Simple Living and Simple Travel

I could live in a watch tower, a treehouse without the tree. The one I wrote about on the August 2013 page, up in Oregon would be a fine place. Quiet, solitude, and a room-with-a-view. I came across one for sale on the web but it sure would not be compatible for full-time living. It looked like an 8’ box on top of a tall, spindly tower. Would not want to be up there in a windstorm. I’d be upchuckin’ over the side. I wasn’t able to work on sudoku puzzles while in the hospitals and nursing facility. The mind just was not able to cope with puzzles and logic. Now with all the meds and whatnot out of my system, I’m enjoying the challenge again. I had to go back to much easier puzzles than I was doing before, but it’s slowly coming back. I also had to go back and relearn some techniques. &#8216Sudoku’ is a registered Japanese trademark filed by the Nikoli company. Similar number puzzles have been around since the late 1800’s, but the rules were slightly different. In 1979, Dell

I’ve been trying to come up with something to write for the November page but I’m having trouble focusing, let alone coming up with something interesting. So since I can’t, I’m going to take Rob K’s suggestion and just give a short update. I got a ride with Lisa and Glen on Tuesday, Nov. 29 from SLC down to Moab. I left the Nash on July 31. So much for planning to be away for a few hours or a night at the most. It felt good to be back with Meadow and Mesa. They recognized me but seemed somewhat surprised that I was here. It didn’t take us long to get back to our old ways. Much easier for me to cope when my pets are around. M&Ms last couple months of being cooped up in the Nash was apparently getting to them. One or the other would make a run to freedom when Glen opened the door to check on them. They can be so fast. He emailed this text to me while I was in the hospital. “Normally I just pull open the door a crack and make sure no one is there but Mesa was right there and jus

As I often do, I went back to last month’s page and added/tweaked some text and added a photo. I think it was Lisa who reminded me that I did not have any medical insurance from 2002 until 2012. I sure lucked out with the timing. Glen and Lisa headed east last month and rented this 42’ boat from Mid Lakes Navigation. The lady in the photo is Lisa. They spent five days cruising the Erie Canal. The boat had a 50 hp. diesel engine so top speed was 5.5 knots. Glen sent me some text (I wish I could write as well): Our boat was a steel hulled craft that was designed and built by Mid Lakes in their own shop. The design was modeled after English canal touring boats that are sometimes called long boats. It was pretty amazing to look around their boat building shop. It was quite an active operation. The company is in the process resorting 3 older boats that they have acquired. The latest one is the Harriet H. Wiles. Mid Lakes had actually built this boat back in the 80's and sol

A camper was up on the Kaibab plateau in northern Arizona. The last day in July, a Sunday, he got up, feeling good, and started the day off with an early morning one-hour run along the AZ Trail. In the afternoon, he felt a pain across the top of his chest, moving towards his right shoulder. The camper didn’t want to, but thought it best to drive down to the emergency room in Kanab, UT; the pain was increasing. It took an hour and he barely made it. He must have looked pretty bad when he shuffled through the doors because two staff workers got up and met him half way. So far, really no big thing. The camper’s upper right arm started turning red during the last 20 minutes or so of the drive. The doctor diagnosed shingles. The camper said the redness was NOT what brought him in here. Then the upper arm started discoloring as we sat there watching. The doctor admitted the camper overnight for strep throat (positive for strep A), shingles, and dehydration. The next morning, cellulitis wa

Our last moving day was interesting. Neither Meadow, Mesa, or myself, enjoy moving days—Meadow least of all. I break camp the afternoon before, pack up, and back the Dodge to within a couple inches of the trailer’s A-frame and hook up the chains and break-away cable. Meadow knows what this means. In the morning, if she gets out, she’s gone. I might be able to keep walking after her and wear her down and snag her after half an hour or so. If she hides, however, she’ll hide and sleep for hours and I have to move the next day. Been there, done that. It rots. When I catch her, I have to grab her by the scruff of the neck or she will shred me. Yep, been there, gone through that, most assuredly, didn’t like it. Luckily in the morning, it wasn’t Meadow that got out. I had gone outside for a few minutes and when I came back in, there was a hummingbird flying back and forth across the back window; keeping real close to the glass, almost skimming across it, not repeatedly flying into the glass

A little after 5:00 one morning, an animal sound that I was not familiar with, just outside my window, woke me up. It was getting near time to get up anyway, so I did. After a couple minutes, I pulled up the back blinds, and there was the source of the sound, a little elk. I love these little unexpected treasures that Nature offers up. Last month I wrote about local mega-fires. Remember I mentioned the lost hiker? A local told me that the hiker did everything right with her signal fire and kept it contained. The local said that the helicopter flew directly over her fire and the down draft spread it out of control. The people on the chopper denied it. I wonder what the true story is. On my last town-run, I was in a laundromat that had a local radio station playing. At one point, the host started talking about the towns of Show Low, Lakeside, and Pinetop being on pre-evacuation notice. I was doing my laundry in Lakeside. I asked the lady working in the laundromat what the story wa

I was out on a hike one morning and came across an older couple on the trail. We stopped and talked about a number of things. I love when this happens. They’re from British Columbia so I asked if they lived near Hope (where Jim and Barb live). They live a bit north of Hope in Lytton, BC. The town was named after Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the man who wrote, “It was a dark and stormy night.” That got a smile from me. Meadow was injured more than I originally thought by that feral cat. After 3 or 4 weeks, she did not seem to be getting any better, still hobbling around on three legs. I took her to another vet in the town we were then near and she said there might have been nerve damage from the bite. It might heal in time and it might not. I asked if it would help if I worked on moving the leg from time to time. So there I was, doing physical therapy on a cat. One day I asked Meadow if she wanted to go for a walk and she perked right up; it had been a month since our last walk. She went

Yep, once again, I was late for another month’s page. I had to pre-date the last entry so it showed up in April. I’m back to my 3-week stints out in the woods, with web access only when I go into town for supplies once or twice a month. And the one day I was in a town back in April, I didn’t have enough stuff to write about. I’ve been having to use my Slime compressor to keep air in one of the Ram tires so when passing through Silver, I stopped at Big O Tire to have the leak fixed (it had a nail). The Nash brakes have not been working properly (seemed to be veering) for quite some time so I called a shop in Silver to see if they had time to fix them. As luck would have it, they did. I had the hubs greased back in Moab, and apparently, when the mechanic put the wheels back on the street-side, he sheared the wires to the two brake magnets. Hence, no brakes on one side. Guano. But as to the leaking tire, it still leaked. I stopped at a tire shop in Pinetop/Lakeside and they found a