Occupation of Independence

 Photography used to be more fun before the smartphone era.  Yes, that sounds a bit ungrateful to all the things that camera phones do well.  One advantage that doesn't get talked about much is their lack of moving parts.   That was always my problem with compact zoom cameras, with their dust covers and telescoping zooms.  It seems like a single grain of sand could have jammed things up.  But if you want to go back to having more fun, maybe a two-year lifespan is just something that has to be tolerated. For example, when walking through a thick forest a person can slip into quite a mood.  It is hard to believe, but there was a time when I considered thick, dark forests to be undesirable.  Gloomy almost.  Today they make me think of being 5 F cooler, and what else matters? The darkness makes you think about stumbling into a bear.  Thick vegetation could turn lethal!  And then, all of a sudden, you see a bright spot where the sun...

 Recall that I am a recovering armchair general, attempting to become an armchair media critic.  It has always been surprising how much talking there is on You Tube, and yet there are hardly any maps.  I have seen talking-heads give confusing and lengthy speeches about war-front geography -- please, shut up and show me a meaningful map! The maps that are shown do not even have labels on them.  If graphs are shown, their labels and legends are illegible. Perhaps the medium is the message.  Graphs and maps do not show well on the restricted real estate of a smartphone, but talking does.  Earlier I wrote about how bad many talking-heads are, at talking.  But there are people who are good at talking.  Other people would be wise to imitate them.  So this is a shout-out to one of those good talkers: 'Mr. Global,' on You Tube.  Seriously I love the way that guy talks! 

In preparation for a colonoscopy, they put you on a special diet to empty out your intestines.   It involves a lot of Gatorade, clear broth, and laxatives. I thought I would be hungry without solid food, but the broth was surprisingly satisfying.  I had never bought broth before, at the grocery store.  Why wasn't I buying broth all the time?  On top of everything else, broth doesn't need refrigeration when unopened.  A camper should like that. Putting leftovers into broth for more nutrition and taste is so easy.  That is how our frugal (and less obese) ancestors ate.  They used leftovers from the main meal in mid-day.  Remember that they didn't have good refrigeration in those days.  There is always something that needs to be used up, soon. My new evening meal. Just think: all my life I had been cleaning out skillets and pans during the mid-day meal by washing the residue down the sink, instead of saving it for evening soup.  A...

 Perhaps we got as much as 0.05" of rain the other day.  If that weren't miraculous enough, it stayed cloudy most of the day. The next day there was some dampness to the ground.  This is fantastic for a hiker or mountain biker.  The ground had turned from something uncomfortable and dead into something completely different, something with real hope.  But don't think I am telling tall tales: there weren't any mud puddles to slosh through. If life and hope aren't worth noticing and writing about, what is?  But how would you actually write about it?  Lavishing adjectives on it probably wouldn't work.  The long-suffering reader knows my stump speech by heart, by now.  But each new manifestation of it seems fresh to me because something that was dead and predictable is washed over by the surprising and the alive, like a wave of white sea foam onto a beach.  Before the smartphone, RVers still had daguerreotypes to capture the moment....