Category Archives: Transportation

The Brother of Invention

Posted on December 11, 2012 by | 7 comments

Humane gunfighters

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

Life’s so full of happy surprises here it took me a while to remember to be surprised when I awakened warm, still parked where once chickens scratched and pecked on mornings such as this.  Then I remembered what it was I ought to be surprised about – that I’d expected this post to be made on a fast WIFI connection somewhere out where it’s probably colder than it is here.  Which is plenty cold enough to satisfy the needs of the feline population, I’m informed.

I thought it was the money situation keeping the delays coming hot and heavy, but when I managed yesterday after the temperature dropped to 20 degrees F, to get the propane heater working in the RV, I knew a new reality had dropped in to flex its muscles.  That heater had to be why the Universe kicked in to impose good sense into my activities.

I don’t know how I fixed it.  Maybe just pulling things apart and putting them back together, tapping on things, testing, and taking them apart again was what did it.  Or maybe it was my genius brother, Invention.

So this morning I woke someplace warm for the first cold morning in at least a couple of years.  I hope today I’ll be changing the oil on the RV, wrapping up a couple of other details, and try to round up the cats to hit the road before the end of the week.

But it’s not easy to feel much dissatisfaction with life when there’s warm out there to be had.  I’m going to have to kick myself with some determination to impose a sense of urgency into my intentions.

But I’ve digressed.  I’d planned to tell you about that truck I saw parked in front of the Humane Society Thrift Shop new construction area.

Can’t recall now what I was going to say about it.

Instead, here’s wishing all of you plenty of warm.

Old Jules

7 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, America, Animals, Human Behavior, Kerrville, Nature, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Survival, Texas, Transportation, Trucks

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Cats Cradles, Communities, Hungers and Bokononism

Posted on November 19, 2012 by | 9 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for the visit.

Cats Cradle

I’m rapidly developing an overweening pride in this.  15-18 pounds of cat slept on it last night, and it’s no worse for the wear.

But, I’ve digressed.

Maybe it was inevitable.  While I was doing other things over the past weeks my mind began toying around with abstractions involving communities and the attraction human beings have for them.  I’d been reading some Jack London and found myself sticking pieces of his thinkings off in the side of my mind, observations about the packages of community he experienced and wrote about.

But on the side Slab City sneaked into my mind occasionally, and the attraction I’ve no intention to indulge, that remains despite my intentions. 

Or the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous RV and van dwellers are going to stage in Quartzite, Arizona in January.  http://cheapgreenrvliving.com/Rendezvous.html 

Evidently thousands of RVs and van dwellers converge on the spot every January for a big RV show, and the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous takes place concurrently.    50-100 people who live in RVs or vans or wish to live in them, and feel the need to be part of a community of a sort they didn’t find surrounded by RVs, campers and vans in RV parks, State Parks, or in National Forests.

Are the people occupying those dots down there different than the ones you’d meet if you went knocking on doors at the Take It Easy Trailer Court in Kerrville, Texas?  I dunno.

But something in my mind connected the concept of community and the human need for it with Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and Bokononism:

Bokononism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bokononism is a fictional religion invented by Kurt Vonnegut and practiced by many of the characters in his novel Cat’s Cradle. Many of the sacred texts of Bokononism were written in the form of calypsos.

Bokononism is based on the concept of foma, which are defined as harmless untruths. A foundation of Bokononism is that the religion, including its texts, is formed entirely of lies; however, one who believes and adheres to these lies will have peace of mind, and perhaps live a good life. The primary tenet of Bokononism is to “Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.”

