -O ~/.ssh/authorized_keys +chmod 0600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys +chown -R vagrant ~/.ssh +~~~~ + +Confirm that the key is in fact in the `authorized_keys` file by typing `cat ~/.ssh/authorized_keys`, which should print out the key for you. Now we need to set up SSH to allow our vagrant user to sign in: + +~~~~console +sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config +~~~~ + +Uncomment the line `AuthorizedKeysFile ~/.ssh/authorized_keys ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2` and hit `control-x`, `y` and `enter` to save the file. Now restart SSH with this command: + +~~~~console +sudo systemctl restart ssh +~~~~ + +### Install Virtualbox Guest Additions + +The Virtualbox Guest Addition allows for nice extras like shared folders, as well as a performance boost. Since the VB Guest Additions require a compiler, and Linux header files, let's first get the prerequisites installed: + +~~~~console +sudo apt install gcc build-essential linux-headers-amd64 +~~~~ + +Now head to the VirtualBox window menu and click the "Devices" option and choose "Insert Guest Additions CD Image" (note that you should download the latest version if Virtualbox asks[^1]). That will insert an ISO of the Guest Additions into our virtual machine's CDROM drive. We just need to mount it and run the Guest Additions Installer: + +~~~~console +sudo mount /dev/cdrom /mnt +cd /mnt +sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run +~~~~ + +Assuming that finishes without error, you're done. Congratulations. Now you can add any extras you want your Debian 9 Vagrant base box to include. I primarily build things in Python with Django and Postgresql, so I always install packages like `postgresql`, `python3-dev`, `python3-pip`, `virtualenv`, and some other software I can't live without. Also edit the .bashrc file to create some aliases and helper scripts. Whatever you want all your future Vagrant boxes to have, now is the time to install it. + +### Packaging your Debian 9 Vagrant Box + +Before we package the box, we're going to zero out the drive to save a little space when we compress it down the road. Here's the commands to zero it out: + +~~~~console +sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/zeroed bs=1M +sudo rm -f /zeroed +~~~~ + +Once that's done we can package up our box with this command: + +~~~~console +vagrant package --base debian9-64base +==> debian9-64base: Attempting graceful shutdown of VM... +==> debian9-64base: Clearing any previously set forwarded ports... +==> debian9-64base: Exporting VM... +==> debian9-64base: Compressing package to: /home/lxf/vms/package.box +~~~~ + +As you can see from the output, I keep my Vagrant boxes in a folder call `vms`, you can put yours wherever you like. Wherever you decide to keep it, move it there now and cd into that folder so you can add the box. Sticking the `vms` folder I use, the commands would look like this: + +~~~console +cd vms +vagrant box add debian9-64 package.box +~~~ + +Now when you want to create a new vagrant box from this base box, all you need to do is add this to your Vagrantfile: + +~~~~console +Vagrant.configure("2") do |config| + config.vm.box = "debian9-64" +end +~~~~ + +Then you start up the box as you always would: + +~~~~console +vagrant up +vagrant ssh +~~~~ + +#####Shoulders stood upon + +* [Vagrant docs](https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/virtualbox/boxes.html) +* [Engineyard's guide to Ubuntu](https://www.engineyard.com/blog/building-a-vagrant-box-from-start-to-finish) +* [Customizing an existing box](https://scotch.io/tutorials/how-to-create-a-vagrant-base-box-from-an-existing-one) - Good for when you don't need more RAM/disk space, just some software pre-installed. + +[^1]: On Arch, using Virtualbox 6.x I have had problems downloading the Guest Additions. Instead I've been using the package `virtualbox-guest-iso`. Note that after you install that, you'll need to reboot to get Virtualbox to find it. diff --git a/src/why-i-built-my-own-mailing-list-software.txt b/src/why-i-built-my-own-mailing-list-software.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b9877cf --- /dev/null +++ b/src/why-i-built-my-own-mailing-list-software.txt @@ -0,0 +1,52 @@ +This is not a tutorial. If you don't already know how to write the code you need to run a mailing list, you probably shouldn't try to do it yourself. Still, I wanted to outline the reasons I built my own mailing list software in 2020, when there are dozens of commercial and open source projects that I could have used. + +At the core of my otherwise questionable decision is the notion that we ought to completely understand the core infrastructures in our lives. Why? Because it adds value and meaning to your life in the form of understanding. And that understand doesn't stop with the thing you understand either, it becomes part of you, you will find other places this understanding helps you. + +It's also just not that hard to do things yourself. It makes maintaining the system easier, and it often saves time (or money) in the long term. + +The only way to really understand a thing is to either build it yourself from scratch or completely disassemble it and put it back together. + +This is true for software as well as the rest of the world. I ripped all the electrical, propane, plumbing, and engine systems out of my home ([a 1969 RV](/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome)) because I needed to know how every single piece works, and how they all work together. + +I understand those systems now because I built them myself (with expert help when needed), and that makes maintaining them much easier. Otherwise I would always be dependant on someone else to keep my home running and that's no way to live. + +The same is true with software. If the software you're considering is a core part of your personal or business infrastructure, you need to understand every single part of it and how all those parts fit together. + +The question is, should you deconstruct an existing project or write your own from scratch? The answer depends on the situation, the right choice won't always be the same in every case. I do a mix a both and I'm sure most other people do too. There's no one right answer, which means you have to think things through in detail ahead of time. + +When I decided I wanted to [start a mailing list](/jrnl/2020/11/invitation), I looked around at the software that was available and very quickly realized that I had different goals than most mailing list software. That's when you should write your own. + +The available commercial software did not respect users privacy and did not allow me any control. There are some services that do provide a modicum of privacy for your subscribers, but you're going to be working against the software to enable it. + +*If you know of a dead simple commercial mailing list software that's built with user privacy in mind, please post a link in the comments, I'd love to have somewhere to point people. * + +I also wanted to be in complete control of the data. I host my own publishing systems. I consider myself a writer first, but publisher is a close second. What sort of publisher doesn't control their own publishing system?[^1] What makes email such a wonderful distributed publishing system is that no one owns the protocols that dictate how it works. That's great. I don't want to control the delivery mechanism, just the product at either end. + +Email is more or less the inverse of the web. You send a single copy to many readers, rather than many readers coming to a single copy as with a web page. The point is, there's no reason I can't create and host the original email here and send out the copies myself. The hard part -- creating the protocols and low-level tools that power email -- was taken care of decades ago. + +With that goal in mind I started looking at open source solutions. I use [Django](https://www.djangoproject.com) to publish what you're reading here, so I looked at some Django-based mailing list software. The two I considered most seriously were [Django Newsletter](https://django-newsletter.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) and [Emencia Django Newsletter](https://github.com/emencia/emencia-django-newsletter). I found a few other smaller projects as well, but those seem to be the big two in what's left of the Django universe. + +Those two, and some others influenced what I ended up writing in various ways, but none of them were quite what I wanted out of the box. Most of them still used some kind of tracking, whether a pixel embedded in the email or wrapping links with individual identifiers. I didn't want either of those things and stripping them out, while staying up-to-date with upstream changes would have been cumbersome. So, DIY then. + +But running a mail server is... difficult, risky, and probably going to keep you up at night. I tried it, briefly. + +One of the big problems with email is that, despite email being an open protocol, Google and other big corps are able to gain some control by using spam as a reason to tightly control who gets to send email[^2] That means if I just spin up a VPS at Vultr and try to send some emails with Postfix they're probably all going to end up in, best case, you Spam folder, but more likely they'd never be delivered. + +So while I wrote the publishing tools myself, host the newletter archive myself, designed everything about it myself, I handed off the sending to [Amazon's SES](https://aws.amazon.com/ses/), which has been around long enough, and is used by enough big names that mail sent through it isn't automatically deleted. It may possibly still end up in some Spam folders, but for the most part in my early testing (thank you to all my friends who helped out with that) that hasn't been an issue. + +In the end what I have is a fairly robust, loosely-joined system where I have control over the key elements and it's easy to swap out the sending mechanism down the road should I have problems, or just find something better (preferably something not owned by Amazon). + +###Was it Worth It? + +So far absolutely not. But I knew that when I started. + +I could have signed up for Mailchimp, picked some pre-made template, and spent the last year sending out newsletters to subscribers, and who knows, maybe I'd have tons of those by now. But that's okay, that was never the goal. + +I am and always have been playing a very long game when it comes to publishing. I am building a thing that I want to last the rest of my life and beyond if I can manage it. + +I am patient. I am not looking for a ton of readers, I am looking for the right readers. The sort of people who are in short supply these days, the sort of people who end up on a piece like this and actually read the whole thing. The people for whom signing up for Mailchimp would be too easy, too boring. + +I am looking for those who want some adventure in everything they do, the DIYer, the curious, the explorers, the misfits. There's more of us than most of us realize. If you're interested feel free to [join our club](/newsletter/friends). + +[^1]: Sadly, these days almost no publisher retains any control over their systems. They're all beholden to Google AMP, Facebook News, and whatever the flavor of year happens to be. A few of them are slowly coming around to the idea that it might be better to build their own audiences, which somehow passed for revolutionary in publishing today. But I digress. +[^2]: Not to go too conspiracy theory here, but I suspect that Google and its ilk generate a fair bit of the spam themselves, and do nothing to prevent the rest precisely because it allows for this control. Which is not to say spam isn't a problem, just that it's a very *convenient* problem. diff --git a/sufficient.txt b/sufficient.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 358f149..0000000 --- a/sufficient.