As I said last night, I am done with all that tent design work so I will try to write here again more often because I really do enjoy it.

Right now I am trying for the first time using my 3G smart phone (Tilt) as a modem for my laptop.

I am typing this via that connection, and so far I am pleased.

As remote as my campsite in Louisiana is, it is on the edge of AT&T 3G coverage (due to oil wells out in the marshes and the Gulf of Mexico).

With solar to keep things charged, and with this way of connecting my laptop to the internet, I will even be able to do things down there as sophisticated as accessing my desktop at work and launching my graphics programs and working on art.

I actually tried this about an hour ago and it was pretty impressive.

Also, I just uploaded five more pictures of Ghost the cat taken Saturday, to the end of the
Ghost gallery, including this one:

Today (Sunday) I really did get all done with this long effort to create a practical and at least somewhat portable shelter to use in Louisiana when I go there to camp on the land I am leasing there for that purpose. The requirements besides portability were insulation (unlike a tent or duck blind, and waterproofness.

I ended up making a shelter made of 1" thickness of polyisocyanurate insulation boards from Home Depot or Lowe's (nominal R value of walls = 6.6).

The final weight of the whole shelter is about 56 pounds.

It is painted brown on the outside and white on the inside.

Inside, it is 6'-4" square, and high enough to stand up in throughout.

It folds up like an origami creation into a solid size of 5'-6" x 20" x 32", which will fit into my Geo alongside my outboard motor and boat seats, etc. as long as I remove all but the driver seat. I have made it easy to remove the passenger and back seat, so I can make my car like a tiny delivery van for this.

Of course, my Porta-bote will be strapped to the roof like last year.

I intend to leave it strapped up in a tree on the property along the bayou, wrapped in a camo tarp. This will keep it from being swept away if the bayou floods the land during the long times I am away. (The 100 year flood there is over ten feet deep, and lesser floods could also carry it away becaue it is made of foam.

I am pleased enough with this design that I probably will patent it, and I may actually consider making and selling these on the internet, like I was hoping to do with the leaf tent, which didn't work because of the nature of leaf litter.

It is not small and light enough to be carried in a large backpack, but it is still amazingly light and compact for the footprint and insulation.

Here is a picture of the white kitty who I have been taking care of this fall:



A gallery of him is here:

Pictures of "Ghost"

It's too late for a decnt update, but I will say I tested my leaf tent prototype, but unfortunately the idea is not practical for reasons I can describe later.

I have other excuses for being too busy to post entries here, including the fact that gold and silver are going up dramatically again so I have been spending time with my investments.

But, I promise I will get back to recording things here often enough soon, because I'm getting things taken care of that I have been preoccupied with.

Since I've been working full-time steadily lately, and also finishing up the work on the condo garage, and taking the white cat we've sort of adopted here for neutering and shots, the time left for finishing up this leaf tent protype I've been talking about has been limited.

But I am still getting closer to testing it soon, and still optimistic that it will prove to be a really nice invention.

But for now I unfortunately am still not writing much here so I can work on it instead.

I'll make sure I at least "check in" like this when I've been away from this journal for too long.

As I said, I haven't written here as much as I like because I've been perfecting my prototype for a completely new kind of backpack winter camping tent.

I am pleased so far, and I think I might be able to start testing it later this week, or next week.

I am also happy because today (Sunday) we continue to have beautiful weather for November.

I am in Columbus and I will get to see Terry and Emily and Greg, too.

All last week was bright and somewhat warm too.

It is unusual to have so many sunny days in early November, but for me it is wonderful because they keep my moods up.

I will be able to test my "leaf hut" even though I live downtown because I can hike south a short distance along the bike trail to just south of Carillon Park.

This part of Dayton is a wilderness that looks like it did five hundred years ago.

Nothing is there because it is a huge prairie floodplain.

If you leave the bike trail then go through the tall prairie grass you reach sand dunes and the Great Miami River.

I think I am the only person on earth who ever goes there, even though it is public land.

