The All-New Bunrab

Since connie doesn't have a computer, let alone wifi so we can use our notebooks, I couldn't post from her house. Thank goodness for coffee shops!

we had a great stay in Katy with Pam and Dan! As we were leaving Wednesday a.m., Pam gave us a HotShot water heater for our tea, and pillows! Which, you will recall, are one of the things we forgot to pack. So now we have pillows.

The drive to Austin was straightforward enough - we don't need GPS for that one. We stopped at Mikeska's in Columbus for a quick bite to eat (and enough of a dose of rural Texas to remind us why we wouldn't want to live there).

To a large extent, who we see during the short amount of time we're in Austin is determined by who is willing to come to far south Austin. The RV has a mileage charge, as well as paying for gas (it's been getting between 11 and 12 mpg), and also, although it is small for an RV, there are still many places we won't even try parking (condo complex parking lots, for example). And as usual I've overestimated how much energy I might have - after a few days of driving, I needed to sleep till 11 a.m. And we can't stay in Austin longer - one of our stops is in Oakland, CA to visit my brother, and he and his family leave the next day on vacation, so if any of the trip got pushed back, we'd miss them. So, this is a whole bunch of excuses to say, I'm sorry, we are not going to be able to see everyone in Austin. Our range is pretty much from Connie's in Oak hill to the parkking lot in Westgate Mall (at Ben White & S. Lamar). Thank you so much to the people who have been willing to drive down here to get together! We've given the short tour of the RV (well, there really isn't a long tour one can give of a 19-foot RV) to Jerry & Kathy, and Susan & Scott. We got to see Anita and Dana for a few minutes, as they live near Westgate Mall and dropped over here for a bit just before I started this post. (Yes, they are close enough that it wouldn't have been any trouble to drive there, but remember I mentioned our unwillingness to tackle crowdede condo complex parking lots? Case in point. We'd never have made it through there to their condo.)

Tomorrow morning, we leave Austin and plan to get as far as Van Horn. There's a KOA there, so I should have wireless, and since there's not much else to do there, I probably will sit around playing Farm games on FB. The 21st century is certainly weirder than I ever thought it would be. None of the science fiction writers got it right, that we would be doing everything with our cell phones (including camera) and looking at Lolcats online - the power of the World Wide Web, devoted to lolcats and trading imaginary farm animals.

I need to mail a few things - postcards, etc. Next post Friday night!

But I have not caught up on my flist yet - that may take another day. The visit to my friend S in New York was reasonably successful - we can now see parts of the surface of her dining table, sit on the sofa, and see large chunks of the living room floor. There is still a lot to be done, but we made a lot of progress. The best part is, she does know there's a problem, and that only repeatedly facing it will help solve it; I'm not sure she had ever really acknowledged that before.

I got a free ride up to New York - door to door, in fact - with another friend, R, who also still lives in the town we all grew up in, although not in the same house as he lived in as a teenager (my friend S lives in the same house she has lived in all her life except when she's been out of state at college.) And R is also a person with a serious house clutter problem. I am referring to these as clutter, but it's really closer to hoarding, like animal hoarding - think Collier brothers. Really. And I did some thinking about what might be behind the compulsive need to keep stuff, and why, even though squirrel_magnet and I are packrats to some extent, we have never had that kind of major problem.

What it is, I think, is worry about the future. S is still too attached to the past, holding on to all her parents' and grandparents' stuff; while intellectually she knows she won't forget them if she gives away some of their stuff, she doesn't feel it in her gut, and also, she's afraid that if she gives away something, it might be the one thing she needs in the future. She doesn't deal really well with change, and thinking about the future not being exactly like the present means change, and she doesn't want to deal with it. R, on the other hand, lives too much in the future. Partly, 'cause that's his job; he runs a technology-forecasting business. But, he's saved every piece of paper he's had for the past 35 years, just in case the information on it might be useful. Well, if anyone could make use of it, it's him - but it would take several lifetimes more than any of us have, to make use of that much STUFF. He is hoarding information and data to use in the future, but far beyond any future he will live through. His way of dealing with the future is to attempt to be the person who knows more about it than anybody else, and his information addiction is part of that. If somehow one could convince him to take the time away from other things to scan all that paper into electronic form, or at least microfilm, he wouldn't have much of a problem after that. But, he never has free time to do that, because he's busy dealing with the future. And S is trying to keep things in the past.

And why don't Squirrel and I have a problem? Because we live pretty much in the present. We have enough to get by; we don't feel we have to have ever more stuff in order to brace ourselves against change. We wouldn't mind having a little more money squirreled away for the future, but we aren't afraid of the future in general. We figure that we'll be able to deal with it - pretty much like my little side quote from Aurelius. We assume that we know how to find stuff, and if we need stuff in the future, we'll find it then. We assume that we can remember our past. We start from the assumption that we can deal with change, because we have dealt with change successfully already. So we don't need to hold on to STUFF to deal with every possible contingency, and we don't have to keep things the same as they've always been to be comfortable.

My, I'm certainly flattering myself this evening, aren't I?

Incidentally, R's daughter SE is an excellent driver for a young person, and her Prius was very comfortable to ride in.