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,61 +0,0 @@ -Perhaps the strangest thing for us about these times is the number of people who have said to us something along the lines of, "well, you had three years to prepare for this, huh?" Or "not much of a change for you, eh?" - -I've had plenty of time to meditate on these statements, but I am still puzzled about what people mean by them. On the one hand, thanks so much for thinking we have any idea what we're doing, ever. - -On the other hand, let's be clear: there's nothing about living in an RV that prepares you for illness, nationwide shutdowns, supply chain disruptions, or anything else we've all dealt with in the past six months. If anything, living in an RV makes you much more vulnerable to these things[^1]. Where are you going to camp when public lands close (which has [happened to us twice now](/jrnl/2018/01/eastbound-down))? - -When people say these things I think maybe they're referring to the fact that I've always worked remotely, and we homeschool our children, but that was true long before we started living in an RV. The other thing I've considered is that, historically, people who are willing to leave at the drop of a hat, tend to survive upheaval better than those who are dug in, but I don't think that's what the comments above are getting at. - -What I think people are referring to is the very mistaken idea that there's something self-sufficient about living in an RV. There isn't. Look, I love living in the bus, but even I will admit that the self-sufficient notion is mostly fantasy. - -There's plenty about living in an RV that makes you self-reliant, which is well worth being, and will help you all the time, not just in these peculiar times, but self-reliant is a far cry from self-sufficient. Self-reliance means you know what to get at the hardware store, self-sufficient means you never needed to go the hardware store in the first place. - -It's an interesting notion, self-sufficient. When I looked it up in the Webster's 1913 dictionary (the one true dictionary) nearly all the example usage was negative, bordering on pejorative. Self-sufficient was next to words like "haughty", "overbearing", and "overweening confidence in one's own abilities." - -At first glance I thought, well, that does describe luxagraf fairly accurately, maybe we *are* self-sufficient. But whatever it used to mean, for most of us today it means roughly, *sufficient for one's self without external aid*. Which is to say, no one anywhere on earth is 100 percent self-sufficient. - -We think self-sufficient is a singular thing when in fact it's a spectrum on which we all live, where at one end you have the floating chaise-lounge bound people in the movie Wall-E and at the other you have children raised by wolves. That there are more people at the Wall-E end of the spectrum right now seems indisputable, and any effort you can make to slide yourself down toward the wolf children is worth making in my opinion. - -But just because you can get a month's worth of groceries at CostCo does not mean you're self-sufficient for a month. It means you can plan ahead, that's all. Similarly, if you think living in an RV is going to make you completely self-sufficient you are in for a learning experience. I know this because that's how I envisioned living in an RV, and I have personally learned the hard way how wrong that vision was. - -The easiest example of this is solar power. I need about three minutes of conversation to discover whether the person I'm talking to has ever actually lived entirely off solar power. Which is to say that, while I love solar power, it does not make you self-sufficient. Having solar slides you down the spectrum a bit closer to the wolf kids, but honestly the lifestyle changes you have to make to live with limited solar power do a lot more for your self-sufficiency than the actual solar (which doesn't last forever, and has to be made in a clean room -- got one of those in your RV?). - -Typically people hear solar power, and think, oh cool, you're self-sufficient for energy. And sure, we can run our freezer, lights, and charge all our devices with nothing more than the sun. That *is* pretty cool. In fact there are times when I pinch myself because it still seems so science fiction to me. Solar is awesome. When it works. But sometimes the sun [doesn't come out for five or six days](/jrnl/2017/10/pacific), or we're camped in a deep valley with only a few hours of sun a day, or we're [camped under trees](/2018/07/trees), or a fuse blows, or a wire frays, or the [alternator goes out and you don't realize it until it's too late and you batteries are dead because you never installed the isolator](/jrnl/2017/10/through). These are not hypothetical scenarios. All of these things have happened to us. - -And you know how we have saved ourselves every single time solar power has let us down? By connecting to the power grid. By admitting that we're not self-sufficient and using the available shared resources of our times. - -Want another example? Water. We can carry just under 80 gallons. We can stretch that to about six days if we don't shower much. That's actually crazy impressive. The [average American uses 80-100 gallons of water](https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/science/water-qa-how-much-water-do-i-use-home-each-day?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects) *every day*[^2]. But it doesn't make us self-sufficient at all. Not even close. If we happen to be camped near water then sure, we can filter and boil and get by pretty much indefinitely, but I can only think of a handful of times in three years on the road when this would have been possible. - -Then there's food. Food is the best case scenario. We can easily store two weeks worth of food. I believe we could probably go about a month, though it might be a little grim and vegetable-less by the end. I'm super interested in trying to grow some veggies in the bus[^3], but so far we have not tried this. - -The single biggest limitation on our self-sufficiency is waste. I'd guess this is true for all RVers, but I do know that five people on a single black tank is somewhat extreme, even by RV standards. Under normal circumstances we can go about three days without dumping the tank. If we're camped somewhere that it's okay to dump grey water (AKA, dish and washing water), we can stretch our tank to six days. Six days. That's the hard limit. Anything beyond that, and you are full of shit. - -So for everyone thinking, damn, those RVers were really ready for this lockdown, yeah, not so much. If it seemed that way it's simply because full time RVers to started abiding by the rules later and stopped abiding by them sooner. And I think in most cases they did that not because they didn't think the virus was a problem, but because really they had no choice. And that's not were you want to be. - -This is actually something I spend a good bit of time thinking about though. I am with you people who think RVs are self-sufficient. I *wish* there were a way to make an RV more self-sufficient. But I've yet to come up with a way to do that without going to extremes that are impractical. We could, for example, put out tarps and harvest rain water when it rains, and dew when it's damp, but that's way more hassle than it's worth when you're going to have to dump the tanks anyway. And this is the core of why an RV will never be very far to the self-sufficient end of the spectrum. - -If you want self-sufficiency in travel, look to boats. The self-sufficiency of boats was born out the best of mothers: necessity. - -Boats are more self-sufficient because they have no choice. - -So long as you are always just a few miles from the grocery and hardware stores (like RVers) you're never going to apply the same kind of evolutionary pressure and so you're never going to get the same level of self-sufficiency in the outcome. - -Every smart thing in the bus was taken from reading books on sailing. Sailors know how to store food and stretch water because they have no choice. - -There's a side effect of this that's worth thinking about though no matter how you live. Without that pressure, you also don't generate the kind of community that sailors have, and in the end, even with social distancing, that community is what I've seen sailors turning to more than their own individual skills. The collective sufficiency trumps self-sufficiency every time. - -But you have to have that collective sufficiency, and I'd argue that the dynamics of sailing are what created it. Take a group of people, select for self-reliance out of the gate, because you have to have some degree of self-confidence and self-reliance to even begin to want to live on a boat, and then throw those people together and stir the pot for a hundred-odd years. What you'll get is a tight-knit community of like-minded individuals who know the value of working together because they know the hardship of going it alone. - -That last bit is the key. The hardship of going it alone. When the going gets tough, most RVers go home. Most people with houses lock the door behind them and hole up. That's not to say we haven't met great people on the road, or that communities don't come together, we have and they do, but so long as there's a fall back plan to fall back on, we all do. - -If there is no backup plan and everyone around you is used to improvising, solutions will be found. If everyone around you has a fall back plan, no solutions will be found. - -In the end this is really neither here nor there, except to say that no, living in an RV does not make you much more self-sufficient than living in a house. Buy a few solar panels, get a water holding tank and composting toilet, and you'll be every bit as self-sufficient as we are. Throw in a garden, five years practice in the garden, and you'll be well ahead of us. - -Don't get me wrong, I love living in an RV. It's more fun, puts a lot more adventure in your life, makes you feel more alive, makes you learn to rely on yourself, and host of other things that make it my favorite way to live of the ways I've tried so far. Don't let me put you off it if you're thinking of trying. - -This is really just to say that, no, we were no more prepared for this very interesting year than you were. - -[^1]: Living on a boat puts you in a better place because you have access to a much more self-reliant, better connected community (few, if any RVs have radios. Every ocean-going vessel has a way to communicate, which is a big part of it I think). You might also be able to harvest water if you have a desalinizer, but those are fantastically expensive (worth it in my opinion, but still expense). And seafood is easier to catch than land food. But yeah, self-sufficient RVs? Not a thing. -[^2]: The largest single use of water in the average household is flushing the toilet. Every day we fill a bowl with clean, pure, drinkable water, and then we literally take a crap in it. The is to me, probably the most puzzling, bizarre behavior in the modern western world. -[^3]: There's an old guide to growing veggies on a boat called *Sailing the Farm* that got me thinking about how we could grow food in 26 feet. Crazy as that sounds, people have some clever ideas out there on the internet. And no, it wouldn't make us self-sufficient, but it would move us a little closer to those wolf children. diff --git a/unused/abundance.txt b/unused/abundance.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bf9ab1a --- /dev/null +++ b/unused/abundance.txt @@ -0,0 +1,73 @@ +The idea behind comments, behind Facebook, and twitter as well ends up being, you post your personal experiences and someone comes along and injects their belief system into your experience and judges your experience against their framework. I have no idea why you would want to experience that, but I certainly don't so I don't use this things and I heavily moderate comments here. Most comments here are from friends, family, and other thoughtful people, but every now and then someone feels the need to tell me I am not living inside their moral framework. Here's the thing: I already know that. + + + +Travel cannot be taught in a class, and lists of travel tips are fraught with problems, because every traveler is different. I am still learning how to travel, and in these travel organization ideas and tips, I try to share some of the lessons and techniques I've learned along the way. + +I don't want to presume to tell you how to travel. Everyone is different, and I am still learning. I created this section to share some lessons and techniques I've learned in twenty years of traveling, especially in the last four years on the road, [living full time in a vintage RV](/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome). + + +Spanish palindrome on the subject of pilgrimage: La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural – "The path provides the natural next step". Its form cleverly acknowledges the transformative consequences of the pilgrimage, which turns the mind back upon itself, leaving the traveller both ostensibly unchanged and profoundly redirecte + +https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/15/rites-of-way-pilgrimage-walks + + + +True materialism is respect for nature—it is an appreciation for what nature has given us: Throw things away just because we tire of them or buying things because we are bored shows lack of respect. I’d argue that traveling (burning jet fuel) for simplistic reasons such as reaching goals we can brag about e.g. “I’ve visited more exotic places or a greater number of destinations than you” is also disrespectful [of nature]. In a similar vein showing off by buying bigger houses or bigger cars or more stuff than one needs is disrespectful and contemptible as well. In general consumer culture is somewhat of an immature delinquent civilization; it is inconsiderate and has no class—it is only concerned with itself. + +I repeat: A respectful philosophy is crucial. + +Without a philosophy, one’s understanding and behavior is simply a collection of techniques. It is possible to just follow “rules”, but I think this is merely the first step on the path towards living well. Perhaps by repeating the actions of a good life, they will eventually be internalized and grow into something greater, that is, personal growth. + + + + + + + + +Abundance is the natural state of the world. If you leave something alone, there is enough, plenty in fact for all. Anyone who thinks that life is a competitive battlefield filled with individuals struggling, clawing at each other to survive needs to get outside more. + +That's not what life is and the first time you sit still and listen to the forest, pause in a grassy meadow in the moonlight, or tk you'll realize our conception of the world as struggle is flat wrong. It's flat wrong for many reasons, but the one that's come to interest me the most is that that boundary between individual and environment is not nearly so neat and clean as we imagine. + +There is a harmonic resonance between the world and forms that make it up, a kind of vibrating, edge-blurring, feedback loop. Things move, change, do what they need to do, others dissolve, morph, recombine in new ways. Nothing is still, nothing is static, nothing is cut off from anything else. We're still not sure where a tree ends: is it the roots? The mats of fungi feeding nutrients to the roots, without which the tree would die? Where is the beginning and end? + +The better question might be, why are we looking for these things? Where did we get the idea that things begin and end? + +If you do pause somewhere and sit and be still and watch, listen, smell, taste, you'll also notice something very important: you are part of this harmonic dance going on around you. The grass presses against your feet, the gnats explore your skin, the carpenter bees' wings announce their arrival to you. + + + + +When we come to a place where the ecosystem is thriving we feel at peace + +When we seperate ourselves from the ecosystem that abundance goes away. + +Until we learn to love ourselves we can't fix anything, we can't be part of anything. We have to come to grips with who we are, how we fit into the larger picture. We need to see the ways in which we are part of ecosystems, we just have to change how we do it. We do not use things, we are in things. + +Anyone who believes that life is a battlefield full of +individual warriors should go out into the meadows +on a spring night. There, you can learn that the +biosphere does not spawn cutoff, clearly +differentiated individuals who compete against one +another—assuming you find such a meadow; that is, +now that some farmers have started to sow a single, +standardized species of grass. + +Such an experience of the harmony between a +landscape and its lifeforms is probably not the +result of objective analysis. But this is precisely the +point: If you let the calyxes and grasses slide +through your hands amid the firefly flurries, +celebrating the coming summer, you don’t just +perceive a multitude of other beings—the hundred +or so species of plants and countless insects that +make up the meadow’s ecosystem. You also +experience yourself as a part of this scene. And this +is probably the most powerful effect of experiences +in the natural world. When you immerse yourself in +the natural world, you wander a little through the +landscape of your soul. +For a long time now, such experiences have been +considered not very reliable, certainly unscientific, +and, if valid at all, deeply steeped in that pleasant diff --git a/unused/bird-watching.txt b/unused/bird-watching.