Monday, September 26, 2005
8 year anniversary
So hey- today is Amber and my 8 year anniversary! That is- 8 years ago today we started dating. Tomorrow will be our 2 year wedding anniversary. We've really been through a lot- and still continue to. What's really cool is that we are both completely different people today than we were 8 years ago (of corse! we were only 14 eight years ago!). Looking at how we have evolved as individuals and as a couple is really interesting. It seems that we have both grown parallel to each other, closer to each other, and farther up, out, and in all directions as a result of each other.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
urban camping night #2
So we bought the 77 westy which is actually a 78. turns out that it needs much more work than we thought (about $6000 worth) but we decided to tow it to my parents and do it ourselves. right now im sitting in our avenger typing on the laptop mooching someone's wireless signal. I'm parked in front of our station wagon (hey my dad gave us his station wagon!). We decided to temporarily use it to sleep in so we bought some 83 cent rag rugs and used them and 2 of our existing towels to tuck in the plastic edging above the windows. They make excellent curtains, and while the ceiling is rather .... well.... low.... its still great to have our own space where we do not have to put anyone else out. It's at least sort of our own space. The battery is low on this laptop. It needs to be plugged in soon.
I don't quite feel homeless anymore. I still don't feel quite welcome being parked on the street this way because it seems that we are still vulnerable to speculation from people who could notice what we are doing here and report us. I think that is why we should find a couple different areas to go to... instead of always parking here on forsythe. It's getting late for me and I need to go join amber in bed. More news tomorrow...
I don't quite feel homeless anymore. I still don't feel quite welcome being parked on the street this way because it seems that we are still vulnerable to speculation from people who could notice what we are doing here and report us. I think that is why we should find a couple different areas to go to... instead of always parking here on forsythe. It's getting late for me and I need to go join amber in bed. More news tomorrow...
Monday, September 05, 2005
Wow dude what a month
So its been a while since I've written on here. alot's happened!
We became vegetarians... and quite on accident, too! We liked to eat organic quite a bit, and one day at an organic food store we came across some meatless hamburger and meatless sausage, etc. They are made mainly with soy. We decided to try it and a few days later noticed that we still hadn't eaten meat. After a week or so of still not eating meat, and not missing it, we agreed that we were now officially vegetarians.
We vended at culturefest thrown by Lori and Robert, our future roomies on the mountain. We made some money but didn't make a return on our investment. In addition they lost a considerable amount of money on the festival which is believed to be related to non-attendance due to high ticket prices. While in West Virginia, we saw the town of Princeton for the first time. It was a small economically depressed town. This was kinda bumming. We ate a meal with them before we left and revealed our interest in heading out west in maybe a year. We also revealed our interest in starting a coffee shop that travels to festivals, growing off of capital only and not getting a physical location until years later. They revealed their plan to rent a building in Princeton, start a music venue in it, and now thought it would be cool to put a coffee shop in it too. This wasn't exactly what we had in mind, considering the local economy and lack of demand for a hip, cool, hippie type of place. Businesses there seemed like they had enough trouble surviving. This was also bumming, but it'll work out. Vending the festival sure was fun, though!
We were in a car accident that wasn't our fault but pretty much totaled one of our cars. A girl at a stop sign evidently did not look both ways or something and smacked into us kind of hard. Turned out that she didn't have a valid license and her mom's insurance therefore won't cover her. Luckily I had full coverage, but I'm still waiting for them to do something about it. So we lost a car and my lower back hurts. At the time of the accident we were more upset that our plans for a quiet sunset picnic in the park had been foiled.
Meanwhile our other car finally got fixed at a repair shop in Mansfield where the mechanic said the repair shop in Columbus that we had taken it to 1st not only had no idea what they were doing, but also forgot to put a spacer back in the fuel rail thus causing gasoline to leak onto the engine putting us at risk for it to catch fire and or explode while being driven. Those same mechanics who almost got us killed had charged us over $1300, had kept our car for 2 weeks, and had given us the car back in about the same running condition as it was before they "fixed it"
We had found a 71 vw van for $5500 close by that was pretty much ready to go. We also didn't quite have the $5500. We were close though with... like... 1800 or so . The car accident blew our chances of selling that car to Amber's little sister Misty who had just days before requested to buy it. So we went to the bank. The loan that we had applied for at the bank was evidently out of my league as well as that of Amber and I combined as well as that of Amber and my grandma and I combined. In short, they told us no 3 times.
