RVing--It Ain't All Campfires and Kumbaya

My Last Reading.  Acrylic on canvas, 11 x 14 in.

I got to go into town for some culture recently.  By town, I mean Tucson, and by culture, I mean a Dixieland concert at the University of Arizona.  It was really great fun, the most smile-inducing, foot-tapping concert I'd been to in years.

It got me thinking about the future.  Steve and I think maybe someday we'll want to get an apartment in Tucson.  It'll be when he's tired of moving solar panels around and fixing things and dumping Blue Boys.  For now, he still enjoys this sort of puttering around.   

 Green Thumb.  Acrylic on canvas, 11 x 14 in.

I like Tucson.  It's got good food and interesting groups of people.  There is always something going on.  Parts of the city are beautiful, with pockets of untouched desert in between developed areas.  I love some of the spaces that have been set aside for public enjoyment.  On my way home, I stopped at Ironwood Picnic Area in Tucson Mountain Park.  If I lived in Tucson, I'd want to live fairly close to this lovely spot.  

I also bought art supplies while in town.  Michael's was having a 50% off sale on their canvases, so I bought four big gallery-wrapped heavy duty canvases for less than $100 to use in a show later this year.  Such a deal!

While I was in Tucson, Roxanne was staying at Coyote Howls, taking care of Sonja.  How nice of her!  Normally when I go to town, I have to limit my visit to two nights because I leave Sonja locked up in my RV.  This time, Sonja got to go in and out and in and out and so on.  

 Roxanne registering our surprise visit to Organ Pipe.

Last weekend, before I went to Tucson, Roxanne and I took my Geo Tracker out for a Sunday afternoon drive.  We headed out Bates Well Road, on BLM land near Ajo, Arizona.  It turned out this road eventually goes to a back entrance to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.  Roxanne had her federal lands pass with her, so we drove into the Monument a little ways, until the roads got really rough and we decided to turn back.  

 Being a gimp, I didn't get out of the Tracker, so I'm taking a picture of Roxanne taking a picture of an organ pipe cactus in front of an interesting rock formation

Since getting back from Tucson, I made another quick trip up to Phoenix to take care of some business.  So now I am happy that I have no more little trips to town to make for a while.  I can just hunker down and work at projects for a while.  My next commitment to go anywhere is in April, when I'll head to Truth or Consequences to hang a solo art show at January's.  This week I've completed a couple more paintings for that show.   

Man-Cave to Casbah

Happy Hippie indeed.

Hi guys and gals, as well of those of you who are unsure or unwilling to commit. In my last blog post, I shared with you that I was having a busy week listing lots of scarves on eBay during a free listing week for eBay store owners. It was a great success, so the past week I've been packing up the items that sold and getting them to the post office as quickly as I can.

It's been very reassuring to me to see that I really can make a modest living from my business, so long as I'm willing to devote enough time to it and live frugally. I'd previously had some success at this level, but it was back when I had a large suburban home where I could devote an entire room to eBay shenanigans. To achieve the same results in an RV took me a while.

It wasn't just the smaller space--it was also getting to the point of settling down to business. I spent a year kind of treading water in one place after my marriage ended and then another year wandering about, both geographically and in terms of how I made a living. For a while last year, I actually had a job. After a time, I came to realize that working for someone else, even just part-time, was distracting me from my real work, which is self-employment on eBay and as an artist and busker. So I am beginning to buckle down now and do what I need to do.

Today I got an email from eBay about some upcoming policy changes that present new challenges. Every time I just about figure out how to be a top-notch eBay seller with stars and ribbons showing potential buyers how reliable and trustworthy I am, the rules change. Now I need to decide whether I can provide one-day turn-around on my shipping in order to maintain my privileged status as a Top-Rated Seller. Can I do this, living on the road? I don't know yet. I have a couple of months to practice before the new policy goes into effect.