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..349d5ca --- /dev/null +++ b/unused/bird-watching.txt @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +One of the wonderful side effects of home schooling your children is that ornothology can begin at age five, rather than waiting for, well, never. + +One of my twin daughters has in fact been studying birds far longer than that. My wife has picture of her, age two, pasifier still in her mouth, cell phone in one hand, looking at an image a friend's mother had texted to my wife, the Sibley guide spread out before her, thumb thoughtfully tracing it's way down a page of yellow warblers. Which was a pretty good guess for what was actually a female goldfinch in non-breading plumage. + +It probably helps that her middle name is Bird. Not, actually, for avians, for the intrepid 19th century British explorer Isabella Bird, but when it comes to love and namesakes intention it seems is irrelevant. + +It also probably helps that we travel the country by RV, stopping off, when we can, migration hot spots. We're not Kenn Kaufman by any means, but we've been known to be on St. Georgia Island in April, summer in the Great Lakes and perhaps even spend a fall in the Chiricauhua region. And no we did not see a tk, or a tk or a trogan. The truth is we're fans of the rather less rare, but still spectacular avians. The Cardnial never ceases to cause wonder. + +We spent two weeks around the Natchez Trace area watching nesting Summer Tanagers in full breeding plumage. + + + +I write a travelogue, mostly for friends and family, but I set it up to list the birds we see, which I know puzzles plenty of relatives and other visitors. diff --git a/unused/camera.txt b/unused/camera.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..508b04c --- /dev/null +++ b/unused/camera.txt @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ +One of the best parts of my job is that I get to test some very nice cameras. I've used the Hasselblad X1D, the Fuji X-Pro 3 (personal favorite), Canon tk, Sony A7RIV, and others. For the most part I am cynical about new technology, but I won't lie, I love testing new cameras. + +That said, every camera I've ever tested I've been happy to send back[^1]. I've yet to test anything that made me want to give up the [camera system](/technology) I actually own. + +Part of this is related to how I shoot. For nearly four years now I have been shooting everything with manual focus lenses and fully manual exposure. Everything. Landscapes, street scenes walking the cities, the kids playing, running, jumping, swimming. I compose, I focus, I meter, I shoot, I adjust, I refocus I re-shoot. + +It's a process, one that's become part of me at this point, it just happens without me really thinking about it. I rarely miss a shot that autofocus would have pulled off. + +which is something I never realized until I pressed the shutter on the X-T4 and realized, oh, right, that's all there is to it. + +The most recent one to cross my desk is the Sony A7RIV. We've been in this area for a few months now and I have quiet a few images in mind, that I knew I wanted to make at some point. Having a new camera to test is a good excuse to get out and shoot them. I try to mix things up, shooting at different times of day to see how the camera/lens responds. + +The scene above is about half a mile down the road, half way between our house and our nearest neighbor. It's just an open field, but when the thunderheads give it a good dramatic backdrop, it's fun to shoot. + +I wandered down one afternoon by myself and spent a few minutes taking in the scene and then... pointed the camera, everything snapped into focus, and I pressed the shutter. Well, that was boring. + + +I felt less a part of the process, less invested in the result. + +I felt let down. Being out and doing nothing but making images makes me want to shoot more, that part was good, but it made me want my lenses, the feel of metal turning. There's a hard stop when I reach infinity, there satisfying clicks when you turn the aperture ring. The Canon is a great camera, and the lenses are nice too, but I much prefer what I have. + +I worry this sounds like some hipster lamenting the bygone era of records or lumberjack shirts. But then, I'm not really sure I care if that's how it sounds because that's not what I mean. I don't want some previous time to come back, I just think the technology of that time was much better than we might think. + +But then I have an attachment to the tactile parts of the process of making a photo. Possibly others do not. I enjoy the process of turning the focus ring and snapping through apertures. Sometimes I count them. That way I can focus on the scene and know what my depth of field is without having to look at the info on screen. + +and am glad that I have found a way to have the best of both worlds, analog process, digital and analog results. + +I don't really miss film the way some do, a little maybe, again the tactile part of standing in the dark, feeding and winding the film into the metal wheels, hoping it wasn't touching as you spiraled it on, but I certainly don't miss paying for film. And I'm far better at developing in darktable than I ever was at working with prints in the darkroom. + +Sometimes technology moves so fast and pulls us with it so fast we don't get a chance to process what we're giving up. I didn't start out with manual focus lenses because I was nostalgic or missing focusing and metering. I started out with them because I was frugal and they're cheap. My favorite lense, a Minolta 50.. f/2, which I suspect is no one else's favorite lens, cost me $20. My most expensive lens, which is a 100-300 zoom, which I pair with a 2X teleconverter, was a whooping $200. + +I got in because I was trying to get some good glass without spending a fortune. What I didn't realize was happening was that photography was again becoming a process in which I was a key participant. At first I missed shots all the time. I still miss shots, but far fewer. My focusing skills have become much better and I can meter a scene in my head within a stop or two without consciously thinking about it any more. I see the kids playing, backlit by the morning sun coming through the trees and I just sort of know that I'm going to want about f5.6 to hold them in focus but let the trees and light blur, and in this light, shooting at 100 ISO I should set the exposure around 1/80, maybe faster or slower depending on how much light is getting in the trees, but I know my starting point before I ever raise the camera to my eye. + +That sounds pretentious again perhaps, woohee, look at how skilled I am. But it's not skill, it's repetition. Do anything for a while and it becomes *second nature*. + + +[^1]: I hope it goes without saying, but I will say it anyway: I don't keep anything I review for work. Expensive cameras go back to the manufacturer. Things that companies don't want back go to charity. diff --git a/unused/fear.txt b/unused/fear.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9121a8b --- /dev/null +++ b/unused/fear.txt @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +I spend a fair amount of time thinking about fear. My own mostly, but sometimes how others get through or past their fear. + +I listen to a history podcast, particularly military history. I'm interested in warrior cultures, how that way of life manifests itself in the various places it's come up in history, be it amoung the tribes of North America pre-western contact, or special forces soldiers in Vietnam. In practical terms of human behavior there's not a huge difference. + +Anyway, dig into this idea at all and you will brush up against fear. In many ways fear is a constant part of any warrior society. It's a very obvious fear though. There is nothing subtle about it. Fear of death, fear of injury. These are things anyone can relate to, what become fascinating is how individuals move past those fears. + +I think what I like so much about these stories of overcoming fear is that the fear is so obvious and confrontational. The fears in most of our lives are neither as extreme nor as obvious, which in a paradoxical way makes them almost harder to recognize and deal with. + +There are many kinds of fear. There's the one you probably thought of when you first read the word a sentences back: fear as in something is going to get you. There are other sorts of fear though and the one I've been thinking about lately is the kind of fear you have when you get married. Or at least you might have had. I did anyway. + +If you've ever been married you probably recall a certain amount of anxiety, fear, about getting married. Not that you're scared of marriage, or scared of your partner, or the commitment (if you had any of those fears I sincerely hope you didn't get married). The fear I'm thinking of stems I think from the fact that this thing -- this case marriage -- means a lot to you, it's this very important thing, and you want it work out the way you have it in your head, but you're afraid too -- what if it doesn't work out that way? + +This is the kind of fear that I think subtly grabs us and pulls us around in all sort of ways. I know it does me. I can sit around for months rationalizing all sorts of inaction, dodging that underlying fear, which usually boils down to: oh crap, what if this doesn't work out the way I want? + +God forbid you take this question to the internet because there are seemingly millions out there waiting to browbeat you for your inaction, to belittle your fear and tell you to get over it by just doing it. But what few, if any of these people do is help you answer that questions, what if it doesn't work out? + +Like if full of decisions that may not work out. That plan to quit your job and travel the world working in dive shops or building websites? It might work. It also might not. And you'd be wise to spend some time at least considerng the latter and planning around it. + +That whole travel in a 1969 RV? There are some ways in which that might not work out. They range from the frustrating, finding yourself at the side of the road, unable to move a 12 ton hunk of steel and fiberglass, to the potentially fatal, finding yourself unable to stop a 12 ton hunk of metal and steel. I've had both happen to me. So far I am still here to tell the tale, but who knows? It's a fear I have. It's fear that's kept me from doing what I've wanted to do a number of times. Glance through our travels, see how many mountains we've climbed? + +There's a book I really dislike that nevertheless has one bit of wisdom in it that I do like: "the more we're scared of something, the more we know we have to do it." There's an element of the cheesy, "face your fears" nonsense in that, but there's also something more subtle there if you consider it as speaking to that other sort of fear: that fear of what if it doesn't go the way I want? + +The answer is, it doesn't matter how it goes, if you're scared that it might go wrong the lession to take away is that this thing, getting married, traveling the world, driving a vintage RV, whatever it may be, is important to you. And if it's important to you, you need to follow it. You need to see where it goes. That doesn't mean it won't end badly. It just means you have follow it. + +I'm not telling you to chuck caution to the wind. I'm not suggesting you risk everything just because you're scared of the outcome. But you know those things, those things you're afraid of, but they just won't go away. You do have grab them, you have to direct your will toward them and see where it goes. diff --git a/unused/fict-book.txt b/unused/fict-book.