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Sunday, February 10, 2008 - Pancho Villa State Park, Columbus NM

LD's new bathroom curtain rod, February 12, 2008
LD's new bathroom curtain rod, February 12, 2008

My new bathroom curtain rod

Today I'm going to take a break from the series of images of my walk up the Dog Canyon Trail at Oliver Lee Memorial State Park to show you a picture of the new bathroom curtain rod I made for this old Lazy Daze RV. Big deal eh - a silly little curtain rod? Such is the scale of life around here these days.

This is the latest in the series of curtain rods I've installed in LD. The first and most important were the ones in the dinette and livingroom I put up in place of the light robbing and ugly valances and dilapidated roller shades that came with this old buggy. Those just had to go before I set out on this trip but the mini blinds Lazy Daze used on the kitchen and bath windows I felt I could suffer along with for a while. At least until I found the time and inclination to do something. Kate Klein finally got my inclination up by asking me to make her some curtain rods for the bath and kitchen of their rig, Cholula Red. We needed to get hold of some aluminum rods for her project so I ordered a couple of extra rods for mine.

Like on my other rods, I made leather hangers for the them but in this case I'm using towels for curtains, an idea I borrowed from Andy Baird. Thanks Andy. Extending the rod into the shower gives me more towel bar to which I attached some of those little plastic spring clips that came on some coat hangers I found at Wal-Mart. These are the greatest little clips. Throw away the silly hangers - it's the clips we're after here. Not only do they fit my new rods but they work great as bag seals in the kitchen as well.

Now to find some nice new towels...

Night camp

Site 29 - Pancho Villa State Park, Columbus NM

Beware of Hypnotic Media

To live sanely in Los Angeles (or, I suppose, in any other large American city) you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should fear, what you should wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should think and do and be. They have planned a life for you — from the cradle to the grave and beyond — which it would be easy, fatally easy!, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience to the hypnotist’s command. Wake up, wake up — before you sign that seven-year contract, buy that house you don’t really want, marry that girl you secretly despise. Don’t reach for the whiskey, that won’t help you. You’ve got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.

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