it's hard to let go
First the house, then the dog, then the bike. I've lost three very dear things. I am not bereft of shelter, dog, nor indeed, a bicycle, but I am less rich, I suppose you would say. It feels rotten, anyway. Plus the bike includes the hitch attachments for two trailers and two baskets and I don't know how replaceable these things will be. I might be able to fabricate them? Well anyway, that's the place my head is at. Plus it's cold. I did pull my head out of the grave, anyway. Baking cookies was a smart thing to do. It really did lift my spirits. I can call that a ladder rung, building a ladder to climb out of the hole. Today sees me on a street parking in a place that is too busy but seems ignored and therefor ok to park. It's just down the street from the first errand of the morning too. My anxiety is peaking hourly because its so damn cold now and I worry about using the heater and killing the coach batteries. I've got Rene in a warmer outfit now, that helps. I mean, 17C shouldn't be too cold. I think down to 9C we should be able to tolerate it without needing the heater on. Maybe down to 14. I dunno. But it's warm enough to activate a housefly.
I do have a full tank of gas, that should get me to maple creek, a place I want to see, anyway. If I have to stay resident in saskatchewan, it might be warm enough for me there. They consistently post warmer temperatures than anywhere around. But not in this bus, I'd need more infrastructure for their winter. For this, I need the coast.
No mechanics are available so the problem with brakes and manifold remains and I will have to make do. Put more paste on the cracks, more fluid in the reservoir. Drive gently. I do that well, I think. I've always been able to coax a lot more life out of a vehicle because I don't use the service brakes if I can slow by coming off the throttle, I leave enough following distance to use the throttle to handle traffic slow downs, and I don't jump accelerate. Usually. I mean, I did sometimes in the smart, for giggles, when she was very young.
I'm so grateful she has safe storage. Well, she could get stolen too, for all I know, she's gone already and the owner of the property has never seen me before. LOL Still, if she's appreciated, I pray she is, then I guess that will do? I think the poor bike got parted and killed.
Dan informs me he gave over keys to the house to his friend who knew someone with a quonset and access to undescribed distribution options for the stuff in the house. They cleared out everything, dan says, everything. I just hope he gets a little kickback next spring for the stuff but I'm glad it didn't get vandalized. It had sat as long as it should. I never thought the bank would take this long to act. The contract sets out for 45 days from a missed payment, and they didn't even start complaining for three months. If you try to contact the client and they don't respond, move on it immediately! What if the client if laying there dying or something? If they want to keep the house, they'll get back to you.
Well oh well.
We might take the route from north to south through the rockies. It's got the least elevation of them all. But we might also feel up to bombing through in one long drive. I don't like the way my body feels in the driver seat, this seat is too high and too far back but lowering it puts my face too low. So then I am reaching for the pedals and perching on the seat. Not a comfortable drive. No speed control thingy, although there is a throttle acceleration lock I can fiddle with to try and get it to run at the right speed. Not great, though, unless the road is very smooth, flat and straight, like in saskatchewan, and you don't need to adjust anything for long minutes, or even hours.
the campsite was nice. There was a slow and lazy river not very wide, that wound in keyhole turns through a tight little valley and the campground was nestled in one of these turns. My site backed onto the bank. I quite enjoyed the sparkling water outside my back doors.
I met some copacetic folks at the campground, they even wanted to exchange facebook contacts! So that is nice. It made things warmer. Although it certainly added fuel for my anxiety yesterday. I got to the point of actually crying hard, something I don't do often since transition. Thank god. I can usually decide not to cry, and do. Yesterday, I felt like it would be work to stop and anyway, I had plenty to cry over and it was cold and wet and the week went too fast and I wanted to cry. I got over it normally, too, which was another surprise. After a good cry, realizing the depression hole I was digging wasn't going to do anything useful, and started making a ladder. thinking of things i could and should do which would help get me past this. And it did, I guess. Not entirely, I'm delicate. I feel it. I need to have a successful trip to the coast, definitely. And then to find a supplier of the charger I need. The cable connectors are due in saskatoon tomorrow, and I don't know where I should send them, perhaps maple creek? Or will they be here overnight so send them here? hrm tough call. there will be mail too. Tomorrow is full of things, getting money from the money mart, doing laundry, calling ups. Ok, that's not a lot to YOU, but remember, with autism, cptsd, and adhd, one of my ways of fudging executive management is to try and either tie things together as one clump, or separate them a day apart.
I hear the wind blowing on my rack pipes. My bus does a deep bass harmonic, a little flat but sonorant enough. It's very irregular. One day I will record it to use in a music piece but I will need it to be in isolation from traffic noise and the like. It is a craptastically busy street, really unpleasant after all the quiet. I will endure it, nonetheless as this is my life now and busy streets get less karen attention when you park overnight, or that's the theory.
Oh, my solar charger couldn't handle the weight of all my panels so I moved it back to the earlier job of charging a smaller battery off just two panels in parallel. I also redesigned the electrical and ordered connectors for it. I need to buy a bigger charger but they don't sell them in town and mail order is such a nuisance right now. I want to test it out with smaller things first at least. I think I should buy a mailbox on the island too and have my mail automatically forwarded and just maintain two addresses for a while. I really want to see if I can navigate the process of moving there. But the bus is going to require a mechanic to get imported, for sure. I relish the idea of time to stop running and get things done, even though it seems I've had such time, yet it always seems too short. This may be a temporary state of mind until I get used to the new lifestyle. Well, my knitting has been winning, I've gotten a bunch of hats and recently a hat/scarf combo. I finished the tie I want to dye and it waits for me to feel like doing the dye job. I started a new one, using the same knit pattern. I understand it well enough to stop reading the pattern or counting it, and I like the way it looks in tie form. I will use it for a few ties, it's a good one.
half the trees here are naked already and the rest are yellow except for the cottonwoods who wait to the frost then their leaves just die and drop. I want out, but Dan is tiling at a farmhouse and it takes him as long as it takes, you know? He's got to focus. he can catch up if I start slowly, so there's that. But if he actually finishes by wednesday I could stay around that long, probably.