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..50df2e1 --- /dev/null +++ b/unused/fict-book.txt @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +After Oil 5: Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology, and stories should be submitted by January 1, 2020 + + +A family father who restores a wrecked boat on the shores of Lake Michigan in order to build a future for his family that will help them rise above their current station in the de-industrial world to lead lives of adventure and daring. he fixes up the boat he found, he makes sails of the skins of dogs, the largest easy to kill animal left in the area. He then takes the extra furs to a town at the mouth of the lock and attempts to sell them and gets laughed off the docks as backward, a yoken with skins in a world that doesn't yet need skins. He manages to get passage through the locks anyway somehow and navigates down the st. larwence river and out to sea. + +A young girl, patterned after the hummingbird's daughter and omakayas Mexus people, the ojibwe, the remnants of christianity clinging to power in the city. The high and lowland peoples. + +ON THE COOL OCTOBER MORNING when Cayetana Chávez brought her baby to light, it was the start of that season in Sinaloa when the humid torments of summer finally gave way to breezes and falling leaves, and small red birds skittered through the corrals, and the dogs grew new coats. diff --git a/unused/flying.txt b/unused/flying.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3014bd3 --- /dev/null +++ b/unused/flying.txt @@ -0,0 +1,6 @@ +I like airports -- liminal zones between worlds fascinate me even when those zones are only between national borders -- but I really dislike flying. I dislike the process of it the way that everyone dislikes it, but I also dislike parachuting into a place, so to speak, without any context of how you got there. Airplane travel also is far worse for the environment[^1], and, to me at least, feels gratuitous in a way that buses, trains, autos and RVs do not. As I've written before, I like the planning process, I like driving in, I even like traffic sometimes because it teaches you something about the place. + +We spent most of December at our friends' house while they were back in the states for the holidays. Aside from saving our asses from homelessness, it was a really nice house and had a lot of books. One of the books I read while we were staying at their house was called Gringo, by Chesa Boudin. I was not a huge fan of the book overall, but Boudin captures my dislike of plane travel in one rather tidy little sentence: "Airplane travel predisposes us to superficial, compartmentalized knowledge of a country, while land travel forces us, often uncomfortably, into contact with more everyday realities". + +Arguably, you can go further. Bike in and you'll understand it that much better. Walk and you'll know it rather well indeed. Since walking more than a few miles with a three year old isn't a lot of fun, we effectively parachuted in, as you do. And despite having been here three months I still I feel like I do have a superficial, compartmentalized understanding of the area. That feeling is compounded by the difference in language and culture. It's relatively easy for us as Americans to go from Georgia up the UP, spend the summer there and come away with reasonable understanding of the area. It's impossible to do the same when spanning cultures and throwing in different language for good measure. + diff --git a/unused/hard.txt b/unused/hard.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7ef9c5e --- /dev/null +++ b/unused/hard.txt @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +I've debated for years now whether I should write something like this and one day, about a month ago I finally came up with the particular set of circumstance that made for a good story to illustrate the point of writing something like this. It all just sort of came out, felt right, so why not? + +I hope that the handful of you who follow along by reading this site realize that what is documented here are only the highlights. While we are fortunate to have what we consider interesting day, adventures, and what have you, it's not like we do that all the time. That would be insane. + +One thing I don't think I've ever written about is how damn hard it is to live this way. Some times anyway. There are roughly four weeks a year my job more or less sucks. Which is to say I don't enjoy it. Which is amazing. I mean that's 48 weeks in which my job is more or less amazing. I get sent things in the mail, I use them, I write about them. I am amazed I get paid to do this. but then there are those four weeks. And somehow, heading into them, I've also got to fly to Dallas, pick up the bus, drive it back to Athens, not knowing mind you if it will even begine to make it, it hasn't been driven more than five miles in 18 months. That's nail biting stress. And my wife and kids are back in the GA in a bus they can't even move, have never driven and depend on me to deal with, and we're trying to buy a car in GA, with a loan from a bank in California, while registering it in our home state of South Dakota, while our other car may well stop working at any moment and I'm the one who can fix it and I'm 800 miles away and did I mention I might not make it any closer to home? So if you think living on the road is all fun and games and whatever you see on the internet, instagram or youtube. It's not. Life on the road is harder than the life you live right now because it's everything in the live you live right now, plus all the extra stress of all kinds of weird shit like I just listed. + +So the question becomes, why do we do it? There's probably a different answer for everyone you ask, but for me it's pretty simple: it's just more interesting. diff --git a/unused/instant.txt b/unused/instant.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..78a452c --- /dev/null +++ b/unused/instant.txt @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +I've been living with them for weeks now, scattered like wind nlown seeds around the bus, memories surfacing at first of the images, then of the printing, of times I pve though of them, there are here in the real world,not locked away behind glass somewhere, they do not scroll away, they are here, now, with us, about . It's finny then that we call these instant, they take far more time to come into the world than the digital scenes immediately chimpable under glass. + +They are not particularly good prints as such things are judged from a technical standpoint, and yet they are in some way some immediate and micaculous. This technology is like something out the future and that we are not utterly amazed by it says far more about us than it does about the quality of the prints. + +The immedicy is why. + +The real, the artifact. What does it mean to have the artifacts? The ability to share with others, to take a portrait is far less introsive when you can share the results immideate. I do not have a fuji camera so it takes considerably more effort ofr me, but I've seen several Fuji photographers go on at length about what a game changer this was to be able to immediately hand an artifact to a subject, or even to return the next day with a gift. + +In an age when photography has a sinsier undercurrent about it -- cameras in use! shoplifters will be perscuted! facial recognition -- the instant print reminds us the camera can, and should, be a thing of joy, a thing of sharing, connecting and a bridge between rather than the all-seeing eye that big brother in all its forms seeks to twist it into. + +The little rectagles are smaller than the full size polarouds of my childhood, but they are somehow more powerful for it, as if these are new growth, the old growth has been clear cut away, a loss yes, but look what remains, look wt we still have, look what can still be enjoyed. Thes tiny artifacts have been to put up like seeds taking root. There were siveral tucked in the molding aa cabinent this morning. Tomhgith I found one tucked beneath the wall mounted face in my daughters' room, another leaning against the bookshel and a third wedged in the clasping weave of a bamboo basket. We print, they scatter and take root in our world. The colors are all wrong, the blies too dark, the light tones washed out, the shadows less vibrant than the should be. And no cares, not ne loosk at these and things wow, that black doesn't go to 250. + +They have their own frame, setting them off from the world, a little whie border, a way of becoming their own thing perhaps. Little squares and rectables of color popping up everywhere I run. And the more I ove with them the more IO love them. I buy some twine and tiny clothes pins, the one and only time I ave set foot in the crafting isle at Walmart. I want then to have room to grow, places to live, little exibits that subtly keep the past alive all around us. + +It could be argued that perhaps we should keep the past alive only in hour heads, or more in our heads, in our memories and we do. I have know people who displike photographs a famous climber pasked Gelen Rowell not to photograph his climbs because the photo interfered with his meory of the event. ButI don't know, it does not have the affet for me, I think of these events more when I see the phiti, I feel in the detaisl that phoio failed to capture, the minutes befoe and faster the shugger flicked up for that fraction of a second to capture whatever it is that if captured. All those meoment that come bfore and ater come with the phitigraph, it's stack of time not singular moment. Ilike what it is fir the viewer, for the photographer and subject a photoigraph is a stack of time, not a single moment, what happened juest befoer the sutter opened, what happened just after, it is all there in memory and singlyuar images, the moment draw out, calls up all the rest as well. It's a movie of the moments in the mind. perhaps this why I can not particular drawn to video, perhaps this is why the instax has some power because it keeps that movie in the mind, it doesn't share it, it is a private moment. + +This may be why photographs do not ruin my memories, but movies do, the feel artifical this need to record, I like to record with my head, memorie becomes my vide I use photographs to categolue and organize it. diff --git a/unused/june.txt b/unused/june.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..327a7ba --- /dev/null +++ b/unused/june.txt @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +Abundance is the natural state of the world. + +If you leave something alone, it thrives. Anyone who thinks that life is a competitive battlefield filled with individuals struggling, clawing at each other to survive, needs to get outside more. + +When you get out in it, that's not what life is. That might be what we have made our lives, but it's not what life *is*. + +Sit still and listen to the forest. Pause at the edge of grassy meadow in the moonlight and listen. Crouch in a crook of red sandstone halfway up the canyon wall and listen. Here the insects, the birds, the wind. The conception of the world as struggle did not come from observation of the world. + +Observing the world you very rarely find individuals struggling. To be sure, creatures eat each other. Just today I watched a wasp and spider have an epic battle, I turned away for a moment though, and when I looked back, both were gone. Who won? I have no idea. Probably neither. Even if the spider did kill the wasp, it was gone from its web. + +Watching this though I couldn't help but think it was actually less an epic battle than a kind of dance. Martial arts, deadly though it can be, often looks like ballet. That's what the spider and wasp looked like, a kind of deadly ballet. + + + +is flat wrong. It's flat wrong for many reasons, but the one that's come to interest me the most is that that boundary between individual and environment is not nearly so neat and clean as we like to imagine. + +That is to say, in order for there to be competition there must be individuals and, when you start looking closely, the line between you and everything is indistinct at best. + +There is a harmonic resonance between the world and forms that fill it. There is a kind of vibrating, edge-blurring, feedback loop. Things move, change, do what they need to do, others dissolve, morph, recombine in new ways. Nothing is still, nothing is static, nothing is cut off from anything else. We're still not sure where a tree ends: is it the roots? The mats of fungi feeding nutrients to the roots, without which the tree would die? Where is the beginning and end? + +The better question might be, why are we looking for these things? Where did we get the idea that things begin and end? + +If you do pause somewhere and sit and be still and watch, listen, smell, taste, you'll also notice something very important: you are part of this harmonic dance going on around you. The grass presses against your feet, the gnats explore your skin, the carpenter bees' wings announce their arrival to you. + +Many don't even think of themselves as part of the environment at all, which is part of why they know nothing of the abundance of the world. When we separate ourselves in our minds, when we see ourselves as separate from the ecosystem, the abundance goes away. + +When you live in a bubble, that bubble starts to become the world. It's too easy to live in our bubbles, it becomes hard to reach out. And to do so without passing judgement. Just to say there are all kids of people living here and they're all different, and that's okay. There is no one right way. + + + +Homeschooling bothers people because it implies we're living on a single income, and that that's enough. I think it reminds people that that did *use* to be enough, but that things have declined from that, that it is simply no longer possible. + + diff --git a/unused/ko-kradan-wally.txt b/unused/ko-kradan-wally.