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Niantic

So I’ve moved into my grandfather’s old house in Niantic. He’s been diagnosed with alzheimer’s, and is in assisted living. He had saved a lot of money, but assisted living eats that quickly, so he may need to sell the house to stay. We’re living in and fixing it up in exchange for rent. It’s nice having an entire house to ourselves, and having a place where people can crash for extended periods of time. Cooking for ourselves has probably been the biggest benefit, and we’ve been exploring different meal options, on a real tight budget. I’m keeping our receipts, and will be posting after some time a write up on how we’re eating cheap and healthy.

Also, I recently bought two bread books and will be starting to bake more difficult breads in the coming weeks. I’ll be posting updates on that as well.

iCaved

I’ve been considering buying an mp3 player for months now, but I’ve avoided doing so because the only real option I have is a large capacity iPod. I don’t like iPods for one big reason: once you put music on, you can’t take it back off. Sure, tools like Senuti exist, and work well, but it doesn’t work that way by design, and I don’t like that at all. However, there aren’t many >100GB players, and of what is out there, the iPod is the best for my needs. So I caved, and bought a refurbished 160GB recently.

Moving from my main computer with it’s 60GB internal, I’m really really happy with all the new space. Things I’ve had lying around on DVDs can now be readily accessed, and life is good.

On a side note, I have a set of speakers that I bought at the same time I bought my first computer. It was a bottom-of-the-line Dell, and I paid as much for the speakers as I did for the computer. While that computer is now living out its remaining years as a MythTV box, I still have and love those speakers. They’ve traveled with me to college and back – but upon returning home were never unpacked. I just used the speakers that were already set up. I’ve recently set up these speakers, and I’m shocked at the difference I notice when listening to anything. I’m enjoying listening to music again, a hobby I’d taken a leave from for…well…about as long as it’s been since I’ve heard these speakers. While audiophiles might go overboard sometimes, a good set of speakers really makes a world of difference.

Been Dreaming

Been dreaming a lot recently, being unemployed and all. The dreams all tend to drift towards the same future, which I’m going to work like hell towards. Living off the grid, supporting myself with homegrown food and power. However, an important part of this dream is that I need other people there. I imagine a decent sized group of people (a dozen or so) working together on interesting and idealistic projects. I know the people who I would want to join me, but I don’t know if they would. I’m saving up money for this now, but I know very few people who are doing anything similar. I wish I knew a way to convince people to join me so I wouldn’t be alone in this.
Until then, I’ll keep dreaming.

Flagstaff

After much research and many phone calls, it seems that Flagstaff may not be the best place to spend the winter. Not only will the weather pose a challenge (though, one we were prepared for), but the city seems to have a decided anti-RV stance. Flagstaff appeared with a handful of other U.S. cities that try and discourage RVers, almost certainly because of their proximity to the Grand Canyon. The few RV parks in the city won’t have us, because of our nontraditional vehicle (not surprising), and the few calls for a parking space on Craigslist went unanswered. I have no interest in driving across the country for a city that doesn’t want me, so it will have to wait until later, when I can properly experience the city from an apartment or some such.

So what to do for now? We can’t keep living in my parents’ garage. No one likes that arrangement. My grandfather is in assisted living, and his savings are starting to run down, and they are considering selling the house he used to live in. It needs to be fixed up first, so an exchange of labor for rent may be worked out. All up in the air.

Sleep Number

I was watching TV the other day, and I saw a commercial for the Sleep Number bed. It’s a commercial I’ve seen hundreds of times, but something struck me about the product that hadn’t struck me before. It is an incredibly odd way of going about making a personalized bed. The entire selling point of a sleep number bed is that you can customize it to your liking, so it won’t be either too firm or too soft. To do this, you press a little button which either inflates or deflates your mattress. All of this technology is built into the bed you buy.

I wonder how often people change their settings. I can’t imagine just picking a random number each night, just to spice things up. I imagine most people find something that’s comfortable for them, and stick with it – identifying with their ‘sleep number’ as they do in the commercials. So that means the technology required to get the bed to the appropriate setting is used exactly once. That first day (or two) a person is getting used to the bed, inflating and deflating, trying to get it just right, and then never touching it again.

It seems to me that someone could make a killing by undercutting the price of the Sleep Number bed and centralizing all of that technology. Or maybe it’s just cheap enough that it doesn’t even matter. But it struck me as an odd way of selling something. Sort of like buying the largest belt available because you know it will be able to fit just right, even if there is a lot of excess hanging off.

Unemployed

Officially unemployed. Though thanks to the pay schedule of the Census, I’ll be getting paychecks for a few more weeks.

Now, on to other shenanigans.

Post-Fox

I got back from Grey Fox late last night, and it was certainly a good time. I ended up staying with my normal camp, which I think may have been a mistake. Most nights we went out to other camps, since that’s where the people are. Next year, that’s where we’ll be. The bus did a spectacular job, and there was only one minor malfunction (there has yet to be a trip of considerable distance where nothing went wrong). On the way home there was a bizarre exchange between another car and myself, where they looked up the bus’ website while driving alongside me. That caught me off guard.

Back to Census work, for as long as they’ll have me. I’m hoping I can stay on for the next operation, since it seems that I will be staying in Middletown until mid-September. I have to challenge a tax assessment on my bus, since they valued it about $22,000 more than it’s worth. But once that’s taken care of, it seems like I’ll be heading for Flagstaff. I think.

On To Grey Fox

Just as the next Census operation is kicking off, I’m leaving for Grey Fox. The bus is receiving some TLC to make living a little more comfortable, and things are looking good. This will be my first year with my own camp at Grey Fox, so I’m really looking forward to that. I love the camp I grew up with, but the current members are quite different from those of twenty years ago, and I’m not sure they would appreciate us jamming well into the night. Anywise, it looks to be a good year, and I’m looking forward to being back.

Big Brother

NRFU is finally over, and I must say it’s a relief. Towards the end it was getting a bit frustrating. Another operation is coming up, and I won’t have more than a few days of downtime, but I’ll use that to reflect on something NRFU taught me: People are still scared of the government.

There’s an important distinction to make here – I don’t mean that people do not trust the government, or that they don’t have any faith in it getting things right, but I mean that people are actually scared of the government. Even after Hollywood abandoned the Top Secret Government Agency for the vigilante movies of the late aughts, because the very thought of the government pulling off something extremely complicated and secretive was too much to ask for the audience’s suspension of disbelief, people still fear the feds.

I find this incredibly interesting, but maybe it has always been this way. And I’m by no means interacting with a perfect cross section of Americans – these are the people who didn’t send in their Census for one reason or another. I guess I don’t really know if this is a popular sentiment, but it is out there.

I also got to learn a bit about bureaucracy from the inside. This reaffirmed some of my assumptions, and shed some light on things I didn’t know I didn’t know. In the field, we would have a running joke about the incompetence of the people at our LCO, but after many visits to the Office, I began to realize it was just a mutual misunderstanding that stemmed from the very set of rules that tied us all together. Bureaucracy itself is the problem, not the people inside of it. Interesting.