playa-fied

 wow, what an amazing weekend i had! it was SO COOL to be around people that i haven’t seen for almost a year. the more i think about the entire "burning man" experience, the more i believe what a unique and amazing event it is and to be a part of it makes me proud, humble, and awed. it’s so odd not to see someone for a year, and then just come together around this commonality called rangering, and get to catch up on all of the last year, pick up a friendship as though no time has passed…because with burning man, time seems to pass based on what happens between events =)

i had an interview with the director for a sub-team of the rangers that i want to be a part of. it went well, i think. they have a lot of attorney’s who work as part of the team, and they are moving towards having fewer attorney’s and more laypeople. that would be me =) i guess they have some more interviews to do, then will all get together and let us know who the selectees are. i am hopeful, but won’t be crushed if it doesn’t happen. it doesn’t hurt to try =)

there were some communication issues with d and i, which always seems to be the case. i guess if we lived in isolation where we only interacted with each other it might not happen, but when you add other people into the mix, things always get messed up. i know this whole process i have been going through is part of the mercury retrograde thing, and in some ways that makes it easier, but in some ways, it does not. it’s mostly my own stuff that i am still working through. he is inifinitely patient with me and for that i am grateful. i guess we put up with each other’s shit well. i really do need to get over myself, somewhat.

saturday night, we went to the hot springs and it was really cool. i think there were about a baker’s dozen of us at the springs, laughing and playing and being drunk (some of us, i was not one, although i did have some yummy plum wine), swimming and generally being together. the hot springs are near railroad tracks and when a train goes by, it ramps up the geothermal activity that makes the water warm there, making it more bubbly and hot, closer to the tracks. then, if you don’t want super hot water, you just move farther from the tracks, and it gets cooler. neat place, anyway.

also true to mercury being retrograde, the ride home last night turned into a bizarre odyssey of mishaps that i hope are all done now and not the harbinger of things to come. not far after leaving the playa, we blew a tire on the motor home. when the tire blew, it knocked the cap off one of the water holding tanks so we had to stop and empty the tanks the rest of the way and then decide what to do. i guess the person who remodeled the motor home couldn’t have done much testing with it because the boards they had over the wheel wells rub the tires if you go over a large bump or something. this is what tore the tire apart. we probably spent an hour on the side of the road there, then we got on our way again, now going very slow because of the bad tire (there are two on that side) and a little farther down the road, the motor home started to run out of gas. i told d that i thought the generator took more energy than he though in terms of fuel, i suppose now he believes me =) so, what we had to do was take part of the gas tank on the truck apart so that we could access it directly in order to siphon gas from it to put in the motor home =) we eventually made it home, short one tire and rolling in on fumes from the gas tank, but we made it =) i think that d was pretty stressed, but i just kept my mouth shut and waited for him to tell me what he needed in order to make some decisions about how we were going to deal with our situation. i can help, but he is the mechanically inclined one, so i generally defer to him in these types of things.

i got to connect with the lady who helped me braid my hair last year, and she is going to talk to her so to see if they can come a day or two early and we can do hair. yay, hair!! i am still thinking of a color scheme i want. i need to order hair. i can’t believe it’s only six weeks to burning man!!!

peace.