We began looking aggressively for a camper van to call home and found (an unbelievably affordable) one that ran and had most all the equipment in it. It was a 78 with the sink, stove, and fridge! The 71 only had a sink and icebox. It was listed on thesamba.com. We made plans to drive down just 10 miles outside of Washington DC to a town in Virginia to pay and pick it up. We would rent a car one way(and try to bill the insurance co. of the driver that hit us, not et knowing that she wasn't covered) and drive the vw van back. It was about a 900 mile round trip. Evidently you have to be over 25 to rent a car unless you have lots of money, so my parents offered to drive us instead. The whole trip was a disaster. I think every person I encountered the whole time was mean, nasty, or shady in some way. The guy that was selling us the van was 4 hours late, urged us not to go to the DMV because the plates were "still good!", DIDN'T have the title in his name, and kept trying to get us to meet him in parking lots instead of at the address he gave us. Not only this, but the title had writing in the wrong place, and was from a different state. Also the van was a manual transmission (of course) but turned out to be VERY tricky to drive - not like a newer stick shift at all. Gears were hard to find and we were not very confident about it making the 450 mile trip home. After much waiting and 2 days down there dealing with the DMV, they declined to issue us a temp tag to drive it back to Ohio, and told us that this guy we were buying from needed to transfer it into his name then ours, but first he needed to find the guy HE bought it from and have that guy get a duplicate title that didn't have writing in the wrong places. He was very apologetic and promised to get it taken care of on Monday, but when we got home we got an email that told us he had suddenly decided that we had wasted his time and that he should call the deal off. As if that were not enough, my mom saw him looking in car windows in the parking lot he met us in. We have concluded from the shadiness he omitted as well as the evidence and the sudden attitude change when we insisted on him going by the book with the title (so we didn't have problems with the BMV in Ohio) that he probably stole the van. He was, after all selling it ridiculously cheap. We were lucky to get out of the mess with our money.
Discouraged by the events of the past couple weeks and also the last couple months too (add us having to leave our apartment earlier than planned), we began to notice a negative pattern. It seemed that something was trying to get our attention and it was doing a good job. Among all the chaos, we hadn't yet packed any of our things and we had only days left until we moved out. We began giving things away, throwing things away, and packing what we wanted to keep. As we carted old books to a used book store on Lane Ave called 'half priced books', picking up a couple new reads and going to the neighboring Pizza Hut to get a vegetarian pizza to take home, we decided that it was important for us to change our course somehow. We questioned whether we should be going to West Virginia or if we should be trying for something else, like calif or Oregon. We grew sad to think of leaving such a cool, artistic, diverse, liberal city as Columbus with a culture for music, but we also knew that we felt such a strong attachment to Columbus that we needed to leave now if we wanted to see the world. We loved it too much and if we stayed, we would probably never leave. We went home and read our tarot cards for some both confusing and revealing news. I'm not sure that I can explain it all in full but basically we needed to stop boasting, stop bitching, and take refuge: take a step back. We didn't know what it meant, but troubled, we moved our remaining things into a storage unit in Crestline and ourselves into an extended stay hotel up ion 161 which was on the other, no so 'us' part of town. It's the bowling alley and strip club part of town. My parents offered to put us up for a week there (thanks guys!). Our cool attic / loft apartment is now in the process of becoming someone else's but it is no longer ours. It was the first place that Amber and I moved out of - ever - that either of us felt sad about leaving.
We have been going to the hotel only to sleep and have been spending all our hours wandering about the city in coffee shops, restaurants, on sidewalks, and in parks. I found an automatic 77 westy vw van in Ohio advertised on thesamba.com. It doesn't run yet. We went to the gallery hop on Saturday night and set up our stuff to sell. We got there pretty late and got our stuff set up even later. A good portion of the crowd had dwindled by the time we were set up. Still, after about 10 minutes of inactivity, people began to wander over and buy things. By the end we had made some good money for the short time we spent there. We had also met plenty of cool and interesting people. One girl talked to Amber for some time and recognized Fire, the little boy in one of my photographs from Bonnaroo. She had danced with him while there. After the crowd had almost completely vanished and the day spa that we had set up in front of closed and turned out its lights, we looked up to see something which was, unmistakably, a sign. A dragonfly fluttered over from the street to us. It ran into the brick wall beside us, then circled over us and our tables of stuff, then flew away. A dragonfly in the middle of the city, at night! I don't really know how common an occurrence this is, but I've never seen it happen before, and neither had Amber. We felt that this was a signal of good thing to come for us.
