Tag Archives: Gettysburg Farm RV Park

The eye of the beholder

15 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by in Depression, Personal, Randomness, Travel

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fungus

I suffer from the relatively common ailment of mean brain. Not mean to other people, but mean to myself. It’s something I’ve worked on for a long time, but I still have flare-ups. Maybe it’s like an allergic reaction? My hyperactive immune system thinks that half the common substances on the planet are dire threats and stimulates misery in response. When my mean brain gets triggered, it stimulates misery, too. Maybe it’s some kind of protective mechanism, but it’s not a very good one.

Sunday morning, it started whispering. I’ll spare myself writing out the details — it’s not like it’s going to be good for me to spend more time in those thoughts — but the words “homeless” and “failure” were pretty loud. Fortunately, I was in a really good place to see those thoughts for what they were, just words. Just labels.

Earlier I had been sitting in my chair, watching the water and the trees and a chirpy little sparrow. The sparrow was adorable, totally charming in that tiny bird way. It kept a fearless eye on the dogs, but it was much more interested in whatever it was finding in the dirt. It flew away and I thought, “What a miracle birds are.” Flight is so amazing. It’s incredible that they can just lift off and soar through the air. It’s not a new thought, I’ve had it many times before, often when seeing birds take off around the pond where I used to walk the dogs. And then one of the nasty biting bugs landed on my leg and I thought, “Hmm, I don’t think I ever think about bugs being a miracle. But they can fly, too.”

I waved the bug off and moved on, heading inside to figure out what I could eat for breakfast. The campground I was in was a first-come, first-served campground, and I was reluctant to pack up to make another grocery store run while weekend people were coming in. My spot was lovely, a mix of sun and shade, looking right out on the water, with a pretty view of an open field on the other side. It was also nice and flat with no major ruts or big muddy spots, easy to get to, and reasonably simple to access. In other words, I was afraid to leave it for fear I’d lose it. But food supplies were running low. Still, I made myself breakfast from the dregs of the fridge. And when it was ready, I took a picture of it, because it was very pretty.

salad photo

As I sat down to eat, I was thinking about reality and how we shape it with our words. Here’s a reality: my nectarine was bruised. I had to cut out the bruised bits. My cucumber was a tasteless grocery store purchase, no flavor at all. The radishes, from the farmer’s market two weekends ago, never tasted very good and were getting squishy. I threw the rest of them away when I was done with my salad. The carrots are the kind that seemed old the instant I opened the bag, slightly bitter and drying out. The salad greens are still remarkably nice given that they’re a week old, but they’re heavy on some grassy thing which I’m not nuts about. One of my three remaining eggs was cracked, so I had to throw it away. As a result, I only had one egg on my salad, so I could save the second one for later when I would be hungry again.

Here’s another reality: the egg was perfectly cooked and delicious. Still warm, it peeled easily and the yolk was exactly right. (Go, insta-pot!) I made a dressing to go on the salad that was fantastic — mayo that is gluten-free, soy-free, egg-free, and dairy-free (aka, miracle mayo), plus olive oil, lemon juice and powdered ginger. It made the cucumbers delicious, the carrots tolerable, couldn’t help the radishes, was interesting on the nectarine, and was amazing on the egg and the greens. I didn’t quite lick the plate, but I ate every last bite of the whole salad, even the grassy stuff.

And maybe those thoughts about reality and how we shape it were the trigger for me being mean to myself, but before I could do more than take two or three nasty swipes at my choices and my character, I caught sight of the image at the top of this post. Such a bright color, almost like a California poppy. And the curves of the stalks are like petals on a flower.

But it’s a fungus. A fungus growing out of the picnic table where I was eating. Ick. Gross. And yet… it really was beautiful in the sunlight.

When my mean brain triggers, my eyes stop seeing the beauty around me. And in me, too. They start labeling: bugs, fungus, homeless.

It is a reality that I have moments when I feel homeless, not adventurous. Three weeks ago, I had a perfect last day in my house, and the memory is bittersweet right now. I miss my pool. I miss my shower. I desperately miss my high-speed, always-on Internet connection! And it’s painful to be homesick for a home that you never get to go back to.

But my mean brain is not running this show. It’s also a reality that I feel incredibly lucky. My salad was no different, no better than any salad I could have had a month ago at any time… but I appreciated it more. A shift of the kaleidoscope wheel and the pieces are the same but the picture is changed.

Spicy sweet potato hash

12 Friday Aug 2016

Posted by in Food, Randomness, Spicy

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Spicy sweet potato hash

The dogs couldn’t believe I didn’t share. I always share sweet potatoes with them. But it was so good, I just kept eating and then… it was gone.

