![\"\"](\"https:\/\/ilivehere.life\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Empire-300x169.jpg\")
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I continued my \u201clife in the empire\u201d this week. Richard and I spent several days putting up shelves in what was the closet that once held my toilet. There was a lot of wasted space above my composting toilet, and now everything has a place. Not only did we get the shelves up, but a visit to the container store got us containers to hold my compost material, dog food, my soaps, lotions and potions, and a space for my laundry detergent, fabric softeners and other cleaning supplies.\u00a0 We took the old roll-top enclosure off of the cabinet that once held the old TV (the kind with a picture tube) and found baskets to put on the shelves inside. Now things are neatly organized, and it is so easy to pull any basket out and go through it instead of pulling everything out to get to something in the back. The van is looking good, with so many things cleared out and either thrown away or given to Steve\u2019s church. There is lots of room with everything put away.\u00a0 The passenger seat is cleared off and it is able to be turned completely around facing the living space, functioning as another chair. I\u2019m pretty pleased with the result.<\/strong><\/p>\n The company who built my solar system e-mailed and said they had found the solution to my fans running constantly. They said they would be happy to fix it for me free of charge if I sent my unit back to them in Idaho. Sending it means the van is without electricity until it comes back. It would have been much more convenient a week ago, since I\u2019ve been staying in Steve and Richard\u2019s guest room and didn\u2019t need electricity in my van, but I sent it anyway. I will be leaving this weekend and heading to Wrightwood, and will have to go several days without any AC power, but it is better to do so while staying in friend\u2019s driveways than to wait until I\u2019m boondocking in the desert. They usually fix it the same day it arrives, and ship it out the next day, so I shouldn\u2019t have to be without it for too long. And I\u2019ll have an address to ship it to for another week, so better now than later.<\/strong><\/p>\n The place where I got my eyes examined last week called and said my new glasses came in. They had originally told me it would be 10 to 14 days. They were done in a week. Better to under promise and over-deliver, right? I picked them up and they seem fine.\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n I continued to re-arrange things in my van. With the extra shelves and containers, there is plenty of room to store things with a better sense of order. <\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 ###\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 ###\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 ###<\/strong><\/p>\n I woke up to a beautiful sunrise.<\/strong><\/p>\n Not quite a \u201cQuartzsite Sunrise,\u201d but not a bad view from the balcony.<\/strong><\/p>\n My mission to disconnect from \u201cnews\u201d has failed miserably this week. I had been doing better, only scanning the NY Times\u2019 headlines and finding even most of them irrelevant to my life. Here, the TV is always on and I\u2019m stunned by the local news. It almost seems like a Saturday Night Live parody to me. One morning, the host on KTLA read an article about Taylor Swift from Variety<\/em> magazine, before condescendingly explaining to his TV audience what it was about. I just shook my head. What does Taylor Swift have to do with my life? Why would I care? It\u2019s like the Kardashians\u2026How do the kids of a lawyer who got a murderer off get to be celebrities? And for what?\u00a0 I must be missing something. And the local \u201cnews\u201d was about the Long Beach Library being re-opened after it had been closed for security reasons because homeless people and mentally ill people were making themselves at home (no pun intended) in the library and scaring people. It all felt very removed from my life.<\/strong><\/p>\n I left Steve and Richard and headed south toward downtown Long Beach where I met Tina, Richard (a different one) and Victoria for lunch at Park Pantry. It was so nice to catch up and also a pretty good meal. Afterwards, I followed Tina and Richard home and intended to park in their tenant\u2019s lot. It was off an alley and the road was so narrow that I couldn\u2019t get backed in without scraping the sides of my van. Richard ended up giving me his parking space in front of his house and he took the parking space in the tenant\u2019s lot. <\/strong><\/p>\n Lessons From the Road<\/strong>: My lesson for this week was to learn to appreciate everything I have. I get such anxiety when my solar equipment is traveling to Idaho, not knowing when I\u2019ll have electricity again. I need to learn to feel appreciative every day when I DO have solar power, and everything is working fine. I worried some that my new eyeglasses would not arrive before I left Long Beach and I was trying to come up with an alternative plan for getting them if I was already on my way to the mountains or the desert.\u00a0 So the corollary for this lesson is to not worry so much. The glasses arrived way before schedule. I thought the solar company was blowing me off when they said they were unable to fix my problem with the fan running all the time at that moment, but they\u2019d let me know when they figured out the issue. I expected to have to nag them, but they figured it out and reached out to me<\/em>.\u00a0 My lesson is to learn trust. Everything works out.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I continued my \u201clife in the empire\u201d this week. Richard and I spent several days putting up shelves in what was the closet that once held my toilet. There was a lot of wasted space above my composting toilet, and now everything has a place. Not only did we get the shelves up, but a … <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/ilivehere.life\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Long-Beach-2-300x169.jpg\")
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