Today my weather webpage says there's less than 13 hours of daylight. I have always hated watching the days get shorter and shorter because it meant winter was comming. Since I'm going to leave for a warmer climate in October, I am wondering if this will change my outlook on the expanding darkness. I like the night. I've always been a night person, usually able to get more done in the solitude and stillness of the night. With an expanded darkness but not the extreme coldness I have to deal with in Illinois, maybe I'll have increased capacity for getting things done, although I've been pretty good of late in getting things done. Since I've been at the campground, I've put new zippers in the canvas of the popup part of the camper, hung curtains over the openings where the sleeping platforms are (I use the one on my side for storage), hung the mesh type baskets you see hanging in kitchens for storage, built a countertop that sits over the 2 burner propane stove that's built in (I don't use it but rather a hotplate) so I can sit my computer monitor on it and I have the cpu underneath. I am in the process of building a door that can be locked to go over the opening where the cpu is. I sewed and constructed an awning that hangs over the front door and is fairly sturdy but will be easy to take down and store the poles-1/2 in. pvc pipe and fittings-quite cool actually. I built a step but I might redo it. I think it needs to be wider. I've done all this with a manual saw, lol. Oh, and I redid the bottom half of the door but I'm short a bit of luan plywood so I have a bare bit about 5 inches wide and 21 inches long in the middle of the door. But I really HATE to go buy a whole sheet for just a little bit. Even if I replaced the whole thing it would still be just 27"x21". Thanks to dad for letting me have the scraps of plywood I find in the garage. I've had to play with the hardware for the door. The problem was that there's a catch between the top of the door and the bottom of the door so that when the camper collapses the top half installs on the ceiling. Now this wouldn't ordinarily be a problem except that at some point the maniac who redid this camper (whoever he was I'd like to strangle him) moved the hinge for the bottom part of the door over so he could use a thicker bottom half of a door. The result is that the top and bottom of the door don't work together right and the aluminum hasp that was screwed to the bottom part of the door with a wingnut broke off because of the wobble back and forth this disaprity between the hinges caused. So I had to figure out how to fasten the top and bottom of the door without it being permanent and make sure that it would have plenty of play so that it could be fastened. I ran down to ACE Hardware (they know me there, lol) and got a chain door lock. This allowed me to connect the two halves and still be able to unlatch it to lock the top half of the door for when I collapse the camper and has enough play so that the door swings right. I might have to tighten it up a bit, I'll have to see.

I also managed to buy a new potty. It's a Century and it was the cheapest one I could find that wasn't a hassock toilet. $65+tax at Wal Mart. At least now if I have an issue in the middle of the night I won't have to try to run the block down to the bathrooms without having an accident. :P

I was taking some pictures today for my daughter and took this one while I was down by the lake shore, about 40 ft from my camper.

Later on a friend and I went to Taco Bell. I took this pic.


Can you honestly say that this doesn't remind you of Mr. Bill? Unless of course you are too young to know who Mr. Bill is.

OK, I got it. It's http://sarcasticlove.deviantart.com/ and it's quite cool. I'm very proud of Nina and her artwork. I hope she ends up having the courage to do the things and take the chances I never did.

I found out this evening that my 12 yr old daughter is now into photo editing. She was just doing online art, but now she's into taking something and making it her own. When I figure out where I put the piece of paper she wrote the url on I'll post it.

I made out a wish list today that's viewable thru my profile. This is stuff that I intend on buying, not that I'm trying to solicit anybody to buy for me. The cameras are just wants not needs. The solar panels are needs. I need to be set up so I don't have to have an electrical hookup. I intend on boondocking a bit. This means camping where there's no electrical or water hookups. Once I'm set up to do this it won't take me long to be able to afford the cameras. The one I really want is the Panasonic. You can play with the exposure time and I'd like to see if I could get a shot of the milky way once I'm in the desert. It would be cool to catch a meteor shower or two as well. The digital camera I have now is nice, but you can't take good close up pics or decent pics at night. I could do both with the panasonic. The campgrounds that I'm at now is on a lake and there's all kinds of dragonflies about. I love dragonflies. They are just so cool looking, kind of like strings of jewels, reflecting the sun, with wings. The camera I have now can't capture a decent pic of one. There's lots of different hues of blue ones and blue is my favorite color. It's just very frustrating.