Silk Ceiling

So, you are probably wondering what all this has to do with my title, "Man-Cave to Casbah." Actually, I have to give Steve credit for this title. While he's been dogsitting in Ajo and I've been living by myself in Why, I've been getting a little creative, bring colors other than brown and design elements besides the bones, feathers, skins and skulls of dead animals into Steve's 5th wheel. While sorting through my many hundred scarves to pull out the best designers and brands, as well as green scarves for St. Paddy's and florals for my spring sales, I uncovered some hippie fodder...hand blocked silk scarves from India. Today I stapled them onto the ceiling of the cab-over bedroom. Hence the title.

Rumi in the living room

I've also been taking down some of the yellowed paper on which years ago Steve printed out some of his most beloved sayings, and I've been painting the words directly on the walls. That's right, commitment. With me constantly finding new ways to improve his home, I'm sure Steve feels trepidation every time he comes out here to visit me. But he still keeps showing up and fortunately he has been happy with the results thus far. My next redecorating projects involve using up some of my vintage fabric cache to cover cushions and make curtains.

My first mandala

For a while this winter, my creativity seemed to be kind of dried up. But the practical art of redecorating has gotten it flowing again, and now I'm spending a little time each day drawing. One of the items on my bucket list was to create mandalas and now I am thinking of making some greeting cards, combining mandalas with the quotations that I've been gathering for daily posts on FaceBook over the past year. Mandalas are a natural for me, because I love to doodle and, like any mosaic artist, I'm mad about geometry. Most types of art work integrate your inside and outside, but mandalas are particularly great for this because you can choose symbols that hold special meaning for you.

Mesquite honey from Indigenous Nutrition

In closing I'd like to rehash some old business from past posts. In my last blog posting, I mentioned that the blooming desert is causing me hay fever, a condition I thought I'd left behind when I came to the Southwest. Who knew that such tiny flowers could cause so much sinus congestion and headache? I sure didn't. I thought about taking pictures of these little blossoming bio-hazards, but Roxanne has already done it for me. So I'll just mention that I'm trying a couple of ancient remedies this time around rather than just popping Zyrtec and they seem to be helping me.

While it's debatable whether local honey actually helps immunize you from the effects of pollen, I sure do enjoy slathering a full tablespoon of mesquite honey on my toast each morning. If nothing else, it soothes my throat while going down. And there is no doubt in my mind that using my neti pot once or twice a day is helpful. Once you get past the revulsion of having stuff coming out of your nostrils, nasal irrigation rocks! I've also begun using lavender oil instead of antibiotics for the rosacea that usually starts bothering me by late winter, and that rocks, too.


On a final note, there was a very interesting article on Yahoo! News today about the reopening of portions of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, ten years after their closure to the public following the killing of a park ranger by drug runners. For my friends living in other parts of the U.S., this article gives you a little bit of a feel of some aspects of living near the Mexican border. In a short time, though, I have become inured to the loss of civil liberties that occurs each time I travel around here (although I'm sure I would be far more stricken by their lack if I wasn't a pinkish, blondish Norwegian-American). Most days, the beauty and peace of living in the Senoran Desert allows me to forget about politics and crime.

On the Road Again

My traveling companion, Sly

"On the Road Again"...Willie Nelson comes to mind, but so do John Denver, Canned Heat, and a lot of other musicians who had their own road songs. Anyhow, I'm traveling for a few days with my son Sly, who is visiting from Seattle while his dad is on vacation.

Painting a tiny muskrat skull

I haven't blogged much in the past few months, in large part because of how tenuous Sly's health has been. It's been difficult to cheerfully talk about my winter in the Arizona desert when my kid is battling for his life...or sometimes not battling for it, which is even more disturbing. Ever since he was little, he's always had mild to middling mental health issues, but the past few months have been very scary. Sly's at the age where people with depression sometimes graduate to schizophrenia, and that may be what's happening. We don't know yet, for sure. But what we do know is that Sly, at age 19, needs to be with one or the other of his parents or with mental health caretakers rather than on his own. He can't manage his own meds and he can only use sharp objects when closely supervised.

