8/15- Life at Home

The lounging of Denver days has been nice these past many weeks. If not for just seeing good friends and feeling grounded again it securely made real the notion that I am not just on a trip but am living a new lifestyle now. Its a strange affect living in a town you consider home with no home to call your own in it. Though with a good collection of solid close friends you suddenly find yourself with several open doors that make senses of home. Such has been the case here.

The last week of July, and in some ways these past two weeks in August, have been taking care of business here. As in my last post, the first two weeks were a lot of revisiting, making my rounds to see how everyone is and checking in with the friends' network at large; Denver Chapter. These past three weeks was the organization I came to do in my stay, and my departure date was ever amorphous, as it continues to be.

First on the agenda was getting my game on. Arranging with my friends Stefan, Tony, Ryan, and Luke we had a good old fashioned, geek infested, D&D slumber party on Wednesday night to Thursday morning. I haven't done this since college and I loved it. We're an odd group as we acknowledge ourselves, but those peeking in have also seen. As Tony noted, we've been playing together for six years and it is the most reliable gaming group he's played in despite its participants. Luke is a small business owner of the book store Kilgore (advertised at the bottom of the page with the long book mark) so rarely has free time. Stefan is a high school teacher who moonlights as a renaissance man filling his summers traveling back home to Europe for weeks on end and playing every sport known to man through out the year. Ryan lives about an hour south of Denver in Colorado Springs complete with full time job and burgeoning family. Tony is the other nomad of the group who roams the country as a professional insulter in Ren Fairs six months out of the year, if not more, living out of a tent as well. Then there's me, settling for a year then heading off on these sorts of long sojourns only to move back again later.

Between the lot of us we're quite busy, scattered, and diverse in thought and lifestyle, but I think that's what make the games that are steeped in imagination so fun and interesting. As those who have been reading along know, I'm often referencing things I've learned in these internal fantasy worlds of roving and adventuring to practical travel tips in my real life wanderings. One very unusual form of this referencing would come about a week after this gaming bonanza that I'll get into in a bit.

The other main thing that came of the last week in July was the Great Moving Weekend starting Friday the 31st. Thursday night I stayed over Penney and Robert's place to be there in the morning when they were due to move out of their apartment and into their truck. As I believe I mentioned in my last post, we've been talking much about traveling together up to Seattle and seeing where that takes us. We spent all day packing, hauling, and cleaning until about 5pm. When we were done and had eaten I then walked down the road to Loreli's house. She and her merry band of anarchists had to be out of their coop house by midnight of the 1st so I agreed to help them out as well.

We did one load to Loreli and Brandon's new house, which is amazing, then Brandon hit on the idea of using the time we had now before my storage unit closed to empty it out to try to save me a day of pro-rated rent. He called in his Dad's help as well, with his larger truck, and we spent two hours packing three cars of the majority of my things until the place closed its gates at 9pm. Loading that stuff into their new basement we then set off back to The Pitchfork (the name of the coop house) until around 1am packing and hauling. That's truly a sign of good friends to help you move in the midst of their own move.

The next day, after a good diner breakfast at Breakfast King, Loreli caught up on her rest while Brandon and I attempted to finish the job at my storage unit. It couldn't be done, we just didn't have the carrying capacity in his truck for my big shelf. I nearly decided to ditch it before I figured I'd check in on Robert to take him up on his offer to help despite the busy plans they had that day. It turned out that was a good call because all their plans had fallen through so he was free and quite happy to help out. Again, good friends to help me move amid their own. Once that was done I returned to help cleaning The Pitchfork out until about midnight again. That was that, all moves completed and my last bill I had was now done with. I am now completely detached from needing to make payments to anything anymore.

Sunday Robert picked me up in the morning to help him put together the trailer cover he had built for their rig. That was a fun day of just mucking around the open lot he worked at, drinking the occasional beer, watching the occasional hawk, drilling things, painting things, and other wise basking in the dead heat of the day. I spent that evening at Dazbog with Ang before Greg met up with me for dinner.

Greg, if you don't remember from the previous post, was the guy I'd met up with to hear his story of his near death experience. We had kept in touch a bit through email and I wanted to see him before I set off again. My plan at that point had been to leave that Tuesday, the 4th, after coffee with my friend Susannah. So we had dinner at Vine St. and talked about what he's been up to and what my plans were. He still had that light in his eye of inspiration and it was a good dinner catching up on our ideas.

