Occupation of Independence

It does do a blogger some good to mouth-off on the internet. After doing so -- about the great vice of putting tools down in such a reckless way that you can't find them three minutes later -- it helped me go on a massive cleanup campaign.  It is not in front of me at the moment but I think that Thomas Edison visualized his thoughts and inventions as an excrudescence (?) from his head, somewhat like dandruff. I smiled thinking of tools and materials flying off my person, in random directions. But today brings another issue: closure for a project, its difficulty, and whether it is objective or subjective. It's so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that a project's end is fixed, absolute, and objective, when in fact much of it depends on us saying, 'Enough!' There certainly is a disconsolate phase in the natural history of any project when we are like a hiker who is fooled again and again by false summits. The hiker keeps climbing, keeps making demonstrable

Around the New Year I argued that 'I am not getting older, I am getting better,' need not be an empty cliche. There really are things we naturally get better at, with age. So why not pound the crap out of these things, and put aside the things we must lose on? Such qualities include: 1. Self-mastery and self-restraint. 2. Patience. 3. Perspicuity. 4. Setting more realistic (i.e., lower) expectations on new projects or people. 5. Understanding the consequences of our actions. 6. Thinking more independently. 7. Better juggling of trade-offs when making decisions. This project of converting a cargo trailer into a travel trailer has offered me an impressive and perverse example of how difficult it is to achieve #1 on the list. If you were to step back from the thousand-and-one machinations of the day, and ask yourself why you can't work faster, you wouldn't have any trouble coming up with a list. But it was fun to identify the top problem on the list.  For

The woman in the RV park was swinging her arms as she walked. You can't get much of a walk in an RV park, so I considered telling her about Farmington's (NM) nice linear city park, along the Animas River. That would certainly make for a longer and more interesting walk for her. But I kept my mouth shut. I might like recreational trails in a city -- in fact, they are my favorite thing -- but most RVers are out to "consume" the standard, bar-coded brand names of the tourism industry. In this area, Indian ruins are the main brand names, which is surprising considering how visually unexciting most old pueblo ruins are. It seems advantageous to simply read about them, for free, on the internet. My dog and I went off to do our usual thing of walking along the Animas River. On the way back, we ran into two interesting families. The first was a goose family. They paddled along on the other side of the river, which tortures my dog, Coffee Girl, who is no fan of water. Th

Let's assume that most readers find discussion forums as painful to read as I do. I'm almost glad they are, because it created a delightful surprise. On the forum for converting cargo trailers to travel trailer/campers, several people have used the term, "re-purpose," as in 'they repurposed a metal bracket from a shelf in their basement to a new life in their cargo trailer.' It really caught my eye. What a wonderful word. In some ways, it is magic to create a new function and add value to something that you already own. When camping in the outback, repurposing scraps and other things is the only way to make your little house more comfortable, unless you are willing to make several long round-trips to town for the hardware store. Personally this is when I've gotten the most pleasure from repurposing. You feel so clever when you succeed! The downside is that the result looks amateurish and ad hoc.  When you drive a half dozen times a day to Home Depot