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2ae4344 --- /dev/null +++ b/unused/ko-kradan-wally.txt @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +In February of 2015, my friend Wally Sanger died of natural causes at Paradise Lost on Ko Kradan. + +I spent two weeks on Ko Kradan. I arrived their on a whim. I had been island hopping, traveling alone after a long time with a group, working my way down the Andaman sea side of the Thai peninsula for the better part of the month, mostly by convincing day trip snorkel boats to drop me at various relatively remote islands. + +Ko Kradan was not supposed to be the last. I was heading down to Thailand's Tarutao National Marine Park and then perhaps into Malaysia, but I never made it. And the reason I never made it was Wally Sanger and Ko Kradan. + +There was a storm blowing in the day I was dropped off so the snorkle boat I had convinced to take me from Ko Hai down to Ko Kradan would only drop my at an isolated beach on the windward side of the island. I jumped out from the bow and my bag hit the ground about the same time I did. The boat was gone two minutes later. The beach was small and lined with a thick wall of jungle. It was about 3 o'clock in the afternoon and I could tell it would be pouring in 15 minutes. + +I sat down on the sand and smoked a cigarette. I figured, worst case scenario, I'd get a little wet. + +The guidebook I had claimed there was a trail to the other side of the island, and somewhere over there were a couple of guesthouses. It took me ten minutes to find the trail and another ten to make it to the other side of the island. The rain held off longer than I thought. The first place I encountered was Wally's Paradise Lost. + +He offered me a room, but at this point I had been in southeast asia for nine months, no way I was taking a room from the first farang I met. I might have literally been fresh off the boat, but metaphorically I was too cynical to take Wally up without surveying the island first. I set off for the other guesthouse on the island, which was down on the beach. + +The rain hit at the edge of the tree line on the leeward beach. I followed a couple of dogs deeper into the trees for shelter. A woman walked up off the beach and came into the thicket. We chatted for a while and she talked me out of even seeing the other guesthouse by describing it as “more of a refugee camp.” I did later head down there and that was in fact an apt description. + +I went back and got a room at Paradise Lost. Wally seemed entirely unperturbed by my snub and reversal; I trust he had seen more than few of my kind -- there's no shortage of self assured dumbasses in Thailand. I would not have blamed him for being a bit standoffish with me, but he was in fact the opposite. That night he pulled some ribeye steaks out of the freezer for me, as well as Tony and Zoe, the only other people staying there are the time. Sure, I paid for the steaks, that's not the point. They weren't on the menu. + +The whole of Paradise Lost was like that. There were quite a few layers to the place. There was the one most people saw while I was there, which was the standard guesthouse experience. It was a clean, friendly and cheap place. There'd be no reason to complain if that was all you ever got. + + + + +He will be missed. Condolences to his family and anyone who had the great pleasure of knowing him. + + +http://www.offbeatthailand.com/2015/04/17/ko-kradans-wally-sanger/ diff --git a/unused/leopold-essay.txt b/unused/leopold-essay.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2bb8c0b --- /dev/null +++ b/unused/leopold-essay.txt @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +One of Thoreau's most quoted phrases claims that "in wildness lies the preservation of the world". + +If that's true we're screwed. + +Fellow conservationist Aldo Leopold seems to have written much of what he did to let us know not so much what we could save as what it was already too late to save, the wildness we had already lost. The last grizzly killed in Arizona. The jaguars disappearing from the banks of the Colorado as it snakes it's way through the Grand Canyon; the ways countless birds in Leopold's day still clung to existence in the islands of native prairie that speckled his home country of Sand County. + +All that was gone long before I was born. Or mostly gone. + +Wilderness + +When I was young there were still small pockets of wildness to be found. Buy enough 7.5 topo sheets and you were bound to find some relatively blank spots. The Superstition mountains. The chocolate mountains. The Chihuahuas. The Dragoons. For a kid who grew up in the decidedly not wilds of southern California, the southern edge of Arizona, the borderlands in more ways than one, retained pockets of wildness here and there. + +My father and I made frequent forays into such places. He always looking for snails. Me looking for something I could not put my finger on at the time. Some intangible thing that felt missing from the world. Adventure perhaps, connection perhaps. Whatever it was, all I knew back then was that it did not, for a few moments here and there, hiking the agave chocked hillsides of nameless mountains, tracing the delicate wisps of shade in the Palo Verde lined washes, sitting at the base of sheer buttes, back leaning against the warm sandstone, watching the shadows lengthen and the thunderheads roll in the from the south, it did not feel like anything was missing from the world. + +It wasn't just wildness though. Or not wildness in the sense that we westerner's tend to think of it -- roadless natural areas that are inaccessible. Accessibility is after all, very relative. Could you have driving a 4x4 up the wash to the base of the butte where I sat? Possibly and that alone is enough to destroy the kind of wildness that Leopold wrote about. A kind of wildness that ceases to exist not so much through the loss of land -- though that certainly doesn't help -- but through the growth of technology. + +Leopold writes when I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process of ordinarly referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adeults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living. + +"When I first lived in Arizona the White Mountain was a horseman's world. Except along a few main routes, it was too rough for wagons. There were no cars. It was too big for foot travel; even sheepherders roade. Thus by elimination, the coutnry-sized plateau know as 'on top' was the exclusing domain of the mountaed man: mounted cowman, mounted sheepman, mounted forest officer, mounted trapper, and those unclassified mounted men of unknown origin and uncertain destination always found on frontiers. It is difficult of this generation to understand this aristocracy of space based upon transport." + +These days we eschew aristocracy of space or otherwise. We want everyone to have equal access.: + + + + +We called half a dozen or more car rental places, but each time the minute the words four wheel drive and Dragoon Mountains came together in the same breath the lin went dead suspriciously soon after. Finaly we stumbled upon roadrunner car rentals, which had an old Dodge truck we could use. Roadrunner proved to be little more than a single wide trailer in front of car wrecking lot, which did not inspire confidence, but did in fact have a dirt brown dodge truck that looked like it was probably held to gether with tin cans, bailing wire and a healthy amount of duct tape. There seemed to be a mutual don't ask don't tell policy at work in which if we didn't ask the owner about the condition of the truck he wouldn't ask what sort of roads we plannned to take it down. + +We brought the thing home amid belches of smoke and accidental peeling of the nearly bald rear tires. It was those tires we were worried about. The roads we planned to take were intended for four wheel drive jeeps, but all we had was a lightweight truck with bald tires. Sometimes when adventurous land is running low you have to create your own adventure. + +And so we did. + +Grandpa eyeing the truck. My mom did not come. This was before cellphones, when a modicum of danger still existed in travel. + +The drive in, building our own road over the ruts with split fire wood. Piling rock in the back of the truck to weigh it down so the rear wheel drive tires would have some bite/purchase in the rutted dirt. + +the widlness of the west slope versus the tamed campgrounds of the east slope. The chiricuauas in the distance, the history of Cochice and jeffer's, cave creek, Jeffer's house, the dark roots of the blank walnut stump that had become a coffee table. + +The last grizzly in arisona. + +We did no so much reach a camp as reach a point at which we -- the truck my father and I -- seemed to wordlessly conclude that this is as far as we were going. We set up the tent amid fading light. It was far to dry and windy, to say nothing of the general treeless of the west slope of the mountains for a camp fire fire. We cooked over a Coleman stove borrowed from my grandfather + +Mysterious foot prints. There are plenty of possible explanations of the footprints, though they all stretch credulity enough that I don't quite believe any of them. It could have been a barefoot hiker with extrorinarily large feet. It could have been bigfoot, the ghost of cochise, geronimo, an entirely non-hominid source, a hominid stepping in the larger track of something else. Whatever it was though, the location it was in spoke of concealment. If it was a thing, the path it took was one you would take if you wished to stay hidden from view by anyone on the rock summit above or from the trail below. These were the footrpints of something that did not want to be seen and that realization only fueled the mystery over the years. + +It's been well over two decades now since I set foot in the Dragoons, but I still think about them. About those footprints. I think two about my dissatifaction with explanations and wonder if herpahs thsi isn't a defense against the lose of wildness. If I explain them away the wildness fades. With so much wildness already gone this feels like too great of a cost so I live with mystery. + diff --git a/unused/new-job-essay.txt b/unused/new-job-essay.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5d8399b --- /dev/null +++ b/unused/new-job-essay.txt @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +We came to Mexico with a pretty simple plan -- hang out, visit family, live cheap, save money, get some projects done. It is hard sometimes, traveling and working, to carve out time for your own work and I had some work I wanted to get done. + +Sawdust in a hurricane has more permanence than a plan of ours. So nothing we planned to do ended up happening. That's how these things go. I went back to doing what I do, drumming up clients, writing things that made them happy. In my search for new clients I noticed my old friends at Wired were looking for a full time writer to do roughly what I've done on a freelance basis for them for years. + +I applied. I talked to the editors. Some months passed. I talked to more editors. Next thing I knew I was booking plane tickets back to the states. While the job is remote, it involves products, shipping physical things to me. If you know anything about customs, you know that's not something that's going to work abroad. + +So we're headed stateside once more and we're excited about it. We love Mexico, we'll miss the people, our friends, our family, but this feels like the right thing to do to me, at the right time too. + +I still have some projects I'd like to tackle, some projects that would be hard to do without the stability of a regular paycheck. As a freelance writer you are either hustling all the time or starving. I need some time, and mental space, to tackle some longer term work and a job provides that, so we're off, back to the United States. diff --git a/unused/not-traveling.txt b/unused/not-traveling.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5746c18 --- /dev/null +++ b/unused/not-traveling.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +"the joy of travel, in this case, had less to do with the actual motion of travel than escaping the 9-to-5, suburban, consumer-capitalist world of which I’d been a clock-punching member from the beginning. My escape proved life-affirming and necessary." https://rolfpotts.com/ken-ilgunas/ diff --git a/unused/se-renta.txt b/unused/se-renta.