Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - Leasburg Dam State Park, Radium Springs NM

Dog Canyon Trail, Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM, December 5, 2010

Implications of a short day and a low winter sun

There are implications of a short day and a low winter sun in a boondocker's world. By noon yesterday it was clear the solar panels were not going to recharge my depleted batteries without some help. so I shut down every electrical drain I could find and ran the generator for a couple of hours. That helped but I was still no where near having full batteries by nightfall. No computer and internet for me tonight. How do you spell "withdrawal" anyway? I may be needing that word.

[Update] This was the last post made in real time between now and my Thursday, December 23, 2010 - Leasburg Dam State Park, Radium Springs NM post. Managing power consumption to enable enough laptop and internet access time to post as well as do other necessary computing proved too much of a hassle to bother with. Now that I'm settled into LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM with electric hookups I'll try to get back here and fill in the missing posts.

Night camp

Site 9 - Leasburg Dam State Park, Radium Springs NM

Verizon cell phone service - good signal
Verizon EVDO service - good signal
Go to Leasburg Dam State Park website
Locate Leasburg Dam State Park on my Night Camps map
Check the weather here

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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