Tag Archives: thoughts

Scouting the Escape Route

Posted on January 2, 2012 by | 13 comments

Even though Gale’s change in plans for last week postponed the schedule for The New Truck Resurrection the new year seemed a good place to start examining the next steps for exploiting the possible.  I didn’t have a clear enough idea about the options and my thinking was bouncing around inside a range from becoming Joe Palooka’s pal, Humphrey Pennyworth:

to building a house on a trailer http://tinyurl.com/7a95xyo, to finding some trashed bumper-pull trailer and fixing it to live in RAZ Auction and an Aborted Escape Route.  I needed to narrow things down.  So I finally did the obvious and visited Craigslist to see what’s out there within the price-range of what I might be able to manage.  The results were surprising, welcome and uplifting.

I received this travel trailer in a trade. It has been sitting for a while. We are in the process of cleaning it. {lots of dust} The trailer is in overall good condition. Would make a great hunting trailer. The outside looks dirty because it has been sitting onder a oak tree. I tried the A/C and it will have to have the dirt dauber nests removed, the fan makes noise. The water pump runs but I am not going to put water in the tank until the weather warms up. Not sure about the ref. but one the same size at Home Depot or Sams are about $100.00. I am selling the trailer as is where is for $1500.00. It has the propane tank with the small fitting. New tanks are about $20.00 each. The trailer looks great inside, it has not been abused.

And inside:

Or if the New Truck doesn’t turn out to be dependable after a Real Mechanic gets it going:

1983 Toyota RV – $1500

One Owner
Runs and Drives Good
53k on 4 cylinder
5 speed manual trans.
Missing door on camper…
Needs TLC..$1500 obo..

Inside:

What I found is that within a 200 mile radius of here there are a number of already livable dwellings on wheels available for $1000 to $1500.  Livable, or capable of beng made so without a lot of expense or labor.

It took me a year to set aside a thousand bucks to be sure I could pay a mechanic to get the New Truck licensed, mechanic-worked, and inspection-stickered, or the Toyota fixed.  But the work mightn’t require all of it.  In any case, putting together whatever remains between what’s left and buying something will require some squeezing of turnip-blood.

But I need something I can pull out here and move the cats and me into so I can begin putting the cabin into the shape it was in when I moved here.  And start pulling down the chicken house and pens, garden fence, and the upside-down hot tub project so’s nobody’s left with a mess I made of the place.

I think I managed, at least, to define the critical paths and some potential realities as a means of finding my way out of a situation I’d come to think of as too nigh-onto-hopeless to contemplate in any meaningful way.

All in one day, January 1, 2012.

I feel 30 years younger than I was December 31, 2011.

Old Jules

 

13 Comments

Posted in 2000's, Adventure, America, Homesteading, Human Behavior, Outdoors, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Survival, Transportation, Trucks

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Order Out of Chaos

Posted on December 29, 2011 by | 18 comments

Morning readers.  I’m obliged you came by for a read. 

This drawing of Jeanne’s was on an otherwise blank draft post page in the whatchallit, dashboard, with the title Order Out of Chaos.  It’s evidently a Photoshop manipulation of another work and until I messed up re-sizing it and lost her explanation it also said (sold).  Hopefully if she wants to she’ll add an addendum saying whatever else she wants to say about it.

But I was mulling over things that aren’t mainly on my mind deciding which of them to write about this morning, carefully avoiding the one thing that mainly is, when I saw the title in the drafts.  It brought to focus what actually is swirling around in my brain.  I suppose I might as well write a bit about that.

A project I’ve been working on almost a decade appears to be coming to a climax.  Surprising progress began falling into place during the past few days, and preliminary results provide a reason to hope I’m finally examining datasets that will allow testing and formulating a theory.    If the tests indicate it’s worth it, there’ll be revisions, more testing, more revisions, until something cohesive emerges, or doesn’t emerge.

I don’t dare speculate on where it will head because expectations have a way of working themselves into outcomes, and I’m doing my best to avoid that. 

But the fact is, it’s taken a decade almost, and countless hours and days of research, calculations, accumulation of data, wrong directions untaken, other wrong directions taken and backed out of in getting here.

One way or another I think this simultaneity and time thing is finally going to be allowed to absent my life over the next few months.  Order out of chaos finally, either by discovering my fundamental premises were wrong and I don’t have to do this anymore, or they were correct and sense can be made of this.

