Wheat and chaff

You have to blow a lot of chaff out the back of a combine in order to fill the hopper with wheat. Its kind of the same with people - you have to winnow your way through a huge number of acquaintances in order to accumulate a few lifetime friends. We added a few potential long term friends to our list over the last week.

Arcadia, Florida is the location of a large bus rally, hosted by Jack and Paula Conrad. This year about 115 coaches showed up for the rally. We didn't by any means meet everyone who was there but we met enough to encounter the occasional asshole, more than the occasional fool and a few grains of wheat that will bear continued contact with over the years.

Mother used to worry that we wouldn't have "community" as we aged if we continued with our foolish notion of travelling and it is a legitimate concern. Homo sapiens is a social creature, given to living in proximity to other members of the species and drawing strength from association with friends and family. Our nomadic lifestyle runs counter to the evolutionary bias toward living in stationary communities. Electronic communication makes it possible for us to stay in contact with a dispersed group of friends. It however remains to be seen how well we will make use of our social skills to form an extended community and then to stay connected to that community. So far we think we're doing pretty well but only time will tell.

Right now we're parked in Jack and Paula's yard, about 15 miles south of Arcadia. There's about 7 other busses parked here as well. Apparently that's what happens after the rally in Arcadia - some of the busses move out here for further fellowship but more importantly so that the owners can get some work done. Jack loves working on busses so he is a great resource and just having other bus owners in the same yard is also a resource. Jack loves working on busses so much that he has 13 thirty amp outlets installed around the yard for us to hook up to. He's also got a couple of long term projects where the owners have dumped their coaches here and are clearly taking advantage of Jack's good nature. In one of those cases the bus is in such a state of disassembly as to be almost unrecognizable as a bus anymore. We're here so that I could get an oil change done. Even among the small sample of people here there's at least one out and out asshole, one complete fool and only a couple of people that we will even make an attempt to stay in touch with.

When we filled the rebuilt engine in Vineland the first oil turned to slime immediately. I thought all the slime in the engine had dripped out on Bill's neck while he was working on the engine but evidently it hadn't because that first oil was absolutely gross. We changed it after about a half hour of run time and even that second oil turned milky immediately but it steamed off and eventually changed back to something that at least looked like oil. I was prepared to do another oil change but Dr. Bill seemed to think we were OK to run with what we had so we did. Yesterday I pulled a sample from that oil before we dropped it and once we get up to Winter Haven I will pull another sample from the "new" oil. Assuming that second sample tests clean I will start to relax a bit.

Yesterday Tom Mason got Marilyn's computer fixed so that she can use external microphones on it. She hasn't been able to use her voice recognition software since she bought the computer this summer so getting that fixed will be a huge help to her. Last night she tested it by phoning Judy to tell her that we were sitting outdoors passing handguns around the circle and talking about gun control. Judy was appropriately horrified but the computer worked well on Skype so that was a good thing. The handgun discussion was informative too.