November 2010
New idea for the exterior - I thought it would be kind of cool to construct a makeshift "tent" off the passenger side of the truck - create a little exterior room for remote camping locations, and perhaps try to keep from going stir crazy. Luckily, there is a little lip that goes down the sides on the roof, and this turned out to be an excellent place to drill a hole and insert a carabiner.  Close-up of drilled lip and carabiner.  I can simply put the carabiner through a grommet in the tarp, secure the tarp to the ground with a couple sandbags or whatever, and voila! A lovely new addition to my home. I have to wait to test it - Walmart carries a 24x30 tarp for $72, but they were out of stock. I went to Amazon.com and found a 30x40 tarp for about $55 after shipping. I'm sure it's much flimsier, but let's just see if the idea is successful. I'll get it all in place before the snow comes, and perhaps I'll actually have some sort of winter path to the truck under my new canopy...? The big project for me right now needs to be the conversion of all my cd's to .mp3 files, and sell off the discs as fast as possible. This is obviously a dead-and-dying medium, and if I'm going to get anything in return it needs to happen now. There is certainly no room in the truck for a bunch of cd's. I have tons and tons of music, and although I haven't been able to listen to too much in the last few years, there's still no reason not to have it - especially when an external terrabit drive is around a hundred dollars. I have a one terrabyte drive now, but I'll probably end up with several stashed inside the truck as data storage and duplicates. I'll also be converting thousands of dvd's onto external hard drives, but almost all of my collection is from "burned" discs anyway, so there's not a lot of inventory of dollar-value there. All in all, it's exciting to turn tons of discs into small electronic files. I love movies, and I'm sure I will be in plenty of situations where streaming via the internet will not be an option. And a movie - even a bad one - can cure a lot of loneliness. * * * Well, I haven't bought any property in awhile, so it seemed like a good time to throw away $65. This little wooded parcel sits outside Hardy, Arkansas and measures 30x130. And that's enough Arkansas woods to disappear in for sure. Annual taxes - about $8.  Here you can see the proximity to a lot of lakes in the area. Hardy is next to the community of Cherokee Village, where people pay Property Owner Association dues and have certain access rights to their lakes and swimming pools and clubhouse, etc. It looks like an easy walk to get over there, so I may just be hanging out there a little if it's easy enough to infiltrate.  Hardy is in the upper NE corner of Arkansas, about halfway between Nashville and Tulsa.  I have a raft of friends from Arkansas - among them, Orrenda, Mark, Tommy, and of course Luke, who lives in Ft. Smith these days. They talk it up, and it does seem to be the kind of state I could appreciate. I've driven it several times in my life, and thus far am not impressed with the State's allocation of interstate highway funds. The most time I've ever spent in Arkansas is the 1.5 white knuckle days it took to cross during a 2004 Winter ice storm. Look, I know part of using I-40 to cross Arkansas is acquiring an appreciation for the many forms of pothole, but when you throw in a monster ice storm, things just get stupid. I was moving my new bride (that's #2, if you're counting at home) to her new home in Virginia, and we counted ourselves lucky to get the last hotel room, when we slid in to West Memphis at the end of a perilous day. I am looking forward to something new from Arkansas. Something that says, "Just kidding, Darren. We really want you here." * * * Monk, the monkey-boy.  * * * Been selling lots of little stuff here and there...got rid of all the odd DVDs that were leftover stock from my Ebay-DVD days. Been selling a bunch of odd CDs on Amazon as well; every once in awhile I see I have something worth more than five bucks, so I list it there. I sold the five-foot nutcracker for $100 (what I originally paid) and a small utility table for $20 (I got it for free!). Jose moves in a few days from now, and I'd love to get the pool table sold......but that might be a tough one. There are some antique pieces downstairs too - sofa, lamp, radio, armoire - and I'd love to be free from that responsibility. For now, I'm going to try to get everything except the pool table into the "drum room" - I want Jose's living area to be completely free of anything I own. Otherwise I'm going to be constantly overseeing it all and worrying about scratches and breakage. All in all, just another step closer to fixing up the house, selling the house, and the bigger picture. * * * So here's what I ended up doing with the tarp idea - made a frame out of PVC pipe, which is lightweight and can disassemble easily. The top of the frame is secured to the roof with the carabiners, as shown above. When I take it apart, I can just leave it attached at the roof and wrap it all in a bunch with some bungees. Hey, it's a rooter truck! Shouldn't there be PVC pipe dangling from the exterior anyway? Yes, I am brilliant.   December 2010 Buying Property In Deford, Michigan Tarp: Fail |