Me paying to camp?!?!

I’m in a nice little campground about a half mile from my previous spot. I moved because of highway noise—especially from big trucks—and because the place was a bit… sketchy. There were a couple of piles of trash and the feeling it was a spot where locals came to do annoying things. No one ever came, but once that idea got in my head…

So down the road is a BLM campground. A few years ago it was only a spot by a farm road with a boat ramp and some picnic tables. Now it’s all official and stuff. But it’s quiet and has a respectable vibe. Just other old fart nomads and snowbirds. At least at this time.

Two things, though. 

One is that jets and helicopters from the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma make occasional low-altitude passes along the river. About five times yesterday (and just now) the tranquility has been interrupted by brief shrieks or more prolonged whoppita-whoppita-whoppitas.

The other is the occasional rumble very much like distant rolling thunder. It’s actually the sound of vehicles driving on a wood plank bridge about a hundred yards away. Okay, no big deal now that I know what it is.

About another half mile downstream is the first place I camped in this area, with a group that formed at the 2014 Rubber Tramp Rendezvous. It, too, was just a river access area. I see it’s also a campground now, with designated sites, a pit toilet, and fees. Things change. 

I want to kill a week

I drove to Quartzsite this morning to pick up a package at my mail forwarder. Another shipment is supposed to arrive next Tuesday. The sensible thing would be to hang out in Quartzite and do the nomad/snowbird thing. But I don’t like that town much anymore, with the main problem being clogged cell bandwidth. I could go over the hill to Ehrenburg and a good cell service, but both Ehrenburg and Quartzsite are having freezing nights.

The stupid, wasteful thing would be to return my regular camping area near the border where lower elevation and latitude allow the night temperatures to stay in a more bearable range.

So, what if I split the difference? There’s camping spot about halfway between Quartzsite and my border spot. It’s on the Colorado river at about 230 feet elevation instead of nearly 1,000 feet in Quartzsite. And the forecast also splits the difference. An entire week here? Maybe. I’ll see how it goes.

From 11 years ago today: Useful Moves

Are you hitting your head here, hoping you’ll wise up?

The solitaire app on my iPhone is kind enough to inform me when a particular shuffle has no solution. 

“No useful moves detected.” 

I love that phrasing. No useful moves. “Sure,” it says, “you could keep moving cards around, hoping for a breakthrough, if that makes you happy, dear player, but don’t pretend you’re accomplishing anything.”

How many times in life, after lots of determination, hard work and expended resources, do we learn we’d been wasting our time, that nothing we could do would bring about the desired outcome? Perhaps you or I are in the middle of one or more right now but we haven’t realized it yet.

For those of us who don’t learn from our mistakes, or who believe making a different choice earlier would change the outcome, the solitaire game provides the option to replay a dead end shuffle. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, right? But there’s seldom any going back and starting over in the real world. 

It would be great if we all had magical Futility Detectors. A gizmo that tells us in a soothing, forgiving, avuncular voice when our moves are useless.

“Al, my friend, you can keep moving around the cards of your life, but it’s not useful. There’s no solution. What do you say you cut your losses and try something different?”

No, I’m not quitting this van dwelling life. I’m just reaching out to my audience (assuming I have one). Examine your life, your goals, the time and energy spent on it. Are you making useless moves? Is there really any possibility of a win? Is it time to change course?

American culture tells us it’s wrong to quit. Losers quit, right? (Insert everything you’ve ever heard in school, pep talks, company meetings or the gym.) But chasing futility is also losing.

For those times it’s possible to reach the goal, but at way too much cost, it would also be great to have a personal Point of Diminishing Returns detector. To help us decide what to do at each point of diminishing returns, we should also have a Success Simulator. Again, the wise, soothing voice:

“Al, here’s what it would be like when you grab the prize. And here’s what it would be like after the rush of accomplishment fades. Will it be worth what you’re going to have to do to get there? Are you sure?”

Sometimes I don’t understand the weather

Temperatures have been in the mid 60s to the low 70s, with the nights in the mid 40s. And the harder the wind blows the cooler it gets.

But the past couple of days the wind has been from the south, and it has been cooler. What? Wait. It’s warmer the farther south you go, right? So we should have higher temperatures. But no.

I guess what’s happening is this wind is coming off the Pacific, the Sea of Cortez, and the mountains of Baja California. The sky has been mostly overcast, reducing the amount of sunlight that would otherwise warm the air and ground and me.

I can’t complain, though. It’s not freezing. We didn’t get snowed on. It’s just surprising. And confusing.

The Great Burrito Search: Candidate 1

I was back in town and in the mood for a burrito. So I asked Google Maps for the closest ones near me. At the top of the list, with rave reviews, was Mr. Burros. Okay, let’s go.

Mr. Burros is a funky no-frills place with a few tables, a small patio, and very little parking. The patrons were 90% blue collar Latinos, which is always an endorsement.

I was disappointed to learn they didn’t have pollo asado. I went with the carne asada instead. My order was ready in a couple of minutes and I took it out to the Rolling Steel Tent to eat.

This burrito was a little shorter than the monsters Diego’s served, but it was also a buck cheaper. There was a bit of lettuce inside which had wilted from the heat and moisture of the meat. There was also pico de gallo. The carne was diced into small cubes with a bit of sear. Very tasty. A drawback was that the cubes tumbled out whenever I set the burrito down. The salsa verde was just right even though it came from plastic packets instead of a pot in the kitchen. Oh well.

When I was waiting I saw their breakfast burrito menu featured their version of a California burrito—the Calizona. Carne asada, fries, cheese, sour cream, pico de gallo and guacamole. I’ll have to try that. And their carne asada fries.

Over all, I rate Mr. Burros a B+. Open 5AM to 2:30PM Monday-Saturday, 7AM to 2PM Sunday.

