Monday, December 17, 2007 - Foscue Creek Park, Demopolis AL
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Sunrise at Site 42, Foscue Creek Park, Demopolis AL, December 17, 2007 (Brrrr - open the door & shoot)
It sure is nice not having to deal with the snow and ice I escaped this winter.
I wondered why the great little Titan Ceramic Heater with Thermostat #TCM16W-U I picked up at Wal-Mart a couple of weeks ago was having a hard time keeping the temperature up in here. When I was looking for a ceramic heater to use instead of propane when I'm hooked up to shore power this one was recommended to me by a friend who has used a couple of them for supplemental heat for his house for years. It's great but won't heat the RV all by itself at 25 degrees so when I got up this morning I supplemented it with my Olympian Wave 6 catalytic heater. Now we're nice and toasty warm.
One of these days I need to figure out what is causing shore power to interfere with the Kyocera KR1 Mobile EVDO WiFi Router I use with a Verizon USB720 USB EVDO Rev A modem for broadband access. To get get the WiFi working I have to shut off shore power and run it off the house batteries. What a pain. For the period I'm online I'm without my ceramic heater and my laptop recharging brick. I end up running 2 hours online followed by 2 hours off line to recharge the laptop. There is a caution in the KR1 manual about setting it up too near a microwave oven or some other source that dirties the power. Maybe it's the old power converter that is causing my problem. I removed the microwave oven before I left on this trip so it can't be that.
Night camp
Site 42 - Foscue Creek Campground, Demopolis AL
- This is a well maintained US Army Corps of Engineers campground with level paved sites, most with full hookups
- Many sites overlook the water of the inlets off Demopolis Lake on the Tombigbee River
- There is good biking on the park roads
- The campground is pretty full Thanksgiving week and is generally booked solid the weekend of the Demopolis Christmas on the River festival in early December.
- Poor Verizon cell phone service - access is via Extended Network, roaming
- No Verizon EVDO service - access is via the Extended Network and service varies is slow but reliable
- Only 3 miles to Wal-Mart and other services in Demopolis AL
- Find other references to Foscue Creek
- List the nights I've camped here
- Check the weather
- Reserve a site
- Get a map
When Hope Dies
When you give up on hope, something even better happens than it not killing you, which is that in some sense it does kill you. You die. And there's a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that they—those in power—cannot really touch you anymore. Not through promises, not through threats, not through violence itself. Once you're dead in this way, you can still sing, you can still dance, you can still make love, you can still fight like hell—you can still live because you are still alive, more alive in fact than ever before. You come to realize that when hope died, the you who died with the hope was not you, but was the you who depended on those who exploit you, the you who believed that those who exploit you will somehow stop on their own, the you who believed in the mythologies propagated by those who exploit you in order to facilitate that exploitation. The socially constructed you died. The civilized you died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you died. The victim died.
And who is left when that you dies? You are left. Animal you. Naked you. Vulnerable (and invulnerable) you. Mortal you. Survivor you. The you who thinks not what the culture taught you to think but what you think. The you who feels not what the culture taught you to feel but what you feel. The you who is not who the culture taught you to be but who you are. The you who can say yes, the you who can say no.