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..48690af --- /dev/null +++ b/unused/se-renta.txt @@ -0,0 +1,117 @@ +When we left Dallas our plan was to be gone six months. + +We were going to spend the winter down here, stay warm, improve our Spanish a bit and go back to the bus. Then we were going to spend spring traveling the southwest desert, see some areas of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah that we hadn't seen yet, and then head up to Wyoming, Idaho and Montana when it got hot, spend summer at higher, cooler elevations. Then we'd swing south again when it cooled off and come back down to Mexico and work our way down the west coast of Mexico for the winter of 2019/2020. + +It was a pretty good plan I thought. It still is a pretty good plan. It's important you make plans but it's rare to actually follow one for too long. And that one, much as I still like it, is no longer *the* plan. At least not on that timeline. + +The new plan is to stay down here an extra year. We love Mexico and we don't want to leave just now. We, I especially, have some larger projects I want to work on, projects that require more time than is easy to come by when traveling the way we were. The truth is it's very hard to write from the road. When you're traveling you're too busy living to do more than scribble notes frantically. To write well about travel, the irony is, you need to stop traveling. + +Then there's a other reason we're staying: money. + +When we parked the bus last year we knew that before it went much further it was going to need some work. Significant, time and money eating work. We need more power on hills and the only way I've come up with to do that is to either drop in something bigger, a 440 or the like, or rebuild the 318 to get better compression, which means boring out the engine, new pistons, new manifolds, probably a new transmission and quite a few other things that are not cheap. It's all doable, but it takes money. + +Coming to Mexico was part of that plan, live cheap, save up some extra cash and pour it into the engine. Then, just before it was done, my biggest client decided to scrap the project I'd been working on for a year. I won't lie, it caught me by surprise. It wasn't so much the money, though losing over half your income is rarely good, but it derailed me for a bit. Like you probably do I get wrapped up in the things I make, I want them to good, I want others to like them. No matter how much you like something though, not everyone is always going to like it. It took me a while to get past that on the emotional level, but I finally did and then it hit me, oh right, that was all our money too. Crap. + +We're very fortunate to be able to do this and there isn't a day that goes by that I'm not grateful for everything we've been able to do. If we had to sell the bus and go home tomorrow I would have no regrets. We're not going to do that, but I don't mind saying that the belts are going to have to be pulled tighter for a while. Sometimes you do have to adjust things if you want to keep going. + +Throughout this trip people have emailed to ask all kinds of questions about money and for the most part I've avoided the subject. Until now. + +It takes money to travel. Sometimes it takes a lot. To get our bus back on the road and house ourselves for nearly a month in California we spent over $7,000. We came close enough to just selling it that I have interior photos I was going to post in a Craigslist ad. That's a lot of money and it was the hardest decision we've ever had to make. + +I tell that story not in search of sympathy, but to point out the obvious. It take money to travel. + +For a point so obvious, this one gets little press. Before we left I searched high and low for anyone willing to talk about how much it cost to travel the U.S. by RV and came up with very few hard and fast numbers. Consider this my contribution to anyone searching for information on how much it cost to travel the United States in a 1969 RV. + +First though we need to get some terms down. We track our spending to the penny, so I can give some pretty accurate figures at the monthly level. Ultimately though this is not how much it costs. The real answer is that how much is costs to travel the U.S. by RV really depends on where you are, how many of you there are, and how you travel. For contrast's sake, to balance out the $7,000+ month in California we spent less than $2000 the month before we left for Mexico. + +That said, here's a rough number: **It costs around $3,000-$4,000 a month for our family of five to live on the road in the United Stats**. This figure assumes no unforeseen expenses, which is a euphemism for the bus didn't break down. Uou need to have extra money available for when it breaks down. It will. + +Now I know that's a big spread, $3k-$4k. The reason is that around half our spending is on food, which varies tremendously around the country. The west is much more expensive in nearly every regard, relative to the midwest and south, but especially for food. Generally speaking the $4000 a month areas would be California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, etc. The midwest and south are cheaper for us because food is cheaper there. In the end things rounded out to $3438/month[^1]. + +On the flip side of that equation boondocking tends to be easier out west -- there's lots more BLM land, which means you can find a free place to stay much easier -- so you spend less on camping (except in California, Calfornia is just expense). If you're on the Gulf Coast it's going to cost you upwards of $30 a night in to camp in most of Florida (unless you know where to look). + +Another way that average is lying is that throughout the course of our trip we've spent less and less per month (except for last winter in California, which puts an irritating bump in the nice downward sloping graph I generated). There are two reason for this. First, we're getting smarter about boondocking and finding cheap camping. Second, we went back cross the country to the south and midwest where food is cheaper. + +Final point -- we could do it for less. We could probably cut our food bill by 30 percent if we dropped the organic meat and eggs for conventional and changed our eating habits a bit (in fact we have by necessity here Mexico). We don't, or we didn't in the U.S., because we didn't need to. As I noted in the post on food, food is one of life's most important elements to me. Not that good food has to be expensive, but good quality ingredients in the U.S. are going to cost you even if you do what we do and mostly shop at Asian and Latin grocery stores. + +So what's the point of all this money talk? The U.S. is considerably more expensive than Mexico. We spend just over half our U.S. monthly spending here in Mexico, sans bus. + +You probably could have guessed that, what you probably would not guess is why. + +Part of it is that some things are cheaper here. Though really, not that much cheaper. Food, which makes up the largest part of our budget, is about 30% less here. That's nothing to sneeze at, it helps for sure, but it's not the real reason it's cheaper for us to live in Mexico. + +When I take a hard look at the spreadsheet, and then rotate it sideways to get a new perspective, what really jumps out is the "miscellaneous" category. I don't get real fine grained with spending categories so miscellaneous holds everything that is not gas, food, lodging or vehicle repair. It holds the non-essentials. That category doesn't exist in Mexico. We have spent less than $200 on misc spending in four months of living in Mexico. + +Why? It's pretty simple, we don't have access to Amazon.com. + +But wait, you're travelers, you live in a bus, you don't buy useless stuff, you can't, where would you put it? + +I know right? But it turns out they makes some pretty small and expensive useless stuff you even can fit in a bus. + +Why do we buy it though, surely we know better? + +We do know better and yet we still buy it. + +The spreadsheet does not lie. But why? + +After spending some time meditating on this I've a very simple answer: access. + +Mexico has pretty much everything the United States has, especially here in San Miguel. My wife brought home duck fat yesterday for crying out loud (it was only $2). We're not in the boonies, we're not just eating beans and tortillas. The difference is that here all the stuff you could buy is not all in your face 24/7. + +Shops here do not have windows, most do not even have a way to browse through stuff. Half of them you can't even get to the stuff yourself. Instead you walk in, tell the person what you need, the person asks small medium or large and then goes rummaging around to find what you want. + +Everything you buy here comes from your own mind first and is found second. + +In the United States everything is presented and then your mind decides what to buy. On the internet literally everything is right there at your finger tips. + +One of these purchasing models will leave more money in your pocket than the other, full stop. + +And I know, I know. I like to think I am immune to advertising too, that I am smarter than the advertisers, that I resist the never-ending onslaught "buy this stuff". + +Unfortunately my spreadsheet says otherwise. I am not immune. + +And I don't even own a TV, how much more would I be buying if I watched television and were subjected to that much more advertising? And it's not that I'm comparing many years of life in the U.S to just three months in Mexico. Comparing the U.S. to Mexico is not what led me to this conclusion. It got me thinking about it, but it wasn't until I went back and made another comparison that I believed it. It was when I comparing the time we spent in the bus without a car, to the time we had a car that made it painfully obvious to me. It's very simple: given a car and easy access to everything, we spent more. + +Take away the access and we spent less. Mexico also takes away the access, so we spend less here too, but it's not the situations or places really, it's us. + +I am not immune. You are not immune. We all fall for advertising. + +Advertising is a debased form of magic, which is another way of saying it's powerful and you probably are not aware of its power in any conscious way. I know I am not. However, now that I'm outside its sphere of influence a bit, I've noticed something -- I don't want anything. Maybe that's not quite true, I want much less. So much less that I became aware of it, I noticed how much less stuff I wanted. At first I thought I was maybe a little crazy, but we've talked to couple of Americans who've been down here a while longer than us and they've noticed it too. + +A good example of this for me would be camera lenses. I use old, manual focus lenses. In the course of the trip I've bought and sold about a dozen, and there were many more I wanted to buy. I used to follow all the used lens websites and would lust after various expensive hard to find lenses that I wanted. Wanting gives you a hit of dopamine. So nice. Not wanting takes away the dopamine. This is biochemical source of buyers remorse, once you have something, no more dopamine from wanting it. You have to move on to wanting something new. This will never end. Nothing you ever buy will satisfy you. It can't, no dopamine. Subjected to this cycle of wanting we become like a rat in cage, running on a wheel, around and around, chasing that hit of dopamine in an endless loop -- desire gratification dissatisfaction, desire gratification dissatisfaction. + +Once you see yourself doing this you can't unsee it. It's horrible to realize this is you. That you are a lab rat in someone else's experiment. You also start thinking more broadly about other things. I started obsessing more and more about where my attention goes and how that affects me. + +In the case of the lenses I stopped reading all those sites and redirected my attention to actual photographs. I started directing my focus to technique instead of tools -- things like composition, texture, light, tone and all the other bits of craft that actually make good photos. Not only have I not bought a lens since, I've become much more satisfied with the ones I own. + +This dovetails with a lesson we learned early on in the bus -- once you realize you can live without something, get rid of it. It will never become more useful by existing in your closet. It is either useful right now or not at all (tools are the only exception to that rule). Once I realized I could live without reading about cool new camera lenses I sat down and scrutinized everything I read on a regular basis and got rid of anything that was likely to make me want stuff. + +I wanted off that wheel. + +If you like to travel there's a good chance you have more D4 dopamine receptors (here's a good link to learn about D4) than the average person, which makes you especially prone to wanting, which in turn makes you susceptible to advertising, which in turn, ironically, makes you less likely to be able to save up the money to travel. + +What does this have to do with traveling? Well we sat back and took stock of things, what we all wanted to do, why we wanted to do it, the whole bit and we decided that we wanted to stay here in San Miguel for longer than six months. + +Not too long after that we found a house that was just about perfect for us so we signed a year lease and we're staying here. We're staying here to slow down for a while, to work on some projects that require the kind of deeper focus that's difficult to manage on the road, to get better at Spanish, to try to move beyond a superficial, compartmentalized understanding of the place we're in, and to save money, both because we can live a little cheaper and because we spend less here. + +There are other reasons, the kids wanted to do somethings that are hard to do on the road, like take gymnastics and swimming lessons, and I wanted a break from crawling under the bus every other day to see what the mysterious fluid was leaking now. + + + + + + + + + + + + +[^1]: This is endlessly debated on the internet by people looking to justify which variety of travel they support. Based on what I've read at the [Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies][1], as well as Michael Sivak's work for the University of Michigan Transportation Research on the energy intensity of both driving and flying, a family of 5 driving, even in the bus, puts less carbon in the air than flying. Would it be better to do neither? Yes. As for the whole climate change debate, I managed to pick up enough of an understand of energy flow and the laws of thermodynamics back in high school to realize that billions of tons of infrared-trapping gases into Earth’s atmosphere is going to fuck things up as it were. The fact that Earth’s climate has changed drastically without human interference in the past should really just demonstrate how idiotic it is to tinker with a system clearly vulnerable to destabilization. + +[^2]: To arrive at that figure I also threw out all our early spending on bus restoration. If you haven't been following along since the beginning, know that we went ahead and hit the road with no water tank (no plumbing at all for the first two weeks), no propane system and no solar system. Solar especially makes our actual monthly spending considerably higher for the first year, but assuming you're not remodeling on the road, you won't have these expenses so I left them out. + +[1]: https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2015/09/evolving-climate-math-of-flying-vs-driving/ + + + diff --git a/vagrant-custom-box.txt b/vagrant-custom-box.txt deleted file mode 100644 index d73019d..0000000 --- a/vagrant-custom-box.