The Tension Mounts...

September has been a bizarre and unpredictable month. I’m preparing to head south for the winter and to complete several writing obligations at the same time. But something is always conspiring against me.

Take pickleball for example. Pickleball is sometimes referred to as old man’s tennis. Played with an oversized ping pong paddle, a whiffle ball, and an undersized tennis court, we go out and bat the ball around until a team either scores eleven points or until bocce ball starts or until happy hour. But, in a close game, the tension mounts, adrenalin starts pumping, and an old man might exert himself over-much and pull a muscle.

Me. Pick me.

I didn’t really feel a problem but when a compatriot exclaimed “My God! What happened to your leg?” I had to get out a mirror and try to look at the back of my knee and thigh. Wow! I had a black bruise extending from below my knee to halfway up my thigh. Black, not black and blue. I have lots of helpful friends and the leg was elevated and iced in no time with dire warnings for me not to use heat until the color had changed from black to that lovely rainbow orange that bruises achieve. Another friend brought me a paper cup of baby aspirin and told me to take one every morning to prevent any blood from coagulating and breaking loose in my system.

And, indeed, it healed. Three weeks! I’m ready for the next match Tuesday.

I’m excited to have a birthday coming up and the annual celebration with my sister of going to the Washington Cigar and Spirits Festival at Snoqualmie Casino on October 6. But before that show, the local (Coeur d’Alene) cigar store decided to have a Big Ash show and celebration on September 8. Tickets are a lot cheaper than the October show and the gift bag included nine good cigars. It was a festive atmosphere and three of my friends were also there. Saw a couple of cigar vendors that I know and stocked up on a couple boxes for my trip south. Each purchase came with another eight free cigars.

Big Ash Cigar Festival

Then came the entertainment. They were having a solo fifteen second dance-off. Sure. Gimp leg and all, I put on my best dance moves and got out there to show my stuff. I WON! Then I found out the contest was to determine the worst dancer. Well, I still won and the prize was a beautiful Adirondack wooden humidor. This beauty is a $200 value and it happened that I didn’t already have a good humidor. I do now.

I capped off a great evening by taking all my treasures to the truck, climbing in and not starting it. Oh, I turned the key, but start it would not. Then I realized I’d forgotten my phone. Another common problem I have. I found my friends and managed to call AAA. I can still text even without my phone (tablet) so they told me to let them know if I was stranded and where to take the truck that was nearby if it needed repair.

It needed repair.

Had it towed over to the shop and Mike met me and took me home with him. I stayed there three days while the nice guys in the repair shop fixed the electrical problem and a dozen other problems then sent me home $1500 poorer. Dang! That’s two-thirds of the cost of my planned round-the-world ticket for next year. Start over.

The view from Mike and Sue's deck. Wish I played golf!

During my time laid up at Mike and Sue’s, I had no phone and no computer. The tablet is handy, but it’s hard to type on, so writing suffered a bit. Picked up some groceries and got home to find that the mouse who’s been tormenting me for the past month and a half finally walked into the trap I’d set and was starting to smell.

I’ve been cleaning and organizing the trailer so I can hitch up next Friday and take it in to be serviced before I head south. I’ll use that week to go to the Seattle area and see family, friends, and doctors. But cleaning and organizing keep getting interrupted because I am a writer and generally creative obsessive person. My obsessions extended to redoing a major portion of my websites and inviting people to READ MY BOOKS FOR FREE!

http://www.nathaneverett.com/releases/index.html

Yes, I finally figured out that if I can’t sell the damn things, I’ll give them away. Now you, too, can read City Limits, For Money or Mayhem, and The Gutenberg Rubric online at no charge. Of course, there is a hand little button that allows you to donate to the care and maintenance of the author should you so desire. More books will be coming in the near future. If reading online is not your thing, you can still purchase all my books in eBook or paperback format.

It's not just the Nathan Everett books that are being made available. I’m also putting a major portion of my Devon Layne books up for free on that website. Call me crazy but I’m really just crazy.