Either way, it’s a strange place to find myself, a hollow looming up in my life I wonder how I’m going to fill with what must inevitably be another pesky reincarnation.

Old Jules

18 Comments

Posted in 2011, Human Behavior, Nature, Senior Citizens, Solitude

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Jeanne’s Christmas Gift to Visitors and a Few Non-Gifted Words

Posted on December 25, 2011 by | 39 comments


Jeanne does Christmas but she has a gift worth giving.  I mostly don’t do Christmas so I tips my hat in gratitude she’s here to give it.

Note from Jeanne: This is one of the largest gel pen drawings I’ve ever made. It’s 24 x 24 inches square. I did that size as an experiment for a contest entry for a casino, but when I didn’t win, I re-worked it quite a lot and decided to show it in other exhibits.  I hope you enjoy looking at it!

Morning Readers,

Hope all of you are getting the cobwebs out of your punkin heads sufficiently to maximize whatever joy a person gets out of sitting around a Christmas tree unwrapping packages.

I overslept here, didn’t wake until dawn.  Maybe some of this Christmas spirit thing rubbed off on me and disrupted my routines.  Nice morning.  Quiet outside, cool, but not a shock to hit you when you climb out from under the covers or hit you in the face when you venture outside.

A red dawn.  Sailorman would be concerned about that, I expect.

Last night the cats refused to keep me entertained, so I began reading H. D. F. Kitto’s, The Greeks.  It’s a book I’ve read before, but I occasionally read it again as a refresher course.  Kitto’s work is a fairly expansive treatise on life in Greece during the Classical Period, but he constantly jumps backward so’s to demonstrate how they got where they were and why.

Those Classical Greeks are worth the effort of remembering about.  They’re as much how we got where we are as Homer, the Dorians, the Minoans are how they came to be what they were.  We owe our ability to think in particularly organized ways to them, mathmatics, philosophy, their practical use of democracy, even our concept of drama to some extent.

But we in the West also owe the curse of the Utopian Ideal to their pointy little heads.

That Utopian Ideal has haunted us every since, even though the Greeks, themselves never actually believed in it.  They knew perfectly well that human beings are fundamentally flawed in ways that assure they’ll poison their own watering holes, then run them dry.  They knew that wherever human weakness fails to do the trick, fate, or the gods will step in to lend a hand.

Those Greeks studied Homer much the way really devout Christians study the Old Testament.  And Homer, whatever else it might be, is a refined catalog of human strengths and weaknesses.  Of the drumbeat repetition of human experience.

In their own way, the Greeks were experts on a few thousand years of history in ways we aren’t.  They learned from it, not as we believe we’ve learned from it, but haven’t, but rather as an assurance that human beings make the same mistakes over and over.  That they’ll go on making them as long as there’s a human being left to do the job.

The Greeks derived a wisdom from their knowledge of history, but the wisdom was an oblique one that provided a separate wisdom….. one that included the certainty there’ll never be any Utopia.  Never be any meek inheriting much of anything and holding onto it.

But that’s my premise, not Kitto’s.

I hope you’ll spend a bit of time remembering what Christmas was supposed to be the anniversary of the beginning of.  Not baby-Jesuses or Santa Clauses, readers, but a beginning of a spiritual commitment to peace, love, understanding.

An ideal for breaking the endless cycle of power struggles, killing, worship of gluttony and greed.  A beginning for human beings to take responsibility for their own behavior, attitudes and lives.

Christmas.  Jesus.  A beginning of not being so frightened of everything.  So angry.  So aggressive and downright rattlesnake ugly mean you want to kill strangers a long way from here who are no threat to you if you’ll leave them alone, and take joy from doing it.

A beginning of having the faith that death is part of human experience, and that isn’t something you have to be so damned cowardly scared of it keeps you furious and wanting to look away at anything at all to take your thoughts away from having to do it.

I hope you’ll remember that for a few moments, readers, but I know you won’t.

I ain’t a Utopian.

Old Jules

39 Comments

Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Country Life, Education, History

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Christmas Eve for a Hermit and Cats in a Mountain Village

Posted on December 24, 2011 by | 20 comments

I wrote this several years ago in a previous lifetime before Social Security kicked in when I was trying to make a living playing blackjack.

