Occupation of Independence

Box Canyon Blogger reprimanded me for my amateurish and emotional accounting: he thought I should stop obsessing over $4 gasoline since it doesn't really amount to that much at the end of a year. Indeed, it's easy to overemphasize gasoline prices because of their high visibility. The beauty of being a full time RVer, in a traditional land yacht, is that a retiree can kiss off the burdens of being a stick-and-brick houseowner; not just the financial burdens, but the domination of your ever-dwindling time by repairs, maintenance, remodeling, and buying excessive crap that you don't need just because you have space to put it. (Not that you'll ever be able to actually find that crap when you need it.) There is something even worse about house-slavery if you believe that true Evil is a banal and insidious thing: in a house you settle into soul-numbing routines centered around comfort, cleaning, and other trivia. One day leads comfortably to the next and you

Anyone who has an inflated ego should just spend more time as an amateur prophet in the business world, politics, or any place actually. That said, Google's Chromebook seems more portentous than anything we've seen in the computer industry for years. I am willing to believe that, five to ten years from now, Washington state politicians will be frantically patching up a government bailout of Microsoft Corp., which will then be called Government Software. The future might be as dark for anti-virus firms like Symantec, or for regular PC manufacturers like Toshiba, Dell, and HP. In order for Google's Chromebook to supplant Microsoft Windows and Office as the desktop standard, there must be an enormous expansion in internet traffic. So the biggest beneficiary of the new paradigm might be the telecommunications industry.

For somebody who has experienced both sides of it, the short answer to the title question is 'yes'. But it's in the interest of some RVers to trick it into a 'no'. That is my current project. By 'camping' I mean short-term sleeping/hauling/sitting in a sub-RV, as opposed to 365 days per year of living/walking in a big RV. I might want to camp for as long as one month, a few hours drive from where I live permanently in an RV park in my no-longer-roadworthy travel trailer.

What would my kelpie, Coffee Girl, do if she were free to bother a horseman? Would the horse rear up and kick off the rider? I used to worry about it. One day this fellow was walking this young horse on Gabbie's Ridge. It seemed like a good chance to test Coffee Girl. She ran up and sniffed at the horse a little, while the horse kicked slightly at the dog. No harm done. Both were rather calm about the whole thing. What a relief. I suppose horses grow up with ranch dogs around here. I'm glad to see a horse culture hanging on in the West, although just barely. For the most part, the economy seems based on retirement housing and healthcare.