Bokononism encompasses a number of unique concepts expressed in the San Lorenzan dialect:[1]

  • boko-maru – the supreme act of worship of the Bokononists, which is an intimate act consisting of prolonged physical contact between the naked soles of the feet of two persons.
  • “Busy, busy, busy” – what a Bokononist whispers whenever he thinks about how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.
  • “Calypso” – song from The Books of Bokonon. Eight such songs are cited in Cat’s Cradle, some of them are presented with a title (i.e. On Dynamic Tension or The Boko-maru Calypso) and others are presented with a number (i.e. The Hundred-and-nineteenth Calypso). The Calypsos illustrate various aspects of the teachings of Bokonon.
  • duffle – the destiny of thousands of people placed on one stuppa
  • duprass – a karass that consists of only two people. This is one of the few kinds of karass about which one can have any reliable knowledge. The two members of a duprass live lives that revolve around each other, and are therefore often married. “A true duprass can’t be invaded, not even by children born of such a union.” The novel cites the example of “Horlick Minton, the New American Ambassador to the Republic of San Lorenzo, and his wife, Claire.” The two members of a duprass always die within a week of each other.
  • foma – harmless untruths; lies that, if used correctly, can be useful.
  • granfalloon – a false karass; i.e., a group of people who imagine they have a connection that does not really exist. An example is “Hoosiers“; Hoosiers are people from Indiana, and Hoosiers have no true spiritual destiny in common, so they really share little more than a name. Another example is a Cornellian, a student or graduate of Cornell University.
  • kan-kan – the instrument which brings a person into his or her karass
  • karass – group of people who, often unknowingly, are working together to do God’s will. The group can be thought of as the fingers that support a cat’s cradle.
  • “Now I will destroy the whole world” – What a Bokononist says before committing suicide.
  • pool-pah – wrath of God or “shit storm”
  • saroon – to acquiesce to a vin-dit
  • sin-wat – a person who wants all of somebody’s love for him/herself
  • sinookas – the tendrils of one’s life
  • stuppa – a fogbound child (i.e. an idiot)
  • vin-dit – a sudden shove in the direction of Bokononism
  • wampeter – the central theme or purpose of a karass. Each karass has two wampeters, one waxing and one waning.
  • wrang-wrang – someone who steers a Bokononist away from a line of speculation by reducing that line, with the example of the wrang-wrang’s own life, to an absurdity.
  • Zah-mah-ki-bo – fate, inevitable destiny

Brought me to realize these cats around here are all Bokononists.  They’ve been sneaking around here converting me to their religion all these years without me knowing it, superimposing their viewpoints over my natural ones.

Forcing me to have a community with them.

But at least I don’t have to go to Quartzite, Arizona to have a community.  Bokononism is a big step up in life if I can look around inside the RV and find a community without having to go all the way to Quartzite, or Slab City, AZ.

Old Jules

9 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, America, Animals, Human Behavior, New Mexico, NM, Relationships, Solitude, Spirituality, Transportation, Trucks

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Smug Self-Congratulation and Slow Rapid Advancement

Posted on November 18, 2012 by | 38 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

When I brought up the screen to post I noticed it’s November 18.  Old Sol’s muttering to me that he’s becoming bored with all my scurryings and goings on every time I go around him again without becoming a bit wiser in any way discernable by alert human beings.

But tomorrow I’ll have gotten by with it 70 times despite a persistent, continuing foolishness and determination to smack head-on into heavy, solid objects.  One such object I’ll be telling you about here, but that’s later on in the post.  But first, a few other matters. 

My friend Rich and his wife Lisa came to visit a few days recently.  We spent a lot of time just savoring the company, hours and days flashing by in such rapid sequence I’m reminded of those strobes a person used to have a to deal with on dance floors during the 1980s when I try to remember the details.

All I can say for certain is the time passed more as a pleasant dream than some feet-on-the-ground experience anchored in reality.

But somewhere during all that Rich fixed my computer so’s it connected online through WIFI.  When I left one evening he was downloading several years of updates to Windows Vista and AVG, which turned out to be a considerable task.

Rich has an amazing music collection and he brought along an 8gb flash drive loaded with some I didn’t have.  Took a T-drive back with him I’d freed up 600 gb from and he’ll be sending me the rest of what he has.

Amazing times we live in, where a thing such as that can happen.

Reality did rear up and whinny, however.

The second night I was driving home, moderate speed, and saw a dim shape in the oncoming lane ahead.  Thought it might be a deer and moved my foot to the brake, but before I could press the pedal it became a frightened, full grown buck.

I stood the RV on its nose while the deer ran in front, reversed himself, ran back, then back again before the WHACK.  A catastrophy for the deer, but a wild stroke of luck for me.