Casino’s Shut Down for Christmas!

Went back down there for some more blackjack and didn’t get in more than a few hands before a pit boss announced they were shutting down the tables, the casino, and sending everyone home to spend time with their families.

Surprised me, but a worthy cause I wouldn’t have expected of them.

Fact is, all those gamblers who aren’t aware that blackjack’s a spiritual experience needed to be off somewhere else, anyway.  Which is to say, pretty much all of them except me.

So, I smiled to meself with a warm red glow that a casino would let the employees go home to be with their kinfolks instead of staying there making a lot of money for the mafia.  Swung over by Taco Bell on the way back out of Bernalillo and picked up three bean burritos and three crispy tacos to celebrate a victory for those employees over casino management.

Brung those tacos and burritos back up to the village and capped the hill looking down into Placitas…. looked as though something awful had happened here….. flashing emergency lights copcar style all down on the main road.  Sheriff with a flashlight was waving me to take a back road.  I rolled down my window, “Accident?”

“No.  Most of the roads are shut down.  People in groups in the middle of the roads singing carols.  You’ll have to take this road.  Be careful.”

Happened ‘this road’ was the very selfsame road I needed to take to trip my young arse home as fast as safety allowed to lock the front gates and turn off the outside lights before any carol singers could catch me unawares and make me listen to Christmas carols.

I don’t so much mind people singing carols.  I think it’s kind of cool, actually, especially if they were to go a step further and listen to the words they’re singing.

On the other hand, I honestly don’t want to listen to the words, the music, nuthun do do with Christmas carols.

I figure if I can go through an entire presidential term without knowing who’s president, and go through Thanksgiving to New Year without hearing a single Christmas carol (most especially ones involving Santy and reindeers), it will be okay to die.  I’ll know I’ve lived right, at least one period of my life.

Anyway readers, if you’re reading this blog you need to get your young arse off the computer and go spend some time with the family.

But if you don’t have somewhere else to be, don’t have someone else, why heck, amigos, rejoice.  Luxuriate in the beauty of being alone with yourself and any cats you might have.

If you don’t have any cats, nor any particular self you can bring yourself to rejoice about, heck.  As Sonny and Cher used to say back when everything was supposed to be pretty well straightened out by now,

You got me, babe.

Old Jules

20 Comments

Posted in 2000's, America, Country Life, Gambling, Human Behavior, New Mexico, NM

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Lovejoy the Tail Wagging Comet

Posted on December 22, 2011 by | 17 comments

Morning readers.  Thanks for coming by.  The traffic’s down on the blog so far I figure I can talk about Lovejoy a bit more without boring too many people back to sleep.  First, here’s what’s on Spaceweather dot com about it this morning:

THE AMAZING TAIL OF COMET LOVEJOY: Widespread reports of Comet Lovejoy‘s tail are being received from around the southern hemisphere. The ghostly plume emerges just before sunrise, jutting vertically upward into the eastern sky ahead of the sun.

“I observed the comet with my unaided eye for 55 minutes this morning,” says Colin Legg of Mandurah, Western Australia. “I also captured a timelapse sequence of the comet rising as twilight progressed.” Click on the image at the site to set the scene in motion.

“In the image you can see 2 tails,” notes Clegg. These are the dust and ion tails. The gaseous ion tail is blow almost directly away from the sun by the solar wind, while the heavier, brighter dust tail more closely follows the comet’s orbit.

The visibility of both tails could improve in the days ahead as the comet moves away from the sun and the background sky darkens accordingly. Early-rising sky watchers should be alert for this rare apparition. [finder chart]

http://spaceweather.com/

Edit 8:00AM:  I decided to try to embed that video by Colin Legg here so’s I can watch it without trying to remember how to get back to the site:

 

Comet Lovejoy (2011 W3) rising over Western Australia from Colin Legg on Vimeo.

Over the next while I’m figuring to attempt to duplicate the behavior of that tail inside a fish bowl full of circulating water orbiting a tube of permanent magnets stacked atop one another, then electromagnets if the permanent ones don’t do the trick.  I’ll have an anode on one side of the fishbowl, a cathode on the other injecting, first colloidal iron, then if necessary, other metals into the circulating water.

I’m harboring a lot of curiosity about what that tail’s saying.