And I’m trying desperately to finish another book I’m writing before I switch to NaNoWriMo mode on November 1 and write the sequel to City Limits, Wild Woods. So this week, I tapped out a mere 42,300 words on two stories I’m working on. Sometimes it keeps me awake at night, or wakes me up. That was the case on Thursday this week when I was wide awake at 2:30 in the morning. I stumbled to my computer and found that even though I was wide awake, I wasn’t ready to write the scene that was coming up.

So far this year, I've written 539,000 words. Someone must want to read them, right?

Two or three times a week, I compile my life statistics. These include how many copies of my books have been downloaded on free sites (*BTW, chapters of my books are downloaded about 23,000 times a week*), what the reader review scores are, how many times my blog has been viewed, and my current financial status. Since I wasn’t in the mood to write, I did stats.

Imagine my surprise to find that only a few hours before I’d used my credit card to purchase old people supplements from a store in San Diego. I looked at their website and determined that not only had I never heard of them, there were no products of any sort at their site that I would ever buy.

After an hour of being passed around at the VISA fraud site, I was told their computer system was down and they couldn’t log the problem but would cancel my card. Please call back in a couple of hours. Right. I called back the next time I woke up. Eventually, I got my card canceled, promise of replacement, and investigation. Since I spotted and reported the charge while it was still pending, they were going to cancel it and launch an investigation into who had stolen my card numbers and how. The charge no longer appears on my account.

Sounds like an exciting month, right? Friday, I realized my driver’s license expires this week. I had to drive into Spokane Valley, WA to get to a DMV where I could get snapped, questioned, cashed in, and validated. They were actually very nice, the process didn’t take long, and they’ll send me my license and ballot sometime in the next three or four weeks.

No, I’m not done yet. Verizon’s Go Unlimited Data Plan that I got a year and a half ago, isn’t. I have a flip-phone that I make about six calls a month on and receive about thirty robo-dialed calls a month which I ignore since I usually don’t know where my phone is anyway. I have Go Unlimited Data on my tablet which I also use as my hotspot. That is 4G high speed data up to 15 gigabytes at which time the connection speed is cut to something reminiscent of a 9600 baud dial-up modem. In other words, checking email takes an hour to load and GPS is worthless. I usually run out of 4G data about four days before the end of the month.

Now Verizon has Beyond Unlimited and Above Unlimited for just $10 and $20 more. I carefully read the description of the plans and determined that for just $10 a month I could solve my data problems. In two attempts, I could not get the plan changed online, even with the very helpful help of two different chat reps. So I went to the Verizon store.

The service person at the store was very nice and very helpful and said, yes, he understood the programs the same way I did and he’d gladly help get me switched. Fifteen minutes later he was having the same problem as the online service reps had and went ‘back to make a call’ and see what was wrong. Five minutes later we had an answer. Beyond and Above are only available on smartphones, not on my tablet “because they use a different connection system”. Right.

I left the store another couple hundred dollars poorer with a 15gb a month Jetpack MiFi hotspot for my laptop and a 15gb streaming data plan for my tablet. At least I should stop running out of data now!

This weekend was also the Spokane County Fair in Rockford WA. Since I failed to get my fair fix in Coeur d’Alene this year, I stopped in Rockford to see the festivities. It took about half an hour to see all the booths, the 4-H exhibits, the giant pumpkins, and to eat a German sausage smothered in sauerkraut and mustard. But

I’ve been to the fair.

Well, I had a lot to catch up in this blog post. Please visit the website and let me know what you think of the new online reading versions of my novels. I’ll be in the Seattle Lynnwood Bellevue area from September 30 to October 6 and then back here at Sun Meadow for a week before I head south on the 14th or 15th.

And in case you didn’t catch it before, I’m celebrating my 69th birthday this week. I’m sort of hoping that’s a symbolic number and a theme for the year!

I Can’t Believe It’s September!

It’s okay. I’m not hurt. Not too much. Sheesh! I haven’t had a sports-related injury since Kovaleski sent me through the meat-grinder in high school. And to think I got injured playing ‘old man’s tennis’—pickleball. No one hit me. I didn’t stumble into anything. I didn’t fall. This is from stretching too far! I didn’t even know pulled muscles bruised like this and this picture of the back of my knee shows the bruise after three full days of icing!

