charity bonanza

tuesday 8th september: kalispell, montana
went to register monty the rv at the dmv (department of motor vehicles), in kalispell. dmv said you can’t register an rv unless you’re a property owner. this seemed quite harsh, surely not everyone, even in this the land of milk and honey and consumerism gone mad and the richest country in the world, surely not everyone can afford to own property. surely some choose to live in rvs because of this fact? or at least to own an rv whilst renting a property. we left the dmv, down hearted at our non property owning status, but the proud owners of a 30 day trip ticket allowing us to drive monty for 30 days whist sorting out this issue.

we went to a thrift shop to cheer ourselves up - i bought a little book about the weather, from 1965, but i figured it can’t have changed much since then, some old national geographics - one was supposed to have a map of peru in it, but on getting it home i realised it was a map of australia (i was outraged), some bedding for monty (a lady was in there buying up all the king size sheets to use as covering for her vegetable garden), and some pans.

the day ended with bert chasing a mosquito around, slightly insanely, with a tea towel. he always gets really cross when flies or bugs get in our new home, and it always makes me laugh to see him chasing them, as he gets really involved in it and personally offended when they refuse to be swiped. we had dinner in the motorhome but didn’t move into it just yet as we didn’t have the energy to make the bed after chasing that pesky fly around.

wednesday 9th september
tootled around during the day. bert returned to the dmv and successfully registered monty - seemed to be a case of the lady he spoke to yesterday either had the wrong information or was having a bad day, because the lady today who was a different one, told him yes that’s fine and did he wasn’t lifetime registration of just yearly? so that was a big relief as we were contemplating having to register it in another state which could have been much more expensive.

we went to the cinema in the evening to watch julie and julia, the film starring meryl streep, about french cooking. Basically julie lives in new york and writes a blog based on julia childs’ book the art of french cooking (written in the 50s), whereby she cooks all 500 something recipes in it in 365 days, and writes a blog about this. she gets fans, and it gets to the attention of food magazine editors, who get her to turn it into a book, and eventually into this film. this made me wonder when i would find fame and fortune via my blog, but also made me think about the whole act of writing a blog. i wondered if i have become carried away with having to keep up to date with my blog, almost as though nothing is actually valid until it is recorded on my blog. not that my blog covers absolutely everything that happens, as it would then take as long to read as it would for the events that happen in it to actually happen, which would be impractical and insane to say the least. though i remember reading about a play which covered a time period of about 30 minutes, but to act out the play took 2 hours, ie it was the opposite of normal writing which can cover huge time periods but only take 2 hours to read/enact. anyway the point i’m trying to make is that watching a film about a blog made into a film made me question the whole nature of writing a blog - who is it for? what is it for? does it matter who reads it? how do you determine quality anymore these days when anyone can publish their nonsensical thought patterns on the internet and call it writing? should i write it for myself or for readers? is anybody even out there? should the blog have more of a focus - is it even a travel blog anymore? what is a blog? what is travel? why are we here? why do brie and apple taste so good together?

i think the above final sentences partially explain my blog absence for a while too.

tonight was our first night in the motorhome as we hadn’t been able to get it until we’d paid for it (as is the norm when buying something), and we’d had to wait for money transfers from belize and suchlike. we ate our brie and apple combination in bed, (the brie inspired by the french cooking in the julie and julia film), and felt very cosy and like when you’re little and you build a den and live in it for a few days, away from the real world. we used to do this a lot when we were little, i’d get all the sheets and blankets and cushions and make huge labyrinthine dens, which must have been annoying for mamma mia and papa pepinillo at the time, but they probably enjoyed not seeing me for the few days i was in my den.

thursday 10th september
went to another thrift shop.

got some utensils, and a really good frying pan - one of those ones with a spot in the middle that i guess is meant to tell you when it’s hot enough to use, but doesn’t actually do anything, nor do you need it to because you can in fact use your own brain to determine this matter. i saw an advert in the paper for an amazing new tap (aka faucet in america) which you can turn on and off by merely touching it. like turning a tap is so difficult or time consuming in the first place that it necessitates a whole new invention to make it easier and quicker?