But for those of you who don’t click the spaceweather site I’ll give you this thing some guy did with a pinhole camera and a beercan showing the anelemma of the sun over several months:

THE SUN IN A BEER CAN: “I have captured the sun in an empty beer can,” reports Jan Koeman of Kloetinge, the Netherlands. In June 2011, Koeman assembled a solargraph–a simple pinhole camera consisting of a beer can lined with photographic paper–and for the past six months he has used it to record the sun’s daily motion across the Dutch sky. Today he removed the photo-paper for inspection. 

“This is what a photo with an exposure time of nearly 6 months looks like,” says Koeman. The highest arcs were traced by the summer sun of June 2011. The lowest arc was made just today, Dec. 21st, on the eve of the 2011 winter solstice. Occasional gaps are caused by clouds.

Curiously, Koeman had more than one empty beer can to work with on that hot summer day in June when he began his project, so there are multiple views to enjoy. Click here for more solargraphs.

Got me thinking maybe all that weirdness we’ve been seeing across the face of Old Sol lately might be the result of a combination of a hangover and spending several months jail-time inside a beer can.

Old Jules

 

 

17 Comments

Posted in 2011, Astronomy

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Sundragons and Other Serious Stuff

Posted on December 20, 2011 by | 15 comments

Good morning readers.  I’m gratified you came by for a read.  There’s a lot going on in the Universe this morning, but most of it is too big, or too little to get a gander at, so I’m going to give you an opportunity to shrug it all off as I’m doing.

If you’re the sort of person who sees herds of cattle, naked women, elephants, alligators and stagecoaches in clouds, mountains and whatnot you’ll see immediately what was on Old Sol’s mind yesterday:

Which doesn’t require any further discussion except to say:

Which also speaks for itself.  Enough said about that.

 

Unless you want to hear it in song.

But if you’re feeling more in the serious and unsmiling turn-of-mind this morning you probably won’t grasp the implications and ramifications of that.

Instead you’d probably prefer something you can’t shrug off.  For you, I suggest you have a look at the comet Lovejoy as it passed away from the sun:

http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=19&month=12&year=2011

http://spaceweather.com/images2011/18dec11/spiraltail_strip.jpg

All that wiggling and wagging it’s doing with the tail might be the most interesting thing human beings have had an opportunity to view since the invention of the camera, the rocketship, the atom and other genius gadgetry of modern life including toasters.

Lovejoy is telling you something it might take human beings a longish time to hear, if they ever get around to hearing it at all.  Which seems about equally likely.

With the possible exception of the cats, chickens, and the occasional folks out there who see it but ain’t about to say anything.

But I’m not going to say any of that.  Instead, I’ll just say I’m figuring I might post something later along more interesting lines.

Thanks for coming by.

Old Jules

15 Comments

Posted in 2011, Animals, Astronomy, Music, Science

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Mysterious “white web” found growing on nuclear waste

Posted on December 19, 2011 by | 22 comments

I’ll leave it to you to decide what’s strange about it. Cob-webs around here are the norm. Maybe it has something to do with the nuclear waste part of things. Old Jules

22 Comments

Posted in 2011, Adventure, America, Current Issues, Nature

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Sunday morning thoughts December 18, 2011

Posted on December 18, 2011 by | 40 comments

Good morning readers.  I’m obliged you came for a visit and read.

I’m going to start this morning by telling you something you ought to know already, but mightn’t:

Sometimes I take myself a lot more seriously than is justified by my history of being ‘right’ compared to my history of being ‘wrong’.  People who’ve known me forever are acutely aware of this.  The terms, ‘alarmist‘ and ‘melodramatic‘ have occasionally been used with brutal accuracy by people in a position to arrive at informed judgements.

Keep in mind I’m the guy who dumped a second career within a couple of years of being able to draw a hefty retirement check because I believed so thoroughly Y2K was going to happen, leading eventually to my current situation.  Keep in mind I also spent a lot of years climbing and unclimbing mountains searching for a lost gold mine I believed I’d find.

And keep in mind I don’t regret any of it.

So with all that in mind, I think those of you who read my ‘indefinite detention’ posts of the past few days would be well advised to examine other opinions, even though I still believe I’m generally right.  My believing it shouldn’t carry any weight for you.