We also feel that maybe being at the hotel for a week was the first step in taking refuge and taking a step back from all of our situations. The tarot cards always make more and more sense as you watch things play out.
We drove up last night and checked out the 77 westy. It needed some work, but the guy selling it seemed real cool, and real trustworthy too. He's gotta do some stuff with the title this week, but we've decided to buy it, and we gave a deposit of $60. It doesn't have a stove built in, and it really just has an icebox that could be converted to a fridge later. It has some rust, and doesn't run. We hope to have it towed to Motorkars to have it repaired to the point of mechanical mediocrity. Since it is cheaper, we have some money left over to get it fixed: hopefully! As long as the vw mechanic there, Mike, can get it running, we can begin fixing up the inside and living in it. The question is, though, how long will this take?
The other day while walking down high st. as usual, Amber saw a guy and his wife that frequent her coffee shop ride by on their vespa and turn down a side st. Thinking perhaps they were parking to eat at one of the restaurants in the short north on high there, we turned and walked down the small side street. We didn't see them or their vespa, but we DID find a cool place called the 'Benevolence Cafe'. It seemed to be pretty cool with vegan meals advertised and environmental books lining the shelves inside. It also seemed to be closed, but we returned the next day to find the best homemade salads, smoothies, and bread known to Columbus, as well as a very chill, serene environment with some nice, nice people. What a find! It gave rise to talks of the coffee shop we plan to have one day.
It's now Monday and we are leaving the hotel on Wednesday night. We are still trying to figure out where to go, but we are not really so worried now. We can probably stay with Mark for a couple days, and there are other places we could stay but are less enthusiastic about. Most promising, though are the option of my dad's old station wagon which he was going to get rid of and has offered to let us *drive* (but which we plan to use to sleep in) and the option of reorganizing the car so that we can simply lay down the back seat so it opens to the trunk and putting our feet in the trunk and our heads on the laid down seat. I don't know how well the latter will work but it may be better than laying down the front seats in the car to sleep on which would make our backs stiff. The station wagon, unfortunately, doesn't have good brakes and doesn't run right, hence the motivation for him to junk it. It may or may not be worth fixing up to the point that it would make it to Columbus to park.
regardless, I think we are both okay with whatever and wherever we end up this week. It has been and continues to be a real adventure. It also feels good to write it all out finally. Writing has long been a good outlet for me, just not in the context of a journal until now. I'm happy to have had the opportunity to read some of those coveted National Geographic magazines I've been hoarding, but hadn't yet opened as well as a new book, Tex and Molly in the Afterlife. I've been going to bed early and getting up early, and I feel pretty cool about everything. I've been sitting in Vics Midnight Cafe now for hours reading and writing and previous to that I spent a couple of hours at Caribou reading. It doesn't feel the same as sitting at home or at the hotel all day, though. It feels enlightening, calming, and renewing. It also feels good to walk out the door of wherever I am and be in 'it'. That's what I'm going to do now. I've got my camera and a loose concept of time.
We became vegetarians... and quite on accident, too! We liked to eat organic quite a bit, and one day at an organic food store we came across some meatless hamburger and meatless sausage, etc. They are made mainly with soy. We decided to try it and a few days later noticed that we still hadn't eaten meat. After a week or so of still not eating meat, and not missing it, we agreed that we were now officially vegetarians.
We vended at culturefest thrown by Lori and Robert, our future roomies on the mountain. We made some money but didn't make a return on our investment. In addition they lost a considerable amount of money on the festival which is believed to be related to non-attendance due to high ticket prices. While in West Virginia, we saw the town of Princeton for the first time. It was a small economically depressed town. This was kinda bumming. We ate a meal with them before we left and revealed our interest in heading out west in maybe a year. We also revealed our interest in starting a coffee shop that travels to festivals, growing off of capital only and not getting a physical location until years later. They revealed their plan to rent a building in Princeton, start a music venue in it, and now thought it would be cool to put a coffee shop in it too. This wasn't exactly what we had in mind, considering the local economy and lack of demand for a hip, cool, hippie type of place. Businesses there seemed like they had enough trouble surviving. This was also bumming, but it'll work out. Vending the festival sure was fun, though!