The incident revealed all the cabinet doors in the RV suffered from metal fatigue.  Every item I’d carefully arranged in those cabinets, securely stored, came down, forward, cans of cat food hitting the back of my head, all manner of articles filling the floorboard underfoot.  A crucial piece of knowledge I’d hate to have learned under different circumstances.

So the past few days have been spent scratching my head about the best ways for securing belongings in a vehicle destined to travel at highway speeds with the potential for sudden stops.  Studying those cabinet doors for ways to lock them shut. 

Trying out cargo nets as an option.

Installing recycled refrigerator shelves and ways to secure what’s on them, along with a platform from a grader-ditch cooler-top for the comp to sit on when I need it as a GPS, a place for incidentals the rest of the time.

Which is all to say, these are things I needed to know, bought at the price of minimal damage to the RV, the life of a buck deer, and enough expense making repairs to cut into the gas money I’d been hoarding.

Well worth the cost of setting back departure clock enough to accomodate it.

I’ve been waiting almost 70 years for this trip and the cats assure me a few more days won’t matter.

Old Jules

38 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, America, Animals, Emergency Preparedness, New Mexico, Redneck Repairs, RedneckRepairs, Senior Citizens, Texas, Transportation, Trucks, White Trash Repairs

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The Trekster Saga Continues

Posted on October 25, 2012 by | 25 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

I won’t bore you with the details of preparations for the road, mostly.  Suffice to say it’s coming along gradually without tipping its hat to any deadlines and schedules I might attempt to impose.  I came to realize a few days ago I don’t have any alligators gnawing on my pantsleg to hurryhurryhurry, anyway.

So I’ll get on the road more-or-less soon, but not quite so soon as I’d told myself I will.  Which is okay by the cats and the Coincidence Coordinators as nearly as I can discern.

Shiva the Cow Cat opted out of the future with the other cats and me.  Refused to be cajoled into getting laid back about the RV, willingly adapt to it and think of it as a source of pleasurable quality time.  I finally decided I wouldn’t insist.

Jeanne’s son, Michael, drove down from Kansas and spent a couple of days I wouldn’t have missed for anything I can think of, then departed with Shiva.  Took her back to reside with Jeanne.

Second night he was here we were sitting outdoors talking and he pointed north.  “What the hell is that?”

We watched and gasped and wondered while a UFO performed impossibilities in the sky for a while.  Nice gift the Coincidence Coordinators provided to top off his visit.  Something to remember alongside Shiva’s departure.

Damn I’m going to miss that cat.  What the hell.

Otherwise, what the hell on everything else that needs it to balance things out, also.

Old Jules

25 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, Country Life, Texas, Transportation, Trucks, UFOs

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Brief Out-of-Sequence Flashes of Yesterday

Posted on September 20, 2012 by | 4 comments

Scene:  Highway 479 midway back from Kerrville.

Boom!  Riiiipppp-like drumbeat roar from somewhere in the back of the truck.  I pulls over first opportunity, no sign of anything wrong.  Squat down peek under boxing the compass.  Nuthun.

I re-mount, pull back onto the pavement, nothing seems wrong for a few miles, then the unmistakeable sound of a tire flopping.  Pull over again.  Yep, inside rear dually tire’s blown.  What the hell.

Tire’s destroyed, but it’s a blessing.  I’ll just have to sort out how sometime later.

Scene in town, me and a guy I stop in to see when I’m there and have time, sitting on the porch telling one another how glad we were for the rain. 

“By the way, I’ve decided to swap you that trailer if you still want it.  Let me know and I’ll take the stuff off it and we’re in business.”

“Yessir.  Thankeevurymuchsir.  I wants it.”

Behind the scenes – RV air conditioner listing San Antonio Craigslist potential potentate:  

“I won’t give you more than $150.”

I ponders.  Seems to me a new tire’s likely to cost $200. 

“I ain’t taking less than $200.

The RV Air Conditioner Universe takes a powder, hopefully considering.

Scene – Elsewhere, Out-of-Nowhere Political Remark:

“We’re in deep doodoo if this guy gets re-elected!”

“We’re in deep doodoo no matter who gets elected.”

“Yeah, but more so if this one does.”

