Fire the day before.

 

 

 

I See Mexico 

Help, a rock is about to crush my car!

 

Mojave Desert

I just got my pictures! 

Indiana Payne in the California Hut of Doom

I woke up early this morning to eight little legs scurrying across my face, I brushed them off and went back to sleep. I woke up a few minutes later to more little legs crawling across my lips. I was fully awake this time. I lay there thinking, “ooh it was a spider. I bet they are coming in the house because the teardown in the back yard has stirred them up.” Then I thought about the black widow spiders I keep hearing everyone say probably live in the back yard. I finally fell asleep again figuring if my face and hand weren’t in pain, I probably hadn’t been bitten.

I headed to the grocery store to pick up some breakfast. I opened the Mexican pastry cabinet and six flies flew out like they had been waiting all day for someone to open that door. I went ahead and picked out three buns and gave them to Bill. When the flies were attacking me yesterday while I ate pizza, he said he didn’t think they were a big deal, so I didn’t mention the flies trapped in the bread case. I ate a packaged nutty bar because I kept thinking about the flies. There are flies all over this stinking state, in every restaurant, the house, inside, outside, there are these strange sewer flies in the bathroom because the water dried up in the pipes since the house was empty for six months. They are constantly buzzing around me and landing on me and I am hot. Imagine how irritable I must be. Poor Bill.

Tonight, I was cleaning the rest of the spider webs and dirt off of the walls so that we could paint and I headed into the front bedroom to finish up. There is a giant black spider with the telltale red hourglass. Oh my God! I hate poisonous spiders more than anything, because they are small and you never know one is there until it is too late and webs are nasty sticky things. Bill finally went in the bedroom and killed it. He then casually mentioned how many black widows they were finding outside. “Dave handed me a board for the dumpster and said, ‘Watch out, there are at least four on that board.’” I reminded him that the spider is female because she kills and eats her mate.

Now I have to sleep in this house (on an air mattress on the floor), wondering when death is going to crawl across my face and bite me.


 

Fire2Wire Supports Free Internet

Wi-Fi should be FREE everywhere. Down with Starbucks! Support your free wireless internet coffee shops if you can find them. I mean really, I am going to buy coffee or something if I go in their business, so the internet is an incentive to get me to shop there. It is a disincentive if you are going to charge me for it.

Note: I was ranting and raving when I thought it was $10/day or $20 for one month. It is $40 for one month, $20 to $30/month only if you sign up for a year. Now I am really mad! I already get DSL for $20/month. Why would I pay twice as much for the inconvenience of Starbucks? I think we should start a boycott! I know I am not going to shop there anymore.

Uh oh, I am starting to sound a little Socialist, Communist, or Anti-Capitalist.

Support Plantation Coffee Co. in Modesto. Good food and free internet. They even have a plug if you start to lose power.

The State Dog

I have another stereotype for California. Everyone owns a Chihuahua dog! These little guys run collarless through the streets of Modesto. I wonder how dangerous a pack of them would be. They outnumber the other dogs 5:1. I think I am going to go to the pound and adopt one to take home as my souvenir of CA.

Now that I think about it, Bill's dog Cali, was chihuahua colored. Maybe he was a halfbreed. 

Destination Achieved

Modesto is a blue collar town of about 150,000. It is a full of cheap delicious fruit, way overpriced houses, and gangs.
Currently there is a heat wave in California. Yesterday it was 104 degrees. I am staying in a stinky dirty house with no A/C and it is over 100 every damn day. The things I do for love. There is no Wal-mart supercenter with 24 hour grocery and all of the shopping centers seem a little out dated. The evenings are cool so that is wonderful. (I can't imagine sleeping in a hot stinky house).
Apparently our renters were running a refugee camp in the back yard. the neighbors say there were 30 Cambodians, dogs, ducks and chickens living in our house. There are several mysterious structures that we are tearing down. I think the women and children slept outside with the dogs and chickens and the men slept in the house. It is pretty wild, but I am sure it was better than a dirt floor bamboo hut in the jungle.
So far, California is OK, but I wouldn't want to live here. No earthquakes yet, but I am going to be here for a week or two. Oh, I also haven't seen any beautiful blonde men or women flying down the side walk on rollerskates so I think maybe the TV has been exagerating all these years. Personally, I think Texans are more attractive, after all, we win those stupid pagents every other year.
I am painting the house green! I am an American Mexican 

Travel Day 4

Today is the fourth day of our trip. I am taking my Somas a lot closer together and popping massive quantities of ibuprofin as well. The spasms in my back and legs are almost unbearable. We pulled off the highway at Fresno for lunch and paid a dollar to drive into a park so that I could lay on a picnic table in the shade and have Bill massage me. People kept driving by and staring at us. I guess they thought we were weird. It finally helped my back feel well enough to get back in the car until we got to Turlock where Bill got his degree. Then a few more miles to Modesto and the house.

Travel Day 3

We made it to California last night and stayed in Blythe. We started out this morning and headed for the Joshua Tree National Forest/Park It was amazing. There was a cloud keeping the sun off of my head so it felt about 75 degrees it was wonderful. I saw a Jackrabbit, horned lizard, prarie dog, lots of other lizards, a desert squirrel or chipmunk, and an abandoned gold mine. We spent all day there and ended up spending the night about 100 miles closer to Modesto than the night before.

Travel Day 2

I drove across Arizona today. It was 106 degrees. Dry heat is hot, you just don't sweat and you start feeling sick even though the air conditioner in your car is on high because the sun has been beating on you through the windshiled and when you stop to go to the bathroom at the rest stop you rest your elbows on your thighs and get burned. It was 107 in the shade and 108 when the sun went down. Where the hell am I?
By the way, I hate to be hot, I hate to be sweaty, but I really hate to be hot.

El Paso

We spent the first night of our journey to California in El Paso, Texas. Cuidad de Juarez was this huge city of lights on the other side of a dark area known as the Rio Grande. It was exciting and felt a little dangerous to be so close to Mexico. The next morning I saw the Rio Grande. It was about as wide as Lanana Creek (about 6 feet wide?). I thought people swam to freedom, not leapt accross while staying dry. There is no wet back involved in crossing this river.

El Paso and beyond.














The mighty Rio Grande!

Feminist Literature

Bill and I went to the library to get some books on CD for our road trip to Cali. The library had almost no romance novels on CD. There was lots of macho crap, self help, and murder mysteries but no romance.

Why is murder and crime more uplifting that romance? I get so sick of having one of my choices in literature denigrated. Most of the non-romance books on the best seller lists have some kind of sex scene, so it's not that. Is it because they have happy endings? No, lots of books have happy endings. Are they too predictable? No, in our day and age almost everything is predictable.

I know why people discriminate against romance novels, they are a declaration by the woman reading them that she is intelligent and likes or looks forward to sex. This makes people uncomfortable because everyone knows that women hate sex, it's only for men to enjoy and women are modest, less intelligent creatures who spend their time reading home decor magazines and sweet little murder mysteries with recipes. Only an immoral, wicked woman would read a romance novel (and that includes the Christian ones).