We were in a car accident that wasn't our fault but pretty much totaled one of our cars. A girl at a stop sign evidently did not look both ways or something and smacked into us kind of hard. Turned out that she didn't have a valid license and her mom's insurance therefore won't cover her. Luckily I had full coverage, but I'm still waiting for them to do something about it. So we lost a car and my lower back hurts. At the time of the accident we were more upset that our plans for a quiet sunset picnic in the park had been foiled.
Meanwhile our other car finally got fixed at a repair shop in Mansfield where the mechanic said the repair shop in Columbus that we had taken it to 1st not only had no idea what they were doing, but also forgot to put a spacer back in the fuel rail thus causing gasoline to leak onto the engine putting us at risk for it to catch fire and or explode while being driven. Those same mechanics who almost got us killed had charged us over $1300, had kept our car for 2 weeks, and had given us the car back in about the same running condition as it was before they "fixed it"
We had found a 71 vw van for $5500 close by that was pretty much ready to go. We also didn't quite have the $5500. We were close though with... like... 1800 or so . The car accident blew our chances of selling that car to Amber's little sister Misty who had just days before requested to buy it. So we went to the bank. The loan that we had applied for at the bank was evidently out of my league as well as that of Amber and I combined as well as that of Amber and my grandma and I combined. In short, they told us no 3 times.
We began looking aggressively for a camper van to call home and found (an unbelievably affordable) one that ran and had most all the equipment in it. It was a 78 with the sink, stove, and fridge! The 71 only had a sink and icebox. It was listed on thesamba.com. We made plans to drive down just 10 miles outside of Washington DC to a town in Virginia to pay and pick it up. We would rent a car one way(and try to bill the insurance co. of the driver that hit us, not et knowing that she wasn't covered) and drive the vw van back. It was about a 900 mile round trip. Evidently you have to be over 25 to rent a car unless you have lots of money, so my parents offered to drive us instead. The whole trip was a disaster. I think every person I encountered the whole time was mean, nasty, or shady in some way. The guy that was selling us the van was 4 hours late, urged us not to go to the DMV because the plates were "still good!", DIDN'T have the title in his name, and kept trying to get us to meet him in parking lots instead of at the address he gave us. Not only this, but the title had writing in the wrong place, and was from a different state. Also the van was a manual transmission (of course) but turned out to be VERY tricky to drive - not like a newer stick shift at all. Gears were hard to find and we were not very confident about it making the 450 mile trip home. After much waiting and 2 days down there dealing with the DMV, they declined to issue us a temp tag to drive it back to Ohio, and told us that this guy we were buying from needed to transfer it into his name then ours, but first he needed to find the guy HE bought it from and have that guy get a duplicate title that didn't have writing in the wrong places. He was very apologetic and promised to get it taken care of on Monday, but when we got home we got an email that told us he had suddenly decided that we had wasted his time and that he should call the deal off. As if that were not enough, my mom saw him looking in car windows in the parking lot he met us in. We have concluded from the shadiness he omitted as well as the evidence and the sudden attitude change when we insisted on him going by the book with the title (so we didn't have problems with the BMV in Ohio) that he probably stole the van. He was, after all selling it ridiculously cheap. We were lucky to get out of the mess with our money.
Discouraged by the events of the past couple weeks and also the last couple months too (add us having to leave our apartment earlier than planned), we began to notice a negative pattern. It seemed that something was trying to get our attention and it was doing a good job. Among all the chaos, we hadn't yet packed any of our things and we had only days left until we moved out. We began giving things away, throwing things away, and packing what we wanted to keep. As we carted old books to a used book store on Lane Ave called 'half priced books', picking up a couple new reads and going to the neighboring Pizza Hut to get a vegetarian pizza to take home, we decided that it was important for us to change our course somehow. We questioned whether we should be going to West Virginia or if we should be trying for something else, like calif or Oregon. We grew sad to think of leaving such a cool, artistic, diverse, liberal city as Columbus with a culture for music, but we also knew that we felt such a strong attachment to Columbus that we needed to leave now if we wanted to see the world. We loved it too much and if we stayed, we would probably never leave. We went home and read our tarot cards for some both confusing and revealing news. I'm not sure that I can explain it all in full but basically we needed to stop boasting, stop bitching, and take refuge: take a step back. We didn't know what it meant, but troubled, we moved our remaining things into a storage unit in Crestline and ourselves into an extended stay hotel up ion 161 which was on the other, no so 'us' part of town. It's the bowling alley and strip club part of town. My parents offered to put us up for a week there (thanks guys!). Our cool attic / loft apartment is now in the process of becoming someone else's but it is no longer ours. It was the first place that Amber and I moved out of - ever - that either of us felt sad about leaving.