Right now, at the driest river levels of the year, there are sandy beaches hidden between the little dunes, and there will be lots of dry leaves from the willows and poplars that grow on the dunes, which are islands from January through June.

I will be able to unpack my backpack on one of these little hidden beaches and set up and test my prototype.

For as many hours as I stay, it will be a perfect simulation of being in the wilderness, but only a moderate walk away from my downtown condo.

The Wright Brothers, who lived just a few blocks away from me, came to this same stretch of the Great Miami to test seaplanes about 100 years ago. I bet it appealed to them for the same reasons it does to me.

Maybe I can take some pictures if I go there soon to test my prototype.

The main reason that I haven't said much here on my journal is because I have been immersed in inventing the thing I talked about on October 3rd.

It is a completely new kind of tent that will be insulated with leaves. So little heat will be required to keep it warm at night that a few bags of solar-heated water brought in as radiators will be all that is required.

This cardboard and foil solar cooker, that folds up to go in a backpack, will concentrate the sun on the water bag:





This is called the "Cookit". It was invented about 15 years ago by aid workers as a tool for undeveloped countries, and there are plans online to build and use them. Or, you can buy them already made for about $25.

I also tested how hot a freezer bag of water would get just laid out in the sun, without a Cookit. It reached an impressive 33 degrees warmer than the air!

I want to get back to work on all this, but before I do, I'll put this picture here of the nice little portable rake I got at Lowe's for about $10:



Everything in this "complete package" I am designing, including the rake for the insulating leaves, must fit in one backpack. This one will do so nicely. The handle telescopes out, and the wires fan out.

I got wrapped up in other things and didn't write here for awhile, but now I want to get back into it.

It is supposed to be a nice week until more rain possible about Friday.

Last week was extremely cold for October.

I need to try to get back to doing things again, like writing here, now that I am at least beginning to heal after losing James on August 25th.

I knew I'd have kind suggestions that I adopt a kitten, because there are and always are so many that need homes. And I've heard of so many specific ones that my friends know about or have just had a litter of.

Because of where I live, a dog is not a good idea, even though I love dogs too.

So I know that from now on I will always want a cat to be my friend like James was.

Right before James died, a white male cat, still not full grown, was apparently abandoned here at Forest and Grand.

He was fearful, but hung around the lush gardens among the yards on this block and watched me and my neighbors every day.

I started giving him food in September and now we are friends.

When it gets rainy, he stays up on the balcony with me and then comes in when I give him food and water, and then he wants to play with James' toys which I still have.

When he is happy he talks a lot like James always did, and he likes to be carried on my shoulder, and to have his hair combed to get the burrs out.

I will get him fixed soon, and get him vaccinations too.

He still loves to be outside constantly, because he is still so young and fascinated by nature, and because September and the beginning of October have been so nice.

If he ever does want to spend much time indoors, I will then "formally" adopt him, and will need to teach him to use a litter box.

He is not so attached to me as James came to be, so if I go to Louisiana the neighbors can look after him and I'm sure he will be fine.

-------------------------------------

I think I just got the flu, which has been going around early, but it is a mild case, and I never really had nausea and vomiting until last night (Friday). And now I feel fairly good, so maybe I am almost over it.

The other thing I have been up to again is designing something related to how I live.

This time, it is another new idea that came to me about staying warm while camping in Louisiana, but one that is somewhat revolutionary, so I am excited that it could be patentable and marketable if my prototypes work. It could even be significantly practical beyond just camping. A Canadian thought of the same idea in 2004, and uses it now on a fairly large scale for something different from how I want to use it. He established an "open" patent on it for his use, because he thought it was too valuable for humanity to not share it as much as possible. I suspect if my experiments are successful, I will open patent the core idea for camping too, and will only use a standard patent for my specific products using it. That way other creative designers could use the main idea without license to create and sell other products. I doubt what they would invent would compete with my market, because there are so many types of things that could use the core idea, and each would sell to a slightly different set of customers.