So, in the insta-pot (surprise!), cook one chopped up sweet potato on a rack with a cup of water at high pressure for 2 minutes. When it chimes, use the quick release to let the steam out.

Take the sweet potato out and dump the water, then turn the insta-pot to saute. When the screen says Hot, saute some chopped up bacon and 1/2 cup of onion until they’re cooked to your liking. I like my bacon crispy and my onions carmelized, but you could stop when the onions were translucent if you like them better that way.

Return the sweet potato to the pot, and add some chopped up fresh cilantro, and something to make it deliciously spicy. I used about a teaspoon of a spice mix from Trader Joe’s called Pilpelchuma, a blend of chili, garlic, cayenne pepper, paprika, cumin, and caraway. I considered using chili garlic sauce, but you could also use a jalapeño pepper or some sriracha, whatever suits your spiciness needs.

Mix the ingredients together and make a little nest in the pile. Carefully crack two eggs into the nest. Turn the insta-pot back on high-pressure and set the time for 1 minute. It will take a lot more than a minute for the insta-pot to reach the pressure level because there’s not a lot of water in there to create the steam, but eventually it will chime. Use the quick release button to let the steam out and then carefully lift it out, trying not to break the eggs.

Say yum.

Don’t share with your dogs, even if they give you pleading looks. Although come to think of it, if you made more, you might have leftovers and they’d be good, too. Honestly, if I had another sweet potato, I might make myself some more right now. It was that good.

It’s been incredibly hot. I don’t mind so much, but it’s impossible to go anywhere, because I’m not willing to leave the dogs alone in the van. Plugged in, with the AC on, we’re fine, but if I was relying on the generator… well, I’m just not that confident. I bought an alert system to let me know when the temp in the van gets too high, but I’m not so convinced of its reliability that I want to test it out in life-or-death weather. So we’re hanging out at the campground, I’m fiddling with Grace, and listening to a lot of country music. Life is good. And so is spicy sweet potato hash with poached eggs!

Small adventures

11 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by in Personal, Serenity, Travel

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I had an adventure yesterday. I went to the grocery store.

Yes, that makes me laugh, too. But it sure felt like an adventure. Strange roads, following my GPS, managing the parking lot and running the generator and air-conditioner for the dogs, roaming the aisles of an unfamiliar store. I actually also stopped at a farm stand, run by a woman in Amish clothing, where I bought shallots and a squash and a cantaloupe.

I thought about going to a museum. According to Roadtrippers, the Agricultural and Industrial Museum was right down the road from the grocery store. (My Internet is so slow that I’m having trouble testing my links: apologies if those don’t work the way they should.) It felt like it would be virtuous to go to the museum, like it was something I should do.

But while I waited for my GPS to give me directions, I remembered two things. First, I’m not a tourist. My goal with living in Serenity is to have a simpler, more flexible life, not fill up my brain with factoids and miscellaneous places. I’m sure it’s a cool museum, but there’s no inherent virtue in adding another random place to my collection of inaccessible memories. Second, “should” is not the same as “want to.” When I took that mental step back, I realized that I’d really rather go back to the campground and sit under my awning and knit and think about Grace.

So I did.

Alas, nasty little stinging flies were chewing on my legs, so I didn’t last outside all that long. It lacks romance to admit that I retreated inside and hung out in the air-conditioned van for the rest of the day, but I did my Insta-Pot experimenting, some knitting, texted with friends, wrote a little and thought about resistance a lot.

If I was camping — say, on my one-week summer vacation from an office job, due back at work on Monday — I’d feel guilty for my wasted day. I could have been outside. I could have been kayaking. I could have been exploring the battlefields of Gettysburg, soaking in the history and tragedy of my location. But living in a camper is not the same as camping, and it wasn’t a wasted day.

In fact, today I think I will do pretty much the same thing. At the moment I’m sitting outside, listening to the noise of the bugs — so incredibly loud, beyond chorus levels and into rock symphonies — and watching the occasional wildlife. I’ve seen a chipmunk, so cute, squirrels and birds. I heard a big splash in the water, which gave me an instant surge of adrenaline before I remembered that murky water + splash doesn’t equal alligator in Pennsylvania. No idea what the splash was, but probably fish of some sort, since I didn’t see a bird. The flies are biting but not as badly as they were yesterday when it was hotter and I was sweatier.

My big adventure for today might be walking the dogs up to the field with the animals and seeing whether the brown creature I caught a glimpse of yesterday when I was driving in really is a baby alpaca.

