Week 3 of hiatus

Monday, 20 through Sunday, 26 of April 2020

Spring weather
Most days this week, the temp's been in the 80's which, when it's also humid and you don't have AC, can be pretty warm.  Sometimes when I think about my Momma with 3 kids, 2 still in (non-disposable) diapers, living through Texas summers without AC, I wonder about the Nobel Prize committee's selection process.

We had some variety on Wednesday, though - a serious tornado threat to our area.  David said Anna was monitoring various weather outlets and they'd let me know if anything got close.  He wanted to be sure Lily's carrying case was handy (behind the driver's seat) and said he'd come over and help me get the critters across the street if it was time.  We had some rain in the morning, but the threatened tornadoes and hail both skipped right over us and landed in East Texas instead.  I'm very sorry for them, but I'm also very relieved my little RV wasn't put to that test.  Then all the clouds cleared up and we got up to 88° by 6:00.

The temp got back up to 88° again on Friday and seems to be aiming for that level again today (Sunday).  I'm assuming it'll be even warmer next month, giving me so much to look forward to.

This week's activities
The tornado non-event day I spent working on my unfinished post about the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis.  I've had enough trouble with my computer freezing up that I've finally learned to save my work in progress, but this time that wasn't good enough.  Google itself ate every bit of work I did during the afternoon and all I was left with was the morning's work.  The blog is on Google's platform and the error message I got was a Google error message, which is why I'm blaming Google.  And no matter what I could think of to do, all that work was gone gone gone.  To keep from being in complete despair all evening, I watched Walk, Don't Run - Cary Grant's last movie, also starring beautiful Samantha Eggar and Jim Hutton (aka Ellery Queen), who I thought was brilliant in this film.  Both very sweet and likeable.  It's impossible to watch this movie without coming away feeling the world's not such a bad place (despite Google).

The next day I redid all my work that had gotten lost and - ta-da! - have finally published a completed account of my visit to the National Civil Rights Museum.  If you want to take a look at it, it's right after the Day 22 - Memphis post in the Tennessee section.

I also added in the great photos Anna took when she and David came to spend Christmas with me.  Some she took in the town of Ozark, others are of the dogs.  They're in the post for Days 24 & 25 in the Alabama section.

I spent most of a day sorting through and packing the notebooks of the 24 states I've visited so far and storing them in the space I freed up in my basement storage after visiting the rented storage unit (see below).  That was actually a lot more work than it sounds and I was pooped after I got it done.

I took advantage of these sunny, hot days to clean all the windows in the RV - even the little one by the upper bunk that's used exclusively by Lily.  I discovered that the screens over the windows slide, but they slide only where the window slides and can't be removed, as far as I can tell.  That means the screens can't really be cleaned and the windows can't be completely cleaned unless I want to start removing a lot of screws.  Not happening.  At least, not right now.

And I discovered I'll have to remove the screws holding in the window covering to take down the venetian blinds in the little window over the kitchen sink.  As far as I'm concerned, the only reasonable way to wash those blinds is by taking them down and laying them on the grass somewhere and washing them that way, drying them in the sun.  Trying to do it while they're hanging is more of a nuisance than it's worth.  So maybe next month I'll think about taking down these window coverings and meanwhile I did a quick wipe-down of the blinds.

Now that I've gotten the RV's state inspection, I was eligible to renew the registration online, which I did.  Very exciting.  I felt like a real resident.

I spent almost a full day on the simple chores of taking a shower across the street and doing 3 weeks worth of laundry, also across the street.  Anna and David are really generous to allow me to plug in my RV and use their facilities and pat my dogs when we're all outside at the same time and get me some milk on their grocery run and just generally be good neighbors.  I'm a very lucky camper.  Without them, I'd be spending this quarantine period in near terror.  Instead, I've got 2 very sensible, level-headed relatives who are absolutely doing their share not to catch and pass on this virus.

Plans
I saw in a Carolyn Hax column the idea that someone who really likes to make plans and is very frustrated with this uncertain situation we're all in might actually be able to make plans anyway.  They just can't be the kind of plans with dates attached.  You can plan on taking a trip to France (for instance) and start researching places to visit and start taking French lessons and plan routes - for when the world's no longer under a death threat.

I thought that was a great idea because it allows room for hope.  For someone like me, goals and plans for the future carry hope.  No ideas/no plans carry a sense of hopelessness.  Sensible or stupid - that's the way it feels to me.

So I pulled out my ancient wooden puzzle of the United States and took a look at where I've been and all the states I haven't yet visited and came up with a new idea.  Instead of planning the sort of route I had before, based on avoiding northern states in the winter and southern ones in the summer, and based on moving from one state to another that was geographically next to the first, I grouped the remaining states in clumps of 3 or 4 or 5.