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,171 +0,0 @@ -I'm a little old fashioned with my love of Vagrant. I should probably keep up with the kids, dig into to Docker and containers, but I like managing servers. I like to have the whole VM at my disposal. - -Why Vagrant? Well, I run Arch Linux on my laptop, but I usually deploy sites to either Debian, preferably v9, "Stretch", or (if a client is using AWS) Ubuntu, which means I need a virtual machine to develop and test in. Vagrant is the easiest way I've found to manage that workflow. - -When I'm deploying to Ubuntu-based machines I develop using the [Canonical-provided Vagrant box](https://app.vagrantup.com/ubuntu/boxes/bionic64) available through Vagrant's [cloud site](https://app.vagrantup.com/boxes/search). There is, however, no official Debian box provided by Debian. Worse, the most popular Debian 9 box on the Vagrant site has only 512MB of RAM. I prefer to have 1 or 2GB of RAM to mirror the cheap, but surprisingly powerful, [Vultr VPS instances](https://www.vultr.com/?ref=6825229) I generally use (You can use them too, in my experience they're faster and slightly cheaper than Digital Ocean. Here's a referral link that will get you [$50 in credit](https://www.vultr.com/?ref=7857293-4F)). - -That means I get to build my own Debian Vagrant box. - -Building a Vagrant base box from Debian 9 "Stretch" isn't hard, but most tutorials I found were outdated or relied on third-party tools like Packer. Why you'd want to install, setup and configure a tool like Packer to build one base box is a mystery to me. It's far faster to do it yourself by hand (which is not to slag Packer, it *is* useful when you're building an image from AWS or Digital Ocean or other provider). - -Here's my guide to building a Debian 9 "Stretch" Vagrant Box. - -### Create a Debian 9 Virtual Machine in Virtualbox - -We're going to use Virtualbox as our Vagrant provider because, while I prefer qemu for its speed, I run into more compatibility issues with qemu. Virtualbox seems to work everywhere. - -First install Virtualbox, either by [downloading an image](https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads) or, preferably, using your package manager/app store. We'll also need the latest version of Debian 9's netinst CD image, which you can [grab from the Debian project](https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-cd/) (scroll to the bottom of that page for the actual downloads). - -Once you've got a Debian CD, fire up Virtualbox and create a new virtual machine. In the screenshot below I've selected Expert Mode so I can go ahead and up the RAM (in the screenshot version I went with 1GB). - - - -Click "Create" and Virtualbox will ask you about the hard drive, I stick with the default type, but bump the size to 40GB, which matches the VPS instances I use. - - - -Click "Create" and then go to the main Virtualbox screen, select your new machine and click "Settings". Head to the audio tab and uncheck the Enable Audio option. Next go to the USB tab and disable USB. - - - - -Now click the network tab and make sure Network Adapter 1 is set to NAT. Click the "Advanced" arrow and then click the button that says Port Forwarding. Add a port forwarding rule. I call mine SSH, but the name isn't important. The important part is that the protocol is TCP, the Host and Guest IP address fields are blank, the Host port is 2222, the Guest port is 22. - - - -Hit okay to save your changes on both of those screens and now we're ready to boot Debian. - -### Install Debian - -To get Debian installed first click the start button for your new VM and Virtualbox will boot it up and ask you for the install CD. Navigate to wherever you saved the Debian netinst CD we downloaded earlier and select that. - -That should boot you to the Debian install screen. The most important thing here is to make sure you choose the second option, "Install", rather than "Graphical Install". Since we disabled USB, we won't have access to the mouse and the Debian graphical installer won't work. Stick with plain "Install". - - - -From here it's just a standard Debian install. Select the appropriate language, keyboard layout, hostname (doesn't matter), and network name (also doesn't matter). Set the root password to something you'll remember. Debian will then ask you to create a user. Create a user named "vagrant" (I used "vagrant" for the fullname and username) and set the password to "vagrant". - -Tip: to select (or unselect) a check box in the Debian installer, hit the space bar. - -Then Debian will get the network time, ask what timezone you're in and start setting up the disk. I go with the defaults all the way through. Next Debian will install the base system, which takes a minute or two. - -Since we're using the netinst CD, Debian will ask if we want to insert any other CDs (no), and then it will ask you to choose which mirrors to download packages from. I went with the defaults. Debian will then install Linux, udev and some other basic components. At some point it will ask if you want to participate in the Debian package survey. I always go with no because I feel like a virtual machine might skew the results in unhelpful ways, but I don't know, maybe I'm wrong on that. - -After that you can install your software. For now I uncheck everything except standard system utils (remember, you can select and unselect items by hitting the space bar). Debian will then go off and install everything, ask if you want to install Grub (you do -- select your virtual disk as the location for grub), and congratulations, you're done installing Debian. - -Now let's build a Debian 9 base box for Vagrant. - -### Set up Debian 9 Vagrant base box - -Since we've gone to the trouble of building our own Debian 9 base box, we may as well customize it. - -The first thing to do after you boot into the new system is to install sudo and set up our vagrant user as a passwordless superuser. Login to your new virtual machine as the root user and install sudo. You may as well add ssh while you're at it: - -~~~~console -apt install sudo ssh -~~~~ - -Now we need to add our vagrant user to the sudoers list. To do that we need to create and edit the file: - -~~~~console -visudo -f /etc/sudoers.d/vagrant -~~~~ - -That will open a new file where you can add this line: - -~~~~console -vagrant ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL -~~~~ - -Hit control-x, then "y" and return to save the file and exit nano. Now logout of the root account by typing `exit` and login as the vagrant user. Double check that you can run commands with `sudo` without a password by typing `sudo ls /etc/` or similar. If you didn't get asked for a password then everything is working. - -Now we can install the vagrant insecure SSH key. Vagrant sends commands from the host machine over SSH using what the Vagrant project calls an insecure key, which is so called because everyone has it. We could in theory, all hack each other's Vagrant boxes. If this concerns you, it's not that complicated to set up your own more secure key, but I suggest doing that in your Vagrant instance, not the base box. For the base box, use the insecure key. - -Make sure you're logged in as the vagrant user and then use these commands to set up the insecure SSH key: - -~~~~console -mkdir ~/.ssh -chmod 0700 ~/.ssh -wget https://raw.github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/master/keys/vagrant.pub -O ~/.ssh/authorized_keys -chmod 0600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys -chown -R vagrant ~/.ssh -~~~~ - -Confirm that the key is in fact in the `authorized_keys` file by typing `cat ~/.ssh/authorized_keys`, which should print out the key for you. Now we need to set up SSH to allow our vagrant user to sign in: - -~~~~console -sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config -~~~~ - -Uncomment the line `AuthorizedKeysFile ~/.ssh/authorized_keys ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2` and hit `control-x`, `y` and `enter` to save the file. Now restart SSH with this command: - -~~~~console -sudo systemctl restart ssh -~~~~ - -### Install Virtualbox Guest Additions - -The Virtualbox Guest Addition allows for nice extras like shared folders, as well as a performance boost. Since the VB Guest Additions require a compiler, and Linux header files, let's first get the prerequisites installed: - -~~~~console -sudo apt install gcc build-essential linux-headers-amd64 -~~~~ - -Now head to the VirtualBox window menu and click the "Devices" option and choose "Insert Guest Additions CD Image" (note that you should download the latest version if Virtualbox asks[^1]). That will insert an ISO of the Guest Additions into our virtual machine's CDROM drive. We just need to mount it and run the Guest Additions Installer: - -~~~~console -sudo mount /dev/cdrom /mnt -cd /mnt -sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run -~~~~ - -Assuming that finishes without error, you're done. Congratulations. Now you can add any extras you want your Debian 9 Vagrant base box to include. I primarily build things in Python with Django and Postgresql, so I always install packages like `postgresql`, `python3-dev`, `python3-pip`, `virtualenv`, and some other software I can't live without. Also edit the .bashrc file to create some aliases and helper scripts. Whatever you want all your future Vagrant boxes to have, now is the time to install it. - -### Packaging your Debian 9 Vagrant Box - -Before we package the box, we're going to zero out the drive to save a little space when we compress it down the road. Here's the commands to zero it out: - -~~~~console -sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/zeroed bs=1M -sudo rm -f /zeroed -~~~~ - -Once that's done we can package up our box with this command: - -~~~~console -vagrant package --base debian9-64base -==> debian9-64base: Attempting graceful shutdown of VM... -==> debian9-64base: Clearing any previously set forwarded ports... -==> debian9-64base: Exporting VM... -==> debian9-64base: Compressing package to: /home/lxf/vms/package.box -~~~~ - -As you can see from the output, I keep my Vagrant boxes in a folder call `vms`, you can put yours wherever you like. Wherever you decide to keep it, move it there now and cd into that folder so you can add the box. Sticking the `vms` folder I use, the commands would look like this: - -~~~console -cd vms -vagrant box add debian9-64 package.box -~~~ - -Now when you want to create a new vagrant box from this base box, all you need to do is add this to your Vagrantfile: - -~~~~console -Vagrant.configure("2") do |config| - config.vm.box = "debian9-64" -end -~~~~ - -Then you start up the box as you always would: - -~~~~console -vagrant up -vagrant ssh -~~~~ - -#####Shoulders stood upon - -* [Vagrant docs](https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/virtualbox/boxes.html) -* [Engineyard's guide to Ubuntu](https://www.engineyard.com/blog/building-a-vagrant-box-from-start-to-finish) -* [Customizing an existing box](https://scotch.io/tutorials/how-to-create-a-vagrant-base-box-from-an-existing-one) - Good for when you don't need more RAM/disk space, just some software pre-installed. - -[^1]: On Arch, using Virtualbox 6.x I have had problems downloading the Guest Additions. Instead I've been using the package `virtualbox-guest-iso`. Note that after you install that, you'll need to reboot to get Virtualbox to find it. diff --git a/violet-crowned-hummingbird.txt b/violet-crowned-hummingbird.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 35e779e..0000000 --- a/violet-crowned-hummingbird.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,97 +0,0 @@ -The white stands out against the green and brown tangle of Bamboo. Even without the darting erratic and eye catching movement, even without the striking red bill, even without the iridescent violet namesake atop its head, the white alone is enough to know a Violet Crowned hummingbird is in the courtyard. - -I see it in the mornings when I sit outside, drinking coffee, making notes about the previous day. I see it in the afternoon, passing by the upstairs window, I catch the white belly in the corner of my eye and stop, pulling back the drapes the housekeeper always pulls shut so I can once again see the outside world. The Violet Crowned hummingbird is sitting there, perched on a leaf of bamboo, barely bending it, seemingly regarding me just as the house sparrows and rock doves do throughout the day. They linger, the Violet Crowned does not. He hovers, perhaps snatching insects, I've never been able to tell, though there are very few flowers in the courtyard so if he's here for food it must be meat. - -Is it the same bird? A different bird each day? For the first month I never saw a hummingbird anywhere near here, then one day, there was the while belly flitting in the bamboo. Every day after that he came back. Something here he liked, I suspect it was not me though I could not shake the feeling he was watching me. - -Hummingbirds are more than birds in Mexico. They are omens, gods, creatures of the old world. - -Further south in Peru, out on the Nazca plain, there is an image of a hummingbird so large it's only recognizable from many hundreds of feet in the air, which has proved puzzling to everyone since since there's no way to get several thousand feet in the air and actually see the hummingbird. - the hummingbird is 93 m (305 ft) long - -It seems safe to assume that the creators had completely different ways of looking at the world, literally and figuratively, if may be so bold. And yet they too celebrate the hummingbird. - -in southern Peru, ancient artists carved out an image of a hummingbird so large that it can only be recognized at about 1,000 feet in the air. These people recognized the sacredness of nature. They understood the magnitude of these tiny gifts, which