Cool people everywhere I go

Leaving the city with no money was a no-brainer. I drove and drove and drove north, until I landed in DeAnna‘s driveway. For some reason, 4 hour drives take me two days.

DeAnna has awesome raised beds with cold frames full of lettuce and greens that we’ve been eating all weekend. Her cat Magoo hate’s Bro. She attacks him really ferociously every time she sees him, but she doesn’t draw blood.

DeAnna is one of those very logical people, and she tackled my tick problem (have I mentioned? Tick infestation in the van) on google. It turns out that I have Brown Dog Ticks, who are lucky enough to be the only tick species that can complete their whole life cycle inside. They don’t normally carry Lyme’s disease, but they do carry Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, which is what we all lived in fear of when I lived in Arizona, tho now I don’t remember why. The internet advised that Brown Dog Tick infestations are really bad and that chemical intervention is needed. I don’t want to put tick killing chemicals on Bro, especially since they cause seizures in older animals, and especially especially because the van is such a closed space that we will definitely be breathing anything we put in. DeAnna noticed, via Google, that their eggs are prone to drying out.

She totally held my hand while I took everything out of the van, sprinkled around the edges and the tick-ish spots with diatomaceous earth, and washed everything in her washer. Then she took me out in the woods and introduced me to all kinds of plants I’d never seen before and taught me a bunch of the stuff she knows about being a wilderness instructer. She knows a lot of stuff.

One thing that she taught me, which I will tell all of you, is that learning happens best in an adrenalated state. You can repeat things a hundred times, but you won’t need to if you’re a little scared. Adrenalated states are easy to achieve in kids by playing hide and seek or racing or pretending. For example, when she teaches kids to build fires she has them pretend that they’re out in the woods and their dad fell in the creek and he’s getting hypothermic, so we need to build a fire really fast!

It makes total sense to me, because that was how I learned best when I was a kid and because that’s how I learn as an adult. I go along through life until I get in a situation that’s bad, and then I get adrenalated and figure out how to get out of it. But those lessons always apply to so much more, and now I can kind of justify all that risky learning.

So, dear readers, today, get yourself adrenalated (unless your adrenals are already too stressed) and see what you learn. Reporting back would be cool too.