Friday, February 4, 2011 - Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM
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Sandhill Crane, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, January 21, 2011
As luck would have it
This was a brutal storm we're just coming out of and I got lucky. John Farr has a great post today at FarrFeed about his reaction to the crisis up in Taos when the natural gas supply went down and how he and his dear wife coped.
I was reading just yesterday about the wisdom of resilience; the wisdom of having simple, bulletproof, systems in place to deal with the unexpected loss of services and I was feeling pretty smug about my setup. Until I realized while reading John's article this morning that I'd have been in deep doodoo if the electric grid had gone down, that is.
I had enough propane and clothes on hand to keep reasonably warm and to cook but I doubt I could have kept my fresh water tank from freezing - the pump froze a couple of times as it was - without electricity from the grid.
It didn't dawn on me what the frozen pump really meant until it froze. All my water was in the fresh water tank and I had no way to get it out. I didn't even have a jug of water in the fridge! Yikes!
I managed to get the pump thawed, it didn't burst, and all was well. But without electricity from the grid, so I could point a portable electric heater at it, getting that pump running would have been a real challenge.
These system critical moments don't come 'round often enough to keep me fully alert to the state of my systems and the implications of their vulnerabilities. I need to make a few changes around here - I want my smug back.
Night camp
Site 10 - Bosque Bird Watcher's RV Park, San Antonio NM
- This is a basic, small Mom & Pop RV Park with full hookups.
- Verizon cell phone and Broadband service are available here with a strong signal.
- Locate Bosque Bird Watcher's RV Park on my Night Camps map
- Click for Google street view
- Check the weather in San Antonio NM
Beware of Hypnotic Media
To live sanely in Los Angeles (or, I suppose, in any other large American city) you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should fear, what you should wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should think and do and be. They have planned a life for you — from the cradle to the grave and beyond — which it would be easy, fatally easy!, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience to the hypnotist’s command. Wake up, wake up — before you sign that seven-year contract, buy that house you don’t really want, marry that girl you secretly despise. Don’t reach for the whiskey, that won’t help you. You’ve got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.