It was an awesome storm. It has been warm, foggy, overcast, and rainy off and on for the last couple days. Last night it all broke loose. Midnight thunderstorms, frightening the dog and pounding the motorhome. Judy got up to look, and said it was like someone making a movie in the rain under pouring fire hoses. It rained in waves. The ocean was wild. The ocean got closer to us while we slept. Our 100 yards of beach shrank to twenty yards. I snoozed warm and dry in bed until it was over. We're happy to report that the Bounder, slides and all, weathered the storm flawlessly.
It was a noisy night. It was great!
This morning dawned flooded. Our site was fine, but the one directly across from us was completely under water. We had our oatmeal and coffee: a leisurely morning in the fog and drizzle, then headed out for
We drove loops in the parking lot to calibrate the compass. It worked.
You know how you can check the accuracy of you speedometer, by watching the highway markers? You find a watch with a second hand, hold sixty miles per hour exactly for one mile and time yourself. If it takes exactly 60 seconds, you're lucky, and your speedometer is accurate. If it takes something more or less, not only is your speedometer off, but you have to be able to do arithmetic to figure out how much it is off.
There is another way. You ask Judy how fast you are going, she pushes a button on the computer, and the GPS Navigator announces "current speed, sixty-one point seven miles per hour". Instant. Agrees with our speedometer. We're lucky. This measurement is not tied to the vehicle at all. The speedometer is driven by the wheels and road. The computer is corresponding with satellites overhead that all agree our speed is sixty-one point seven miles per hour. Last time I asked the computer which satellite it was using to track us, it listed the eight satellites that were currently engaged. Big Brother? We are currently being monitored by eight big brothers. We'll be careful not to do anything nefarious while the GPS is online.
Just when I thought there would be no more clues forthcoming in the great cream cheese incident, a resolution presents itself! But I have to start somewhere else. I have to start with diet. I have discovered recently that the afternoon food fades I've experienced all my life are due to carbohydrate poisoning. Nature's most perfect food: complex carbohydrates? Starchy foods like potatoes, pasta, rice, and bread. They're poison to me. I eat them. My liver panics and floods me with insulin. The insulin sucks all the sugar out of my blood. My forehead hits the table, or whatever else is in front of it. It leaves a mark.
Every person needs carbohydrates to function. Now what do I do? The solution is elegantly simple. All vegetables are made up of carbohydrates, but they don't deliver as heavy a load as the starches do. I don't have to abandon carbohydrates altogether and try to figure out some other way to survive. All I have to do is abandon potatoes, pasta, rice, and bread altogether, and eat as much of every other kind of fruit and vegetable I can, and I get all the carbohydrates I need, and I feel awake and great. How cool is that? And what could possibly go wrong?
Cream cheese. It's all about the cream cheese. I had discovered a new favorite snack. Celery and cream cheese. It gives me some fat in the cream cheese, balanced by the carbohydrates of the celery. Nothing complex there. I've been eating it every day.
Now I have to digress one more time. When my blood sugar gets low, I get to feeling generally lethargic. One of the symptoms of being lethargic is that I don't think things through well, often failing to recognize that I'm feeling lethargic, and not considering that I might have a blood sugar issue. I had been feeling lethargic for several days. The only little change in my diet lately, has been the addition of the perfect snack. Celery and cream cheese. That was it! The cream cheese! I read the labels. Cream cheese is about 50% carbohydrates. Hard cheese is about none. I don't know what it is about the carbohydrates in the cream cheese, but that was the problem. I substituted hard cheese for the cream cheese the next day, and the energy was perfect. Which brings me to the great cream cheese incident. Here, all this time I was wondering if a pet could possibly be involved in appropriating my cream cheese for their own benefit, but without any clues, who's to say? Now I realize I was completely wrong in my suspicions. It was not a matter of pets putting their interests ahead of mine. It was our animals, who are much more in touch with inner processes than I am, protecting me from myself! They knew, days before I figured it out, what I was doing to myself, and at the first opportunity leaped to my defense. They fell on the grenade. They sacrificed their own energy levels to protect mine.
What noble creatures.