Yesterday, I was joking with my friend Tim about facing the challenge of the grocery store. The thing is, going to the grocery store did feel like a challenge. I had to pack up Serenity for driving, unhook her from the electric and water, dump her tanks at the “sanitation station”, navigate unfamiliar roads, start the generator to run the AC to keep the dogs cool, check on my alert system for a temperature reading inside the van, park more carefully than I did… (I really need to remember that Serenity is tall — I again scraped her roof along trees, alas.) But it was exciting. And it was fun.

And I realized that I’m accomplishing (almost) exactly what I was vaguely, incoherently, hoping to accomplish. I’ve turned my life into an adventure, where even the small challenges, like going to the grocery store, require an eyes-wide-open approach, an appreciation of where I am and exactly what I am doing. My heart is beating. It’s a wonderful feeling.

It’ll be even better when I’m also writing again regularly. And that is going to happen. Maybe even today.

Insta-pot debate

10 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by in Chicken, Food, Personal

≈ 10 Comments

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I bought an Insta-Pot during the Amazon Prime summer sale days. It seemed like a good idea — I’d wanted one for a while and I figured it could replace my slow cooker and give me some additional functionality for life on the road. But when it came and I tried to fit it into Serenity, it started looking like an expensive mistake.

Not my first — I bought an Amazon Tap on impulse when I meant to buy a Dot and purchased a very expensive tire-pressure monitoring system before reading the manual and discovering that tire-pressure monitoring was built-in to the Dodge system. Oops.

Fortunately, those were easily returned, but the insta-pot decision wasn’t so clear. After all, I had wanted one and I do feel like I need a slow cooker. But it’s big. Really big. It doesn’t fit in the over-cab space (not that I would put something that potentially dangerous there anyway – death by Insta-Pot during a fast stop is not how I want to go.) It doesn’t fit in any of the cabinets or in the limited under-the-bed space. In fact, the only place I can store it is inside the wardrobe. Apart from that, it would have to sit out on the floor and that’s sort of the same problem as the overhead space — leaving heavy objects out to fly around the van while you’re driving is not the greatest idea. It probably wouldn’t kill me from the floor, but in a 50mph collision with B and the Insta-Pot, B would lose. Squashed dog would be heartbreaking.

So the question was: do I want to give up my precious wardrobe space to a pressure cooker? I decided to answer by trying the insta-pot out as quickly as possible.

The first thing I made was a lemon chicken recipe using chicken thighs. It was… eh. Acceptable, but I could bake chicken thighs in the convection oven just as easily and they would taste just as good, maybe better because they get crispy. Admittedly, they would take a lot longer and heat up the van a lot more, but still, the chicken thighs were not a selling point.

Next I tried hard-boiled eggs. Wow. It is incredibly easy to make absolutely perfect hard-boiled eggs using an Insta-Pot. Five minutes, no mess, no heating a pan over the propane stove, and the eggs were truly perfect, exactly the way I like them.

However, have I mentioned the preciousness of my wardrobe space? I need shoes, ones with toes, and a winter coat, and maybe some rain gear. All of those things, once I get them, are going to need to be stored somewhere. I’d like to try going to the occasional writer’s conference: that would require professional(-ish) attire, which again, would have to be stored somewhere. Cleaning supplies, the screen door for the back, towels, the shower curtain, dog food, tools… there is a lot of stuff competing for that precious, precious storage space. Perfect hard-boiled eggs are not good enough to warrant giving it up to a pot. A big pot.

Today, I decided to try again. I bought two bone-in chicken breasts at the store, figuring I could cook them, then use the bones to make a small amount of stock. But when I tried to find a recipe that made sense, I failed. I should have looked for the recipe before going to the store instead of after. Alas. But I’m used to having a lot of staple ingredients, including a fully stocked spice cabinet, on hand.

Of course, not having a recipe never deters me. I decided to improvise. I did wonder, while I was mixing up a marinade of Marie Sharp’s Exotic Sauce (which I brought from the house and need to use up), balsamic vinegar, a generous handful of cilantro, and several chopped shallots, whether I was setting up the Insta-Pot to fail. Talk about a random marinade! But I marinated the chicken in the above for an hour, then sautéed it for a few minutes on the saute setting, then added a little bit of chicken broth, probably 1/4 cup, and used the poultry setting to cook it. When it was done, I took it out, measured the liquid — about a cup — and cooked a cup of jasmine rice in a 1:1 ratio with the liquid.

