Occupation of Independence

Although the daylight hours have been calm and comfortable, nights have been windy. Tonight was so bad I put the (trailer) stabilizers down. They seemed broken but are probably just jammed with sand and dirt. How long must you camp in this part of the world before you make it a habit to lubricate things?!  I also slapped on some noise-cancelling headphones and played some relaxing solo piano music, to drown out the screaming wind.  Was my dog scratching herself on the floor and causing the trailer to shake? No. So what was happening? Then I pulled off the headphones and was shocked at how windy and noisy it was. Being under relentless attack from the wind is no fun. The headphones instantly returned me to a peaceful world and a beautiful world, despite the trailer shaking some. Removing the headphones was as drastic as stepping out of a comfy winter cabin into a frigid snowscape. It is funny how we take some layers of protection for granted -- such as house insulation, hats & sungl

Lately I have been posting about doing better with winter darkness. It seemed desirable to look for a visual metaphor on the internet. It was fun to shop around and try to find the perfect one. The visual metaphor needs to express how one's imagination during reading can take the mind into the great outside world, as an antidote to the closed-in, cloistered, depressed feeling a person can get during too many hours of darkness. Here is the best one that I found.  from twenty20.com Perhaps the photo should have had a cat looking out the window?  It would nice to think of the perfect musical metaphor for this same idea, but I can't come up with anything.

Things are starting to get a little tense on the I-15 corridor. Any day now we could get our first wave of Canadian snowbirds, probably from places that line up with the longitude, such as Calgary. Must I put a disclaimer in this post that says something like, "But I really like Canadians?" (Well, I do like them.) But after two winters of being cooped up in the Great White North, it is possible they will act crazy. Let's face it: even under the best of circumstances, they are a wild and lawless people. It is impossible to get them to follow any rules and act like civilized human beings. (facetiousness warning.) So this year we might get lucky and they will act like a horde of college students invading a beach town on spring break. Or maybe they will act like Vikings landing on the shores of England in 900 A.D.  Soon they will be displaying their maple leaf flags in the American desert and arranging the rocks in little circles around chollas. Desert paradise as Canadian s

  I should feel happy for people who visit red rock country and become wildly excited, but for me it isn't the color that matters so much. It is the camp-ability of the topography.  Mesas and plateaus are easy to camp on. Canyon bottoms are difficult to drive through, camp on, or get a wireless signal.  Crumpled mountains make for surprisingly few camping locations. And of course, mesas make for good dirt-road mountain biking.

It isn't a new idea in the world, but it might be the first time I ever put the idea into practice: visualizing a book rather than just reading it. What exactly is your brain doing when you read a book? It knows the meaning of each word, but that is only a partial step towards visualizing a sentence. You are still just mechanically rastering across the page. There is something dry and sterile and lifeless about it. It is eye-fatigue, but the mind stays bored. But what if you changed your job from a movie scriptwriter to the person responsible for "screenplay" or teleplay? They turn the sterile verbiage of the writer into tangible things that move and can be photographed in an interesting way. Perhaps somebody who has spent most of his life reading non-fiction doesn't really appreciate the importance of this verbiage-to-screenplay transition. Switching to fiction, things change. I happen to be reading Bernard Cornwell's "Saxon Tales" right now. Consider v