are unique to the New World. - - - - -Frida painting with hummingbird necklace (Chilam Balam of Chumayel). reference andrea. - ---- - -https://vivirmexicohermoso.wordpress.com/2015/12/09/the-hummingbird-in-mexican-culture/ - -Hummingbird has different names in Mexico depending on the region quindes, tucusitos, picaflores, chupamirtos, chuparrosas, huichichiquis, or by name in indigenous languages: huitzilli Nahuatl, Mayan x ts’unu’um, Tzunún in huasteco or Jun in Totonac, among others. - -The Aztecs or Mexica, recognized hummingbirds as brave and courageous fighters. It was admired because, despite its size, showed great strength and power to fly. Its beauty, color and accuracy were highly prized qualities besides. Notably, the Aztecs believed that this bird never died, and was the symbol * Huitzilopochtli, the god of war. In the Zapotec culture, it was in charge of drinking the blood of the sacrifices. - -* Huitzilopochtli was usually translated as ‘left-handed hummingbird “or” Southern Hummingbird’, although there is disagreement around the meaning since the Opochtli ‘left’ is not modified and the modifier to be right, so the translation literal would be ‘left Hummingbird’ - -In the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel “it is called the hummingbird as a referral from a Nahuatl name, Pizlimtec, which comes from Piltzintecuhtli, Sun Young (name also Xochipilli, Aztec goddess of music, song, flowers and plants hallucinogenic), and presented himself as the father of the sun of today’s universe, it generates when it had to restructure the earth after a cosmic cataclysm. This coincides with the Popol Vuh, where the sun of today appears after the creation of men corn (De la Garza, 1995) ” - - - - - - - - - - - ---- - -http://www.hummingbirdworld.com/h/native_american.htm - -On the Nazca plain in southern Peru, ancient artists carved out an image of a hummingbird so large that it can only be recognized at about 1,000 feet in the air. These people recognized the sacredness of nature. They understood the magnitude of these tiny gifts, which are unique to the New World. - -This massive image can't be far from the place where, in primordial times, the first hummingbird opened its eyes to the pale light of dawn. In Peru and other South American countries, at or near the equator, there is an amazing variety of hummingbirds. Probably all of them have not been discovered yet. We know of over 300. - - -There is a common folk belief in Mexico that hummingbirds bring love and romance. In ancient times, stuffed hummingbirds were worn as lucky charms to bring success in matters of the heart. - - - -There is a legend from Mexico about a Taroscan Indian woman who was taught how to weave beautiful baskets by a grateful hummingbird to whom she had given sugar water during a drought. These baskets are now used in Day of the Dead Festivals. - - -A Mayan legend says the hummingbird is actually the sun in disguise, and he is trying to court a beautiful woman, who is the moon. - -Another Mayan legend says the first two hummingbirds were created from the small feather scraps left over from the construction of other birds. The god who made the hummers was so pleased he had an elaborate wedding ceremony for them. First butterflies marked out a room, then flower petals fell on the ground to make a carpet; spiders spun webs to make a bridal pathway, then the sun sent down rays which caused the tiny groom to glow with dazzling reds and greens. The wedding guests noticed that whenever he turned away from the sun, he became drab again like the original gray feathers from which he was made. - -A third Mayan legend speaks of a hummingbird piercing the the tongue of ancient kings. When the blood was poured on sacred scrolls and burned, divine ancestors appeared in the smoke. - - -In Central America, the Aztecs decorated their ceremonial cloaks with hummingbird feathers. The chieftains wore hummingbird earrings. Aztec priests had staves decorated with hummingbird feathers. They used these to suck evil out of people who had been cursed by sorcerers. - -An Aztec myth tells of a valiant warrior named Huitzil, who led them to a new homeland, then helped them defend it. This famous hero's full name was Huitzilopochtli, which means "hummingbird from the left." The "left" is the deep south, the location of the spirit world. The woman who gave birth to Huitzil was Coatlicul. She conceived him from a ball of feathers that fell from the sky. Huitzil wore a helmet shaped like a giant hummingbird. - -At a key moment in an important battle, Huitzil was killed. His body vanished and a green-backed hummingbird whirred up from the spot where he had fallen to inspire his followers to go on to victory. After Huitzil's death, he became a god. - -The Aztecs came to believe that every warrior slain in battle rose to the sky and orbited the sun for four years. Then they became hummingbirds. In the afterlife these transformed heroes fed on the flowers in the gardens of paradise, while engaging from time to time in mock battles to sharpen their skills. At night the hummingbird angels became soldiers again and followed Huitzil, fighting off the powers of the darkness, restoring warmth and light. As dawn broke, the hummingbirds went into a frenzy. The sun rewarded them for this by giving them a radiant sheen. - -In an Aztec ritual dancers formed a circle and sang a song which included these words: "I am the Shining One, bird, warrior and wizard." At the end of the ritual young men lifted young girls helping them to fly like hummingbirds. - -There is another Aztec legend which says the god of music and poetry took the form of a hummingbird and descended into the underworld to make love with a goddess, who then gave birth to the first flower. - -grape_1.gif (1301 bytes) - -One of the widespread beliefs is that hummingbirds, in some way, are messengers between words. As such they help shamans keep nature and spirit in balance. The Cochti have a story about ancient people who lost faith in the Great Mother. In anger, she deprived them of rain for four years. The people noticed that the only creature who thrived during this drought was Hummingbird. When they studies his habits, the shamans learned that Hummingbird had a secret passageway to the underworld. Periodically, he went there to gather honey. Further study revealed that this doorway was open to Hummingbird alone because he had never lost faith in the Great Mother. This information inspired the people to regain faith. After that the Great Mother took care of them. - - - - - - - ---- - - -This good-sized hummingbird was not found nesting in the U.S. until 1959. It is now uncommon but regular in summer in a few sites in southeastern Arizona and extreme southwestern New Mexico. In places where flowers are not abundant, the Violet-crowned Hummingbird may be discovered flying about or hovering in the shady middle levels of tall trees, catching small insects in flight. - -Mostly nectar and insects. Takes nectar from flowers, and eats many small insects as well. Will also feed on sugar-water mixtures in hummingbird feeders. - -Distinguished from all other North American hummingbirds by its immaculate white underparts, iridescent bluish-violet crown, and red bill, the Violet-crowned Hummingbird reaches the northern end of its range in southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico. There, it nests almost exclusively in the Arizona sycamore tree (Platanus wrightii), which, in the United States, is limited to the riparian zones of the arid Southwest. In Mexico, this hummingbird's range extends down the Pacific slope from Sonora through Jalisco to northwestern Oaxaca and in the interior Madrean Highlands from western Chihuahua south through Durango to Oaxaca. Within its Mexican range, it inhabits arid to semiarid scrub, thorn forests, riparian and oak woodlands, and parks and gardens. Fairly common in Mexico, it is uncommon and local in the United States. - -It is most easily identified by its white under plumage and iridescent bluish-violet crown (from where it gets its name). The back is emerald green. The tail is dark brown / olive green. -- cgit v1.2.3-70-g09d2 From 539a31745a39b948a19e44d6cf59409ab5f7ad9d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: lxf Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2021 22:16:02 -0500 Subject: jrnl: added new post on driving on the solstic, archived Elliott birthday post --- published/2020-12-20_six.txt | 28 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ solstice-strange-town.txt | 40 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 2 files changed, 68 insertions(+) create mode 100644 published/2020-12-20_six.txt create mode 100644 solstice-strange-town.txt diff --git a/published/2020-12-20_six.txt b/published/2020-12-20_six.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..de3bdc4 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2020-12-20_six.txt @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +Five was one of those years that seemed to fly by. I feel like you just turned five and now you're six? How did that happen? + + + +Even crazier for me to think about is that when we left home three and a half years ago, Elliott was still a toddler in diapers. And now he's six and [riding a bike](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2020/12/learning-to-ride-bike) and [backpacking](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2020/10/walking-north-carolina-woods). + +You'd be hard pressed to find a sweeter kid than Elliott. I know I am biased, but I keep waiting for him to turn into, well, a little boy. A little boy like I remember being, up to no good all the time. So far that just hasn't happened. He's the kindest, most thoughtful person I know. His sisters have no idea how lucky they are. + + + +Happy birthday Elliott. I have enjoyed the past year, strange though some of it has been, I have enjoyed it. I've enjoyed it with you. + +
+ + + + + + + +
+ +I like that you enjoy doing the unusual things we do, that you like figuring out how to make things work, that you always want to go over the next rise and see what's on the other side, that you always want to keep doing everything for just two more minutes. I know you won't always be a little boy, but I sure am enjoying it while you are. I hope you're enjoying it too. + +And sorry about all the ribbon, it won't happen again. + + + diff --git a/solstice-strange-town.txt b/solstice-strange-town.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9a7938d --- /dev/null +++ b/solstice-strange-town.txt @@ -0,0 +1,40 @@ +I have a handful of habits that carryover from growing up in the west. One of them is *going for a drive*. Not a drive to get anywhere, just a drive to drive. People don't seem to do that as much back here. Aimless driving is not the most ecologically sustainable thing you can do, but I miss it sometimes. + +Driving is a kind of meditation, especially in the wide open empty spaces of the southwest where I grew up going for drives, where there's nothing but clouds and sky and road. + + + +Where we are in South Carolina I have tree-lined country roads overgrown with huge, heavy old oaks. Their bare, twiggy arms stretch toward the winter sky. The dappled light of afternoon sun flickers like a strobe light across the windshield at 50 miles an hour. + +I drifted aimlessly, taking random left turns but trying to keep the sun on my right, so I knew I was heading south. I wound up in a town called Abbeville, which has the slogan "pretty near perfect." You have to be careful with overly-optimistic slogans, lest they become ironic. + + + +I have no idea what life is like in Abbeville, but if the old broken windows theory is correct, things are probably headed in a direction that you might charitably call, not good. I know that's the case in Iva, the closest town to our woods. It's not a social problem. It's an economic problem. The jobs left when the mill shut down. + +That sentence applies to any number of a hundred small towns we've driven through in the course of our travels around America. Whatever social problems may exist in this country, they pale next to the economic reality that most of us live with. + +There's a town named Due West + + + + + + +The bare twiggy oak trees + +I didn't have a direction in mind, I just kept turning left. Eventually I saw a sign of Abbeville and thought, I wonder what's there. Eventually I made it to the old downtown and parked. I walked around + +By strange coincidence I was shooting with the same camera as last year, not mine. + +I stumbled across + +On the way out of town I saw a road marked Heritage trail. + +The gulla gulla gas station, a reminder that you're in SC. + + +a junction for level land in one direction, due west in the other + +There were so many barns I would have loved to photograph, but somehow knocking on someone's door in a pandemic to ask if you can photograph their crumbling barn doesn't seem like the right move. + -- cgit v1.2.3-70-g09d2 From 3b0ecf3362ac1707d36f8cc7161136aec2c3b122 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: luxagraf Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2021 22:16:02 -0500 Subject: jrnl: added new post on driving on the solstice also archived Elliott birthday post --- cheap-recipes.txt | 11 ++++++++++- 1 file changed, 10 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/cheap-recipes.txt b/cheap-recipes.txt index f3d3787..2fa6a59 100644 --- a/cheap-recipes.txt +++ b/cheap-recipes.txt @@ -70,4 +70,13 @@ Nutrition Facts --- - +1 cup soy sauce +1 cup granulated sugar +1 ½ teaspoons brown sugar +6 cloves garlic, crushed in a press +2 tablespoons grated fresh ginger +¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper +1 3-inch cinnamon stick +1 tablespoon pineapple juice +8 skinless, boneless chicken thighs +2 tablespoons cornstarch -- cgit v1.2.3-70-g09d2