A completed cow lower jawbone, now on display in our driveway at Why

Despite these challenges, we've been having a good time, overall. For the first few days of Sly's visit, we stayed close to home in Why, Arizona, visiting the nearby town of Ajo and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. We had a really nice picnic one day out on Darby Road, a beautiful stretch of BLM land just outside Ajo. We golfed at the "Why Country Club," which is a little 18-hole putting course at Coyote Howls Campground. Steve gave Sly free rein to paint some animal skulls, which Sly has enjoyed immensely. A neighbor, seeing the results, commissioned Sly to paint some antlers, too.

"Why Country Club"

Now Sly and I are on a multi-day camping trip in the Guppy. I've never traveled with another person in my little Toyota Dolphin, and it is cramped, but comfortable. There's room for both of us to sit at the dinette, and, since I had a nice big work counter custom made in my rig, we can each have some sort of project going at the same time. At night, we roll out a single futon down the aisle between the built-in furniture for Sly, and so far I've managed not to step on him if I needed to get up during the night.

Our first day out, we stayed overnight at Cochise Terrace, a commercial RV park near Benson. I thought it was half-price due to my Passport America membership, but I guess I forgot to read the fine print. It's only half-price in the summer when it's too hot to want to be in Benson, Arizona. Anyhow, it was a nice place and it was great to have warm showers and electric hookups so we could run my little electric heater. (We've had some warmer temps since my last post about the desert being surprisingly cool this winter, but it got cold again as soon as Sly and I left on our trip!)

Sly enjoying the warm weather before we started our camping trip

The next day, we went to Kartchner Caverns, about 10 miles south of Benson. This is a State Park that has several different tours of an amazing cavern that is still "alive"--which means it's still dripping wet in some places, so stalactites, stalagmites, and other cave formations continue to grow. The tours are expensive--over $20 apiece--but well worth it. Ever since we went on the tour, Sly has been busy writing a story about "The Creature of Kartchner Caverns," told in the first person and with creepy-cool illustrations.

Texas Canyon Rest Stop

Beautiful rock formations surround the rest stop

To save some money after our expensive night at Cochise Terrace, I looked for someplace we could camp free last night, and we ended up staying at a rest stop that's at the top of Texas Canyon, on I-10 between Benson and Willcox. It was a beautiful place, and we were well-situated for our visit this morning to the Amerind Foundation in Dragoon, but, boy, was it cold up there! We used a little Coleman propane catalytic heater (I believe these are known in some circles as "hippy killers"), but it ran out of fuel before we woke up.

Before heading to the museum, we had to go see "The Thing," which is advertised on billboards throughout this part of the Southwest. It's your basic gift shop/tourist trap with a gimmick. Be strong; resist it.

The Amerind Foundation is a museum that has a lot of nice artifacts in a beautiful building designed in the 1930s specifically as a museum. It does, however, have very live acoustics, so you can hear every comment made by every other visitor, which is a bit annoying. Sly and I are both soft-spoken and easily overwhelmed by loud sounds, and we were ready to get out of there sooner than we might've been if 22 RVers caravaning together hadn't shown up just before us.

Sly at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, before our camping trip

Today we backtracked to Benson where Sly got a piercing between his brows--haven't taken a picture of that one yet, but stay tuned! Then we headed north of Tucson, and we're spending the night at Catalina State Park. It's a beautiful flat stretch next to the Catalina Mountains, barely outside the city, and surprisingly quiet for how much use it gets. Almost every site is full tonight (it's a holiday weekend), but I have heard almost nothing but natural sounds here. Tomorrow morning we will head off to Biosphere 2, just a few miles further north.

Sonja stayed home with Steve. She prefers her cozy hideaways in the larger RV that stays in Why year-round.

Yay! Mom bought shoes!

You don't really need a linen closet in the bathroom, do you? How about a cat closet instead?

I'll write another blog post about the remainder of our trip and Sly's visit soon.

The Desert Is Cool

A beautiful vista from the 21-mile scenic loop at Organ Pipe National Monument

The Sonoran Desert is cool--in fact, quite a bit cooler than I'd anticipated. Recently we've had afternoon highs in the 50s and night-time temps hovering above freezing, with lots of clouds and frequent rain. This is the kind of weather I thought I'd left behind in the Pacific Northwest. I've had to break out the fleece clothing and my rain jacket that I hadn't worn since February.