My thought was that I may be able to travel only a few months at a time, depending on whether the virus does increase in the fall during flu season, and depending on whether states open up too fast and we have a resurgence in cases before flu season ever comes, and depending on whether those who've been infected once develop immunity (which WHO says isn't looking likely, I'm sorry to see), and so forth.

I can tell I'll be here until at least June 1st, maybe even July 1st (though living in a metal box in Texas in July without AC isn't my first choice).  But whenever things seem to be settling down enough that I won't feel I'm risking my life by going back on the road, then I can see how many months I might have of travel time.  Maybe I'd just plan to go to - say - the clump of Missouri and Iowa and Minnesota.  And if it looked safe to stay out longer, I can add on some or all of the clump consisting of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas.  Like that.  I've got one clump that's just Texas and Oklahoma, in case traveling seems safe but the experts are cautious.

Anyway, I feel better with a plan that's flexible and can be adapted to different and changing conditions.  It makes the future seem more possible and less improbable.

Errands
For this week's Cleanliness Trip on Tuesday I picked out a Love's Travel Stop in the small town of Anna, north of McKinney, for dumping my waste tanks.  I'd intended to run by the Recycling Dropoff Center to offload both my and David/Anna's weekly accumulations and then run up the highway, aka US 75, aka Central Expressway.

Groceries
Well, then I remembered there's a Kroger just around the corner from the Recycling Dropoff and, because they've designated early mornings for seniors to shop, there aren't many folks shopping then.  So I stopped off there.  By the time I got out of the Kroger, it was almost 10:00 and I'd made an 11:30 appointment for Lily to get her claws clipped.  Driving up to the Love's was more than a half-hour's drive for regular drivers (meaning much longer for me) so I'd almost certainly be late for the appointment.

Instead, I rearranged all my stops, upending my carefully planned itinerary.  Fine, no problem, but for someone trying desperately to feel even a modicum of control over life in these uncontrolled times, it was very unsettling.

Frig power
Even more unsettling was my refrigerator.  After I'd put in things like milk and eggs I'd bought at the store, I noticed the indicator light for power to the frig was off.  There's a switch at the top of it that can be set for power from propane or electricity, and when I unplug from a power source the propane comes on automatically.  Except it wasn't on.  We were already feeling the temp creeping up to the seriously hot level forecast today and the last thing I needed was a nonfunctioning frig/freezer.  So my mind started scrambling to figure out where I could get it repaired and was I going to have to cut my errands short so I could dump food off at David/Anna's extra frig/freezer to keep it from spoiling and was I going to have to cancel Lily's appointment and so forth.

Storage
Still, I decided to keep on keeping on until I could come up with a Plan C and went from the grocery store up to a UHaul to buy some book boxes, and then on to the storage unit I've been renting for the last 2+ years.  Their security procedures are pretty good and the only reason I got in and back out is that I was able to dredge up memories from when I was here in February 2018 - how to get through the gate, where the storage unit was, how to get it unlocked, how to transfer stuff in and out, how to lock it back up, how to get back out through the gate - procedures at every turn that weren't obvious on their face.

But now I've got much more room in the basement storage space and even more room in the cabin after moving out things I brought with me that I've never used.  And there'll be even more stuff moved out in a week or two because of those boxes of notebooks I packed.

Pets
By then I'd thankfully noticed that the frig's power light was back on, so that was one less thing I'd have to worry about, and it was almost time for Lily's appointment.  Except I made several wrong turns getting there because I wasn't coming from any direction I'd planned for.  Still, we made it.  One of the few vet offices in the area that was accepting non-emergency patients - and the length of Lily's claws constituting an emergency for my furnishings didn't quite make that grade.

Meanwhile, the dogs had been becoming increasingly insistent that they should have a walk, but I'd been so focused on the frig and Lily's claws and wise use of time (storing stuff because the storage place was sort of on the way) that I hadn't been able to bring myself to take time out for the dogs, poor things.

So while we waited for Lily, I took them across the busiest street in Plano to the only green grass I could see and walked them around a parking lot for a bit.  Then we went back and got the kitty and then, finally, we went on up to the City of Anna (pop. 14,200) to the Love's.

Love's
I've been noticing that most of these convenience stores are providing fairly strict adherence to CDC guidelines and employee protection: stickers on the floor showing safe distancing, plexiglass shields at the counter, employees wearing masks and/or gloves.  It's a far cry from what I saw last month in Arkansas and I'm guessing most of it indicates the change in public attitudes about the deadliness of the coronavirus.  I always wear a mask when I run these errands, and sometimes I wear gloves too - especially in grocery stores and places where I might touch things other people have touched.  And I welcome any precautions I see others taking, especially in this state with an unofficial motto of "You Can't Tell Me What To Do."  You'd think Texas was your basic idiotic 15 year old.

Sights while driving around
While we were driving around, I saw a sign at a church that said, "Jesus washes away all sins, but you still have to wash your hands."  Definitely a sign of the times.