we wandered around whitefish, and went to a museum at the train station (depot) there, showing old pictures and articles about montana people, loggers and the like. here's me as a fisherman on a lake

there was an article about a fur fish, and a picture, which was of a fish covered in fur, which it needs to survive the extreme cold temperatures in glacial lakes. it took me a while to realise it was a fake article and picture as it was cleverly done, and i am pretty gullible and have lost most of my english sarcasm, having hung out with american bert for a year. i think this is ok as i’m sure it will grow back one day, and also maybe it makes me a nicer person to lose a bit of the scepticism/sarcasm/cynicism (all these things are very lacking in america).

we then went to the library, i really like libraries as i may have mentioned before. i like the idea of all that knowledge on all those shelves in one place. also outside this library was another of my favourite things - a bike, all stocked up with panniers and tents. it was a surly bike, like the ones mike and max the alaska to patagonia cyclists were riding, and we saw the cyclist inside the library but didn’t talk to him. his bike was in good shape so we figured he must have just set off recently.

we had pasta and bruscheta in monty tonight, and slept well, the bed is very comfy. the only thing is that if you set the heaters to come on in the night (which you ought to do in cold cold weather so things don’t freeze up) they are fairly noisy and annoying. bert wants to get a memory foam pad to go on the mattress to make it more comfy, which i think is ironic as he has a fairly bad memory, but he never forgets to talk about memory foam. Perhaps if we do ever get round to this, some form of osmosis will take place and his brain will become a memory foam centre and all his memories will come flooding back in the night.

friday 11th september
went to some more thrift shops. got a barbeque grill, and a really cool coat. went to walmart to buy some shoes as we were going to a wedding tomorrow (it’s quite strange writing this in the present but about the past, and referring to a future event that was in the future at the time, but is now in the past - i’m never sure which tense to use - should i say as we were going to a wedding the next day instead of tomorrow?) found some $7 shoes at walmart and celebrated by sharing a 99cents frosty from wendy’s - a little ice cream which i told bert off for buying but quickly did an about turn when i tasted how good it was, and consequently told him to go and buy his own. ha ha.

i entered a walmart survey to win $1000 of walmart vouchers. well, i started to enter it, but bert told me off for being so silly as to spend my time filling in a whole online survey which isn’t a survey but is a clever marketing ploy, and that i would no way win the $1000 anyway. it asked questions like which walmart service did you use today (they have opticians, pharmacy, camera film developing etc etc), and you tick the ones you used, but really the point of the exercise if that you become aware of all the services they offer and thus walmart becomes deeply embedded in your head and next time you need an opticians maybe you’ll go there instead of somewhere else. i felt shocked that i had become so uncynical as to not realise this, and was impressed that bert had pointed it out - perhaps some osmosis has already taken place and bert has absorbed some of my previous personality traits. hmph, i want them back if so.

today i felt quite far away from my previous life in england - i think i hadn’t had an email from anyone for a while, and this made me feel a bit out of touch with england, and therefore a bit sad/dejected. but then the whole point of not being in england is to not be in england, and to be experiencing a whole other way of life and culture, so why would i feel the need for such a connection to another way of life if i have chosen to leave that for a while? i felt physically detached all day and a bit floaty like i wasn’t really there, like when you take a co-codamol. it’s like when we were in belize and we would get annoyed at how things worked there, but then realised that we shouldn’t be annoyed by it, we should embrace it and experience it properly instead of trying to fight it, because how can you fight the way a country works. and if you are constantly wondering what is happening elsewhere and thinking about what you used to do in your previous life, then you are not exactly living in your present life. it sounds obvious, but it’s difficult to always bring your attention back to the present, and not be worrying about the future, or reliving the past.