But I couldn’t wait for the rice. The chicken smelled so good! I kept stealing tiny bites of it, trying to figure out why/how it was so delicious. Was it the exotic sauce? The cilantro? The chicken wasn’t overwhelmed by the marinade, but it was infused with the flavors of the other ingredients. I could taste them — a little bit of a tang, that green bitterness of cilantro, the subtle kick of shallots — in each bite of moist, falling apart, yet fully-cooked chicken. It was ridiculously good.

When the rice finished, I added some dried cranberries — which probably would have been even better if I’d added them during the cooking — and a sprinkle of salt and ate. And ate. And ate. I had to force myself to stop when I was past full because I kept wanting just one more bite. I can’t remember the last time I over-ate. Which is not a particularly good selling point in the insta-pot’s favor, really, but I don’t suppose I should blame it too much for that.

The debate’s not over for me: my fridge is not big enough to store lots of leftovers and I can’t freeze extra ingredients. I may eventually decide that a diet of mostly salads and cold foods just makes the most sense for life in a van. But oh, I do regret the time I spent wondering if an Insta-Pot was really worth $120. If you have the room to store it, the answer is yes, yes, yes. And if you follow that link above, the price (at the time I write this, anyway) is only $70. Totally worth it! (It’s not an affiliate link — I don’t get any money if you buy it — so if you know anyone who uses affiliate links on their site, go visit their site, find an Amazon link, follow the link and then search on Insta-Pot, so they’ll get a few dollars from the sale. Yes, I have been learning about affiliate links recently!)

In other news, I’m hanging out in Gettysburg. I failed to go to a museum of agriculture and industry today. I felt like I should, since I was close and I’m traveling and museums are worthwhile… and then I remembered that my goal with this life is not to be a tourist, but to live simply. And to write. So far the writing is not going well, but maybe being very well-fed will be inspirational. 🙂

Gettysburg Farm RV Resort

08 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by in Bartleby, Pets, Randomness, Zelda

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I can tell already that the campgrounds are going to blend together. Less than two weeks and I was struggling this morning to remember which one had the concrete pads, cracked and broken, with grass springing up in the ridges, and which one was like parking in a field. A nice field. With a lovely walk for the dogs. (Ans: St. John’s RV in St. Augustine for the first; Bass Lake in Dillon, North Carolina for the second.)

I don’t think I’ll forget today’s campground soon, though. There are goats! Lots and lots of baby goats, wandering around the driveway like they own the place. As, in fact, they might do. It’s a first-come, first-served campground, so after I picked my site, I wandered back up to the front to turn in a card with my site number on it. I brought the dogs, both because they needed the walk and because, like apparently a lot of campgrounds, one is not supposed to leave pets unattended. (I suspect I’m going to have to break that rule upon occasion, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.) We were headed back when we startled a little white and brown goat that had been browsing in the bushes by the mini-golf course. It bounced away like a Superball, surprising both dogs. Z looked mystified, but B was all set to charge after it.

B has been seriously rambunctious lately. It’s quite a surprise. I expected him to tolerate traveling while Z would like it, but Z’s been anxious while B’s energy level has skyrocketed. At my brother’s house, he was playing, chewing on a blanket that wasn’t his, mouthing my hands… not at all the “hide in closets” puppy that he used to be. Serenity has a screen door that I suspected would be no deterrent to Zelda if she saw a squirrel, but Bartleby was actually the one who barreled right through it — and for no other reason than that he thought it was time to be outside! He wasn’t chasing anything and he didn’t need to be walked, he just didn’t feel like being in the van so shoved his way out the door.

Or maybe he wanted to check out the campsite. I chose a spot that looks onto the water, and instead of pulling in or backing in, I parallel parked Serenity, so that she’s alongside the water. Well, I didn’t literally parallel-park. There was plenty of room, so I just pulled in as if I was parallel-parking. You can see the view from my window on instagram (because I am having trouble uploading files to wordpress.) Having trouble taking photos, too — my phone stopped letting me save photos, which is possibly the universe telling me that I shouldn’t bother? But it’s hard to resist the temptation.

So I’m going to be here for a week. It’s my first test of real life in Serenity. I’ve been living in her for two weeks already, but it doesn’t feel like it at all. It’s been two weeks of driving and learning and visiting family. I’ve felt busy and on the go. This is my chance to slow down, take some deep breaths, and get back to work. I wish I could say that the weeks in which I’ve not been writing have been inspiring me, the words piling up like water behind a log jam, but alas, such is not the case. I suspect I’m going to be off to a slow start. Still, better slow than not at all.