I passed a business called Windmill Stables in Richardson near Dallas.  The thing about this place is that it's in the middle of a residential neighborhood but it's a real functioning horse stable, complete with plenty of horses.  I've assumed it was grandfathered in to the neighborhood - how else would a horse stable get into the middle of a bunch of houses - and finally got around to looking it up.  And in fact it was opened in the 1980's, at which time those houses weren't even a gleam in a developer's eye, so yes, they did get grandfathered in.

(I have mentioned, haven't I?, that grandfathering something in is a phrase that grew out of Jim Crow laws post-slavery.  Ruling whites tried to make it impossible for blacks to vote so they established literacy tests; well, poor whites couldn't pass those any more than the blacks could so they came up with an exception for those whose grandfather had been eligible to vote.  That took in the poor whites but left out the blacks who had all had grandfathers who were enslaved and were, therefore, ineligible to vote.)

I passed a church named Asian American Baptist Church.  Asian Americans are a really varied group, I'd have thought.  In fact, I looked it up and learned that, as of 2018, almost 25% of Richardson residents are foreign-born.  Only 68% of residents speak English at home; 12% speak Spanish (which is a surprise to me only because of how low a percentage it is), but 4% speak Chinese at home, more than 2% speak Vietnamese, almost 1% speak Korean, and 1.6% speak other Asian languages in the home.  So I wondered how on earth a church could cater to such a broad category of folks, and I looked them up.  What I learned was that it's a fairly new church that tries to fill an ethnic need that more conventional churches aren't but still bridge the Asian cultural differences by using English in the church.

I passed a (temporarily closed) business called Condom Sense and of course had to look it up.  They say they were established in 1990 in response to the AIDS epidemic, after Magic Johnson had announced he was HIV+.  They claim status as Dallas's oldest adult product store.

Shakespeare and the Bubonic Plague
I heard on the radio that the Bubonic Plague was a serious threat during Shakespeare's time and that he'd written Macbeth and King Lear while in quarantine.  So I looked that up and got some conflicting reports - some websites agreed with this and said he'd also written Antony and Cleopatra in that same year (1606) while stuck at home, while others said he'd left London where theaters had been closed because of the plague, was touring the provinces with his plays, and he was bored out in the boondocks, which is why he'd had time to write.  Whichever is right, they all agree that the Plague had an enormous effect on him and references can be found throughout most of his plays.

The Bubonic Plague, aka the Black Death, arose in the 1300s and was rampant in London especially but throughout England from at least 1563, when 20,000 died in London alone, 80,000 in England.  There were outbreaks periodically throughout Shakespeare's life (he was born in 1564) and it wasn't finally conquered until the Great Fire of London in 1666.  That fire killed the rats that infested the city; the rats carried fleas that carried the virus, which arose from the raw sewage dumped straight into the Thames.  In 1665 alone, the Plague killed 16% of London's population.

The Plague killed Shakespeare's 3 sisters and 3 brothers, his grandson and, most tragically, his only son.  It was so greatly to be feared and so little was known about it and went on intermittently for so long that it's no wonder Shakespeare's plays are filled with references to it.

It's hard for me to imagine it now, when we live in a time of such great scientific knowledge and people are impatient when a vaccine can't be discovered this month (i.e. instantly) for our own plague.  The people then were literally living in their own sewage, which was killing them with a horrible and excruciating illness, and that situation went on for more than 100 years.

Back at the ranch
It was hot
The official temperature today seems to have only gotten to 84° but it seemed about 10° hotter than that, especially in this metal box I'm living in.  I opened all the windows, the door and all the skylights and turned on the ceiling fan and 2 small fans that I put on the floor for the dogs.  By 5:00 Wednesday morning, the cabin temperature had still only gotten down to 75° which was only just starting to be comfortable.  We were plenty warm during the night, but there just wasn't anything I could do about it.

Holocaust Remembrance Day
I heard on the radio that Tuesday is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and when I looked it up I learned that yes, it started at sundown Monday until sundown Tuesday.  Well, sundown in Richardson these days is after 8:00, so by the time I found out, I still had time to remember.  I decided to rewatch Denial, the movie about the libel trial of an author who was sued by a Holocaust denier when she wrote that he was a Holocaust denier.  She won.  The judge in London's High Court agreed that he had lied and manipulated historical facts to promote his ideas of anti-Semitism and favoring Hitler.

She's among the many who are very concerned that, like so many of the WWII generation, Holocaust survivors are beginning to die, leaving a world that is increasingly unable to believe that wholesale slaughter of people for being who they are occurred.  Maybe they're the same people who think enslaved Africans were happy working on plantations.

Correction
Actually, it's not really a correction, but somebody wrote in and asked about a post I did when I was in Delaware about Barratt's Methodist Chapel.  I've added the comment and clarifying information to that webpage, if anyone's interested in taking a look.