I'm enjoying my little experiments with the idea now, and they are helping me heal and think about more than just how much I miss James.

I have finished the second gallery of pictures of James, this one containing all the pictures taken since this journal began:

James -after 11-1-2006


And, as I said in the entries just after her death, there is also this gallery of earlier pictures:

James-before_11-1-2006




I have not wrote anything here since September 1st not just because I have been sad, but also because I have been trying to be very active, with the beautiful weather that has been in effect all month so far.

I will try to begin doing entries again now that I am starting to get over the grief.

I went through six days when I cried so much my face felt sore, and I couldn't even write again until now.

What really was the love that grew slowly over sixteen years into something so big it could do that?

I always knew that when I was away, James spent all her time thinking about me.

Since that was interrupted by death, the vacuum is so noticeable, I now think it was some kind of force or energy that stopped, not just the consciousness of an animal.

This grief is calm and beautiful because of the memories that keep flashing, unlike chronic depression which is a dark ugly throb.

The time of year when that comes back is just a few months away again.

I hope the Saint John's Wort I started taking five days before James died helps me.

My research told me that for what I experience, it is even better than the anti-depressants.

Those are better for stronger types of depression.

I know that at least I can function now, in spite of my sadness, and so I have a will to do the kinds of things I watched Dad learn to do in 2006 to remember Mom and to try to heal.

I started by finding my older pictures of James, from before I started this journal, and I put them in a new folder, James -2002 to late 2006.

Maybe next, when I am not this tired, I will write a story about what was so unique about her and put the link at the right side of my journal page.

And I can make a links page to ALL my pictures of James, which are now scattered among many folders here.

Other than these, I have no other thoughts about the future now, except about how to survive.

I know I have changed forever again.

But I don't know what things will be like in a few months or next year or after.

I am like in my boat, no longer floating on the force that came from James always thinking about me, and greeting me when I came home, and hugging me. But I'm still floating, but all I see is the horizon.

Yesterday, a bright summer day I will never forget, I put James to sleep at 5:39 PM, at the office of a kind veterinarian a few blocks from my condo.

I am feeling grief now even worse than what I felt right after Mom died three years ago, perhaps because James was still a central part of my life every day.

Now I know at least a little of what it felt like for my Dad in 2006.

I took this picture of James yesterday morning, before I took her on a horrible car trip to be prodded and tested by a vet in Kettering:



Then the test results arrived a few hours later. They made it clear her kidneys were failing very rapidly, and very soon she would begin suffering pain.

So I made the decision to end her life peacefully before then.

As weak and thin as she was, she still hugged me and purred in the morning as she has always done, to tell me it was time to get up.

And, after we returned from the tests, when I apologized for the trauma, she looked at me and said she understood.

Then when I prepared for the end a few hours later, she knew somehow it was over, so she lay down on the balcony in her favorite quiet place:



Then, she looked in my eyes as I wrapped her for the very short trip to be put to sleep, both of us knowing we would never look at each other this way again.

I stroked her fur as she faded away forever on the cool table.

Tomorrow I will have her ashes back, with a tiny plate with her name and the years she was with me.

Today, I feel more lonely than I have ever known, like a huge part of me is gone.

I know this is because I've tried to simplify my life so much.

This left me with just a few things of value, and my only pet was the most important one.

I told myself when Mom died that somehow I would find the will to go on living, and somehow I did.

As I stumble through this anguish now, I will keep reminding myself of that.

James is now 16-1/2 years old, and I've had her 16 years.

Vets say her age is equivalent to about 80 in human years, same age now as Dad.

It seems like she's always been mine, because she loves me so much, and always wants to be with me, even when I travel.

Since summer began, she's been losing weight and seeming frail, and I've been trying to pamper her a little and stay home with her more.

She keeps trying to say and show that she's fine, but I know she senses her body is aging, and when she hugs me or I carry her, she feels so light and delicate. We both feel a deep sadness because we are reminded she must die someday.

I keep thinking of this, and I almost faint when I imagine her not being around. It's almost like a dream, because when I snap out of it and remember she's still here, all I can think of is going home and holding her and never letting go.