“We’ve been in deep doodoo from the time we first started letting kings make the deep doodooism decisions.  If one man’s capable of getting us up to our necks in doodoo he’s going to do it.  Ain’t nobody to stop him, so he has a moral obligation to the doodoo delivery dingus. 

“Simple as that.  If you don’t like it, don’t elect anyone.”

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2012, Government, Human Behavior, Politics, Texas, Transportation, Trucks

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Toyota leaf spring enigma

Posted on August 27, 2012 by | 9 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

I spent an unanticipated lot of time yesterday learning about leaf springs on 1983 Toyota Motor Homes.  I knew I’d have to do something about those sagging springs and began the day knowing pretty much what it would be.  Namely buying some helper springs or spring supports from JC Whitney, installing them, then going on about my business.

Except JC Whitney doesn’t have them.

So I visited the Toyota RV Discussion group with the intention of finding out what others who don’t know as much as I do have handled these problems I’ve never handled.  Got a lot of knowledgeable, helpful suggestions gradually indicating the problem isn’t so inexpensively solved, the solution so patently obvious as I’d originally believed.

But before any solution a person’s got to know what’s under there now.  Airbag spring supports?  Retrofitted helper springs?

None of the above, turns out.

But new springs, helper springs, or airbags are clearly the way to resolve the issue.  On the forum there’s disagreement as to which.  As time allows, today I’ll spend more time at non-JC Whitney sources for the options, learn as much as I can with a head full of already knowing so much at dawn yesterday I thought it unlikely I’d be learning much else between now and dying.

But sometime soon I’m going to have to lift that house up and get under there with a tape measure and find out how long, how thick, how something else I can’t recall at the moment, those springs are.  Then spend some time on long distance phone calls with [probably] people in China or India who answer technical questions for suppliers in the US.

Meanwhile, it’s quiet outside these batwing doors.  Too quiet.

Poor old silky rooster outsmarted himself yesterday, missed an adventure a lot of chickens would pay the poultry equivalent of good money to experience.

Old Jules

9 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, Country Life, Education, Senior Citizens, Texas, Transportation, Trucks

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Done Deal Down in the Middle of Nowhere

Posted on August 21, 2012 by | 6 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

Drove that house out here at speeds that our great-great grandaddies would have fainted and revived themselves to know.   By 19th Century standards it was a rush.  By 20th Century standards it slowed down some.  But it came down the 19th Century standards road from the pavement to the cabin as smoothly as a buckboard or stagecoach would have. 

Didn’t require many miles to discover I’m gonna need to install some helpers for the rear leaf springs.  Or replace the old ones.  A cross-wind at 55 adds thrills a person couldn’t find on a drag strip or Daytona speedway.

Now, whenever this is, I’m going to have to see if it will climb back out of here, drive over to the County Seat at TimeWarpVille, Texas.  Maybe turn loose a few criminals if I get selected for jury duty.

Civic duties, civic duties, civic duties!  Just drives me crazy!

Old Jules

6 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, Transportation, Trucks

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The Opera Ticket, The Backpack and The Feline Asylum

Posted on August 20, 2012 by | 7 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Elroyjones and others who’ve asked for pics,  I don’t have this miracle out here yet so I can’t provide you pics at the moment of that specific one.  But the cool thing about living in the 21s Century is a person can meet himself coming the other direction down the road he’s going on.

Someone on Craigslist is selling one so much like it I had to look twice to make sure it wasn’t the same backpack.  http://sandiego.craigslist.org/csd/rvs/3189851591.html

image 0

image 1

A couple of things are different, but generally the same animal.  The Craigslist one’s 21′ and the Opera Ticket’s 18′, I’m thinking.  Same model, same engine, interior design somewhat different – this guy claims 18 mpg on the road.  The one I’m getting has a generator mounted below on this side, while this one doesn’t.

But the Feline Asylum’s got 76,000 miles on the 22R engine, sat up a decade after the man owned it was killed in a plane crash.  Then another man bought it, worked on a lot of it for five years, put a new set of tires on it, and before he was finished decided he has to move to Arkansas.  It has a few things to be done before it’s ready to head off looking at operas.