My plans to leave on the 4th, however, had already changed, pushed for more D&D on Wednesday and Saturday. I had also come in contact with my friend Tania, and arranged to have dinner with her and some friends Saturday night, so I figured I'd just set of on the 9th. Talking with Greg, we figured we'd meet up one more time before I left. There was something there, something on the tips of our tongues, but it didn't make itself known, hence the last meeting. I'm really quite curious to know what that connection is.

Monday morning I woke up with nothing really on my plate for the day. My finances were low, and I had resigned myself to leaving Denver that next Sunday with $40 in my pocket. I didn't know how smart that was, but on the same token I felt completely fine with it; in no way worried oddly. I woke up, though, to a call from Julie, Loreli's boss who had claimed she'd had work for me. I had all but given up on getting work out of her, or anyone else, before leaving. The winds would change again, though, and my departure date would slide back another ten days. She offered me a house sitting gig from the 9th until the 17th. All I had to do was take care of a pair of dogs, cats, and chickens along with a parakeet and a hamster for $25 a day. That sounded perfect to me. It was becoming a solid notion in my head now not to have any concerns whatsoever about where money comes from. Not to stress it, it'll show up when needed.

Where I was going to set off into the mountains and wander around until Penney and Roberts returned, it made a lot more sense to sit in the comfort of this remote home to my familiar grounds in Denver, eat well, have a patio to recline on, and really be able to process. This was the mental end of my organizing that I'd do in these past weeks. For that first week of August I just organized my things in Loreli's basement so that they could access any of my books easily, while my furniture filled in the missing gaps they'd lost to the coop. This had a mutual benefit to us both. For them they got the obvious, furniture to use. For me, I got the comfort of home in coming home to a familiar welcome place that was filled with my own furniture. Its a surprisingly nice comfort to feel like you have a space of your own when you're living around like this.

On Tuesday I set off to take care of another bit of business. The business of buying physical gold. Since I started preparing for this "trip" in January I have had the overwhelming sense that tucking money away in savings at this time would be somewhat futile. It could be completely irrational from the wake of last September's crash, but I've long felt another, harder, crash would be coming this upcoming September or October. It gets stronger as it nears as well, and others I've talked to have said they also feel a big shift of some sort coming around then, though they are unsure of what.

Because of this I put some "landing money" away in a CD in case I'm wrong, but the other half of it I invested in gold stock. I didn't like the idea of having stock and not the physical gold in my hand when I invested in March, but it was something and I am terrible at researching how to get those sorts of things. Now, being July and August, I felt more driven too, so I spent this first week in August checking in on a few more options. The first was to check out the mint and see if I could buy direct.

Here's a brief history lesson I know of. In the past, when inflation has been driven high, it has always been preceded by banks hoarding in their gold. You see many more "cash for gold" ads around, which I have been seeing this summer. When I went to the mint it clinched it. Talking to the information guy about how to go about buying some gold he told me they were no longer selling it. This had stopped in April due to fluctuating market prices. Quite a few things are fishy about this to me. The first being that, although the market did fluctuate some in the fall of '08 (I had been tracking the price since September, and have line graphs showing historical progress back to 1997) I would hardly call it radical fluctuation. The second point being that its a market, prices always will be going up and down, just as buying stocks in the stock market prices will rise and fall by the hour. Why the sudden freeze on sales?

I then looked up a Coin retailer out in Lakewood who had an honest reputation and talked to them. They were still selling gold coins, and they were still raising and lowering their prices by the hour according to the whims of the market. Again, its possibly my over reaction, but with what I'm seeing out in the world today, and what I'm feeling in my gut it strengthened my resolve to buy sometime soon this month. I am saying all this because it might not be a bad thing to look into for yourselves as well. A rule of thumb to think on is that when the economy tanks the price of metals sore, and gold is the most recognizable of metals to trade on. A thought.

Anyway, the rest of my week that week was more D&D with Tony and Stefan and learning the intimate details of how to run Julie's house for the following week. Saturday night I spent taking care of Ang's dog while she went off to a wedding, then Sunday, the 9th, I went over to Julie's and settled myself in there as she and her family were still bustling around for their road trip to California for the week. That afternoon, I met up with my friends Josh, Emily, and Patrick for a good few hours of Catan, the greatest board game ever conceived by man.