Here is a picture I've shown before on this journal, of James in the car after a long hike with me in Louisiana in early 2008:

I've been busy working 40 hours per week as well as doing brick repair on the 5-car condo garage while Shawn does structural repair at the other end. I think we will still be able to recondition the driveway and remove all the old built up flat roof in September.

I'm glad that the weather has really felt like summer again.

Today I'll go to Columbus on my motorcycle because today and tomorrow (Sunday) are both going to be hot and dry.

Last weekend, I got five big bags of apples along the bike trail between Xenia and Jamestown. There were at least ten apple trees along there.

I am pleased with how well they dry out for longer-term storage.

They are as easy to dry as the blackberries, but they need to be sliced up and the slices dipped in lemon juice before spreading on the large trays.

We had the coldest July in history across a huge part of the northeast US.

This was due to a volcano that erupted June 12th in Russia and to another one in Alaska.

The wetness was also very odd.

I was OK anyway because it felt like early May all month, and I love early Mays.

But it was disorienting and bizarre and it just didn't seem right.

Unfortunately, the break from this relentless pattern that just occurred yesterday, August 5th, is only supposed to last until mid-August, and then the cold/wet pattern should return, and the winter will also probably be cold and wet.

Meanwhile, though, I still focused on foraging, and took this picture of what I harvested Saturday, August 1st along the bike trails. You see the wild garlic bulbs unpeeled in one bowl, the peeled ones in another, the scapes from the top of the wild garlic in a bowl, and the seeds from them in another. At the top is one of the two drying trays of later blackberries I got. And, I even found two bunches of wild grapes already ripe. The paper is the page from my "foraging log" where I sketched a map of where all these things were found with other details:

I knew it's been two weeks since I wrote anything here so here goes.

I'm going to Columbus again today and I'm going to see if there are many of the other kind of blackberries ready to pick on the way. These are the completely different species that were still small and green when I picked all the black raspberries in late June.

I will be looking along the same bike trail sections east of Jamestown.

I've also been helping get the repair of our condo garage started, and doing the things I love to do in the summer.

In fact, last Saturday, the 18th, there were seven free events going on at the same time in Dayton, including five free events just along the bike trails!

I enjoyed three of these events (free concerts), and then I took this picture when I got back home downtown:



Then, Sunday the 19th I enjoyed the Blues Festival, and last night (Friday) I spent time across the bridge at the Celtic Festival.

And the day after the last entry, Sunday July 12th, I rode the newest bike trail almost to Tipp City and back.

I've managed all this even though we are having what I think is the wettesty July in history.

I'm not sure about that, but I do know the first 23 days have been the coolest in history.
This is because all the constant showers keep it from warming up.

And I am still having to go out to Camden to cut grass every 7 to 10 days just like in May!

For pictures of the concerts I enjoyed for free last night and the night before,

go to the end of this gallery: main7,

or to this new gallery: mid-summer2009 .

Here are two samples:

The Hal Harris Big Band along river downtown Thursday night:



Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Bob Dylan at baseball stadium downtown last night:

The harvesting of blackberries that I did the last two weekends in June was very successful because I learned so much and because my methods to preserve the huge numbers I picked worked.

I dried about half of the berries, and these will now be a good snack food for several months.

I put the others in lemon juice as a preservative, in jars, and I eat these in a bowl with some sugar sprinkled on top. I don't know how long they will stay fresh in the lemon juice without refrigeration, which I don't use because I'm off the grid. But so far they are doing fine. I am prepared to turn them into jam if I need to, because the sugar in jam adds an additional layer of preservation to the acidity of the lemon juice.

Then this past weekend, Friday through Sunday, July 3rd through 5th, I took a break from foraging and visited Suellyn in Cincinnati, and then Dad and the rest of my family in Columbus. I also enjoyed a few hours of the Cityfolk Festival in Dayton and watched the fireworks after.