The Great Burrito Search resumes

One would think finding an exceptional burrito in the Southwest—particularly within visual distance of the border—would be very easy. Of course, everyone has their own idea what constitutes a great burrito.  And standards differ as to a fair price for that burrito. But I had found a burrito that made me very happy at Diego’s Mexican Food in Yuma: a pollo asado burrito, about a foot long and four inches in diameter, no rice or beans, just chicken and pico de gallo, with salsa verde. Delicious and big enough for two meals. Ten bucks.

I was doing errands in Yuma today and discovered, alas, Diego’s is gone. Very gone. The signs and awnings have been removed and the red trim has been painted over.

The last posting on their Facebook page is from November, saying they’d be open Thanksgiving Day. A comment on that post asked if they’ve shut down. No response.

So what happened? Not enough business? Too much competition? Did the owners retire? Have they moved the business elsewhere? Did the landlord not renew the lease? I should have checked to see whether there was a message on the door or on the drive-through window.

Oh well. I guess I’ll be trying new places for a while. Maybe I’ll find a burrito I like even more. One with guacamole included, perhaps?

Injury update

It has been a couple of weeks since I gouged my forehead on the corner of my cabinet door, accidentally scrubbed off part of the scab, then wised up and covered it with a bandaid. It has healed up quite nicely.

Then, because I had wised up, I finally defanged the cabinet door with a blob of epoxy putty. I’m certain I’ll bump into it again several more times but at least it’ll do less damage. Now I need to trim that wild hair in my eyebrow.

Just a spoonful

It was a little past noon when I realized I hadn’t eaten all morning. Because I hadn’t been hungry. And I wasn’t in the mood to cook. But now I could use a little something. 

I stared into my cupboard hoping I’d see something quick, easy, and appealing. Soup… canned chicken… tuna… dehydrated potatoes… ramen… refried beans… pancake mix… seasonings… salsa… olive oil… peanut butter… bread… Hmmm, peanut butter. I could make a sandwich. But I wasn’t in the mood for bread. So how about just peanut butter? Sure, I’ve done it before. It turned out to be the perfect thing.

Blinka-blinka-blinka

It’s human nature to notice coincidences. Sometimes we bestow special meaning on the coincidences.

Well, for some reason, the past couple of weeks I’ve thought about the Rolling Steel Tent’s turn signal bulbs. Hmmmm, how long has it been since I last replaced a bulb? How long before I’ll need to do that?

Then yesterday afternoon, while running errands in Yuma, I noticed the dashboard light for my right turn signal was blinking very rapidly, which indicates a bad bulb. Well, there’s that question answered.

But was it the front or rear signal? I hoped it was the front one because it’s easy to change. Simply push a tab on the light assembly, popping it out of the grill. Then just give the socket a quarter turn to remove it and reveal the bulb. The rear lights require unbolting a trim panel and the taillight assembly. Would I be able to find the correct wrench socket, or will it have disappeared, as 10mm sockets tend to do?

So I parked the van and flipped on the turn signal. A tour around the van revealed the front signal was the problem. Okay, easy. However I had forgotten there were two different sized bulbs: one for the turn signal and one for the running lights. I also didn’t remember which was which. I had only one size bulb.

Okay, so which bulb has the broken filament? Um, neither of them. Huh? Well, all I could do at that point is replace the bulb that was the same size as the spare I had. When I removed that bulb I saw what must have been the problem. The connector end of the bulb was blackened. Something had gotten too hot, melting an internal wire. I hadn’t seen this phenomenon before.

I popped in the new bulb and, presto, everything worked properly. I suppose the wise thing would be to replace all the bulbs now. Or to at least make sure I have enough spares of the right size. And a few 10mm sockets.

Ouch

The fold-down cabinet door that serves as my table has a corner very much like a woodcarving chisel. I’ve had a few very minor collisions with it over the years, but I hit it real hard the other day, gouging off a strip of epidermis. I bled for a while, using up a couple of tissues before it eventually clotted. As I learned in Boy Scouts, apply pressure to the wound. Then this morning I accidentally scrubbed off part of the scab. A little more bleeding, a little more pressure with a tissue.

I keep telling myself to do something about that corner. It’s a threat whenever I try to retrieve something from under the bed. Most times I think to put my hand over the corner. Sometimes I forget.

I think I might still have some epoxy putty I could shape a nubbin with. It’s probably stored under the bed. I’ll need to be careful when I check. But I could be stupid.

Human to human

As I was walking into a grocery store a disheveled man pushing a shopping cart filled with his possessions said something to me I didn’t understand—probably because I was expecting he would ask for money. And because my hearing sucks.

I asked, “What?”

He repeated, “You’re nicely color coordinated.”

I was wearing what some might call an outfit rather than a random selection of clothing. My shirt and pants were both the same raw sienna color. And my shoes were a similar yellow-brown. These clothes were bought at separate times but, oh, hey, look how they work together.

The man’s comment surprised me. “Um yeah, it’s sort of a uniform, I guess.”

We shared a chuckle and he went on his way. No panhandling, simply a kind human exchange.

It made me think about how we tend to dehumanize street people, how we think they’re not like us at all. “Oh, they’re all just ___________________.” But we’re not all that different. Sure, some have addictions or mental problems. Some are lazy. Some are scammers or thieves. But so are some of the people with homes. We’re just differentiated by money. Some of the “respectable” people, the “good” people, are as penniless as the beggars, or about to be. And when we’re going through rough times we hope others will see our struggle, see us as a fellow human, and maybe help a little.

By the time all this made its way through my brain and into my heart, the friendly ragged man was gone. I hope I remember these things the next time I cross paths with someone in need—even if they don’t compliment my wardrobe.