I’ll be back and forth this week getting things arranged while the cats chew their toenails and stomp around complaining.

Old Jules

7 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, America, Animals, Senior Citizens, Transportation, Trucks

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Down Here Where It’s Sane

Posted on August 19, 2012 by | 12 comments

Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

I try not to allow myself to get too involved in the kinds of things real people trouble themselves over, but for the past several months Real Reality’s been poking me and pinching me on the rump.  Real Reality’s an ego-maniac, thinks it’s important and if a person isn’t careful it can convince him it has something to do with anything, make a considerable nuisance of itself.

All these oak trees falling, others threatening to fall on inconvenient and distracting places.  Various new roof leaks.  A number of other nagging items not worth mentioning.  They’ve been taps on the shoulder by Real Reality I’ve suspected might be followed by a round-house to the jaw if I didn’t duck and dodge.

So, a few days ago when I came across a 1983 Toyota RV I can manage to squeeze me and the cats into [out from under trees] I felt more relief than I expected of myself.  I can quit wondering where I’m going to live, at least structurally and what I’m going to drive transportationally.  Opens the doors to more palatable geographic questions.

I’ve a number of issues I’ll need to wrap up here, depending on all manner of non-ponderables, but if things required it I could be out of here in a couple of weeks.  Or, if I’m left to piddle around doing it, a couple of months.  But one-way-or-another the engine’s running and the Coincidence Coordinators are giving their approval for me to get the hell out of Dodge before the snow flies out west.

The road mightn’t be brick, mightn’t be yellow, but there’s an exit ramp coming and if I can get this thing slowed down enough I’m going to cut myself loose from all this pesky Real Reality rushing around making a nuisance of itself. 

Old Jules

12 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Transportation, Trucks

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Damned Environmentalists vs It’s All About Money

Posted on July 17, 2012 by | 22 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

The neighbor up the hill drove down to sit awhile yesterday evening.  We discovered once again, as we have before, there are areas where we’re rigid enough in our certainties so’s there’s no room for civil discourse.  We found two of those more quickly than it takes to tell it.  One involved multi-national corporations.

Neighbor:  Sure.  They’re shipping jobs and industry overseas because labor, costs of production are cheaper.

Me:  That’s what I’m saying.  They’re indifferent to the well being of US workers, the US economy. 

Neighbor:  It’s still jobs.  Still people working, making a living.  Africa, South America.  They’re all people.

Me:  Yeah, they’re people.  But why should a guy in Minnesota trying to scratch out a living favor losing it so’s someone in Asia can have a job?

Neighbor:  He can buy products cheaper.

Me:  He can’t buy products at any price if he doesn’t have a job.  Part of the job of his government is to make sure his job stays inside the country.

Neighbor, clamping jaw:  We aren’t going to talk about this.  You and I see it differently.

Then, a few minutes later:

Neighbor:  They want to build a pipeline to bring oil from Canada to the Texas coast.  Damned environmentalists are protesting, keeping them from it.

Me:  So why don’t they refine it up there.  Canada, northern US?

Neighbor:  No shipping ports.

Me:  What they need shipping ports for?  Nobody in Canada, Minnesota needs gasoline?  Cities don’t need hydrocarbons to produce electricity?

Neighbor:  They need to sell it overseas.   It’s all about money.  They can get better prices selling it to China or somewhere.

 Me:  Who needs to sell it overseas?  The people living on the land they’d take by government mandate to  put in a pipeline?  The people in the US who’d be heating their houses and running their cars on the gasoline if it’s refined close to where it comes out of the ground?  Who?

Neighbor, getting up:  Sorry I brought it up.

Luckily, neither the neighbor, nor I, depend on any sort of agreement between ourselves.  Neither has anything invested in the opinion of the other.  And whatever we might think about it, that oil’s going to arrive where the people who burn it pay the highest price.  The Canadian sands producing oil belong to people who might be anywhere, but who own stock in a company who bought the mineral rights.  They want the most dividends so they can buy more stock and get more dividends.

Old Jules

22 Comments

Posted in 2012, Current Issues, Government, Human Behavior, Nature, Relationships, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Texas, Transportation

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