Between these pleasant things, I am always just paying attention to the normal things of summertime like the birds and the clouds and the little dogs and kids walking down the sidewalk and the cats curled up on porch steps. And out in the country I love the way the land looks and how the dead little towns I go through are still so attractive in the summer.

In other words I don't just love summer for what I can do with the long daylight and for how easy life is during the warm months. I pay attention to the season itself and admire it every minute, just like other people admire things like cars after they wash them or food when they eat it.

Here is a picture I took on Sunday (June 21st) while picking HUGE amounts of black raspberries along the rail trail east of Jamestown:



After fifteen hours of picking over Saturday and Sunday I brought back about 3 and a half gallons even though I was just getting familiar with the best locations to pick!

I am absolutely amazed at how healthy and abundant these and other things are after what was obviously the perfect spring.

It looks like I will be able to continue picking like this for several weeks wherever there are former rail lines through farm fields. (I also checked out the trail just west of Dayton and it is full of ripening blackberries and developing grapes.)

In fact, if I was not working right now, I could spend 8 hours every day picking blackberries until mid-July and would probably earn what I make in a year if I could sell them all to a supermarket chain.

Instead, I am scrambling to preserve as many as I can for my own food.

I am pleased with how sun drying worked on many of the ones I just picked.

Also, I have many quarts in jars with pure lemon juice. I hope the acidity will be high enough to prevent spoilage or fermentation. (So far so good but it has not been that many days yet.) When I put some in a bowl to eat from the lemon juice jars, I sprinkle a little bit of powdered sugar on top and they are really good this way.

Tomorrow morning (Saturday) I will finally take a break from berries and get out on the water again. -Tim Lemons and I are going to do some more testing of the new Sail Cat boat he just got that was shown in the May 29th entry below.

I've had trouble getting on the internet lately and that's why I haven't posted here in 11 days.

It's my favorite time of the year so I've been doing a lot, including scouting out the blackberries, which look very promising this year. I want to start picking them out near Jamestown beginning this coming weekend.

I also harvested the flowerheads of many cattails, even though I learned how after most of them had blown away. (They are little bundles of pollen that become porous and powdery so they must be gathered before this happens or there won't be anything to take home). In this picture they are the green tail above the main larger brown cattail:



I also finally rode my motorcycle to Columbus over the weekend, and got to see Ed who is here from Jacksonville for a few days.

Here are some samples of the pictures I took on Sunday, May 31st on a wonderful boat trip I took between Shawnee Lookout on the Great Miami River and Aurora, Indiana on the Ohio. (All the pictures, with titles, and viewable at full resolution, are here: gallery including 5-31-09 pics :













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But this first week of June saw yet another horrible slap to Dayton, already unquestionably the most economically troubled city in America.

Believe it or not, there actually was still one remaining major employer left here besides Wright Patterson Air Force Base. Before Monday June 1st that is!

We all just took it for granted, though, because it was NCR (National Cash Register), the company that had a major role in every aspect of what Dayton came to be in the 20th Century, a company almost synonymous with Dayton.

There were still about 1300 people employed at the headquarters just south of downtown.

But the overpaid dirtbags from elsewhere who have been running the company lately were playing the extortion game that has become the norm, secretly, for two years, with the governor of Georgia.

Out of the blue this week, they announced Georgia had arranged a basket of taxpayer giveaways to pay NCR to move to Atlanta!

...So the surreal, nightmare-like feelings are going to get even worse than I already was expecting. -It is really and truly more than just a metaphor when I say living here seems like living in an archealogical area. Miles of "ancient ruins" cover Montgomery County, like historic sites commemorating what a healthy American City was like up until the 1970s. Some streets are almost like Pompeii or Nagasaki -completely frozen in time -with almost no habitation, but still with many fading business signs from 35 or 40 years ago. The city just keeps all the vacant lots around these relics mowed and cleaned meticulously making them seem even more like outdoor museum items.

But even this will end soon, because the men who mow and clean will definitely lose their jobs because there is absolutely no tax base left to pay them.