Elwood: Illinois Nazis.
Jake: I hate Ilinois Nazis.

If you don't know what movie that came from, I pity your life.

Have you ever noticed that your propensity for diarrhea is proportionate to your distance from a toilet of any kind? The further you are away from a toilet, the higher the risk. I'm thinking that ought to be officially made a corollary of Murphy's Law. Like the Butter Side down rule. What sucks even worse is that I had a toilet. It was an old Mansfield Sani Pottie. Scary, eh? It was that yellow gold color from the 70's. But of course, it broke. What's worse than a chemical potty? Emptying it. What's even worse than that is that they are EXPENSIVE. See, I refuse to use one that doesn't have a seperate tank for the "black water". So, not only is a portable chemical toilet gross to empty but expensive to replace. I wish I could afford a nicer rv than this popup camper that had a real toilet but I can't so I have to deal. It just doesn't seem fair to have to pay out the butt "so to speak" just to have to deal with feces. :P

I just watched one of my favorite movies, Contact. Afterwards, I began asking myself the same questions I usually do. Would we even recognize a truly alien lifeform as intelligent? I mean, say we encountered a big mass of green goo. Kind of like the blob. Hell, let's say it is the blob. A dude gets it out of a meteor that fell to earth and it immediately devours the guy. Ok, first of all, there could be quite a few reasons it ate him and then everyone it encounters. It could be that our flesh is simply liquefied by it's substance. Possibly it's species communicates by enveloping and mixing with whomever it wants to talk to. Won't work with us. I guess you can see where I'm going with this. And we, of course, panic. It looks like it's eating people. Seems quite hostile and inimical to human life. The problem is that instead of finding out anything about this entity, we react with typical hostility and immediately try to kill it. And they say that dolphins are as smart as people are. Ok. Then why can't we speak dolphin? I know that there are scientists out there working on it, but we are talking about animals from our own planet with intelligence. I doubt they care if we figure them out, otherwise they might be trying to help us figure them out. But here we are, not even understanding the animals on our own planet that have intelligences comparable to ours and we have the arrogance to assume that we could figure out an alien if they landed????? For that matter, with our prejudices, could we even emotionally deal with an alien society? What if they had three sexes? What if they were completely androgynous? Lots of people have a problem with the concept of gay marriage, can you imagine the uproar a hermaphroditic race would create? Or a society that considers monogamy a sin? I don't think the human race is ready for alien contact. We need to grow up as a species I think before that happens.

Well, I am not a happy camper. Yet. Although I think I will be soon. My plans have changed somewhat. Looks like my daughter will stay here with my parents while I travel the warmer climes until April when it will be warm enough to come back here. I had originally planned on going to Arizona to make a home, but I think I'll skip that now. I'll just be a homeless nomad for the moment.

