January 21, 2009

Life in the Desert

The weather has become very nice. For the last couple weeks it has been perfectly comfortable outside in shorts and a T-Shirt. The kind of weather that it doesn't matter if the door is opened or closed because you don't notice the difference. The kids have had a kind of strange brown glow because of how much they are playing in the dirt. I think it is funny. Lexie has some other ways to describe it. I'll give a kid a hug or pat on the back them and they'll give off a little cloud of dust. Dallin and David are particularly striking in that their hair is naturally a sandy blonde color. After they have been playing around outside a while the color difference between their skin and hair reduces making them look sort of fuzzy. I find myself blinking to try to bring them into focus, but they just stay fuzzy. We do bathe them frequently, but they can go from clean to dirty in about 30 seconds out here. On the bright side, it is clean dirt. A long time ago, the Navajo would actually bathe in the dirt itself, so I suppose we are double bathing the children.

As Josh and Camron, who had the great fortune of tenting outside of our trailer will testify, our camp area is almost all rocks. There really isn't much dust on the surface because of all of the rocks giving our campsite an almost paved effect. The notable exception to the lack of dirt is directly in front of our trailer. By the entry way there is an appreciable amount of dirt. For reasons known and understood by children, one of their first tasks upon arriving at our campsite was to run down into the wash, where the dirt is, and bring it up in front of the trailer, one shirt load at a time. I am impressed with the volume of dirt they were able to move that way.

New subject ... (that's why its in a new paragraph, but I am explicitly stating it for the benefit of people like me that found their minds wandering excessively through most of their english classes in school and also to warn people used to reading fluid continuous material that there is a sharp turn coming up and I don't want them to slide off the edge). I had a really nasty head ache last night. The kind that has you alternating between vomiting because of the pain and being curled up in a ball crying. I traded beds with Tyrell so that I would have a more direct shot at the bathroom in case an urgent need for it were to arise. The funny part about this, hopefully none of you have found any of this funny yet, but rather found the imagery at least mildly repulsive, is when I woke up this morning. You know how, especially when you sleep in a different bed, you will sometimes wake up not knowing where you are. This happened to me this morning. It was the most extreme case I have ever experienced, in that even after I had finally figured out I was in the trailer, in the wrong bed, because all of the curtains were closed, I didn't have any idea where the trailer was. My mind went through possibilities all over the United States, "the mountains, a parking lot, the beach, a forest, by a river, by a highway, oh now I remember, the desert, Quartzsite."

Big Foot here I come

Along with the weather one of the big draws to Quartzsite in January is the huge flea market that develops here. There are a series of several different shows that come and go giving a wonderful array of various ecclectic items that can be purchased. It is a lot like some of the fairs I have been to, but it seems bigger. and some of the items are more unusual. For example there was a booth dedicated to authentic African tribal masks.

On Saturday we went as a family to see a new RV show that had come into town. I should have known better than to go in, knowing that I left the last show thinking about buying meteorites and fossilized dinosaur poop. I was able to relatively easily, with help from the rationalizing power of the blog, talk myself into a very long term deferrement of the gratification of those desires. This show was hosted by Honda Generators. Now there is something that isn't quite so easy to get out of the mind of a person like me. It is amazing how quiet those generators are. I think my best personal defense against ripping out my wallet to buy one of the little beauties will be a combination of staying away from all generator displays, engineering a casing for my current generator that will make it more quiet, and self talk of "finish the game, sell enough copies, and its all yours!".

Another display of interest that was so far out it was easy to ignore in the short term, was the booth for RV tours of Europe. They advertised six or seven different month long RV tours through Europe all of which seemed absolutely fantastic. The catch of course was the per tour price of around $7,000 per person for the first two people and then $4,500 for each additional person. A pretty hefty price for a family of seven. The booth did, however, seed an idea for a great way to tour Europe. I hadn't realized there were RV parks over there. My experience with European hotels is that they are much too small for the family. At the cost of those tours, when we do finally get over to Europe, I don't think we will go on the tours. Either renting or buying an RV could work out really well. Europe isn't on the near term anyway, in as much as we have so much left we want to see in North America, but it is nice to have a little piece of a long term plan.

The booth that we did not make it past without major short term consequence was the "Be a camp host in Oregon or Washington" booth. Lexie and I have been thinking that after our traveling we will likely wind up in Oregon. Getting paid camping for the summer seemed like a great way to get some experience of Oregon and stretch out the time I have to develop the game before we run out of money. I also have had it in my mind that some day I am going to buy a campground. I think that managing someone else's campground will be a great way to learn how interested I really am in the idea. It will also prevent a lot of the early mistakes I could make buying a campground without previous experience.

The campground we will be hosting is in the Deschutes National Forest near Sisters Oregon (about 45 minutes from Bend). I will be in charge of four camp grounds each with about a dozen sites. The campground hosting starts in mid June, but I may start doing work setting up campgrounds in Oregon as early as late April. I am still waiting to learn how well the campground setup work will pay. If I can live off the wage I can make for doing the campground setup I will most likely do it also in the name of experience. This is a link to the campground at which I will be staying: http://www.hoodoo.com/Deschutes_National_Forest/Sisters_Area/Three_Creeks_Meadow.htm .

Oh yeah, before I close the section, I should probably tie into my title. The Cascade Mountains are the location of several Big Foot sitings. Ever since I heard of research by one of the Idaho State University professors, Jeff Meldrum, about the existence of Big Foot, I have been interested in Big Foot searches. The local museum in Pocatello went as far as to put up a display devoted to Big Foot with a map of the sitings and evidences found to support Big Foot's existence. The little bit of research I have done has left me very convinced that Big Foot does not exist in any way currently understood by science. The arguments against existence are much stronger than the arguments for existence. With that said, there is a lot to be said against the scheme of thinking that says something doesn't make sense so it isn't so. I've found many of the dots in the Universe to be farther apart than my small mind will connect. I have also found it very simple to make connections that felt very good, but were entirely incorrect. So while the odds of me finding Big Foot this summer in the mountians of Oregon are about 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% if that high, the need to have my eyes and mind open for things new and unexplained is 100%. Even something as simply explained as a mountain lion or a bobcat would be a great find. Well, simply explained if one doesn't think about it too deeply.