Multitasking on the road

Greetings from someplace in Arizona. Yes, I am back in the brutally hot sunshine state. I guess soon every state will be brutally hot, but probably after I'm dead, so at least I don't have to live through that. This is bad enough. I'm doing my Goldilocks routine again, searching for a place that's not too hot and not too cold. Like most hothouse flowers, I require optimal temperatures to feel my best. 

I'm in Prescott, hanging out at a park with all the other travelers who live in their cars. I have figured out my wild camping routine. Wild camping means finding places to park overnight in a city. First, I search Google Earth for a park with a big parking lot. Street parking is no good. You can't deploy solar panels across from somebody's house. They will think you are stalking their children. In a park parking lot, normies come and go, doing their pet-walking, jogging, or biking thing. The ones who stay all day are people like me, the ones who would rather not waste gasoline driving all over the state just to charge up their batteries. I'm sitting in the sweltering shade of my car with a solar panel spread out on the roof. The battery that powers my fridge is slowly sipping power from the sun. Meanwhile I'm blogging. Look at me go, I'm a multitasker.

After my cross-country expedition, I still have no answers about where to look for housing. All the states I visited are lovely in the fall, but would not suit me in the summer or winter. California is beyond reach, financially, so that leaves Washington and Oregon. Both states are gloomy, but of the two, Oregon is a little less gloomy. Bright side: As long as I'm mobile, if the weather sucks, I can move on.

Happy birthday to me. I'm 68. Sometimes birthdays invite a reflection on the past year. In my case, I'm inspired to consider my entire past, the choices, events, and circumstances that led me to this lifestyle. I might add a page to my blog chronicling my timeline. I assume nobody will read it, or when they arrive there by accident, they will read two lines and quickly click away to assuage their boredom on another website. The timeline would be for me. There will come a day when I won't be able to pull together a timeline. Even now, the sequence and details of events are hazy. People and pets are fading into the mist. Certain events—my cat's death, COVID, and my mother's death, for instance—are gashes in the timeline, leaving a lingering trauma that probably will outlive me, but dates sometimes get fuzzy. 

I still can't believe this is my life. Sometimes shock hits me. The surreality of this existence flows over me like a massive wave, driving me deep, so I can't breathe for a moment. Then I surface and get on with things: Do I need water, do I need to dump trash, is my fridge powered up, do I have clean clothes, is there gas in the tank. The minutae of my daily life, just moving from task to task, getting it done, not thinking too much except beyond the next few minutes. 

There are people like me everywhere. Now I can spot them easily. Most of them aren't in soccer mom vans, but their ineptly made window covers are a clue. A rooftop box, a hitch box carrying a portable generator, a general dustiness, back window piled high with blankets... When the occupant gets out of a car and brushes his teeth with a bottle of water, spitting in the sand at a rest area, you can figure he is a nomad. 

Where do we go when the park closes? Thanks for asking. Walmarts used to open their parking lots to vehicles of all sizes. Not any more. Many Walmarts have posted signs to indicate they don't allow overnight parking of any kind, probably from all the shootings and trash. Those rascally nomads. Sometimes Walmart allows cars but not RVs and trucks. Sometimes there is a fringe of unpatrolled spaces in the wayback, where the riffraff is allowed to park. Back east, Walmarts were much friendlier to overnighters. Here in the west, not so much. However, you can almost always park overnight at a home improvement store, if you don't mind the employees who come and go in shifts all night long. After about 3:00 a.m., you will be the only car in the parking lot. If you don't mind that, for a few hours, it's quite peaceful. The other standby is Cracker Barrel, traditionally a welcoming respite for overnighters. 

In some ways, I am invisible. Older white gal in a nondescript white minivan. There are thousands of us cruising the streets of America. Not all of us live in our cars, but possibly more than you would think. In January I will find them in Quartzsite, Arizona, the traditional winter home of nomads. They will come from all over the country seeking desert sun. I will find my tribe there, and the moments of surreality will fade for a while. When everyone is living in their car, suddenly this lifestyle is normal, and it's all of you stick-and-brick folks who are the weirdos. 

It happened again

Once again, you had to remind me! I can't believe I forgot to blog last Sunday. I looked at my calendar to see what happened. Every line was full, and every line was checked off done, except I had forgotten to put "Blog" on the calendar. 

Now we know. My life is ruled by my calendar. At this rate, soon I will be putting "eat" and "sleep" on there, too. That will be a sad day. I probably won't be blogging when I reach that point. You can visit me in the retirement home, if you can still walk.

Speaking of last legs, many thanks to my blog reader who checked in to see if I'm still alive. It was 106°F today. I don't know if I would call this living. Summers in Tucson resemble being in a prison. Not that I would know from firsthand experience, just that being confined to the Bat Cave for most of the day doesn't exactly feel like freedom. Still, roof over head, not complaining. Much.

Another thing to be grateful for: no little dudes! I believe the property management company actually took some action. I didn't see said action, but they sent round a notice saying they were doing inspections for pest control. That makes me think maybe they did something. I haven't seen a little dude in over two weeks. I still tiptoe into my kitchen though, and I'm still spraying insecticide every Sunday like I found religion. I'm sure the little dudes aren't far away. 

It's been so hot, I had to finally turn on the air conditioner. It works, that's nice. Fans don't really suffice when it's over 100 in the Bat Cave. When I turned on the AC, a huge black beetle flew out. It was probably lounging comfortably in the dark dusty crevice, then whoosh! I can imagine it thinking what the heck? It came fluttering out and went behind a box. 

I screamed a little, remembering my previous encounter with a flying monster. I grabbed the ammo bottle and spritzed it to get it to come out of hiding. It landed in drunken fashion on the window sill. I saw it had some iridescent markings on its tummy. Suddenly feeling magnanimous, I captured it and let it go outside. Sorry, big black dude, for scaring you. I was willing to save you, because there was only one of you, and you had art on your belly. I don't extend the same courtesy to the little brown dudes that live in the walls. 

Happy birthday to CS and to Bravadita. Also to my older brother and to my mother, who would have turned 93 later this month. 

I self-published my third novel this week. Yay, me, getting it done in the desert.