Here’s another viewpoint offering up a mitigated set of possibilities regarding the same situation and the activities leading to it:

Addicting Info – The Knowledge You Crave http://tinyurl.com/cjs4xav

The NDAA Is A Horrible Bill, And Why Obama Is Going To Sign It
December 17, 2011 By Wendy Gittleson

If you’ve formed any opinions based on anything I’ve said here I think you owe it to yourself to read it.   Wendy Gittleson is certainly a lot more qualified to have an opinion than I am, most likely.  Even though I don’t necessarily agree.

Old Jules

40 Comments

Posted in 2011, America, Communication, Current Issues, Politics

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I’d Sure Like to Have Me One of Them Drones

Posted on December 17, 2011 by | 17 comments

Morning readers.  I’m obliged you came by for a read.

I’ve been studying on that picture of the pretty little airplane those whatchallit, Iraning people found in the sky and captured.  I’m fairly impressed and would sure like to have me one, even though I haven’t figured out exactly how it works.

 

That airplane doesn’t have much in the way of control surfaces and weight-and-balance might be tricky.  Not as much rudder on it as a person might wish.

I’m wondering if a person might lure one down with an orange jump suit, Helicopters and Orange Jump Suits.  If those things are flying around some silly-assed place like whatchallit, Irang, where there’s nothing to see but a bunch of Persians, seems to me they’re bound to be flying around here where there’s really good stuff.

Anyway, they can’t be that hard to catch.  A man with a CB radio might be able to snag one, I’m thinking, if the orange jump suit didn’t do the trick.

I’ll have to study on it after I’ve got it to decide whether it’s best to put a harness underneath of the hang-glider variety, or mount a saddle on top.  I don’t like the idea of riding it bareback the way Slim Pickens rode that bomb.  Until a person got the feel for it, that thing might just buck some.

Besides, I’m used to more rudder than that and I’ve never flown anything without a tail section.  Likely I’d want to fly it around treetop level a while so I didn’t have too far to fall at first.

If I’m good maybe old Santy will bring me one.

Old Jules

 

17 Comments

Posted in 2011, America, Flying

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Indefinite Detention, Rip Van Winkleism, and Respecting the Future

Posted on December 16, 2011 by | 19 comments

Yesterday I was talking on the phone with my friend, Rich, in North Carolina.  We were discussing this ‘indefinite detention’ thing going on in Congress and the fact it’s a lead-pipe cinch it’s going to happen.   The US Government is defacto eliminating habeas corpus.

The conversation kept drifting back to the question, “How in the world did we get here?  How did it come to this?”

The answer always came back the same.  “We followed the yellow brick road.”  We did it.  He did it.  I did it.  We all did it.  We saluted, marched in step, ignored the unpleasant obvious, and allowed ourselves to be cogs in a giant wheel.   We closed our eyes and Rip Van Winkled our way into this.

We abdicated.  When we saw our energy needs exceeding our capabilities to produce energy we took the comfortable route of ‘protecting’ sources someone else owned and kept the thermostats where they were.   We wanted government services we couldn’t afford, so we signed the chits to let our descendants pay for it.  When we saw the elected officials rubber-stamping the desires of multi-national corporations to move our production and manufacturing to countries where someone else could do it, we tacitly helped fill the void with government jobs.   We watched them add layer after layer of new cop functions at every level.  We watched them militarize the police throughout the country.  We cheered as they imposed increasingly draconian measures of ‘protection’ of us against the microscopic threat our lives would be touched by terrorism.

We marched in step because it was the easy way and trusted someone else would pay the price.

We’re there now.  There’s no going back.  There’s not a damned thing you, I, anyone can do about it.  It’s time to salute the future.  Congress and the president wouldn’t have done this if they didn’t plan to use it.

Sometime during the next few years you’re going to have some choices to make.  You can watch them haul off people you don’t like for indefinite detention.  You are going to watch that, whether you like it or not.  But since you don’t like those people anyway it will be easier to accept.

So long as it’s someone else.

We’re there and we’ve gotten what we paid for.

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me to be a strange place to find ourselves.  Hog-tied, handcuffed, at the absolute mercy of the whims of people we were crazy ever to trust and really never did.

Old Jules

19 Comments

Posted in 2011, America, Current Issues, Human Behavior, Politics

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