I'm given to understand, though, that December is the coldest month here and that things are bound to improve later in the winter. Maybe that's why a lot of snowbirds don't head south until after the first of the year.

We've had to conserve electricity, since we rely on the sun for ours. Some days the choice has been between my selling on eBay or our watching a DVD in the evening.

One night recently, we were going to drive over to the Why Not Store for an after-dinner treat, but the rain was so intense, we weren't sure we'd be able to drive through the washes (the streams that are dry most of the time, but are like fast-moving flood waters when it rains in the desert).

The next morning, we decided to head to Tucson for a break from the gray weather. There was no guarantee that Tucson would be warmer or sunnier, but we have free use of Steve's sister's apartment while she's out of state, visiting her kids. So we've been here a couple of days, using all the electricity we want. I've done a lot of eBay selling and we've watched a bunch of cable and On-Demand TV. Yesterday, we went out for Greek food and saw "Tower Heist" at the movie theater. And a couple of nights ago, I took my 22-year chip at an AA meeting. It's been a nice break.

Sonja sleeping under a blanket near the propane heater in Steve's 5th wheel

We're heading back today, because two nights is the limit of how long I can leave Sonja by herself. By then, she's emptied the food dishes and filled up the box. She is always extremely affectionate when we get back home from these short hops to Tucson.

Last weekend, we took a chance on the weather and headed to Organ Pipe National Monument for their holiday open house. This treasure is just a few miles south of where we live in Why, Arizona. It's an attraction I'd always wanted to see when I've traveled through Arizona in the past, but coming this far south always seemed just so out of the way. Now, having seen it, I can't recommend it strongly enough to travelers. Make the jaunt south to Organ Pipe! It's beautiful! And it's on the way to Rocky Point, a Sea of Cortez beach town in Mexico--I haven't been there yet, but that trip is probably the next one for Steve and me.

Steve in front of prickly pear and organ pipe cacti

The day we went to Organ Pipe was the one day recently that the sun burst out and the temps soared to the high 70s. It was glorious. We walked the nature trail outside of the visitors center and enjoyed the informative displays and Christmas cookies inside, then we drove the 21-mile scenic loop of mostly gravel road. Fortunately we were traveling in Steve's truck rather than the Guppy--the road was so rough in places, I think it would probably shake things loose in my little old motorhome.

My son Sly is coming to visit me for a couple of weeks in January, so I scoped out the possibility of coming back down to Organ Pipe with him. The National Monument's campground is very nice, and in January they'll start running guided van tours of the scenic loop that Steve and I drove, so coming back to Organ Pipe with the Guppy is a distinct possibility.

I've also been checking out other camping venues and attractions for when Sly comes. On our way into Tucson this time, Steve and I drove through the Saguaro National Park's campground, another beauty. I'm thinking of taking Sly on a trip that would include Tucson and some interesting places nearby such as Biosphere 2 and Kartchner Caverns.

He Da Man

I've been very blessed to have Steve's help in getting the Guppy ready for Sly's visit. Sly will be using the Guppy as a guest bedroom, and now there's solar power to keep the house battery charged so Sly can play hours and hours of Skyrim on his laptop (assuming the weather improves!). Also, Steve got up on the roof and sealed the leaking cabover vent that has plagued my travels since the first day I left Oregon. So far, no more leaks!

My eBay sales have been very good lately. I'm working my way through the inventory I purchased on my recent buying trip to Phoenix and on my Thanksgiving weekend visit to Tucson. I've also been purchasing box lots of vintage scarves on eBay, then cherry-picking the best ones for individual resale. I'm not quite to the point where eBay covers my expenses, but closer all the time. Success requires constant fine-tuning of the techniques I've learned over the many years I've been selling online. I'm always learning new ways to acquire good inventory in a part of the country that's not exactly dripping with couture.

The well-paid prevaricators that do the TV weather reports say Christmas will be sunny and warm. I hope so! Have a safe, happy and warm holiday season!