That night, I returned to the house that was now quiet save for the pitter patter of a variety of animals. I walked the dogs around the block and nestled in with some coffee, crackers, and cheese for an evening of North By Northwest. The rest of the week was similar to this nesting evening.

Monday morning I awoke to Julie's dad, Jack, coming by to check on the garden, then I walked into town and hung out at Dazbog for a bit, later continuing on to Loreli's to grab some more things. Tuesday, Loreli swung by and we drove around some as she ran errands. We later met up with Brandon and picked Izzy up from her Dad's which turned into an ice cream social. Her Dad, Nathan, had treated Iz to ice cream, which was where we caught up with them, but Loreli had set her mind to treating Izzy to ice cream (as well as all of us), so she did it anyway. We all ended up sitting around eating ice cream and testing Izzy's math skills.

This was an interesting experience to watch, which the next day I related to my sister as a way of showing her the frustration in learning, but that persistence is worth it in the end. My sister's troubles were very different than Izzy's math problem, but the parallels were fascinating to me. Wendie, my sister, was becoming frustrated with the difficulties of learning a particular life lesson. She said she was just continually driving at it and was beginning to lose heart and give up. The frustration was getting at her.

Izzy had been boasting to us that she knew more math than a girl who was older than her, which was a great point of pride. She knew 100+100=200. I challenged her then to what 99+99 equaled. I'd never really taught anyone before, but this was probably a more enlightening experience for me than it was for Izzy. We spent 45 minutes showing her hints, giving her clues, but essentially getting her to understand the values of 100 and 99 rather than just the memory that this one particular number symbol added to itself again equals 200. Writing this out now I can even relate this to a conversation Todd and I have been having over the past two days.

What I was relating to Wendie was how Izzy would process everything sounded a lot like how Wendie was processing her own findings. Izzy would turn away from us, write in secret, then turn and whisper what she believed was the right answer in either my ear or her Mom's so that "the public" at large wouldn't know she was wrong if that turned out to be the case. We would then try to help her along showing her hints like asking her what's one less than 100, or what's 100-2. All these varying ideas flying at her while she was processing frustrated her, got her stomping her feet and verging on tears until we shut up and let her think and process everything we were saying. As per Todd and my more recent conversations tie in, she was making it her own rather than just a memorization of what we were telling her.

In the end she allowed herself to take a break, which is saying something if you knew this little one. She's a bit determined when she decides to figure something out, but after twisting her brain around for a little under an hour we took a break and I went home again. Her struggle with this question in her life was quite an interesting parallel to seeing myself and so many others around me with our own questions in life.

With diving into this spirituality and trying to understand guiding intuition I noticed my own behavior in Izzy's struggle with math. In the beginning I did a lot of whispering in people's ears who I thought were safe to bounce ideas off of. As Todd pointed out yesterday, I still do it to an extent in not wanting to use all the New Agey terms that fit easily into what I'm talking about. I turn my back away from everyone going to live in the woods or the side of the road so I can think on my own and try to process all the information I'm picking up, whether through my own experience, hearing first or second hand stories, or reading about it in books. I take all this off into my own corner and have been trying to process it before I get another barrage of hints and clues as to what "this" is that I'm looking at.

So this has been this past week. I've been staying up until 5am or 6am, regardless of my efforts to get to sleep early, and waking up anywhere between 11am and 2pm. In the morning I'll generally walk the dogs, feed the cats, let the chickens out, check on the hamster, and move the parakeet cage to the back patio for the day. I like sitting out there for a bit of the morning to the chirps of the bird while little Luca circles the cage from below and sip my coffee reading my book. As the week, and my visit to Denver, wind down to a close I feel ready to go. Not anxious in anyway since I'm really loving being around my friends again, but I feel ready in the sense of knowing what I'm doing next and where I'm going in more ways than simply destination.

Todd and I have been talking lately about our up and coming plans and they seem to vary greatly, though are also quite similar. For a while in there we were talking of getting back together here in Denver and setting off to the northwest with Penney and Robert in their veggie rig. I don't think that idea ever really set well with Todd in that he never really seemed drawn to Seattle like I was feeling. Seems to have hit him the other day to go due north and explore out that way, but its seeming likely that we'll touch base here in Denver while he's on his way out. I am definitely still compelled to head out with Penney and Robert to see my sister in September. I don't know when I'll be leaving, but I'll likely be heading out of Denver by the middle of next week. Stay tuned for further adventures as the posts and pictures will likely be coming out closer together once again.