Staying here in southern Illinois when it's warm enough to doesn't make me happy at all. For one thing I'm allergic to everything here. I have a lung condition called pulmonary hypertension. It will probably be what kills me. It's a chronic condition that will only get worse as my life goes on. This is a statement of fact, not a declaration to get sympathy. I neither want nor need sympathy or pity or any of that crap. I was diagnosed with this condition last year in September and one of the things they told me I could do to lessen the impact of this was to go where I wasn't allergic to everything. Thus I figured Arizona. My brother is out there and I figured my daughter could stay with him until I got on my feet there. My original goal was to be there in July. Well, I had my final appointment with my shrink, was wrapping things up and getting the camper ready to go when my brother e-mailed me to let me know that Nina couldn't stay with him till December cause he got a roomate and he had already discussed this with my mom and Nina so it was all set. Of course, it was never discussed with me, just handed to me after the fact. I didn't say anything. It wasn't very nice to do that without at least giving me a heads up, but my brother isn't generally a common courtesy kind of person. Well, he might be to other people, but not to me. But oh well. He was going to let Nina stay with him and that was cool. Well, I have been very frustrated and upset about things lately and my brother e-mailed me. It was an "I'm glad you are taking steps toward getting your life together but..." kind of letter. And it set me off. You know when you hit the point where you have taken eough crap from everyone and then one little things makes you loose it? Well, that was it. My brother has always been kind of condescending towards me. He's always better or more of whatever than I am. I think this comes from the fact that he's not as smart as I am and he feels inferior and thus has to point out anything he perceives as a lack in me as a fault I need to correct. While this might amuse him I've had enough of it. In the past couple of months I have lost my home of 7 years and almost everything I own. I had a guy I thought was a good friend of mine who was working on my camper for me rip me off for about $300. I had two people I have known for years, a guy named Vance and a girl named Sarah, ask me if I was still an athiest. Then I had another dude named Lance ask me if I was still a witch. For the record, I'm not an atheist, nor a witch, nor a christian. I have my own religious beliefs and I am not going to explain them because I'm tired of trying to explain my concept of god to people. All it does is frustrate me because they don't understand how I see god and then they end up thinking I'm some sort of athiest or witch or something. Why I care what people think is beyond me, but it does upset me that people freak out because my ideas don't conform to their idea of what god is. Why can't I just believe what I believe and all of you leave me alone, ok??? So, that said, I probably shouldn't have blown up at my brother, but I'm tired of him doing this to me. Because I am not how he feels I ought to be, there's something wrong with me. Because I don't think or believe or act like he thinks I should, I am defective. I have been diagnosed with bipolar II and he thinks I should stop taking the medication that has kept me fairly stable for the first time in my life. He's also a taker. You can do and do and do for him but he's one of those that you can't ever expect anything in return. Maybe he's not like this with other people, but he's like that with me. It's sad. I have finally realized he's just like my ex-husband. :P Anyway, all this said, I won't be hanging around Flagstaff anytime soon. The rest of Arizona, maybe. We will see.

My dog on my bed in the camper.

I get these flashes of insight sometimes. It's weird. Kind of like all the sudden I see things very clearly. Problem is that unless I document it when it happens, I forget exactly how all of whatever I flashed on went together. :P I got lucky though, and I had this flash of insight earlier and I remember how most of it went. It was about the sad fact that in the year 2006, women are still second class citizens. What hit it home for me was when I was reading an article about a new birth control pill that would eliminate periods. Yup. Totally eliminate that monthly curse. Why in the world do you think this would have pointed out that women are second class citizens to me? Easy. They are trying to get FDA approval for a birth control pill that will eliminate a woman's menstrual cycle while viagra, the pill to allow men with erectile dysfunction get an erection, has been on the market for years. Now I'm sorry, but I believe that with all the problems women have had from their periods like cramps, PMS, bloating, headaches, even anemia are things that should have been addressed LONG before the fact that some 50 yr old guy with adult kids can't get it up anymore. I, personally, have had problems for years. I have had cramps so bad they made me throw up. Back before you could buy motrin over the counter, they prescribed me motrin. The lovely thing about that was that the cramps made me sick. And the motrin made me sick if I didn't eat before taking it. Classic catch 22. I am sure all the guys reading this are getting nauseous, but get over it. If men had to have even just one period, a bad one with horrible cramps, water retention, awful bloating, passing clots, etc. I'm sure the FDA would have received an application for this medication YEARS ago. It's kind of like when I go to the doctor and say I have a yeast infection and he says Monistat. I'm sorry, but any woman who has ever had a yeast infection knows how badly it can itch and burn and how disgusting it is to have to use a cream or vaginal supository for 3 to 7 days to clear one up. I won't describe it here (so as not to offend men's delicate sensibilities more than necessary) but it's gross to say the least. Now can anybody tell me why I should go buy that junk rather than my doctor writing me a script for a diflucan pill? One pill. No creams or suppositories. Just a pill. It boggles the mind. But my doctor baffles me anyway. To me it just doesn't make sense not to write me a script for the pill so I can take it and be done with it. I haven't decided if this is a man thing or a doctor thing or it's just MY doctor. God knows I've been complaining to my doctor for years about the severe cramps, mood swings, headaches, etc. I have HORRIBLE periods sometimes. His response? I just have to live with it. So I've quit asking. I have degenerative arthritis in my back and he doesn't want to prescribe me anything for it. This leads me to believe I need a new doctor, one who isn't a sadist. I'm kind of of the opinion that there's not really a good reason for me to be in pain all the time. Imagine that. Sometimes I almost wish I could break my leg or something just so I could get temporary relief from the pain I live with on a daily basis when they medicate me for the break. But then I remember that it would hurt like hell to begin with and that my pain level isn't that bad yet so...