Sunday, January 11, 2009 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
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Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM, January 9, 2009
Will I ever catch up
I'm still trying to catch up with my internet backlog from the Verizon Broadband Access outage here at the park and now the main circuit breaker in the rig overheated and died. Now today I'll have to pack up and go into town for a new breaker.
Will it never end with all these maintenance issues I've been dealing with ever since I bought this rig? It's been as bad as buying a 20 year old house - everything is wearing out at the same time. Ah well, once I get through it LD should be good to go for another 15 - 20 years. I sure hope so.
Night camp
Site 7 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
- Verizon cell phone service - good signal
- Verizon EVDO service - very good signal and access speed ( I have to qualify this - during my January 2008 visit the signal and access speed was excellent - in January 2009 it was practically non-existent during the day and slow at night with unpredictable short periods of excellent access)
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park website
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park on my Nightcamps map
- Check the weather here
Writing From the Inside Out
A young writer, if he is unknown, can be at a party and watch what everyone is doing. If he has a marveluos ear for dialog, he can wake up the next morning and remember all that was said and how it was said. He is a bird on a branch. Sees like a bird and writes books that are extraordinarily well observed. But once he is successful, especially if that happens quickly, it's as if the bird were now an emu. It cannot fly. It grows haunches and foreshoulders and a mane: lo and behold, it is a lion. And everyone is looking at the lion, including the birds. But it is a lion with the heart of a bird and the mind of a bird. So there is a terrible period when the transmogrified emu is trying to live like a lion and has little talent for it. Then the beast begins to experiment. When it runs, it now sees other animals scamper. It takes a while - often years - for the writer to get to appreaciate his effect on others, and even longer to begin to understand human beings again. In the old days, he could write about friends, enemies, and strangers by intuition, by induction; now he puts it together by deduction. Of course, he does have more material on which to work his deductions.