Heat Waves and Progress

It's 86 degrees inside the rig.

Both ACs are running. Every window is blacked out with Reflectix. Outside it's 105 and Palm Springs in March has apparently decided that's just normal now. The built-in fridge - 25 years old, doing everything it can - is holding at 62 degrees, which is not great but it's trying and I respect the effort. We solved the food safety problem already. Dropped money we didn't love spending on a dual zone 12v car fridge that is working absolutely stellar. Dairy and meat are fine. We are fine.

I am sitting at the dinette with my laptop and a needle and thread, sewing roman shade rings onto the front curtains. 17 inches from the bottom so we can hook them up while we're driving and get some actual relief from the windows that generate their own weather system in direct sun. 12 rings left on this curtain. 18 on the next one. I have one hour before Laurie finishes work and we need to go get drinking water -- five gallon Primo jugs with a USB pump -- before we leave Saturday morning for Kingman and whatever comes after that.

I am also writing these posts.

I have been doing this -- the road, the rig, the making-it-work -- for five years. The dream of what Soul Legacy Collective could be has been in my chest for seven. And this is the picture of the day it finally went live. Not a studio. Not a clean signal and a clear morning. The dinette, the needle, the heat, the cats, the one hour left.

Gen X women know this picture. Not this exact one - your version has different furniture, different stakes, different logistics - but the same shape. You have the thing you're actually trying to build and the entire parallel operation required to keep everything else from falling apart while you do it. The invisible maintenance layer. The seventeen small necessary tasks that stand between where you are and where you're trying to get.

We learned this young. We were the ones watching the adults not pay attention and quietly picking up the slack. We got so competent at the logistics of keeping things running that it became invisible - to everyone around us and eventually to ourselves. We stopped counting it. We stopped calling it work.

It's work.

I have 12 rings left and one hour. I'm going to finish both.

Come find us in the Campfire.