Occupation of Independence

Should I migrate north by a different route than in past springs?  But if you go looking for trouble, you will probably find it.  Isn't that what our mothers and grandmothers told us? There certainly are practical advantages to using a familiar route.  But travel is supposed to be about adventure.   Didn't I just go through a similar experience of looking for a new route a couple summers ago, and then ran into quite a disaster with a wheel bearing on the travel trailer?  All in all I was quite lucky, and left the experience determined to grease the bearings on a more regular basis. Rationally, the new route had nothing to do with the wheel bearing disaster.  But that wasn't how I felt at the time.  It is not going over the top to see my feelings as old-fashioned "religious" guilt. Recall Gilbert Murray's "The Five Stages of Greek Religion," now available for free on archive.org.   I still carry a few paper books around with me.  But...

They have a support group for everything these days.  How about a support group for people who have become addicted to doggie rescue videos on You Tube?   One of the channels belonged to a woman who rescued puppies by bringing them home and bathing them in an attractive, old-fashioned ceramic bowl.  The little dogs were usually filthy of course.  As warm sudsy water dribbled over the little dog and splashed into the bowl, it made a 'slow rain on a hard roof' type noise; then the gentle and melancholic solo-piano music would start.  That got me every time.  Sometimes the grooming videos have the biggest impact.  When non-shedding dogs go forever without a haircut, they become quite a sight.  The dog can barely move, and its hindquarters are filthy.  A good hair-clipper works miracles in a few minutes and it shows up so well on camera.  Sometimes large sections of hair come off the dog all at once, somewhat like the farmer tries to d...

Ahh, Spring.  But it doesn't really live up to its image.  For one thing I usually leave Arizona before there any flowers to look at. Since Arizona uses 'God's Time,' unlike the silly states in the rest of the country; and since I am still in Arizona, let's gloat by talking about the change of seasons a little bit today.  No matter how many springs a person has seen, there is still a stubborn tendency to expect temperatures to warm up gradually.   Wrong idea!  This notion needs to be renounced once and for all.  It will save you unnecessary frustration. Gradually is the key word.  The only things that happen gradually are higher angles of the sun and longer hours of daylight. But temperatures do not warm up gradually in the normal sense of the word.  Temperatures toggle from winter to summer and back to winter.  They skip intermediate numbers, except in an immaterial mathematical sense of the word. A graph of spring temperatures looks l...

It is fun for a hillbilly to go shopping in the big city.  So many choices!  But I lost track of how many times I told the checkout-human that I was not "in their system" and no, I would not give them my phone number. Harbor Freight has always been obnoxious and aggressive about that.  At least the biological unit who checked me out had a sense of humor about it. Later, something happened as obnoxious as McDonald's replacing their checkout-humans with those damn electronic kiosks, where the customer gets to fumble with a multi-step menu until they finally memorize it.   At one of the big gas station chains, I went in to pay cash as I usually do.  But instead of just giving the human a 20 dollar bill and saying, "Pump #7", he made me go to this iPad-looking thing, and fumble around with an arbitrary and non-intuitive sequence of steps in a multi-layered menu. He had to step around the counter and help me.  It took us 5 minutes to do what used to take 5 ...