The clouds appear to be huffing and puffing out of the building itself. Great job!

It bothers me so much I have a crsp app to report this filth. Sorry, Scott..

And according to the calendar for today, January 5, it’s “ national bird day”!

Thanks for the reminder to get a handlebar bag, something I haven’t traveled with in probably 20 years but looks perfect. I’ll need a bit more carrying capacity anyway, because the bags are about maxed out as it is.

Stellar day. Just noticed that we were channeling the mural behind us with our colors. I'm doing the Snoopy dance over your green light for a return to Tucson.

I'm glad you're making friends with the new camera. It always takes a while to get comfortable with the different buttons, settings and size. And I find my small handlebar camera bag is very quickly accessible. Once you get used to it,you might find that setup just as fast as the back pocket on your bicycle jersey.

Awesome.

This was a fascinating read, thanks Scott! On the rare occasions I look back at my life, Younger Me seems familiar but not real - a distant cousin perhaps.

48! Well done, you’re almost golden. I’ve been married over 50 myself, but it sounds less impressive when you split it four ways.

Oh, if ONLY I could get my “other half” to follow Thoreau’s mantra despite the part he literally is akin to him!
He has a rock, book, letters, papers collection all over the house, in the shed, in the garage. His reasoning is he may need it all again “someday”, despite the 48 years we have already been married… 🙄

I know. I’ve ended up beating the odds - prosperous so far in spite of all my best efforts to impoverish myself. It changed the arc of my life when my first wife and I sold our house when we split up. The buyer went on to become a good friend: Werner, a second generation German immigrant, lanky, about 6’5”, a runner, and one of the computer programming instructors who taught at the local community college. Many evenings ended with me walking over at dusk to play chess with him on his porch.

On one life-changing evening he told me I had an unusual gift for logic, and that I might do better by following my talents and what I obviously loved in my hobbies rather than scraping by on house painting, day care and cannery work.

He made a good point. I enrolled at the community college the following quarter, and hired on as a a programmer for the state a year later.

". . . I'm so tired of being poor."

BTDT. The college student's lament. But, we found ways out.

At least we didn't grow up living in a shoe box in the middle of the road.

For me, the only thing that ever really worked was downsizing the space itself. If you make it small enough, something’s got to give and you have to make choices. We got rid of over half our belongings by bulk when we sold our home in Salem and bought a condo in Portland. And we reduced it by another 90+ when we went vagabond. Ever since collage Thoreau’s Walden was one of my guide stars through life.

“ Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.”

And another runaway tire story! It immediately brings back the scare when we were biking across the mile long Chatham (now Miramichi) Bridge in New Brunswick 35 years ago and an oncoming car lost an entire wheel along with half its front axle. The car lurched and nearly crashed into up its neighbor, and the wheel and axle careened our direction up the highway toward us, shocked and frightened us half to death until it blessedly kept its lane and passed on our left. A little less luck, and the Team Anderson story could have ended at year one, four days before our first wedding anniversary..

Another rock collector here. I have a similar memory, a crystalline black rock I found while my dad was climbing into and out of a ravine beside the brand-new highway to rescue the trailer's spare wheel that had bounced off and away.