I’m thinking of taking up chess.

It appears that I have found a home for the winter months. I’m headed down to Quartzsite, AZ where the weather is warm and dry and the rates are cheap. I think the RV parks keep the rates down because they know you could just tow your trailer out into the desert on BLM land and park it for $180 for six months. I can dry camp for a couple of weeks, but I’m just not cut out for ‘no services’ camping for the long haul. So, I’ve located a campsite that will let me park for about $200 a month for the six months I’ll be there. It’s called the Scenic Road RV Park and is convenient to downtown, the flea market, the bookstore, and the huge RV Show in January.

I hope Quinne will come down to visit over the winter holiday and we can hop down to Mexico, perhaps Palm Springs, and visit London Bridge at Lake Havasu. I’m thinking this will be a fun winter.

If I can play pickleball.

I managed to get out of camp on Tuesday the 28th to take a friend to the airport at god-awful o’clock in the morning. We were a bit worried when we left as fog slowed our progress for about fifteen minutes. When we headed north on the highway, it dissipated and I got her to the airport in plenty of time. Then I took the opportunity to have breakfast at Frank’s Diner in Spokane.

I had a bunch of errands to run—Fred Meyer, Safeway, Costco—but it was only six in the morning, so after I ate a delicious meal of corned beef hash, eggs, and hashbrowns, I decided to do a little exploring of Spokane that I’d put off for the past three years. I headed for the Riverside Park and Expo Center. The first thing to greet me was the runners.

Of course, the leaders were far off to my right, but this is a pretty cool sculpture in the park. Then I headed for Canada Island where the flags of both countries fly next to a huge totem pole. I hadn’t been to see the upper falls on the Spokane River, so that was a treat.

There was a lot of construction around the area, so I never actually got to the Expo Center itself. Security was all over everyplace, directing traffic and pointing out event parking. I found out ‘Pig Out in the Park’ is this weekend and they were setting up. The first booth I came to, though, convinced me that I’d spend the weekend safely back in my campsite.

Deep fried bacon? Really? Doesn’t it deep fry when you put it in a pan?

After several gloomy and smelly days, the smoke has blown past us. We had a good rain that washed it out of the air and left us with a fresh-looking campsite, if a little quiet in the dawn hour.

I sort of miss the days when I got up at five o’clock and it was already sunrise. Now I get up at five o’clock and have to wait an hour and a half for the sun.

Here’s a not-so-random thought. My former employer, Charlie Cudd, once told me, “There are only three reasons for government: Print the Currency, Defend the Shores, and supply sewer and water to my developments.” Everyone can agree on the first two. The last one is why there are over 5,000 federal criminal laws and up to 300,000 rules and regulations that carry criminal penalties in the US. I use vague numbers because no one can really tell us how many laws there are.

One of those edicts was signed into law on April 11, 2018. It is popularly referred to as SESTA/FOSTA, a combined House and Senate bill to “Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act” and “Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act.” Well, good. We all want to fight sex trafficking, rescue and help victims, and eliminate the sex slave trade. I’m for it. In fact, in the second fully unified act of congress in the past twenty years, only two senators and twenty-five congressmen voted against the bill. The first one, of course, was to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both were mistakes.

Vaguely-worded laws become the haven for persecution. In this case, websites, ISPs, banks, and other service providers (like Patreon) have been enabled to interpret ‘possible sex trafficking’ as any adult content. In other words, pressure is being applied on providers of adult content (visual and verbal) to limit freedom of speech and expression.

None of my work under any name promotes sex trafficking, child trafficking, or illegal adult content. Therefore, I object to banks turning down credit card charges for my content, service providers having to move processing offshore, and Internet access slowing to a crawl if adult content is suspected. Unfortunately, all three are occurring.

Does anyone know what this fruit is? It grows on a bush about four feet tall next to my trailer. Very pretty when it turns bright red, but I have no idea what it is. Do tell!