We have been going to the hotel only to sleep and have been spending all our hours wandering about the city in coffee shops, restaurants, on sidewalks, and in parks. I found an automatic 77 westy vw van in Ohio advertised on thesamba.com. It doesn't run yet. We went to the gallery hop on Saturday night and set up our stuff to sell. We got there pretty late and got our stuff set up even later. A good portion of the crowd had dwindled by the time we were set up. Still, after about 10 minutes of inactivity, people began to wander over and buy things. By the end we had made some good money for the short time we spent there. We had also met plenty of cool and interesting people. One girl talked to Amber for some time and recognized Fire, the little boy in one of my photographs from Bonnaroo. She had danced with him while there. After the crowd had almost completely vanished and the day spa that we had set up in front of closed and turned out its lights, we looked up to see something which was, unmistakably, a sign. A dragonfly fluttered over from the street to us. It ran into the brick wall beside us, then circled over us and our tables of stuff, then flew away. A dragonfly in the middle of the city, at night! I don't really know how common an occurrence this is, but I've never seen it happen before, and neither had Amber. We felt that this was a signal of good thing to come for us.
We also feel that maybe being at the hotel for a week was the first step in taking refuge and taking a step back from all of our situations. The tarot cards always make more and more sense as you watch things play out.
We drove up last night and checked out the 77 westy. It needed some work, but the guy selling it seemed real cool, and real trustworthy too. He's gotta do some stuff with the title this week, but we've decided to buy it, and we gave a deposit of $60. It doesn't have a stove built in, and it really just has an icebox that could be converted to a fridge later. It has some rust, and doesn't run. We hope to have it towed to Motorkars to have it repaired to the point of mechanical mediocrity. Since it is cheaper, we have some money left over to get it fixed: hopefully! As long as the vw mechanic there, Mike, can get it running, we can begin fixing up the inside and living in it. The question is, though, how long will this take?
The other day while walking down high st. as usual, Amber saw a guy and his wife that frequent her coffee shop ride by on their vespa and turn down a side st. Thinking perhaps they were parking to eat at one of the restaurants in the short north on high there, we turned and walked down the small side street. We didn't see them or their vespa, but we DID find a cool place called the 'Benevolence Cafe'. It seemed to be pretty cool with vegan meals advertised and environmental books lining the shelves inside. It also seemed to be closed, but we returned the next day to find the best homemade salads, smoothies, and bread known to Columbus, as well as a very chill, serene environment with some nice, nice people. What a find! It gave rise to talks of the coffee shop we plan to have one day.
It's now Monday and we are leaving the hotel on Wednesday night. We are still trying to figure out where to go, but we are not really so worried now. We can probably stay with Mark for a couple days, and there are other places we could stay but are less enthusiastic about. Most promising, though are the option of my dad's old station wagon which he was going to get rid of and has offered to let us *drive* (but which we plan to use to sleep in) and the option of reorganizing the car so that we can simply lay down the back seat so it opens to the trunk and putting our feet in the trunk and our heads on the laid down seat. I don't know how well the latter will work but it may be better than laying down the front seats in the car to sleep on which would make our backs stiff. The station wagon, unfortunately, doesn't have good brakes and doesn't run right, hence the motivation for him to junk it. It may or may not be worth fixing up to the point that it would make it to Columbus to park.
regardless, I think we are both okay with whatever and wherever we end up this week. It has been and continues to be a real adventure. It also feels good to write it all out finally. Writing has long been a good outlet for me, just not in the context of a journal until now. I'm happy to have had the opportunity to read some of those coveted National Geographic magazines I've been hoarding, but hadn't yet opened as well as a new book, Tex and Molly in the Afterlife. I've been going to bed early and getting up early, and I feel pretty cool about everything. I've been sitting in Vics Midnight Cafe now for hours reading and writing and previous to that I spent a couple of hours at Caribou reading. It doesn't feel the same as sitting at home or at the hotel all day, though. It feels enlightening, calming, and renewing. It also feels good to walk out the door of wherever I am and be in 'it'. That's what I'm going to do now. I've got my camera and a loose concept of time.
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